Al-Hayat is describing the demonstrations in Kabul yesterday as a “Tajik intifada”… That piece indicates that Khairkhaneh, the area of northern Kabul where the US military vehicle lost control and killed a number of passers-by, was near to the headquarters of former Defense Minister Gen. Muhammad Qasem Fahim, a leader of Afghanistan’s Tajik community; and the young people in the neighborhood then comgregated around the convoy to protest– and the American soldiers then fired into the crowd…
The ethnic-Tajik dimension to what happened hasn’t been mentioned in any of the western media reports that I can find except for this one in Newsday by Moises Saman and James Rupert.
They write:
- Various witnesses told of organized crowds of teenaged boys waving pictures of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a guerrilla commander killed in 2001 who is the hero of ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley in northeast Afghanistan. They voiced suspicion that Panjshiri political activists stoked the rioting to strike at President Hamid Karzai, who in the past 18 months has sidelined several top Panjshiri political figures. The country’s highest ethnic Tajik official, parliament speaker Yunus Qanooni, appealed for calm.
Evidently a lot of different (though overlapping) conflictual things are going on in Afghanistan these days. If the Kabul riots have a strong ethnic-Tajik dimension to them, that makes them noticeably distinct from anything to do with pro-Taliban activism. Though both these strands of the story indicate the deep and still-unrolling failure of the rebuild-Afghanistan project, as I noted here yesterday.
Tajiks make up around 27% of the national population and speak a language called Dari that is close to Persian.
Regarding the growth of Taliban activities– and as a follow-up to the Ahmed Rashid piece I quoted from extensively here yesterday– Rashid has a new piece up on the BBC website.
He writes:
- Nearly 400 Afghans have been killed in an unprecedented offensive by the Taleban, in a bid to pre-empt a major deployment by some 6,000 Nato troops this summer in southern Afghanistan.
From just a few hundred guerrillas last year, Taleban commander Mullah Dadullah now claims to have 12,000 men under arms and control of 20 districts in the former Taleban heartland in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan. There is also a strong Taleban-al-Qaeda presence in the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.
Why – five years after the Taleban and al-Qaeda were smashed by US forces – is Afghanistan facing a resurgent Taleban movement that is now threatening to overwhelm it?
… Neither Nato, nor the American forces they are replacing, have offered an honest assessment of their successes and failures during the past five years.
He then runs through an important “checklist” of the failures of the policies pursued by the US, Nato, the UN, and the Afghan government in the south of the country. It starts (as certainly always seems important to note) with this:
- Washington’s refusal to take state building in Afghanistan seriously after 2001 and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq, created a major international distraction which the Taleban took advantage of…
Anyway, it’s a good and searing piece of analysis there. (Many of the comments from readers beneath it are also worth reading.)