Afghanistan Page 5
The Hazara are racially distinct Mongol descendants, predominantly Imami Shia (with a few Sunnis), Dari-speaking, internally divided by tribe and lineage. They make up about eight to ten percent of the population (estimates go to 15–20 percent; their own leaders claim up to 35 percent). Farsiwans are Imami Shia, Farsi (rather than Dari) speaking, closely related to Iranians. Afghanistan’s Shia population is estimated at about 16 percent if the urban Qizilbash, Dari-speaking descendants of the Persian Empire’s ruling elites that are among Afghanistan’s most educated groups, are included. The Aimaqs are less than five percent of the population. They are a Sunni, Dari-speaking, semi-nomadic group, divided into four distinctive clans.
The Uzbeks are the largest group among the speakers of Turkic languages in the north; Sunni, Uzbek-speaking (with Dari as a second language), tribe and clan-based (although this has less military-political meaning than it does for Pushtuns), constituting some 13 percent of Afghanistan’s population. In addition to Uzbeks, there are also small populations of Turkmen and Kyrgyz. Unlike the Pushtuns, they have fewer links—economic, political and cultural—with other members of their ethnic groups across national borders in central Asia, a legacy of the decades of the Iron Curtain on Afghanistan’s northern border. Many members of these groups, like many Afghan Tajiks, are descended from refugees from Russian or Soviet repression.
Smaller tribes and ethnic and religious groups include Ismaili Shias, called “Seveners,” who are primarily Dari-speaking and have their strongest concentration near Pul-e-Khumri on the northern end of the Salang Pass. The Pashai (strongest in Nangarhar and Laghman provinces), Brahui (concentrated in the southern provinces), and Baluchi (in the south, contiguous with their counterparts in Pakistan and Iran) all have their own languages but also speak Pashto as a second language. Other groups include the Nuristanis (whose language is divided into five distinct dialects and use Pashto as a second language) and Gujurs (who speak Dari as a second language). The only non-Muslims are a few hundred Hindus and Sikhs in Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad, remnants of once-thriving trading communities. Afghanistan’s Sephardic Jewish communities that, at their height, had their own vigorous culture and traded with others along the Silk Route had been reduced to two aged gentlemen by the time the Taliban were driven from Kabul in 2001.
All in all, there is no agreement as to the number of languages and ethnic affiliations in Afghanistan, even within the seemingly binary division of Pushtun versus non-Pushtun. Despite the lack of agreement as to what constitutes an ethnic group and the lack of a formal census to determine the population’s ethnicity, it is apparent that few of Afghanistan’s major regions or even its 34 provinces are ethnically homogenous. There is more diversity in Afghanistan than just about any other country of comparable size and population.
Of the major loosely defined geographical regions, the Northwest is populated mainly by Dari speakers but also includes Pushtuns. In the North, Mazar-e-Sharif and the northern plains are the most multi-ethnic area, with communities of Uzbeks and Tajiks being the primary groups alongside substantial Pushtun and Hazara populations. The Northeast is primarily Tajiks but includes a number of smaller groups, such as the Nuristanis. Pushtun minority populations remain in this region. The Hazara Jat is the most cohesive entity, being, as its name implies, the home of the Hazaras. The South and Kandahar is the Pushtun heartland, populated primarily by Durrani and Ghilzay Pushtun tribes. The East is also primarily Pushtun, but is also where that people’s tribal fragmentation is most widespread. Kabul, like most of Afghanistan’s cities, including Kandahar, was originally Persian-speaking, but for a century attracted emigrants from the countryside even before the 1978–2001 conflicts led to floods of internal refugees. Other regions have their own unique patterns of ethnic divisions. Kunduz, for example, is a Pushtun-majority city in a predominantly Dari-speaking countryside.
It is clear, then, that just as ethnic identification is not fixed, Afghanistan cannot be easily divided into ethnic cantons. Ethnolinguistic maps of Afghanistan are approximations at best and too often misleading. Ethnicity can be fluid, situational, and multilayered. This especially applies to Pushtuns with often-competing loyalties to an overarching Pushtun identity, to tribal groups (e.g., Durrani) and, often most significant, to a specific clan or tribe (e.g., Popalzai, of which President Karzai is also a hereditary chief). Many of the larger groups (especially tribes and clans) share at least a fictive shared descent (usually from a heroic common ancestor). This, along with the patriarchal and patrilineal nature of authority that cuts across most Afghan ethnic groups, makes family lineages important. Among Pushtuns, lineages often determine political alignments and can be a primary cause of infighting.
