Word: pashtun
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...shift risks being seen as a slap in the face to extremely powerful interests in Kabul. In the first days after the Taliban's fall Karzai kept a small band of Pashtun soldiers from his Kandahari home close to him. But tensions with the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance forces, who fought the Taliban for close to six years and have now assumed control of much of the government, meant the future president had to send his soldiers away. Since then his personal security has been in the hands of the most formidable Northern Alliance commander in Afghanistan, defense minister Mohammed...
...price, no matter how much, will be less than losing the president." Two weeks ago Kabul lost a key figure to assassins' bullets, deputy president and public works minister Haji Abdul Qadir. The loss was of more than another politician; Qadir was Karzai's rallying point for the vast Pashtun south which feels excluded - and threatened - by the Northern Alliance. Though the Qadir killing is most likely related to the drug trade, local power plays or revenge against a mujahedin warrior who made many enemies, it has scared Afghanistan's political elite...
Many of the south's majority Pashtun believe that Karzai's government is dominated by Panjshiri Tajiks who fought in the Northern Alliance alongside the Americans--though Karzai is Pashtun. About 1.1 million Afghan refugees have flooded back into the country since the beginning of the year--many more than aid agencies had predicted--but according to unhcr registries, less than a third of them have resettled in the Pashtun provinces, suggesting most Pashtun exiles are staying away...
Qadir, one of Afghanistan's most astute and powerful Pashtun politicians, had been a linchpin in President Hamid Karzai's effort to reconcile the country's largest ethnic group with the rest of the nation. His death increases the risk of ethnic division in a nation already suffering from civil violence. His passing also removes a moderate voice from Karzai's government, still struggling to impose its authority across Afghanistan...
Local traders and drug barons, many of whom had been supporters of Qadir, were furious. Moreover, although Qadir was vocal about the rights of the Pashtun, some viewed his cooperation with the Tajik-dominated regime in Kabul--and his lack of support for the reinstatement of Afghanistan's king, Zahir Shah--as a betrayal."My efforts have been to urge people here to have patience," Qadir told TIME in June...