Ashraf Ghani and the Pashtun Dilemma

Ashraf Ghani and the Pashtun Dilemma, If he is to succeed, Afghanistan’s president will need to come to grips with the country’s ethnic tensions. 

By Ali Reza Sarwar

With his impressive background, which includes a stint as a senior official at the World Bank and a ministerial post, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani would not appear to be short of qualifications for leadership. Yet, the president appears on course to be just another Afghan leader who is unable to rule the troubled country. When Ghani delivered his lofty inaugural speech on September 29, 2014, following a disputed election and power-sharing deal, expectations were high. The president made a strong argument in support of what he called the “triangle of stability” – economy, security and human resources – promising to restore Afghanistan’s valuable ancient geopolitical and economic position as the “crossroads of Asia.”

More than 100 days after taking the office, however, and Ghani is bogged down in a serious political crisis, one that draws a gloomy picture of the fragile unity government. He has only in the last few days been able to form a cabinet, leaving Afghanistan’s major public institutions, including ministries, independent departments, and commissions without leaders for months. A recent survey conducted by Afghanistan’s popular private TOLO TV and an independent civil society, shows that Ghani’s popularity has fallen dramatically, with only 27.5 percent of respondents satisfied with his leadership. With insecurity and political uncertainty looming, a number of parliamentarians have asked for Ghani’s impeachment for “treason,” blaming him for Afghanistan’s current state of disarray.

What has gone wrong? Why is this impressively credentialed leader unable to fix Afghanistan? Traditionally, Afghanistan’s woes have been blamed on crippling corruption, weak governance, dismal economic conditions, and worsening security coupled with foreign intervention. While these are certainly painful realities, the root cause of political crisis lies in ethnic politics and the breakdown of consensus among diverse ethnicities in regard to the persistent Pashtun dilemma.

The Pashtun Dilemma

Constituting around 40 percent of the population, Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and are on the front lines of the war on terrorism, both as perpetrators and victims. The Taliban that is behind the bulk of the brutal militancy both in Afghanistan and Pakistan are mainly Pashtuns and derive their support from strongholds in tribal areas across Afghanistan and Pakistan’s borders. The mainstream Pashtun intelligentsia in both countries have been mostly uncertain over whether to sympathize with the Taliban as a nationalist movement seeking to restore traditional Pashtun dominance in Afghan politics and to some extent in Pakistan, or to condemn them as an extremist and externally infiltrated militancy that have dragged Pashtuns into an asymmetric confrontations with the U.S.-led coalition at a massive cost in human life.

Despite the Taliban’s indiscriminate attacks on Pashtun areas, including the last year’s suicide bombing in a market in Paktika province that killed 89 people, some leading Pashtun thinkers support the Taliban as a nationalist movement that could restore Pashtun dominance in Afghanistan, which they believe declined following the fall of the Afghan monarchy in 1973 and the following decades of the Soviet invasion and civil wars. For instance, in his article, the decline of Pashtuns in Afghanistan, Anwar Ul-Haq Ahady, a former finance and commerce minister under Karzai and an influential Pashtun thinker, believes that the decline of Pashtuns in Afghanistan after the fall of Najibullah in 1992, was “more significant than the fall of communism. The rise of the Taliban generated optimism among the Pashtuns about the reversal of their decline.”

The view that the Taliban could serve as a powerful Pashtun nationalist movement with the ability to reverse the post-Taliban inter-ethnic relations and political landscape of Afghanistan remained largely visible in during the administration of President Hamid Karzai. Karzai was frequently criticized by the opposition for his lenience towards the Taliban, yet he continued to compromise and push for negotiation. For its part, the Taliban categorically rejected talks, humiliating Karzai as a “puppet and unauthorized” to negotiate. At the grassroots level, particularly in non-Pashtun circles, there has been a difficult debate over whether Karzai would have been as willing to compromise if the Taliban had been a non-Pashtun movement.

Ghani’s Test of Leadership 

Ghani, a Pashtun himself, already seems incapacitated by the Pashtun factor. If he is to get to grips with the problem, he will need to address several important issues.

