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New political alignments emerging in Afghanistan
EFL
While Afghanistan heads towards the presidential and parliamentary elections in September this year, the country is also witnessing new political alliances. The basic underlying principal of Afghan politics has been cycles of fission and fusion: political and other actors come together, forge alliances, fall out and eventually turn against each other. Tribalism, ethnicity, religion and political ideologies have always been the primary tools of political mobilisation in Afghanistan and these factors continue to shape the political chessboard today.

Following the Constitutional Loya Jirga that concluded on January 4th, ethnicity is now more manifest and is perhaps one of the key factors defining politics in Afghanistan today. That event provided a platform to the Pashtuns – the county’s majority ethnic group – to make a political comeback. In the post-Loya Jirga scenario, Pashtuns are increasingly coming together and are also pushing to re-elect the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, as president in the September elections. The most interesting aspect of such a development is the understanding reached between the Pashtun Islamist and modernist elite. Hezb-e Islami and many other jihadis, which once tried to eliminate all liberal and secular Afghan intelligentsia, are in alliance with the Pashtun bloc within Karzai’s cabinet. This group consists of finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, interior minister, Ali Ahmed Jalali, rural development minister, Hanif Atmar, state bank’s governor, Anwar-ul Haq Ahadi, and many others in the upper echelons of power.

Gulbadin Hekmatyar, Hezb-e Islami’s fugitive leader has lost most of his best commanders to Karzai. The effort is a result of America’s ‘carrot and stick’ policy which while threatening use of force promises that anyone not engaging in active military opposition to the US-led military coalition has a chance of becoming part of the government – or at least freely participate in the country’s political life. The US policy was the result of the realisation that without meaningful Pashtun participation, the peace process in the country won’t last. The Pashtun Islamists were estranged from non-Pashtun Islamists because initially after the fall of the Taliban regime all bearded and turban-wearing Pashtuns were branded as Al Qaeda and Taliban. They were also kept away from power and participation in the government by non-Pashtun ethnic minorities who occupied the more powerful cabinet posts. More recently, Karzai has publicly extended the olive branch to Afghanistan’s former hard-line Taliban rulers by urging them to end insurgency and join in rebuilding the country. President Karzai said his government has been talking to the less-militant Taliban leaders for some time about ending the insurgency. The former Taliban foreign minister Abdul Wakil Muttawakil was freed from American captivity a few months ago and is believed to be instrumental in these negotiations.

The non-Pashtun ethnic minorities on the other hand are bitterly divided among themselves and Karzai is all set to play on such divisions. The most powerful such bloc of disparate grouping, the Northern Alliance, is now defunct. Two of its leaders the ethnic Tajik defence minister and vice president Marshal Qasim Fahim and ethnic Hazara Karim Khalili have struck an alliance with Karzai in return for being co-opted into the present and future power sharing. Both were recently rewarded by the formation of two new provinces, Dehkundi –a Hazara populated region formerly a district of the south central Uruzgan province – and Panjshir the stronghold of the late ethnic Tajik resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, which was part of the central Parwan province. Analysts maintain that both Fahim and Khalili are tasked with pulling non-Pashtun votes for Karzai.

Haji Mohammad Mohaqaq and many other regional leaders such as ethnic Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum in the north and ethnic Tajik Ismail Khan in the west are also losing because of being dubbed as ‘warlords’. The recent donor conference at Berlin that announced US $8.2 billion in aid for Afghanistan must be a morale booster for a confident Karzai who has been lucky to survive the quagmire of Afghan politics. But for how long and at what cost he would be able to hold together the current political order still remains an open question.
Posted by: Paul Moloney 2004-05-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=32099