How can Afghanistan re-form into stable state?

Broad coalition will need opposition leaders, tribal elders, Pakistan

10/03/2001

By GREGG JONES / The Dallas Morning News

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - For a country so small and poor, landlocked amid the arid mountains and deserts of Central Asia, Afghanistan has seized more than its fair share of attention.

It inspired the 19th-century superpower struggle between Britain and Russia known as the Great Game. And it was the scene of the Cold War's climactic struggle during the 1980s, when CIA-supported Islamic insurgents defeated a Soviet occupation army.

Now, Afghanistan - the hideout of Osama bin Laden and home of the world's most radical Islamic regime - stands again in the spotlight, the focal point of a U.S.-led war on international terrorism.

Beyond the immediate quest for Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants lies a problem of more complexity, experts say: How can Afghanistan be transformed from an Islamic dictatorship and staging ground for international terrorism into a stable, law-abiding state?

"My priority, and I think it should be the priority of Pakistan and other countries, is to have a stable government in Afghanistan that has the broad-based support of the people," said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani army lieutenant general who was involved in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation. "How you do that is not the million-dollar question, but the billion-dollar question."

Over the last few days, Afghan opposition leaders have taken potentially significant steps toward a political transition.

Tribal leaders from southern Afghanistan met in the Pakistani border city of Quetta on Friday to discuss a new government to replace the Taliban, their former allies. The 20 tribal elders met at the home of a staunch supporter of former King Mohammad Zahir Shah, who has offered to assist in a democratic transition should the Taliban be toppled.

On Monday, after a weekend of meetings at his home outside Rome, Mr. Zahir and representatives of the Northern Alliance announced that a national council, or loya jirga, would convene to consider steps for forming a government. On the council would be various tribal and ethnic groups and leaders of the Northern Alliance, which is leading an armed rebellion against Taliban rule.

"This is Afghanistan's best shot, the best shot they've had in the last 10 or 15 years," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., a senior member of the House International Relations Committee.

The question of whether a new government should be installed in Afghanistan - and how that might be done - is being discussed in world capitals from Beijing to Washington. Here in Pakistan, many people warn that the United States and its allies have badly miscalculated if they believe they can impose a friendly government on Afghanistan.

"Pakistan feels that any government that arrives in Kabul on the strength of foreign tanks and foreign arms will not survive," said Rifaat Hussain, chairman of the department of defense and strategic studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. "We are going to turn Afghanistan into the worst form of warlordism."

The debate over Afghanistan's future is intense in Pakistan, which shares a 1,125 mile-long border with Afghanistan and has suffered from the burdens of 2 million Afghan refugees and the influx of guns and drugs from across the border, scholars, politicians and government officials say.

If a U.S. goal is to replace the Taliban regime, the last 20 years of political chaos and bloodshed in Afghanistan should serve as a warning of the difficult task ahead, experts say.

Political conflict in Afghanistan - and the desire to install a friendly government - led the Soviet Union to invade its southern neighbor in 1979. When the Soviets withdrew 10 years later, the various Afghan factions that had united to defeat the Communist superpower couldn't agree on the composition of a new government.

"Everyone looked at the other leader as a leader of a group or ethnic faction and not a national leader," said Mr. Masood, the retired Pakistani general. "All the foreign assistance stopped, and the struggle for power began."

As the United States focused on shoring up the newly freed states of Eastern Europe and on the upheaval in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan descended into civil war.

Pakistan saw an opportunity to secure its western border and gain access to markets in Central Asia by installing a friendly government in Kabul. It began supporting a group of ethnic Pashtun religious conservatives who called themselves the Taliban.

Now, senior Pakistani officials are deeply concerned about the possible replacement of the Taliban regime with the opposition Northern Alliance, which is supported by Russia, India and Iran and is openly hostile toward Pakistan.

Retired Gen. Zahid Malik says the replacement of the Taliban by the Northern Alliance would be a "nightmare scenario," one that would sandwich Pakistan between a hostile, nuclear-armed India on its eastern border and a hostile, Russian-backed government to the west in Afghanistan.

Many foreign and Pakistani experts also question the viability of a Northern Alliance-dominated government, because the alliance is comprised of ethnic minorities from northern and western Afghanistan and doesn't include the Pashtun majority.

"If you try to impose the Northern Alliance on the rest of Afghanistan, you will condemn Afghanistan to civil war for years and years," said Imran Khan, a prominent Pakistani politician.

Northern Alliance leaders say a loya jirga would lay the groundwork for a new government. Many observers say Mr. Zahir, who has lived in Italy since he was overthrown in 1973, could be crucial to any transition.

But Taliban supporters in Pakistan disagree.

"The solution for peace in Afghanistan is for the foreign hands to take their hands off Afghanistan and leave [Afghans] to solve the problem by themselves, according to their religion and culture," said Sen. Nasar Mohammad Khan, a Pakistani Pashtun leader in the northwestern border region.

Taliban supporters and critics say that a broad-based government must be formed, one that includes the seven regional and ethnic factions that led the war against the Soviets.

"It's going to take a lot of time, and a lot of assistance," said Dr. Hussain of Quaid-i-Azam University. "Otherwise, Afghanistan will remain a threat to regional peace."