First, it should be realized that the war on terror is being fought mainly in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and this reality constrains the political status of Pashtun in both countries. To overcome this, Pashtun leaders and intelligentsia, including Ghani himself, need to draw a stark line between the Taliban as a radical movement linked to global terrorist networks, and the legitimate cause of Pashtuns for justice. Fail to do that and Pashtuns will only be more isolated in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and forever in conflict with non-Pashtun groups and the international community. Breaking with the Taliban should also not be limited to the official level; the debate should move to the heart of Pashtun tribes and traditions that continue to provide the Taliban with sanctuaries and new recruits.

Second, the dynamics of ethnic relations and politics have fundamentally changed in Afghanistan and Pashtuns must face the reality that the time for a despotic monarchy or factional regime like that of the Taliban has passed. In the worst possible scenario, the collapse of Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy and unity government could lead to chaotic civil war, but it will not permit the emergence of a Pashtun-dominated government, just as it will not allow a government that excludes Pashtuns. Pashtuns will need to renegotiate their relationship with other ethnic groups in Afghanistan and this will inevitably mean giving up some of the privileges they enjoyed in earlier times.

Ghani could play a pivotal role in pushing this message among Pashtuns, but he seems to be replicating the failings of his predecessor. Like Karzai, Ghani is uncertain whether to consider the Taliban enemies or political dissidents. For the moment, he believes they are political opponents, a designation that would baffle many Pashtuns and all non-Pashtuns who have suffered under the Taliban’s violence. Ghani has been clear on his desire to reach a diplomatic settlement with Pakistan, and has also increased his contacts with nationalist Pashtun leaders in Pakistan. In fact, he recently hosted them in Kabul, a risky move that will have infuriated Pakistan’s government and intelligence agency given Pakistan’s long obsession with Pashtun nationalism.

Clearly, there will be no peace in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the region without the genuine participation of Pashtuns. Yet Pashtuns’ failure to engage constructively with non-Pashtuns in a democratic process that rejects the Taliban will only lead to their isolation. Ghani is the one man who could achieve this engagement, and he will need to do so if he desires to escape the fate of other Afghan rulers.

Ali Reza Sarwar is a Fulbright Graduate Fellow at Texas A&M University, Bush School of Government and Public Service where he is completing a master’s degree in Intelligence and National Security. Reza graduated from the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) where he was also in charge of the university’s enrollment management plan.

source: http://thediplomat.com/2015/01/ashraf-ghani-and-the-pashtun-dilemma/

The Unsolved Pashtun Question in Af-Pak

Divide and Rule of British Implemented since 1857 continue by Inherited sons of Pakistan in Punjab who Plays with Fire by Trying to Enslave Pashtuns whom they consider not to be their Equal and it  Treats Pashtuns and Afghans as their Fifth Province and subjects . 

ANSWERING THE PASHTUN QUESTION

by Myra MacDonald
December 29, 2014 · in Book Reviews on a Book by  Abubakar Siddique, The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan(C. Hurst & Co. 2014)



The “mujahideen” reached Peshawar in the early 19th century, bringing with them a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and the readiness of zealots to use violence – then against the Sikhs. Their leader, Sayyid Ahmed from Rae Bareilly in northern India, who was inspired by the reformist preacher Shah Waliullah, is still celebrated today in the officially sanctioned ideology of Pakistan as a forefather of modern jihad. But local Pashtuns, who disliked his severe interpretation of Islam, rejected him and the Sikhs killed him in 1831. 

The story is significant in showing how in the history of the region, extremism and religiously sanctioned violence was just as likely to move from east to west, from the heartland of undivided British India to Pashtun lands, as it was to move from west to east. It has all the more resonance following this month’s attack by Taliban militants on a school in Peshawar, in which more than 140 people – most of them children – were killed. It is an attack that Pakistan would desperately prefer to blame on an external enemy hiding among the Pashtuns to the northwest than on influences radiating outwards from its heartland.

The narrative that the dangers of extremism would come from predominantly Pashtun lands to the northwest of British India – including large parts of modern-day Afghanistan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) adjacent to Peshawar – is of British origin. It was a convenient way for colonial functionaries to explain to London their poor judgment, which led to the massacre of a British army on its retreat from Kabul in 1842. 

