Word: pashtun
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...Jowzjan and Faryab. But the onetime master of the north now finds his position challenged by the growing power of his erstwhile ally in the Northern Alliance, the mainly Tajik Jamiat-i-Islami faction. Jamiat's ascension has prompted an unlikely alignment between Dostum and Hamid Karzai, the patrician Pashtun tribal leader who heads Kabul's interim government. In December Karzai appointed Dostum deputy to Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, Jamiat's military strongman, and in March he named Dostum his "special representative" in the north. Dostum has also conspicuously aligned himself with former King Mohammed Zahir Shah. The moves suggest...
...Dostum's mercenary troops achieved notoriety for ruthless courage on the battlefield and wild indiscipline off it. Bearing a legacy of 200 years near the bottom of a Pashtun-dominated social order, they seemed to take a special delight in evening the historical score, killing Pashtun mujahedin of the south, and looting and terrorizing the civilians...
...hidden hand behind the campaign to destabilize the new order, according to the government, belongs to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious Pashtun mujaheddin commander whose forces killed tens of thousands of people when they shelled Kabul in the early '90s during a power struggle with the forces that today comprise the Northern Alliance. TIME has learned that two days after the rocket attack on the peacekeepers, Afghani police raided a house in west Kabul and arrested eight men in possession of the same Chinese 107mm rockets. "They were Hekmatyar's men and their plan was to hit the main ISAF base...
...Fires are expected to spread in the run-up to the loya jirga. "The next few months will be an especially fragile period," CIA director George Tenet recently told the U.S. Senate. Pashtun royalists hope people will rally around former King Mohammed Zahir Shah, even though he has returned with the constitutional rights of an ordinary citizen rather than those of a monarch. But Afghanistan's volatile ethnic divisions are just as likely to turn the frail 87-year-old king into a symbol of division than one of peace...
...Pakistan as "very good" or, as General Tommy Franks called them last week, "remarkable." It became apparent to Pentagon officials that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wasn't keen on letting U.S. troops charge across the border. He reportedly told the Administration that such a move could further inflame the Pashtun tribes in the border area--who already sympathize with their Taliban clansmen--and that it could stir up militants elsewhere in the country...