the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

“No!” several men shouted, not unless Karzai reversed his decision.
“You are the president,” one elder said. “You can do it. You should
do it for us. Otherwise we will not support you.”
After another lunch, with elders from Uruzgan Province, Karzai
showed what he really believed in—Afghan unity. He wanted people to
consider themselves Afghans rst, not Pashtuns, Tajiks, or the other
major ethnic groups of Hazaras and Uzbeks. He called me to the front
of the room as a stage prop.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Please come up here.”
Karzai always called me “ma’am.” I don’t know that he knew my
name. He pointed to four elders from one Uruzgan district and asked
me to identify their ethnicity. I was being set up, but I played along.
“Pashtun?” I said. This made him happy because he could deliver his
punch line. They were Pashtuns and Hazaras, he said, but they were all
Afghans, men who lived side by side in peace, sharing the Pashto
language.
“That’s how good this country was,” Karzai said. “That’s how we
want to make it again.”
Performance over, I returned to my seat. But this idea of unity was
not enough to save Afghanistan—not when Afghans still referred to
themselves largely by ethnic group, not when the Pashtun-dominated
Taliban insurgency was making inroads down south, and not when the
Tajik-led Northern Alliance was accused of organizing the Kabul riots.
No ethnic group held a clear majority in Afghanistan, even though the
Pashtuns had run the show for almost three hundred years, a fact that
had fueled resentment and rivalries. About 42 percent of Afghans were
Pashtuns, mainly in the south, southwest, and east; about 27 percent of
Afghans were Tajiks, mainly in the north; about 9 percent were
Hazaras, mainly in central Afghanistan; about 9 percent were Uzbeks,
mainly in the north; and the rest of the population was spread among
smaller ethnic groups like the Aimak, Turkmen, and Baloch. (Those
numbers, of course, were hotly disputed, each Afghan ethnic group
always claiming a bigger pie piece. There had never been a census.)
To show who was boss, Karzai, a Pashtun, needed to do something
more than an Afghan version of Free to Be … You and Me. He needed
to take charge, to stop making excuses, to stop blaming the foreigners
for everything. In short, he needed to man up.