The Ethnic Split

The tenacity of the Taliban insurgency is rooted in opposition to a foreign occupation that is particularly distasteful to the Pashtuns.

By

October 21, 2009

Alexander the Great, the British Raj and the Red Army all learned the hard way that the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest and historically dominant ethnic group, will unite to fight a foreign occupation force simply because it is foreign. As Howard Hart, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, recently told the New York Times, “The very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem. The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition.”

The tenacity of the Taliban insurgency is rooted in opposition to an occupation that is, in this case, a particularly distasteful one to the Pashtuns. The US infideluntil the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973. Initially limited to the Pashtun heartland in the south and east, the Afghan state gradually conquered the neighboring Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek areas to the north and west. Today the Pashtuns make up an estimated 42 percent of a population of 28 million; the Tajiks make up 27 percent. Yet Tajik generals hold the key levers of power in Kabul because they happened to be in the right place at the right time during the confused months when US forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001.

During the struggle against the Soviet occupation, the Tajiks built up a militia in the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, that had close CIA ties. Later it acquired allies in neighboring areas and became the Northern