That retreat took place more than a decade after Sayyid Ahmed died, and yet it is far more frequently cited as a foundational moment for the development of jihad in the region than his arrival in Peshawar from the east. Later, the British would relegate the Pashtun lands to the periphery of the British Raj, happy to avoid the burden of governance provided that Afghanistan accepted British tutelage on foreign policy. 

The British colonial spotlight on the Indian subcontinent meant that the history of Afghanistan was often consigned to the shadows. If there were a grammar of Raj thinking, the Pashtuns would always be the objects of a sentence, never its subjects.

The Pakistani state, the direct inheritor of British colonial power in the lands bordering Afghanistan, has preserved many elements of the Raj view of Pashtuns. Its military continues to see Afghanistan as a country over which it has rightful influence – as it has proved with its enduring support for the Afghan Taliban and other Pashtun groups opposed to the government in Kabul. 

It still governs the Pashtun tribes living in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) through the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulation. Since the United States overthrew the Taliban in Kabul in 2001, Pakistan has also been able to rely on an orientalist description of “untameable” Pashtuns to explain resistance to the American presence in Afghanistan.

 This explanation also allows Pakistan to avoid its own active role in Afghanistan’s instability. Some years back, Pakistan’s military establishment, which runs foreign and security policy, even managed to convince many at home and in the West that the Pakistani Taliban were essentially wild tribals riled up by U.S. drone strikes in FATA. 

After the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack on the school in Peshawar this month, Pakistan’s attention has again been primarily focused on the northwest. 

The day after the attack, Pakistan Army chief General Raheel Sharif travelled to Kabul to demand its help in hunting down Pakistani Taliban leaders that Pakistan says are based in Afghanistan. The Pakistan Air Force stepped up its attacks on militant targets in FATA – the days of worrying about civilian casualties from air strikes seem to be long gone. Just as the British view had relocated violent Islamist extremism to the northwest from the heartland of undivided India where it found its intellectual roots, Pakistan did the same in its response to the Peshawar attack. 

It is not that there are no Pakistani Taliban in Afghanistan or FATA. There are. The point is that the roots of Islamist militancy come from deep within Pakistan; the use of religiously sanctioned violence is integral to its history and ideology. 

Its heartland in Punjab province is home to violent militant groups nurtured for decades by the military to impose its will domestically and to fight India. But this problem in the heartland is all the more easily ignored if attention is focused on what the Raj called its “Northwest Frontier” – on the wild tribal Pashtun of the colonial imagination. The enemy becomes external.

In his book, The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan, journalist Abubakar Siddique – who is from Waziristan in FATA – sets out to show that violent extremism is neither rooted in Pashtun history nor finds willing hosts among its tribes. He highlights how Pashtuns comprised not only “ungoverned” tribes but also conquerors and rulers, like the Lodi dynasty, which ruled in northern India from 1451 to 1526. 

Rather than celebrating bearded, religious extremists, the heroes of Pashtun history are poets, proponents of non-violence, and Sufis. The Pashtun leader Ahmad Shah Abdali of the Durrani tribal confederation fought and won what was one of the world’s most important battles in the 18th century when his forces defeated the Marathas in The Third Battle of Panipat north of Delhi in 1761. 

Tellingly, Pakistan has appropriated this victory in its official histories as one of Muslims over Hindus rather than one of Pashtuns over Marathas; it suppresses Pashtun ethnicity and replaces it with Islamic ideology. This effort to stress Islam over ethnic identity is one that has defined Pakistan’s attitude to its own Pashtuns, and to Afghanistan, for decades.

Since its creation in 1947, Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan have been troubled. Afghanistan refused initially even to recognise Pakistan at the United Nations. To this day, it refuses to recognise the colonial-era Durand Line as the official border, instead harbouring claims to Pashtun lands on the Pakistani side as far as the Indus River. Pakistan has also fretted about the Pashtuns on its side of the Durand Line hankering after a separate Pashtunistan, an idea floated in the mid-20th century. 

