Word: shahs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...American presence is not just protection for the status quo," says a businessman. "We assume it will bring an improvement in the integrity of the government." From Washington's viewpoint, however, pushing Fahd and family down the fast track to Westernization and democratization is a likely prescription for a Shah [of Iran]-like disaster. Swift liberalizations could easily stir religious extremists to revolt. "If there's an internal threat to the kingdom," says a U.S. expert on Saudi Arabia, "it's from fundamentalists on the right, not liberalizers on the left...
...bias shown by the U.S. to Israel and because of America's cruel insistence on continued sanctions against Iraq. Plus, for historical reasons, Muslims and Arabs can always feel bitterness toward America: in the early 1950s, the CIA helped topple the elected government of Iran to reinstall the Shah. In the late 1980s, the U.S. left Afghanistan very messy after using it as a battleground against the Soviets...
Meanwhile, tribal chieftains such as Achakzai have their own game plan against the Taliban. In Quetta, the elders of the 23 million-strong Pashtun tribe, which is spread across western Pakistan and most of Afghanistan, are moving to bring back Mohammed Zahir Shah, the deposed Afghan King who is living in Rome. In high-walled and guarded villas, these elders receive a stream of whispering chieftains, Afghan ex-army generals, mujahedin commanders and Pakistani officials--all eager recruits for an uprising against the Taliban. "It's happening so fast," says Hamad Karzai, an influential Afghan Pashtun elder who is backing...
Bringing back the King has its drawbacks. Zahir Shah is 86, and many Afghans resent the fact that throughout the brutal war against the Soviets and the turmoil afterward, he remained aloof from their suffering, silent in his gilded exile. But already a groundswell for his return is growing among the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan along the frontier. Reports are sketchy, but in the southern Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika influential tribal elders are so worried about rising support for the King among their clansmen that they are threatening to burn down the houses of anyone caught switching...
Traditionally uneasy with one another, Islamabad and many of the fiercely independent tribal elders along the Afghan frontier are uniting behind Zahir Shah. Islamabad is aghast at the possibility that the Northern Alliance--backed by Iran and Pakistan's enemy, India--might actually topple the Taliban with U.S. military help. The clan chieftains agree for ethnic reasons: except for a few brief and violent intervals, the majority Pashtun tribes have always ruled Afghanistan, and they want to see that happen again. As a Pashtun, Zahir Shah fits the bill. The ethnic minorities of the Northern Alliance find him acceptable...