The murder of Afghanistan's Minister of Aviation by a mob (perhaps incited by members of Afghanistan's own interim administration) shows that Afghan society remains deeply fissured. The first reforms to Afghanistan's army will only make these divisions worse.
The Minister of Defense in Hamid Karzai's temporary administration in Kabul has already named the top officers of this new army. The Minister, General Mohammed Fahim, is a Tajik from the Panjshir district in the North, who rose three months ago to command the Northern Alliance forces that captured Kabul after American bombers cleared the way for them. As a group, his appointments pose a direct challenge to Mr. Karzai's goal of reunifying the country.
Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic nation, the largest group being Pashtuns, with two-fifths of the total. Hazaras and Tajiks constitute about a fifth each of the population. Of thirty-eight officers elevated to general's rank by Mr. Fahim, thirty-seven are Tajiks, the other being Uzbek. If any of the country's fifteen to seventeen million Pashtuns are recruited as soldiers, they will serve under a command structure made up almost entirely of Tajiks. The Pashtuns' language, however, is as different from Tajik as Spanish is from English and millions of Pashtuns of military age know only a smattering of Tajik, at best.
The geographical profile of the new military leadership is as narrow as its ethnic makeup. Thirty-five of the thirty-eight senior officers hail from one small area north of Kabul consisting of Parwan province (where the Bagram airport is located) and the nearby Panjshir valley, long the Northern Alliance's stronghold. Stated differently, potential leaders from twenty-seven of Afghanistan's twenty-nine provinces were excluded from their country's new military elite.
Perhaps so narrow-based a group could overcome the impression that its members are a closed clique if they represented a broad cross-section of the country's dozen or more political parties. But this is not the case. Eighteen of the thirty-eight top brass come from one party, the Jamiat-e-Islami, the Islamic faction that has long been led by mullah and former theology professor Burhanuddin Rabbani. It was this party that ruled Kabul briefly in the mid-1990s, creating the bloodshed and chaos that caused most Afghans to welcome the coming of the Taliban.
Almost equaling the number of Jamiat members in the army hierarchy are Communists. Sixteen of the thirty-eight have long been aligned with this party, whose ploys in the late 1970s led to the Soviet invasion of 1979-89 which cost two-and-a-half million Afghan lives. Most Afghans today view the Communists with the same degree of sympathy that Czechs or Poles reserve for Hitler's National Socialists.
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True, people in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, joined the Communist Party for various reasons, and by no means were all of them hard-core ideologues. But in the case of General Fahim's generals, six were professional Communist Party workers, and continued to serve the Party after the Red Army's invasion.
All six of these men, plus three more Communists who served as officers in the Afghan army, collaborated actively during the Soviet's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. Imagine how the French would have reacted if a quarter of France's post-World War II officer corps had sided with the Wehrmacht during its occupation of their country. In Afghanistan news travels quickly by word of mouth. Afghan nationalists (which includes nearly all Afghans) will soon discover the political backgrounds of members of General Fahim's inner circle, if they don't know already.
Even this overwhelming evidence of one-sidedness and bias in the formation of the new army's high command could be neutralized if the generals brought professionalism and commitment to the patriotic values of a truly national armed forces to their work. Unfortunately, only ten of the thirty-eight brass promoted by Fahim have backgrounds as professional military officers. An eleventh served as a pilot. By contrast, twenty-four of the total (the backgrounds of the remaining four are unknown) come from civilian life, whether the professions, Communist Party offices, or in one case, a career as a mullah.
What do all these statistics mean in terms of day-to-day reality? They mean that when the commanders of the international peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan, as well as American military and diplomatic officials, meet Afghanistan's Deputy Minister of Defense they will encounter Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notoriously brutal and corrupt warlord and Communist who keeps in touch with old Red Army friends still serving in Moscow. It means that the Chief of the Afghan Armed Forces, as well as the Chief of Operations and the Chief of Army Intelligence are also Communists, men whose loyalties remain uncertain and are distrusted by most Afghans.
Is this a team likely to bring war-torn Afghanistan together? Is the presence in Kabul of so dubious a crew likely to instill confidence in the three-quarters of Afghanistan's population who are shut out of the top army command? Or is this list, rather, the harvest of a "winner-take-all" approach to governance that is bound (at some future point) to unleash another bloody national backlash by those whose legitimate interests have been cynically trampled? UN, European, and American policymakers should ponder these questions before allowing themselves to acquiesce in a ruthless power grab by a small and unpopular minority.
