Taliban criminal identy of the Pashtun, Pathan or Afghan
Taliban criminal identy of the Pashtun, Pathan or Afghan.
( This transcript may contain the paradigm for converting Taliban to Pakistanis and Afghanis.)
I was reading an excellent article on Informed Comment: Global Affairs
a remarkable Blog.
The article "Do Taliban Represent Pashtun Identity? A Letter from Kurram"
was very good and prompted my comment, "THEN WHY IS THE PAKISTAN ARMY TREATING THE TALIBAN WITH KID GLOVES?"
The following comments from Indigenous Pakis are educational and a view point I had been missing.
Transcript follows:
Anonymous said...
Hi,
I am absolutely certain that Taliban are Pashtons and they are truly and representing Pashtons identity. This thoroughly factual and no need for justification.
Amin
Scotland
January 10, 2008 6:00 AM
Mohammad Fahim Khairy said...
Maybe Taliban doesn't t representing Pashtun, Pathan or Afghan but whatsoever they do is based on Pashtonwali's law. After Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in just a few months. The first thing they did was to kill Dr. Najibullah. Then they invited their Pakistani, Arab, and Pashtun brothers to Kabul and gave these foreigners the most luxurious houses of Kabul located in Wazir Akbar Khan.
When the Taliban started invading the North in 1996, they burnt down houses, they raped women and girls, they killed men and boys, and they were planning to move Pashtuns from the South into the North so as to replace the original inhabitants of the North. The Taliban also attacked the Hazarajaat and they massacred thousands of Hazaras.
Instead of not hurting any Pashtun in north and central Afghanistan they gave them power, weapons, lands and money.
Gargaray Khan a Pashtun rebel, thief, and drug dealer who was a member of Junbish Mili Gen Dustom became the Taliban top commander in Mazar-I-sharif.
Gargaray with his bloodshed and robbery history started to rule the areas as an educated Islamic Clergy ''Mullah''.
Gargaray never went to school in his whole life even cannot read the Quran. There are other hundreds of illiterate and criminal Pashtuns whom gave power by the Taliban even former communists after they captured north cities and Kabul.
The world already understood who the Taliban is and what they want. They just started Sunni and Shia war in Pakistan to make a motive for transferring of thousands Pashtuns from Pakistan to Afghanistan because of the next election. So they can make more votes for the Pashtun future president of Afghanistan.
Why do they not go to Peshawar, Quetta and Islamabad etc, those cities are more peaceful than Afghanistan?
Now if they don't representing Pashtun why do they always supporting other Pashtuns with any politic ideologies? Shah Nawaz Tanai Ex Defense Minster of Communist regime is now on Taliban side.
Osama Ben Ladin use Islam as tools to empower Pan Arabism so do the Taliban, they empower Pan Pashtunism.
January 10, 2008 6:50 AM
Anonymous said...
Pashtons are dreaming and working hard to Afghanize(Pashtonize) all Afghanistan and the neibours accordingly ,but they hav been failed for decades.Now people of Afghanistan fed up and saden by the work of Pashtons(Afghans)People are struggling to find a new Afghanistan with a new vision of democracy and civil society.Not tribal kindgom!
January 10, 2008 6:57 AM
Daniel said...
I'm sorry I missed this post, as it was my question to Dr. Rubin that prompted the entry. I defer to Dr. Rubin of course, but note that Vali Nasr described the "Talibanization" as the "Islamization of Pathan nationalism. Selig Harrison has written about this as well http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/01/opinion/edharrison.php and quotes Afghan Ambassador Mahmud Ali Durrani as worrying publicly that "I hope the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism don't merge. If that happens, we've had it, and we're on the verge of that."
January 16, 2008 11:09 AM
gerald said...
Excellent posts.
Lot of food for thought.
Thanks
Gerald
January 16, 2008 11:21 AM
Anonymous said...
For the sake of argument…let us assume for a moment that there is a religious ideology behind the Taleban movement.. which sustains them. Then the question arises where does the motivation for that ideology comes from? ... Deobandi School of Thought? many others of the type, Paki state-funded mufties, and Paki State sponsored Mullahs? Where this religious ideology comes from? Do you know that all these things are not indigenous to the Pashtuns at all? Pashtuns being a proud nation with history going back thousand of years do not need a religious identity. In other words the use of religion as a means for acquiring political power either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan. In fact the crisis of identity is with the Panjabi state Pakistan..which needs religion to bind it together in the absence of any meaningful contract between the various groups for a collective well being of all its citizens. You remove that religious motivation and preach secularism for a while...and the phenomena of Talebanisation will recede automatically ..because it is superfluous, imposed and not indigenous to the Pashtun culture which offers a much better alternative identity.
