Word: pashtun
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...Soviets. He left Afghanistan during the post-Soviet power struggle and renounced politics after his wife and son were murdered in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home. But he recently returned to the Afghan frontier, hoping to enlist defectors and warlords in an anti-Taliban southern alliance. Because he was Pashtun--the dominant tribe of southern Afghanistan and the Taliban itself--Haq was a precious asset to the U.S., which desperately wants an erosion of Taliban authority in the south and east, where American commandos have launched the hunt for Osama bin Laden...
...Still, it seems clear that the war planners in Washington cannot afford to ignore the Alliance; the assassination of anti-Taliban Pashtun leader Abdul Haq last week makes the Alliance warlords the only rebel commanders of any stature. Even if Dostum and Atta can't seize Mazar-i-Sharif, the U.S. will need their experience when it sends its own ground troops into Afghanistan. Last Friday, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem told reporters that the U.S. "will utilize all of our forces and all of the types of warfare that we have to bring to bear." He characterized...
...Friday when Abdul Haq, a heroic mujahedin commander who lost his right foot fighting Soviet occupation in the 1980s, was captured by the Taliban and hanged in Azra, south of Kabul. Haq had entered Afghanistan to drum up support for a multiethnic government among his own people, the Pashtun of the south, but was captured as he tried to escape on horseback under cover of U.S. air strikes. Haq had feared that the bombing campaign would jeopardize his efforts to win support from Pashtuns - the Northern Alliance is mainly supported by ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks - and moderates among the Taliban...
...Soviets. He left Afghanistan during the post-Soviet power struggle and renounced politics after his wife and son were murdered in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home. But he recently returned to the Afghan frontier, hoping to enlist defectors and warlords in an anti-Taliban southern alliance. Because he was Pashtun--the dominant tribe of southern Afghanistan and the Taliban itself--Haq was a precious asset to the U.S., which desperately wants an erosion of Taliban authority in the south and east, where American commandos have launched the hunt for Osama bin Laden...
...wrest control over Mazar-i-Sharif will be fierce and bloody, and the outcome far from certain. The city is, in every sense, occupied by the Taliban. The majority of its residents are Uzbek and Hazari, and the Taliban can only count on the support of a few Pashtun villages on the outskirts of the town. For the rest, they rule by fear, and Northern Alliance leader General Rashid Dostum believes his Uzbek supporters in the city will function as a fifth column once the battle begins. That may not be enough...