Hazara Nation

By Betsy Hiel

The "land of the Afghans" has long bedeviled invaders and would-be conquerors.

As a local proverb holds: "It is easy to enter ... but very hard to leave."

Slightly smaller than Texas, it is a landlocked country of jagged, snowcapped peaks, dusty, open plains and deserts. North of the capital, Kabul, the Hindu Kush mountains divide Central Asia and South Asia.

The influence of its neighbors -- Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China -- is seen in the ethnically mixed faces of its national army.

The nearly 33 million Afghans include 20 ethnic groups speaking more than 30 languages. The Pashto-speaking Pashtun tribe is the largest, at 42 percent. They live by an ancient code, Pashtunwali, of hospitality and revenge.

The Dari or Persian-speaking Tajiks are the second largest, followed by Hazara, Uzbek, Aimak, Turkmen, Baloch and others.

As an East-West crossroads, Afghanistan became a buffer in the "Great Game" between the Russian and British-Indian empires in the late 19th century.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British fought and lost three wars against the Afghans. Seeking to divide the Pashtuns, who spread out into present-day Pakistan, the British drew the Durand Line, still a point of contention between Afghans and Pakistanis.

The Soviets invaded in 1979, but withdrew in 1988 after failing to defeat U.S.- and Saudi-backed Afghan mujahideen.

Following seven years of civil war, the Pashtun-dominated Taliban seized control in 1996, imposed an austere, brutal interpretation of Islam, and harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists. The Sept. 11 attacks sparked a U.S. invasion and the overthrow of the Taliban.

Today, President Hamid Karzai's weak central government is trying to broaden its influence to tribal-ruled regions.

Presidential elections are scheduled for 2009, parliamentary elections in 2010.

Afghanistan remains one of the poorest nations, with a per-capita annual income of $1,000 and literacy rate of 43.1 percent among men, 12.6 percent among women.

Due to extreme poverty, government corruption and the relative ease of growing poppies, Afghanistan has become the world's opium capital. It cultivates 93 percent of the globe's opium, and its poppy crop represents more than half of the country's GDP, according to the United Nations.

The Taliban has tapped into the narcotics trade to finance its insurgency.

Around 70,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan -- some 53,000 under NATO command (including 23,550 Americans) and 16,000 under U.S. command. The United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands have led the fighting in volatile southern provinces.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called for higher troop levels, citing a 40 percent surge in violence in recent months.

"We are short of forces there," he said at a recent Pentagon briefing. "I need at least an additional three brigades, one of them a training brigade."

Betsy Hiel can be reached at hielb@yahoo.com.