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Sunday, November 18, 2001

Speaking on NBC's Meet The Press, the President's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "The nature of this government is going to be up to the Afghan people."

She said that U.S. officials had been in touch with Burhanuddin Rabbani, who returned to Kabul Saturday from exile and proclaimed himself President of Afghanistan following the city’s capture by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

While Rabbani's government occupies Afghanistan's seat at the United Nations, the U.N. Security Council this week passed a resolution calling on all parties to cooperate with the body to form a broader-based government.

"We've been in touch with elements of the Northern Alliance. We've been in touch with a number of Pashtun leaders, and everybody I think understands that the future of Afghanistan has to be one in which all elements are represented," Rice said.

Most of the diplomatic effort for the United States is working through James Dobbins, a former Balkan envoy, who met this week with local Pashtun leaders in Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan.

Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, and many live in Pakistan as well. The Northern Alliance is a fractious coalition of local warlords dominated by the country’s three largest minorities – Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. They enjoy little support from the Pashtuns, who dominate in the south of Afghanistan and formed the demographic basis for the Taliban.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told ABC’s This Week Sunday – referring to Dobbin's meeting with Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance Foreign Minister – "Mr. Abdullah has agreed on behalf of the Northern Alliance to send Northern Alliance representatives to a meeting that's being convened by Mr. (Lakhdar) Brahimi, the Secretary-General of the United Nations' representative on these matters."

That meeting may take place as soon as this week, possibly in the United Arab Emirates, Geneva or a third location according to State Department officials. Abdullah himself cited Austria and Germany as possible venues and said a decision would be taken within the next three days.

"The victories and liberation of areas by our armed forces shouldn't affect our commitment to the formation of a fully representative, multi-ethnic broad-based government, but it will rather encourage us to speed up our efforts with our national, regional and international partners in order to achieve that," Abdullah told reporters in Tashkent Sunday morning.

But in the meantime, Rabanni has occupied Kabul’s presidential residence – the so-called Palace Number One – and a high level Russian delegation, headed by President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Aleksandr Oblov was in Kabul Sunday to meet with him.

The de facto establishment of a Rabbani government may complicate U.S. efforts to persuade the Northern Alliance to cede control eventually to a broader Afghan government.

And Brahimi's work to bring together the various Afghan factions -- including the Northern Alliance – will not be easy. Already the alliance representative at the U.N. has been quoted by Pakistan’s Daily Jang as saying they would not work with Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, reported to have returned to Afghanistan this weekend.

But U.S. diplomats have another card to play if talks do not work out. On Tuesday, U.S. and Japanese officials will host the first conference on developing an international relief plan for Afghanistan.

Christina Rocca, the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, told reporters Thursday, "One of the things, we have going for us is that we are putting together an international reconstruction effort, and we hope that will serve as an incentive to participate in a broad-based government."

The new committee will include representatives from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Qatar will help in its capacity as head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Norway as the next head of the U.N. working group on Afghanistan. In addition, the Asia Development Bank, the World Bank and the Islamic Development Bank are expected to attend Tuesday's meeting.

State Department officials say the new effort will first focus on immediate development needs such as water supplies, hospitals and ridding the country of its many land mines. Later on however, the fund could end up financing the building of roads and other forms of infrastructure, something particularly important for oil companies that have long looked to Afghanistan as an ideal location for a central Asian pipeline.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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