Afghan officials order guns off streets of Kabul

KABUL, Dec 21: Afghanistan has ordered guns off the streets of the capital, Kabul, but few people seemed to take any notice this morning as numerous armed men strolled in the winter sunshine.

The order was to take effect just a day before an interim six-month Government is to be sworn in to lead Afghanistan into a post-Taliban era after the collapse of the fundamentalist Islamic militia under the weight of US air strikes.

"People who are not from the authorised security forces should not carry their weapons on the streets," said an Interior Ministry order read on television late yesterday.

"They should hand over their arms to the police," the order added.

But today, men with guns slung casually over their shoulders dawdled on street corners or walked through the markets and it was not clear how many were fighters of the Northern Alliance or civilians, the target of the Interior Ministry order.

The only people authorised to carry guns on the streets would be Mujahideen — holy warriors — assigned to guard the city and Interior Ministry police.

Lightly armed foreign troops were expected on Kabul’s streets today, after 53 British Royal marines flew into Bagram air base north of Kabul to take up a security role in the capital ahead of the installation of the interim Government tomorrow.

The marines, wearing green camouflage arctic jackets, emerged from the hercules transport plane with backpacks, assault rifles, shoulder-fired light anti-tank weapons and at least two general purpose machineguns.

They were expected to carry arms in the city after receiving authorisation from the United Nations to help keep the peace in Kabul under a resolution that allows the use of force.

Their mission begins today when the troops, working with Afghan security forces, accompany VIPs arriving for the inauguration ceremony from Bagram air base to Kabul.

The streets of Kabul have been awash with arms for years.

As Taliban forces pulled out of the city under cover of darkness on November 12, they were replaced within hours by the Mujahideen fighters of the Northern Alliance.

The Mujahideen fighters have patrolled the city at will carrying a menacing array of Kalashnikov assault rifles, rocket launchers and other weapons.

Initial reports of looting and robberies in the confusion after the capital fell to the Northern Alliance have decreased, but many Kabul residents have said they are eager to see foreign security forces on the streets to ensure order and bring peace.

The new foreign security force was established in principle for Kabul and its environs as part of the UN-brokered landmark accord agreed among anti-Taliban Afghan groups in Bonn, Germany. The agreement envisages an interim and then a transitional Government, with elections called for in two years.

The accord also calls for the Northern Alliance to withdraw all military units from Kabul, a point emphasised in the resolution and which the alliance has been loath to do. (AGENCIES)

Recent history not on side of new Afghan Govt

ISLAMABAD, Dec 21: Hamid Karzai has vowed to put Afghanistan’s 23 years of war, desecration and warlords behind him when he takes power tomorrow, but a flip through the recent pages of the history books is not encouraging.

The new Northern Alliance conquerors of Kabul, where the Taliban were swept from power last month, are more or less the same feuding Mujahideen who came to power in 1992, unleashed four years of civil strife and reduced the city to rubble.

It may be a measure of the horrors the city has endured under the Taliban since 1996 that they now look like liberators.

After soviet troops retreated from Afghanistan in 1989, the country’s last pro-Soviet rulers clung to power for far longer than expected by anyone.

In 1992, a UN peace plan to set up an interim Government fell apart and the guerrillas came into Kabul shooting — largely at each other — turning streets into free-fire zones. Government ministries became guerrilla strongholds and schools were turned into armed fortresses.

The Uzbek militia of Abdul Rashid Dostum, from the north, acquired a reputation for rape and pillage within days.

Pakistan-backed Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar refused to take up his post in the guerrillas’ new "coalition Government", preferring instead to spray the city with rocket fire.

The Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Masood enjoyed more popular respect but his forces also blotted their record in the months to follow with atrocities against civilians.

Within weeks of the Mujahideen takeover, Kabul had become a patchwork of warring fiefdoms, some no larger than a city block. Over the following four years, tens of thousands lost their lives in the factional fighting and more and more of the city was destroyed.

So it was perhaps no surprise that the capture of power by the Taliban in 1996 was welcomed by many Kabul residents and some foreign observers. The new Taliban Government would at least bring stability, law and order, it was said.

The Taliban’s first and bloodiest act was to beat up Najibullah, who had been staying at a UN compound since 1992, drag him behind a car several times round the presidential palace, shoot him and hang his body from a lamp post.

Taliban stability in the years to follow was won only at the cost of ruthless repression of the population and continuing civil war elsewhere in the country.

The restrained behaviour of Northern Alliance fighters in kabul since their capture of the city in November has raised hopes that years of opposition have chastened them.

The Northern Alliance factions agreed at UN-sponsored talks in Bonn this month to set up a six-month interim Government to replace the Taliban, routed by their local opponents backed by weeks of US air strikes.

Peace-making by the United Nations has in recent years failed to yield any dividends, but not for lack of trying.

"The reason is simply that as long as outside powers fuel the warlords with money and weapons, the civil war does not have a likelihood of winding down," author and journalist Ahmed Rashid says in his book on the Taliban.

One thing in Karzai’s favour is that the interim cabinet includes politicians and technocrats, while the first Mujahideen cabinet was made up of warlords and Mujahideen faction leaders.

"Warlordism must end," Karzai said this week in rome, where he travelled to pay homage to former King Zahir Shah.

