The Pashtun Factor: Is Afghanistan Next in Line for an Ethnic Civil War‪?‬

ON JANUARY 15 of this year, the American news media reported yet another story of a suicide bomb attack--this one on an army convoy in which fourteen people were killed, including a Canadian diplomat. On January 16 the headlines announced a pair of attacks that killed twenty-five civilians and one soldier, and injured another four dozen people. On February 3 an operative disguised in traditional Muslim women's dress killed himself and four soldiers at an army checkpoint, and on February 7 a terrorist drove a motorcycle into a police headquarters killing thirteen uniformed men. Sadly these all would have been fairly unremarkable stories had the setting been Baghdad or Karbala in Iraq, where such bloody events have become almost commonplace. But these were just the latest in a spate of some twenty such attacks since October 2005 in Afghanistan, where suicide terrorism was almost unknown before last year. The majority of Americans have now come to feel that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, but Afghanistan was supposed to be different. Operations there were much more clearly a front in the war on terrorism and a justifiable response to 9/11. American troops liberated Afghan men and especially women from the hated Taliban, and the subsequent international effort to reconstruct the country and introduce democracy seemed successful and welcome. Afghans turned out in large numbers for their presidential election in fall 2004, choosing by a landslide the Bush administration's preferred candidate, the likable Hamid Karzai. Last September's parliamentary elections there were a little messier but resulted in the first truly representative governing body in Afghanistan. The very traditional, very conservative, very Muslim society even set aside 25 percent of the seats in the Wolesi Jirga, or lower house of parliament, for women and wrote protections guaranteeing women's equal status into the new constitution. There remained Taliban remnants to clean up, and Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda deputies were still at large but had been chased into mountain caves in Pakistan. Compared to Iraq at least, everything seemed to be going according to plan.