Center for International Policy

What's Next in Afghanistan?

A CIP seminar at the Brookings Institution on December 13, 2001

Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani journalist and author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, currently number one on both the New York Times and Washington Post nonfiction best-seller lists.
Qayyum Karzai, an adviser to former king Zahir Shah. His brother, Hamid Karzai, is a key Pushtun leader against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and prime minister of the interim government chosen in Bonn to take office December 22
Selig S. Harrison, National Security Project director of the Center for International Policy and author of Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal
Ashraf Ghani, adviser to Lakhdar Brahimi, U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan
Eliza Van Hollen, former head of the Afghanistan desk in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department

Ahmed Rashid

Those who may have read my articles during the first months of the war saw I was critical of the lack of a U.S. political strategy to match the military. There has been a tussle here in Washington. There on the ground we did not see a U.S. political strategy in September and in October, until the fall of Mazar-e Sharif. There was a relationship with the Northern Alliance, a military one. This is most damaging in the Pushtun belt. Qayyum Karzai will back me up on that. When Hamid went in it was without any support whatever. He didn’t have sleeping bags, radios. This was after the death of Abdul Haq, who also had no U.S. support, although his unofficial network in the United States tried to make contacts with the U.S. military. In the first month, the United States abdicated its Pushtun strategy to Pakistan. General Pervez Musharraf told Secretary of State Powell that there were moderates in the Taliban and he would work with them. The moderates never emerged. In fact, nobody high left the Taliban until after Kabul was rolled up and they were under siege in Kandahar. A crucial U.S. strategy would have been to back politically other anti-Taliban Pushtun leaders with credibility. Hamid Karzai was one, Abdul Haq another.

The practical result is enormous fragmentation in the south. It will take months to sort it out, to get a leadership that is moderate, flexible and loyal to the interim government. There is no umbrella group like the Northern Alliance. Every city and province is contested by four or five factions. They came out of the woodwork from the jihad years of the 1980s. Many are hugely unpopular. They won’t suddenly become do-gooders and help the aid and reconstruction effort. It will be difficult to negotiate through this maze. It will be hard for the new government to find good people among them.

Similarly to the question of U.S. policy, we must start with the fact that Afghanistan is a failed state, a destroyed state, as we well know. Yet the United Nations at Bonn has been very successful. It created space for an interim government consisting of a new generation of politicians, rather than warlords, who cross the ethnic divide. It’s the Northern Alliance that should get credit for nominating Hamid. All three of the leading triad I call the Three Musketeers, i.e., Yousuf Qanooni, Mohammed Fahim, and Abdullah, nominated Hamid Karzai. This was an incredible break from the past. They were first of all willing to accept a Pushtun prime minister, and second someone who had disagreed with them in the past. I was encouraged by hearing this from all three of them.

The other gain of the U.N. conference was to get the power struggle between Rabbani and the others in the Northern Alliance out in the open rather than leaving it to fester. And the Americans forced the pace of that. If it had not been brought out and Rabbani had not been exposed and demolished, this would have destroyed the interim government. The ground needed to be cut out from under Rabbani, as the United States and United Nations did inadvertently in a very successful way.

Given the problems of Afghanistan today, there has to be a partnership with the international community. The question is how the interim government can extend its authority. It’s going to be done by negotiations; it can’t be done by force. And Hamid’s partners in the Northern Alliance believe that also. But extending that authority can’t be done by them alone. This is a question for U.S. diplomacy. It will take the U.N. working with the interim government. The U.S. government will have to sit on the warlords, as they did to Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum. Dostum objected to the interim government, but two days later he met with the American government and changed his tune. There will have to be a lot more of that. The Americans will have to be present in a very strong way, talking to the commanders.

In Kabul I talked to many Pushtun delegations from the south who had come up to talk to the Northern Alliance. Many came from areas that had been bombed to bits by the Americans. My first question was, “You must hate the Americans.” They said no. They had to get rid of the Taliban. And now they had to negotiate with the Americans because this was the power that was going to be guiding this region in the future, and they had to talk to them. There is no visceral kind of hatred. Pustuns are not al-Qaeda people who are going to hate the Americans. Afghans are pragmatic. They know where power lies.

