The Pashtun factor: is Afghanistan next in line for an ethnic civil war?

ON JANUARY 15 of this year, the American news media reported yet another story of a suicide bomb attack--this one on an army convoy in which fourteen people were killed, including a Canadian diplomat. On January 16 the headlines announced a pair of attacks that killed twenty-five civilians and one soldier, and injured another four dozen people. On February 3 an operative disguised in traditional Muslim women's dress killed himself and four soldiers at an army checkpoint, and on February 7 a terrorist drove a motorcycle into a police headquarters killing thirteen uniformed men. Sadly these all would have been fairly unremarkable stories had the setting been Baghdad or Karbala in Iraq, where such bloody events have become almost commonplace. But these were just the latest in a spate of some twenty such attacks since October 2005 in Afghanistan, where suicide terrorism was almost unknown before last year.

The majority of Americans have now come to feel that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, but Afghanistan was supposed to be different. Operations there were much more clearly a front in the war on terrorism and a justifiable response to 9/11. American troops liberated Afghan men and especially women from the hated Taliban, and the subsequent international effort to reconstruct the country and introduce democracy seemed successful and welcome. Afghans turned out in large numbers for their presidential election in fall 2004, choosing by a landslide the Bush administration's preferred candidate, the likable Hamid Karzai. Last September's parliamentary elections there were a little messier but resulted in the first truly representative governing body in Afghanistan. The very traditional, very conservative, very Muslim society even set aside 25 percent of the seats in the Wolesi Jirga, or lower house of parliament, for women and wrote protections guaranteeing women's equal status into the new constitution. There remained Taliban remnants to clean up, and Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda deputies were still at large but had been chased into mountain caves in Pakistan. Compared to Iraq at least, everything seemed to be going according to plan.

But suddenly a whole lot seems to be amiss. It's not clear exactly who is carrying out the suicide bombings. Some insist that, since the tactic was unknown in Afghanistan before 2005, it certainly must be that Arabs and non-Afghan extremists are finding their way to the country from Iraq and other hot spots and importing that most effective of terrorist methods. That would be bad enough. Still worse though, spokespeople for the movement so often now referred to as the neo-Taliban insist they have hundreds of volunteers--all native Afghans--lined up ready to martyr themselves. And no doubt intentionally playing on America's uneasy memory of Vietnam, they brag that their fighters are so easily able to blindside the foreigners and "infidels" because they are welcomed by, and move unseen among the Afghan people. The violence is partly funded through the country's gargantuan opium trade which now makes up one-third of its gross domestic product, dwarfs the national budget, and may be the country's greatest challenge overall. Drugs and violence are of course tied to the intractable poverty as well--a poverty so bad that the average worker tries to feed ten people on a mere $35 a month. And while the national government struggles to purge its own ranks of corruption and provide basic public services like electricity and police protection, entrenched warlords still run some large provinces like their own private kingdoms. Most disturbing perhaps, because of the way it recalls Iraq, ethnic and sectarian violence is sprouting again in Afghanistan. Suddenly the success story in the war on terrorism is looking more and more--to borrow author Robert Kaplan's famous mouthful of pessimism--like the coming anarchy.

Just how bad is the situation in Afghanistan? By the measure that the American public is most likely to track, it's pretty bad and getting worse. There are only about 20,000 U.S. troops in the country, as compared to 139,000 in Iraq, but soldier for soldier, American service men and women are more likely to die in Afghanistan. Ninety U.S. military personnel died in Afghanistan in 2005, twice as many as in the previous year, and more than 250 were seriously wounded, up from about 200 in 2004. Some thirty NATO soldiers stationed at the outlying forts known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, were also killed. Reliable reports on the number of Afghan civilians to die as "collateral damage" or direct targets have been famously difficult to come by since the U.S.-led air assault in 2001, but the explosive devices killing them are now increasingly set off by their fellow citizens and co-religionists. Eighty-seven police were killed between August and October 2005 alone, and more recently a number of schools have been torched at night by masked bands. Foreign and Afghan aid workers, as well as government officials and other public figures, have also been shot or killed by amateur but increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices (called IEDs).

