The ex-King of Afghanistan, Mr Mohammad Zahir Shah, and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance yesterday in Rome agreed to set up a Supreme Council for the National Unity of Afghanistan, aimed at ousting the ruling Taliban in Kabul.
The agreement, which comes after a week during which the former king held talks with a number of senior Western diplomats, calls for the Supreme Council to summon a Loya Jirga, the traditional grand council of Afghan elders.
The Loya Jirga, made up of representatives of all Afghanistan's ethnic and tribal groupings, would then elect a new head of state and an interim government.
Although a joint communique issued by the 86-year-old former king and the Northern Alliance did not specify when or where the Loya Jirga would take place,
Mr Yosnou Kanuni, head of the Northern Alliance delegation, yesterday described the agreement as a new beginning and the opening of a new era for Afghanistan.
Speaking at a news conference in Rome, Mr Kanuni said that the Supreme Council would be empowered to take decisions on all the vital issues.
Another delegation member, Mr Abdul Sattar Sirat, added: "The Supreme Council will be the only institution legally empowered to take important decisions on any question".
On Sunday, following a tripartite meeting in Rome with both the ex-king and the Northern Alliance, a US Congressional delegation had reported that the former king was "willing, ready and able" to return to Afghanistan to serve at the head of an interim government.
Mr Mohammad Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since being ousted in a 1973 coup, is now a feeble 86-year-old who has difficulty climbing the stairs of his relatively modest home in a northern Rome suburb.
At meetings with Western diplomats last week, he claimed that he had no ambitions to return to power on a permanent basis but that he was willing to play a role in forming a post-Taliban transitional government.
Last weekend's meetings with the ex-king form part of an overall strategy on the part of the Northern Alliance to win US support in its fight against the ruling Taliban.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, the Northern Alliance's Washington representative, Mr Haron Amin, said:
"Our aim is to go with an uprising in southern parts of Afghanistan, to join local commanders that are favourable to a free Afghanistan, to move over and give support to the former monarch in Afghanistan so that he can come as a unifying figurehead
"You can go ahead and hunt down Osama bin Laden and roll back the Taliban. But if you cannot create the kind of responsible government that is broad-based and fully representative and multi-ethnic, and a government that is going to be respected by its neighbours as well as a government that will live by international law, you're going to make conditions conducive to perpetrators to do the same sort of heinous crimes that they've committed on September 11th", he added.