3 Afghans Jockey for One Spot at the Top

Like the Great and Powerful Oz, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani indulges in fiery rhetoric and delusions of grandeur as he insists from his elegant villa that he remains head of state and the best promise of unifying this fractured country.

Two blocks away, Mohammad Zaher Shah makes a more subtle case for resuming power. Each day, the 87-year-old deposed monarch holds court in his landscaped garden for hundreds of supplicants who come to praise his return after nearly 30 years in exile and urge him to serve once again as father of the nation.

And on the grounds of the nearby presidential palace, in a guest house that miraculously survived 23 years of civil war, provisional leader Hamid Karzai is waging his own bid to become ruler by marshaling international aid, keeping a lid on ethnic tensions and appeasing rival warlords.

The three men are jockeying for position in the weeks before a June 10-16 loya jirga, the convention of national elders that will choose a new leader for a country that for centuries has defied all attempts to be governed.

Of the three would-be kings, the international community’s money and muscle are clearly on Karzai, the 44-year-old polyglot blueblood who has rocketed to widespread respect and renown for holding together his battered homeland through a United Nations-brokered transition.

But Afghans are famous for resisting outside pressures and influences, leaving many here skeptical of what they see as a Western plot to empower Karzai, and engendering hopes among his political, ethnic and military opponents that the loya jirga can be manipulated to fulfill their own ambitions.

“There’s no official campaigning, but unofficially everyone is trying to get something in motion,” said Sadaq Mudaber of the 21-member Special Independent Commission for Preparation of the Loya Jirga. Although the commission members are obliged to be neutral, Mudaber said a consensus was forming among the organizers that the former king will be chosen as head of state but that most powers will be vested in a prime minister’s post to be filled by Karzai.

Few will hazard a prediction on the likely outcome of the loya jirga. While Afghanistan was sealed off from the civilized world for more than five years by the fanatic Taliban, all institutions for gauging public opinion collapsed. There are no polls measuring political leanings among people who haven’t seen a free election in two generations, and the mostly illiterate population has little exposure to newspapers or only recently restored television broadcasts.

The 1,501 loya jirga delegates are being chosen by vastly differing procedures in districts nationwide, feeding fears among observers here that more clout is being bestowed on representatives of the unruly hinterlands than on urban intellectuals who might be expected to act in the country’s best interests.

One of the most difficult-to-measure elements is the potential support for Rabbani. A 62-year-old Tajik from the backward northern province of Badakhshan, the Cairo-educated cleric rose to national prominence in the late 1960s by organizing armed resistance, at first against the secular drift of Zaher Shah’s regime, and then against the godless communism imposed after the Soviets’ 1979 invasion.

Backed by moujahedeen rebels who used U.S. arms and support to harass the Soviet occupiers, Rabbani was appointed president after the fighters led by the late warrior legend Ahmed Shah Masoud toppled the last Communist government in 1992.

But vicious infighting among the rival Northern Alliance militias inflicted such bloodshed, chaos and atrocities on the population that many welcomed the fundamentalist Taliban when the Islamic movement seized power four years later, sending Rabbani into exile.

He returned to Kabul, the capital, after U.S. bombing and a Northern Alliance advance drove out the extremists in November, imperiously occupying the presidential palace and proclaiming himself the rightful Afghan ruler.

Even after a power-sharing accord was reached near Bonn, Germany, ushering in the Karzai government in December, it took U.N. authorities two months to persuade Rabbani to leave the bombed-out palace--and only after he was provided the plush villa in the Wazir Akbar Khan district where the former king is now a neighbor.

Rabbani’s gunmen, however, remain outside the palace gates, controlling access to Karzai, who is as much imprisoned at the compound as he is protected.

In an interview in the mammoth living room of his villa, where a dozen overstuffed sofas line the walls and menacing-looking aides prowl the adjacent hallways, Rabbani made clear that he still harbors presidential ambitions and resents the West’s overt support for Karzai.

“We shouldn’t allow foreign intervention into Afghan affairs anymore,” the white-bearded cleric insisted from his throne-like chair in the reception room’s far corner. He is critical of the U.S.-led fight against alleged Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, accusing the American troops of being duped by warlords into settling scores with Afghan rivals.

Portraying himself as the power broker of the talks in Germany that he sought repeatedly to thwart, Rabbani said that it was at his behest that Karzai was appointed. Rabbani also insisted that he had encouraged Zaher Shah’s return; in fact, the cleric had denounced the role of the monarch as “extinct, like the dinosaurs.”

Although Rabbani’s relations with the younger generation of Northern Alliance figures are thought to be looser than during the early 1990s when Masoud was the guarantor of his power, he retains considerable influence over the military and police forces through his allies running the defense and interior ministries.

