At the start of the CLJ meeting, four candidates stood in a hotly contested election to become its chairman. Karzai’s candidate, Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, the first president of Afghanistan after the fall of the communist regime in 1992, won with 252 votes.
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In his opening address, Karzai argued strongly for a presidential system and appealed for national unity. “The new constitution must bring order and good governance and organize the future of the country,” he said. His opponents refuted him strongly. “Karzai wants a dictatorship which people will not accept,” said Abdul Hafiz Mansur, an ideologue of the Northern Alliance.
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Nearly half the delegates opposed the presidential system, and wanted a parliamentary system with power divided between a president and a prime minister and greater provincial autonomy.
All the non-Pashtun groups—Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Hazaras—temporarily buried their rivalries to oppose the presidential system. They were joined by Islamic fundamentalists and monarchists. There was a danger of an ethnic divide, as most Pashtuns supported Karzai and a presidential system. Just before the opening of the CLJ, Karzai had threatened to resign if the presidential system was not accepted. Over the next few weeks, Khalilzad, Brahimi, and Karzai’s aides tried to persuade the opposition to vote for a presidential system in exchange for concessions on other articles of the constitution. There was much haggling on the floor of the tent. Washington considered the passage of the constitution, followed by presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004, as critical to persuading American voters that Afghanistan was a success story for Bush.
The delegates in the large tent were broken up into smaller groups to discuss each article of the draft constitution. There was intense lobbying as amendments to the constitution could be accepted only by the chairman and put to secret ballot if they were supported with the signatures of 151 delegates. (Ultimately 24 amendments were voted upon.) Faction leaders were in constant dialogue with UN and Western diplomats, in smaller hospitality tents outside. The atmosphere was both intense and jovial, intellectually challenging and lighthearted, as Afghans gossiped and cracked jokes. All the delegates knew that the life and death of the nation was at stake, which is why they fought so fiercely for their beliefs.
The jihadis, led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani, had a list of Islamic demands, including that Sharia become the supreme law of the land. Sayyaf was a notorious figure, a follower of the Wahhabi sect who had encouraged the first Arabs to join the anti-Soviet jihad in the early 1980s and a mentor to Osama bin Laden. The Filipino terrorist group Abu Sayyaf was named after him after its founder, Abdurajak Janjalani, received military training from Sayyaf. During the civil war in the 1990s Sayyaf’s forces carried out massacres of Shia Hazaras in Kabul, which were documented by Human Rights Watch.
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Sayyaf rejected the Taliban and joined the Northern Alliance, becoming the most important Pashtun within the largely non-Pashtun NA.
A tall, imposing man with a flowing snow-white beard, Sayyaf speaks fluent Arabic and English in a booming voice that he uses effectively to intimidate people. He lives in Paghman, outside Kabul, where his militia imposes a strict Islamic regime and regularly appears in the Western suburbs of Kabul to rob homes and rape women.
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He was one of the first NA warlords on the CIA’s payroll, according to CIA agent Gary Schroen, who gave Sayyaf one hundred thousand dollars after 9/11.
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After the war ended Sayyaf ingratiated himself with Khalilzad, much to the chagrin of the reformist ministers. He continues to have enormous influence over the judiciary and the Supreme Court, which his nominees controlled until 2006.
In a plenary session of the CLJ held on December 17, Malalai Joya, a short, plucky young delegate from Farah province, took on Sayyaf and the warlords. She accused them of being criminals out to destroy the country. Before she could finish speaking, furious delegates led by Sayyaf accused her of being an atheist and communist, while others threatened to kill her. She was placed under ISAF protection for the rest of the CLJ. It was pure drama and it electrified the country, as the public watched the plenary sessions live on television. Joya’s move did much to unite the women delegates and put the jihadis on notice not to browbeat them.
