Ceremony in Kabul to Swear In the New

Invitations went out to 1,000 dignitaries and diplomats and those who coughed up cigarettes or trinkets to get into the big event.

Weapons were ordered off the streets of this capital city in a bow to newly arrived foreign peacekeepers--and to ensure that today’s inauguration of Afghanistan’s first civilian government in decades goes off without the usual daily dose of bloodshed.

According to the elaborate inaugural program, Pushtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai was to be sworn in as interim prime minister by the chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, even though this country has neither such a court nor a presiding judge.

“We will find somebody,” Karzai’s chief of staff, Sayed Najibullah Ashimi, assured Western journalists on the eve of the inauguration.

Patching together a leadership for this country ravaged by 23 years of war remains a work in progress, despite its formal acquisition of power today and the concerted efforts of the United Nations and the world’s wealthiest countries to put a stop to warlord rule and banana republic justice.

But today’s transition of authority from the ragged Northern Alliance forces who overran Kabul nearly six weeks ago to a 30-member Cabinet chosen at U.N.-brokered negotiations in Germany constitutes a promising first step on the long road to stability and nation-building.

Northern Alliance politicians and regional chieftains will fill 18 of the Cabinet seats, but the atmosphere just hours before the transition was still tense because no one knows what those who are losing power will do.

Outside the Interior Ministry, where Northern Alliance veterans put on a show of providing law and order, gunmen gruffly brushed off suggestions that the foreign peacekeepers would be taking over some of their duties.

“They aren’t here. They will be posted elsewhere. We are the police for Kabul,” insisted Sher Aga, an aide to the acting and incoming interior minister, Younis Qanooni.

One alliance figure who will be absent in the new leadership, deposed former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, is nonetheless prominently included in the ceremonies that began about 11 a.m. The 62-year-old Rabbani, whose 1992-96 administration oversaw an era of savage fighting that killed 50,000 in Kabul alone, has refused to bow out of the limelight, and fellow alliance leaders appear to be carrying him along as an unofficial head of state to keep him in line.

The new government was neither elected nor chosen by a fully representative delegation of Afghans to the talks this month near Bonn, Germany. But most factions in this deeply fractured country have either accepted the incoming Cabinet as a legitimate interim authority or at least ignored what is happening in the capital as irrelevant to their own regional clout.

Still, world powers have begun regarding Afghanistan as an emerging state worthy of their aid and attention, if only to ensure that the fractious militias and political parties don’t slide back into the bloody chaos that has long prevailed.

“I want to confirm that the United States will, as of tomorrow, officially recognize the interim administration as the government of Afghanistan,” U.S. special envoy James Dobbins told a news conference here Friday. “We will turn over the embassy in Washington, invite them to name an ambassador to Washington and deal with them in all matters as the government of Afghanistan.”

That diplomatic recognition--expected to be emulated by other Western powers--should open the floodgates of humanitarian aid and development assistance that were promised Afghan leaders if they set their battles aside to give the country a chance to rejoin the international community. The U.S. has not recognized an Afghan government since the 1979 Soviet invasion established a Moscow puppet regime here.

Open warfare has been waning with the defeat of the fundamentalist Taliban that was in power for the last five years. But gunfire and banditry remain rampant--so much so that the authorities had to order citizens to hand in their weapons for safekeeping to avoid any clashes that would disrupt today’s transfer of power.

The disarmament order from the Interior Ministry, read on television late Thursday, was to have taken effect at dawn Friday.

But ordinary pedestrians as well as the hordes of camouflage-clad youths of indeterminate association still carried their rifles as if they were wallets or keys. Shoulder rocket launchers and spare projectiles could also be seen on bicycles and protruding from the backs of handcarts and wagons.

The first foreign peacekeepers of the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, began deploying in Kabul on Friday. The 80-odd British Royal Marines and special operations troops were expected to escort diplomats and visiting VIPs to and from today’s ceremonies, then take up guard at key facilities such as the presidential palace and ministries.

The deployment of the first troops of a planned 5,000-strong peacekeeping force was delayed while the British troops spent most of the day at Bagram air base north of Kabul to escort dignitaries arriving at the last possible moment for the inauguration.

Those arrivals, expected to be followed by mass departures within 24 hours of the swearing-in ceremony, hinted at the outside world’s still shaky confidence in Afghanistan’s future.