Hazara Nation

By Drew Brown

A squad of Afghan police trainees advances slowly across a bare, dusty field.

A staccato burst of AK-47 fire rings out. Although the rounds are blanks, most of the Afghans drop to the ground, as they’ve been trained to do. A few of them, however, appear momentarily confused.

The booming voice of Sgt. 1st Class Samuels Baidoos, a soldier with the New York National Guard, brings them to their senses.

"Come on, hit the dirt, let’s go!" he shouts.

The Afghan who’s supposed to be in charge of the patrol, a young Hazara, looks to Baidoos for guidance.

"Come on, commander, let’s go, get your men moving!" Baidoos shouts. A translator quickly relays his commands into Pashto, the dominant language of southern Afghanistan.

The commander yells out orders. The squad begins to leapfrog ahead three men at a time. What some of them lack in skill, they make up for in enthusiasm. "Allahu akbar!" three of them shout, as they bound forward a short distance and flop on their bellies. "God is great!"

Baidoos, roving back and forth behind the Afghans, yells at them to stay on line. "Situational awareness!" he shouts. "Pay attention to where you are on the line."

Their advance continues for 200 meters across open ground, the rifle fire ringing out sporadically until the men get close, then it stops. Cameron McFarlane, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who’s been playing the enemy, slumps backward, pretending he’s dead.

The Afghan commander runs past McFarlane and flops on the ground. The rest of the Afghans do the same.

"What are you doing?" Baidoos yells at the commander, picking him up by his shoulder, and maneuvering him in front of McFarlane. "You make sure he’s dead. You take his weapon away!"

Welcome to the Kandahar Regional Training Center, where U.S. soldiers, Canadian police officers, and civilian mentors from DynCorp are training local police to take up the frontline fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida in southern Afghanistan.

It isn’t your typical police academy. During the eight-week course, attendees are schooled in leadership, patrolling, small unit tactics and other basic paramilitary skills. They learn first aid, how to handle weapons and shoot properly, how to set up vehicle checkpoints, how to search for weapons and bombs.

They also receive instruction in basic criminal procedures, the Afghan constitution, human rights, values and ethics. But the paramilitary training predominates, because if the war in Afghanistan is to be won, according to their U.S. and Canadian trainers, it’s the Afghan police that are going to win it.

"This is a counterinsurgency," said Maj. Roy Hunter, executive officer for the Regional Police Advisory Command-South. "And the strength of a counterinsurgency is the police force. We want to give these guys the skills they need to stay alive."

Efforts to train and equip the Afghan security forces have been uneven. The U.S. military has spent more than $13 billion on the Afghan army over the past six years, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently endorsed a plan to increase spending by another $17 billion over five years.

The plan would add another 50,000 troops to the Afghan army, which currently stands at about 65,000 troops.

But efforts to bring the Afghan police up to speed have lagged far behind. Earlier attempts by German forces and DynCorp were considered too slow and ineffective.

The U.S. military took over Afghan police training last January, and has spent about $2.5 billion on the program. Soldiers drawn mostly from the New York National Guard’s 27th Brigade have trained about 1,300 police in southern Afghanistan in the past nine months. Senior officers say they will have trained more than 3,000 by year’s end.

Similar training centers have been set up near other cities in Afghanistan, including Herat in the west, Kunduz in the north, Jalalabad in the east and the capital of Kabul.

The model that the U.S. military has employed for the program is called Focused District Development. The entire police force from a district, from the top commander to the lowest recruit, is brought into the center, and they all go through the training together. The Kandahar center can handle up to 350 attendees at any given time. After the police officers graduate, they leave the center fully equipped, with all of the trucks, radios, weapons and ammunition they’ll need to do their job.

Military trainers also accompany the police back to their home districts. Small units of U.S. soldiers, called Police Mentor Teams, or PMTs, work with the newly trained police in the districts and provide them with continuing advice and support.

U.S. officers say that Focused District Development has had a dramatic impact in rooting out corruption and instilling a new sense of professionalism in police units that have attended the course. The program has also helped reduce casualties. According to Hunter, insurgents killed an average of 200 police a month throughout Afghanistan before the training program started. Casualty rates have since dropped by about two-thirds, he said.

Despite renewed emphasis, the effort to train and equip the Afghan police still suffers from chronic shortages. According to Col. Thomas J. McGrath, who recently finished up a 15-month tour overseeing the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command-South, there are only about 2,800 police trainers working in southern Afghanistan, but the region needs at least twice that number. Only about 25 percent of the districts in southern Afghanistan have police mentor teams assigned to them, McGrath said, in a recent interview.
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President Hamid Karzai said yesterday that he will seek reelection next year, saying he has yet to finish the job he began four years ago as Afghanistan's first freely elected president after nearly 30 years of war.

In a candid admission of some of his failures after four years in office, Karzai said Afghanistan does not yet have a functioning government, corruption remains rampant, and the Afghan people "still suffer massively" in the fight against terrorism.

