Afghanistan: Karzai's High-Risk Negotiating Plan

The stage is set for a cross-border “jirga” or assembly to bring Pashtuns living on either side of the Afghan-Pakistani border together to agree a path to peace.



The thinking is that communities in southern Afghanistan who have been left out of the political process because of the continued Taleban insurgency will have a chance to offer their own solutions, while those on the Pakistani side of the frontier – where the militants are believed to be based – will be drawn into constructive peacemaking.



But local analysts, and many of the potential participants, warn that convening a jirga under present circumstances is fraught with dangers. With complex national interests at play, there is a risk the wrong people will be sent to the assembly, and there are few incentives on offer to make local communities buy into any deal.



The decision to hold a bilateral jirga was finalised when Afghan president Hamed Karzai met his Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf, together with United States president George Bush in Washington in mid-September.



The meeting was a difficult one, as officials on both sides were continuing their war of words over who is to blame for the Taleban and the deteriorating security situation across southern Afghanistan. Musharraf suggested that the militants were an Afghan phenomenon and were mostly operating in that country, while Kabul insists that the movement recruits, trains and conducts its cross-border attacks from bases in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.



It is clear that in the midst of the violence and the propaganda war between the Taleban and the Kabul government, alternative Pashtun voices from the south of Afghanistan remain largely unheard.



The jirga, an Afghan mechanism for bringing together tribal leaders, Muslims clerics and other notables, should offer a chance for these voices to be heard, and perhaps agree on ways in which the conflict could be defused, including steps to address some of the local concerns that fuel Taleban support ranging from poverty and opium eradication programmes to the perceived cultural insensitivity of foreign troops operating in the south.



President Karzai’s spokesman, Karim Rahimi, said the agreement to convene such a meeting is a major step forward which he believes will produce a positive outcome. “We anticipate a positive response from this jirga, which will draw in tribal chiefs and [other] and influential leaders,” he said.



It is believed that the jirga - a date has yet to be set - will consist of two meetings, one in each country, but Rahimi said the details had not so far been nailed down, “This process needs more work. Mechanisms for how it will function will be decided later on. For now, there’s no more that can be said about the specifics.”



But it is precisely these details that worry political analysts in Afghanistan, who argue that the government in Islamabad is not an honest and impartial broker, and will attempt to stuff the talks with its own people rather than genuinely representative figures from Pakistan’s Pashtuns.



“Politicians have sometimes misused the name and meaning of jirgas. The components of this one are not clear yet. Will it be made up of ISI representatives, or define its own path?” warned Habibullah Rafi, a political analyst based in Kabul, referring to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency that helped shape the original Taleban movement - and still backs it, according to its detractors.



While he sees jirgas as an important tradition for the Pashtuns living on both sides of the border, Rafi fears Islamabad will try to direct the way the negotiations proceed. “Afghanistan must be prudent and avoid being cheated by false jirgas and decisions,” he said.



Kabul University professor Mohammad Esmail Yoon agrees that it is essential for future decision-making to involve the Pashtuns. But he too believes an ill-conceived jirga could result in the meeting being packed with unrepresentative people - and possibly hijacked by the Taleban.



“The Taleban are not to be identified with the Pashtun people; they are an ideological militant movement,” he said.



Political analyst Abdul Razaq Mamun expanded on the point, saying, “This jirga is designed to achieve formal recognition for the Taleban, as a crucial move by Pakistan to gain advantage in Afghanistan.”



Mamun recalled how President Musharraf signed a ceasefire with community leaders in North Waziristan in September, pulling out the Pakistani military from this tribal agency in return from a hard-to-police agreement that the Taleban would not use the territory to launch raids into Afghanistan.



“The winner [in the jirga] will be the Pakistani government, which has done a lot of work on its own Pashtuns and on those on our side of the border, and will enter the jirga from a position of strength, while the Afghan government will go in with a weaker hand,” he said.



These suspicions are shared by Maulawi Mohammad Sadeq, who heads the national council of the Gujjar tribe in Afghanistan, “I don’t trust the intentions of Pakistan… [which] has always sought the destruction of Afghanistan. The jirga will be pointless unless the international community demands a guarantee from Pakistan that it will not interfere in Afghan affairs.”





Similar concerns have been raised by leading Pashtun politicians in northwest Pakistan.



Akram Shah, who heads Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami, a nationalist party, believes the Pakistan-based tribal chieftains selected to attend the jirga will be under the sway of Islamabad.



“The jirga will be fruitless unless it is removed from the [Pakistan] government’s influence and real representatives of the people are invited,” Akram Shah told the Pajhwak news agency.



Mohammad Sadeq Zharak, a leading Pashto writer in Pakistan, said that as well as tribal chieftains, the Pakistani contingent must also include Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami leaders, who would be better placed to put pressure on their own government to curb the violence.



Sayed Naim Pacha, the official responsible for the jirga within Afghanistan’s ministry of tribal and border affairs, said the Kabul government recognised the dangers and would seek to ensure that the Pakistani delegates were genuine figures, not ISI plants.



He insisted the event was dependent on Islamabad’s goodwill, “The success and effectiveness of this jirga will depend on the Pakistani government’s intentions, because it is Pakistan that creates problems for Afghanistan, not the other way round.”



However, Mamun pointed out another reason why the event could fail - the deteriorating economic situation in southern Afghanistan where people have seen too little benefit from international aid and reconstruction to have a stake in peace. “Jirgas on an empty stomach will not feed people or give them jobs,” he said. “



“What have the people in the east, south and west [of Afghanistan] got to defend? They have nothing to lose in this battle. The economic foundations of these provinces need to be strengthened so that people will defend them. For the moment, people have become estranged from their government.”



Hafizullah Gardesh is an IWPR editor in Kabul.