BONN, Dec 1: Landmark talks on Afghanistan’s future were hauled out of deadlock on Saturday when the UN was forced to lower its ambitions for a comprehensive power-sharing deal and accept the formation of just a small interim executive.

Seeking to overcome deep divisions within the powerful Northern Alliance over the composition of a proposed two-tier authority, United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi suggested they instead name people to a provisional cabinet.

The radical revision of the UN’s blueprint meant the rollercoaster talks in Bonn were again pushed into extra time.

“The earliest I will have something to say is tomorrow morning, if we have a deal,” UN spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told AFP as the delegates were once again headed into an overnight session of hard, complex bargaining.

But he warned: “It could all break down again.”

The nail-biting talks stalled in their fifth day when the Alliance’s old-guard president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, refused to approve a final list of nominees for a 120-member parliament-style supreme council.

After his chief delegate Yunus Qanooni dropped a political bombshell by threatening to ignore his nominal leader back in Kabul, Rabbani instead proposed the talks narrow down to deciding on a cabinet line-up of 12-25 people.

He said the interim cabinet should be shaped up of specialists and technocrats, and administer the country for four months.

Diplomats also turned the screws: Brahimi made a personal appeal in a telephone call to Rabbani, and Germany’s Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called his Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov, requesting Moscow to exert extra pressure, diplomatic sources said.

But as Rabbani appeared determined to guard his position, his days as Afghanistan’s UN-recognised president appeared to be numbered.

Rabbani has attempted to take centre stage in the Alliance since the assassination of his more popular top gun, Ahmad Shah Masood, in September.

Diplomats monitoring the power-sharing talks in Germany said neither Rabbani nor Afghanistan’s former king Mohammed Zahir Shah — who has the second most powerful delegation at the negotiations — were likely to head a new interim government if one could be agreed.

The Northern Alliance foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah — who along with Qanooni forms the core of the grouping’s more dynamic generation — also said in Kabul that Rabbani would not be taking the helm in the interim set up.

“It is evident that neither the (former) king nor Rabbani will be head of the cabinet,” added a western diplomat who asked not to be identified.

A European Union source close to the talks also said 87-year-old ex-king Mohammed Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973, was not considered a “practical option” to lead a small interim cabinet, while Rabbani was “not seen as a unifying figure”.

Both sources said one leadership figure currently under consideration as the head of the executive was Hamid Karzai, a highly respected royalist and ethnic Pakhtoon tribal leader now fighting the Taliban in the south of the country.

Neither ruled out the prospect of the ex-king playing some kind of figurehead role, but it was still not clear exactly how he would fit in.

A spokesman for the royal camp, Zalmai Rasoul, denied that their so-called Rome group had abandoned its demands that Zahir Shah be Afghanistan’s new head of state.

A leading role for the ex-king, 87, is seen as important for winning over the majority ethnic Pakhtoons in the south, an area once the heartland of the crumbling Taliban militia and where Islamic extremists such as Osama bin Laden first got their foothold in Afghanistan.

Forces of the Alliance is dominated by minority Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, and although it controls the capital Kabul and much of the rest of the country, it has little influence with Pakhtoons — something illustrated by the walk-out of its number-two delegate and most prominent Pakhtoon member, Haji Abdul Qadir.

The UN wants an interim set up to lead to a Loya Jirga or traditional “grand assembly” of tribal elders, in March or April next year. That would in turn lay the groundwork for a broad-based transitional government and then elections.

One key agenda item — how security is to be maintained — appeared to be inching towards some kind of compromise between the Northern Alliance and other groups who want to see a multinational security force put in place.

Such a force had been presented by the UN as the most viable option, but diplomats said one possibility now under consideration was the deployment of a small force and teams of foreign advisors.—AFP