"So I have a job to do, a job to complete. In that sense, yes, I would like to run," a relaxed Karzai said during an interview in the grand presidential palace in the center of Afghanistan's heavily fortified capital.

Karzai reflected on his aspirations for Afghanistan, which is still struggling to recover from poverty and war seven years after the rigidly religious Taliban regime was driven from Kabul.

"I have begun a task to rebuild Afghanistan into a peaceful, prosperous country, into a democratic country, a country where the Afghan people will have a voice and their rights respected, a country that will be producing its own and living off its own means," Karzai said.

"I have achieved some of those objectives. I have not achieved some of the other objectives," he said. "Afghanistan is not at peace. The Afghan people still suffer massively in the war against terrorism and in the war for stability in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not yet a well-off country, still a very poor country."

Karzai acknowledged that his country "does not have a properly functional government yet. It must get that."

Afghanistan has seen a sharp rise in violence this year.

Militants have unleashed powerful bomb attacks on an international hotel and the Indian Embassy, and 2008 is on pace to be the deadliest year for international troops since the Taliban's 2001 ouster.

Karzai himself was the target of an assassination attempt in April, when militants firing rockets and automatic rifles attacked an anniversary ceremony to mark the 1989 mujahedeen victory over the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The president also warned that his fledgling government was being "very seriously" undermined by errant US and NATO bombs that kill civilians, as well as hunts for insurgents that take international forces into Afghan villages.

On Saturday, four civilians were killed when international troops blasted a house in southern Helmand province with rockets targeting and killing insurgents, a NATO statement said.

NATO blamed the unintended civilian deaths on insurgents mingling with the local population.

The episode was only one of dozens this year where international troops have killed Afghan civilians. More than 3,400 people - mostly militants - have died in insurgency-related violence this year, according to an Associated Press tally of figures from Western and Afghan officials.

Karzai said he wanted attacks on Afghan villages stopped. "We also want the weaponry in this war to be targeted at the terrorists properly," he said.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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DailyTimes

The attack was two days ago but fire still smoulders in a house and two shops in a small village in remote central Afghanistan.

“The nomads came down from the mountains, they broke doors and looted the shops,” says a toothless old man who owns one of the destroyed shops, a grocery store. “What can I do now? I lost everything.” This village of a half-dozen traditional mud brick homes in Behsud, 150 kilometres east of Kabul, is the latest target in a conflict which has for the past five years pitted Kuchi nomads against Hazara settlers.

It is an increasingly violent standoff over grazing land that has ethnic undertones, as the Kuchi from Afghanistan’s majority Pashtun tribe have a bloody history with the Hazara. “Kuchis attacked our house yesterday, they took away our animals,” says another Hazara, 23-year-old Mohammad Yacine. “We escaped but they burned my house.” He has come to the village to find help.

“They fired at us and we couldn’t respond because we have no weapons. If we had, we wouldn’t have left our area,” he says, standing in a group of men holding old rifles or Kalashnikovs. “They want us to leave this place so they can claim our lands.” The Hazaras, a minority of Mongol origin, have lived and farmed in these valleys overlooked by bare hills for centuries. About 130 years ago, the Kuchi started arriving every summer to graze their camels, sheep and goats - a right they say was given to them by royal order.

“The area does not have the capacity for more than the people who already live here,” says Abdul Raza Razahi, a Hazara parliamentarian for Wardak province which includes Behsud. afp
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Afghan Minister for Mines Ebrahim Adel has said that his ministry had discovered varieties of mines worth of 300 billion US dollars in Afghanistan's central high lands, a local newspaper reported Saturday.

[The English] Daily Outlook quoted the minister, who had recently visited the above provinces, as saying the coal mine reservoir discovered in Yakawlang District of [central] Bamyan Province could be more than 200 million tons.

He said that the iron mine discovered in the same district could have some 1 billion tons of the metal.

The mining of the entire underground treasury would be leased to private sectors in future, according to officials at the ministry.

Afghanistan has already leased its biggest copper mine in Logar Province to the China Metallurgical Group Corp. months ago.

Meantime, a press release of the Afghan Foreign Ministry issued here Saturday said that Afghan Minister for Public Work Dr Sohrab Ali Safari and Italian ambassador to Afghanistan Ettore Francesco Sequi will sign an agreement for the rehabilitation of the second section of the Maydan Shahr-Bamyan Road today.

Work on the 136-km road linking Kabul through [Maydan] Wardag Province to the central Bamyan Province began in 2006 with 151 million US dollars financial support from Italy and is expected to be completed within the next three years.

Originally published by Xinhua news agency, Beijing, in English 0841 12 Jul 08.

(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring South Asia. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
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by Wesley Oilpheant

The federal government, the military, the media and the public have largely ignored the war in Afghanistan since the conflict began in 2002. By January of 2003, the Bush administration turned their attention to Iraq and became preoccupied with the logistical and financial aspects of that impending war. Since then, Afghanistan has taken a backseat in importance. Even the death of 500 American soldiers in the region earlier this year wasn’t enough to rekindle media interest in the territory.

