Afghanistan Short on Credible Leaders

Endless war has reduced Afghanistan to ruin and killed or forced out so many millions of people that only the desperate and the extreme are left. It is a country suffering a critical shortage of credible leaders.

If a U.S.-led force were to attack Afghanistan and the ruling Taliban movement became the latest in a succession of regimes to fall, it would stir up a cesspool of drugs, guns and terror that could only be avoided if the country’s political future were mapped out as carefully as the targets of war, experts here warn.

“I have no doubt the situation is not going to improve. It is going to become worse,” said Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, who has reported on Afghanistan’s wars since 1983. “Some people who did not like the Taliban were supporting them because they were able to give some unity to the country. Earlier, there were seven different warlords, seven different fiefdoms.”

In Afghanistan--which harbors Osama bin Laden, wanted by the Bush administration as its prime suspect in last week’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon--the U.S. faces a nation in crisis where all options are bad, but some are much worse than others.

For the Pentagon, one of the most tempting choices would be to ally with the opposition forces already fighting a civil war against the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic movement that rules 95% of the country.

But to many Afghans, the Northern Alliance of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was driven from power by the Taliban, is led by war criminals who destroyed Kabul, the capital. The return of Rabbani and his forces, made up of minority Tajiks, Uzbeks and others, also would anger the nation’s dominant Pushtun ethnic group.

The best alternative, some argue, is to bring Afghanistan’s octogenarian deposed former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who ruled from 1933 to 1973, back from exile in Rome to oversee a power-sharing government.

That idea is angrily rejected by some Afghan warlords, as well as the Taliban regime, which denounces it as a plot hatched in Washington so that the U.S. can control Afghanistan by pulling the strings of an antique puppet.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose radical Islamic Hezb-i-Islami faction was accused of committing widespread atrocities in Afghanistan, said Tuesday that he would return from exile in Iran to fight alongside the Taliban just to prevent the ex-king from returning.

However, Rasul Amin, a political science professor who fled Afghanistan when Soviet forces invaded in 1979, sees Shah as the only person who can break down the tribal and political divisions that cripple Afghanistan.

“When I was a professor at Kabul University, my children would not come to me for advice, they would go straight to their grandpa,” Amin said. “We want a ‘grandpa’ who can gather the children together and make ours a peaceful country.”

Fractured Nation Needs to Be Put Back Together

But Afghanistan has fractured into so many pieces during more than two decades of war that it is hard to see how anyone will be able to put the country back together again if, as experts here warn, a U.S.-led military action reignites a full-scale war.

Yusufzai, the Pakistani journalist, has a rare insight into Afghanistan. He has interviewed Bin Laden twice and Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar once. Omar is a reclusive man who refuses to be photographed and rarely speaks to the people he rules, except by written edict.

Like most Pakistanis who recognize the intensity of world revulsion after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., Yusufzai accepts that “the Taliban have now become part of the problem. If you want to strike at Bin Laden, you have to strike at them. Otherwise you can’t catch him.

“If the Taliban are left in power or if they are still around, I think there will be a reason for them to give refuge to more such people, just as [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein is still a problem.”

In Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a military attache at the Afghan Embassy--which is loyal to Rabbani’s opposition forces--declared Thursday that it is time for the West to send military and financial assistance to the Northern Alliance fighters.

“We need help because we are in the first front against the Taliban,” said the attache, Soleh Mohammed Registani. “We need the help from the world to win this war.

“We need ammunition, we need weapons, we need economic help. We also need humanitarian help because we have a lot of refugees and they are in very bad condition,” Registani said.

Registani claimed that the Northern Alliance has 15,000 troops and that it could call on local people to join its ranks when needed. He contended that there was no need for the U.S. to risk its own ground forces because of the size of the Northern Alliance forces.

Rabbani’s government was ousted by the Taliban in 1996. However, it retains embassies in about 30 cities, including Moscow, and holds Afghanistan’s United Nations seat. Only three nations--Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates--have recognized the Taliban government.

Yusufzai insisted, however, that it would be a fatal mistake for Washington to make common cause with Rabbani, who is still recognized as Afghanistan’s president even though his forces control only a sliver of territory in the nation’s far north.

“You would be removing one armed faction only to bring into power another armed faction, and the Northern Alliance has already been tried once,” he said. “They were a disappointing lot.”

Factional Fighting Left Capital in Ruins

Kabul is a crumbling ruin largely because of infighting between coalitions when the city was ruled by Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Masoud, his former defense minister. Masoud was assassinated this month in his headquarters by two Arabs posing as journalists who had a bomb in their TV camera.

“More people were killed in Kabul, and more destruction was wrought, during the Rabbani-Masoud rule than during the whole [10-year] period of Soviet occupation,” Yusufzai said.

Shah first suggested in 1994 that a traditional loya jirga, or council of tribal leaders, be convened to end the war, appoint a head of state and set up a transitional government. He couldn’t persuade enough key faction leaders to agree and gave up, but he revived the idea two years ago.

One of his top aides said Thursday that after the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. diplomats and lawmakers and other foreign officials were calling with new interest.

“They have requested nothing specific,” Zalmai Rassoul, who heads Shah’s office near Rome, where most of the royal family lives in exile. “All I can say is there is suddenly very big interest, like we never saw before.”

The former king fled to Italy after a cousin deposed him in a 1973 coup. He now lives with his wife, Homaira, four of their six children and several grandchildren in a compound in Olgiata, a suburb just north of Rome, where he is surrounded by aides and advisors and is rarely seen in public.

The deposed monarch is not giving interviews these days. He is believed to be in his late 80s, but Rassoul said Shah is in good health. The royal family is keeping a low profile because Shah doesn’t want to be seen as campaigning to restore the monarchy, Rassoul said.

“We don’t want to give this impression that the king wants something for himself or his family,” Rassoul added. “There is sensitivity about bringing back the monarchy.”

That is an understatement to Yusufzai, who doubts that Shah could pull Afghanistan out of the quicksand.

“He was in power 40 years and the country didn’t have a democracy, there was not much effort to respond to the people’s needs and aspirations,” Yusufzai said. “The only saving grace was peace, and now there is trouble.

“Because of that, people would let even him come back if he can, and try to restore some peace and dignity to their lives. But the question is whether he can manage it, because of his old age, because of his having stayed away for so long.”

Rassoul, Shah’s aide, thinks that neighboring Pakistan is the only obstacle to the ex-monarch presiding over a council of tribal leaders to end Afghanistan’s war.

But if the U.S. goes to war with the Taliban regime, Yusufzai and many others here think that it will deal a devastating blow to the struggle to unite Afghanistan and to lift it out of the almost medieval poverty that feeds extremism.

“The Americans will strike--bang, bang--and they will achieve their limited objectives--maybe--and they will leave,” Yusufzai said. “Then Afghanistan and Pakistan will be left to pick up the pieces.

“That is the main worry here,” he said. “That is why many people in Pakistan don’t want Pakistan to cooperate with the U.S.”

*

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Rome and Robyn Dixon in Dushanbe contributed to this report.