Word: pashtuns
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...prospect of the Taliban's defeat may even be exacerbating sharp differences between the agendas of the rival Uzbek, Tajik and Hazari components of the Northern Alliance, and between the competing regional interests of Iran, Russia and Pakistan. The Taliban's demise, however, will depend strongly on whether Pashtun groups can be persuaded to switch sides. And despite Pakistan's efforts to rally them this week, many of these groups appear to be hedging their bets...
...potentially messy war. The Taliban was proving more tenacious than expected, U.S. commanders said. And what they didn't say was that the Northern Alliance's capabilities may have been overestimated. U.S. and Pakistan-backed efforts to organize a "southern alliance" to fight the Taliban in its own Pashtun heartland in the south have not yet yielded much fruit, and suffered a setback Friday with the reported execution of a key anti-Taliban moderate mujahedeen commander...
...Taliban heartland: Hedging its bets The U.S. game plan until now has involved a combination of air strikes and commando raids and an offensive by the Northern Alliance to provoke an internal collapse of the Taliban regime. It had been hoped that seeing the writing on the wall, many Pashtun militias around the country that may once have sided with the Taliban would switch sides. While there are continual reports of Taliban allies sounding out the possibility of switching sides, the Taliban does not appear to be anywhere near collapse. Delegates assembled by Pakistan for an anti-Taliban confab this...
...Alliance to march on Kabul, but the U.S. does not want the opposition group to actually capture it. That's because the alliance is composed primarily of fighters from the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazari minorities and would be unable to create a stable government without the consent of the Pashtun, the largest of Afghanistan's ethnic groups. The Taliban's membership is exclusively Pashtun, but it is far from representative of all Pasthun, and Washington had hoped that the bombing campaign would create significant defections from within the Taliban as well as rallying other Pashtun warlords against the Taliban...
...part, that's for ethnic reasons. The Taliban is dominated by the Pashtun, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and one that straddles the border with Pakistan; the Northern Alliance troops are predominantly from Afghanistan's other minorities. And in part, it's because of the memory of the years from 1992 to 1996, when warlords held Kabul and did little else other than wreck it and fight among themselves. The Northern Alliance's fighters, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said last week, were responsible for "all kinds of atrocities. I think their return would mean a return to anarchy and criminal...