Author: Chidanand Rajghatta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: December 8, 2001
Perhaps it has to do with the dicey
pitches back home, but as the end game approaches in Afghanistan, India
appears to have read the treacherous wicket there better than any other
country and has come out on top of the political situation.
More than the selection of the Shimla-educated
Hamid Karzai as the head of the interim set-up in. Kabul, New Delhi has
reason to be pleased with the composition of the remaining 30 spots in
the arrangement.
Eighteen of the posts have gone
to the Northern Alliance or the United Front, 11 to the so-called Rome
group, and only one to the Pakistan based Peshawar group.
The crucial portfolios of foreign
affairs, defence and interior have all gone to the Northern Alliance, which
New Delhi fully and consistently backed. Sima Samar, a prominent social
worker and a Shia Hazara from central Afghanistan, has been named deputy
Prime Minister in -charge of women's affairs, one of the two women named
to the interim government.
In fact, reports suggest that the
new set-up in Afghanistan could be making its first political contact abroad
soon with a visit to India by interior minister Yusuf Qanooni.
Defence minister Gen. Mohammed Fahim
is also a familiar figure in New Delhi, having visited the Indian capital
before and having dealt with the Indian military and intelligence during
the Alliance battle with the Taliban well before the September 11 events.
New Delhi has also been in close
contact with foreign minister Dr Abdulla Abdulla.
All three are Tajiks from the Panjsher
Valley and are legatees of the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was widely
respected in New Delhi.
The intensely despised Pakistan
backed Taliban, moderate or otherwise, has ended with cipher. Also missing
from the power line-up are Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum who rules in northern
Afghanistan, Pakistani hatchet man Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hizb-e-Islami,
and Saudi client Abdulrab Rasul Sayyaf of the Ittihad-i-Islami.
Expectedly, those who were excluded
from the new arrangement have already begun making noises. But the western
powers overseeing the Bonn treaty, expect the arrangement to hold. Even
Pakistan, which has lost the most in the arrangement, has been forced to
welcome it publicly.
With Hamid Karzai, a leader of the
majority Pashtun tribe, leading the dispensation, India hopes that the
ruling set-up will have the ethnic balance needed to carry forward the
work towards providing a permanent political platform in a country ravaged
by a decade of bigotry and strife. Karzai himself is ambivalent towards
India, probably as a result of being denied a visa to pursue his doctorate
in the 1980s and the subsequent loss of contact. The feeling is mutual,
since India watched Karzai being groomed by the ISI.
But then there's no love lost between
Karzai and Pakistan either. Islamabad had once asked him to leave Quetta,
where he was organising anti-Taliban forces, at the height of its dalliance
with the fundamentalist regime in Kabul.
However, he is known to be fiercely
independent. Already, he has begun to show an autonomous, defying the US
to strike a deal for the surrender of Kandahar with the routed Taliban
forces.
For Pakistan, the composition of
the interim set-up is bad news. Islamabad had just begun to make overtures
to the incumbent president Burnahuddin Rabbani, but he has been jettisoned
by the younger leadership of the Alliance, partly to overcome the stigma
of his disastrous rule from 1992 to 1996.
Now Pakistan has expressed "delight"
at the selection of Karzai, but the joy may be misplaced. Despite the academic
mishap in India, Karzai, a secular and liberal Pashtun, in even more suspicious
of Pakistan and holds Islamabad's Taliban proteges and their ISI masters
responsible for the assassination of his father in 1999.
