Amidst the euphoria over Hamid Karzai's Himachal connections and the visits by the interior and foreign ministers-designate, Yunis Qanuni and Abdullah Abdullah, to New Delhi, Indians have overlooked one major development in Afghanistan: Pervez Musharraf is getting a taste of his own medicine. When George W. Bush was putting together his coalition against terrorism in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Musharraf successfully ingratiated himself into the American president's favour by throwing overboard Pakistan's progeny, the taliban. Whenever the Indians tried to bring to the notice of the White House and the United States state department that their new friend from Islamabad was not only a patron of terrorism, but also a murderer of democracy until the other day, the Americans had an excuse. We need Musharraf for the time being, India was told time and again by officials of the Bush team. We will set him right once our immediate objectives are achieved. Atal Bihari Vajpayee's top advisers who visited Washington took recourse to the sensible and practical line that they did not want to burden the Bush administration's agenda by pushing for the immediate consideration of India's problem of terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. Now these advisers can have the last laugh. During the last fortnight, aides to the US president have been repeating to the Pakistanis exactly what they were telling the Indians since September 11. At issue is the composition of the interim administration in Kabul. Everyone knows that Musharraf is unhappy that Pashtuns, on whom he has been counting, are not adequately represented in the new set up which will take charge on December 22. But what is not so well known is that the Pakistani strongman is more miffed that the three key portfolios of defence, foreign affairs and interior will all vest with Tajiks in the successor administration to the taliban. This is something that many Pakistanis, especially those in the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence will find most difficult to swallow. They have spent the last 12 years since the Soviet withdrawal from Kabul plotting the defeat and humiliation of Tajiks led by the legendary commander, Ahmed Shah Masood. To be sure, the Pakistanis bitterly complained to the Americans in Bonn, in Washington, in Islamabad and wherever else possible about the Tajiks getting an unfair share of the Afghan cake. Pakistan even had unexpected backing in this effort from the Northern Alliance: separately, the non-Tajik components of the alliance protested that Tajiks were walking away with more than they deserved. But Washington's answer to such criticism was precisely what the Indians were repeatedly told after September 11 whenever Musharraf's duplicity was discussed. We need the Tajiks now, Bush administration officials told the Pakistanis and the dissenters in the Northern Alliance. The Tajiks are the ones who will find Osama bin Laden for us, if at all. They are the ones who will bring Mullah Moahamed Omar to justice. Once that is done, we will deal with the Tajiks. This is easier said than done. When relative calm returns to Afghanistan after the current war, the Americans may well find that it is easier to deal with Musharraf in Islamabad than with the Tajiks in Kabul, who would doubtless have, by then, consolidated their position in the power structure. This is so because, as with many things in Afghanistan, history is the guide. And history tells us that even when Zahir Shah was ruling Afghanistan, the Tajiks wielded power in his durbar which was disproportionate to their numerical strength. There were more Tajiks than Pashtuns among the king's ministers during most of his reign. And after the king's cousin and one-time prime minister, Muhammad Daud, staged a coup in 1973 and proclaimed Afghanistan a republic, his cabinet too had more Tajiks than Pashtuns. To be fair, the Bonn agreement is true to history in many ways. During much of the monarchy, when Tajiks held power disproportionate to their numbers, the trappings of power were still with the Pashtuns. In the Bonn accord too, Karzai, the head of the interim administration, is a Pashtun.. The compromises hammered out in Bonn to produce an accord does not, however, give Karzai much authority beyond the power to summon cabinet meetings. He cannot hold any portfolios in the cabinet: nor can he change the portfolios of any minister. If he is to have any authority beyond the titular ones envisaged in the four-party accord in Bonn, he has to create it. If the way Karzai negotiated the surrender on Kandahar - and later bought order, if not peace - is any guide, he ought to be able to put his imprint on the new government. But his problem is also Musharraf's worry, though this is not to say that the two men are working in concert. The difficulty facing the two men is that right now, the Americans are absolutely unwilling to trust the Pashtuns with any real authority in Afghanistan. It may be unfair to paint an entire ethnic group with one brush. But the fact remains that all Pashtuns, at least in the short run, have been tainted by their close identification with the taliban. In marked contrast, the Tajiks are trusted in Washington, for the present, in any case. For the Bush administration, they are respectable by today's standards of political correctness in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Tajik leadership is the only one which enjoys this privilege in Washington. The Americans reluctantly put up with the Uzbek, General Rashid Dostum: his hands are still bloody from the inhuman excesses attributed to him when the warlord was very much a part of the Soviet set up in Afghanistan. Nor are the Hazaras trusted in the White House. They are considered to be Iran's fifth column in Kabul. Since the Indians, the Russians and some others are more comfortable with the followers of the late Tajik commander, Ahmed Shah Masood, they went along with the American strategy in Bonn of tilting the balance of power in Kabul in favour of the Tajiks. This settlement is an ominous headache for Pakistan today. It has the potential to undercut Islamabad's long-term objectives in Afghanistan if the UN legitimizes this arrangement on the basis of the ethnic composition by which it reached the accord in Bonn. The yardstick for the agreement that created Afghanistan's interim government was a United Nations population survey 27 years ago. This put the Pashtun population of the country at 38 per cent and the Tajiks at 25 per cent. The Pashtuns have been given eleven ministries and the Tajiks eight, notwithstanding the fact that three of these eight ministries control the levers of state power. The Pashtuns maintain that they are in excess of 50 per cent of Afghanistan's population while the Tajiks are just under 20 per cent. Pakistan vociferously endorses these figures. Afghanistan may be chaotic, but chaos is not the reason why there are no reliable or up-to-date population statistics for Afghanistan. Every effort in the last three decades to conduct an orderly census in Afghanistan has been deafeated: not because it was impossible to undertake a head count, but because it was politically unwise to do so. Any credible census would have shown a drastic decline in the Pashtun population commensurate with an increase in the number of Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others. Those opposed to Pashtun dominance in post-conflict Afghanistan - be it the Indians, the Americans or the Russians - played the population card cleverly in Bonn. That may yet prevent the history of the taliban's birth from being repeated in Afghanistan. The Americans, with the support of their wealthy Japanese friends, are now seeking to mollify the Pashtuns and the Pakistanis with the offer of greenbacks. The most lucrative portfolios are with non-Tajiks, they keep telling those who complain of unfair distribution of political booty. The portfolio of post-war reconstruction is with Muhammad Farhang of the king's Rome group, finance with Hedayat Amin Arsala, also of the Rome group and irrigation with Mangal Hussein of the Peshawar group of Pashtuns. These, indeed, are the portfolios which bring in money. Whether money can be a substitute for the Afghan staple political diet of warlordism will determine the durability of peace arrived at in Bonn this month.