Who Will Rule?

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At the high-walled villa of Afghan warlord Gul Agha Shirzai, the horse trading has already begun. On the edge of a magnificent carpet in his vast reception room, Shirzai holds court daily, propped against a bolster, surrounded by whispering attendants and discreetly armed bodyguards. For the past month, a steady stream of low-level tribal leaders from across the border in Afghanistan has appeared at his ornate doors in Quetta, Pakistan, seeking an audience with a man they expect will soon return from a five-year exile. His contacts and prominence--Shirzai heads an ancient and powerful clan--make him a strong contender to replace the local Taliban leaders if they fall in the southern region of Kandahar where he was once governor.

Shirzai, a robust, middle-aged man, has been currying favor himself, furiously networking, Afghan-style. On Sept. 15, he dispatched an envoy to the newly arrived U.S. ambassador in Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, in hopes of gaining American backing. And last month he sent an envoy to Rome to pay respects to the aged, deposed Afghan King, Mohammed Zahir Shah, whom the U.S. has tapped as a symbolic rallying figure for post-Taliban Afghanistan. But if Shirzai is following the age-old Afghan custom of building bridges, he is also following its equally venerable tradition of nursing grudges. His clan is part of the Pashtun ethnic group, which, with 40% of the population, is Afghanistan's biggest. Shirzai is wary of the forces of the Northern Alliance, who are mostly Tajiks (25% of all Afghans) and Uzbeks (6%) and who are poised, should the Taliban fall, to greatly expand the limited terrain now under their control. "If the West allows the Northern Alliance to gain an upper hand, it will be a terrible mistake," says Shirzai.

Shirzai's calculus--leveraging alliances above and below while handicapping one's enemies--is being repeated on every level of Afghan society as the leaders of the country's numerous tribes peer through the fog of war to glimpse a post-Taliban future. They are not alone. Each of the bordering nations--Iran, Pakistan, China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan--has its preferred outcome and is working to secure it. Further afield, the U.S. and its allies are waking up to their need for a stable postwar Afghanistan. Without it, U.S. officials say, there is no way to prevent the country from continuing to serve as a haven for terrorists. "[We] should learn a lesson from the previous engagement in the Afghan area that we should not just simply leave after a military objective has been achieved," President Bush said at his press conference in Washington Thursday. But given the complexities of the Afghan tribal structure, the monstrous poverty afflicting the country and the competing views of its neighbors, Bush may find staying in Afghanistan as unappealing as leaving is. The message of history: If you think war in Afghanistan is hard, wait till you see peace.