Interventions (42 page)

A consensus quickly emerged that the United Nations had the legitimacy and credibility to convene the Afghan factions. As everyone turned to the UN, I turned once more to Brahimi.

Our prior efforts at the UN in attempting to broker peace in the Afghanistan civil war now proved useful. Following the military defeat of the Taliban, representatives of the key sectors of Afghan society were already convened at the negotiating table. An umbrella—the Geneva Initiative—had been created for dialogue on the future of Afghanistan between the former king's supporters (known as the Rome Group) and the Pashtuns and Hazaras, who opposed the king and were backed by Tehran (the so-called Cyprus Group). This work produced no immediate results, as UN diplomacy often does not, but it was far from wasted, as UN diplomacy seldom is.

After I reappointed Brahimi as my envoy to Afghanistan in early October, he tiptoed carefully through the many groups and interests concerned, doing what people very often fail to do in these situations—listening, carefully, to everybody. Some grumbled that we were moving too slowly. Colin Powell's mantra was “speed, speed, speed.” He was concerned that if the political process fell far behind the ongoing military operation, a vacuum would be created. He even told me in mid-November that “something is needed to put a fire under Mr. Brahimi, rather than relying on the level of energy he has hitherto exhibited.” On other occasions, the Iranians or the Russians or the Pakistanis would ring me and complain that they were not being sufficiently consulted or had some other objection to our diplomacy.

But these objections soon faded. Once Brahimi had consulted adequately—including with a kitchen cabinet of outside experts whom he had remained in close touch with through the years—Brahimi moved with speed to fashion a diplomatic process to support the UN lead, and a political process among the Afghans to help them chart the way forward for the country.

There was a lot of discussion and debate on the shape of a postwar UN presence in Afghanistan. Kosovo and East Timor were the most recent blueprints for UN interventions to stabilize a traumatized society—countries where we had almost assumed the responsibilities of a sovereign government. But these were small territories with relatively homogeneous societies and benign security environments, where the population backed a strong UN intervention to help their transition to independence. We could not apply our little experience from these operations to Afghanistan. We had to tailor an approach suitable to a vast, ethnically factionalized, poor, and almost ungoverned nation, with a long history of resistance to outside rule, and which would continue to be a battleground between Western forces and al Qaeda elements. Brahimi was acutely sensitive to the deep-seated hatred of foreign occupation in Afghanistan, and feared that the wrong strategy would play into the radicals' hands.

We decided that the UN could be the midwife for the birth of an interim Afghan government as the first step in an agreed process of transition, and should provide discreet support to the Afghans in building better governance from an extremely low base. But we would have no pretensions to run Afghanistan. Any UN political role had to be based on a genuine Afghan national consensus, and UN agencies should work to put the Afghans in the lead in rebuilding the country. I spoke of a “homegrown” solution. But it was John Renninger, a senior officer in the Department of Political Affairs, who coined the term that would come to characterize the UN approach: the “light footprint.”

It was also clear that security would be the essential platform for postwar political, economic, and social reconstruction. I did not favor sending UN peacekeepers, as they would take far too long to deploy and would operate in an environment where there would not yet be a proper peace to keep. We recommended to the Security Council that a multinational force was required to provide an international security presence in the main cities to ensure security and give sufficient space for the political and security transitions. Eventually, an all-Afghan force would be the logical security guarantor.

But it was the regional diplomacy as much as the architecture in-country that would determine the success or failure of our efforts. The role of Tehran and Islamabad as the hitherto main backers of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban respectively, would be essential for the outcome of the inter-Afghan negotiations. Could their rivalries be sufficiently reduced, and their influence over groups in Afghanistan be used to positive effect? We paid close attention to both. The other key actor was, of course, the United States, by far the most powerful player, and I worked as closely with Colin Powell as Brahimi did with his U.S. counterpart James Dobbins.

After a frenetic round of bilateral consultations, I convened the “Six plus Two” group with each member fielding its foreign minister at a meeting on November 12, during the opening of the general debate of the General Assembly. The meeting took some careful handling, but afterward we were able to announce a consensus in support of the creation of a “broad-based, multiethnic, politically balanced, freely chosen Afghan administration representative of [the Afghan people's] aspirations and at peace with its neighbours.”

Shortly thereafter, the Security Council supported my proposal to convene a meeting of representatives of the various Afghan groups to chart the political transition.

At the end of November 2001, a conference was organized in Bonn with the main participants, including the leaders of the Northern Alliance that had formed to fight the Taliban, the leaders from the Rome and Cyprus processes, and the Peshawar Conference, which had all been formed in previous negotiations. Brahimi also added that each of these were welcome only if they had at least one woman in each delegation.

The Northern Alliance was now working out its own divisions even as it was gaining dominance over the Taliban on the battlefield. Its representatives did not want the Bonn conference to reach a final outcome, preferring instead to play a long game in which the spoils of power would be decided among them at a later date. Equally challenging was the fact that the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, were only partially represented—an unavoidable flaw at the heart of Bonn. There were heavy differences over security and power-sharing issues—indeed, the political and ethnic geometry of Afghanistan was uniquely complex. There were many inherent and unavoidable flaws embedded in the Bonn process, but simply getting the Afghans to Bonn was an achievement.

I sent a message to the Bonn conference appealing to the Afghans to seize the opportunity, and German foreign minister Joschka Fischer opened it. I continued to support the effort through constant calls to the leaders with influence on the parties. In Bonn, we cordoned off the conference venue to outsiders. This no doubt frustrated the couple of dozen nations that sent observers, including the Americans, but it allowed the team to orchestrate their intervention with one party or another, whenever needed, around the clock. After an all-night session, Brahimi clinched what became known as the Bonn Agreement.