However, for all these nuances, the divide that is most important for Afghanistan’s conflicts is the binary one between Pushtuns and non-Pushtuns, which largely means Persian-speakers. The many other languages including Uzbek, Pashai, Baluchi, Nuristani, and Turkmen do not change the basic bilingual division of Afghanistan. Many small groups, like the Pashai, do not define themselves as a minority. Most small groups are bilingual. The Nuristanis whose homeland is in the most remote part of the Northeast—racially distinct Indo-Europeans converted by the sword to Islam in the nineteenth century—do not share a common language.
While Afghanistan’s Persian and Turkic speakers share languages and cultural links with populations outside Afghanistan’s borders, these are qualitatively different from the links between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Pushtuns. Pushtun nationalism has a transborder impact far beyond that of other groups. The relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan has shaped the region for decades, and the impact of the transborder Pushtuns has, in turn, been the critical factor in that relationship.
Since the formation of the proto-Afghanistan state in 1747, the only times when the de facto head of state has not been a Pushtun has been in two periods marked by intensive civil war, 1930 and 1992–96. The ethnolinguistic mobilization of Afghans that has taken place since 1978 means that state power, central power, and rule from Kabul have been increasingly identified with Pushtun power. The belief of many Pushtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan that this is the only legitimate possibility for the future of Afghanistan is not accepted by the non-Pushtuns of that country, politically mobilized by decades of conflict and better and more cohesively organized than the tribally divided Pushtuns. While no other group had the numbers of the Pushtun, these have at times been able to use their Dari language and opposition to Pakistan’s policies that stressed the importance of Pushtun control of state power in Afghanistan to work together, most notably in the pre-2001 Northern Alliance, which included substantial Pushtun allies in the form of Dr. Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf Ittehad-i-Islami (one of the Peshawar Seven) and the Nangarhar shura of Haji Qadir (previously part of HiK) plus a number of Pushtun leaders that were opposed to the Taliban, including Hamid Karzai, who became president of Afghanistan.
Faith
Islam is central to the future of Afghanistan. Traditional Afghan Islamic practice is distinct from that of the Arab world, the subcontinent (although this has been the source of most outside influences), and Persia (reflecting the Sunni-Shia divide). Traditional Afghan practice recognized that there is no compulsion in Islam and did not seek to extend its dictates, except by persuasion, beyond the walls of the family compound. Yet this did not prevent Afghanistan’s nineteenth-century King Abdur Rahman from converting the polytheistic Kafirs of the northeast to the Muslim Nuristanis by the sword, or conquering alike Shia Hazaras and Sunni Turkic-speakers. While traditional Afghan Islam as a whole has never been fanatic, it has also never been pacific. For example, it reveres the archetype of the ghazi, the raider and warrior, never afraid to strike a blow for Islam and his honor.
Islam has also been the rallying cry that brought together Afghans of different ethnicities and Pushtuns of different tribes to take arms against outsiders. The 1978–92 war against the Soviets and their Afghan supporters was perceive
d by the majority of Afghans as a jihad, a Muslim holy conflict.17
The most significant divisions within the various Sunni populations, not limited to any single ethnolinguistic group, are between the practitioners of traditional Afghan Islam, heavily infused with Sufic practices (many of which have had strong political impacts such as the reverence to pirs, living saints, or the importance of Sufic brotherhoods as solidarity groups). These practices have stressed the importance of jihad but have also been historically resistant to its use to legitimate terrorism. Their opposition are those whose religious practices reflect the critics of Afghan Islam, including Islamists but especially those fundamentalists whose ideology includes elements emanating from the subcontinent (Deobandi) and Arabia (Wahabi or Salafist).
Prior to 1978, there were two primary sources of internal opposition in Afghanistan: Communists (supported by the Soviets) and Islamists (that ended up being supported by Pakistan and money from outside the region). They were both opposed not only to what they saw as Afghanistan’s underdevelopment and the practices of rule from Kabul, but also to traditional Afghan Islam. The traditional Afghan Islam, marked by the relative tolerance of the clergy, rooted in their community and qawm rather than responding to a centralized national religious leadership or bureaucracy, was seen as part of the old Afghanistan that Communists and Islamists alike wished to overcome. The religious figures, along with the secular tribal and local leadership, the local khans, provided a set of autonomous checks and balances that neither opposition wished to accept.