Part of the problem is that the war in Afghanistan has never been as critical to Americans as the war in Iraq. This lack of concern only grew with the deterioration of security in Iraq and the recent domestic economic woes. However, it seems that the war in Afghanistan should require as much airtime, if not more, than the Iraq War due to the threat that al-Qaida and the Taliban pose to American interests abroad. Al-Qaida only grows stronger as it gains the support of local populations. That support is either based on ideological sympathy or the belief that al-Qaida can help oppose a greater threat. In Iraq, the support among the Sunni Muslim population was based on the latter, and many Sunnis saw the Americans and Shiites as greater threats. Al-Qaida only lost support once their brutality convinced the Sunni population otherwise.

In Afghanistan, the support for al-Qaida and the Taliban is concentrated in the south, which is predominantly Pashtun- the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan—and is stronger than in Iraq. The support for al-Qaida and the Taliban is based on the perceived threat from the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras—ethnic groups from the north who dominate the central government. The support is also ideological. Despite the faults of the Islamic fundamentalism that the Taliban and al-Qaida practice, many Pashtuns associate it with stability and order. Thus, it is no surprise that the two groups have found a niche in the area.

Militants in Afghanistan have safe havens in bordering countries like Pakistan, the ability to cross the border at will and a large and growing source of domestic income from opium. Consequently, the Taliban and al-Qaida have regrouped since their defeat in 2001. They are able to conduct increasingly numerous and deadly attacks against coalition and Afghan security forces, including a devastating attack in June on the main prison of Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar. In the process, the resurgent Taliban members have re-occupied lost territories. In February, National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell estimated that the Taliban controlled 10 to 11 percent of Afghanistan while the central government controlled 30 to 31 percent. McConnell estimated that local tribes were controlling the remaining 58 to 60 percent. But what can be done?

One solution should involve more representation for Pashtuns in the central government, even if the other ethnic groups are unwilling to share power. In terms of closing the border crossings into Afghanistan, it is unlikely the Pakistani military will be productive because of the territory’s difficulties and resurgent militants who weaken Afghanistan and India, their regional rivals.

The opium trade seems equally problematic. As stated in “The Economist,” opium is mass-produced because it provides huge profits to smugglers and refiners, and huge debt relief for farmers. If the government destroys the opium crops, they could risk a civil war with the southern population and the drug lords who profit from and protect the industry. If the government does nothing, the opium revenues will continue to fund the Taliban and al-Qaida, further destabilizing the central government.

However, this problem will be easier to solve if economic development projects begin to succeed, giving farmers other options in lieu of opium production. While multiple countries have pledged around $15 billion in aid to Afghanistan, questions remain on how the money should be spent.

Some of the answers lie in Afghanistan’s period of stability from 1933 to 1973. During that time, Afghanistan’s government invested in and developed the county’s infrastructure, industries, agriculture and education. Some projects succeeded, but most failed. The failures were in part the results of misplaced priorities.

For example, the government emphasized industrialization over agricultural development, even when the economy lacked the raw materials, training and surplus manpower to industrialize. On top of that, the projects floundered due to a lack of supervision, oversight, coordination between projects, input from the indigenous population and knowledge of the local culture.

More troops are also needed. They can help protect more development projects from attack and decrease the Islamic militants’ major source of funding. We shouldn’t pull all our troops out of Iraq because some security gains there are reversible. Instead, we should begin moving some brigades meant for Iraq to Afghanistan, until the Afghan army can independently hold and protect their country.

With the November election coming up during a weak economic period, the top issues for the public, the media and the federal government will continue to be domestic problems. However, we ignore Afghanistan at our own peril, given the growing strength of the Taliban and al-Qaida.

Wesley Oliphant is a third-year economics graduate student. He can be reached at woliphan@uci.edu.
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It is an increasingly violent standoff over grazing land that has ethnic undertones between the nomadic Kuchi from Afghanistan's majority Pashtun tribe and the and the settled Hazara.

The attack was two days ago but fire still smoulders in a house and two shops in a small village in remote central Afghanistan.

"The nomads came down from the mountains, they broke doors and looted the shops," says a toothless old man who owns one of the destroyed shops, a grocery store. "What can I do now? I lost everything."

This village of a half-dozen traditional mudbrick homes in Behsud, 150 kilometres (90 miles) east of Kabul, is the latest target in a conflict which has for the past five years pitted Kuchi nomads against Hazara settlers.

"Kuchis attacked our house yesterday, they took away our animals," says another Hazara, 23-year-old Mohammad Yacine. "We escaped but they burned my house."

He has come to the village to find help. "They fired at us and we couldn't respond because we have no weapons. If we had, we wouldn't have left our area," he says, standing in a group of men holding old rifles or Kalashnikovs.

"They want us to leave this place so they can claim our lands."

The Hazaras, a Shiite minority of Mongol origin, have lived and farmed in these valleys overlooked by bare hills for centuries.

