Hazara Nation

Shafaq has had other bad news as well: He will not be able to marry his girlfriend back in Waras. "I love her and she loved me," Shafaq says, but "when I sent my mother to ask for her hand from her father, he refused. Because I am a Hazara."

And so, Shafaq is alone, back in Hazarajat, teaching at Bamian University, where all the other teachers are also Hazaras. Like their students, they are earnest, motivated, intelligent—and a bit fearful. Since reopening in 2004, the university has grown.Beyond the entrance is a dusty courtyard where groups of smartly dressed male and female students, books in hand, make their way to class. The sign on the front of the school is written in three languages—in English and in Dari, the most common language in Afghanistan, and then in Pashtu, the language of the Pashtuns, in the largest script.

Shafaq teaches the history of Afghanistan during the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, expounding on John Locke and Abraham Lincoln, on liberty and democracy. His salary is 2,000 afghanis a month, about $40.

After so much hope, so many promises, the Hazaras are feeling ignored by the new government—led as it is by a Pashtun president. Across Hazarajat, the question echoes: Why has there not been more development and more interest in an area that is safe, where the population supports the government, where corruption is not widespread, where women play a role in public life, where poppies are not proliferating? It's not uncommon to hear farmers muse about growing poppies to sell on the heroin market, maybe even causing a little violence, because they think that might draw the government's attention.

Construction is not easy in this terrain, granted, but Hazarajat could be a model of what's possible when a region buys into the nation-building process. Yet so much time has passed. Already, the resurgence of the Tali-ban, who recently have targeted Hazara leaders in several districts abutting their southern strongholds, is stirring difficult memories. "Anytime we hear news of the Taliban on the radio, our bones turn to water," says Mohsin Moisafid in Kata Khona.

Perhaps a new generation of Afghan leaders will emerge to finally lead people beyond the mindset of war and warlords and jihad. Much depends on whether the Taliban will continue to grow, whether the international community will lose interest, whether the tensions between the U.S. and Iran, fellow Shiites, will adversely affect the Hazaras. Whatever happens, much more than the fate of the Hazara people is at stake. As Dan Terry, an American aid worker who has lived in Afghanistan for 30 years, puts it: What happens to the Hazaras is "not just the story of this people. It's the story of the whole country. It's everybody's story."

Phil Zabriskie has reported extensively in Afghanistan for Time magazine. Steve McCurry has shot for National Geographic for over 20 years and is the best known for his 1985 cover photo of an Afghan girl.