The most important outcome of the CLJ was that it led to the reemergence of the Pashtuns, who united under Karzai to insist upon a presidential system. Until then, despite Karzai’s position as head of state, the Pashtun tribal leaders and elders felt disenfranchised, but now they came together as a cohesive political force ready to oppose the dominance of the Northern Alliance. They complained bitterly about the refusal of the Northern Alliance to carry out DDR and about the forced eviction of fifty thousand Pashtuns from northern Afghanistan by Generals Dostum and Atta; the refugees were still eking out a miserable existence in relief camps near Kandahar. Their grievances affected their reluctance to give official language status to Uzbek, a point that almost wrecked the CLJ. Meanwhile, the Pashtun delegates tried to get Pushtu declared as a national rather than just an official language, in order to reassert their dominance. Pashtun military officers were furious at Fahim, who had changed the names of ranks in the military from Pushtu to Dari.
This newfound Pashtun unity was confronted with acute divisions within the Tajik camp. Ever since 9/11, the Northern Alliance, led by the Tajik Panjsheris, had dominated the political scene. Now their power was being rapidly eclipsed. They were divided over which form of government to adopt, and over whether to support Karzai or not, and with Fahim discredited as he enriched himself and his minions, they were leaderless. His alleged corruption and business interests had lost him the support of his fellow Panjsheris.
With the Panjsheris in eclipse, the Uzbeks and Hazaras began to adopt their own leaders. The Uzbeks had gained a great deal, such as the declaration of Uzbek, and other minority languages, as official languages. The Shia Hazaras gained as the constitution recognized Shia jurisprudence for the first time, granting it equality with Sunni Hanafi jurisprudence. Nevertheless there were fears that the CLJ would exacerbate ethnic divisions in the country, as many of the amendments demanded by the minorities had a distinctly anti-Pashtun ethnic character. Ashraf Ghani and Ali Jalali, who led the reformist group opposed to the NA warlords and the Panjsheris, were accused of inflaming Pashtun ultranationalism.
The final agreement did not come easily. Toward the end, with still no agreement on the language issue, the role of Islam, or the question of dual nationality, an angry Mujaddedi walked out and did not return until Brahimi and Khalilzad privately met with him at his home. The CLJ’s fate hung in the balance until the final compromises between the delegates were pulled off by Khalilzad, Brahimi, and his deputy, Jean Arnault.
The major concession won by the jihadis was that the Supreme Court was given the power to review constitutional legislation and presidential decrees. The Court was dominated by the conservative ulema and the eighty-year-old chief justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari, who was versed only in Sharia law and was controlled by Sayyaf. European ambassadors privately told me that Khalilzad had struck a deal with Sayyaf in which he would later have the power to nominate judges to the Supreme Court if he gave concessions now on other fronts. Sayyaf emerged more powerful from the CLJ. To the Americans, he was a fundamentalist, but he was “our fundamentalist.”
After twenty-two days of intense debate, on January 4, 2004, the 502 CLJ delegates stood up to approve the new constitution. The closing day was full of high emotion and witnessed the most moving speeches to be made since the liberation of Afghanistan three years earlier. Everyone in the tent—men and women, Afghans and foreign diplomats—were weeping quietly or had pins and needles as Karzai and others made their final speeches.
Karzai told his opponents that those wanting a prime minister could revise the constitution down the road. Karzai said:
The other aim behind opting for a presidential system at present was the fear that under a parliamentary system, the country may be divided among political parties which are formed along ethnic lines, or split into small parties, which are disposed to forming alliances and coalitions along ethnic, sectarian or regional lines. . . . The constitution is not the Koran. If . . . we find that stability improves, proper political parties emerge, and we judge that a parliamentary system can function better, then a Loya Jirga can . . . be convened to adopt a different system of government.
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Lakhdar Brahimi, who was leaving his post after three years, was eulogized by Karzai. Brahimi urged the delegates to turn the constitution from just words on a page “into a living reality.” Brahimi’s last speech resonates even more strongly today: “There is the insecurity that we don’t see much of in the press, the fear that is in the heart of practically every Afghan because there is no rule of law yet in this country. The people of Afghanistan are afraid of the guns that are held by the wrong people and used not to defend them and not to wage a jihad because the time for jihad is finished, but to frighten people, to terrorize people.”
