Ethnic Conflict—Afghanistan

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Afghanistan Summary

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Ethnic Conflict—Afghanistan

Ethnic differences are strongest when other significant differences—religious, ideological, economic, geographic, linguistic—reinforce distinctions between one ethnic group and another. Although Afghanistan is a complex country in terms of ethnic composition, the importance of ethnicity in explaining conflict has varied significantly throughout its history.

In the original state named Afghanistan, dating back to 1747, the Pashtun ethnic group constituted an overwhelming majority. Until the late nineteenth century, Afghanistan was a fragile confederation of Pashtun tribes, and the word "Afghan" was used as a synonym for Pashtun. As part of a nation-building project early in the twentieth century, it increasingly came to imply "citizen of Afghanistan." The borders of the territory that now form Afghanistan were established toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the British and Russian empires were competing for control of the region. The Pashtun population was split, one part living in British India and the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan being reduced to around half the total population.

During his monarchy, Abdur Rahman Khan (reigned 1880–1901) attempted to build a stronger, more modern state, less dependent on shifting tribal alliances. Trying to establish authority throughout the country, particularly where ethnic minorities were dominant, the king battled several contentious groups, with especially harsh implications for the Hazara and Nuristani peoples. Whereas Afghanistan's majority are Sunni Muslims, the Hazara are Shiʿa, and the Nuristani practice their own religion. Religion was used to legitimize warfare and ethnic persecution. Abdur Rahman Khan also forcibly moved large numbers of noncomplying Pashtuns to minority-dominated areas in the north, thus forming people who were formerly a threat into an effective instrument for strengthening his rule in non-Pashtun areas. Pashtun nomads were granted privileges such as access to pastures in the Hazara-inhabited central region.

Twentieth-Century Events

Habibullah (reigned 1901–1919) and Amanullah (reigned 1919–1929) introduced constitutional reforms and outlawed slavery and other discriminatory practices that affected primarily minorities. King Amanullah fell in 1929, replaced by the sole non-Pashtun ruler in Afghan history, Bacha-e-Saqao—"son of the water-carrier." A Tajik from the Kohistan region north of Kabul, his position was based less on ethnicity than on support from a religious network.

Nader Shah (reigned 1929–1933), representative of a tribal Pashtun confederation, deposed Bacha-e Saqao after only nine months. After Zaher Shah (reigned 1933–1973) inherited the throne, the country was relatively calm for several decades. A short era of liberalization in the late 1940s was strangled by the ruling family in 1953, when Prince Daud Khan, the king's cousin, became prime minister. Daud, a strong proponent of Pashtun nationalism, wanted to expand Afghanistan to include the Pashtun population of Pakistan. This led to tense relations between the two countries and to the eventual ouster of Daud in 1963.

The constitution of 1964 allowed freedom of the press, and political parties were established. The pro-Soviet communist party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), was dominantly Pashtun, but split into the Parcham branch of urban intellectuals with a tendency toward ethnic accommodation and the rural, authoritarian, and nationalist Khalq branch. The major Maoist party, Shula-e Jawid, arose in 1967 from divisions in PDPA. Faced with a variety of parties seeking to place ethnic discrimination squarely on the political agenda, the king responded by unofficially ensuring that minorities were represented in the cabinet, but the basic attitude toward ethnic differences was that economic modernization would lead to their gradual erosion.

When former prime minister Daud Khan regained power in 1973, the "new democracy" of the past ten years came to an end. He established an authoritarian rule that was overturned in a PDPA coup in 1978. PDPA immediately announced a Soviet-style nationality policy that addressed four areas: government participation, education, newspapers, and culture. PDPA's credibility was severely undermined by Pashtun dominance of the party and its attempts to foster Pashtun support by launching ethnic appeals.

With the 1978 coup and the Soviet invasion of 1979, Afghani resistance parties were established in Pakistan and Iran. The Pakistan-based parties were, with the exception of Jamat-i Islami, dominated by Pashtuns, and all had some form of Sunni Islamic orientation. Iran became the major backer of the groups active among the Hazara. The resistance based its legitimacy on various forms of politicized Islam, and ethnicity was low on the political agenda of the exiled parties in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, the fact that the resistance leadership was overwhelmingly Pashtun was problematic from the perspective of the non-Pashtun population. Resistance-based shadow cabinets were notoriously weak and fragmented, mainly because the resistance leaders could not accommodate Afghanistan's ethnic variety.

Once in power, the PDPA went on to announce a Soviet-style nationality policy. In practice, the will to implement such reforms was limited, and PDPA's credibility was severely undermined by its Pashtun dominance. When President Najib took power in 1986, there was a change of approach. First, Najib's government was designed as a massive project in political accommodation. Second, the government realized that Soviet military presence in Afghanistan was on the wane, and ethnic and tribal loyalties were exploited to establish local militias to fill the gap. The so-called Uzbek militia of General Dostum and the Ismaili militia of Sayyed Mansoor developed into major military units. Ethnicity, for many, became an avenue to privileges. Military groups of different origins opposed or supported one another, as when Uzbek militias were used to reinforce the defense of threatened government garrisons in the Pashtun south.

The ethnic dimension was brought to the limelight as the resistance took power in Kabul in April 1992. Jamat-i Islami and its key commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, were a major force, but different groups in the resistance soon split Kabul into separate sections, and the ethnic definition of the conflict gained in prominence. Alliances between resistance groups and sections of the old government army that shared ethnic identity emerged as key forces in the battle for controlling the capital. Alliances rapidly shifted; political and military leaders used ethnic arguments to build support, and common people had little alternative but to seek protection with their own group.

The Taliban emerged in late 1994 in reaction to the strife in Kabul and the lawlessness in the rest of the country. Based on traditionalist networks of Islamic scholars and village mullahs, the Taliban found supporters mainly in the Pashtun population. At first the organization avoided ethnic rhetoric, but gradually it began using pro-Pashtun as well as anti-Shiʿa arguments. In the aftermath of armed confrontations with other groups, the Taliban often arrested and harassed people only for ethnic reasons. The movement's dominantly Pashtun membership and the frequency of ethnic violence have only contributed to further manifest ethnicity as a central component of the conflict in Afghanistan. It remains to be seen how the Taliban's removal from power in late 2001 will affect the complex ethnic conflicts in the country.