[LINK] "What kind of regime?"

[rfmcdonald]

Registan's Joshua Foust profoundly disagrees with William Dalrymple's characterization of the Afghanistan unpleasantness as a civil war between the pro-Indian Tajiks and Uzbeks of the north and the pro-Pakistani Pushtuns of the south.

Right, so that’s just wrong. At least if you’re defining the sides ethnically. As one example, Jamiat-i Islami, one of the biggest factions of the Northern Alliance, had a large number of Pashtun members, especially in the Parwan—Kapisa—Shomali area. Secondly, what the fuck? A regime where most of the cabinet ministers are Pashtuns, where most of the governors (except those in obviously ethnic-majority provinces) are Pashtuns, and where the vast majority of aid and reconstruction money is spent on Pashtun areas is not exactly a “Tajik-Uzbek-Hazara regime.” Sure, there’s a Tajik and a Hazara Vice President, and where other minority leaders, like Ismail Khan or Abdulrashid Dostum, can make asses of themselves they’re incorporated into the government.

Secondly, while Afghanistan has been embroiled in wars for a good 30 years, only a few of them have been civil, and those civil wars have been different civil wars. And I’m not sure it’s even fair to consider these civil wars noticably different from the many civil wars Afghanistan fought in the 20th century, aside from scale. We can look at the Bukharan Rebellion in 1928, the 1929 coup, the Safi Rebellion of 1945-6, the Gujjar Wars of the early 1960s, the Balochi insurgency in the 1970s, and then the initial anti-communist rebellion in Kunar and Nuristan in 1978.

These rebellions, which generally were about smaller, insular communities resisting the encroachment of central control, are not materially different than the current struggle to impose a central government on many of the same regions. We can argue over whether it’s a good idea or not (I’m of the opinion we should let the Afghan government choose where we go and what we do there), but what’s difficult to argue is that anything other than the Soviet War was particularly unusual other than scale (the Soviet War, since it was the result of an invasion by foreigners, is a separate thing).

But when we look at what happened in 1989, we see something very familiar: small, regionally-based militias fighting against a central government trying to impose control. When Najibullah gets thrown to the street, and then to a UN compound in Kabul, we see something very similar again: larger, still regionally-focused militias fighting over control of the government. It’s one way the fighting morphed somewhat—rather than merely resisting central control and seeking autonomy, in the 1990s the fighting changed to who gets to be in the center and impose control outward.

One commenter argues that the Pushtuns (the Pushtuns of Pakistan, at least) have traditionally enjoyed positive relations with India.