This international partnership has to take many forms. It must take a political form, humanitarian aid, and reconstruction. And critical to this is American commitment. It has to be concrete and sustained. If tomorrow America goes into Somalia or Iraq, its interest will wane. I urge the Bush the administration to back the U.N. fully in extending the writ of the interim government through reconstruction, humanitarian aid, and political presence.

There is also a crucial American policy role in stopping outside interference. This will be paramount. At the moment, everyone is struck by Lakhdar Brahimi’s success at Bonn. Everyone is waiting for December 22. Yet this interim government is going to have its power struggles. Once it begins extending its authority all sorts of Afghans are going to be seeking favors, lobbying, and so forth. That again will give scope to Afghanistan’s neighbors to interfere with dollars and proxies. All the neighboring countries, not just Pakistan, but Iran, Russia, and Central Asia will be looking for opportunities to weaken or polarize the interim government. It’s critical that the United Nations play a very tough role here. There is a specific paragraph of the Bonn agreement dealing with this.

Here America's role will be critical. Maybe their clout with Iran is not so great, but their clout with Pakistan, Russia, and Central Asia is very, very important. I am not just talking about the Americans using the big stick. The key to U.S. policy in the region is how effectively the United States is going to be in locking the neighbors into the reconstruction process. Reconstruction is the biggest tool for achieving consensus in the region to stop interference in Afghanistan. You want to create business lobbies in Pakistan and Iran to say their business is involved in the reconstruction. Every economy in the region is devastated. All could benefit by Afghanistan’s reconstruction. Pakistan, for example, could sell everything from cement to steel. This is the way to build a new relationship with Afghanistan. This is the way to revive your own economy. This is the way to open up trade links with Central Asia.

The need is to get the policies of Afghanistan's neighbors out of the hands of their intelligence agencies and into the hands of their mainstream economic ministries.

The United States will need to use a mixture of carrots and sticks. It will need to give Afghanistan a breathing space from foreign interference that has devastated their country so long.

The Taliban has an important grid in Pakistan, one that has nothing to do with government. They have traders, a mafia, Islamic parties, extremist groups, and the whole madrassa culture. These grids have to be tackled by the regimes themselves and they need help to do that, they need U.S. support in all fields including intelligence and the military.

It will be complicated, but at the heart will be American commitment. On my recent trip through Europe the message was uniform: tell the Americans that if they are not involved, we Europeans will not be able to sustain an involvement either. So whether the Americans like it or not, there is a leadership role they have to play to be able to bridge the many problems that this interim government is going to face.

Qayyum Karzai

I begin with the agreement in Petersburg, Bonn. Its genius is that for the last ten years most Afghans prescribed exactly the same recipe that is in this agreement. The Afghan people in the last twenty years, and particularly during these last years under the Taliban, have grown very realistic about their destiny, very realistic about what they expect from politics. The agreement says it is the first step in the process to create political stability. At stake are the humanitarian and reconstruction aid.

The agreement should be judged in terms of where we are and were want to be in six months, a year, or two years from now. In the current phase of making peace, we must deal with what we have—warlords, gun-runners, an underground economy, a narcotic economy.

The second stage is keeping the peace we have made. Unfortunately, the warlords who are present in this peace-making phase do not have the skills, do not have the temperament, nor the desire, to use the reconstruction tools for peace. This remains a critical need for the international community, that peace-making be kept separate from peacekeeping. Peacekeeping requires skills and temperaments that warlords don’t have. The interim government will face enormous problems here. The creative participation of the international community will be an essential part.

The agreement seeks to solve the situation left by recent history. The true revolution, in the Marxist sense of the word, was the Taliban, not the Marxist revolution in 1978. The Taliban, in the Marxist sense, turned Afghanistan upside down. They uprooted everything. They destroyed almost every institution that made society work. The Afghan people realistically see the solution in Afghanistan to be beyond their power. They see that the international community must participate in every phase that is put forward in the Petersburg agreement.

