Here are a few nuggets that may help explain why Karzai is likely to be opposed for some time, why he must rely on the United States to stay in power, and why Pakistan cannot be fully trusted to support him.
First, some background on the Afghanistan National Liberation Front (ANLF), a nationalist group led by the Naqsshbandi (Sufi) leader Sibghatullah Mujaddidi:
The core of leadership consisted of the leader's brothers and sons ... nearly all the rest of the staff was Pashtun, reflecting the tribal base of the old regime. Significant numbers attended elite high schools or were educated in the West. The ANLF, however did not attract as many former high military officials as did NIFA.
Indeed, ANLF hardly existed as a military force, and it had too few commanders to be included in the [Afghanistan scholar Olivier] Roy survey [of mujahedin commanders]. The ANLF lacked both military professionals from the old regime and Pakistan-trained Islamic revolutionaries -- either of which might have convinced the ISI that the party could use weapons well--so the party never developed a stable supply relationship with Pakistan. The ANLF was so loosely structured, however, that joingin it was a viable alternative for commanders and refugees who would have preferred not to join any party at all. This appeal, plus some Naqshbandi allegiances, accounted for the adherence to the party of the Kunar Valley tribal front led by the Majrooh family of sayyids. The Karzai family in Qandahar, leaders of the Popolozai tribe, likewise affiliated themselves with Mujaddidi. (Their Barakzai rivals were affiliated with NIFA.)
Mujaddidi had probably the worst relations with the ISI of any of the seven recognized leaders: because he received the fewest weapons, he had the least to lose. He was the only party leader who publicly denounced ISI's interference in Afghan affairs and its playing favorites among the leaders. In spite of his family's liks to the Muslim Brotherhood--his cousin Harun, who lied in Egypt, was arrested by Nasser for his membership in that organization--and in spite of his fluency in Arabic and his good personal relationship with the Saudi royal family, he never received significant assistance from Arab support groups.
While M-Diddy never really bathed himself in glory during the Afghan-Soviet War, he remains a close ally of Karzai to this day, and a positive force overall:
After long debate, a moderate leader and ally of President Hamed Karzai has been chosen to chair the Constitutional Loya Jirga, the assembly called to debate Afghanistan’s new constitution. Former president Sibghatullah Mujaddidi – who defeated three rivals – has a reputation as a mediator.
The post is an important one, since there is a need for a guiding hand to control proceedings given the wide scope for interpreting the Loya Jirga guidelines.
Observers are hoping that Mujaddidi – who is well-known for his mediating abilities - will use his talent for compromise to bring together the many opposing interests debating a new constitution for the country.
He won a convincing victory, taking 252 of the 489 votes cast in a ballot held at the end of December 14, day one of the assembly.
Hafiz Mansoor, who is on the editorial board of the Payam-e Mujahid newspaper and recently wrote a book called Karzai Signs Without Reading, was runner-up in the ballot, with 154 votes. Unlike the winner, Mansoor is vocally anti-Karzai and anti-Western.
Mujaddidi’s close ties to Karzai date from mujahedin times when the latter was a member his National Liberation Front of Afghanistan, one of the main factions in mujahedin times.
The 75-year-old owes his presence at the gathering to presidential patronage, being one of 50 handpicked delegates.
Having stood down in the contest to head the Emergency Loya Jirga last June, Mujaddidi this time accepted the post and appealed to the 500 delegates to help bring stability to Afghanistan.
“We have defeated two foreign powers [British Empire and the Soviet Union] and now we must show the international community that we are able to make a peaceful country.”
Born into a respected family of religious scholars, Mujaddidi led the National Liberation Front which fought communist rule and Soviet occupation in the Eighties, with followers mainly in the Pashtun south.
Elected the head of a seven-party government-in-exile” in Pakistan in 1989, Mujaddidi served as Afghan president for two months in 1992, after the mujahedin took control of Kabul.
But he was not associated with the years of internecine fighting that followed, and instead became known for his ability to negotiate between the many quarrelling factions.
A fierce critic of Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan, he was forced to leave his sanctuary there to live in the West for a number of years.
Some critics see Mujaddidi’s changes of position over the years as a sign of flightiness. In the past he expressed support both for the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud and the latter’s bitter rival, Hizb-i-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Like many other mujahedin leaders with a Pashtun following, he also vacillated over supporting the Taliban.
Rubin says that during his time working among anti-communist leaders at Kabul University, Mujaddidi "had a bitterly antagonistic relationship with the main student leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar" and called him a "criminal and a terrorist" during the famously destabilizing internecine battles between Ahmed Shah Massoud and Hekmatyar in the late 80s and early 90s.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, you may recall, is known as the most ruthless of all Afghan commanders. The ideological zeal of his militia, Hizb-i-Islami, attracted a great deal of support from the like-minded radical Islamists of Saudi Arabia and the ISI, despite the ineffectual complaints of the CIA. Many of Hekmatyar's recruits came from refugee camps in Pakistan, where Hizb-i-Islami built the dominant network of sympathetic madrasas with Pakistani assistance. Nevertheless, neither the Saudis nor the Pakistanis were ever able to fully control Hekmatyar.
According to Rubin:
Hikmatyar consistently placed the long-term goal of Islamic revolution above resistance to the Soviets or to the Kabul regime. His militants were commonly engaged in fighting against fronts of all other parties, for his most important strategic goal was securing the dominance of Hizb over all the Islamic forcesAnd so in Mujaddidi/Karzai and Hikmatyar we have a deeply personal rivalry coupled with ideological incompatibility. The hardcore Islamists, moreover, have never viewed the Loya Jirga process that brought Karzai to power as legitimate, as the Pakistanis and Saudis discovered to their chagrin during the 1980s, when they tried to bring some order to the resistance.
Hekmatyar has called for Afghans to boycott the elections, and is busy plotting disruptive attacks along with another fabled commander and Islamic radical, Yunis Khalis and his ally Jalaluddin Haqqani, who actually did officially join the Taliban at one point in the 90s, and several lesser-known figures. Karzai's challenge is to somehow prevent these groups from uniting and spurring a broad Pashtun revolt. With the support of the U.S. military, he will need to crush them one by one or alternatively, wean some of them away, all while outmaneuvering his chief rival, the Tajik Yunus Qanooni, in the electoral campaign.
It's going to be interesting.
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