The Great New Afghan Hope

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Karzai has never shied from risks. On Oct. 7 he slipped inside southern Afghanistan, heading first to his ancestral village of Karz, near Kandahar. From there he set off to the mountains of Oruzgan province, recruiting tribal elders to join an anti-Taliban coalition. It was not long before the Taliban got on his trail. He escaped ambush and certain death by calling in U.S. forces to rescue him by helicopter. The U.S. says it whisked him out of the country; he insists he never left--perhaps concerned about being seen as too close to the U.S. Since then, Karzai has been back in the mountains, while his Pashtun recruitment drive has picked up speed as one Taliban city after another has fallen to the Northern Alliance.

Having secured the peaceful fall of Kandahar, Karzai is heading up to the capital, Kabul. "That's where my focus is now," he says. When he formally takes charge there on Dec. 22, he will find his 30-member Cabinet assailed by regional warlords who were elbowed out in Bonn. Top of the list: Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, who controls a big chunk of northern Afghanistan and who has already announced that the Uzbeks will boycott Karzai's government. Dostum is angry that the three most important government portfolios--Defense, Interior and Foreign Affairs--went to his Tajik rivals within the Northern Alliance. Another potential spoiler is Rabbani, the Alliance leader who was President from 1992 to 1996 but was excluded from the new government. Intelligence sources in Islamabad say that Rabbani's men, using money from Iran, are paying off Pashtun elders in the eastern regions to oppose both Karzai and the return of former King Mohammed Zahir Shah, 87, whom Karzai supports.

One notable element of Karzai's Cabinet is that it will include two women. Suhaila Seddiqi, a doctor in Kabul, will be the Minister of Public Health. Sima Samar, who works with a nongovernmental organization in Quetta, will be Minister of Women's Affairs, as well as one of Karzai's five deputies.

The Bonn plan calls for Karzai to stay in power for about six months, at which time a loya jirga, or tribal assembly, of 1,500 Afghans will meet to choose a transitional government. That government in turn will last about two years, during which a new constitution will be drawn up. Elections will follow. Until then, the U.N., the U.S. and Pakistan are counting on Karzai to be evenhanded in doling out $600 million in foreign aid and patching up tribal and ethnic grudges. It helps that Karzai knows all the major players, is fluent in all the local dialects and considers himself an Afghan first, a Pashtun second.

To succeed, Karzai must first persuade the warlords and defeated Taliban fighters to hand over their guns. The U.N. plans to have peacekeepers begin patrolling Kabul on Dec. 22, when Karzai's temporary government takes over; then they will fan out to other Afghan cities. But in Bonn, the negotiators were in such haste to secure an agreement that they never spelled out who would be empowered to disarm the Afghan combatants. "We need peace and security," Karzai says. "That's our first priority." Everyone, friend and foe alike, will be watching now to see if he is the man who can deliver them.