U.S., Pakistan Shaping Kabul’s Next Leadership

A flurry of diplomatic activity surrounding Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s visit to South Asia has produced the first recognizable contours of an interim post-Taliban government for Afghanistan, diplomatic and Afghan sources said Tuesday.

Concerned that intensifying military actions will topple Afghanistan’s extremist Islamic regime before a political framework is in place, Pakistan and the United States have scrambled to assemble a successor body that would include royalists, tribal elders, ethnic representatives, politicians, overseas Afghans and even “moderate elements” of the Taliban movement.

“Extremism is not at the heart of all Taliban,” Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Tuesday at an Islamabad news conference with Powell.

The secretary of State, who later traveled to New Delhi for meetings with Indian leaders, praised Musharraf for his “bold and courageous” decision to join the anti-terrorism coalition.

Powell also pledged a new era of U.S.-Pakistan relations that will include a massive infusion of foreign aid. According to a senior State Department official, Powell told Musharraf that $500 million is in the pipeline for Pakistan for poverty alleviation, including education, health and social services.

“This is not just a temporary spike in our relationship,” Powell said. He also pledged a proactive role in the simmering India-Pakistan dispute over the territory of Kashmir that would take into account the “aspirations of the Kashmiri people” in the predominantly Muslim region. India and Pakistan traded sporadic gunfire across the border in Kashmir for a second day Tuesday.

U.S. House Passes Bill to Lift Sanctions

In another sign of the U.S. shift toward Pakistan, the House on Tuesday passed legislation lifting all remaining economic sanctions against the country. The measure was approved earlier this month by the Senate.

Bush earlier had ended by executive order the sanctions imposed on India and Pakistan after they tested nuclear devices in 1998. But congressional action was required to remove a ban on all foreign aid to Pakistan imposed in 1999 in response to the coup that brought Musharraf to power.

In exchange for the deeper relationship between the two countries, Powell called on Pakistan to do something about the system of fundamentalist religious schools, called madrasas, that have served as breeding grounds for militant anti-Americanism and support for the Taliban.

Musharraf, a moderate career military officer whose secular attitudes were formed as a schoolboy in Turkey, responded by pledging “long-term actions to check these extremist views.” Musharraf ordered Tuesday night that a powerful fundamentalist cleric, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, be charged with sedition.

Pakistani government sources say the charge is the first step in a purge of extreme fundamentalist institutions that began earlier this month when Musharraf replaced several senior army officers with fundamentalist leanings.

But the major theme of the Powell-Musharraf meetings was the urgent drive to put in motion a post-Taliban political order in Afghanistan.

The general outline of the new political framework centers on the 87-year-old former monarch, Mohammad Zaher Shah, who was deposed in 1973 and has lived in Rome since. Under the plan, the different factions and interest groups would nominate candidates for an interim Afghan ruling council. For several weeks, representatives of the different groups have traveled to Rome for audiences with the king.

Concurrent with Powell’s visit here, a three-man delegation representing the king, led by royal aide Hedayat Amin Arsala, met with Musharraf and other senior Pakistani officials. The delegation did not meet with Powell.

Pakistani Foreign Ministry officials said the first meeting of a preliminary representative body of Afghans could take place as early as next week in Pakistan.

“The political process needs to be put on a fast track in order to forestall the possibility of a political vacuum,” Musharraf said. “It should not lag behind the fast-moving events in the military field, nor should any attempt be made by a warring faction to impose itself on Afghanistan in the wake of the military strikes against the Taliban.”

Musharraf’s comments reflected Pakistani fears that the Northern Alliance forces fighting the Taliban will seize control in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Although the Taliban is despised and feared by many, the Northern Alliance may be even more hated in Pakistan, particularly in its borderland “Pushtun Belt.”

Pakistan Wants Pushtuns Included

The desire to include ethnic Pushtuns--from whom the Taliban draws its support--in the interim government has led Pakistan and even U.S. leadership to seek out supposed “good Taliban” elements.

The Northern Alliance draws its support from Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajik and Uzbek minorities.

Even at this early stage, there are signs that the Northern Alliance may be balking at attempts to limit its influence in the post-Taliban order.

Haron Amin, the Washington representative of the Northern Alliance, said he fears that the United States is deferring to the wishes of Pakistan.

And Amin said he does not believe that former Taliban members should be included in any new government.

“We don’t think a moderate Taliban can exist any more than a moderate Nazi can exist,” he said.

Aides to the former king are playing down the reservations within the Northern Alliance camp over the interim ruling council.

“These are technical delays,” royal aide Hamid Sidig said. He acknowledged, however, that there are pressures on the ex-king’s aides to reduce the Northern Alliance’s representation on the council.

Fierce Objections to the Bombing

But as the political uncertainty continues, the reaction in the region to the air campaign has been almost unequivocal: Even people who are strongly opposed to extreme Islamic parties and the Taliban movement are registering fierce objections to the bombing.

“Innocent Afghan people should not be punished for the sins of other people, people who are not even from there,” said Mehmood Khan Achakzai, who leads an ethnic Pushtun nationalist party in the western Pakistani city of Quetta. He said the bombing should stop and Washington should give support to opposition groups in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban.

From the beginning, the objective of the U.S. air campaign over Afghanistan has been to force the Taliban government to turn over Osama bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on America, and, barring that, to bring the Taliban down.

But with political intrigue an Afghan national sport, there have been immediate complaints about the suggested formula.

Some claim that attempts to forge a coalition that brings together two groups--the Taliban and the Northern Alliance--that have taken 60,000 lives in fighting between them, plus an aging former monarch who hasn’t set foot in the country for nearly three decades, is stillborn.

Others believe it is simply wrong to include groups such as the Taliban that have so badly forsaken their country.

A Peshawar-based Afghan scholar, Rasul Amin, noted that the government should also be backed by an international peacekeeping force made up of troops from Muslim countries that practice more moderate forms of Islam--nations such as Malaysia, Bangladesh and Jordan.

But virtually everyone interviewed underscored one crucial point: Whatever its form, a credible, visible alternative to the Taliban must be formed quickly.

If the Taliban should disintegrate under the weight of U.S. airstrikes before that happens, they say, nothing will stop most of Afghanistan from sliding once again into chaos.

In fact, a number of Afghan emigres and other observers in Pakistan believe that the absence of any alternative is the biggest single factor still holding the Taliban in place.

Some See Support for Taliban Growing

There are signs--albeit little hard evidence--that the sense of panic at the idea of another period of anarchy has actually helped buttress support for the Taliban since the bombing began.

Legendary Soviet-era resistance commander Abdul Haq, who now lives in Peshawar, maintains that before the start of the U.S. strikes, public support was draining from the Taliban and that several Taliban commanders were on the verge of abandoning their leaders.

The bombing, he claims, has reversed all that.

Acknowledging domestic pressure, Musharraf conceded Tuesday that the majority of Pakistanis oppose Operation Enduring Freedom, as the anti-terrorism campaign is known.

“Certainly a majority of the people are against the operation in Afghanistan,” Musharraf said. “They would like to see this operation terminated as fast as possible, and that is what I would urge the coalition--to achieve the military objectives and terminate the operation.”

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Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Quetta, Richard Boudreaux in Rome and Doyle McManus and Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report. Video of the Tuesday press conference with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is on the Times Web site at https://latimes.com/powell.