Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 08:02:02 +0000 (GMT)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?anna=20miller?= <ruboutthewords-AT-yahoo.co.in>
Subject: the bad guys dead


1.

 Robert Fisk: Forget the cliches, there is no easy way
for
 the West to sort this out.17 November 2001
Afghanistan – as the armies of the West are about to
realise –
 is not a country. You can't "occupy" or even
"control"
 Afghanistan because it is neither a state nor a
nation. Nor can we dominate Afghanistan with the
clichιs now being
 honed by our journalists. We may want a "broad-based"
 government, but do the Afghans? We may regard cities
as  "strategic" – especially if reporters are about to
enter them –  but the Afghans have a different
perspective on their land.
As for the famous loya jirga, a phrase which now slips
proudly off the lips of cognoscenti, it just means
"big meeting". Even  more disturbingly, it is a
uniquely Pashtun phrase and thus  represents the
tribal rules of only 38 per cent of Afghan
 society.The real problem is that Afghanistan contains
only tiny
 minorities of the ethnic groups which constitute its
population.
 Thus, the 7 million Pashtuns in the country are
outnumbered
 by the 12 million Pashtuns in Pakistan, the 3.5
million Tajiks in
 Afghanistan are outnumbered by the 6 million Tajiks
in
 Tajikistan. The 1.3 million Uzbeks are just a
fraction of the 23
 million Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. There are 600,000
Turkmens in
 Afghanistan – but 3.52 million in Turkmenistan. So
why should
 the Afghan Pashtuns and Tajiks and Uzbeks and
Turkmens
 regard Afghanistan as their country? Their "country"
is the bit
 of land in Afghanistan upon which they live.Indeed,
Afghan Pashtuns have long disputed the notorious
 Durand line – the frontier which divided Afghanistan
from British  India and which now forms the
Afghan-Pakistan border. In  1897, Sir Mortimer Durand
took no account of the fact that the
 Afghan Empire once included much of what would become
 present-day Pakistan.
 Hence, today, the constant fear for Pakistan's
leader, General Pervez Musharraf, is not so much an
Islamic revolution but a rebirth of the notorious
demand for "Pushtunistan" in the
 North-West Frontier province.A remark by a victorious
Northern Alliance official – that his
 men might push on to "the Pashtun city of Karachi" –
caused a
 minor political heart attack in Islamabad. In similar
fashion, the
 journalistic idea that Taliban leaders might "flee
over the border
 into Pakistan" seems a lot less odd to the Taliban
themselves
 – who would merely be moving across an artificial
British-made
 border into another part of the Pashtun tribal area.
Of course, it's not difficult to see how we Westerners
like the
 idea of a loya jirga. All we have to do is supervise
a massive
 congress of Afghan tribesmen – forgetting that the
loya jirga is
 totally unrepresentative because women are banned –
in order to produce a power-sharing government of the
kind that the  British created in Northern Ireland.
Only it's not like that. The loya jirga became part of
Afghan tradition when, in 1747, Ahmed Abdalli took
4,000 soldiers to
 Kandahar – which was then just two small towns – and
brought  together the leaders of the eight major
Pashtun tribes. They
 chose Ahmed Durani as the king. But since then,
despite the
 inclusion of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, Pashtuns
have ruled
 Afghanistan for all but three brief periods of the
20th century.

 It's easy to see why. The Uzbeks never had loya
jirgas. The
 Tajiks are an urban, non-tribal group. How can they
obtain
 equal or proportionate weight in such a meeting when
they do
 not have tribal leaders? Will the Tajiks have one
representative
 for the Pashtuns' eight or more?

 Nor can history be excluded. The Shia Muslim Hazaras
– who
 may or may not owe their origins to Genghis Khan's
invading
 hordes – were the victims of savage repression at the
hands of
 Pashtun forces under the "Iron Emir", King Abdur
Rahman, in
 1880. Abdur Rahman, it should be added, repressed his
own
 Pashtun people as well. He had been invited to rule
 Afghanistan by – you guessed it – the British government.

____________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send a newsletter, share photos & files, conduct polls, organize chat events. Visit http://in.groups.yahoo.com


     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---