The aftermath of the Taliban revolution has changed the definition of politics in the mind of the common people. They no longer define nationalism in a chauvinistic way; rather they now define it in terms of building bridges, schools and hospitals, creating jobs, and reclaiming the Afghan economic system. The Afghan people have become realistic and welcome the interference or cooperation, whatever you want to call it, of the United States and the international community.

In the CNN interview of Hamid Karzai yesterday they asked him whether he had asked for help. The conventional politician would have said no. He said yes because it was beyond the resources of the Afghan people to deal with the Taliban and the terrorists. He said he was advised by the local people and the tribal leaders that we must seek help from the United States to intervene militarily, financially, and politically.

This is an enormous departure from conventional nationalism that existed in Afghanistan. It’s a politics of realism that now almost every Afghan accepts.

The international involvement must go beyond the conventional. Governments usually work with other governments, the rest gets ignored. The reconstruction needs not only government institutions but those of civil society, educational institutions, every aspect of Afghan life. In the last ten years the destruction has been so great that we no longer have farmers, we no longer have carpenters, all the professions have been disrupted. We must help Afghan society from the bottom up.

Fundamentalism, the revolutionary force of the last ten years, has a cross-border structure. It exists in southern Afghanistan and on the frontiers. It is a porous border. It would be difficult to prevent crossing even if you desired to. The end to the Taliban lies in rebuilding every village, city, and person. Otherwise, we will face terrorism and fundamentalism once again.

Selig S. Harrison

I'm going to focus on Pakistan today for three reasons. First, because Pakistani support has made the rise of the Taliban possible, and there is a danger that Pakistan will continue to play a destabilizing role in Afghanistan now. Second, because the United States has pressured General Musharraf into a marriage of convenience that has emboldened Pakistan to step up its pressure in Kashmir, which could lead to a new war with India. Third, because the American embrace of Musharraf has polarized Pakistani politics, strengthening anti-American, anti-Indian hardliners who are deeply entrenched in the armed forces and who actively support Islamic fundamentalist groups. I will begin with some essential history, then turn to the situation in Pakistan today and conclude with a discussion of U.S. policy. My bottom line is that American interests in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India require serious and sustained U.S. support for a transition to a civilian democratic government in Pakistan, a broad-based government based on redrawn National Assembly constituencies that end the grip of the landed oligarchy on the existing gerrymandered Assembly at the expense of the urban middle class. The best hope for a secular Pakistan lies in representative institutions that will dilute the disproportionate power now enjoyed by Islamic extremists through their alliance with sympathetic generals.

How did it happen that the Pakistani armed forces, known for their professionalism, became the sponsors of the Taliban?

The place to start is the Bangladesh freedom movement and India's military support for the liberation of Bangladesh. Pakistan's humiliating defeat in 1971 marked a basic turning point in the history of the Pakistan army. A whole new generation of officers has grown up since 1971 nursing a bitter determination to get even with India. This has coincided with the transition from a Sandhurst-educated generation of cosmopolitan, elitist officers to a new generation of more insular officers with rural and middle-class roots. Many of this new generation of officers have been receptive to the religious appeals made by Islamic groups—groups that suddenly expanded with the official encouragement of the Zia Ul Haq regime during the Afghan war. Zia consciously built up a powerful group of like-minded officers, centered in the intelligence agencies, who were driven by an ideology that mixed anti-Indian nationalism with a pan-Islamic vision.

I had a conversation with Zia on June 29,1988, six weeks before his death in that mysterious plane crash. He spelled it all out very clearly in that conversation. His goal, he said, was a "strategic realignment" in South Asia. Pakistan needed a satellite state in Kabul so that its western front would be secure and it could face India without worrying about the possibility of a pro-India Afghanistan. Also—because he had a pan-Islamic agenda.

Here's what he said: "All right, you Americans wanted us to be a front-line state. By helping you we have earned the right to have a regime in Afghanistan to our liking. We took risks as a front-line state, and we won't permit it to be like it was before, with Indian and Russian influence there and claims on our territory. It will be a real Islamic state, a real Islamic confederation. We won't have passports between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will be part of a pan-Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims in the Soviet Union, you will see."

