Afghanistan, as most readers know, comprises a number of
ethnic groups other than the Pashtuns, who make up about 45 per cent of the
country’s 30 million people and are the backbone of the Taliban.
Before 2001, while the Taliban were in power in Kabul and large
areas of the south and west, they never managed to control the regions where
the other ethnic groups live. The Hazara, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks, who together
account for another 48 per cent of the population, resisted Pashtun control
with their own military formation, the Northern Alliance.The Shi’a Muslim Hazara live mainly in the west, bordering Shi’a-majority Iran, while the other groups, mainly Turkic Sunni peoples (except for the Shi’a Tajiks, also of Iranian origin), are found in the borderlands next to the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Then there are the Kyrgyz, also aTurkic Sunni people, who have lived in the northeastern corner of the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow stretch sandwiched between some of the highest mountains in Asia. On maps, it looks like a tongue or panhandle between Pakistan in the south and Tajikistan in the north. It meets China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, also home to Kyrgyz and Tajiks as well as the Muslim Uyghurs, in the east.
A
geographical aberration, 210 kilometres long and
between 20 and 60 kilometres wide, the Wakhan Corridor belongs to
Afghanistan only because the British and Russian empires created it as a buffer
zone after fighting for influence in central Asia the mid-19th century in the
so-called Great Game.
The Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission awarded the
area to Afghanistan in 1895-1896. What is now Pakistan was within
British India, while Tajikistan, which had been part of a Muslim state, the
Emirate of Bukhara, had been conquered by tsarist Russia.People in the corridor suffer from a range of problems including poverty, ill health, lack of education, food insecurity and opium addiction, according to the United Nations.
In 1978, some three to five thousand ethnic Kyrgyz in the
corridor fled to Pakistan in the aftermath of a Communist regime coming to
power in Kabul, and only some 1,300 remain. The
corridor’s total population has been estimated at about 10,000, now mostly
Pamiris, a Shi’a group Iranian in origin and related to the Tajiks.
In the 1980s, when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the
Russians built a dirt road through part of the Wakhan Corridor, but it isn’t of
much use today. And while the Americans have poured tremendous sums of money
into the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, in an effort to win “the hearts and
minds” of Pashtuns and entice them away from the Taliban, in the Wakhan there’s
never been an insurgency, so it has been ignored. It’s too remote to matter.The part of the Wakhan Corridor that abuts China is 76 kilometres in width and includes the Wakhjir Pass crossing the Hindu Kush mountains at an elevation of more than 16,000 feet. In recent years, Afghanistan has asked China to open the border as an alternative supply route to help forces battling the Taliban.
In 2009 the Chinese Ministry of Defence constructed a new road
to within 10 kilometres of the frontier, for use by border guards. But the border itself remains
closed, partly because China fears it might lead to Uyghur separatists in
Xinjiang getting help from Muslims in Afghanistan.
Still, as western countries ready themselves to exit Afghanistan, China is
increasing its influence in the country. Its state-owned enterprises have made
billion dollar investments, including the acquisition of major oil and copper
mining concessions.China has also established security ties with Kabul. Last year Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Beijing, where he signed a bilateral “strategic and cooperative partnership” agreement.
The mountainous area at “the top of the world,” where the countries of east, central and south Asia meet, still remains a site of contestation between the great powers.
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