Dr Sima Samar was amazed to be appointed deputy prime minister in the new Afghan government. Now, only weeks later, she is beginning to wonder what role on the political chessboard the Americans have in mind for her, writes Elaine Lafferty
'I am the sovereign of the sun-rise, and thou the sovereign of the sunset. Let there be between us a firm treaty of friendship, amity and peace and let traders and caravans on both sides come and go, and let the precious products and ordinary commodities which may be in my territory be conveyed by them into thine, and those in thine into mine."
Genghis Khan sent this note to the Shah of the Khwarizm Empire, in what is now Afghanistan, sometime around 1217. Along with the note, Khan sent 500 camels laden with gold, silks, silver and furs. The booty proved too tempting for the Khwarizm Shah's border commanders. They grabbed the stuff and killed all those accompanying the caravan to prevent word of the looting. Unfortunately for this part of the world, they missed a single witness, a young camel boy who returned to Khan with an account of the theft and murder. Khan demanded the commander be turned over for punishment; the Shah refused and returned Khan's messengers to him with singed beards. Thus began in 1219 a bloody and historic campaign.
Genghis Khan vowed to kill every man, woman, child, animal and plant in the region. Writing some 30 years later, the chronicler Juvaini noted: "With one stroke a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert and the greater part of the living dead and their skins and bones crumbling dust; and the mighty were humbled and immersed in the calamities of perdition."
If only these accounts and descriptions were merely tales consigned to history. Yet the passages in Khan's note referring to the hope for secure roads and peaceful trading, and the ensuing theft, betrayal and bloodshed - these are strangely and sadly relevant to Kabul and Afghanistan today. The December 2001 Bonn agreement which put into place an interim government - an echo of Khan's call for safe trade and peace - has been met on the ground by a policy of rule by guns, what Afghanistan's deputy prime minister and minister for women's affairs calls "jihad culture".
Dr Sima Samar was named as one of the five deputy prime minsters, and minister for women's affairs, on December 5th. She was on a lecture tour in Canada at the time and heard the news through the media, via her brother in Quetta, Pakistan. Her first reaction, and his, was that CNN had got it wrong. She had met Hamid Karzai, the new interim president named in Bonn, just once, several years earlier at his brother's Afghan restaurant in Baltimore. Now she was being named his deputy?
It was only after a second phone call from CNN's Atlanta headquarters that she became convinced the appointment was real. Along with Karzai and eight other appointments, her name was proposed by the Rome group led by the former king, Zahir Shah.
In exile from Afghanistan for 17 years, Samar, a member of the minority ethnic Hazaras, nonetheless ran a number of girls' schools and medical clinics within the country even during the rein of the Taliban. Her political involvement in her homeland's affairs was limited to meeting donors in the US and Europe - she is fluent in English - and in more recent years pressing the US government to take action against the Taliban.
Several weeks after the new government was sworn in, Samar still has no office space. At first she joked that she was the only minister "without a destroyed building of my own". Now she is seriously concerned that something is going awry in this government, that a triumvirate of Islamic fundamentalists in the interim cabinet are simply biding their time, waiting for Karzai to be replaced after six months.
Defence minister Mohammed Fahim, foreign minister Dr Abdullah Abdullah and interior minister Mohammed Qanooni are three ministers appointed in Bonn by the Northern Alliance, the resistance group formerly led by Ahmed Massoud, who was assassinated on September 9th. The men are considered by most in Kabul to be the real powers in the new government; all three are neighbours in the Panjshir Valley, the legendary home of jihad fighters, and all three are described as having less than warm relationships with Karzai.
Qanooni has close ties with Saudi Arabia, and is the son of a strict mullah, while Fahim has regularly opposed the presence of international peacekeepers in Afghanistan, saying that his rag-tag band of armed men is perfectly able to maintain security.
For a government that is extremely strapped for cash, the group is showing remarkable, if questionable, entrepreneurship. Abdullah's foreign ministry charges anything from US$30 to $190 for exit visas, depending on the day. The ministry's office also tries to force its own translators on journalists. Independent translators are now required to pay $50 to gain entrance to the Intercontinental Hotel, where most journalists are staying.
Fahim's commanders will sell the password for staying out beyond the 10 p.m. curfew - the word changes daily - to all comers, or they will shuttle people around the city at night, later demanding $50 for a five-minute ride.
SAMAR has been urged simply to find a building she likes and take it over, using armed men if needed. Some other ministers have chosen this route. "I will not do that. It is not my style, and jihad culture is supposed to be over," she says.
Samar says Karzai must be stronger, and must take a more spirited stand on security, transparency and corruption. But she lays ultimate responsibility at the feet of the US and the United Nations.
At several Washington meetings in late December with secretary of state Colin Powell and State Department assistant Paula Dobriansky, Samar insisted that the US must stay involved in Afghanistan and spend as much money on reconstruction as it did on the bombing. Only half-jokingly, she told Powell: "We know we are part of a CIA-sponsored government. But you have to send money to rebuild the place." Powell smiled, she reports.
"I think I was appointed for three reasons: to shut up women, to shut up Hazaras, and to shut up me. That is okay, but I won't shut up, and I won't be a token," she says. "We must rebuild this country and we must include women."
In a statement typical of her lyrical, steely and Socratic style, she says she asked people in the State Department: "Who is Dr Abdullah anyway? Who am I, for that matter? We are pieces on your chessboard, aren't we? Now what are you going to try and do with us?"