decade ago, the collapse of the communist regime was seen as a
moment of ideological triumph by its opponents; now, there is a
politics of interests in Afghanistan, but hardly a politics of ideol-
ogy. A decade ago, the shadow of a total spoiler loomed across the
landscape; now, that spoiler is in exile, and there is no plausible
candidate to fill his shoes. A decade ago, the post-communist elite
was dominated by party leaders steeped in patrimonial politics;
now, a generational change has brought to the fore more techno-
cratic figures whose interests would actually be served by the insti-
tutionalisation of politics. A decade ago, Pakistan was in a
predatory mood; now, with its fingers thoroughly burned and under
pressure from Washington to behave, it may want to reconsider the
merits of meddling abroad. This is not to say that Afghanistan is
out of the woods. In a briefing to the UN Security Council on 6
February 2002, Ambassador Brahimi rightly warned that ‘the road
is still very long and fraught with danger’. The threat of violence
continues to haunt the Afghan people. On 14 February 2002, the
Head of the Civil Aviation Department of the Interim
Administration, Dr Abdul Rahman, who had earlier abandoned the
Jamiatin favour of Zahir Shah, was killed in mysterious circum-
stances at Kabul Airport (United Nations, 2002: para. 54).
Furthermore, credible reports of revenge attacks on Pushtun com-
munities in northern Afghanistan by Uzbek and Hazara militiamen
highlighted how difficult it would be to break the cycle of inter-
communal tension (Bouckaert and Zia-Zarifi, 2002). These attacks
contributed to the reluctance of some refugees to risk an early
return to their homeland (Human Rights Watch, 2002: 43–4). So
did reports of Taliban supporters regrouping in the wake of the
inconclusive outcome of the US military’s March 2002 ‘Operation
Anaconda’ in eastern Afghanistan (Hussain, 2002). So did the
short-sighted refusal by the USA and France to sanction the expan-
sion of ISAF beyond Kabul (Sipress, 2002), an expansion which
Brahimi and other expert observers had recommended (see Rashid,
2002a; International Crisis Group, 2002; Olson, 2002).
The task of stabilising a post-intervention situation is not a nar-
rowly technical one: it invariably raises fundamental questions of
276 The Afghanistan Wars