About 130 years ago, the Kuchi started arriving every summer to graze their camels, sheep and goats -- a right they say was given to them by royal order.

"The area does not have the capacity for more than the people who already live here," says Abdul Raza Razahi, a Hazara parliamentarian for Wardak province which includes Behsud.

"When Kuchis and their hundreds of thousands of sheep come down to this area, logically fights and looting happens."

Seven people have been killed this year and 1,500 homes abandoned, he says.

Razahi and others allege a new dimension has emerged, contributing to the violence -- the involvement of Taliban, mainly Pashtu extremists behind an insurgency in Afghanistan and said to have support from elements in Pakistan.

The leader of the nomads in these parts was a commander of Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar during the hardliner's 1996-2001 rule of Afghanistan, the MP says.

"The Kuchis are not the same as before -- a lot of them come from Pakistan," he says.

Hussein Dad, 42, says the men who destroyed his property were carrying the white flag of the Taliban. "They came with machine guns, Kuchi with Taliban mixed together," he charges.

Another Hazara villager, Mohammad Nabi Akbari, 73, interjects: "If it was only the Kuchis, it would be simpler. But they are also Taliban and Al-Qaeda."

"When they attacked, they could be heard and I am not a simple guy who does not know they are not speaking Dari and Pashtu," he says, referring to Afghanistan's two main languages.

To face the threat, the Hazara are organising themselves militarily, setting up lookout posts in the hills. At one, five armed men carrying binoculars and walkie-talkies survey their surroundings.

Further away, a blue, white and red flag flies above a school which has become a base for Afghan soldiers and their French instructors.

"We were sent to this area after the deterioration of security. The Afghan army has activated observation posts for 20 kilometres in this valley and we are patrolling with them," says Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Martin.

"There are no more attacks in the valley but the houses are still burning in the mountains. It takes us three hours to get there and then it is too late," he says.

A delegation that has come from Kabul to try to resolve the conflict arrives at a Kuchi camp under military escort. The road passes through burnt homes, suggesting "scorched earth" methods.

"We gathered like we do every year and the Hazaras attacked us," says Kuchi tribal chief Qalai Qalan.

"But anyway this land belongs to us. It was given to us more than 130 years ago by the king -- we have documents to prove it," he says.

Dozens of elders and chiefs are gathered around him -- all of them with long beards, dark eyes and a proud stance. Some of them brandish whips to keep their herds in line.

A few say in hushed words that they are afraid of being attacked when they have to leave again. Other accuse the Hazara of setting alight their homes themselves.

"The Kuchi are very poor people, they do not have education or basic facilities. Every year they take their animals to areas that were given to them more than a century ago.

"Why should they stop them?" asks Haji Mohammad Hazrat Janan, a Kuchi official and head of the Wardak provincial council.

Janan claims Afghanistan's eastern neighbour Iran -- a Shiite nation -- is fuelling the violence, helping the Hazaras because they are of the same branch of Islam. The Kuchi are mostly Sunnis, as are the Taliban.

"Iran is supplying weapons to the Hazara... Kuchi are present in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan -- why do they only have problems here?" he asks.

The official admits though that houses have been burnt and blames the "ignorance of some Kuchi."

Asked about the Kuchi statement that they have been given grazing rights by a previous king, retired army general and former Hazara warlord Zaman Hussein Faizi claims the 2003 constitution nullified all decrees before it.

"In the 21st century, the way of life of the Kuchi is ridiculous and cruel for them. It is time for them to be settled, to have access to civilisation and education. But not on our land," he says.

On the road back to Kabul, four armed young Hazaras are driving the other way, towards Behsud.

"When I heard what is happening there, I could not sleep any more," one of them says. "It is a feeling that comes from the deepest part of me: I must fight to defend my land."
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By George H. Wittman

Afghanistan is the politically correct battlefield. Even the Germans and the French have sent troops, though not for combat assignments. Casualties seem to stay in media-acceptable limits. Deadly fighting tends to be reported as boutique battles. Barack Obama, in an effort to show he's not against all wars, suggests he would send the needed additional two to three more American brigades. Except that Afghan wars never really end.

Ben Mcintyre, of the London Times, certainly one of the most knowledgeable of the journalists who have covered Afghanistan, has written: "The Afghans fought tirelessly among themselves, but when a foreign invader threatened, they united to drive him out. Even Alexander's hold had been fleeting, Macedonian, Mogul, Persian, Russian, British and Soviet armies all tried, and failed, to control the Afghan tribes."

Afghanistan has been for centuries, and remains so today, a nation built on tribalism. The figures differ but the academic consensus is that the Pushtun (aka, Pashtun, Pathan, etc.) are calculated at 42% to 36 % of the population, with the Tajik at 27% to 34%, depending on whether one accepts the CIA World Factbook figures or an unofficial compilation of past census figures, respectively.

In any case the Pushtun are the dominant tribe and the Tajik follow closely. Hazara and Uzbeks close in with about 10% each and another 13% accounts for groupings of smaller tribes. To emphasize the complexities, one must note there are approximately 60 Pushtun tribes divided into 400 sub-tribes.

