Pashtun Blues
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN: As a Pashtun from Kandahar, I feel that since the Karzai government has come to power my people have lost their dignity.
When the Taliban were in power, before the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan, I remember talking about politics with my friends.
We would ask ourselves how we could ever live a normal life with such a radical and isolationist government, and we struggled to find answers. In those days, I believed nothing would change in Afghanistan until the death of Mullah Omar. I never imagined that the Taliban could lose power so suddenly.
Even today, I cannot believe how fast we transitioned to a new government, and how much has changed in my country since then. But in spite of all the development and the reconstruction projects, I myself feel lonely. And many of my Pashtun brothers feel lonely too.
President Karzai is a Pashtun, but he is not a real Pashtun. He is a Westernized Pashtun, who has little credibility here in the South. Moreover, his government is dominated by Tajik and Uzbek warlords who committed many heinous crimes against the Pashtun people during Afghanistan’s long years of civil war. This is why so many Pashtuns today are joining the Taliban insurgency.
The only way the West can end the war in Afghanistan is to convince the Pashtun people that the world is not against them. But for this to happen, the Pashtun people need to see an Afghan government that truly represents them.
We don’t need sham elections. We need honest leaders who care about us. We don’t need war and Predator drones overhead. We need a serious commitment to peace and national reconciliation, and representatives in the Afghan government that know where we are coming from and the situation we are living in.