Hazara Nation

RH The United States has mired itself in the Great Game of Central Asia in a way that promises no easy escape.

There was a reason we did so, going all the way back to 1979. That is when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the United States decided to help the Afghan people resist Soviet occupation. We spent billions of dollars, in league with the security forces of Pakistan, building up fundamentalist Islamic groups to fight the Soviets.

Fast forward to 2001. The fundamentalist group that took control of Afghanistan in the mid-'90s, the Taliban, had provided safe haven for a radical, largely Arab group, al-Qaida, which attacked the United States on Sept. 11. It was clear the Taliban had to go, a goal that U.S. military forces swiftly accomplished, though al-Qaida escaped to rebuild itself in the mountains of Pakistan.

The hostility of fundamentalist Afghans and Pakistanis toward the United States is an example of what is called blowback. Forces we helped unleash have turned against us, and now they are turning against the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis have used radical groups to harass their archenemy, India, by fomenting violence in the disputed region of Kashmir. But radical groups are now targeting Pakistan itself, forcing Pakistan to increase military pressure on al-Qaida, the Taliban and others in the mountainous border region near Afghanistan.

This is the mess where we find ourselves. The attack by Islamic radicals on sites in Mumbai last month is now being seen as an effort to enflame tensions between India and Pakistan in order to shift Pakistan's military attention away from the fight on the Afghan border and toward India. Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari, is said to be seeking peace with India, and the unanswered question is whether Pakistan's military or security forces helped terrorists attack Mumbai as a way of curbing Zardari's peace efforts. For decades conflict with India has been the raison d'etre for the Pakistani military.

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan by about 30,000 in order to quell violence by the Taliban. Our main interest is in preventing Afghanistan from becoming a staging area for terrorism once again. But the violence in Afghanistan, as in Pakistan, will be hard to stop because it is rooted in a complex web of ethnic and religious conflicts. A recent article in The New Yorker magazine described how Hazara police officers are trying to fight the Taliban insurgency in the south. The Taliban is made up mainly of ethnic Pashtuns, and it is questionable whether use of Hazaras to fight Pashtuns is likely to result in a peaceful outcome, ever.

Afghanistan has never been a coherent nation. Even in the peaceful days under the former king, regional leaders had great power, and the Pashtuns exerted harsh control over Hazaras and others. The Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan remain essentially uncontrollable, though in the days of Gandhi a great Pashtun leader, Khan Abdul Ghaffur Khan, was an ally of Gandhi's in nonviolence.

It is not clear whether Zardari's crackdown on terrorists in Pakistan can make rapprochement with India a reality or whether terrorism rooted in the Pashtun homeland will continue to entangle everyone. It is clear there is no easy way out of the Great Game.