Latest Updates: Pashtuns RSS

  • johnpi 9:46 pm on February 12, 2010 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Hazaras, , , , Marjah, , , , Pashtuns, Tajiks, , , ,

    I am so completely unsympathetic to Pakistani criticism of America for its conduct in Afghanistan as represented in this Imran Khan documentary.

    Early in the video a group of “young cosmopolitan” Pakistani women at a pop music concert are portrayed razing America for imperialism and terrorism.

    My response as an American is to just throw it right back in their faces.

    The lack of self-awareness or self-examination is just amazing. America left the region after the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan in 1989. Gone. And in that time until 2001 Pakistan decided to play ‘masters of the universe’ and support the Taliban throughout its campaign to take over Afghanistan. Pakistan provided unlimited military equipment and supplies, it provided military intelligence and advisors that traveled with the Taliban forces, and tens of thousands of Pakistanis volunteered and fought with the Taliban in Afghan campaigns that had the character of ethnic violence in parts of the country largely inhabited by the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc. And these educated middle-class Pakistanis are sitting around getting all indignant about America’s conduct?

    Please…I wonder if any Pakistani veterans of the Afghan campaigns brought captive Hazara concubines with them back to Pakistan…

    Related: Speaking of foreign fighters marines and Afghan troops have started their attack on the Taliban-held city of Marjah. A tribal elder reports most of the Afghan Taliban have already fled the area, but

    Militant commanders from the Middle East or Pakistan have stayed on “and they want to fight,” he said.

    I guess it will be foreign fighters versus foreign fighters then. Too bad the Pakistani and Middle Eastern fighters in Marjah won’t allow Afghan civilians to flee the city, thereby putting them potentially in the line of fire.

    How nice of the Pakistani volunteers to come to Afghanistan and take the Afghans hostage…

     

  • johnpi 5:26 pm on January 30, 2010 | 15 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , Pashtuns

    Afghan men struggle with sexual identity, study finds.

    As if U.S. troops and diplomats didn’t have enough to worry about in trying to understand Afghan culture, a new report suggests an entire region in the country is coping with a sexual identity crisis.

    An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns — though they seem to be in complete denial about it.

    (More …)

     

  • johnpi 10:30 pm on January 29, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Pashtuns, ,

    In wake of US supreme court decision allowing unlimited corporate cash in elections, progressives highlight Saudi Arabia as a country that will take advantage.

    Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil exports so stands to be one of the biggest losers in any pact that curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions. “It’s one of the biggest threats that we are facing,” said Muhammed al-Sabban, head of the Saudi delegation to U.N. talks on climate change and a senior economic adviser to the Saudi oil ministry. [...] Climate talks posed a bigger threat, Sabban said, and subsidies for the development of renewable energy were distorting market economics in the sector, he said.”

    Presumably because of the Citizens United ruling, Saudi Arabian-owned subsidiaries operating in the United States can now spend unlimited amounts advocating the defeat of candidates who support clean energy legislation. According to a ThinkProgress investigation, foreign-oil backed lobbyists in America are already instigating efforts to kill clean energy legislation.

    Juan Cole takes this apart a bit, pointing out some interest in Saudi Arabia for green energy, but I’m skeptical of his skepticism. It wasn’t long ago that he belittled the extremist threat in Pakistan as largely limited to the ethnic Pashtun regions of that country, and that certainly turned out to be wrong (though wrong in service of the greater good of puncturing inflated rhetoric at the time about the Taliban being poised to overthrow the Pakistan government).

     

  • johnpi 7:46 pm on January 4, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Pashtuns, revenge, , ,

    Gloom, fury as Pakistan volleyball tournament death toll nears 100.

    Tribal elders in a Pakistani village where a suicide car bomber killed nearly 100 people insisted Saturday that residents will keep defying the Taliban, even as the bloodshed laid bare the risks facing the citizens’ militias that make up a key piece of Pakistan’s arsenal against extremism.

    Apparently, the lashkar meeting that was going on at the time of the blast was considering punishing the relatives of Taliban militants who had participated in the killing of another tribal elder.

    One reason militancy has spread in Pakistan’s tribal belt — a semi-autonomous region where tribes, not the government, have long wielded the most authority — is because insurgents have slain dozens of elders and filled the resulting power vacuum.

    And the tribal leader in the afflicted town speaks of the tribe’s response:

    “Such attacks will only strengthen our resolve — being Pashtun, revenge is the only answer to the gruesome killings,” said Mushtaq Khan, 50, the head of the tribal council.

     

  • johnpi 10:40 pm on December 28, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Pashtuns,

    Predicting the next wave of violence in Pakistan: Lynch mobs, death squads and night letters targeting right-wing Sunnis and ethnic Pashtuns in Karachi.