But the growing similarity between Iraq and Afghanistan has to do with more than wandering Arabs and the drifting tactic of martyrdom, as reflected in the semantic debates among government and military officials. In private and increasingly in public, U.S. generals are now speaking of their neo-Taliban enemies as "insurgents" even though Afghan President Karzai objects to such thinking. "It's not an insurgency" he declared after one recent attack in January 2006 in a village in Helmand province. "It's terrorism," he insisted, and their choice of methods really only shows the desperation of the "enemies of Afghanistan." But to the extent that the distinction between insurgent and terrorist has any meaning, Karzai is probably more hopeful than correct. The press-grabbing suicide attacks on civilians are simply one tactic by the remaining deepest core of a native Afghan Islamist movement, determined to resist what it sees as a puppet government and its infidel foreign patrons. But not only has the movement not died away, it's being fed by the resentment of Afghanistan's main ethnic group on everything that's gone wrong and is threatening to metastasize again into a popular resistance movement, much like the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq.

Afghanistan has an ethnically mixed population, but there's one group at the core. As political scientist and renowned Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin puts it: the Pashtun are the titular ethnicity of the country. That is, the word Afghan was originally nothing more than a variation of the word Pashtun, making Afghanistan literally the "land of the Pashtun." In some sense, it still is. Though no official or reliable census data exist to allow for certainty, they're typically estimated to comprise some 40 to 45 percent of the modern nation's total population. Also like Iraq's Sunni Arabs, the Pashtun have long monopolized political power at the national level, even while the other major groups--Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara--enjoyed significant regional autonomy and distinctiveness. As often happens, occupation by a foreign power stimulated an all-Afghan solidarity in the fight against the Soviet Union during the 1980s but, as Rubin says, that very quickly gave way to a multipolar ethnic conflict after the rise of the Taliban in 1992.

The Taliban emerged from refugee camps and that half of the Pashtun population located across the line on the map that, in theory, separates modern-day Afghanistan from Pakistan. As the movement emerged as a successful fighting force, its members were embraced by the overwhelmingly Pashtun populations of the war-weary southern and eastern provinces, less for their ideology than because they were local boys who brought a semblance of stability and rule of law. There were very few Tajik, Hazara, or Uzbek Afghans in the Taliban ranks, as all of those groups had their own regional forces led by popular, often deeply loved leaders who stood in opposition to the Taliban.

The Afghan civil war that lasted through 2001 was marked by frequent massacres of surrendered soldiers and unarmed civilians of one ethnic group by troops of another. One of the worst such incidents occurred less than ten years ago in the spring of 1997 when the Taliban briefly captured the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and brutalized and murdered Uzbek and Hazara civilians. When the Taliban lost the city days later, thousands of their ethnic Pashtun troops were themselves executed and buried in a mass grave. The cycle of revenge continued later that year when the Taliban retook Mazar and killed thousands more Hazara. Similar incidents occurred throughout the war, through to the months following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 when, according to Human Rights Watch, "Pashtuns throughout northern Afghanistan ... faced widespread abuses including killings, sexual violence, beatings, extortion, and looting." They were explicitly targeted, the group says, "because their ethnic group was closely associated with the Taliban regime."

Given all these very recent, very bloody interethnic tensions, it might not be surprising that Afghanistan is once again in danger of polarizing along ethnic lines. The Pentagon knew that this was a risk from the outset of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001, when it chose the Northern Alliance to serve as shock troops, because those armies and militias were all drawn from the non-Pashtun populations. When major combat ceased the top Northern Alliance warlord-generals--like the brutal Uzbek Rashid Dostum, the Tajiks Ismael Kahn and Mohammed Fahim, and the Hazara Karim Khalili--found themselves in powerful ministries of the provisional government. Predictably, the Pashtun population was wary and less than enthusiastic to see these developments, and even the rise of the Pashtun Karzai and inclusion of many Pashtuns in the new government didn't put fears of being dominated by a coalition of the other groups entirely to rest.