It's a painful reality that the terrorist problem in Afghanistan and Kashmir today is a legacy of the shortsighted policy pursued by the United States during the Afghan war in giving a blank check to Zia and his Interservices Intelligence Directorate —the I.S.I. The Reagan administration had one single myopic objective after the Russians blundered into Afghanistan: make it hot for them and tie them down there so they don't bother us anywhere else. There was little expectation that the Red Army would be driven out and little thought about the consequences of this policy after the fighting stopped. As Ahmed and I used to write in those days, it was a policy of "fighting to the last Afghan." Anything that made it hot for the Russians was okay. So the United States made the historic mistake of letting Pakistan decide which groups in the Afghan resistance got the $3 billion that the United States and its friends poured in. Most of that $3 billion went to Islamic fundamentalist groups that represented a tiny minority of Afghans but were favored by the I.S.I.

Another historic mistake made by the C.I.A. was encouraging Islamic militants from all over the world to come to Afghanistan to join in the jihad. Afghanistan became a base for Osama and for a wide variety of kindred groups beginning in the last half of the 1980s while the war was still on. This was actively encouraged by the I.S.I. and the C.I.A., notwithstanding C.I.A. denials. I often talked with American diplomats and the C.I.A. people involved and warned them that we were creating a monster. They said that the more militant the jihadis were the more fanatically they would fight against the Russians. Many of the former I.S.I. generals who are key players in the recycled military regime today were responsible for bringing in the foreign jihadis. For example, General Mohammed Aziz, who was corps commander in Lahore until recently and is now chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Why did Pakistan want to control the allocation of U.S. aid to the Afghan resistance? They were thinking ahead, looking for trusted collaborators who would help them to establish a Pakistan-oriented client state in Kabul after the war in order to realize Zia’s dream of “strategic realignment.” They wanted to make sure that no U.S. guns or money went to Pushtuns who might try to get back the lost Pushtun tribal areas that now make up the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan. It’s important to remember that Afghanistan extended deep into what is now Pakistan until the middle of the nineteenth century. There are twenty million Pushtuns, and half of them were part of Afghanistan until the British Raj annexed forty thousand square miles of ancestral Pushtun territory between the Indus River and the Khyber Pass. When the British left in 1947, they handed over this large Pushtun population to the newly-created state of Pakistan. Afghanistan has never accepted that, and a series of Afghan leaders starting with former king Mohammed Zahir Shah have periodically sponsored an irredentist movement for an autonomous "Pushtunistan" linked to Afghanistan.

Throughout the Soviet occupation, the I.S.I. gave only token aid to the Pushtun tribes identified with Zahir Shah even though they were the most important tribes. Zahir Shah himself was not allowed to come to Pakistan to organize Pushtun resistance forces under his banner, which he attempted to do on several occasions. Of course, the Pushtuns fought the Russians with whatever weapons they could get, and the I.S.I. did find some Pushtun collaborators like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. After the Russians left, Pakistan picked Hekmatyar to be its man in Kabul, but he had little popular support so he was dropped when the Taliban appeared on the scene.

The I.S.I. liked the Taliban because it was dedicated to Islam, not Pushtun nationalism. At first the Tailiban did have the support of many Pushtuns who were disgusted with the corruption and endless factionalism of the existing resistance groups. The mullahs who created it did have some indigenous standing, unlike Gulbuddin. But the Taliban acquired the military muscle and the money to defeat its rivals only through Pakistani and Saudi support. The I.S.I. and the Pakistani armed forces not only provided weaponry and logistical help but also Pakistani manpower, and then the Al Qaeda moved in with more money and weapons. The Taliban were tolerated, not supported, by the Pushtun tribal hierarchy, and of course in the north the Taliban were foreigners, since they were Pushtuns. That's why defeating them militarily has been relatively easy.

