Word: pashtun
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While Abdullah's father is a Pashtun from Kandahar, the doctor is more often associated with Panshir because of his close relationship with the late Panshiri mujahedin commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who not only helped defeat the Soviets but was also the Taliban's most effective enemy. Massoud was assassinated, some say as a gift from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, by suicide bombers posing as TV journalists on Sept. 9, 2001. Massoud has been the cornerstone of Abdullah's campaign: his image shadows that of Abdullah's on many campaign posters, and before Abdullah spoke at last week...
...wilds of Waziristan, the tribal belt along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, make an unlikely showcase for the future of warfare. This is a land stuck in the past: there are few roads, electricity is scarce, and entire communities of ethnic Pashtun tribesmen live as they have for millenniums. And yet it is over this medieval landscape that the U.S. has deployed some of the most sophisticated killing machines ever created, against an enemy that has survived or evaded all other weaponry. If al-Qaeda and the Taliban could not be eliminated by tanks, gunships and missiles, then perhaps they...
...cowardly enemy, too frightened to shed blood in battle. "The militants say that if the Americans want to come and fight, they should fight them face to face," says Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier who was once the top Pakistani official in FATA. Shah, a Pashtun himself, says the families of the drones' victims are required under the tribal code to seek revenge, which makes them ideal recruits for militant leaders like Baitullah Mehsud, the Pashtun commander of the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud, says Shah, "likes to boast that each drone attack brings him three or four suicide bombers...
...presidential candidate, Sherzai ticked all the boxes. He is Pashtun, the country's biggest ethnic group; as a tribal chieftain he has the necessary respect to deal with leaders of the Taliban insurgency devastating the south; and he possesses a national reputation garnered from his successful governorship. (Read "Why the Taliban Is Winning the Propaganda...
What's more, if the Taliban's goal were to seize state power rather than local control, it would have little hope of doing so. The insurgency is largely confined to ethnic Pashtuns, who comprise little more than 15% of the population. It is unlikely to find significant resonance in the major cities such as Islamabad and Lahore - though an influx into Karachi of people displaced by the fighting in the tribal areas has swelled that city's Pashtun population, which has in turn raised communal tensions there. While the Taliban is reported to have made some inroads in southern...