For the Communists, there was to be no compromise with the old order. The Islamists, realizing they needed the intensely religious Afghan grassroots on their side, looked to a more gradual strategy of compromise and absorption.
Afghanistan’s Communists had been strong opponents of Afghan Islam when the two parties of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) emerged in the years before they seized power in the 1978 putsch. When the Communists seized power in the 1978 coup, they turned on the Afghan religious leadership, both because of their atheistic Communist ideology and because religion represented the competition for power and authority in Afghanistan. The Khalqi party, predominantly less-educated Pushtuns from rural backgrounds that resented its strong religious component, saw it as a backward remnant. Khalqis targeted families with hereditary claims to Sufic leadership—critical to religious leadership amongst Pushtuns—for arrest and murder in 1978–79. The more sophisticated urban, Kabuli, Dari-speaking Parcham party, installed in power by the Soviets in December 1979, tended to follow the Soviet central Asia model toward Islam, treating it as something that needed to be engaged with, to be controlled through subsidies and support as well as repression.
Another approach critical of traditional Afghan Islam was that of Afghanistan’s Islamists. They were modernizers and, in the years before 1978, were impatient with Afghan religion as, along with the tribal system of the Pushtuns, holding the country back. Afghan Islamists looked to outside voices, especially from the Arab world, which looked to Islam to provide modernity and a shield against Western and Soviet cultural and political imperialism. Afghan Islamists also viewed the rising pre-1978 Communist threat in their own country with great alarm.
Islamism started as the central ideology of pre-1978 opposition parties. The Jamiat-e-Islami Afghanistan (JIA) had its roots in Kabuli intellectuals. Its long-time leader was Dr. Burnhaddin Rabbani, a Cairo-trained theology professor. He retained the leadership of JIA through 1978–92 when it was one of the “Peshawar Seven” of Pakistan-supported Sunni Afghan resistance parties, and was the president of the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA) that was formed from the Peshawar seven’s leadership in 1992. Though driven from Kabul by the Taliban in 1996, he remained the nominal internationally recognized head of state until after the US-led coalition intervention in 2001. Among the members of JIA were such major Afghan leaders as Ahmad Shah Massoud, one of the foremost resistance leaders against the Soviets who, after fighting through Afghanistan’s civil war as the ISA defense minister, was assassinated in northern Afghanistan by Al Qaeda suicide terrorists just before the 9/11 attacks on the US.
A competing source of Afghan Islamism, though one in practice limited to Pushtuns, was the Hezb-e-Islami party. This shared JIA’s pre-1978 origins. However, by 1978 it had splintered into two parties, one led by Younis Khalis, a mullah with strong Khogiani Pushtun links from Nangarhar province and the other led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pushtun from Kunduz whose one-year attendance at Kabul University had earned him the honorary title of “Engineer.” Both of these parties were among the “Peshawar Seven.” The Hezb-e-Islami of Hekmatyar (HiH) became the largest single recipient of Pakistan-distributed outside aid to the Afghan resistance in 1978–92 and eventually became Pakistan’s “chosen instrument” inside Afghanistan until displaced from this position by the Taliban in 1996. The Hezb-e-Islami of Khalis (HiK) merged into other groups post-1992.
In reality, Afghan Islamist ideology had a limited impact with grassroots Afghanistan. Its leadership figures, with their roots among Afghanistan’s elites, found that to have mass appeal, they needed to adapt to more traditional Islamic beliefs and practices and with tribal and other loyalties that the Islamists opposed. Hekmatyar’s difficulty in carrying out such adaptation was among the reasons he has remained unpopular in the southern Pushtun heartland, where Sufic-influenced Islam and tribal loyalties remained strong. Despite having strong support from Pakistan, he was unable to gain the degree of support from Afghanistan’s Pushtuns that the Taliban had in 1996–2001.
Another source of opposition to traditional Afghan Islam is represented by Islamic fundamentalism. This looks at traditional Afghan practices and Sufic influences as syncretic accretions, with roots in the subcontinent or pre-Muslim society. Fundamentalism influences on Afghan Islam were represented by Deobandi and Wahabi or Salafist approaches, brought in from madrassas abroad and supported with foreign money. Fundamentalists may embrace the tools and technology of modernity; but they are not modernizers, looking instead to achieve the pure Islam of the distant past, with the Shias seen as the most damaging polluters of the pure spring. The Afghan Taliban has been, from their origin, fundamentalists, representing their leaderships’ schooling in Deobandi-influenced madrassas in the FATA. This underlay much of their hostility to Islamists in Afghanistan during the 1992–2001 civil war.
