No jirga like a peace jirga

In the feeding frenzy of deadline journalism, the first-ever Afghanistan-Pakistan 'peace jirga' quickly turned into a snack for the mass media. Insta-pundits and participants were asked to offer snap assessments of the four-day jamboree. Demanding instantaneous declarations on whether the jirga, held 9-12 August in Kabul, had been a failure or a success, media organisations sought to simplify the phenomenon, variously terming it a 'tribal assembly' or reducing it to the pronouncements by Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf. But the jirga itself was much more than that.

Though termed a jirga because it was modelled on the tribal assemblies of the past, the 'peace jirga', like the Emergency Loya Jirga of 2002 and the Constitutional Loya Jirga of 2003, included not just tribal leaders, but also politicians, warlords and refugees recently returned to their homeland. The previous jirgas had seen the proactive, behind-the-scenes presence of the international community. During the peace jirga, however, there was a concerted effort to minimise international presence, and to emphasise the indigenous nature of the event. But the fact was that the idea of the peace jirga itself was first mooted in Washington, DC last year, following the separate meetings of presidents Musharraf and Karzai with George W Bush.