There is a danger now that elements in the I.S.I. and in Pakistani Islamic groups will continue to help diehard Taliban fighters with two objectives in mind. First, to use them in Kashmir. Second, to keep the Pushtuns divided. Now, as in the past, Pakistan is likely to view a client state in Kabul as necessary for its security against India. This is not what Hamid Karzai has in mind. Let us hope that when the Loi Jirga meets in six months there is not a Trojan Horse present in the form of delegates bought and paid for by the I.S.I. who are lined up against Pushtun leaders identified with the King and against ethnic minority leaders committed to an independent Afghanistan.

At the moment, the prospects for the interim government and for the Loi Jirga look good, but six months from now, two years from now, five years from now, if Pakistan does play a destabilizing role, the United States does not stay the course, and the new government proves to be ineffective, the result could be a de facto division of the country into northern and southern zones. Some people talk loosely about the desirability of such a breakup. Local autonomy, yes, but within the framework of a viable central authority. A breakup along north-south lines would invite Pakistani manipulation of the Pushtuns and guarantee built-in instability.

What could make the present situation different from the past and more hopeful would be a sustained international commitment to Afghan reconstruction and the constructive use of the leverage that the United States now has in Pakistan. The United States is giving Pakistan grant economic aid totaling $1.1 billion in cash budgetary support, not earmarked project aid, which means it is fungible and can be used for military purchases. In addition the United States and its allies are giving Pakistan debt relief, a relaxation of the conditions governing $1 billion in IMF aid, and more liberal access for Pakistani exports.

What is the United States getting in return? Pakistan has provided the use of several airfields that have been indispensable for helicopter operations. At the moment the border is being patrolled to prevent Al Qaeda units from escaping to Pakistan. But the big U.S. planes used in Afghanistan have not been based in Pakistan. They've come from aircraft carriers, Diego Garcia, from Central Asia, and from captured airfields in Afghanistan itself. The I.S.I. is so divided that Pakistani intelligence has been much less helpful than expected. Musharraf replaced the head of the I.S.I., but it's increasingly clear that he has not really purged the I.S.I. or the armed forces in general of hard-line, anti-Indian elements allied with the Islamic extremists. Nor can he do so without undermining his own position. For example, General Mohammed Aziz, the leading hardliner, has been kicked upstairs from corps commander in Lahore to chairman of the joint chiefs. But he has not been kicked out. The hardliners appear to recognize that it's in the interests of Pakistan to get as much from the United States as possible while the getting is good and to go along with Musharraf and bide their time.

The question now is whether the United States will use its new leverage to promote the long-term stabilization of South Asia as a whole and to make sure that its relations with Pakistan do not undermine friendly U.S. relations with India, a rising power of much greater long-term importance to American interests than Pakistan. I would suggest three policy priorities:

First, any new U.S. aid should be earmarked for specific civilian uses so that it does not subsidize military spending, and the United States should not succumb to blandishments for the sale or grant of new military equipment.

Second, the United States should condition the fulfillment of existing economic aid commitments on an end to Pakistani terrorism in Kashmir. General Musharraf has commendably begun to restrain the use of the madrassas in Pakistan for military purposes. However, Pakistan continues to sponsor Pakistani terrorist groups operating in Kashmir, notably Lashkar-e-Taiba, which assassinates moderate Kashmiri leaders as well as government officials and police. This is a different issue from Pakistani weapons support for Kashmiri insurgents. The Lashkar-e-Taiba consists of Pakistanis, not Kashmiris. It is time for the United States to put Lashkar-e-Taiba on the list of foreign terrorist organizations as Britain did last February and to insist that the paramilitary capabilities of Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Islamic extremist groups be dismantled.

Finally, and most important, the United States should condition the fulfillment of economic aid commitments on steps toward a meaningful transfer of power to a broad-based civilian government. General Musharraf has appointed himself as president in perpetuity and is planning to set up a facade of phony civilian rule with the armed forces continuing to maintain control through a veto power in the National Security Council. Permanent de facto military rule would lock in the power of the generals who were responsible for the rise of the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba and who are waiting for their chance to unseat Musharraf. The Islamic parties are a minority in Pakistan. Their strength rests primarily on their support from powerful generals, and their power would be greatly diluted by democratic elections.

