Excerpted from Robert Fisk's article "Forget the cliches, there is no easy way for the west to sort this out," Independent Digital, (UK) Ltd. Nov/01

Of course, it's not difficult to see how we Westerners like the idea of a loya jirga. All we have to do is supervise a massive congress of Afghan tribesmen - forgetting that the loya jirga is totally unrepresentative because women are banned - in order to produce a power-sharing government of the kind that the British created in Northern Ireland.

Only it's not like that. The loya jirga became part of Afghan tradition when, in 1747, Ahmed Abdalli took 4,000 soldiers to Kandahar - which was then just two small towns - and brought together the leaders of the eight major Pashtun tribes. They chose Ahmed Durani as the king. But since then, despite the inclusion of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, Pashtuns have ruled Afghanistan for all but three brief periods of the 20th century.

It's easy to see why. The Uzbeks never had loya jirgas. The Tajiks are an urban, non-tribal group. How can they obtain equal or proportionate weight in such a meeting when they do not have tribal leaders? Will the Tajiks have one representative for the Pashtuns' eight or more?

Nor can history be excluded. The Shia Muslim Hazaras - who may or may not owe their origins to Genghis Khan's invading hordes - were the victims of savage repression at the hands of Pashtun forces under the "Iron Emir", King Abdur Rahman, in 1880. Abdur Rahman, it should be added, repressed his own Pashtun people as well. He had been invited to rule Afghanistan by - you guessed it - the British government.