manifestation of an international responsibility to protect people in
dire need (International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty, 2001: 69–75).
And what of Mulla Omar? Reports of his last days in Kandahar
before he disappeared from the city depict a ‘distraught Omar, at
times on the verge of weeping’ (Ratnesar, 2001), and making
broadcasts in apocalyptic terms reminiscent of Hitler in the Berlin
bunker. His authority had melted away in the heat of battle. He
was not a general, but a private lifted far above his station. An
observer might well conclude that he had received his just deserts,
given the scale of misery which his dreams had inflicted on other
Afghans. But one is left with the nagging sense that here may have
been a man of limited talent, pitifully out of his depth, and ruth-
lessly exploited by others, who was himself a victim of war. In
May 1945, a New York newspaper cabled the anti-Nazi German
novelist Thomas Mann to ask whether he thought that Hitler was
dead. ‘Who cares?’, he replied (Winston and Winston, 1975: 351).
Perhaps those damning words are a fitting epitaph for Omar as
well.
THE BONN CONFERENCE AND ITS AFTERMATH
The Bonn Agreement
On 3 October 2001, the UN Secretary-General appointed Lakhdar
Brahimi to be his Special Representative, with ‘a widened mandate
entailing overall authority for the humanitarian and political
endeavours of the United Nations in Afghanistan’ (United Nations,
2001d: para. 2). On his shoulders fell the responsibility of trying to
nurture agreement between the different groups that aspired to exer-
cise power after the fall of the Taliban. In the first instance it was
important to build consensus between Afghanistan’s neighbours,
Russia and the US (the so-called ‘6 + 2’) on how to proceed. The
‘6 + 2’ meetings had historically been notable for their insincerity,
given the destructive roles which Afghanistan’s neighbours had
268 The Afghanistan Wars