Past so-called democratic elections in Pakistan have been based on gerrymandered National Assembly constituencies that have kept politics confined to a small circle of landed oligarchs and their conservative allies in monopolistic sections of big business and in the armed forces. This inbred, closed system has encouraged corruption, made the rich richer and blocked egalitarian economic reform measures targeted on the impoverished majority of Pakistanis. The United States should press for a new electoral system based on Assembly constituencies that would give the educated urban middle class fair representation—the Ahmed Rashids, if you will.

In conclusion, democracy has never had a chance in Pakistan. But even the flawed, narrowly-based civilian governments of the past—from Suhrawardy to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to Benazir to Nawaz Sharif have been better for the regional stability of South Asia than the periods of military rule. It was not the generals who went to the Lahore summit. It was not the generals who negotiated the Simla agreement or the conventional force redeployments that Benazir was discussing with Rajiv Gandhi until her wings were clipped by the military. Nawaz, for all of his sins, did go to Lahore and did pull back the Pakistani forces that had crossed the cease-fire line in Kashmir, and this was the underlying reason for his downfall. Now the way to get a Pakistani government that will respect the sovereignty of Afghanistan, stop stoking the flames of war in Kashmir and talk peace with India does not lie in supporting continued military rule. It lies with representative institutions. In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, democracy and secular values are inseparable.

Ashraf Ghani

What will December 22, the date of installation of the interim government, really mean? It will be the first transfer of power since 1747 without violence. Only two times has power transferred between father and son peacefully. Every other transfer was violent.

Since April, 1978, the time when the communists came to power, Afghanistan has not had a real dialogue about its future. December 22 marks the beginning of this dialogue.

The transfer of power will be marked by the the presence of the U.N. as a successful mediator, unlike previous failures to mediate transfers of power.

It will respect the wish of the absolute majority of Afghans to get on with the task of reconstruction. Afghans of all stripes and opinions are agreed, we are tired of war, we are tired of negative interference. We now want the same opportunity to develop as any decent people do anywhere else in the world. We have been denied that opportunity through neglect of the world, through hypocrisy. On December 22 there will be a fundamental shift from cynicism to constructive engagement, to a different sort of partnership between the international community and Afghan society based on a roadmap in which Afghans participate in deciding their future.

The roadmap envisions three transitions:

Transition number one is between now and December 22. This was the most significant transition to bring about. We needed a framework where people on the ground and outside have agreed on a roadmap. Lakhdar Brahimi’s main achievement Afghans have been made responsible for this agreement. It will not be a U.N. trusteeship, or administration. It will be an agreement supported by Afghans. The United Nations will remain engaged.

Transition number two is the six months’ duration of the interim government. During this time there are many significant issues to decide. This has three elements

1. The transitional administration

2. Commission to hold the loya jirga. This is to be a technical commission which will not participate itself in the loya jirga. They will draw up the rules of the game after discussion with the administration and wide circles of society.

3. Interim supreme court. During this six-month interim period the constitution of 1964, minus its provisions for the monarchy, is to prevail. The Taliban rejected the rule of law. It’s quite significant that the rule of law will be reembraced.

Transition number three is from the first loya jirga to another one which will decide on a constitution which would provide for a democratic election.

It’s important to recognize that the agreement was reached by a group that did not represent all groups in Afghanistan. Lakhdar Brahimi told the delegates at Bonn that they would be judged by their results. That’s why the holding of the loya jirga is so significant. The process of the loya jirga is one of reaching agreement across cross sections of the polity. The interim administration knows that it must reach out to bring in all elements who were not present when this agreement was signed.

Because of this the impartiality of the loya jirga, the engagement of the U.N. and the international community is going to be very significant.

The interim government also marks the restoration of a central government that can pay officials and weaken the warlords. The symobolic re-creation of the central government is going to be marked by payment of salaries by this central administration. Once that payment takes place I hope we see a significant weakening of the warlords.

