never lost sight of their duty to assist ordinary Afghans, there were
also some who were singularly unattractive: one such minister
even kept a mistress in New Delhi. The able ministers had to
spend an excessive amount of time covering their backs, and this
not only prevented creative attempts to commence a process of
state-building, but disrupted a flow of shrewd political advice to
Rabbani, who it turned out needed all that he could get.
The failure to find moderate Pushtun allies
A further problem for Rabbani’s government was that moderate
Pushtuns shied away from supporting it against Hekmatyar, opting
in general for a studied neutrality. In some cases this was under-
standable, especially amongst those who walked away from
engagement in the political conflict because they were revolted by
the Afshar massacre. The moderate Pushtun Abdul Haq, who had
been designated Kabul Police Chief in the post-communist distri-
bution of offices, felt that he was totally undermined by the power
of the Shura-i Nazarforces, although the real problem may have
been that the policing function remained difficult to discharge ser-
iously when the law-and-order problems of the city were the prod-
uct of a wider anarchy. And he was not the only moderate Pushtun
to feel that he was being marginalised, or even excluded: where
there is no functioning state, those who hold offices without insti-
tutional power will almost inevitably develop such feelings. In
other cases, the stance taken by ‘Pushtun moderates’ simply sug-
gested that they were more Pushtuns than moderates when it came
to the crunch – a conclusion which no social anthropologist would
find surprising, given that individuals’ identities consist of complex
and not necessarily compatible strands of values and affinities. For
some, denouncing Rabbani and Massoud as power-hungry ‘funda-
mentalists’ was a way of reconciling the tension between ethnic
and ideological strands of identity, although it did involve a certain
cognitive dissonance since, whatever else one thought of the pat-
tern of rule under Rabbani and Massoud, it did notreflect a serious
attempt to establishment a ‘Government of God’.
214 The Afghanistan Wars