‘I do not disagree with the elections to be held under auspices of
the United Nations, or the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
We consider elections to be a sound method of settling the Afghan
issue. But elections will be possible only when the People’s
Democratic Party steps down and an Interim Government trusted
by the Afghan people takes its place’ (AFGHANews, 15 June
1990). Massoud’s reference to Najibullah’s having a ‘share of
power, in one form or another’, highlighted his alertness to the
crucial vagueness in the Secretary-General’s proposals, and also
the gulf which continued to divide Afghan power holders. It was a
gulf which the UN was never able to bridge.
There were some other weaknesses in the proposal as well. An
interesting commentary was issued by the Jamiat-controlled
Information Department of the ‘Interim Government’, whose min-
ister, Dr Najibullah Lafraie, held a PhD in political science from
the University of Hawaii. Noting that the Secretary-General’s plan
called for ‘transitional arrangements acceptable to the vast majority
of the Afghan people’, the commentary raised an obvious logical
objection: ‘before elections, who will determine that the arrange-
ment is acceptable to majority of Afghans’? (MIDIA Monthly News
Bulletin, 1 June 1991). It also noted the need to clarify the mean-
ing of terms such as ‘Afghan traditions’. This was conceptually an
important point to raise, for the Secretary-General’s statement read
as if ‘Afghan traditions’ are universal and fixed, whereas virtually
all ‘national traditions’ are in a constant process of reformulation
or even invention (see Hobsbawn and Ranger, 1983; Shils,
1997:114–19), and ‘traditions’ which are normatively salient for
one particular group (for example the Loya Jirgah amongst
Pushtuns) may at particular times appear to other groups as ‘norms
of partiality’ (Ullmann-Margalit, 1977: 173–6) entrenching the
dominance of one group over another.
The evolution of the UN plan
The evolution of the situation on the ground, and especially shifts
in the US and Soviet attitudes to Afghanistan which I will mention
184 The Afghanistan Wars