|
 wo
victors emerged from the marathon negotiations in Bonn, and the
future of Afghanistan depends on whether they can develop a working
relationship that transcends the ethnicity and partisanship that
otherwise rends the country.
Pushtoon nobleman
Hamid Karzai, and Tajik physician Dr. Abdullah have become respectively
the prime minister and foreign minister of an interim government
given just over two years to prepare for nationwide elections. Both
represent a triumph of the young over an older generation of embittered
warlords.
For awhile
in Bonn it looked as though any coalition government would either
be headed by Professor Berhanuddin Rabbani, current Afghan president
and a Tajik from Dr. Abdullah's old resistance party, or Professor
Sibgatullah Mojadidi, another former president who headed Mr Karzai's
predominantly Pushtoon mujahedeen party. Both were men whose time
had long passed.
President Rabbani,
who first invited the ultra-radical, Cairo-based Muslim Brotherhood
to Afghanistan 30 years ago, had slowly ossified into "the
dog in the manger" — distrustful of anyone but Tajiks
from the tiny Panshir Valley, unwilling to share power and self-cossetted
away like an Afghan Howard Hughes. Similarly, Prof. Mojadidi was
hopelessly vain and organisationally incompetent, although not as
sectarian as Rabbani. Both were nudged gently aside by the delegates
in Bonn.
When the Northern
Alliance last held power in Kabul in the mid 1990s, a few non-Tajik
"Uncle Toms" served as cabinet-level window-dressing for
a government run almost exclusively by Panshir Tajiks. Considering
the exclusionist history of Rabbani and the late commander Ahmed
Shah Massood, Dr. Abdullah is a major change of direction. Ethnically,
he straddles Afghanistan's biggest divide — his mother is a
Pushtoon from Kandahar and his father is a pure Tajik from the Panshir.
With a background like that, it is not surprising that he is as
incapable of bigotry as Colin Powell or Tiger Woods. Trained as
a physician he is modern, outward looking, and often appreciative
of Western technologies and values. But as Massood's former right-hand
man, the new foreign minister's reputation among his own faction
is unimpeachable.
Across the
table from him sits the new pm, Hamid Karzai, a nobleman whose father
heads the most prestigious tribe of the Pushtoon western heartland,
the Popalzai. Educated at Dehra Dun, the prominent boarding school
in India, Karzai speaks English with total fluency as well as Pushtu,
Dari, and various Pakistani and Indian languages. He is not an earnest
middle-class technician like Abdullah, but rather a well-bred aristocrat
with a deep seriousness cloaked beneath an easy-going, self-effacing
sense of humour. Roughly the same age as Abdullah, Karzai also lacks
any sense of bigotry which hampered the previous generation of Afghan
leaders.
Each has taken
a huge gamble, risking their careers and even their lives on the
success of this interim government. Dr. Abdullah has challenged
and defeated Prof. Rabbani and muzzled some of the bigoted Tajik
Old Guard, agreeing to power-sharing and foreign peacekeeping troops.
Rabbani, one suspects, must be bound hand and foot in a palace lavatory,
madder than a wet hen.
Karzai has
taken even a bigger risk since he lends credibility to a government
where he is the only Pushtoon, indeed the only non-Tajik, with one
of the top four jobs. Besides Dr. Abdullah as foreign minister,
the Northern Alliance figures including the brutal General Mohammad
Fahim who heads the defense ministry, and the ambitious Yunus Qanooni
heading interior which oversees law enforcement and secret police.
So Karzai has
the most important job only if he can put his genetic command of
diplomacy to good use. That means dragging recalcitrant and often
greedy local Pushtoon warlords into the civilising process of government,
as well as papering over the differences between Shia and Sunni
Muslims and the welter of Afghan ethnic groups. Karzai's success
lies in what he can build for the future, while the Northern Alliance
figures hold all the practical aspects of current power — the
army, the police, and the relations with the outside word.
If Karzai fails
to build his coalitions, the country will descend once more into
partition and civil war, and Dr. Abdullah will be discredited among
the Tajiks for sharing power in the first place and letting peacekeepers
into Afghanistan. They are now in the same boat.
So into a new
government goes a young, multi-ethnic physician prepared to risk
his life for the principle of sharing power, and an equally young
but elegantly old-fashioned aristocrat who is even now on a hillside
above Kandahar, leading his grizzled old soldiers, shepherds, farmers,
and family retainers — the people of his tribe and of ancient
allied tribes — in a life or death drive against the Arabs
and ideologues of the Taliban.
Karzai's offer
of amnesty is a typically bold move to end the war without recriminations,
but win or lose, a 3,000-year-old culture hangs in the balance.
The best ideas for "buddy movies" don't come exclusively
from Hollywood.
|