The Durrani tribal federation of Pushtuns has been dominant since the 1700s, well before the British arrived. President Hamid Karzai is from the Popolzai clan of Durrani, whose two other main clans are the Barakzai and Alikojai. These three groups were favored for leadership by NATO after the Taliban were routed. Naturally, all the non-Durranis have resented the situation and the Western sponsors ever since; thus providing a convenient and ready supply of dissident fighters, with and without Taliban connections.

The Alikojai, headed by its warlord, Dad Mohammad Khan, has been battling the previously Taliban-favored sub-tribe, the Itzhakzai, in the area of the Sangin poppy-growing region of Helmand Province. Keeping track of current and traditional animosities and alliances is a continuing anthropological task for British and Canadian field intelligence, which has operational responsibility for that provincial sector.


SIX MONTHS AGAO President Hamid Karzai stunned everyone by supporting the concept of not sending more foreign troops into his country. He told the German newspaper Die Welt: "More than anything else we need help to rebuild our human capital and our institutions, our army, our police force, our administrative structure, our judiciary, and so on."

This brought a very positive response from the Germans because they hadn't wanted to send their troops to Afghanistan in the first place. At the moment the German Army contingent of 3,500 is assigned happily in the extremely quiet north patrolling the comparatively friendly, if barren, territory.

The French have committed to avoid battle contact by assuming the training command in and around Kabul. They had a very good spec ops force of 200 pulled out in December 2006 because they were taking casualties. The Brits and Canadians, along with the Americans, Dutch, Poles, Danes and Aussies, have done the heavy lifting in the south and east. So much for the equitable distribution of the NATO command.

Karzai's goal of "rebuilding institutions" would be fine if there had been a history of a modern administrative structure before the Taliban other than the Soviet-constructed communist bureaucracy. What Karzai may have been talking about is what the Economist referred to as "the ancient code of tribal behavior known as Pushtunwali." This is the rule of conduct that is the ethical guide for Pushtun life.

This code is enforced by councils of tribal elders in negotiation, creating a policing mechanism known as arbakai. As fascinating as such a cultural structure may be, it really can't be conceived of as a foundation for a modern state. How much relevance outside of Pushtun society it may have is also questionable.

The central government in Kabul knows full well that its effective dominion does not extend far beyond the reach of its principal weapons -- guns and money. Vying now for the same form of power is the resurgent Taliban and ever present drug network -- sometimes, as in the southern provinces, intermingled.


WHEN THE U.S.-LED FORCES first went into Afghanistan, the reasonable concept was to hammer the Taliban and al Qaeda forces into the mountains of the south and east against the anvil of Pakistan. The role of Pakistan was essential then and remains so today. Unfortunately, Pakistan was not a committed "anvil" in the earlier time and certainly isn't now. In reality it was and continues to be a sanctuary for the Taliban and al Qaeda.

There is one difference now that didn't exist pre-2001: al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan as a home base. Osama bin Laden's organization has grown in sophistication and covert structure. It really doesn't need or desire mountain training grounds cross border in Afghanistan; it is well supported and protected in all manners on the Pakistani side.

Perhaps the essential political military lesson of Afghanistan is best learned by accepting the fact that Afghan tribes will not fit into a modern framework. Making our national strategic plans with that firmly in mind may be what the noble Hamid Karzai, the great Pushtun leader of the Popolzai clan of the Durrani tribal federation, fluent speaker of English, French, Pushto, Farsi, Dari, Urdu, Hindi has been trying to tell us. Or maybe he's just trying to stay alive and in power. In any case, in some form or other, Afghani wars, small and large, will go on no matter outside involvement.


George H. Wittman, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, was the founding chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy.
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From Registan.net

Seth Jones, the RAND fellow who’s currently writing an O’Hanlon number of op-eds on Afghanistan, recently wrote a defense of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for Foreign Policy:

But for all of Karzai’s faults, there is nobody waiting in the wings. There are, of course, political rivals across Afghanistan, such as the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who would love to see Karzai humbled in the presidential elections. A range of more serious candidates also appears to be considering running, including former Interior Minister Ali Jalali, a competent technocrat who lacks significant popular support.

In other words, Karzai is still the best game in town. Not only is he superior to any plausible alternative, but he is a Pashtun, retains broad multiethnic support, and is Afghanistan’s most popular leader. In a December 2007 poll commissioned by ABC News, the BBC, and the German broadcasting consortium ARD, two thirds of Afghans rated Karzai’s performance as “excellent” or “good.” That’s why the United States and other NATO countries should stop undermining Karzai now, shore up support for him as the democratically elected president of Afghanistan, and help him show progress. Ultimately, that means supporting free and fair elections and letting Afghans choose their next president. But, right now, Karzai needs urgent help on several fronts.

