UN political activity in Afghanistan. However, on 21 December
1993, the General Assembly in Resolution 48/208 requested the
Secretary-General ‘to dispatch to Afghanistan, as soon as possible, a
United Nations special mission to canvass a broad spectrum of the
leaders of Afghanistan, soliciting their views on how the United
Nations can best assist Afghanistan in facilitating national rap-
prochement and reconstruction, and to submit its findings, conclu-
sions and recommendations to the Secretary-General for appropriate
action’. On 14 February 1994, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali
appointed the former Foreign Minister of Tunisia, Mahmoud Mestiri,
to head the Special Mission. Mestiri assembled a fresh team of
advisers, of whom one of the most influential was an American,
Charles Santos, who had worked with Cordovez (Cordovez and
Harrison, 1995: 375) and who after ceasing to work for the Special
Mission maintained his interest in Afghanistan, even accompanying
Dostam during a visit he paid to New York. Santos, according to
Ahmed Rashid, came to be ‘intensely disliked by all the Afghan
leaders, especially the Taliban’ (Rashid, 2000: 171).
Initially, the Special Mission worked in a low-key fashion. Its
mandate, after all, was to inquire and recommend rather than medi-
ate directly. In a report of 1 July 1994, it made a number of
important points: that ‘the people widely identify themselves, first
and foremost, as Afghans and Muslims’; that they wanted ‘to
ensure the territorial sovereignty of Afghanistan’; that ‘most of the
country, at least two-thirds, was at peace’; and that the Mission
was repeatedly told ‘that the majority of those fighting were doing
so for money since this was one of the only ways to earn a living,
especially in Kabul’ (United Nations Special Mission, 1994: paras.
23(e), 13, 16). If this had led to a programme of pressure on those
states fuelling the conflict to desist, the Mission might have played
a very useful role. Instead, it became entangled in the morass of
Afghan internal politics, recommending in Paragraph 40 (c) that
the United Nations ‘begin serious and in-depth consultations with
the various Afghan leaders on the establishment of a viable transi-
tional authority and a complete and total cease-fire’. Fatefully, this
idea was adopted by the UN. In November 1994, the President of
210 The Afghanistan Wars