Herat Governor Argues Bonn Conference Decisions

According to radio Pakistan radio, Ismail Khan, the governor of the Herat province in the northwest of Afghanistan, which borders on Iran, accused the participants in the Bonn negotiations of pursuing their own goals and distributing the posts between themselves. Thus, three influential Afghan leaders, members of the Northern Alliance, general Ismail Khan, ethnic Uzbek Abdul Rashid Doustum, who seized Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, and Abdulla Khan Wardak, who was a member of the Northern Alliance delegation at the talks in Germany and who refused to sign the document adopted there, have already expressed their disagreement with the decisions adopted in Bonn, specifically with some candidatures to the posts in the provisional government. According to Abdulla Wardak, the decision on candidatures to the provisional government should have been adopted in Kabul, not abroad. Wardak told the NNI agency: "We went to Bonn only to hold preliminary talks, and the head of new administration Hamid Karzai was not even introduced to us." In addition, the general opposes to deployment in Kabul of an international peacekeeping contingent under the UN aegis. According to him, Afghanis themselves can maintain security, law, and order in their country.