It’s funny, because the rest of the column is spent defending Karzai’s obvious links to corrupt officials, and his own role in marginalizing liberal or critical politicians (along with the appropriate point about the absolute necessity of a good police force). For example, a popular leader with broad multiethnic support wouldn’t feel the need to ban popular parties and politicians, for example, nor would he openly fear the revolt of hundreds of thousands of Hazaras convinced he supports the Taliban because he refused to protect them from a violent dispute with Kuchi nomads. Similarly, one of the primary reasons Karzai doesn’t face more opposition from the Tajiks is because the vast majority of the Kabul technocracy is Tajik; that does not, however, mean he is popular or loved.

I’m curious about that poll. The Asia Foundation 2007 survey (pdf), for example, was far less optimistic about the government:

* Seventy-nine percent of the people felt that the government did not care what people thought while another 69 percent felt it was not acceptable to talk negatively about the government in public.

* Eighty percent felt the government was doing a good job, but most of the credit in this regard went to the education and health sectors, while the government was seen to be performing below par in employment generation, economic revival and fighting corruption.

* Perception of the prevalence of corruption was higher at the national level (74%) than at the provincial (60%) or local levels (48%).

Needless to say, overall attitudes within the country seem pretty upbeat, which is good to hear. We are mistaken, however, in placing all of our eggs in the Karzai basket. In fact, Jones’ argument is emblematic of conventional thinking in Washington, which holds that no matter how counterproductive a leader is, if he’s at least marginally successful, he should be supported—even if that means supporting his deliberate suppression of free media, free speech, or free elections.

If our goal is ever to be a free and democratic Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai must be allowed to fall.
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by Joshua Foust

Despite its reputation for a very conservative brand of Islam, Afghanistan is deeply torn. Before the recent decades of war, the country was more known for its mystical Sufism that attracted crowds of hippies and tourists than anything else; the Soviet War helped entrench a more fundamentalist brand of Islam that peaked in the Taliban; now, Afghanistan struggles mightily with its past—both recent and distant. Afghan bloggers lately have been focusing on issues of justice, given the trial of a young journalism student, the ethnic fighting in Maydan Wardak province, and even the problems of honor-killing women and suicide bombing.

The most recent news to come from Afghanistan involved the violent incursion of Kuchi nomads into Hazara farming communities in the Behsud district of Wardak province, just west and south of Kabul. Many Hazara were killed in the attack, and several thousand fled as their homes were destroyed. After a hunger strike by a prominent member of Parliament, and a large protest rally in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai ordered the Kuchi to evacuate the district.

The Hazaristan Times covered those protests, and now posts on yet another protest rally in Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan:

Thousands of Hazaras came out on roads on Thursday in Mazar city protesting Government’s inaction against Kuchi barbarism in Behsud killing more than 15 vulnerable villagers.

The protectors marching from Shrine towards the office of United Nation’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan chanted slogans and displayed placards demanding of Karzai to resign. They handed over an 8-Points demand resolution to UNAMA official criticizing it for keeping mum on Kuchi invasion of Behsud and Daimirdad Districts.

The Demand Resolution included intervention of United Nation into Behsud Massacare demanding an inquiry into the incident and action against the responsible circles in the Government backing Kuchis with arms for thier devilish political and ethnic aims. The protestors later dispersed peacefully.

It may be mentioned a huge protest rally was organized in Bamiyan on Monday 22nd July in harmony with Kabul protestors against Kuchi invasion in Behsud. Thousands of protestors marched down from Rah-Bar e Shahid Masjid towards UNAMA office. A similar protest rally was organized in Yakawlang.

Of a different topic of justice, The Rumi noted the vicious gang rape of a 13-year old girl by five policeman, and wondered why the government seemed to be doing nothing:

Her relative said she was at six grade of high school and when they claimed to police department, they had received death threat to not report it again. ‘’ If the government dose not take the responsibility, we are going to committee suicide’’ her family told the local media. This is the fourth times that children are abusing in the same city, according to Afghan Paper News Bulletin.

Back in Kabul, The Rumi noted how President Karzai seems to fear political competition, after Abdul Jabar Sabit, the Afghanistan Attorney General, was fired on July 16 after announcing his candidacy for President:

Mr. Sabit a former member of Islamist group of Afghan warlord Gulboddin Hekmatyar, was appointed as Attorney General on May 2006. Sabit who also served as a member of Karzai team now became a full-size rival. He accused Karzai for taking an illegal action firing him and called it a huge conspiracy in a media conference in Kabul.

A few days’ later former lawyers organized a seminar in Kabul Star Hotel to discuses about Sabit’s work history. General Omarkhel, former Chief of Kabul Airport Police, was one of a speaker in the seminar said Sabit himself was shipwrecked in corruption while providing documents as evidence for the audience.

Sabit previously threatened with arrest the Uzbek strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum after Dostum was accused of abducting an official. But he had to back down after he had no support for the arrest.