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The murder of Afghanistan's Minister of Aviation by a mob (perhaps incited by members of Afghanistan's own interim administration) shows that Afghan society remains deeply fissured. The first reforms to Afghanistan's army will only make these divisions worse.
The Minister of Defense in Hamid Karzai's temporary administration in Kabul has already named the top officers of this new army. The Minister, General Mohammed Fahim, is a Tajik from the Panjshir district in the North, who rose three months ago to command the Northern Alliance forces that captured Kabul after American bombers cleared the way for them. As a group, his appointments pose a direct challenge to Mr. Karzai's goal of reunifying the country.
Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic nation, the largest group being Pashtuns, with two-fifths of the total. Hazaras and Tajiks constitute about a fifth each of the population. Of thirty-eight officers elevated to general's rank by Mr. Fahim, thirty-seven are Tajiks, the other being Uzbek. If any of the country's fifteen to seventeen million Pashtuns are recruited as soldiers, they will serve under a command structure made up almost entirely of Tajiks. The Pashtuns' language, however, is as different from Tajik as Spanish is from English and millions of Pashtuns of military age know only a smattering of Tajik, at best.
The geographical profile of the new military leadership is as narrow as its ethnic makeup. Thirty-five of the thirty-eight senior officers hail from one small area north of Kabul consisting of Parwan province (where the Bagram airport is located) and the nearby Panjshir valley, long the Northern Alliance's stronghold. Stated differently, potential leaders from twenty-seven of Afghanistan's twenty-nine provinces were excluded from their country's new military elite.
Perhaps so narrow-based a group could overcome the impression that its members are a closed clique if they represented a broad cross-section of the country's dozen or more political parties. But this is not the case. Eighteen of the thirty-eight top brass come from one party, the Jamiat-e-Islami, the Islamic faction that has long been led by mullah and former theology professor Burhanuddin Rabbani. It was this party that ruled Kabul briefly in the mid-1990s, creating the bloodshed and chaos that caused most Afghans to welcome the coming of the Taliban.
Almost equaling the number of Jamiat members in the army hierarchy are Communists. Sixteen of the thirty-eight have long been aligned with this party, whose ploys in the late 1970s led to the Soviet invasion of 1979-89 which cost two-and-a-half million Afghan lives. Most Afghans today view the Communists with the same degree of sympathy that Czechs or Poles reserve for Hitler's National Socialists.
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Project Syndicate is returning to Climate Week NYC with an even more expansive program. Join us live on September 22 as we welcome speakers from around the world at our studio in Manhattan to address critical dimensions of the climate debate.
Register Now
True, people in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, joined the Communist Party for various reasons, and by no means were all of them hard-core ideologues. But in the case of General Fahim's generals, six were professional Communist Party workers, and continued to serve the Party after the Red Army's invasion.
All six of these men, plus three more Communists who served as officers in the Afghan army, collaborated actively during the Soviet's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. Imagine how the French would have reacted if a quarter of France's post-World War II officer corps had sided with the Wehrmacht during its occupation of their country. In Afghanistan news travels quickly by word of mouth. Afghan nationalists (which includes nearly all Afghans) will soon discover the political backgrounds of members of General Fahim's inner circle, if they don't know already.
Even this overwhelming evidence of one-sidedness and bias in the formation of the new army's high command could be neutralized if the generals brought professionalism and commitment to the patriotic values of a truly national armed forces to their work. Unfortunately, only ten of the thirty-eight brass promoted by Fahim have backgrounds as professional military officers. An eleventh served as a pilot. By contrast, twenty-four of the total (the backgrounds of the remaining four are unknown) come from civilian life, whether the professions, Communist Party offices, or in one case, a career as a mullah.
What do all these statistics mean in terms of day-to-day reality? They mean that when the commanders of the international peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan, as well as American military and diplomatic officials, meet Afghanistan's Deputy Minister of Defense they will encounter Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notoriously brutal and corrupt warlord and Communist who keeps in touch with old Red Army friends still serving in Moscow. It means that the Chief of the Afghan Armed Forces, as well as the Chief of Operations and the Chief of Army Intelligence are also Communists, men whose loyalties remain uncertain and are distrusted by most Afghans.
Is this a team likely to bring war-torn Afghanistan together? Is the presence in Kabul of so dubious a crew likely to instill confidence in the three-quarters of Afghanistan's population who are shut out of the top army command? Or is this list, rather, the harvest of a "winner-take-all" approach to governance that is bound (at some future point) to unleash another bloody national backlash by those whose legitimate interests have been cynically trampled? UN, European, and American policymakers should ponder these questions before allowing themselves to acquiesce in a ruthless power grab by a small and unpopular minority.