Young leaders take Afghan helm

The youthful leaders of Afghanistan's new interim government offer a stark contrast to the long-bearded mullahs of the Taliban.

The new head of state, Hamid Karzai, a Western-oriented tribal leader fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, is seen as the best hope for closing the rifts in his war-torn country while opening it to the West.

Yesterday the Pentagon reported that Mr. Karzai was slightly injured when an American B-52 bomber missed its target.

His sister, Fozia Karzai, said from Boston that after a phone call to another sibling in Pakistan, she had determined that that her brother is "fine."

After eight days of UN-sponsored negotiations in Bonn among Afghanistan's various ethnic groups, Karzai is set to take office in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Dec. 22. Yesterday, four Afghan delegations signed a UN-brokered agreement that set a road map for the devastated country's political future and named a provisional cabinet of 30 ministers.

The Bonn agreement is a historic attempt to bring a stable, broad-based government to Afghanistan after two decades of war.

It also signifies an important generational change, with the removal from the political scene of Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, who tried to delay the talks from Kabul. The accord gives only a figurehead role to the octogenarian former Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who is to call a loya jirga - the traditional Afghan council - next summer to continue the political process.

The Northern Alliance is expected to hold three key ministries in the provisional government, with Abdullah Abdullah as foreign minister, Mohammed Quassim Fahim as defense minister, and Yunus Qanooni as interior minister.

The cabinet will include two women.

Karzai will face the challenge of presiding over a cabinet that the UN cobbled together based on a complicated formula of ethnicity, ability, and acceptability to others.

"Under the circumstances, you have to take a risk and give him a chance," says Citha Maass, Afghanistan expert with SWP, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.

Karzai's strengths are his youth, western orientation, fluency in English, and affiliation with the country's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. she says.

Pitfalls, says Dr. Maass, could be his ties to the US, as well as a potential conflict with other young ministers representing the Northern Alliance.

"Where I see a danger is that power will go to his head," says Maass, who knows Karzai personally. She questions whether he has the personality and maturity to play a conciliatory role.

While the Northern Alliance is composed primarily of Afghanistan's ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, Karzai comes from a prominent Pashtun tribe, the Popolzai, whose homeland is north of the embattled city of Kandahar. The Popolzai are a branch of the Durrani clan, which for the past 200 years has produced the country's kings.

"The family was conservative in the sense that it was rich. They were loyal to the king and wanted to keep the status quo," remembers an expatriate Afghan who studied at Kabul University with one of Karzai's six brothers in the 1960s.

"The father was a large landowner - of course they wanted to maintain this lifestyle." Yet the émigré, who asked not to be named, says the family was not conservative in any religious sense. Abdul-Ahad, Karzai's father, was a member of the Afghan parliament under the king.

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