U.S., PAKISTAN SEE FUTURE ROLE FOR TALIBAN.
General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said in a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Colin Powell today that the US had agreed to a role for moderate Taliban leaders in any post-war regime in Afghanistan, reports the FT.com. Any new regime should include a role for "former King Zahir Shah, political leaders, moderate Taliban leaders, elements from the Northern Alliance, tribal elders, and Afghans living outside their country," Musharraf is quoted as saying. Both stressed the need for a "broad based government," the story notes.
Musharraf also said the attacks on Afghanistan should be short and that the construction of a political alternative to the Taliban should be put on a "fast track" to avoid any power vacuum. He urged the US-led coalition to quickly "achieve the military objectives and terminate the operation."
Powell said he had agreed on the need for a regime friendly to Pakistan and other neighboring countries, and noted that talks would continue into the afternoon. He also said the US would continue to strengthen Pakistan's economy and establish stronger economic and trade ties.
The news comes as the Financial Times (p.14) says in a separate report that diplomats at the UN begin negotiations this week on Afghanistan's future following the probable result of the US-led military campaign: the fall of the Taliban. While it is too early to judge the military campaign's course, US and other governments want preparations in place in the event of a collapse of the fundamentalist regime.
Yet it is a race through a quagmire, says the story. Ethnic and religious splits within the country are overlaid on decades of blood feuds, betrayals and mistrust. Even the Northern Alliance, consisting of at least four groups of fighters and which is the main military opposition to the Taliban, is riven.
How best to secure representation in a future government of the Pashtuns, the ethnic group that constitutes half of Afghanistan's 25 million people, but is also the ethnic base of the Taliban? "You don't run Afghanistan without a Pashtun by your side," an adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is quoted as saying.
The need for economic reconstruction is likely to bring in many UN agencies, as well as the World Bank, notes the story. The role of the agencies is likely to be a main topic when they meet with Annan in New York this month.
The news come as the Times of London reports (p.8) that the way was cleared yesterday for the return of Zahir Shah as the head of a post-Taliban administration when his special envoy met Pakistani leaders to discuss arrangements for his arrival in Islamabad. The King had earlier indicated to French and Italian foreign ministers that the UN could play a key role in a transitional phase but that his country must decide its future by itself, notes the story.
In other news, Reuters reports that a study on Monday portrayed Afghanistan, even before its latest pounding by US bombs and missiles, as a country whose economy has shriveled up, leaving the heroin poppy as its major export, Reuters reports. Afghanistan's economic growth had suffered long before the latest devastation, the Oxford University study, to be presented at a conference arranged by Stockholm's Olof Palme International Center, said. Co-author Valpy FitzGerald, director of the Finance and Trade Policy Center at Oxford's Queen Elizabeth House, said the collapse of viable markets did most of the economic damage.
Commenting meanwhile, Amity Shlaes of the FT (p.13) writes that it has become clear that some kind of western presence in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent the nurturing of future Osama bin Ladens. UN peacekeepers, whatever their strengths, are what their name says: peacekeepers, defusers, whose goal is to calm a battlefield so that neighbors will be left alone. They are not peacemakers and they are not nation- and democracy-builders. Even the most vociferous of UN supporters acknowledges that blue helmets alone will not stabilize Afghanistan.
If the long and gruesome history of Afghanistan has taught anything, it is that Afghanistan's own instability, violence and political extremism-not to mention drug-trafficking-are due to the fact that outside nations have always viewed it as a buffer zone to be managed, rather than a true state whose people believe that it has an independent reason to survive.
It is time they considered whether the place needs a single, individual force to inspire it-a General MacArthur who will work and then depart, Shlaes says.