Occupied territories

Earlier this month Human Rights Watch reported “widespread anti-Pashtun violence” across much of northern Afghanistan. HRW’s docket lists “murder, beatings, sexual violence, abductions, looting and extortion.” This regrettable news comes as no great surprise. It does, however, raise several questions that echo beyond Afghanistan. At issue: What’s “occupied territory” and what

to do about it?

First, are the charges of anti-Pashtun persecution true? HRW is a careful, credible, professional organization. Even so, we’d like to know which Afghans, ethnically, conducted the research, whether neutral ex-pats accompanied each research team, and how well these ex-pats spoke which Afghan language. Otherwise you get what you’re told, and virtually all Afghans – not only abused interviewees but also supposedly neutral interviewers – will tell you their particular ethnic “truth.”

But let’s cut HRW the slack it deserves. My guess (whatever the accuracy of specific allegations) is that, yes, there’s been a good deal of Payback since the Taliban retreat from northern Afghanistan five months ago. Hence this second question: Payback for what? What’s the background, the historical context, of these anti-Pashtun abuses?

HRW explains part of the story in a November 1998 report. The Taliban had just captured the main northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Pashtun expansionists as much as Islamist extremists, they embarked on a weeklong “killing frenzy” (HRW witness) which left thousands dead. Victims died in different ways. Lucky ones were shot; others had their throats cut or were beaten to death with electric cables. Still others were asphyxiated in metal containers, at least one of which was roasted on a fire. Many women were raped and/or disappeared. Hazaras suffered most, but Tajiks and Uzbeks were also attacked. The Taliban perpetrators were almost entirely Pashtun.

This 1998 Taliban massacre was partly reprisal. Their own troops had been betrayed and butchered by a northern warlord – who had betrayed his northern warlord boss – during a first, short-lived Taliban seizure of Mazar in 1997. Getting lost in the gore? This deadly sequence of tit for tat, like the nightmare Palestine-Israel situation, requires us to stand back and ask: Whose territory is it anyway? Who has what right to be there? And in what sense was it (or is it) occupied by somebody else?

In Afghanistan the history is clear. Pashtuns, despite their territorial pretensions, have always been interlopers north of the Hindu Kush. Ancestrally, it’s not their land and never was. Blocked by the British from India – and then backed by the British in 19th buffer-state building – Pashtun amirs turned north, crossed the mountains, and imposed alien control (or at least a semblance of it) upon the Northerners. (The natives, it must be said, had not achieved much control over themselves, but their chronic mayhem was at least home grown.) For more than a century until this past November, northern Afghanistan has been ethnically occupied territory.

Pashtun occupation took many forms, some on daily display when I lived in the 1970s North. Canal-irrigated farmland (called abi) was disproportionately in Pashtun hands. Some areas had been reclaimed from swamp or desert by the Pashtun central government and then made available to Pashtun settlers from the South. Other choice plots had simply been commandeered. The same pattern held true in towns. Pashtuns in Kunduz, near where I lived, occupied the best caravanserai warehouses on the main square. Appeals for justice from Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras were often summarily dismissed by Pashtun provincial officials.

Even buzkashi, the great Central Asian equestrian game of Uzbeks and other Turkic speakers, was being co-opted by Pashtuns. While a good friend and a brave man, the Kunduz governor was also from the Pashtun heartland of Kandahar – two decades later the Taliban capital – and made no bones about his mission: political centralization) and Pashtun domination. Much to Uzbek disgust and resentment, he appointed a fellow Pashtun to be provincial buzkashi organizer and, lest I hear the wrong things, sent me to live with the man. I will always be grateful for that family’s hospitality, however forced from above. Equally unforgettable was their sense of non-Pashtuns as lesser beings who, while numerically superior, merited scant regard.

Faced with the seeming permanence of Pashtun central government control, the other groups had come to accept, even expect, a certain amount of injustice. Pashtun debts would go unpaid and finally be “forgiven.” Livestock would be “borrowed” by Pashtuns and not returned. When irrigation canals went dry in late summer, Pashtun got the last drop. What could the non-Pashtuns do? “It was our turn once,” said an old Uzbek and former buzkashi champion named Abdul Ali. “Now it’s their turn, the Pashtun turn, and they have left me and my sons with only this lalmi [unirrigated land dependent on erratic rainfall].”

Remarkably, there was no talk of secession – either then (when it would have been brutally suppressed) or during the ensuing quarter-century of chaos (when all certainties were seemingly up for grabs). Afghans of all ethnicities want to remain one country. Now, however, things are different in Kabul. At least for the moment, the balance of power is no longer with Pashtuns. And so, once again, it’s the turn of Abdul Ali.

The old man may have died by now, but his Uzbek sons are not about to re-accept Pashtun hegemony. Likewise the Tajiks and especially the Hazaras, most abused of all groups by Pashtun governments for a century and most viciously attacked in recent years by the Pashtun Taliban. For-better-or-worse prognosis: That anti-Pashtun abuses will continue for a time in the North, that Pashtuns will have to concede some of their dubiously-gotten gains, that gradually a new modus vivendi will emerge among the ethnicities. Afghanistan, its people hope, will stay together. The North, I suspect, will be much less a Pashtun-occupied territory.

The Palestine-Israel crisis is different in seven ways. First, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem is far more recent than Pashtun occupation of northern Afghanistan. Second, it is far more brutal. Third, it is far more fervently opposed. Fourth, it is far more prominent in world news. Fifth, it runs counter to a sequence of specific U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Sixth, peace can come only with the establishment of two separate and equally viable states.

There’s a seventh difference. Our country, now the world’s sole super-power, has never known nor cared nor lifted a finger regarding ethnic tensions and occupations in northern Afghanistan. (America’s quarrel with the Taliban is rooted in Sept. 11, not the 19th century.) U.S. Middle East policy-makers, on the other hand, have been cognizant and complicit, pious statements notwithstanding, in the near-destruction of Palestine.

True, we’ve supported authentic peace efforts such as those led by martyred Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. True, we’ve wagged our finger at opportunist Bibi Netanyahu and extremist Ariel Sharon. Also true, however, is the fact of our continued military assistance and diplomatic support for an Israel that, thanks to Likud Party scare tactics, has lost its way. Both our countries are morally discredited in the process: Israel by its barbarism in the face of international dictate, America by its bottom-line agreement to continue aid. As Vice President Cheney has learned in recent travels, the United States is also disabled in efforts to garner Arab support on other issues such as Iraq. Directly and indirectly, our acceptance of Israel’s occupation is gutting us where it counts – among Muslims – in the War on Terror. If that’s not a problem, what is?

Afghanistan will bumble and stagger and but gradually cope with its occupied territory problem. What about us? Who in Washington has the guts to tell Sharon – and his U.S. supporters – to get out of occupied Palestine territory or lose all American aid? Until the Israelis get out, they’ll be like Pashtuns north of the Hindu Kush: temporarily powerful, but ultimately vulnerable. And, by association, so will we.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.