Dmitry Litvinovich: Pashtun tribe will not support Taliban

The Taliban are not doing very well. News agencies distributed the address of the Afghan tribal leader Hamid Karzai (the leader of the Pashtun tribe) to the world community.

Former deputy of the foreign minister of the Afghani government Karzai called upon the world community to render help to the population of Afghanistan in the struggle with the foreign mercenaries, with prime suspect’s gunmen first and foremost. “We think that our country must stop being a shelter for terrorists,” – Karzai claimed in his interview to the Pakistani Nation newspaper.

Hamid Karzai is one of the leaders of a tribe consisting of 500 thousand people; he has a significant authority among the Pashtun tribes. Karzai is considered to be the right hand of the former Afghani King Mohammad Zaher Shah. At the end of October, Karzai came back to Afghanistan , where he continued working on the unification of the anti-Taliban forces. The unification of the Pashtun tribes to struggle with the Taliban is not likely to happen, and the Taliban knows it. The Taliban has always tried to run a reasonable policy towards the Pashtun tribes during their ruling time. The ruling Afghan movement was planning to use the Pashtun tribes when the ground operation starts, which is 60% of the country’s population. Those people have good battle experience: neither the Soviet Union nor Great Britain could cope with them. The anti-Taliban coalition agrees if the Pashtun tribes take a neutral position.

Pashtun is the ethnic title of the Afghan people living on the territory of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their number totals eight million people; their religion is Islam.

Dmitry Litvinovich PRAVDA.Ru

Reuters photo: Ahmad Karzai reads a note handed to him during an interview in Quetta, November 3, 2001