Professor Henry Srebrnik

Professor Henry Srebrnik

Monday, August 05, 2013

Multiethnic Afghanistan is at the Crossroads of Asia

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

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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