After seven grueling days of bargaining, the success of the negotiations in Bonn will comes as a relief to the people in Afghanistan, where there would have been both anger and despair had the talks failed. The anger would have been because the Afghans have had more than their fill of war and destruction, and the despair because failure would have jeopardized the chances of having the international community commit itself to funding the ravaged country’s reconstruction.
Ironically, it was from Afghanistan itself that the problems in Bonn came. The victorious Northern Alliance leaders had instructed their delegation to extract the maximum terms. The Alliance leadership, back in Afghanistan, wanted to concede as little as possible to their political rivals. But a quite remarkable thing happened in Bonn. When the leader of the Alliance delegation Younus Qanuni made his opening statement, he spoke of how Afghans were "thirsting for peace". It was hard to doubt his sincerity. It is clear now that he and his colleagues from the Alliance realize that all sides, including their own, need to make major compromises to produce an interim administration which would lay the foundations for a lasting peace.
The contrast here is between the relatively young men who made up the Alliance delegation in Bonn and the older leaders such as Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gen. Dostum. Even if the delegates did not arrive at the talks with a very clear vision of the future, it is very likely that in the course of the negotiations, chaired with masterful patience by the UN’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Ibrahimi, they came to see that far greater flexibility was required than was realized by their political masters in Afghanistan.
There was much initial concern that the four Afghan delegations that made up the Bonn talks were not fully representative of all the different factions within the country. However,since the Northern Alliance is itself made up of an uneasy coalition of Tajiks and Uzbeks as well as Pashtuns, it is now apparent that all the important voices that needed to be heard were represented in Germany.
Much remains to be done in allocating the different government portfolios in the interim government before the traditional grand assembly, the loya jirga, takes place in about six months’ time. There are to be only 29 Cabinet posts within the administration and already the four factions have put forward 150 different names. There also exists the danger that one or more of the unreformed warlords within the Northern Alliance will act unilaterally, if they see the makeup of the interim administration as militating against their own interests. The role of any UN force, which looks likely to be small and confined to a monitoring role, will be crucial in seeking to ensure fair play. Past experience has, however, shown that if warring parties have a mind to return to violence, there is little that the UN will be able to do.
Perhaps, the key issue that can bring all the different factions together is the food crisis that faces the country. If they accept as their overriding priority the need to save their people from starvation and exposure, this single issue could unite them and teach them how they can work together.
