U.N. mediators have had little trouble persuading Afghan leaders gathered in Germany to accept the principle of a broad-based government. Then again, everyone at the conference has reason to be especially nice; the prize money for consensus is $20 billio n, the amount of aid the international community has pledged as a carrot to coax the fractious Afghans. The three days of talks that began Tuesday in Koenigswinter are aimed at finding agreement among various Afghan factions over some form of transitional g overnment to replace the Taliban — and avert a slide back into the civil war of the pre-Taliban era. Such a government would convene a broadly representative 'loya jirga' grand assembly within six months to discuss how the country ought to be ruled, and conduct national elections within two years.

That's how it would work in theory. But there remains an epic gap between the ideas being kicked around in Germany and the reality on the ground in a country where political power is proportionate to the number of armed men a contender can bring to the battlefield, the nature of their weapons and the identity and generosity of their foreign patrons. There's still a war raging, and reaching an agreement may be relatively simple compared with the challenge of implementing it. After all, the Northern Alliance commanders are the de facto rulers over much of Afghanistan until any new dispensation takes shape. Complicating matters is the fact that the groups gathered at Koenisberg are not exactly a comprehensiv e cross-section of Afghanistan's contending militias, political organizations, tribal structures and ethnic constituencies, and there's a tremendous power imbalance between them.

Winners and losers

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) The fortunes of the Northern Alliance, whic h is present at the talks, have been entirely reversed by U.S. air support. Two months ago, they were clinging desperately to a 10 percent sliver of northern Afghanistan, having been chased out of Kabul by the Taliban in 1996. Now, they're back in control of Kabul and more than half of the country — and they're talking like incumbents. Alliance leader President Buranhuddin Rabbani reminded the world on the eve of the talks that he remains Afghanistan's legal head of state, not only in the minds of his own supporters but also according to the juridical fiction maintained in the United Nations these past five years by an international community reluctant to recognize the Taliban. Also by virtue of the fact that his troops occupy the capital. Rabbani keep s insisting that he's willing to share power, but he also made clear last week that he sees the Germany meeting as purely symbolic.

Across the table from the emissaries of Rabbani and Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum sit three delegations whose co mbined weight isn't even close to that of the Northern Alliance: A deputation sent by the exiled King Zahir Shah; another representing Pakistan-based Pashtun warlords loyal to the king; and a third representing exiled intellectuals and Iran-backed Pashtun mujahedeen commanders. Most notably absent, are not only the Taliban, but also representatives of the Pashtun tribal leaders and warlords who have filled the void left by the retreating zealots in much of southern Afghanistan. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, comprising almost 40 percent of the population. But the Pashtun representatives in Germany are based outside the country, and whereas Washington had once hoped the former king would be a rallying point for the anti-Taliban opposit ion, he has thus far proved incapable of significantly influencing events — after all, to borrow from Stalin's blunt response to the suggestion that the pope be invited to Yalta in 1944, how many divisions has the king? Rabbani two weeks ago said Zahir was welcome to return to Afghanistan, but as a citizen rather than a sovereign.

The Pakistan-based delegation is clearly connected to some of the Pasthun forces, such as Hamid Karzai's, who are fighting the Taliban in its heartland, and the Iran-backed group may also ultimately carry the aspirations of the fearsome Tehran-based Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. But there are plenty of other Pashtun forces in the field, not represented at Koenigswinter. The Northern Alliance, of course, is far from monolithic, and although its prefers to be known as the "United Front" is not exactly united on just who should govern Afghanistan and how. There has been obvious battlefield competition between Tajik militias loyal to Rabbani and those of Uzbek warlord G eneral Rashid Dostum, while the Alliance's ethnic Hazaras even marched on Kabul to stake their own claim on power when the Tajik forces seized the city. And the Alliance's Uzbek and Hazara leaders have shown little enthusiasm for bringing back Rabbani. < p> Making facts on the ground

Still, the real struggle for power still rages in a dizzying whirl of battles, betrayals, retreats and horse-trading among the warlords in Afghanistan. The trickiest issue on the Koenigswinter agenda is almost certain to be the question of an international security force. While there may be a growing consensus among foreign observers and many Afghans on the need for some form of neutral security force to be deployed from outside, the Northern Alliance is having none of it. Rabbani insists that Afghanistan is secure and needs no more foreign troops within its borders, and strong opposition from the Alliance appears to have persuaded Britain to delay the deployment of an advance guard of potential peacekeeping troops. It's not hard to see why the Alliance would oppose foreign intervention — right now Rabbani's force is the uncontested military power in much of Afghanistan, and that allows him to set the terms for a new regime.

The real apportioning of power in t he post-Taliban Afghanistan may be occurring far away from the Koenigswinter talks. Rabbani pointedly stayed away, and so did most other contenders. But the former president, whose tenure is remembered as a time of vicious internecine fighting among the riv al mujahedeen commanders who had appointed him, remains an astute operator. He may have stayed away from Germany, but Rabbani is reported to be planning to visit Pakistan for talks with President Musharraf. Pakistan has traditionally been fiercely opposed to an Alliance backed by old foes such as Russia and India, and had backed the Taliban's five year war against Rabbani's group. But Pakistan is home to the majority of Pashtun, and Islamabad has set itself up as the guarantor of Pashtun interests in Kabul. If Rabbani, whose own claim to power is strongly backed by Russia, can cut a political deal with Musharraf, whatever transpires in Koenigswinter may well prove to be primarily symbolic.