Power needs to be collected back within the orbit of the center. This doesn’t mean overcentralization, but reconstruction of a center with internal and external legitimacy.

Security is crucial. The multinational force's engagement will be a significant statement of the international community’s engagement in security.

Once ordinary politics prevails, there will be bargaining for power. Like an American labor leader, people will want more. But that will be all right. Ballots are better than bullets. There will be noise but there are viable risk-reduction strategies to apply. We must hope that our neighbors will help. A peaceful Afghanistan is not a threat to any of its neighbors but a fundamental asset in their security.

Reconstruction is a thing that is fundamentally political. As Qayyum Karzai said, Afghanistan is not just a failed, it is a destroyed society. The extent of destruction of social institutions can’t be exaggerated. Everyone in Bonn coming from Afghanistan has thought very seriously about the experience of the last twenty-four years. They are willing to acknowledge mistakes and learn from it. So we should not just focus on the past behavior of these political actors but also on their present behavior. Some will emerge legitimately in the new politics, some will drop out. That’s the process of politics, from which a new leadership will hopefully arise.

The Taliban and communist regimes have take a huge toll. Some two-thirds of the five hundred students I taught at Kabul University during 1973–77 have been killed. We are dealing with a disrupted society.

I could propose three steps in the nongovernmental sphere:

First, a consortium of American universities to commit to the reconstruction of Afghan universities, especially Kabul University.

Second, a foundation for media to help them become independent. The fundamentalists in the Middle East and South Asia are well connected and well endowed. The liberals are weak and without a voice, neither in neighboring countries or our own.

Third, to assure that the developmental model is debated. Should it be state-led or private-led? In Afghanistan we see the poverty but we don’t see the wealth, and potentially Afghanistan is a very wealthy country.

Those questions are not questions of today are tomorrow. It’s not stages, proceeding from today humanitarian, tomorrow recovery, then reconstruction—geological layers, one after the other.

That’s not the way it works. The first, most critical issue is going to be institutions. Will we establish the foundations of a form of government where those who are going to govern actually see themselves as servants and agents of those who are governed? In this defense of transparency and accountability foreign aid will play a critical role in facilitating or undermining.

Money will come from outside. The history of pledge-making is a sad one. Everyone makes pledges, but they don’t put in real cash. By January 20 we will need hard cash, not just pledges. We will need a trust fund that is very transparently managed by a group of trustees, which we can discuss and argue about, but there should be real money. Once attention shifts to some other issue, pledges are not honored. And the United States should take the lead.

We have learned from the history of aid that giving money doesn’t solve a problem. There must be a contract. What happens in the life of the ordinary Afghan is the true measure of success. They have borne the brunt of the Soviet invasion, the brutality of the Taliban, and, let’s not forget, the American war. That Afghan is my measure of success. Not just male, men and women. We need to deal with gender very directly and critically.

On that basis approaches could be devised to create institutions. We need decentralized distribution but central coordination.

There are major risks. A number of NGOs have done a remarkable job in staying engaged with Afghanistan. But if thousands more suddenly descend on it, it will exhaust and exacerbate every fiber of capacity in the country. We’ve got to come to terms with civil society to make it engaged and accountable. There’s need for both a voluntary code of conduct and internationally-supervised and -facilitated relationships.

Coordination within the international aid community has proved to be extremely challenging. If the political and the reconstruction are to be coordinated a novel approach has to be taken. We should put Lakhdar Brahimi at the center of this coordination. There are experiences from Kosovo, East Timor, and others that need to be absorbed and reflected on.

A third and most significant criterion is a commitment to Afghan ownership and transition to Afghan control.

Afghans have the distinction of having been invaded by three superpowers in the last hundred years. We’ve paid a huge price from these occupations. We hope that this time a new chapter will open and we’ll finally be able to build stable institutions, where transfer of power from one individual to another is routine. That’s why the selection of Hamid Karzai is so significant, because not only would he be willing to assume power, he will be equally willing to relinquish it when his people ask him to.