The Soviet invasion in 1979, and the American and Saudi money provided to fund the Afghan resistance, gave Pakistan the perfect opportunity to exert its influence on Afghanistan while undermining Pashtun nationalism. With its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency running the resistance, Pakistan made sure to encourage distinctly Islamist fighters whose commitment to the “jihad” against the Soviets would override any attachment to the ethnic Pashtun cause. Pakistan’s subsequent support for the Afghan Taliban who took power in 1996, Siddique notes, created a form of “Pashtun Islamism” that bitterly divided Pashtuns in Pakistan between those who supported the Pakistani establishment and secular nationalists, while also alienating many Afghan Pashtuns.

Siddique’s history is followed by detailed accounts of the war in key parts of Afghanistan and FATA after 2001, when Pakistan formally promised to work with the United States against the Taliban. Instead, he writes, Islamabad followed “a classic game of doubletalk, in which it sent out different messages to different audiences in hopes of capitalising on the ignorance of both, and gambling that its deception would not be noticed by anyone in a position to do anything about it.” The Pashtuns, who would become the main tools and victims of the conflict, of course, noticed it.

The book is at its best when Siddique brings his own first-hand knowledge to bear, particularly in a region so hard for foreigners to visit. On a trip to Quetta, capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, he notes for example that, “it was not difficult to find Afghan Taliban fighters in Quetta. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands…” To outsiders they might have seemed indistinguishable from Pakistani Pashtuns, but to Siddique “the way they fastened their turbans, the slight variations of their Pashto dialect, their unkempt long beards and hair, and the way they walked around in packs, distinguished the Afghan Taliban from ordinary residents.”

Given the richness of the material he has collated, the book is, however, surprisingly tame in its conclusions. What Siddique describes as “the unresolved key to the future of Pakistan and Afghanistan” essentially echoes the arguments of the Pakistani military establishment: that violence cannot be ended unless Pakistan’s security concerns are assuaged. 

Thus, he writes that Washington should encourage “Afghanistan and India to effectively address, respectively, Pakistani security concerns related to the Pashtun and Baloch border regions and Kashmir.” He also argues that “true stability will not be possible without a comprehensive settlement between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” which would include an agreement on the Durand Line while also keeping the border open for the movement of people and goods. 

These are arguments which have been made by other analysts groping for a solution to the Afghan war. Yet Pakistan’s problems with Islamist militancy run far deeper than the insecurity of its borders. If its nuclear tests in 1998 could not make it feel secure, Afghanistan’s recognition of the Durand Line is unlikely to make much difference. Moreover, having attempted to establish that violent extremism does not have its roots in Pashtun history or culture, Siddique falls into the trap of seeking solutions from within Pashtun lands rather than at the core of the Pakistani state.

It would have been great to see a much bolder conclusion, one which, rather than continuing the British colonial pattern of trying to impose a settlement on the periphery, looks instead at the problems inherent in the Pakistani heartland and its inability to accommodate ethnic diversity. 

He might have found a need to upend a system that depends on preserving many of the repressive structures of the British security state while stressing the unifying role of Islam to suppress the different ethnic identities of its people. After all, Pakistan already lost more than half its population in 1971, when ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan broke away, with Indian help, to form Bangladesh. 

Siddique’s book might have opened the way for a leap of imagination that would have addressed the centre far more clearly from the perspective of the Pashtun periphery. Instead, in what appears to be an effort at balance, he ends up repeating the standard security paradigm that Pakistan has somehow imposed on the vast majority of writers and analysts at home and abroad. His book, however, with its wealth of richly footnoted analysis and history, is an essential volume for anyone studying the region or the U.S. war in Afghanistan.


Myra MacDonald is a former Reuters journalist who has reported on Pakistan and India since 2000. She is the author of “Heights of Madness”, a book on the Siachen war fought in the mountains beyond Kashmir on the world’s highest battlefield. She is now working on a book about the relationship between India and Pakistan following their nuclear tests in 1998. She lives in Scotland and can be found on Twitter @myraemacdonald.

source: http://warontherocks.com/2014/12/answering-the-pashtun-question/