Meanwhile, Sanjar mediates on why suicide bombings have come to Afghanistan:

There is no solidarity in Afghan society. People have to struggle to live via other means, while it’s Russians, or mujahdeen or Americans or Taliban or someone else trying to control their lives. The norms in society are old and rotten it does not provide a good framework for individual to act. As a result most individuals are corrupt and their moral structure does not lead them. the society has not lost the morality or it has not been loosen. The only answer afghans think will work is to strengthen norms this is supported by the so called leaders because this serves their purposes. Afghanistan has become corrupt and hypocritical. Life for many has become hard especially for women.

There is a conflict in Afghan society, we as Afghans failed to respond constructively and fix this failure that is why first Russians and now the rest of the world came to fix it. not because they care about Afghanistan but because Afghanistan have caused some serious problems to the rest of the world. The demands of the self proclaimed leaders have conflict with each other and as a result they are in constant conflict and because they have no political intelligence the only way they settle conflict is through bloodshed, and that has turned them into criminals.

This makes for a good segue into some first person accounts of suicide bombings. First, Safrang offers an account of a halted attempt:

She took another cab and it was while describing the bizzare episode to the second cabbie that the driver said that she might have just been the passenger of an intihaari or a suicide bomber, and that she should probably report the kamikaze-cabbie to the police. The driver described how vehicle-borne suicide bombers have taken to camouflaging their operations with passengers that would make them seem innocuous and get them through many a police checkpoints because of the presence of a woman passenger.

Dagarwaal’s daughter in law did call the police, and two days later the cab driver was caught with the cab’s trunk containing an IED and a large amount of shrapnels, nails, and explosives. Just goes to show how far these people are willing to go -to the limit of knowingly sacrificing innocent people’s lives (besides that which is normally lost in collateral casualties -which is again heavily skewed in numbers towards civilians.)

And The Rumi has an account of a relative finding out about the suicide attack on the Indian embassy:

Speaking to the BBC in Kabul, Khan Mohammad breaks down as he recalls those bitter moments.

On the morning of Monday 7 July, eight members of his family stood outside the Indian embassy in Kabul when a massive suicide bombing killed five of them, including his daughter, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. They were among more than 50 people killed.

His three other grandchildren escaped with injuries.

Maybe one day, these Afghans will at last find the justice they so desperately need.
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by Joshua Foust

Afghanistan is one of those countries where minority issues drive nearly everything. They form the basis for why President Hamid Karzai is “the best game in town,” but also why he should resign. They form the fundamental structure of the national government, with ethnic set-asides (Kuchis get 10 seats in Parliament, Tajiks and Hazara each get a Vice-Presidency), warlordism (no one will dare move against Abdulrashid Dostum's ethnic Uzbek enclave in the north), and generally a tense unease between various people groups.

Because this situation is not new, it sometimes gets ignored in the face of the Taliban insurgency. But sometimes ethnic rivalries boil over into outright disputes. In Wardak province, just west and south of Kabul, the Hazara have a long-standing feud with the nomadic Kuchi over land rights. On Tuesday, July 8—the day after the horrific bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul—a band of Kuchis moved into the Behsud district of Wardak and killed several Hazaras, taking at least four hostage and claiming the “right” to use their land. The Rumi reports:

In April, Human rights workers expressed fears that Hazaras were planning to take up arms against Kuchis who settled on their land.

“Given that both parties lack confidence in the government's ability to solve their disputes they may try to defeat each other by violent means,” Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission said.

Kuchis, who are predominantly Pashtuns, traditionally move all over the country in search of green pastures for their livestock and, at the start of each spring, many travel to the central provinces, where most of Afghanistan’s Hazaras live.

Kuchi elders complain that Hazaras have enjoyed strong international support since the Taliban’s fall, while Kuchis have been perceived as collaborators of the mainly Pashtun Taliban.

In July 2007, after several people were reportedly killed in clashes between Kuchi herders and Hazara settlers in Behsud district, President Karzai set up a commission to come up with a solution. Then commission has yet to report its finding.

Very quickly, a blog to help the victims of the attack was set up. A relatively recent blog-based clearing house for Hazara issues, Hazarajat Times, picked up a story that would grow in significance: Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara Member of Parliament, first warned that the Kuchi incursion would lead to civil war if it was not resolved, then began a hunger strike on July 16 to end the conflict. He drew some rather surprising supporters, such as Abdulrashid Dostum, and within days hundreds had pledged to join in the strike.

Since the current conflict was eerily similar to the exact same clash that happened in July of 2007, many Hazara were deeply frustrated at the perceived inaction of Kabul. So they planned a protest.

By July 21, Mohaqiq was trying desperately to spread the word about the clashes (which were almost entirely unreported in the West). The Rumi captured most of what he said:

He said “over 15 villagers including children and women have been gunned down while 20,000 persons have been displaced fleeing the barbarism of Al-Qaeda and Taliban supporters”.

