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Afghanistan Army Tries to Attract Southern Pashtuns
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Recruiting in the Afghan army from predominantly Pastun areas in the south and southeast is way down, almost nonexistent. For Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Zabul, Paktika, and Ghazni provinves with largely Pashtun people, the numbers show they make up 17% of the population and contributed only 1.5% of new recruits to the army since 2009. Kandahar and Helmand with 2 millon people contributed about 1200 recruits, or less 1% of 173,000 new recrutis since 2009. The northern provinces make up a large number of the new recruits, with Kunduz having a population of 900,000 and contributing 16,500 recruits. There are about 42% Pastuns in the population and a similiar number of Pastuns in the Afghan army, but most are from the northern or northeastern provinces where the insurgency has been weaker. One third are from one northeastern province- Nangarhar. The reason for this is fear of the Taliban finding out that that a young man has enlisted in the south and retaliation against the enlistee or his family. The lack of a southern Pastun presence in the army makes the army more of a northern institution. With withdrawal of American and NATO forces by 2014, this leaves Afghanistan deeply divided between the northern and southern regions. The southern region Pastuns have a significant presence across the border in the northern part of Pakistan, and the southern Pastuns draw support and resources from this region. Removing the foreign presence shifts the balance towards the southern Pastuns and Pakistani Pastuns in the largely mountainous country of this region. This is why the project in Afghanistan requires the support of all factions and ethnic communities in the South Asian region to succeed, setting aside differences and animosities of the past. D. Mahmood Khan, a member of parliament in Kandahar says ordinary Afghans in Kandahar see the Afghan government of Karzai collapsing in a week or two without foreign support and sense a much stronger Taliban.
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Foreign Minister Qureshi at the Journal's offices in New York says it would mean the Pakistani Taliban would threaten Islamabad, there would be more misery, suicide bombings, and hurt the economy badly. But Qureshi speaks for an increasingly unpopular Zardari administration. The army, opposition parties, and the Intelligence agencies, and increasingly the public sentiment is against an expanded American presence in Afghanistan, or a bigger American footprint in Afghinstan and Pakistan. See Rosenberg in WSJ.
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Dexter Filkins points to another factor in Afghanistan. Not only is there a double game- see the link to Playing the Game- where the army, the ISI and many ordinary Muslims in Pakistan are sympathetic to fellow Muslims fighting the Americans, but there is a social change in process. This may be even more dangerous, as the British left a feudal order intact in Pakistan with a wealthy landholding class, In the Pathan or Pashtun countryside it was run through tribal elders called Maliks, in the Punjab the wealthy feudal landholding ran things pretty much the same way as the British did for the last 50 years. Dexter Filkins points to the crumbling of this structure in the Pathan (Pashtun) countryside.
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