as a Wahhabi backed by Saudi Arabia. The list of members was
reportedly drawn up by Hamid Gul (Rubin, 1995a: 249), and there
is no doubt that the ISI was heavily involved in orchestrating the
entire process (Khan, 1991: 259).
From the point of view of those closest to Ahmad Shah, namely
Sayyaf and Hekmatyar, and their Saudi and Pakistani backers,
what was needed was some device by which to clothe his ‘govern-
ment’ with legitimacy. The strategy on which they settled was the
holding in Rawalpindi of a shuraor ‘council’, which ran from
10–24 February 1989 and overlapped with the completion of the
Soviet withdrawal. Rather than projecting unity, it achieved the
very opposite (Saikal and Maley, 1991: 122–5). Mojadiddi had
travelled to Iran and reached an agreement whereby the Iran-based
Shiite groups would occupy 100 shura seats (Akram, 1996: 291),
but – realising that a combination of Shia and ‘moderate’ Sunnis
would be able to out-vote the ‘Islamist’ parties if this went ahead
- the Islamists rejected this on his return in favour of an arrange-
ment which offered these Shia far fewer places. The Iran-based
Shia then refused to take part, prompting the mercurial Mojadiddi
to remark at a press conference I attended on 18 February 1989,
organised at short notice by his spokesman Hamed Karzai, that the
shurarepresentedat maximum‘one third’ of the Afghan popula-
tion.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia manipulated the proceedings shame-
lessly, with Saudi intelligence reportedly spending US$26 million
per week in an effort to secure its desired outcome (Rubin, 1991:
81). Prominent commanders within Afghanistan were severely
underrepresented, and Ahmad Shah Massoud later stated that he
had received an invitation to send representatives to the shuraonly
two days before it started (AFGHANews, 15 May 1989: 7). In the
face of deep divisions within the shura, a committee headed by
Jalaluddin Haqqani devised seven groupings of offices for the
‘Interim Islamic Government of Afghanistan’, to be apportioned
between the seven Sunni parties in accordance with the outcome of
balloting. The balloting saw Mojadiddi elected ‘Head of State’,
Sayyaf as ‘Prime Minister’, Muhammadi as ‘Head of the Supreme
150 The Afghanistan Wars