The few Western organizations that have been able to gauge popular feeling have found strong evidence that dissatisfaction and worry about the future is still concentrated in the "Pashtun belt"--the southern and eastern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Pakhtia, Paktika, and Uruzgan. In 2005 Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies surveyed Afghans throughout the country to find out how they felt things stood and what their expectations for the future were, in terms of justice, their financial and social well-being, and safety and security. Consistently the people of the Pashtun regions saw things significantly worse than those in the majority Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara regions. As early as August 2003 the International Crisis Group warned of Pashtun alienation from the Karzai-led government and the international nation-building effort known as the "Bonn process." More recently, those suicide attacks that are making headlines have almost all targeted perceived Pashtun traitors and taken place in the cities and towns of those same provinces, especially in Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan.

Even more worrying are the reports filtering out of the mountainous and isolated Pashtun regions like Zabul province, where the neo-Taliban are most active. U.S. soldiers are constantly on the hunt there in so called "kinetic operations" or search-and-destroy missions, and are now encountering the enemy more and more often. Unfortunately, this isn't because they and their Afghan National Army (ANA) partners have isolated the holdout resisters, but simply because more locals are joining up. The soldiers themselves call Zabul the "Fallujah of Afghanistan" and, when expressing their frustrations, compare their mission to the war in Vietnam, pointing out that the enemy is again invisible and the villagers they're supposed to be fighting for lie to them and play a double game. When the troops find a weapons cache in a hamlet or nearby fields, for example, the local peasants deny any knowledge and claim they've never seen any Taliban.

There's no reason to believe, however, that U.S. troops are held in contempt quite the way they so often were in Vietnam or are in parts of Iraq, but every inadvertent civilian death, including those among Pashtuns across the border in Pakistan by predator drones, increases suspicion and resentment and hands the neo-Taliban grist for their anti-American propaganda. One journalist on the ground there reported that things have gotten so bad in Zabul that ANA Tajik and Hazara soldiers try to avoid getting off the helicopters they use to patrol the region for fear of being outnumbered by the enemy, who are literally at home in the region. In the words of Taliban spokesperson Mohammed Tanif, the sentiment prevails that the "country is occupied by foreign forces, and it affects the pure nationalist emotions of our people" This is true "especially in the southern and eastern provinces of the country." And it's those nationalist emotions in the Pashtun belt, he adds, that explain why the numbers of recruits for suicide bombing missions are increasing.

Is the Afghan nation-building project doomed to failure, and a return to civil war inevitable? That level of cynicism would require overlooking a number of promising developments of the past four and half years. Pashtuns no less than other Afghans are participating in the peaceful reconstruction effort every day by laying down their weapons, returning to their farms, building roads, digging wells, and teaching in public schools. Millions of Afghans seem to have endorsed the Bonn process by voting in the two national elections in much larger proportions than Americans go to the polls. And while an official national reconciliation program to reach out to Taliban rank and file has had limited success, the parliament itself is a forum for reconciliation where resentments are expressed with words rather than bullets.

But the suicide bombings in Afghanistan are symptomatic of a worsening situation and, if the country's largest and titular ethnic group comes to feel that they don't have a stake in the reconstruction process, those attacks may be a bellwether of an Iraq-like civil war, where wariness of one's neighbors becomes an attitude of "get them before they get us" U.S. commanders have begun to embrace, at least in rhetoric, the need to prioritize the political and psychological struggle for the "hearts and minds" of the Pashtun population. But as one expert, Paul Fishstein of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Education Unit, put it when talking about U.S. "kinetic operations" in the Pashtun regions, they'll need "a more nuanced and sophisticated" approach focused on building "legitimacy for the government without creating more enemies" That is, the army and marines might have to live up to the new Pentagon directive that officially makes nurturing civil society and establishing rule of law top mission priorities. And to do that, they'll have to worry less about killing young Pashtuns and more about winning them over. If that doesn't happen, and Afghans come to feel that the neo-Taliban represent them more than Karzai and the Kabul government, then those reports of suicide bombings could become as common in Kandahar as in Karbala, and chaos will come again to Afghanistan.

Dan Consolatore served as a research consultant to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for her forthcoming book, The Mighty and the Almighty; Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs. He can be reached at [e-mail].