Afghan Scholars Dissect Country’s Peace Potential

Peace has been dangled in front of Afghans and snatched away so many times that hope always comes with caution. Yet many here are daring to believe that war may finally be loosening its grip.

Afghans have suffered with war for 23 years, and ordinary people tired of it long ago. But each time Afghan leaders and their foreign sponsors promised to end the fighting, brute self-interest won out.

The difference now is that most of the world seems to be tired of Afghanistan’s war too. Everyone knows the terrifying cost of allowing the country to remain a failed state, and an ideal base for terrorists, said Mohammed Kazem Ahung, a leading Afghan academic and journalist.

The many craters blasted by U.S. bombs across Afghanistan should serve as reminders to warlords that someone bigger is watching them, said Ahung, 68, former dean of journalism at Kabul University.

“This was bombing whose message was peace, and still is peace,” Ahung said in an interview Wednesday. “These are really beautiful bombs because they are serving our cause.”

Guns and corruption are still the main currencies of Afghan politics. As long as the economy remains in ruins and people have to depend on local warlords for survival, politicians and commanders can be a threat to peace.

The long-term future of the deal signed in Germany may depend on whether Afghans, the United Nations and foreign governments can succeed at something that has fallen out of favor in Washington: nation-building.

Many here argue that even as foreign powers deliver on a promise to rebuild Afghanistan, which is expected to cost from $5 billion to $10 billion over the next decade, they need to keep their hands out of Afghan politics.

“When we study the past, the agreements, of course, were not stable,” said Jafar Kohistani, 39, a professor of public rights and political science at Kabul University.

“But the presence of the Taliban, and the foreigners, more and more taught our people that if we had had national unity, we would not have faced such disasters.”

Things should be different this time, he added. “Past agreements were made by commanders, but these are for saving our nation from the foreigners,” Kohistani said.

It is too early to tell whether powerful commanders who control their own fiefdoms, such as ethnic Uzbek Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum in northern Mazar-i-Sharif, or Ismail Khan of Herat in the northwest, will step into line behind the new interim authority.

Order among warlords may depend in part on whether the U.N. and Western governments follow precedents set in the Balkans and Rwanda and prosecute alleged war criminals from all sides of the Afghan conflict.

An early draft of the Bonn agreement forbade the new government from granting amnesty to anyone who had committed “serious violations of international humanitarian law or crimes against humanity,” but that phrase was deleted from the final text of the peace deal.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has urged the U.S. and its coalition partner Britain to ensure that three Taliban commanders suspected of war crimes be held by an outside authority until they can be prosecuted by a tribunal.

Taliban commanders Mullah Fazil and Maulvi Nurulah Nuri were known to be in Dostum’s custody in Mazar-i-Sharif; Mullah Dadaullah was also in Northern Alliance custody in an unknown location, the rights group said.

Fazil was overall commander of Taliban troops accused of killing more than 30 civilians in Khwajaghar and more than 170 ethnic Hazaras in Yakaolang in central Afghanistan, both in January, Human Rights Watch said.

Dadaullah commanded Taliban troops who “carried out a scorched earth policy in Yakaolang district,” burning 4,000 homes, shops and public buildings, and is also suspected of involvement in a 1998 massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif, the agency charged.

Nuri, the former Taliban governor of Balkh province, which includes Mazar-i-Sharif, could be implicated in the executions of Uzbek civilians in May, along with another massacre in the Robatak Pass in the same month, Human Rights Watch said.

The agency said that the three Taliban commanders “represent a test case for how the international community is going to ensure that those who are implicated in the worst atrocities in Afghanistan are brought to justice.”

But for all of the Taliban’s excesses, many Afghans, especially in Kabul, the capital, believe other faction leaders--including several in the Northern Alliance--are guilty of worse. And any Afghan government that tried to prosecute them could have a fight on its hands.

Ahung, onetime chief editor of the defunct Kabul Times, sees “old-fashioned Afghans,” those of his own generation, as the main threat to peace. They include people such as Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Northern Alliance political leader, and Abdur Rasul Sayyaf, who, like his longtime ally Rabbani, is a radical Islamist.

“Their power has been weakened, but they still have some,” Ahung said. “They are still a danger to the cause of Afghanistan, and to the younger generation, and to the cause of peace.”

Rabbani has led the Jamiat-i-Islami party, the Northern Alliance’s dominant faction, since 1972. But his much younger foreign minister, Abdullah, and interior minister, Younis Qanooni, proved the more powerful when they insisted on compromising at the peace talks despite Rabbani’s harder line.

Ahung said he knew Rabbani in the early 1970s, when the Northern Alliance chief was a professor and theologian at Kabul University. He thinks that Rabbani, 61, now realizes that his time is quickly passing.

“He saw the people of his own party were against him,” Ahung said.

Both Abdullah and Qanooni will retain their positions in the new administration, while Rabbani, the U.N.-recognized president of Afghanistan, ended up without a post.

But Kohistani thinks that it is wrong to see Rabbani’s retreat as a sign of weakness and insists that he will win support because Afghans will think he is putting “peace and national security” before his own interests. That could leave Rabbani well positioned if the peace deal unravels.

Afghanistan’s new rulers will have to strike a balance between demands of foreign governments for a more liberal democracy, and of Islamists such as Rabbani and Sayyaf who retain widespread ideological support from veterans of the war against the former Soviet Union in the 1980s.

“Islam will play a significant role in a society which is predominantly Muslim, but of course it will not be the Islam that the Taliban introduced, which had nothing to do with Islam,” Abdullah said.

Money often can buy peace in Afghanistan, but it won’t buy the loyalty of leaders such as Rabbani and Sayyaf to Wednesday’s peace deal because they already have more than enough, Ahung said.

“They have got lots of money, as much as they could spend until doomsday,” he said. “They belong to an [Islamist] ideology.”