played in its politics, but the changed situation on the ground had
reconfigured their interests. On 12 November, after a high-level ‘6
- 2’ meeting in New York, the participants agreed to ‘the establish-
ment in Afghanistan of a broad-based, multi- ethnic, politically bal-
anced, freely-chosen Afghan administration representative of their
aspirations and at peace with its neighbours’ (United Nations,
2001d: Annex). This was admirably vague, and the challenge was
to put in place a process which would come up with concrete mech-
anisms for transition, in line with the ‘6 + 2’ consensus, that rele-
vant Afghan parties would deem acceptable. With the endorsement
of the Security Council, which he briefed in an open meeting on 13
November, Brahimi set about to bring together the representatives
of a number of key Afghan groups – the United Front, the ‘Rome
Group’ associated with Zahir Shah, the ‘Peshawar Group’ associ-
ated with Pir Gailani, and the small ‘Cyprus Group’ associated with
Homayoun Jareer – to craft a transition.
With the strong support of the German Government, a meeting
was held from 27 November–5 December 2001 near Bonn
between key representatives of these groups. No Taliban were
invited (Fielden and Goodhand, 2001: 20). A parallel meeting of
representatives of Afghan ‘civil society’ was held nearby with the
support of the Swiss Peace Foundation, in order to feed ideas into
the formal meeting. The negotiations between the parties proved
extremely taxing. Zahir Shah was not present, and neither was
Burhanuddin Rabbani, still formally the President of the Islamic
State of Afghanistan. Dostam did not take part, and Haji Abdul
Qadir and Karim Khalili left, protesting what they saw as lack of
representation for their particular interests. Still, the participants
were a stellar group by Afghan standards, with women as well as
men taking part. American and European officials were active on
the fringes of the meeting, with Zalmay Khalilzad and James F.
Dobbins of the USA intensively engaged in conveying to the
Afghan participants the desire of Washington and other key donors
to see the negotiations result in an agreement.
The final result was the 5 December ‘Agreement on Provisional
Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-establishment of
The Fall of the Taliban 269