And although he has assured U.N. and foreign officials organizing the loya jirga that he will accept whatever decisions are made, he also has close ties with several Tajik and Uzbek regional warlords in the north who have little regard for Karzai or his fellow Pushtuns from the southern regions.

By contrast, Zaher Shah, also a Pushtun and a distant relative of Karzai, presents the interim prime minister as a skilled administrator and valued ally. The former king’s ambitious relatives and friends from three decades of Italian exile say he would seek a power-sharing arrangement with Karzai if the long-ago monarch is named head of state.

“The people will decide, not me,” Zaher Shah replied with practiced humility when asked if he would be lobbying for the leadership when the loya jirga tackles its first order of business. “I have come home on the occasion of the loya jirga to be near the people of Afghanistan.... I will not interfere with the process, but I will be ready to offer advice and counsel if asked by the participants.”

His voice reduced to a whisper and his words translated from Pashto into English by his cousin, son-in-law and closest advisor, Gen. Abdul Wali, the former king asserts that he could serve as a unifying figure.

“One of the main duties I have assigned myself in returning to my homeland is to bring peace and security to the entire country, and in this purpose I will spare no efforts,” he said through Wali, both settled in cream-colored brocade armchairs after a morning of audiences with rotating delegations from Hazara and Tajik tribes.

Stooped and shuffling, the visibly frail Zaher Shah deflected questions about his personal ambitions with the often-repeated reply that it is “improper” to speculate about the will of the people. But his hovering supporters were quick to suggest that an alliance of the former king as ceremonial head of state and Karzai as chief executive would combine the unifying powers of the deposed monarch with the considerable diplomatic and administrative skills of the interim leader.

Despite his obvious physical limitations, the former king does infuse Afghans with a sense of purpose and self-sacrifice in pursuit of rebuilding the shattered country.

By way of example, he has inspired thousands of refugees and emigres to return to their homeland. U.N. migration officials contend that they are overwhelmed with requests to help refugees reclaim their damaged homes and mined farmland. By the end of April, half a million Afghans had returned from abroad--more than U.N. authorities had expected for the year. “You have given us all new hope and pride in our nation,” Raman Nadjafe, an ethnic Tajik just returned from Hamburg, Germany, after 40 years abroad, effused tearfully during a recent morning audience with Zaher Shah. “We will stay with you forever.”

Western diplomats--newcomers to this shattered capital and often influenced by wishful thinking--nevertheless predict that Karzai will be chosen as head of state.

“The vast majority of Afghans see the interim authority in a very positive way. That’s not to say they don’t see that it’s Western supported, but they don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing,” one Western diplomat insisted. “Karzai has done a much better job than many people thought in becoming a national figure.”

That hasn’t happened without the aid and intervention of Western powers. The educated, progressive chieftain of the noble Popolzai clan from the Kandahar region, Karzai was plucked from Pakistani exile by U.S. Special Forces who provided him with arms, advice and fighters to lead the battle against Taliban holdouts in Kandahar in early December.

At one point, Karzai had to be rescued from advancing enemy forces by a U.S. helicopter.

Fluent in English and French, suave and dignified and able to balance the quest for foreign assistance with Afghans’ abhorrence of being seen as beggars, Karzai has exceeded all expectations--at least in this rapidly recovering capital.

He has gained the respect of those in a position to enjoy the improving security in Kabul and the thousands of jobs created by the U.N.-supported interim government and returning foreign aid organizations.

He has brought a newfound dignity to a country long dismissed as hopelessly fractious and lawless. He proudly carries out his duties as Afghan statesman, lobbying for aid, hosting the few international dignitaries willing to visit.

Whatever the outcome of the presidential contest, diplomats note, some accommodation of northerners will be needed to provide ethnic and political balance if the two Pushtuns, Zaher Shah and Karzai, hold the main levers of power. Foreign Minister Abdullah, a Tajik whose command of English and soft-spoken manner have won over some Western allies, is seen as likely to be returned to his post by the loya jirga.

And if for no other reason than to prevent his becoming a problem, Rabbani is expected to be assigned some prestigious role.

Zaher Shah will open the loya jirga and address the assemblage on the first day of the gathering, then retreat to the sidelines in the role of advisor, said Mudaber of the special organizing commission.

Once the head of state is chosen, the delegates will define the structure of the next government and guide the new leader in selecting Cabinet members, Mudaber said. The delegates are also expected to choose a 111-member national assembly to draft laws and empower a constitutional convention ahead of elections set for summer 2004.

But with so much at stake and so many competing influences converging, the future of Afghanistan remains as uncertain as it was when the Taliban’s ouster created the latest power vacuum.

“Karzai is the only real head-of-state figure,” one diplomat insisted. “The king’s 40-year reign wasn’t really that distinguished, and Rabbani’s rule was a disaster. The choice seems obvious to us outsiders, but that doesn’t mean much. There are still a lot of hurdles.”