The government’s fraying unity

The government’s fraying unity

 

THE hope Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, nurtured for the huge gathering, or jirga, held in a vast tent in Kabul this month was that it would give him the national support needed to start a peace process with the Taliban. Instead, it prompted the resignations of the country’s hugely respected interior minister and spy chief and exposed serious disagreements about efforts at reconciliation with the insurgents.
Hanif Atmar, a trusted technocrat, was seen by many foreigners as Mr Karzai’s best minister. Amrullah Saleh, the chillingly efficient chief of the intelligence service, was also much admired by fellow spooks in America and Britain. Ostensibly, they resigned to take the blame for the failure to stop insurgents getting through security cordons around the venue, despite the presence of some 12,000 police and soldiers. The attackers fired rockets, some of which narrowly missed the tent where Mr Karzai was making his opening speech.
Mr Saleh and Mr Atmar were called to explain themselves. Mr Karzai made clear he did not believe their account. He even suggested they were part of an American and British plot to wreck his peace initiative. The two men offered their resignations, which Mr Karzai accepted. When the world’s foreign ministers gather for a conference in Kabul in July, both main national-security posts may well be vacant.
However, in comments that are worrying for Mr Karzai’s peace initiative, members of Mr Saleh’s entourage say the president’s lack of confidence was only the “tipping point” for his resignation. They say that Mr Saleh has been deeply concerned for some time about Mr Karzai’s conciliatory approach to Pakistan—the old enemy, which Mr Saleh’s spies tell him essentially controls the Taliban. Hardliners, such as Mr Saleh, believe Afghanistan will win respect from Pakistan only by showing a bit of steel. For their part, the Pakistanis have long demanded his sacking.
Mr Saleh is said to believe that Mr Karzai, who like most of the Taliban (and many Pakistanis) is a Pushtun, a member of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, has softened towards Pakistan because he no longer thinks NATO can win in Afghanistan. Hence, in his view, Mr Karzai’s reluctance publicly to endorse the counterinsurgency strategy of General Stanley McChrystal, the American NATO commander.
Even more damaging in Mr Saleh’s eyes are compromises such as Mr Karzai’s post-jirga announcement of plans to release Taliban prisoners held on the basis of intelligence rather than hard evidence. Mr Saleh, whose organisation was responsible for locking up many of the prisoners, believes dangerous men will be freed.
That Mr Saleh, who in the 1990s was a close aide to Ahmed Shah Massoud, a famous Tajik guerrilla and leader of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, objects so strongly even to a confidence-building measure such as prisoner releases shows how difficult it will be to reach consensus on a negotiated settlement. After all, Mr Karzai did not go nearly as far as some proponents of reconciliation would have liked—offering insurgent leaders nothing in the way of provincial governorships, cabinet positions or constitutional change.
The 1,600 delegates to the peace jirga were meant to represent the whole nation. But most were picked by Mr Karzai’s appointees. Non-Pushtun power brokers, whose support will be vital for any consensus, stayed away: Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek leader; the runner-up in last year’s presidential election, Abdullah Abdullah, who is seen as a Tajik; Mohammad Mohaqiq, an ethnic-Hazara leader; and the Tajik governor of Balkh province, Atta Mohammad Noor.
As one leading politician puts it: “The risk is that we win the south just to lose the north”—ie, for every southern Pushtun welcoming rapprochement with the Taliban, a non-Pushtun in the north may be looking to dust off the AK-47 that has been sitting on the shelf for nine years now.