"The rule of the gun must end in Afghanistan." (AGENCIES)

Afghan Aristocrat must unite, rebuild his land

KABUL, Dec 21: Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun tribal chief who will head Afghanistan’s post-Taliban administration, is a tall, patient man who in just a few weeks has made the transition from unknown exile to leader of his war-weary country.

He is unusually qualified to shoulder the huge task of trying to lead one of the most devastated countries on earth back to normal life.

A mix of traditional ties and modern experience won him the support of delegates at UN-sponsored talks in Bonn even though he was absent, away with his tribesmen in southern Afghanistan negotiating the Taliban surrender of their last stronghold in Kandahar.

That support is also an encouraging sign for the new Government that takes office tomorrow an early birthday present for Karzai himself, who was born on December 24, 1957.

In the new Government, the militarily dominant Northern Alliance coalition of ethnic minorities has pledged to share power with Afghanistan’s traditionally dominant Pashtuns to bring peace after 23 years of war.

Karzai’s traditional credentials could scarcely be better.

Tall, balding with a trim salt-and-pepper beard, he is chief of the large popalzai tribal group around Kandahar and scion of a royalist family with a tradition of public service.

During the 1980s Soviet war, he helped to fund and arm fighters from his tribe, which lives in Southern Afghanistan where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar launched his fundamentalist Taliban movement and is still believed to be holed up.

Already a tribal elder at the age of 44, he has a string of very modern skills, including fluent english and an easy good-humoured presence.

Karzai was Deputy Foreign Minister from 1992 to 1994 after the Mujahideen (holy warriors) defeated the communists. He had spent much of the 1980s in the United States — where his family ran Afghan restaurants in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore — and he enjoys strong western support.

One of the main hurdles for the anti-Taliban camp was a lack of leaders among the Pashtuns, the group that often saw the Taliban as defenders of Pashtun interests against the northern minorities.

Karzai stepped in to fill that void on October 8, one day after the US bombing campaign began. He entered Southern Afghanistan to mobilise Pashtun tribes against the Taliban and survived an attack by dozens of Taliban fighters.

He kept in regular contact with his supporters and the outside world via satellite telephone, including a call broadcast to the opening session of the Bonn conference that he had wanted to attend as a royalist delegate.

"This meeting is the path to salvation," he said. "We are one nation, one culture. We are united and not divided. We all believe in Islam but in an Islam of tolerance."

Afghan expert Ahmed Rashid said Karzai shared the view of the alliance triumvirate — Interior Minister Yunis Qanuni, Defence Minister Mohammad Fahim and Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah — that impoverished Afghanistan had to replace its traditional warlord approach with a modern parliamentary democracy.

"If you can link up modern north and modern south, you can form a decent Government," he said.

When the Taliban started up in Kandahar in 1994, Karzai knew many of their leaders from the Soviet war and supported their drive to end chaos and lawlessness there.

But within a few months, he began to notice strange faces at the meetings he attended. He soon split with the movement and denounced it as manipulated by Pakistan and Arab extremists.

"These Arabs are in Afghanistan to learn to shoot," he said after becoming an outspoken Taliban critic. "They learn to shoot on live targets and those live targets are the Afghan people, our children, our women. We want them out."

Karzai and his father, former senator Abdul Ahad Karzai, began campaigning against the Taliban in 1997 from their exile base in Quetta, the closest Pakistani city to Kandahar.

In July 1999, his father was assassinated while walking home from evening prayers. The murder was attributed to the Taliban.

Born in Kandahar, the fourth of seven sons, he went to school in Kabul before going abroad to India to study political science.

He followed his father into politics in the 1980s and dedicated himself to the cause of opposition Soviet occupation. Politics became his passion, and he did not marry until two years ago. He wed an Afghan obstetrician-gynaecologist active in helping refugees in Pakistan.

Another of Karzai’s traditionalist qualifications is his love for the National Sport Buzkashi, a tumultuous game in which horsemen battle for possession of a headless goat.

In late September, Karzai told from Quetta that he dreamed of the day when Afghans could hold a free Loya Jirga, or traditional assembly, and then celebrate with a wild game of Buzkashi.

"We would love to see that," he said wistfully. (AGENCIES)

Most Americans back broader war on terrorism: Post poll

WASHINGTON, Dec 21: A majority of Americans support expanding President George W Bush’s declared war on terrorism beyond Islamic militant Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces to a military campaign against Iraq, according to an ABC news/Washington post poll.

Sixty-one per cent say the war will not be a success unless the United States goes on to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and 72 per cent support US military action to achieve that aim, according to the poll released yesterday.

Three-quarters of the respondents also said they supported striking suspected terrorists bases in Yemen, Somalia and Sudan, the poll found.

Ten leading members of Congress recently sent a letter to bush urging him to make iraq the next target in the US war on terrorism, saying Baghdad had revived its weapons program in the three years since UN inspectors left.

The US-led campaign in Afghanistan was sparked by the September eleven attacks on America that killed about 3,000 people. Bin Laden is Washington’s prime suspect in the attacks.

Some members of the international coalition helping in the hunt for Bin Laden have shown reluctance to expand the military action beyond Afghanistan to countries such as Iraq.

On the search for Bin Laden, 64 per cent in the ABC News/Washington Post poll said the United States must capture or kill him for the US war on terrorism to be a success.

The national poll of 755 adults was conducted by telephone December 18-19 and had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. (AGENCIES)

| home | state | national | business | editorial | advertisement | sports
| international | weather | mailbag | suggestions | search | subscribe | send mail |