Asia Times: EDITORIAL


	November 22, 2001	atimes.com

Editorials

From Kabul to Berlin: Wrong road

Fast-moving events in Afghanistan over the past days have often overtaken reports and commentary. Lightning military advances by the Northern Alliance, with United States and allied support have way outpaced developments on the political front. It is now ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara commanders who control some 80 percent of the country and the capital city Kabul. The Pashtun majority (40 percent of the total population) remains on the sidelines - and that, of course, won't do if Afghanistan is to have anything resembling a stable government in the future. It would simply be a throwback - with reversed roles - to the mid-1990s when the Taliban rapidly seized most of the country from the Northern Alliance-dominated government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Now the United Nations has come up with the plan of convening an all-Afghan conference in Berlin next Monday to discuss and hopefully form an interim government fairly representing all major ethnic groups and to begin the process of restoring some form of order in the nation of 20 million people - and this, to put it mildly, doesn't strike us as a particularly brilliant idea.

As preparations for the Berlin conference are under way, so also is what many believe will be the most difficult phase of the war. The Taliban remain entrenched in southern Kandahar province and in their northern enclave of Kunduz. The search for Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda followers is continuing. Most importantly, while the Northern Alliance has agreed to attend the Berlin conference, it remains unclear who will represent the Pashtuns. Indeed, until the Taliban are finally defeated and relationships between Taliban and independent Pashtun commanders are clarified, no-one can be sure in the slightest that Pashtun representatives in Berlin will actually be representative of the Pashtun majority.

The conference, also to be attended on the sidelines by any number of countries with a stake in Afghanistan's future - from the US and Russia to Pakistan, Iran and India - should be postponed until the situation on the ground is clarified. There is otherwise the very real danger that unrepresentative and untenable "solutions" are reached. A combination of allied ground forces and Northern Alliance troops should finish mopping up operations as quickly as possible and establish a controlling presence. Then, in a more secure environment, different ethnic groups and factions should meet in Kabul to take a first crack at forming a multi-ethnic interim government. Only subsequent to that does a high-profile peace conference make sense.

In the meantime, the type of discussions interested non-Afghan parties should conduct are discussions to line up economic and reconstruction assistance for the war-ravaged country. Peace in Afghanistan will ultimately come only as economic development takes hold. Premature attempts to impose peace and governance from the outside are bound to lead to failure.

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