The fact of matter is that Taleban were not a force/movement until they were given a political agenda, to control Afghanistan and marginalize the Pasthon nationalists in the context of Pak-Afghan relations. Which means that there is nothing religious about the Taleban, its the political agenda behind that facade which needs to be addressed / neutralized if there has to be a long lasting solution to the problem. The moment that political agenda is addressed, the Taleban phenomena will recede.
Regards,
a concern Pakhtun.
January 21, 2008 4:28 PM
gerald said...
First read: wow, excellent points, thank you.
One caveat, you must replace what ever it is they are getting from the Taliban, before they can shift.
Then they are trading for a know wanted quantity, not an un-known quantity.
Offering them an alternative isn't enough,
In Iraq once enough got to experience the new quantity, it became self converting, pro-Islam, anti-Terror.
Very insightful analysis.
Gerald
This transcript contains the paradigm for converting Taliban to Pakistanis and Afghanis.
After you feel you have a good grasp of the above concepts see " THE GREAT GAME"
Macro view of Taliban/Poshtoon Situation.
Omar fired who? B.M.
Taliban as Tribe
What next in South Waziristan?
Internet Anthropologist Team, Cyber warrior station..
.
posted by gerald at
1/22/2008 02:54:00 PM
READ MORE
READ OR SUBSCRIBE, Our WAR OSINT on Twitter
Tweet
4 Comments:
Pakhtun Concern, do you think the rest of Afghanistan is not Muslim? Non-Pashtun does not have any religious ideology? Brothers don’t hide the crime of Pashtunwali culture and don’t be ashamed of it
No one can’t marry a widowed after her husband dies and the only people she can get marry is her brother-in-laws no matter what age. This isn’t what Islam says to do. Its Pashtunwali laws. .
Thank you, I did not know that,
G
There’s clearly an array of powers at work creating the case right now for a war on the Pashtun tribal regions. These things don’t just happen in a vacuum. Wars seem to start with the careful choreography of the news media. The war masters, the maestros, start feeding their lap dogs, the press. The music is then played by the press for the rest of us to hear.
Notice how all the papers are beginning to play the same thing about the Afghan and Pakistan border? The theme of “lawless frontier” is being played every week. The sound drowns out the reality of a noble 5000 year old culture of some 27-million people.
We hear instead about the vilified denizens of a “lawless tribal frontier.”
What you missed it? Well, it’s only been playing for about two weeks. You need to tune in to the inside pages. The maestros have been composing for a while longer…. Their creative juices kicked in about the time Sen. Obama, answering one of those deadly sucker-punch sound bite questions showed us his war face telling us he would take action on “high-value terrorist targets" in Pakistan if President Pervez Musharraf "won't act.
That’s the sunshine it took to start the war-sap flowing. War-sap is sticky stuff, its residue has been known to encapsulate the creatures that get too near and preserve them there for posterity.
There is a legal system in place of course, in this lawless frontier. It’s been there for 5000 years. The Pashtun call the system the jirga. But its not part of the sharia law, it’s unique to the Pashtun and precedes Islam by thousands of years. But we don’t sing about that just now.
Please, I definitely don’t want the Pashtun to start signing their homeland song either. I don’t want to learn that an 1893 border line drawn with the blessing of Queen Victoria divided a group of mountain dwellers along the Afghan and Pakistan boarder in two.
I thought mountain ridges where proper borders. Everybody uses them. I just can’t handle the sound of another this-a-stan or that-a-stan popping up. So please, I don’t want to know about a Pashtunistan. And I definitely have no interest in anything 5000 years old, if it means Obama can catch Osama on good intelligence, bring it on! That should be Commander Obama’s war face call: “Bring it on!” Hmmmm, that sounds familiar.
What is this Pashtuni-whatever, Pashtunwahli, anyway?
They openly express somewhat defiantly, total cultural independence and have seen conquering armies and powers come and go through the millennia. Probably because of their original geographic high mountain foothold they could stand off vast armies with terrain advantage. Well it’s about time maybe for all that to stop.
