Afghanistan Watch: Amb. Zahir Tanin at NYU

April 13, 2007

Amb. Zahir Tanin at NYU

Last night I saw Zahir Tanin, Afghanistan's new Permanent Representative to the United Nations, speak at New York University (in conversation with scholar and journalist Alon Ben-Meir.)

Ambassador Tanin is clearly a learned man, but his comments were mostly pro-forma until the Q&A. But then things got interesting...MORE

(I don't have the transcript yet, so quotes may be imprecise; consider them paraphrases):

He warned that all "Afghanistan's neighbors can revitalize old clients--it's not only about Pakistan" but he also said that "The road to a stable Afghanistan goes through Islamabad." He said that the media had overblown the chilly relationship between Karzai and Musharraf; it's actually quite warm he said.
Regarding Pakistan: "The most important factor that can unite us, it's not our shared religion, geography, or culture--it's America."
Afghanistan should focus more of its development on stable areas; by focusing so much on conflict-prone areas, not only is it inefficient but unfair--people are asking why these areas are getting all the aid.
He seemed sympathetic to, but not supportive of, Ben-Meir's suggestion that a system of regulated opium cultivation could help the nation. It's anti-Islamic, and there's too much insecurity to implement it he argued.

During his comments he mentioned that Afghanistan's two biggest achievements were an elected president and a constitution. During the Q&A I asked him whether we should be concerned about the emergence of the United National Front, which has called for a change in the constitution to a parliamentary system.

He responded by citing Karzai's welcoming of the coalition, but warned that we should be careful of moving along the path to fragmentation of the 1990s. There's a danger in a federal system, he said; the goal at this point should be the concentration of power, which can bring security. Most interestingly, he said the new coalition revived "concerns over the role of neighboring countries."

Posted by Carl Robichaud on April 13, 2007 at 08:21 PM in Opium, Pakistan, Parliament, Politics, Reconstruction | Permalink