Northern Alliance 'not fit to form government'

War on Terrorism: Political Strategy

The Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban is not fit to form a future government in Afghanistan and will not get backing from Britain if it seizes power, senior sources at Whitehall said yesterday.

Britain and the allied powers would prefer the exiled King Zahir to take part in a loya jirga, a traditional assembly of military and political leaders, to decide the future of the country.

Ministry of Defence intelligence officials have revealed that the Taliban leadership are to be the "centre of gravity" – in other words, military targets – in the impending allied attack. But they admitted they had no clear idea what would happen after that. A senior MoD official said: "The Afghans will have to reconfigure themselves." But he added that he did not know how that would happen.

It is the British insistence that the Alliance should not be allowed to fill the vacuum once the Taliban have gone which will be most controversial.

The US government had been signalling that it backed the Alliance, which had been providing the only resistance to the Kabul regime. Iran and Russia, the main supporters of the Alliance, have just given it large amounts of weapons.

Britain maintains, however, that the Alliance's lack of support among the majority Pashtuns in Afghanistan, com- prising about 50 per cent of the population, means it will not be able to govern.

The Alliance – or to give it its full name, the United Islamic Front for the Liberation and Salvation of Afghanistan – draws its support from the minority Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazars, who comprise about 38 per cent of the country's population. However, they are disparate groups which have fought each other in the past and they no longer have the unifying influence of their charismatic leader, Ahmed Shah Masood, who was assassinated by suspected Taliban agents a few days before the 11 September attacks.

Foreign Office and MoD officials also say the Alliance leadership have "blood on their hands" from the time of their anarchic rule in Kabul before they were driven out by the Pakistani-trained Taliban.

There is also disquiet about their continued alleged involvement in the heroin trade. The UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention said yesterday that 150 tons of opium poppy were harvested this year in Alliance-controlled areas.

The United Nations "Six plus Two" group on Afghanistan is due to meet in the near future. The group, which consists of neighbouring countries as well as the US and Russia, will attempt to hammer out a government that would be palatable to all the members.

King Zahir is a Pashtun from Kabul and is expected to be able to gather non-Taliban Pashtuns around him for a coalition government. But British and US officials admit that a loya jirga is fraught with difficulties. The last time Afghanistan had such an assembly is believed to have been in the 1930s and there are different interpretations of how it should be organised or who should take part.