afghanistanAlliance and the Peshawar Group. In the end, Zahir Shah was ‘offered’
the option of return but his representative declined to take it up, stat-
ing the king was not interested in the restoration of the monarchy. The
door was therefore open for Hamid Karzai, America’s preferred candidate
because of his previous links with unocal and the fact that as head of
the Popalzai Durrani tribe he was a monarchist. However, Karzai was not
the international community’s first choice. Initially the usa had wanted
‘Abd al-Qadir Arsala to be head of state. Qadir was a member of Yunus
Khalis’s Hizb-i Islami, whose brother ‘Abd al-Haq had been killed by the
Taliban a matter of weeks earlier. The Northern Alliance and Peshawar
Group eventually grudgingly accepted Karzai as a compromise candidate
since, unlike ‘Abd al-Qadir, Karzai had little military clout and they knew
all real power would be in their hands.
The Bonn Agreement was a hastily made deal that created an uneasy
collation of unelected mujahidin commanders and a handful of mon -
archists. The preamble to the agreement even included a panegyric to
the mujahidin, who were praised as ‘champions of peace, stability and
reconstruction’. The international collation then committed itself to sustain
this unstable coalition in power for at least four years by the presence
of the isaf, consisting of military units from Britain, France, Germany
and other nato nations, with smaller contingents from Asian and Middle
Eastern countries. The United States did not participate in isaf, but instead
it secured major military bases inside Afghanistan for operations against
al-Qa‘ida. Eventually, however, America was dragged into the war against
an emerging anti-government insurgency.
Any hope ordinary Afghans might have had that the American inter-
vention would exclude the mujahidin from power or punish individuals
accused of war crimes were thus dashed. The Bonn Agreement created
a ‘mirage of peace’, 18 an illusion of national unity that failed to address
the roots of the conflict or the reasons for the collapse of governance and
civil institutions in Afghanistan. This was hardly the way for the usa and
Western nations to win ‘hearts and minds’, let alone restore the nation’s
shattered confidence in central government. The prospects of restoring
peace and security to Afghanistan were not improved when the Bush
administration refused to become involved in state-building and passed
this particular buck to the interim government, the United Nations and
civil society advisers and consultants. So a once-in-a-lifetime opportun-
ity for root and branch reform of the Afghan state went begging. Any
reforms that have been put into effect since about 2002 have mostly
involved tinkering with a broken system, tending to reinforce embedded