Why does Afghanistan have a constitution - a calm voice that can elicit compromise.
With Future Charted, U.N. Envoy Departs
As Afghanistan's constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, concluded over the weekend, one of its main architects, the United Nations special representative to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, was preparing to bow out after two years in the job.
Mr. Brahimi, 70, an Algerian diplomat and former foreign minister, has been a loyal ally to the Afghans since brokering the Bonn accords in December 2001 for a new Afghan order after the Taliban. A personal friend of President Hamid Karzai — who granted him Afghan citizenship — Mr. Brahimi has served here twice. He was the United Nations special envoy from 1997 to 1999, during the Taliban years, and in his current role is in charge of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, to help steer the transition to a peaceful and democratic state.
With a new Constitution in place — one of the major steps laid out in Bonn — he took his leave in a speech to the loya jirga on Sunday. "If I don't, then I will be called a warlord for refusing the instructions of the central government," he joked, referring to United Nations headquarters. "I leave but my heart will stay here."
It was time to go, he said in a recent interview. "This is not a job for a 70-year-old man."
Yet he proved his usefulness to the last. He had delayed his departure several times as the loya jirga faltered, and then almost fell apart. Nearly half the delegates boycotted a vote on amendments on Thursday, and tensions were rising as the assembly split along ethnic lines.
That put the rest of the transition in jeopardy, from the United Nations-run disarmament and demobilization program to elections that, under Bonn, would take place in six months.
Mr. Brahimi spoke to the delegates boycotting a vote, entering the tent from the side door, slightly hunched in his overcoat. They had shouted down every other official, including their own faction leaders, but had asked for him to mediate. After a day of meetings Friday, delegates were saying that Mr. Brahimi had succeeded in breaking the logjam.
He seems almost more Afghan than the Afghans, receiving guests for breakfast recently at his Kabul residence wearing a long-sleeved, green silk Afghan coat of the type President Karzai favors. He was mulling over a selection of carpets in the hall. "Can I sell you a carpet?" he asked.
Mr. Brahimi's signature has been a "light footprint" — allowing the proud Afghans maximum sovereignty. He said in the interview that his main aim had been to build the institutions of democracy that would help Afghanistan move forward, rather than forcing rapid change.
But as his departure approaches, he has been more outspoken, calling for more aid and greater efforts from both the government and outside groups to prevent the country from slipping back into turmoil. He sternly warned Afghan leaders to stop corrupt commanders and police officers who prey on ordinary people.
In a memo to the government and foreign diplomats, he called for a second Bonn conference to consider outstanding issues — a program of national reconciliation, a more inclusive government and a revision of financing and political priorities.
He addressed security issues, saying that parliamentary elections, scheduled for next year, would be "well nigh impossible" as the threat from Taliban insurgents made large parts of the Pashtun areas inaccessible.
But he remains unhurried about the general pace of progress here. With a chuckle he recalled a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at the Security Council in New York. "Colin Powell said to me, `The message is speed, speed, speed,' and I said, `It has to be slow, slow, slow.'
"There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee. It doesn't happen that way."
Mr. Brahimi said his short-term objectives were to "give the country a state that is fairly well organized, and give the people a sense that they can have justice, and you have done a lot for all the other things you talk about, in particular democracy." Elections, he said, should come at the end of the process, not the beginning.
"Two years is a very, very short time," Mr. Brahimi said when asked why so many of the warlords and armed factions remained in power. Afghanistan is still absorbed by the culture of the war of liberation against the Soviet occupation, he said. That so many former resistance fighters became delegates at the constitutional loya jirga was to be expected, he said.
"These people carry real power for a variety of reasons," he said, and the loya jirga would have looked unrepresentative if at least some of them had not taken part.
Many aspects of Afghanistan's situation are beyond Mr Brahimi's control anyway. President Karzai has adopted a policy of working with the warlords rather than forcing a confrontation. The American military, the strongest influence in Afghanistan, is still working with many of them against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Mr. Brahimi has had to carve out his own space. "I think we have found a reasonable modus operandi," he said of relations with the American military. "There is a reasonably large space where the role of the U.N. — perhaps even the leading role — is recognized."
Another obstacle is that the Taliban were not at Bonn, and never accepted defeat, he likes to point out. On many issues though, Mr. Brahimi argued, time is the healer. Women would gain a better position here only through education, he said. "Instead of demonstrating against the burka," he said of advocates of women's rights, "why not give tables and chairs to schools for girls."
"The burka will disappear in its own time," he added. "No matter how long and how many demonstrations you have, it will not take one burka off of the face of women."
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