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The Afghan constitution is one of the most modern and democratic in the Muslim world. It stipulates equality between Sunni and Shia, men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim, and among all ethnic groups. Pushtu and Dari became official languages, but for the first time six other languages were recognized in the areas where they were spoken and fourteen ethnic groups were also recognized. Article 4 recognizes the full ethnic pluralism of Afghanistan: “The nation of Afghanistan is comprised of Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baloch, Pashay, Nuristani, Aymaq, Arab, Kyrgyz, Qizilbash, Gujar, Brahui, and other ethnic groups. The word
Afghan
applies to every citizen of Afghanistan.”
For some Afghans, in particular Pashtuns, the CLJ provided reconciliation and a healing process, but for others it was a divisive and bruising experience. For the first time ethnic divisions from the Taliban era, which had lain dormant after 2001, had reappeared. “The CLJ process exposed both the potential for bringing diverse interests and peoples together in order to rebuild the state, as well as the country’s deep fractures which the CLJ served to deepen and even open new wounds,” wrote Barnett Rubin.
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Karzai emerged stronger than before, and there was widespread agreement that he now needed to seize the moment, reshuffle his cabinet, and establish a new political party that would project a national vision before presidential and parliamentary elections took place.
Now was the moment for Karzai to sweep out the warlords and drug traffickers in his government and carry out major reforms. Yet Karzai failed to assert himself and remained indecisive and hesitant as the crises around him multiplied, reconstruction halted, opium production boomed, and the Taliban reappeared. The new constitution was a landmark for the Afghan nation, but its implementation would be delayed as the country faced other mounting problems.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Double-Dealing with Islamic Extremism
Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan
A year after 9 /11 it was clear to many Pakistanis that Musharraf’s support of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan was not the promised strategic U-turn that would end the army’s long-standing support to Islamic extremists but rather a short-term tactical move to appease the United States and offset India’s hegemony. The near-war with India in 2002, the freedom given to the Kashmiri and Pakistani militant groups, and the refusal to grapple with homegrown terrorism created serious misgivings among liberal Pakistanis about Musharraf’s ultimate intentions. The Bush administration did not question Musharraf as long as the Pakistani army cooperated with the principal U.S. objective to catch al Qaeda leaders. Many Pakistanis saw it as a continuation of U.S. policy since the 1950s, with Washington always preferring to deal with a single military dictator who made all the decisions and was unencumbered by parliaments, elections, or politicians.
Washington’s limited aims suited the Pakistani army perfectly because they allowed for a new strategic alliance with the United States at minimum risk to the army’s concept of national security, which rested on three pillars. These were resisting Indian hegemony in the region and promoting the Kashmir cause; protecting and developing the nuclear program; and promoting a pro-Pakistan government in Afghanistan. All three interests rested on unquestioned support from the Islamic fundamentalist parties and their extremist wings. Even though Islamabad had “lost” Afghanistan for the time being, the military was convinced that U.S. staying power in Afghanistan would be short-lived and that their opportunities to reshape the government in Kabul would return.
If the United States ever questioned the army’s intentions, Musharraf could raise the stakes by pointing out the dangers of rising Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan and how he was the only bulwark against it. Every Pakistani government since the 1970s had raised this bogey as a way to secure support from the Americans. U.S. administrations failed to ask the obvious question: If support for the army’s national security interests rested on the Islamic parties, then how could the army claim to be putting down the very same Islamists?
Musharraf epitomized the new breed of senior army officers who were promoted as a result of the Zia era. His personal lifestyle was liberal, secular, and modern, and during his tenure he promoted corps commanders who embodied the same liberal values. He railed against extremism and terrorism, exhorting his countrymen to do the same, but when it came to decision making regarding Islamic fundamentalism, his policies reflected the army’s institutional views, which were that the fundamentalists were the only patriotic allies who could help keep India at bay and liberal democrats in check. The personal views and lifestyle of Pakistani generals did not impinge on their institutional ability to support the Islamists. After 9/11, it was relatively easy for them to convince the international community that their personal views were also their political intentions. Musharraf insisted that only the army could control the fundamentalists.