Kabul Declaration: War and peace covenant

For all the bonhomie in the Afghan capital last week, the signing of the Kabul Declaration on Good Neighbourly Relations was as much a statement of war as it was a covenant for peace.

This was not its effete precursor, the 'six plus two' that allowed the ascendance of the Taliban and its arcane ways to take hold in a country that was essentially liberal, but remained paradoxically, conservative.

Indeed, at the curiously shaped square table, were the savvy, progressive men who lead Afghanistan today, along with four of the country's six neighbours - Pakistan, China, Tajik-istan and Turkmenistan.

Also present, heavyweights from the UN, OIC, the EU, G8, the U.S., who have both the gravitas to play the role of guarantor and the ability to use countervailing force to ensure that Afghanistan no longer descends into the anarchic playground of world powers that it was until December last year; a laboratory of evil, torn between the pulls and pressures of its immediate neighbours and the forces loyal to them tearing at the nation from within.

Turning point

In many ways, the Kabul Declaration,which coincided to the day with the first anniversary of Hamid Karzai taking over as Afghanistan's president, can be seen as a turning point in this war ravaged country's coming of age. "The Kabul Declaration focusses on issues such as non-intervention, the rights of all nations to sovereignty, territorial intergrity and national independence," says Afghan diplomat Omar Samad, in Dubai a day after the agreement was signed.

The underlying message is clearly that while on the one hand the Kabul meet asks Afghanistan's neighbours to keep its hands off their country, "it also stressed the importance of a stable and viable Afghanistan as vital for the security and stability of the region as a whole".While once Afghanistan exported terror - the reverberations of that axis of evil impacting as far away as New York and Washington as well as in the immediate neighbourhood - the Taliban training camps today lie dismantled, and their leaders, including Mulla Omar, a fugitive from justice.

Missing

Missing at the signing ceremony, were nonetheless the leaders of Iran and Uzbekistan.

Samad says too much cannot be read into their absence; that the Iranians cited President Mohammed Khatami and Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi's landmark visit to Pakistan the next day as the reason for their foreign minister not attending, while the Uzbeks' aircraft developed last minute snags and was forced to turn back.

Perhaps. But Iran's influence over elements of the Northern Alliance, particularly in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, and Generals Dostum and Ismail Khan has not waned. And Uzbekistan once played reluctant host to the legendary pro-Osama bin Laden leader Juma Namangani and his powerful Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which had fighters deployed as far afield as Chechnya, and among the Uighurs in China and in Indian Kashmir. The IUM's fierce fighters led by Namangani are said to have taken part in the siege of Kunduz, just across the natural border posed by the Amu Darya, where the Taliban staged their only resistance. Namangani, they say died in the fighting.

A year since they were routed, elements of the Taliban have however, regrouped - in the south in Helmand, and the eastern provinces of Khost, Paktia, and Paktika, which abut the largely unpoliced terrain alongside Pakistan. Here, Taliban remnants together with renegades like Padsha Khan have allied with former prime minister Gulbadin Hikmatyar and his Hizb-e-Islami to raise the banner of revolt.

Often, as with the killing last Saturday of a U.S. soldier and the almost daily rocket and grenade attacks on U.S. forces, they have been nothing more than pin-pricks, displaying none of the elements of a planned rebellion that had been feared by doomsday forecasters.

Limiting the Taliban's role to scale, may be one of Karzai's biggest achievements, given the fact that there are no tangible trophies - elusive Taliban leaders as well as Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden remain untraced. Afghan officials like Samad stress that the renegades, who do not follow the rule of central government, and backed by powerful forces from abroad have attempted to regroup. "But they will fail," he says largely because the brand of fundamentalism they tried to impose on a conservative yet liberal Afghanistan had proved unpopular.

Rabbani backs Karzai

Certainly, former president Burhannuddin Rabbani, once a sharp critic of the return of foreign forces to his country has openly thrown his support behind Karzai.

As has the powerful Northern Alliance leader Gen. Qassem Fahim, who is Karzai's Defence Minister. By far, his most enduring success may in fact, be in winning Northern Alliance figures like his cerebral foreign minister Dr Abdullah Abdullah and Fahim over to his side. While the former had made common cause with Karzai soon after the U.S. forces swept into Kabul with the euphoric Panjsheri fighters, it is Fahim's support that has been hard won. It is also crucial if Karzai is to move forward on curbing the power of the warlords.

Fahim has so far done visibly little to hand over his own vast hoard of weaponry and the thousand strong army, fiercely loyal to him, as the successor to the legacy of Ahmed Shah Massood.

Fahim's remarks

But at last Tuesday's belated anniversary celebrations at Kabul's interior ministry, Fahim did say, in his first remarks in public on the subject that Afghanistan should have a powerful central government, and to achieve this aim "we must all make sacrifices, give up some positions," adding "let's put an end to local military power bases."

He also stressed Afghanistan should have rule of law, and that "if we merely say in words we want a central government but don't actually surrender the national resources or revenues to it, and each of us insists on our regional integrity, then it's impossible."

Fahim's support could reflect the Russians, Fahim's major backers, making common cause with the U.S. in Afghanistan. Whatever the reasoning, without Fahim's backing, Karzai would be unable to completely counter Dostum and Ismail Khan.

The threat of these warlords cannot be easily dismissed. They continue to exercise enormous power in their own respective fiefdoms. While mouthing support for Karzai, they maintain huge private armies, whose commanders fall out in turf wars, while monies extracted from the already down at heel farmers line their coffers, augmented no doubt, by their own respective patrons abroad.

With desperate farmers turning once more to poppy cultivation, and the possibility of warlords gaining access to the drug money that fuelled the Taliban-Al Qaida engine of terror, it is a battle that has only begun. Turf wars have already claimed the lives of two key ministers in the Karzai cabinet - Vice President Haji Abdul Qadir and Civil Aviation and Tourism Minister Abdul Rahman. The car bomb in a Kabul teeming with security officials, and the assassination attempt on Karzai in Kandahar are reminders that the Karzai government is still susceptible to random attacks.

Major milestone

Yet, Karzai's first year in office is a major milestone