‘Great Game II’ Has a Wealth of Players

A month ago, Afghanistan’s main opposition force and exiled king agreed to join in shaping a pro-Western leadership for their country. By the end of October, a Supreme Council for National Unity was to be ready to supplant the Taliban, whose days of harsh, theocratic rule seemed to be numbered.

But that accord among Afghans has done little more than fire up the rival ambitions of outsiders. The opposition Northern Alliance and the former king’s aides have failed to hold a second meeting--to pick the council’s 120 members--and each side is being swayed by competing interests of foreign countries.

“It’s the ‘Great Game, Part 2,’ ” said a frustrated advisor to Mohammad Zaher Shah, the 87-year-old former monarch of Central Asia’s most fought-over country. “Or maybe the Great Game never ended.”

“The Great Game” is a term coined by English writer Rudyard Kipling to describe the 19th century intrigues in Afghanistan as Britain and Russia struggled to control the wild, mountainous land where their vast empires rubbed together.

Today, at least 10 nations--including the United States, Russia and Afghanistan’s six immediate neighbors--are jostling for influence in a post-Taliban order. Each sees a link between Afghanistan and its own national security, and each is nurturing its own Afghan clients as former warlords, exiled tribal chiefs and opposition military commanders bid for credibility and influence.

“The interests of all these powers complicate the process of national reconciliation within Afghanistan,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a Central Asia regional specialist at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. “Each wants to shape the country’s future in the image of its own political interests.”

The consequent lack of a clear political alternative to the Taliban helps explain the apparent failure of U.S.-led military operations to weaken the militia’s control over more than 90% of Afghanistan, analysts in the region say.

No Entity for Taliban Defectors

The king’s advisors predicted a month ago that moderate Taliban officials and commanders would defect, causing the regime to collapse. There is still no entity to defect to, however.

During the past week, the faltering search for a government-in-waiting has stalled altogether as the United States, Russia and other players focus more on helping the Northern Alliance, the country’s only anti-Taliban armed force, advance against government front lines in the north.

At the same time, the U.S. bombing has alienated some would-be members of an Afghan coalition against the Taliban.

Great Game II is hard to follow without a scorecard.

Pakistan funded the Taliban to end the anarchy that was tearing Afghanistan apart under the rule of the factions that now make up the Northern Alliance. The Taliban leaders, Islamic extremists who came to power in 1996, belong to Afghanistan’s Pushtun ethnic majority and still have strong support among Islamic militants and Pushtuns in Pakistan.

After the Sept. 11 attacks on America, the United States persuaded Pakistan to turn against the Taliban. Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, now favors an Afghan government led by the ethnic Pushtun king and moderate Pushtun defectors from the Taliban, and opposes a large role for the secularist Northern Alliance, which is viewed as hostile to Pakistan.

Worried by domestic unrest in Pakistan over Musharraf’s switching of sides, the United States supports the idea of including moderate Talibs in a new Afghan leadership. But Washington also funds and supplies the Northern Alliance’s military assault against the Taliban defenses.

The Northern Alliance, whose troops control about 10% of Afghanistan, is led by ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. Afghan Tajiks and Uzbeks have an affinity with their ethnic kin in neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, former Soviet republics. Hazaras are Shiite Muslims cultivated by Iran.

Iran wants a friendly government in Afghanistan so it can set up a trade route from the landlocked, mineral-rich former Soviet republics of Central Asia to Iran’s Persian Gulf ports.

Russia, Turkey, India, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan support the Northern Alliance. Concerned about the spread of radical Islam at home, they all oppose the idea of any Talibs sharing power in Afghanistan. India, Pakistan’s archenemy to the east, prefers that Pakistan have a hostile neighbor to its west.

Precisely because their history is so filled with it, Afghans tend to resent foreign meddling. But that doesn’t stop politically ambitious Afghans from aligning themselves with outsiders.

