By Steve Hynd
Mian Qadrud-Din has been a foreign affairs diplomat for Pakistan and an office holder in several UN agencies, including being Director for Public Affairs, Chef de Cabinet at UNRWA and Director of the UN Children's Fund. He's got some idea of what he's talking about in his letter to the Financial Times yesterday:
Any serious observer of the situation would agree that the current Northern Alliance-based government in Kabul is dominated by Panjshiri Tajiks (President Hamid Karzai's Pashtun origin notwithstanding) who control all its security hierarchy, be it the intelligence agencies, the army or the police.
Unrelenting opposition to such a set-up in Kabul by the vast majority of Pashtuns should come as no surprise. Moreover, the recent presidential elections, even if they had been free from suspicion of fraud, could not make any difference.
The alternative to Mr Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, is perceived as the Tajik candidate by the Pashtun population, most of whom feel effectively excluded from the process. The fact that the elections coincided with a major upsurge in western military operations in the Pashtun areas only served to aggravate those feelings.
Qadrud-Din writes that a surge of additional U.S. troops "may" be useful, particularly in bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table, but that continued domination of both Afghan security forces and government by Tajiks will undermine that and "could well lead to a resumption of the civil war of the past two decades."
His case would appear to be bolstered by a recent report from U.S. intelligence, which concludes that the number of Afghan insurgents has grown rapidly since 2006, from about 7,000 to 25,000 and that the vast bulk of those insurgents are not Taliban - 90% are described as "a tribal, localized insurgency" which is engaged primarily in fighting the occupying forces out of a a strong desire to repel foreign invaders. Mostly Pashtun, they see the illigitimate Afghan government and Tajik-heavy security forces as just another aspect of that foreign invasion.
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