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BUCOLIC PAST Twenty years of civil strife have devastated Afghanistan;
what will the future bring? |
There is great anxiety among all Afghans—those living in Afghanistan as well as expatriates like myself—as to what the future holds. Twenty years of internecine warfare have devastated the lives of millions.
The social fabric of Afghanistan has been ripped apart, and policymakers have to recognize that tension among ethnic lines has sharpened in the wake of atrocities committed against members of ethnic groups after their areas were captured by rival factions. Such atrocities have included massacres, the brutal ill treatment of civilians, and summary executions.
Memories are long, and, against this backdrop, international efforts will have to concentrate in forging a legitimate broad-based government in the complex sociopolitical landscape of Afghanistan.
These are the same Afghans that fought the former Soviet Union and the Soviet- backed army with US aid for more than a decade until 1989 and—against all odds—prevailed.
Following the collapse of the pro-Soviet government and the failure of Afghan guerilla fighters to agree to power sharing, the nature of the civil war in Afghanistan changed. With the fragmentation of political power under different militias, the country plunged into lawlessness. Mayhem ensued, paving the way for the Taliban, whose vision for Afghanistan consists of an imported extreme Islamic regimen alien to the Afghan tradition.
The principal opponent of the Taliban—whose support base is among the Pashtuns—is the Northern Alliance, which represents a loose coalition of ethnic factions made up of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen banded together against a common enemy.
Afghanistan’s political future is on the line.
Ex-King Zahir Shah could play a national reconciliation role by organizing a Loya Jirga, an assembly of intellectuals, tribal leaders, and opposition leaders, with the goal of free elections to replace the governing Taliban militia. But the formula of patching together a broad-based central government and holding some sort of elections faces pitfalls. Carving the government pie to power blocs will not forge national unity. Trust and healing among the ethnic groups will take time. Twenty years of strife have destroyed national-level institutions, and a Pashtun-dominated Afghan state structure may not be acceptable.
A possible blueprint for peace would be to acknowledge the ex-King as the symbolic leader to form a government different in architecture from previous governments. Each Afghan ethnic area would be accorded full autonomy, with Kabul serving as a coordinating center and common meeting ground responsible for foreign affairs and defense.
The major ethnic groups are concentrated in geographically distinct regions of the country, decentralized into discrete provinces with their own administrative and financial systems. This lends itself to such a governance model. The central government of Afghanistan would possess limited powers with a rotating nominal executive from each ethnic region. Real authority would lie in the hands of the regions.
No Afghan ethnic group claims independence. All Afghans want is a unified country. Such a solution would leave Afghans free to choose their own government and return the country to the very people who currently feel so dispossessed.
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* The author is an Afghan-American. A shortened version of the article appeared in the International Herald Tribune on 6 November 2001. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official views of the Asian Development Bank.
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