Overture to Taliban Jolts Afghan Minorities

[Elmore Furth]

Source: NY Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — The drive by President Hamid Karzai to strike a deal with Taliban leaders and their Pakistani backers is causing deep unease in Afghanistan’s minority communities, who fought the Taliban the longest and suffered the most during their rule.

Mullen Visits Afghan Leaders and Allied Troops (June 27, 2010) The leaders of the country’s Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities, which make up close to half of Afghanistan’s population, are vowing to resist — and if necessary, fight — any deal that involves bringing members of the Taliban insurgency into a power-sharing arrangement with the government.

Alienated by discussions between President Karzai and the Pakistani military and intelligence officials, minority leaders are taking their first steps toward organizing against what they fear is Mr. Karzai’s long-held desire to restore the dominance of ethnic Pashtuns, who ruled the country for generations.

The dispute is breaking along lines nearly identical to those that formed during the final years of the Afghan civil war, which began after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989 and ended only with the American invasion following the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 100,000 Afghans died, mostly civilians; the Taliban, during their five-year reign in the capital, Kabul, carried out several large-scale massacres of Hazara civilians.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/world/asia/27afghan.html

[tekisui]

1. Afghanistan may be inching towards Civil War.

With us regularly throwing gas on the fire.

[cliffordu]

2. Could be one of the few times we've completely agreed.

[tekisui]

4. It must be the full moon or something.

Howdy, cliffordu!

:hi:

[cliffordu]

5. Howdy.

Now, I'm headed back to my cave.

[Braulio]

3. Obama's strategy stinks

This is why Obama's strategy stinks. Afghanistan is like Viet Nam, a lost cause. The best solution is to arm the Northern Alliance to the teeth, and let them go to war with the Pashtun. If they have a civil war, and the northerners are armed, they will win. The Pashtun will be defeated, and many of them will move to Pakistan. It's a messy solution, but the US should never have invaded in the first place. Iraq is the same, it's another one of those wars the US is fighting to please the military industrial complex and the Israel Lobby. We should get our troops out of Iraq right away.

[Robb]

6. Wow. Because that strategy worked so well in 1989?