Word: pashtun
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...century Persian epic revered in Afghanistan. The Taliban co-opted the poem's hero, Rustam, as a propaganda figure, telling Afghans that they, like him, were winged heroes endowed with arrows to defeat evil. Ali's phantasmagoric show, "Rustam," features a devil-figure with horns, wings and the unmistakably Pashtun features of many Taliban. Occasionally, an Arabic numeral floats mid-frame, a nod to Ali's earlier works, which riffed on Afghan schoolbooks that taught counting and reading through the language of war and religious extremism: I was for Infidel, J for Jihad. In one of Ali's early works...
...also alleged that another Italian, photographer Gabriele Torsello, was ransomed for $2 million last October, fueling speculation that these more recent kidnappings may be motivated by financial as much as political gain. "Rumors are going around that the Koreans are worth $1 million a head," says Parliamentarian Khalid Pashtun. "So of course this is going to encourage more kidnappings." At this point it's unclear if Meier's abductors are insurgents or simply a criminal gang going for a more lucrative target. But unlike cases of kidnapped locals, Afghan security forces have already launched a massive operation to retrieve...
...high failure rate? One reason, Williams suggests, is the Pashtun social code of Pashtunwali, which values "acts of martial valor" and revenge. Driven by this code Afghan suicide bombers are more likely to go after hard military targets rather than softer targets such as markets or restaurants as happens in Iraq. The deadliest bombings in Afghanistan over the past two years have been the work of Arabs, not Afghans...
...this has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden but with Mirza Ali Khan, a Pashtun holy man who revolted against the British in the late 1930s. For nearly a decade, the British army chased him and his followers through the remotest reaches of Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier Province-the same ground where allied troops have spent the past five years searching fruitlessly for bin Laden, and where the remnants of Afghanistan's Taliban fled to lick their wounds and recover their strength. The region was then, as it is today, a powder keg of fractious tribes and fundamentalist...
...lashkars, or war bands, ambushed convoys and raided prominent towns, killing Hindu traders and marching off with money and munitions. For colonial officials in London and New Delhi, this was no minor uprising of petty bandits. Intelligence estimates at the time counted 400,000 fighting men among the various Pashtun tribes, at least half of them armed with modern rifles. The insurgency forced the British to commit as many as 40,000 troops to the frontier, and, as World War II raged, to station a permanent garrison there even as the Japanese advanced steadily into Burma...