Mohaqiq expressed disappointment towards human rights organizations, media and UN for not taking any serious notice of the invasion and strongly appealed the international community, human rights organizations and United Nations to intervene and avoid Kuchi nomads massacring the people of Behsud District…

Last year on June 23, 2007 there was a giant peaceful public demonstration in Kabul against the Government to resolve the “Kuchi Headache” for ever “The international community, NATO led coalition forces, United Nations and Human Rights’ organizations are needed to look into the matter and get rid of the “headache” meeting the human rights of the downtrodden people of central highlands” he added.

About this time, some Farsi/Dari-language media began to cover the incursion. Quqnoos has a disturbing video of some Hazara victims of the attack.
Watch the video here

In posting the above video, The Rumi angrily wondered why President Karzai seemed to be doing nothing:

Kabul government sent police forces to stop the Kuchis but in this video you can see the kuchi-armed groups dressed in Taliban style are walking in front of National Police. Why the police forces cannot take their weapons? What is so special for the kuchies to be armed while the rest of the ethnicities are disarmed?

About this time, Mohaqiq was reportedly weakening. Registan.net noted that the ethnic issues surrounding the conflict had much more complex roots, and warns against assuming it is all about the Taliban:

Many Hazara claim the Kuchi are “Taliban,” or at least Taliban-loving, because during the 90s they worked with the Taliban, who granted them access to Hazara (and Tajik) land. Naturally the Hazara are angry over this imbalance.

Here’s the rub. As a predominantly Pashtun force, the Taliban were rather notorious for their appalling treatment of all other minorities within Afghanistan, including (or perhaps especially) the Hazara. In fact, the imposed famine on the Hazarajat was particularly brutal and generally unreported in the media in the West.

Wardak is about half Pashtun, with most of the rest (somewhere around 40%, according to unreliable official statistics) Hazara…It seems, in brief, a fairly standard nomad/settler conflict, with the consequent disputes over land used both for agriculture and grazing. These types of conflicts become especially acute during times of drought or shortage, and the current squeeze over food prices, and a looming drought in the south, have probably exacerbated the conflict.

The next day, July 22, Safrang noted that thousands of people took to the streets of Kabul, demanding the government put a stop to the depredation.

The march started around 7:00 a.m. Tuesday morning in Dasht-e-Barchi area of West of Kabul and proceeded towards the city center and the offices of the UN’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan -UNAMA. Several news agencies have put the number of demonstrators at “thousands”. By mid-day, Farda TV reported that the demonstrations were over and no incidents had taken place. Farda TV also aired footage of the demonstrations showing people in thousands marching in large thoroughfares of the city, advancing towards the center of the city.

Footage also showed police in riot gear standing around, and in some cases lining up on the main streets at a distance from the demonstrators, blocking their advance. Faced with the riot police, some among the demonstrators encouraged those at the head of the demonstrations to sit down and not advance any further, avoiding contact with the riot police and keeping a distance of 15 meters or so.

It was hard to read many of the placards and banners held up by demonstrators on TV screen. Those that I could read included:
“We oppose ethnic conflict and those who support/encourage it”
“The government should stand with defenseless civilians of Behsud”
“We want Justice”

The protests seem to have worked. Amidst a crowd Hazaristan Times estimated at 300,000, Mohaqiq ended his hunger strike, having met with both Karzai and UNAMA officials about the incursion. They posted some beautiful pictures. And President Karzai ordered an evacuation of the Kuchi, who by all accounts are slowly leaving the embattled district.

At what cost, however? The Hazaristan Times started a donation drive to financially assist Hazara who had their homes razed or family members killed. The images they post are gruesome, but help to highlight just how severe this sadly ignored problem really was.
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Philip French

Movies about young people and by very young directors are a notable feature of Iranian cinema and the latest striking picture from that country, Buddha Collapsed out of Shame, centres on a six-year-old Afghan girl searching for an education and is written and directed by 19-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf. Her father is the leading Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and her sister, Samira Makhmalbaf, had a feature film in competition in Cannes before she was 18.

The movie begins and ends with the shocking 2001 newsreel image of the Taliban blowing up the gigantic statues of the Buddha in Bamyan and in between presents a day in the life of a girl living in the impoverished village still littered with the rubble from the explosion.

Baktay, the film's little heroine, sees a boy living in the next-door cave reading a book and becomes determined to go to school. First, she has to raise the money for a notebook and a pencil by selling the eggs of the family's chicken. She only gets enough for the notebook, but takes her mother's lipstick as a writing instrument and sets out wearing a yellow scarf on her head and an ankle-length dress.

On her journey, she's waylaid by a gang of boys playing a game in which they're Taliban fighting Americans. They terrorise Baktay, rip pages from her book, seize her irreligious lipstick, put a paper bag over her head and pretend to bury her alive. It's one of the most terrifying sequences of recent years. 'In God's name, let me go to school,' she pleads.

When she eventually escapes, she's rejected by an open-air boys' school and finally finds the place for girls. But again she has a nasty experience with the Taliban kids on the way home. Only when she pretends to be killed does she find peace. This is a deeply affecting but wholly unaffected picture, direct, truthful and unsentimental, and Nikbakht Noruz makes an indelible impression as the brave Baktay.
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