Word: pashtun
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...Elsewhere, hundreds of Northern Alliance reinforcements sent from Kabul arrived in Gardez on Saturday afternoon. That raised murmur of discontent in the local Pashtun garrisons, because the reinforcements are Tajik fighters from the Pansjir Valley - longtime rivals of the Pashtun in Afghanistan?s complex tribal wars. One of the uniformed government infantrymen told Time they've been brought in to add punch to the Afghans? western assault...
Fighting the Taliban and running the fragile government have clearly taken a toll on Karzai's health. He looks a decade older than 44, and when he is fatigued, his facial muscles twitch. Born in Kandahar and educated in India, Karzai is the scion of a noble Pashtun clan. He glides easily between the traditional and the modern worlds. He relishes sparring with tribal visitors, who come grumbling about their local rivals or demanding special attention. It's like the court of a traditional Afghan chieftain. Everyone has his say, but Karzai, with humor but firmness, imposes his will...
...Iran?s curious claim concerns the paunchy Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who currently lives in Tehran. The former prime minister who has fought against every Afghan government since 1979 has made no exception of the latest administration in Kabul. He recently told an interviewer that Karzai's government "has no value or meaning" as long as foreign troops remain in Afghanistan...
...loathe him as the commander responsible for reducing Kabul to rubble in a fierce power struggle with rival commanders that killed tens of thousands of people in the early 1990s. But his virulent anti-Americanism makes him a dangerous loose cannon amid the power struggles that persist throughout the Pashtun heartland. And he makes no bones about his intentions: "We prefer involvement in internal war rather than occupation by foreigners and foreign troops," he told an interviewer...
...Kabul, too, the new order is looking a little shaky. Last week's mob murder of a government minister is being interpreted as a sign of mounting ethnic tension within Karzai's government (always an unlikely alliance of Northern Alliance commanders and Pashtun royalists). And two attacks on British peacekeeping troops in Kabul in the past week has underscored a sense that even the capital's streets are not entirely secure...