Global Policy Forum

By Mark Baker

Hamida Nazhat wears pale pink lipstick, a smart knitted suit and a silk scarf draped elegantly over her styled black hair. A year ago this would have earned her a beating from the men of the Taliban's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who roamed Kabul's streets hounding women who ventured out without being covered from head to toe, or who dared wear nail polish or stockings.

But the Taliban have gone and so has Nazhat's burkha, the stifling cloak that all women were forced to wear during the five grim years that the Taliban ruled. Unlike her colleagues, she has not burned or banished hers. ``It cost me so much I can't bring myself to throw it away,'' she says. ``But I still hate it. It is the symbol of everything that we suffered.'' School is in at the Rahman Mina High School in the southern suburbs of Kabul. The chatter of excited young voices echoes along the corridors. In classrooms crowded with makeshift desks, eager faces take turns reading from a single storybook.

In the office of the principal, bathed in spring sunlight, Gul Shan Zakhili and Nazhat, her deputy, proudly run through the class of 2002 - 2500 students in three shifts a day, seven days a week. Some are mothers in their mid-20s returning to complete an education they were forced to abandon as teenagers. Others are teenagers starting out in first grade.

The small two-storey school reopened in February after a recess that lasted 10 years. During the years of civil war that followed the collapse of the former Soviet-backed regime in 1992, the building was commandeered as a headquarters by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose forces helped to lay waste to the surrounding neighbourhoods. Then came the Taliban, who banned education for girls and insisted on strict religious indoctrination for boys.

``I never thought that we would see this day,'' says principal Zakhili. ``We have a new Afghanistan. For five years the women and the girls had to stay home and do nothing. They had no hope for the future. They thought they were illiterate and useless. Now we are feeling proud of ourselves again. We think there is nothing that we can't achieve if we want to.''

On the morning of November 13 last year Nazhat was at home listening to the radio when suddenly the station began to play a recording of a famous patriotic poem. It was the signal that the capital had fallen to the United States-backed Northern Alliance forces.

``When I heard that poem again I cried all day, from morning to night, I was so happy,'' says Nazhat. ``I knew that it was over. Then when I saw the new flag flying on top of the hill the next morning, I was sure that the Taliban were finished.''

Seven months on, Kabul is a city transformed: the once liberal and cosmopolitan capital is rediscovering its freedoms after awakening from the long nightmare of war and repression.

Houses and apartment blocks ravaged by decades of war are being rebuilt and repainted. New shops and restaurants are opening each day. There are traffic jams in once empty streets and the markets are crowded and alive with commerce. Even the six-year drought has broken, bringing a lush cloak of greenery - an omen for many that better times are ahead.

Since early this year, more than one million Afghans have seized the prospect of peace and returned home from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, many of them converging on Kabul. Hundreds of thousands of other, internally-displaced people have headed back to towns and villages.

And today, an event will begin that many are anticipating as the real moment when Afghanistan can put behind four decades of war and embracea future in peace. In a giant tent erected on a sports ground in the suburbs of Kabul, 1501 delegates will gather for a week-long loya jirga - a traditional grand council that will choose a new head of state, cabinet and parliament to rule the country for the next two years, pending general elections.

But Kabul is a deceptive window on the rest of the country and its future. Beyond the city limits, guarded for now by thousands of international troops, anarchy reigns, crime is rampant and warlords again hold sway in many places where the Taliban at least brought their own harsh brand of law and order.

Across the areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan, allied air and ground operations continue against remnants of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, making resettlement and reconstruction impossible for the time being.

In the north, a tense stand-off continues between two ostensible Northern Alliance allies for control of the key city of Mazar-e Sharif and neighbouring provinces. The ruthless Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostam and Tajik commander Ustad Atta Mohamad, each with well-equipped armies of up to 10,000 men, are kept apart only by intense diplomatic pressure as thousands of ethnic Pashtuns continue to be driven out of the region.

In the eastern city of Khost, Pashtun commander Bacha Khan still defies the central government as he presses to retain control of the strategically important region on the border with Pakistan in a conflict that has claimed more than 50 lives in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, American and British officials have expressed fears that the anti-American warlord Hekmatyar, who returned to Afghanistan earlier this year after spending several years in exile in Iran, is building an alliance with fugitive Taliban and al Qaeda forces in western tribal areas to mount a challenge against the interim administration.The New York-based Human Rights Watch warned this week that some warlords were using violence and intimidation to stack the selection of delegates to the loya jirga, and that repression and lawlessness had reached alarming levels in some areas.

``This is a make-or-break time for Afghanistan's future,'' one of the authors, Sam Zia-Zarifi said in the group's report. ``Warlords are making a power grab by brazenly manipulating the loya jirga selection process. If they succeed, Afghans will again be denied the ability to choose their own leaders and build a civil society.''

The extent of instability across the country has placed even more pressure on the loya jirga to find a power-sharing formula to defuse the current tensions and enable the country to move forward. ``If the loya jirga fails, it will be a disaster. We will be back to where we were in 1992. It will be an undeclared civil war,'' says a senior United Nations official in Kabul.

After a series of meetings between senior faction leaders in recent days, there are hopeful signs emerging of a deal that could see a continuation of the leadership structure that has run the country for the past six months.

Hamid Karzai, the popular interim leader chosen by the UN-brokered peace conference in Bonn last year, is expected to be confirmed as prime minister after securing the endorsement of key Northern Alliance leaders and the powerful governor of western Herat province, Ismail Khan, as well as the expected backing of most of his fellow ethnic Pashtun leaders. In return, it is expected that the Northern Alliance will retain control of the key portfolios they now hold - defence, interior and foreign affairs.

But the plan could well draw a backlash from other powerful figures within the Northern Alliance, notably the disgruntled former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and a number of influential warlords who have muscled their way on to the loya jirga.

And if the new government is seen to entrench the present disproportionate power of ethnic Tajiks in the Northern Alliance, Karzai could face a revolt from within his own Pashtun camp.

A potentially explosive issue is the question of who will be appointed head of state. Karzai and other Pashtuns strongly favour the ageing former king, Zahir Shah, who returned from 30 years in exile two months ago. But the Northern Alliance is vehemently opposed to any move towards a restoration of the monarchy.

The 87-year-old former king's fitness for any future role was cast into further doubt last week when he had to cancel plans to travel to Kandahar and other parts of the south because of illness.

Diplomats and Afghan analysts also fear that any deals reached at the loya jirga could easily unravel in the weeks and months ahead, especially with the international community's refusal to extend its security role beyond Kabul. There are particular concerns that Karzai - while respected and increasingly popular among all ethnic communities - lacks the muscle to resist if the powerful forces now lined up behind him should turn nasty if they don't get all they want from the new order.

``A lot of Kabul people respect Karzai,'' says a senior diplomat. ``He is not one of them, but they see that he is genuine, that he has no political power base and no army. They say that the country needs more men like him. But that is both his strength and his weakness.''

What should concentrate the minds of those factions tempted to break ranks is the certainty that international support will evaporate unless there is political unity. International donors are withholding hundreds of millions in pledged aid until they see the outcome of the loya jirga and barely 10 per cent of the $US400 million committed for this year's national budget has so far been handed over.

Ghulam Mohuddin Dareez, dean of law at Kabul University and a former justice minister, believes the influence of the overwhelming popular desire for peace should not be underestimated.

``The people are fed up with war and what it has done to this country and they will no longer accept those who want to keep fighting,'' he says. ``Everyone wants to live in a peaceful situation, to see an end to conflict and a time in which there is respect for the rights of all the people of this country. Any leader who jeopardises this chance of peace will be repudiated.''

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