Afghanistan, July 12 — Afghanistan's Pashtuns, the country's dominant ethnic group, say they are beginning to lose faith in President Hamid Karzai and to fear that the U.S. military campaign here is working against them.
As recently as a month ago, Pashtuns still had high hopes for Karzai, a Pashtun tribal elder, and the U.S. forces backing him. After his election by a national assembly, they expected that he would make far-reaching changes, work closely with Afghanistan's Pashtun former monarch, reduce the power of regional warlords and build a new government that reflected Pashtuns' numerical strength.
Instead, many say they are becoming rapidly disillusioned by a series of developments that have reinforced the power of rival ethnic Tajiks and militia leaders, left the former king politically sidelined and a Pashtun vice president assassinated, and subjected Pashtun villages to lethal U.S. air attacks.
Reacting to a U.S. airstrike last week that left approximately 48 civilians dead in Uruzgan province, the Pashtun governors of six southern provinces announced today that they would no longer support American air attacks unless their permission was sought first and that future U.S. ground attacks would have to include Afghan troops from a new rapid-reaction force.
Recent events, none of which is ostensibly connected, add up to create in many Pashtuns' minds a deepening conviction that Karzai is not able to protect the political interests or physical safety of his own ethnic group, despite an expected boost in legitimacy and muscle following his landslide election at the national assembly, or loya jirga, in mid-June.
"After a new start, people are very sad and disappointed," said Ahmed Gailani, a senior Pashtun tribal and religious leader from eastern Afghanistan. "We were all hoping for a more professional and ethnically balanced cabinet, but there is very little difference. And when a government shows it is not capable of protecting its own ministers, what expectations can we have?"
Ghulam Gul, a Pashtun medical student at Kabul University, said that his hopes for Karzai's new government were "decreasing day by day" and that the July 6 assassination of Vice President Abdul Qadir has "placed a huge stone on the path to national unity. An atmosphere of mistrust is growing, and I think the stone will become very difficult to remove."
Meanwhile, the deadly U.S. airstrike on several Pashtun villages in rural Uruzgan province July 1 has sharpened a growing belief among Pashtuns and other Afghan groups that the anti-terrorism agenda driving the U.S. military campaign is working at cross-purposes with Afghans' desires to build a secure and stable nation.
Mohammed Noorzai, the new minister for tribal and border affairs, visited the attack site last week with U.S. military officials. He said that he assured the angry inhabitants that there would be no repeat of the incident and that the Americans promised to help build schools, roads and bridges in the isolated, impoverished area. But regional officials have continued to vent their anger over the airstrike.
Nationally, concern about the impact of U.S. military strategy on Afghan politics has been building for months, as controversial militia leaders in several provinces, adopting new anti-terrorist postures and in some cases receiving U.S. military assistance, have rebuilt autonomous regional empires and played an increasingly high-profile role in national politics as well.
"The warlords were finished, but now they are being revived with American help," said a former Afghan army general who is an ethnic Pashtun. "The Americans wanted to use them in the fight against terrorism, but they have failed to capture the Taliban or al Qaeda leaders, while alienating the populace by making the warlords stronger."
In Washington, the White House's special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, said this week: "We do not want Afghanistan to go back to warlordism. . . . The question is, what do you do about it?"
His answer was that "maybe some of the people that we call regional leaders might integrate" eventually into a national system. "This is going to be nation-building," he warned at a conference on Afghan policy. "It's tough. It takes a lot of work."
Khalilzad said the Bush administration views recent trends in Afghanistan as fundamentally positive. "We recognize the problems that Afghanistan has . . . but we are, as they say diplomatically, cautiously optimistic," he remarked.
Pashtuns also have been angered and dismayed by Karzai's repeated political concessions to ethnic Tajik groups since winning the presidency, particularly to former militia leaders from Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley who have been given key roles in his new cabinet and continue to dominate the country's powerful security forces.
Pashtuns account for nearly half the Afghan population and have traditionally ruled the ethnically diverse country, while minority Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and other smaller groups have been largely limited to regional power roles.
The defeat of the Islamic Taliban movement late last year by Afghan opposition forces with U.S.-led military support, however, brought new domestic and international clout to the Panjshiri-led militias of the Northern Alliance, which occupied Kabul in November and were assigned prominent government posts a month later by the United Nations in an interim coalition government headed by Karzai.
Pashtuns widely expected Karzai to shift the balance of power after he was elected president in June and to give the former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, a prominent national role. Instead, he dismayed and angered many supporters by appointing key Panjshiris to powerful posts, including defense minister and special security adviser, while signing onto a U.S.-backed political maneuver that ensured Zahir Shah would not be tempted to challenge him.
One Pashtun minister noted that the Panjshiris exercise so much political and military influence largely as a result of their cooperation with U.S. forces in toppling the Taliban. "The Americans made them strong, and only the Americans can make them weak again," he said.
Karzai has acknowledged that he had to make numerous political compromises in selecting a cabinet, and his aides say the fledgling government, which lacks the mandate of popular elections and has just begun to train a multi-ethnic national army, cannot yet make decisions and appointments without taking into account the demands of powerful former militia leaders.
One of Karzai's most high-profile political gestures to ethnic Pashtuns was the double appointment last month of Qadir, 48, as a vice president and minister of public works. A widely known two-time governor of Nangahar province, Qadir was respected by the Tajiks for his exploits as a militia commander in the anti-Soviet resistance.
But in another sense, officials said, Qadir was a high-risk choice for a prominent government role. His controversial past also included violent disputes with relatives, unsavory associations with drug smugglers, armed rivalries with other regional militias and a notorious incident in 1996 that involved tit-for-tat executions of commanders within his political faction.
Indeed, officials and other knowledgeable Afghans said, Qadir had so many personal, political and business enemies that virtually anyone could have been behind his killing. The government's best guess so far is that the slaying was the work of local political rivals, working with drug dealers angry at Qadir's support for a program to eradicate opium poppies.
Ultimately, the truth about Qadir's killing may not matter. To disgruntled Pashtuns, the unsolved slaying has only added to a growing list of grievances that are beginning to rob Karzai of crucial support from his own ethnic group, and U.S. military forces here of an important Afghan ally.
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.
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