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Sat Jan 7 11:12:05 PST 2006

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A PLACE FOR WARLORDS TO MEET
Jan 5th 2006  

A new parliament convenes

AFTER three weeks in business, Afghanistan's new parliament, the
country's first for three decades, oozes goodwill and echoes with calls
for national unity. Not bad for a congress of former mujahideen and
Taliban commanders, communists, tribal dictators and urban
professionals. But how long will it last? And, more pressingly for
weary Afghans, what can so incongruous a democratic body achieve?

It is not without men and women of integrity. Besides, its mere
existence has made Afghans feel more represented in government. But
many are unhappy that the architects of a brutal civil war have,
somehow, acquired seats. The big three mujahideen parties,
Hizb-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Islami and Ittihad-e-Islami, are the most
powerful in the parliament, over half of whose members are former
fighters.

More happily, not all these holy warriors are radical Islamists: only
around 50 of the 249 MPs are reckoned to fall under that description,
with around the same number thought merely conservative (by
Afghanistan's admittedly exacting standards). The rest are moderate
mujahideen, royalists, Pushtun and other tribal nationalists, and an
assortment of local champions. Maybe 50 members could, at a pinch, be
described as secular and progressive, including half-a-dozen
moustachioed former communists, survivors from the relatively efficient
government left in place by the Soviet Union and overthrown by the
mujahideen in 1992. The ethnic balance of the parliament more or less
mirrors that of Afghan society, with the largest group, the Pushtun,
holding 47% of seats.

 There is already discord within this pack. A female MP, Malalai Joya,
who had the temerity to rail against the "criminal warlords" in the
assembly, has received death threats. Two elected candidates were
murdered before the parliament convened. Last month, the government
wisely suspended what had become known as the "assassination clause",
which decreed that MPs who die in office should be replaced by the
candidate who came second on the original ballot. 

With powers to sack ministers and block legislation, the parliament
could make life difficult for Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president.
How he will juggle its various groups is unclear. For four years, he
has veered unpredictably between the mujahideen conservative and
secular reformist cliques in his government. In the contest to be
speaker of parliament, he gave discreet backing to Abdul Rasul Sayyaf,
an extreme Islamist accused of revolting war crimes, but a fellow
Pushtun. Seemingly, Mr Karzai considered him the only candidate capable
of defeating Yunus Qanuni, the self-styled leader of the opposition and
a Tajik. If so, he was wrong. Mr Sayyaf's war record pushed a number of
Pushtun members to back Mr Qanuni, who defeated his rival and won the
contest by five votes.

A crucial test of the parliament will come later this month when it
will vote to approve Mr Karzai's cabinet. Heads are likely to roll,
with the mujahideen keen to oust several western-educated, technocratic
ministers. This would be popular, tapping into Afghans' universal
dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reconstructing their country. A
similar target would be international NGOs, which are generally
considered inept and wasteful; many MPs say they want foreign aid money
to be channelled through government ministries. Fine, but given the
corruption there, they would get much less of it.

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VPGVRDT

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