In the 1980s and 90s, the critique of Afghan Islamic practice was embodied in the Taliban’s Deobandi-based version of a maximalist Islamic ideology that emerged from the refugee camps. It was linked in this with what is termed Wahabism in Afghanistan, a movement that had been imported into Afghanistan to “reform” traditional Afghan Islam—with little success—in the years before 1978. Saudi financial assistance was accompanied with a strong push to spread its intolerant and restrictive Wahabi form of Islam, alien in any case to Afghanistan, with disastrous results. Saudi and Gulf money has subsidized the building and operations of maderi in Pakistan that produced the Taliban and other extremists now threatening the stability of Pakistan. During the 1980s, Wahabism became important, especially in the refugee camps and in madrassa in Pakistan, because of foreign funding. An autonomous Wahabi “kingdom” appeared in the Kunar valley.
Because these influences were strongest in Pakistan and because the Afghan exile population there was predominantly Pushtun, these outside influences were strongest amongst Pushtuns. Among non-Pushtuns, the Tajiks continued to be closer to traditional practices, despite the Islamist views of many of their political and military leaders. The Shia Hazaras went through a bloody sub-national civil war in the 1980s which saw supporters of Iran’s Islamic Revolution trying and failing to seize power in the Hazara Jat, but succeeding in killing or driving into exile many of the Hazara’s traditional religious and secular leaders.
Even though the Taliban’s ideology was hostile to traditional Afghan Islam, they were able to accommodate many of its grassroots believers in 1992–2001, using shar
ed Pushtun ethnolinguistic links. But, during the Taliban’s 1996–2001 rule from Kabul, the increased influence of Al Qaeda and the importance of Arab funding meant that the Taliban paid more attention to the practices of outside supporters and less to that of their Pushtun clients, contributing to the loss of legitimacy the Taliban experienced among many Pushtuns by 2001.
The Afghan Taliban first received Pakistan’s backing in 1994 and by 1996 had replaced HiH as Pakistan’s chosen instrument in Afghanistan. It was an attempt to continue Pakistan’s strategy of aiming at political control in Afghanistan through a new set of clients. President Benazir Bhutto and interior minister Nasrullah Babur were secular nationalists that had no problem with using Islamic fundamentalists as policy tools. Taliban’s leadership was drawn from Pushtun ulema (clergy), many with shared backgrounds in the war against the Soviets or in the Deobandi-influenced madrassas of the FATA. This leadership gave the Taliban a capability to mobilize Afghan Pushtuns, reaching across tribal and local lines.
The tension between fundamentalism and traditional Afghan Islam for many years proved a limit on the resurgent Afghan insurgency, but by 2008–10 the Afghan Taliban, well funded and using effective propaganda, had been able to infiltrate or bring over many of the Sufic brotherhoods in southern Afghanistan and influence what was being preached in mosques throughout Afghanistan.
Because Afghanistan is decentralized and lacks a tradition of a state-supported unitary national ulema or religious leadership, the nature of Afghan Islam is largely determined at the grassroots level. There is no single question more important for Afghan stability than “to whom do you listen?” at the mosque. Religious authority—either local, reflecting tiers of kinship, tribe, or qawm, or that of more remote figures (especially Sufic leaders) that can have a broader appeal—is important to provide legitimacy for any actions or change, secular or religious. This authority had been in the hands of major figures connected with Sufic orders (such as Pir Sayid Ahmed Gailani and Sayid Sibghatullah Mojadidi, both of whom led one of the seven Peshawar-based Sunni Afghan resistance parties in the 1980s) or their local counterparts, pirs, ulema and sayids. Afghanistan’s Shia, especially in the Hazara Jat, have a structure of religious authority separate from Sunni practice, one largely unsupported by pre-2001 Afghan governments. These religious authorities have all been challenged by the emergence of new generations of Afghans (and ulema) that have been affected by Deobandi influences from the subcontinent (the original Taliban leadership were educated in madrassas in Pakistan) and other sources of radical Islam.