Pashtuns face post-Taliban anger

When Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim was nearly killed by an explosion in the Pashtun tribal area near Jalalabad earlier this week, tribesmen a hundred miles south could be found celebrating, with cups of tea and smiles all around.

"We don't know who did it, but it was the right idea," said a Pashtun tribal leader from the Khost region, who asked not to be named. "They [the Northern Alliance of which Fahim is a leader] have been killing and abusing our people since they swept into power in November."

Though Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, they have very little to cheer about in the new Afghanistan. Human rights abuses against Pashtuns, which a new Human Rights Watch report claims are taking place on a massive scale, could well undermine the traditional, clan-based system of government that is due to replace the fragile, Tajik-dominated government currently in power in Kabul. The report, which details abuses against Pashtuns across Afghanistan with a focus on the north, says it's "payback time" against the group, which provided most of the fighters and leaders of the radical Taliban movement.

"If northern Pashtuns are unable to take part in district or regional meetings to choose their representatives, then the validity of the entire loya jirga [national assembly] process will be called into question," claims the report by the New York- and London-based group. "The international community must act now to guarantee the security of northern Pashtuns and other local minorities across Afghanistan as the loya jirga process begins."

Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for the group, says that Afghanistan's three major non-Pashtun factions – the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, and especially the ethnic Hazaras, all of whom are major players in the nationally dominant Northern Alliance – were committing offenses against the Pashtuns. "We found case after case of beatings, looting, murders, extortion, and sexual violence against Pashtun communities," he says.

Several Pashtun subtribes held urgent meetings this week in eastern Afghanistan to decide on what they called "a military strategy" to fight back against perceived abuses by the Northern Alliance. "The NA is playing a dangerous game, it is dangerous both for the national interests of Afghanistan and the US campaign against the terrorist groups of Al Qaeda and Taliban," says Malik Mohammad Shah Zadran, chief of the Tribal Union of Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces.

Just a week earlier, more than a hundred Pashtun tribal leaders living in Kabul were rounded up by Northern Alliance officials in the ministries of interior and intelligence and accused of trying to kill their own ethnic compatriot, interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai.

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