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How will Karzai run Afghanistan?

By Rachel Morarjee

SIX weeks after President Hamid Karzai’s election and two weeks after his inauguration, he is still struggling to choose a government, raising questions over whether he will be strong enough to tackle Afghanistan’s problems.

On his campaign platform Karzai said there would be an end to horse-trading and deal-making with local warlords and he would appoint a clean and competent government, but as the weeks drag on he is looking less and less certain.

If he fails to curb their influence he will be seen as failing many of the 55 percent of Afghans who, in voting for him, were also calling for an end to the rule of the gun.

Meanwhile Karzai is facing pressure from abroad to get tough on Afghanistan’s rising poppy cultivation, which jumped 64 percent over the last year to make the country the source of 87 percent of the world’s opium.

Dr Hamidullah Tarzi, an academic and former finance minister, told AFP that the foot-dragging was a bad sign.

“The delay doesn’t send the right signals. He was elected to bring a new government and he is having so much difficulty. This means that he is being swayed by every wish of every commander,” Tarzi said.

One sticking point has been a requirement in Afghanistan’s constitution that all ministers must have higher education - a tall order in a country where the education system was decimated by more than 20 years of war.

There is resentment from former mujahedin fighters leaders, who spent years battling the Soviets, the Taliban and each other, against returning technocrats who spent the war years comfortably in the west and are now returning to claim plum cabinet jobs.

In an apparent bid to appear fair, Karzai on Tuesday said he would also stick to a constitutional clause barring such ministers from having dual nationalities and force them to give them up, but reformists then feared they too could be sidelined.

“We are not optimistic. It is not a good sign. He does not seem to anticipate problems properly and he is very much in disarray,” said one diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. The central problem remains that Karzai needs to keep onside many of the jihadi leaders in the Northern Alliance who helped throw the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban regime from power in 2001, analysts say.

“It’s a difficult predicament he’s in. He has on the one side to maintain the support of those people who voted for him on the expectation that he would have a freer hand after the election to form a cabinet,” said Vikram Parekh, Afghan analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

But Parekh said because Karzai failed to draw much support in rural parts of Northern Afghanistan, where voting was largely divided along ethnic lines, he needs to have those groups represented in his government.

And with much suspicion in the north that Karzai will favour his own ethnic Pashtun group from the south and east, he faces a struggle to find allies for ministerial appointments in the north. “Non-factional personalities from the north will be looking askance at the Karzai’s team. They are worried about being used and sidelined. He will need to convince them will give them real authority and that they will not just be pawns,” Parekh said. afp

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