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| Afghanistan |
| Afghanistan: the return of civil war -- Musa Khan Jalalzai |
| 2013-12-17 |
| [Pak Daily Times] I am not an Afghan. I am Khurasani, I am Tajik, I am Uzbek and I am Hazara because Afghan means Pashtun. Last week, the removal of the name Afghan and religion from the national identity card of people from Afghanistan caused ethnic conflagration across the country. Pashtun parliamentarians and tribal leaders condemned the decision and demanded a review. Some television channels screened anti-state programmes and interviewed ethnic minority leaders who urged the division of the state on an ethnic basis, while some criticised the discriminatory behaviour of the Karzai regime towards minorities. The flames are slowly coming out from the north and are spreading to the south and west. In various northern provinces, ethnic groups and political parties condemned President Karzai for not signing a security agreement with the US. Ethnic rivalries have entered a decisive phase with one ethnic commander receiving a lot of money and arms from different channels. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Afghanistan had never been a strong nation state, with ethnic politics being a big threat to the unity of the nation. In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of people were killed in the civil war. In the 1990s, civil war broke out largely along ethnic and sectarian lines. The mujahideen commanders killed and raped women, looted houses and destroyed government buildings in various parts of the country. In 1992, a young woman jumped to her death from the second floor of her house in order to avoid being raped. In another incident, a woman was raped and her husband was killed in the outskirts of Kabul. Relatives of the raped woman accused General Qasim Fahim, the then vice president of Afghanistan, of attacking her home. Today, each ethnic group has its chief power broker. Warlords and war criminals distribute government posts, and Afghan intelligence, the army and the police have a good representation of Taliban and criminal militias. This is a dangerous trend in a country where the intelligence war among 50 nations is at its peak. The influence of foreign intelligence agencies, warlords, war criminals and ethnic and sectarian leaders in the Afghan intelligence is a matter of great concern. Afghan secret agencies disseminate disinformation and provide different kinds of intelligence to ethnic and sectarian leaders. They also leak secrets of the state, cabinet meetings, presidential palace and Afghan National Army (ANA) headquarters. The majority of workers in these agencies have come from minority ethnic groups based in Northern Afghanistan. There are people within the agencies who have no knowledge of intelligence -- they just passed a primary test in the KGB training centres during the 1980s. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 There is no option for the Afghans to live in peace. Some options mean more killing, some mean less. That is all. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2013-12-17 11:56 |