Global Policy Forum

By Susan B. Glasser

The U.N.-brokered conference of more than 30 Afghan leaders that begins in Germany Tuesday is in danger of becoming marginalized before it starts because new political realities in Afghanistan are being shaped by battlefield advances and private negotiations between warlords on the ground, according to Afghan leaders and diplomats monitoring the talks.

The stated goal of the talks in Germany is to move Afghanistan toward a new "broad-based, multi-ethnic government" by setting up a 15-member provisional council to take power in Kabul from the Northern Alliance, which marched into the capital on Nov. 13 after the Taliban's collapse.

Top Northern Alliance officials, however, have already cast doubt on their willingness to make a deal at the talks in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, even as others warn that the conference will fail because it does not include credible leaders to speak for the ethnic Pashtuns who dominate southern Afghanistan.

"This meeting is not a summit council," Northern Alliance political leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was Afghanistan's president until the Taliban takeover in 1996, said today during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. "The main councils and meetings will take place inside Afghanistan and senior officials must participate to take the main decisions."

Assembling a postwar conference before there is peace has proved to be a political and logistical mess. Even hours before the conference, U.N. officials said, the list of attendees had not been finalized as rival warlords, their surrogates and neighboring countries such as Pakistan frantically maneuvered for influence.

By late today, the United Nations said 32 Afghans from four major factions would participate. But even the meeting's hosts said they were not sure who would be taking seats in Bonn's Petersberg castle, a grand government guesthouse. "The list itself is not final," said U.N. spokesman Eric Falt, "though the composition of who is allowed to sit at the table ought to be final."

Under the complicated formula agreed to by the U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, the Northern Alliance and a Rome-based group supporting the return of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the exiled Afghan king, will each have 11 delegates -- eight negotiators and three advisers.

Two other groups representing Afghan refugees, one based in Pakistan and the other in Cyprus, will be allowed five delegates each, three at the table and two advisers. At least three women are slated to participate.

The list, though, is most notable for who is not on it. Rabbani, the Northern Alliance leader, will not be there, and neither will the other major leaders of the Northern Alliance, such as the ethnic Uzbek ruler of Mazar-e Sharif, Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum, and the ethnic Tajik warlord of Herat, Ismail Khan. Also not attending are the deposed king and Ahmed Gailani, the leader of an Afghan group-in-exile based in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Instead, surrogates, not principals, have arrived in Germany to negotiate. Zahir Shah, 87, sent his grandson, Mustapha Zahir, and other family members; Gailani sent his son.

Not represented at all is the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, though Pakistan has been lobbying for the inclusion of "moderate" elements from within the collapsed government. Also apparently left out are many of the Pashtun tribal leaders who have seized power in former Taliban strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

"The real problem for the talks is not divisions within the Northern Alliance," said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author of a bestselling book on the Taliban. "It is the lack of political leadership and political clarity in the south. The meeting in Germany is not going to have real representatives of the Pashtuns from inside Afghanistan."

Added a senior Pakistani intelligence official, "It's like expecting peace in Northern Ireland without having the IRA agree to it."

But U.N. and Western diplomats monitoring the talks argue that Pashtuns, who make up about 40 percent of Afghanistan's population, will be well represented. Three of the four delegations will have a Pashtun majority and the fourth, the Northern Alliance, will have Pashtun representation, said a senior U.S. official in Germany observing the negotiations. "The Pashtuns will probably have a majority and won't have anything to complain about," he said.

Pashtuns who are attending said they are mostly united in their distrust of the Northern Alliance and are convinced that Rabbani's negotiators will not bargain away territory won on the battlefield at the conference table.

Under the original U.N. plan, the talks were to have taken place only after an international peacekeeping force had entered Afghanistan. But the alliance has resisted such a deployment, leaving it in full control of the capital and potentially strengthening its position in the talks.

"We are all worried that the Northern Alliance has not learned from their mistakes," said a senior representative of the king who will participate in the talks. "Their incompetence ruined Afghanistan once," he said, referring to inter-factional fighting in the 1990s that led to the rise of the Taliban. "We now see their new power grabs and are worried that history is repeating itself."

For their part, many Northern Alliance political leaders and military commanders have bristled at the international pressure to hold the meeting outside of Afghanistan and some have privately dismissed its legitimacy as a result.

Despite his statements today that the real issues must be settled inside Afghanistan, Rabbani repeated on Sunday his commitment to giving up power to an interim government if a deal is reached with other parties.

And the alliance's foreign minister, Abdullah, today called the Bonn talks "very significant," even as he played down hopes for a settlement. "It won't simply be symbolic," he said in Kabul. "But this is also not the kind of meeting for choosing the destiny of the Afghan nation. Everything can't be decided at one meeting."

Leading the alliance team will be one of the coalition's most influential figures, Yonus Qanooni, its interior minister. Qanooni is commonly called a leader of the more Westernized wing of the alliance, as opposed to the more conservative clerics, such as Rabbani. He led a delegation to Rome last month seeking to strike a deal with the king's supporters.

No deal was reached, but according to the senior U.S. official, "there is almost unified support for the return of the king in some function. Only one or two of the [delegates] would quibble with that."

One influential leader working for the king is Hamid Karzai, a former deputy foreign minister under the old Rabbani government. In an interview by satellite telephone from inside Afghanistan, Karzai said he would not be attending the meeting but that he planned to participate in a conference call. "This conference is not premature," he said.

But some Pashtuns disagree, noting that all across the south, local Pashtun warlords are caught up in a whirl of negotiations over who will control which town as Taliban authority disintegrates. "Right now, the Pashtuns are not united at all," said Abdul Khaliq, a tribal leader involved in local negotiations in southern Afghanistan. "Compared to Pashtuns, the Northern Alliance, which also has its problems, looks pretty good."

Although they do not have a seat at the table, neighboring countries accustomed to influencing Afghanistan's affairs are also likely to influence the Bonn conference. Nineteen countries, including China, Iran, Russia and Pakistan, have observer status at the talks, and as Pakistan's recent maneuverings suggest, each will have a role to play.

Until Sept. 11, Pakistan maintained its clout in Afghanistan because of its close ties to the Taliban. But in the last few weeks, Pakistan has moved to embrace Pashtun leaders close to the king and Gailani, the head of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, who is known as the "Gucci commander" for his Italian designer suits.

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