Zaher Shah, who reigned 40 years until he was ousted in a 1973 coup, is popular enough among Afghans not to need foreign blessing. He is too frail to rule again, but an Oct. 1 agreement, reached at his villa outside Rome, was supposed to make him a rallying point for Afghans to find a home-grown solution.

He has been unable, however, to overcome distrust between Pushtuns and the Northern Alliance. And with no widely acceptable strongman emerging from either camp, the jockeying has spread from Rome to Cyprus to Peshawar in northeastern Pakistan.

“They all think they need a Pakistan or a Russia or some outside force behind them,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who has visited Zaher Shah and supports his initiative. “Except for the king, they all need a powerful behind-the-scenes player to make them a player.”

Much of the maneuvering has been aimed against the agreement that Zaher Shah’s aides and the Northern Alliance would each name half the 120 members of the Supreme Council under the ex-king’s figurehead leadership. The council would run Afghanistan until it could choose a loya jirga, a larger assembly that would then elect a provisional government.

Pakistan summoned a royal envoy, Hedayat Amin Arsala, and struck a deal to expand the Supreme Council to 200 members, thus watering down the Northern Alliance’s share of power. To identify Pushtun candidates, Pakistan helped organize a rally in Peshawar for 1,000 Afghans led by Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, a supporter of the king who is vying for a leadership role with Pakistani support.

Responding to what they saw as Pakistani meddling, Russia, India and Iran have voiced support for former President Burhanuddin Rabbani as Afghanistan’s legitimate ruler. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin went so far as to meet last week with Rabbani, who led the Northern Alliance government from 1992 to 1996.

Iran, which overthrew its own monarchy 22 years ago, opposes a role for Zaher Shah. Some Iranian leaders also back an anti-monarchist faction led by Pushtun ex-warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose members met in Cyprus last month and condemned the U.S. bombing.

Given their history, Afghans tend to think conspiratorially, which in itself complicates political agreement. The location of any meeting or negotiation takes on exaggerated importance. The Hekmatyar group and the Northern Alliance have balked recently at sending delegates to Rome, apparently because that would be too deferential to the former king.

Rabbani’s followers have been divided from the start over Zaher Shah’s role. Younus Qanooni, one of Rabbani’s top aides, helped negotiate the Oct. 1 accord and continues to support it.

But in an interview on Turkey’s NTV, Rabbani declared Wednesday that if the Taliban is overthrown, his Northern Alliance would “assume its duties” in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and later convene the loya jirga itself. Until then, “no one should be discussing what role they will play, and this includes the king.”

That defiant statement threw into doubt whether Rabbani’s side would take the next agreed step--to meet in Turkey with a royal delegation to pick the Supreme Council.

Leaders of the Northern Alliance said they will decide after their military commander, Gen. Mohammed Qassim Fahim, returns to his northern Afghan base from consultations in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The meeting in Turkey has already been delayed a week.

But the Northern Alliance seems in no hurry. In recent days, the Pentagon has stepped up its military coordination with the alliance in northern Afghanistan without extracting a promise from the anti-Taliban force that the alliance will share power with others in a broad-based government in Kabul.

Northern Alliance leaders “are feeling more confident,” said Hamid Sidig, a spokesman for the exiled king. “They think they can come to power on their own.”

Zaher Shah’s aides fault the Bush administration for paying more attention to bombing the Taliban than to building a political alternative that would erode the regime’s support. Some Western diplomats and specialists on the region agree.

“They’ve got one part-time upper-middle-level figure [State Department envoy Richard Haass] working on the political side, and they’ve got all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff working on the military side,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghan expert at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. “And they can’t find half the price of a cruise missile to support Zaher Shah’s office in Rome.”

But Washington is supporting an effort by U.N. special envoy Lakhtar Brahimi to reconcile the conflicting foreign interests in Afghanistan, starting with a visit to Pakistan this week and continuing to Iran today.

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Boudreaux reported from Rome and Marshall from Islamabad. Alissa Rubin in Islamabad and Paul Watson in Jabal os Saraj, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.