Who Hates Whom

Chapter 1 AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN Mujahedin (Pashtuns, other local factions and foreign fighters) v. Soviets (defunct) Taliban (Pashtuns) v. other local factions (pre-9-11) Waziris v. Pakistan (treaty, 2006) Taliban (Pashtuns), Al-Qaeda (foreign fighters), and some Waziris v. U.S., NATO, and some Waziris, ongoing To make sense here at all, let's walk through this one step at a time. THE PASHTUNS Borders drawn along ethnic or cultural lines don't necessarily equate with peacecompare the homogenous Korean peninsula to multilingual Canada, for examplebut cultural loyalties trump colonial boundaries every time. So here's how the British drew the 1893 Durand Line through the Pashtuns, the dominant people of the border area: Why all the divide and conquer? The British had a vast empire to the southeast, including modern Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.* Worried about Russia to the north, the British spent the 19th century trying to set up Afghanistan as a buffer zone, yet without empowering the Pashtuns enough to create yet another threat. Thus the Durand Line. However, the Pashtuns had once ruled much of this whole region themselves, and they've been here for centuries. Alexander the Great (for whom Kandahar is named), Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Mughals, Brits, and Soviets have each rolled through, but Peshawar and Kandahar have nonetheless remained firmly Pashtun. (Pashtun survival stems in part from Pashtunwali, a complex two-thousand-year-old code of honor. Grossly oversimplified: befriend a Pashtun and he will die for you. Piss off a Pashtun, and his neighbor's great-grandchildren may hate yours.) Not surprisingly, in 1949, a Pashtun loya jirga (a tribal council, like the end of Survivor with longer beards) denounced the Durand Line, which has been ignored in some areas all along. Point being: in some areas, the border is porous to nonexistent. So you can't really discuss Afghanistan and Pakistan as separate deals. They aren't. THE MUJAHEDIN, AL-QAEDA, AND THE TALIBAN "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" may work on playgrounds, but the enemy of your enemy can be your enemy, too. This will be good to keep in mind. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to support their puppet government, which tortured and killed thousands. Seizing a chance to weaken their enemy, the U.S. armed Islamist mujahedin ("holy warriors"; notice the word jihad in the middle), Pakistan provided training, and Saudi Arabia financed religious schools (madrasahs) to use extreme Islamist ideology as a recruiting tool against communism. (Pursuit of Islamic governancewhether by violent or nonviolent meansis described as "Islamist" as opposed to garden-variety "Islamic," which just refers to the religion in general. Two letters, big difference.) This worked too well, creating a generation of radicals who saw enemies of their freshly brewed puritanical Islam not just among communists, but everywhereincluding the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Whoops. In the 1980s, a Saudi trust-fund kid moved to Peshawar, using family money to bring fighters worldwide into the madrasahs and Afghanistan. This was Osama Bin Laden; Al-Qaeda ("the base") refers either to a specific camp or a database of foreign fighters (sources disagree). Bin Laden eventually split from his mujahedin allies, focused his hatred on the Saudi government for allowing U.S. bases on Saudi soil, and wound up exiled to Sudan for a while (see "Sudan," page 000). After the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, various factions (several funded by opium) fought over the pieces. Pakistan still had an unstable neighbor, and the mujahedin still didn't have theiHarris, Bob is the author of 'Who Hates Whom ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307394361 and ISBN 0307394360.