Bonn was not a final peace agreement, and it did not establish a permanent government for Afghanistan—neither objective was possible or even desirable given the hasty convening and imperfect representation. We ensured that the agreement instead had the capacity for course corrections and adjustments built into it in readiness for unfolding developments. Bonn laid out a series of steps with target timelines, with each step designed to make the governing authority more representative and legitimate than the last.

According to the Bonn Agreement the immediate target was to establish within two weeks an interim authority headed by the Pashtun Hamid Karzai. Within six months, an emergency
loya jirga
—an Afghan tribal council—was to be held under the auspices of the former king. Within eighteen months, a constitutional
loya jirga
would meet to adopt a new constitution for Afghanistan. Two years after the emergency
loya jirga,
there would be nationwide elections.

Crucially, and worryingly, the Afghans decided to defer the question of disarming the militias and warlords. But they did agree to invite a UN-mandated international security force to Kabul, with a view to its later expansion to other urban centers. They also agreed to withdraw all military units from Kabul and other centers where the force deployed. Despite the fait accompli of having captured Kabul, we managed to secure from the Northern Alliance an agreement to withdraw from the capital and to participate in a multiethnic interim authority under a Pashtun head—albeit in exchange for a strong position inside the interim authority.

For all its imperfections, which we acknowledged, the agreement was a remarkable achievement in such a short span of time. When Brahimi called to brief me on the final outcome, I remembered that one regional foreign minister had said to me just six weeks earlier that any UN conference would be a “very long process” and warned me not to “waste your time.” I had often wondered until that moment if he was right. But we were all deeply conscious that the hard work was just beginning.

In March 2002, the Security Council mandated a United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Consistent with our approach, the mission would try to put the struggling Afghan state in the lead, with individual nations responsible for providing security and supporting the Afghans to reform and rebuild their armed forces, police, and judiciary, as well as combat Afghanistan's trafficking of opium. The UN would instead provide discreet support for the political dialogue necessary to sustain the transition; the running of elections; the preparation and endorsement of a constitution; the protection of human rights; and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The Bonn process, initiated by the final agreement of the conference in December 2001, is a modern example of the unique convening potential of the United Nations, the skillful discharge by an envoy of the secretary-general's good offices role, and the effectiveness of UN political action when supported by the Security Council. The same could be said of the successful convening of the
loya jirga
six months later and several other steps in the transition that the UN helped to facilitate on the ground, culminating in the constitutional
loya jirga
of December 2003. All these developments were much better than could have been reasonably hoped for.

—

B
ut Afghanistan was hardly an unadulterated success story. If Bonn showed the potential of the UN's peacemaking role, the realities we confronted over time, both geopolitically and on the ground, were sobering reminders of its limits.

These became apparent early on. When I visited Kabul in January 2002—the first world leader to leave the confines of Kabul Airport after the war—the goodwill toward the UN was palpable, as was the overwhelming desire of an exhausted people, above all else, to put a quarter century of war behind them. Tony Blair had stepped forward, courageously I thought, and agreed that the British would lead the first international deployment into Kabul, spearheading the forty-five-hundred-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) authorized by the Security Council. The deployment went far more smoothly than any of us expected, and during my visit I heard increasingly vocal demands from Afghans for the expansion of ISAF to the rest of the country.

This was something we could never achieve. If the politics had struggled to catch up with the military side in late 2001, we now faced the opposite problem: the security reality began lagging behind the formal political transition. The inability to close this gap became the greatest threat to the transition itself.

We would return to this theme time and again in our reports to the Security Council, but to little avail. While the U.S. State Department appreciated the need for a comprehensive strategy to reconstruct Afghanistan, the U.S. military pursued a narrowly focused military campaign against al Qaeda—and, as it turned out, began to divert resources from Afghanistan to prepare for an offensive against Iraq. This soon absorbed most diplomatic and military energy, too.

On the ground, the warlords became the security contractors of the United States, and in turn resisted the power of the central authority. I am not suggesting it was easy to ignore the warlords—the UN itself came in for criticism that they had a prominent place in the 2002
loya jirga
. But whereas ISAF was seeking to collect their weapons and reintegrate them, the United States was recruiting them to fight the war on terror. Meanwhile, the Pakistanis helped the Americans to chase al Qaeda—but Pakistani intelligence secretly supported Taliban elements both in Afghanistan and in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

In time, it became apparent that a serious course correction was needed. In autumn 2003, we proposed a Bonn II conference. This was designed to examine the shortcomings embodied in the original Bonn agreement, particularly regarding the issue of the representation of all the major sectors of Afghan society, to turn around what was by then a deteriorating security situation, and to speed up reconstruction. This, most important of all, was also the opportune time to reach out to those Taliban who wished to join the political process at a time when they were at their weakest and most amenable to a deal. But, fatefully, we could not get the support we needed, including from our U.S. partners, for this proposal to be realized.

President Bush had told me in October 2001, “During the presidential campaign, I said I would not use the military for nation building, and I intend to keep that pledge.” It was an unwisely narrow approach to a deep-rooted problem, and embodied an illusion that Afghanistan could be stabilized on the cheap. It took several years before the United States stopped paying the warlords. It also took five years for the Europeans, who had been excessively cautious in their readiness to deploy, to strengthen their security commitment. It was only when President Obama came into office that these issues were fully and properly examined afresh, but by then it was very late in the day. As the United States and its allies are making clear their plans to leave the country by 2014, history looks very much as though it will repeat itself, leaving the people of Afghanistan once again pawns in games, great and small.