from smh.com.au....cheers, ken hanly
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The comeback Kings If the Taliban is defeated, who will rule Afghanistan? Paul McGeough looks at some of the candidates.
He was lost on the buttoned expanses of the gold brocade sofa, just as he is lost on the world stage. Burhanuddin Rabbani has embassies around the globe, but he does not have a capital and he doesn't have a country.
He is the President of Afghanistan, yet he hunkers in a tumbled-down provincial palace in Faizabad, a mud-brick town squeezed so far into the far north-eastern corner of Afghanistan that it is almost in China.
Perched in the middle of the sofa, hands clasped in his lap, his eyes were weary and his voice was soft as he made a plaintive pitch for legitimacy: "The Taliban does not control 90 per cent of the country - it has only 72 per cent."
It was six weeks ago.
Sitting in the dimly lit drawing room, retainers served glasses of sweet green tea and the President lectured me in his sage-like manner on the responsibility of the international community to help free his people of the Taliban yoke.
"They have to do something about Pakistan," he said angrily, condemning the dictatorship on the other side of the snow-capped Hindu Kush for the self-serving scaffolding it had built around the Taliban.
But this president said nothing of Russia, Iran and India, the countries that arm and fund his Northern Alliance opposition movement.
Within weeks the President would lose one of his key men. The fabled Ahmed Shah Massoud would be dead, said to be a victim of an Osama bin Laden curtain raiser to the terrorist assault on the US.
Now, following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, a reinvigorated Rabanni is trailing his coat in Washington, demanding $100 million a month in aid and weapons to take the fight up to the Taliban. Rabanni also demanded a role as king-maker in the endless parley now under way on how to govern Afghanistan after the Taliban, but he has been trumped by the resurrection of the former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who has lived in reclusive exile in a villa near Rome since 1973.
A couple of sketches from Afghan history will quickly underscore what a piranha pit this parley process will be if and when the Taliban is driven from Kabul.
Afghan politics is predicated on treachery. Zahir Shar ascended to the throne in the '30s on the assassination of his father. The coup that undid the new king was engineered by one of his cousins.
And thousands have died in the past decade of fighting as a result of cheating and shameless double-crossing, most notably by generals Abdul Rashid Dostum and Abdul Malik, both of whom are with the Northern Alliance for now, but who are capable of turning on each other or on the whole alliance.
Nothing is sacred. The Soviets have been blamed for a lot in Afghanistan, but they did not destroy Kabul. That was done as the unforgiving warlords, Rabbani included, fought for supremacy in the early '90s - by which time the Russians had retreated to Moscow.
Rabanni's Northern Alliance may have short-term attraction for the US as a fighting force on the ground in Afghanistan.
He has spent the past week attempting to elbow the 86-year-old king out of the main game, but because his alliance is made up of the minority Tajiks and Uzbeks of the northern border country, it cannot be a central player in a future government.
The Taliban is almost exclusively Pashtun, the single biggest ethnic group. The Pashtuns still are aligned with the Taliban, although diplomats report splits, bids and counter-bids as various commanders position themselves and their fighters to advance themselves in the event of a Taliban rout.
The second biggest ethnic group is the Hazaras, from the rugged central Hazarajat region. But while they are vocal and can fight, down the years they have been the victims of ceaseless oppression.
And in keeping with the centuries-old habit of international interference in the affairs of Afghanistan, diplomats are wearing a path to the king's door in Rome. So, too, are representatives of warlords from across Afghanistan.
Many of them talk of a government of national unity. And the king, who is Pashtun, is eager to play a role. But jostling for power will be the ethnic leaders who are driven as much by greed as they are by the interests of their people; and the warlords who have been marauding around the country, selling themselves and their men to the highest bidders.
Swirling through all of this will be the deep-seated anger of the mullahs and old men who used to run Afghan community life but who were sidelined by the thirtysomething stampede of the Taliban in the mid-'90s.
And watching from just over the border are paranoid neighbours like Pakistan and Iran, the governments of which will not be able to resist interfering.
Much of the lobbying now is in support of a traditional national forum, a loya jirga, in which hundreds of community leaders seek a compromise on national issues.
It is more than 250 years since a loya jirga was used to install a new ruler, but already mini-jirgas are being held in Afghanistan and in the huge refugee and exile communities as positions are taken.
There is a risk that those who get to the loya jirga will be so consumed by power and politics that they may not see the enormity of the task ahead.
But a paper commissioned from a panel of experts by the Swiss Government earlier this year concluded: "The fact that this conflict has continued for over 20 years, despite repeated changes in the identity of the antagonists and the issues apparently at stake, indicates that its causes transcend such transient manifestations.
"Nor should one analyse the policy objective simply as 'peace' or 'ending the war'.
"A more desirable policy goal would be reconstructing the country as part of the interstate and economic structure of an entire region."
pmcgeough at mail.fairfax.com.au