And, how come they sound more like American cowboys than foreigners? Darn it, if we are going to start another little war, can’t we start it with some body that doesn’t live like my great, grandfather?
Setting aside the Pashtun mostly pray to the same God I do, grandpa did, and great grandpa too, how on earth did they adopt the same code as the old cowboy code of the west?
According to “lawless frontier” musical score, the first impressions I hear is Pashtun love rifles, chewing green tobacco, and appreciate a good sense of humor. So what's not to like? I can’t go to war on that.
If I fell out of the sky and landed in a group of people like that, I'd get along just fine, especially if I were being chased by the law. What they call Nanawateh we call asylum. Nanawateh is extended even to an enemy, just like the Cowboy Code of the Old West. Except if you are granted asylum (called Lokhay Warkawal) by the Pashtun elders as a group you're in like Flynn! They protect you even if it means forfeiting their own lives. Man that is lawless. Imagine a code of living where a principal was so honored, that it exceeded my duty to the state. Hmmm. Now that is lawless. Isn’t it?
Better to just seek hospitality, then they’ll treat you like a king, which makes me want to open a 5-Star hotel somewhere in the snowy peaks along the boarder if I can find a few acres for a ski-lift not planted in opium poppies, viewed on Google Earth satellite, not that anyone is actually checking the carefully cultivated fields above 6,000 feet along the borders. I would feel right at home there, not unlike parts of Tennessee or California.
Look at the forces arrayed here. My little fantasy war is going to happen.
The Democrats need to show they can be trusted with national defense again, be it Hillary or Obama. And McCain says fight to win.
The second verse of the song is still being written: Floating the contingency balloon. Up, up, and awa-a-a-ay, in my beautiful ball-o-o-o-on….
Obama or Hillary, or McCain get sworn in January 20, 2009. By mid June, whoever is President is going to make a push into the boarder regions the so-called "lawless frontier tribal zones” and “on good intelligence,” unless of course my leader does it first before June 20th. The operation will be Pakistan’s (well okay we’ll give them a few billion). It will be a fast coordinated air-ground attack with airborne US intelligence and lots of surrounding US air cover as a safety check to insure the operation stays within operational parameters. Pakistani’s will not go into Afghanistan and vice a versa. Meantime the Pakistan Navy will be backed up (some would say surrounded and outgunned) by the US Navy to keep a lid on the operation seeing to it they don’t launch an attack on India by Pakistan Islamic fundamentalist-leaning ground forces. We’ll hold India’s hand throughout the entire episode and offer security where needed.
Up, up and awa-a-a-ay in my beautiful …. This thing’s going to happen regardless of who wins.
You can’t deny the poetic justice in someone with a Muslim name (Obama) catching a renegade terrorist (Osama). Can you imagine the songs that we could write about that? To the tune of “Froggy went a courting.”
Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, uh-huh
Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, uh-huh
Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, he hunt Osama on the Mount
Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, un-huh. …..
The best time to wage this little war would be during the Chinese Olympics. China would likely remain quiet with their hands temporarily full with the Olympics.
So my fantasy, glorious, contingency war needs to be brief, violent, and force the Pashtun jurga to rethink their long term cultural interests. It needs to end with Osama in a holding tank, brought up on charges in the world court.
If it fails? Well what do you expect from the lawless tribal frontier area in Pakistan with questionable army allegiance? Corruption is everywhere.
I’d still like to open a 5-star hotel with some good ski-runs. You don’t suppose the opium production their so good at, has anything to do with the foolishness of some of our drug laws? Nah.
Victor Davis Hanson says you have to look at war with a long term perspective in order to understand its meaning. Long term is real long term. It may well turn out that while many say Bush's legacy must be a failure, history may have a completely different take on things, long after both you and I and our great grand children have come and gone. It may turn out, that doomed legacy of a Bush Presidency we hear so often this campaign-cycle ends up being written 1000 years from now as the President who started Islamic Reformation and brought freedoms that enabled thinking people to ask questions about religious practices that eventually changed the world and started the east and the west talking again.
Ritz. I like that franchise. A 5-star Ritz, mini-conference center. A Pashtun bag-piper paying my old favorite, “The Ass in the Graveyard” with double malt scotch, in the bracing night air.
Key paradigm:
Then they are trading for a know wanted quantity, not an un-known quantity.
Offering them an alternative isn't enough,
In Iraq once enough got to experience the new quantity, it became self converting, pro-Islam, anti-Terror.
G
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home