Hopping on U.N. Special Envoy’s Bandwagon

The last time Lakhdar Brahimi had the job of special envoy to Afghanistan, he quit in disgust.

Nobody cared enough about Afghanistan, despite his steady stream of reports about Taliban massacres of Shiite villagers, the point-blank killings by state gunmen of foreign diplomats and U.N. emissaries, and the rising danger to relief efforts posed by Osama bin Laden’s network.

And all those problems were set against a dire and volatile backdrop of draconian civil liberties restrictions, raging guerrilla warfare, famine and earthquakes.

The Security Council had authorized him to promote dialogue among rebel factions and between the opposition and the Taliban, but all sides brazenly broke pledges to cease fighting during their initial discussions. And there were no guarantees that wealthy nations would deliver the huge humanitarian aid package needed to undergird reconciliation and reconstruction in Afghanistan. The Taliban was openly rebuffing U.N. demands that it surrender Bin Laden, under pain of sanctions--proof to many that the world body was wielding neither a sufficiently enticing carrot nor a convincingly threatening stick.

So on Oct. 20, 1999, after two years of dead-end diplomacy, the famously calm and cautious Algerian diplomat shocked his U.N. associates by announcing his resignation as Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special envoy.

Afghanistan is “a sad, sad country,” Brahimi said with uncharacteristic emotion. Its biggest neighbors--Iran and Pakistan--were making a dangerous situation worse, he said. But if neither the warring factions there nor the world community was committed to confronting the crisis, he was wasting his time, he said.

“It was a stunning moment,” said a close U.N. colleague here, requesting anonymity. “You don’t hear U.N. diplomats at that level speaking like that.”

Now everybody cares intensely about Afghanistan, and Brahimi has no problem getting the world’s attention.

Coaxed back into the job last month, the reappointed envoy almost immediately became the driving strategist in the global effort to replace the Taliban regime with a broad-based government and rebuild the devastated country with massive foreign aid. His blueprint for a governing coalition was quickly and unanimously endorsed by the Security Council, a show of support that one U.S. diplomat termed “extraordinary,” considering the stakes involved.

On Tuesday near Bonn, Brahimi will chair the first gathering of major Afghan political forces since the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif. He alone will represent the interests of the United Nations and the West, while striving to act as an impartial intermediary among rival Afghan factions.

At the urging of U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte, the Security Council has given him unusually broad latitude. Brahimi has not been ordered to push for Afghan backing for a multilateral peace force, for example, despite requests from some council members. Nor has he been asked to follow any specific ethnic or political formula for the composition of a viable new Afghan regime.

Afghans ‘Must Have Ownership’

From the beginning, the U.N.’s post-Taliban plan bore Brahimi’s personal stamp, drawing on the lessons associates say he has learned not just from his Afghanistan experience but also from U.N. assignments in Haiti and elsewhere--and from the bloody ethnic and religious strife of his own Algeria. He has insisted that the U.N. avoid the kind of caretaker role it assumed in Cambodia and East Timor. The Afghans “must have ownership” of the rebuilding process, he has repeated like a mantra.

Many close observers of Afghanistan were surprised that Brahimi was persuaded to take his old job back.

“He gave up in total frustration before, with basically the same players we have now, though in a different political context,” said Sidney Jones, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, which also had been sounding early warnings about the violent and volatile situation in Afghanistan. “At least he doesn’t have any illusions about everything moving smoothly.”

Brahimi answers skeptics by portraying his patrons in the Security Council--the United States very much included--as chastened by the realization that they are reaping the whirlwind of past policy failures.

“What makes us more optimistic now than in the past,” he said recently, “is the fact that there is a very strong international political will that was not there in the past. The international community, the biggest countries in the world, recognize publicly that they failed Afghanistan in the past, that they left the Afghan people to themselves, and they are saying--and I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt--that they want to now help the people of Afghanistan.”

At 67, effortlessly trilingual in English, French and Arabic, and unflappably cordial, Brahimi today seems the epitome of the urbane, pinstriped diplomat. Though known for a keen analytical intelligence that even close associates can find intimidating, he is praised by colleagues as a careful listener and a natural conciliator.

“I have never seen him lose his temper,” said Brian Atwood, a former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who worked under Brahimi for months on a task force examining U.N. peacekeeping operations. “He is a consensus builder.”

In his youth, though, this polished product of the finest schools of Paris and Algiers was an ardent revolutionary. For five years, he was the Algerian National Liberation Front’s Jakarta-based emissary to Southeast Asia, and after Algerian independence he spent much of his early diplomatic career in the Cairo headquarters of the Arab League. Later, in 1991, as the league’s undersecretary-general, Brahimi gained world prominence as a peacemaker by brokering an end to Lebanon’s ruinous civil war.

Two Tumultuous Years as Foreign Minister

Returning to Algeria, he served for two tumultuous years as the foreign minister of a military regime that suspended elections when it became clear that the Islamist opposition would win. In the vicious civil war that followed, more moderate Islamists were overshadowed by the Armed Islamic Group--a North African counterpart to the Taliban--which routinely killed secular female professionals encountered at its roadblocks and collaborated clandestinely with Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network abroad. The experience strongly shaped Brahimi’s views on Afghanistan, friends say.

The U.N. then enlisted Brahimi as a specialist in difficult tasks, sending him to negotiate with then-President Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire and President Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

As the leader of a team of U.N. observers in South Africa, Brahimi witnessed--and some say helped secure--the historic presidential election of Nelson Mandela in 1994.

Then Brahimi was dispatched for two years as the U.N. special representative to Haiti. Though his immediate objectives were achieved--military despots were forced out; a democratically elected president was sworn in--Haiti today is still a political shambles, riven by corruption and violence.

But Brahimi had few illusions about the ability of outsiders to create lasting institutions there, associates say.

“His view was that we had to give them the opportunity to start all over again, on their own,” said Nicole Lannegrace, a U.N. official who worked with Brahimi in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.

When he abruptly left the Afghanistan post two years ago, Annan tapped him for another sensitive assignment: the analysis of U.N. peacekeeping problems.

The “Brahimi report” greatly burnished the Algerian’s reputation for independence. It pulled no punches, critically assessing the performance of the Security Council and powerful U.N. personalities, most notably Annan, who ran U.N. peacekeeping operations during the period under review. In Central Africa and the Balkans, the report said, U.N. efforts were often undermined by poor planning, insufficient military resources and shifting political goals.

Yet U.N. insiders say Annan welcomed the criticism, calculating that the report’s candor would help win support for its plea for more money, managers and materiel for U.N. peacekeeping missions--and for clearer definitions of these missions from the Security Council.

Brahimi is now seen almost as a surrogate for Annan, associates say, sharing his affable yet detached demeanor and, more important, his broad political views.

But Brahimi’s biggest asset in his current job may be his high standing in Washington, diplomats say. The Brahimi report was welcomed on Capitol Hill, and the envoy’s tenure in Haiti was marked by unusually close collaboration with U.S. policymakers, former Clinton administration aides say.

Still, Brahimi has been openly critical of U.S. bombing strikes and has publicly positioned himself as a spokesman for the Afghan people.

Afghanistan’s problems are “compounded by this military campaign that is affecting a number of civilians,” he said recently. “Yet there is nobody in the whole world, including the Americans and other members of the coalition, who believe that the Afghans themselves have been guilty of anything.”