    Two events today, the suicide bombing in Karachi and the capture of a Sindh-bound van loaded with weapons, explosives and suicide vests indicate that the Taliban and other loosely federated groups are planning a campaign of violence in the South, with Karachi the most likely target.

    Though it can also be suggested Karachi’s social polity has so far won the social and cultural battle against extremist thought, there is however every likelihood that if the Taliban and their clandestine sectarian partners now decide to make Karachi their next main target, the city’s response will be somewhat different than what it has been elsewhere in the country.

    Karachi has had a volatile history of street battles and of living through near-civil-war conditions (between 1986 and 1999). All the major political parties in the city are heavily armed. But the difference this time is that the PPP, ANP and MQM who have all been involved in street battles fought with sophisticated arms in the past, have in the last two years exhibited a commendable show of co-ordination and mutual empathy in the face of the Taliban threat in the city.

    If the going gets worse in Karachi as far as extremist attacks are concerned, this may as well see all three parties willing to pick up arms to fight a common enemy that is now seen hell-bent on destroying the economic and political interests of these parties’ respective constituencies in the city. These constituencies are the most vital pieces of economic and political real state for political parties operating in an economic hub like Karachi.

    Earlier this year, schools were closed and troops called out into the streets of Karachi due to “gun battles, arsons and the deaths of dozens of people” – most of whom were Pashtuns.

    One big question is what role “puritanical” madrassas located in Karachi will play, or if they could be somehow targeted. In 2005, the Karachi police chief said there were “859 madrassas teaching more than 200,000 youngsters” in the city.

     

  • johnpi 2:15 pm on November 11, 2009 | 14 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: 'Islam under siege', , , , , , , Pashtuns, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Pakistani magazine article: The Saudi-isation of Pakistan.

    Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
    ….

    Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
    ….

    Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.

     

  • johnpi 7:09 am on November 11, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Awami National Party, , Pashtuns

    The death toll in yesterday’s car bomb in Pakistan has risen to 34. Juan Cole has some analysis:

    The [religiously fundamentalist political parties] resent having been displaced by the secular Pashtun sub-nationalist ANP [Awami National Party], and this bombing of Charsadda is probably a further piece of thuggery aimed at punishing the Pashtuns for voting secular [in 2008 parliamentary elections]. Asfandiyar Wali Khan, the president of the Awami National Party, and other high provincial officials condemned the attack. Wali Khan said, “These barbaric elements have no religion and faith. The government is determined to eliminate terrorism and our struggle will continue.”

    Such violence is often read in the West as a confirmation of the bigotted view that Muslims in general are unusually violent. Even in Pakistan, it is read as a sign of alleged Pashtun tendencies to violence and barbarism. In fact, a bombing like that in Charsadda is part of a low-intensity, drawn-out civil war among the Pashtuns themselves, with a small rural radical fringe targetting urban, ideologically moderate groups and institutions.

     

  • johnpi 6:34 am on October 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Pashtuns, ,

    There is a sense in which the Pakistani army’s struggle against the Taliban is increasingly an ethnic war between radical Muslim Pashtuns and more traditionalist or secular Punjabis, says Juan Cole.

    Punjabis are 55% of the population and dominate the army; Pashtuns are more like 12% of the population and disproportionately rural and poor.

     

  • johnpi 5:20 pm on September 29, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Colorado, Pashtuns, Pashtuns in the US, ,

    Time magazine looks at terror suspect Najibullah Zazi’s life in Colorado, and how the community there is responding to his arrest.

    Many are suspicious of the charges against Zazi but say that, if true, Najibullah Zazi could not possibly have been indoctrinated in Denver. “He was like an outlier,” says a mosque official who didn’t want his name used. “This is a community that is very close, and if al-Qaeda were active here, we would know about it.”

    Since Zazi’s arrest, many Denver-based Muslims have quietly braced for a public blowback. “Of course we are not happy if he was really doing these things,” says Shohaib Ghori, a Karachi native. “But when there is so much publicity, it makes us all feel guilty by association, despite the fact that 99.9% of our community are law-abiding citizens.”

    For Afghans — especially ethnic Pashtuns like Zazi who follow a strict code of conduct — the arrests have brought shame not just to his family but to the entire community. “The dishonor of getting accused is just as bad in our culture as being guilty,” says Ahad Shahbaz, who runs English-language-teaching programs in Boulder. “Even if he is honest, now he has dishonored his family.”

     

  • thabet 7:11 am on September 8, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Pashtuns

    Not new:

    In 1667, the Yusufzai Pashtuns revolted [against Aurangzeb] near Peshawar and were crushed [...] Soon afterwards the Afridi Pashtuns in the north-west also revolted, and Aurangzeb was forced to lead his army personally to Hasan Abdal to subdue them.

     

  • johnpi 6:28 am on April 27, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Pashtuns, ,

    Juan Cole: Let’s calm down about Pakistan.

    What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity.

    All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

    My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

    Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

     

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