I have never heard of the Hazaras, and you learn something new every day. Perhaps they could be part of the solution of protecting the local populations in Afghanistan, instead of using Pashtuns exclusively? It sounds like the Hazaras care, and they certainly have the incentive. From the sounds of it, they have been crapped on for a long time in Afghanistan. They kind of remind me of the Kurds in Iraq. Great article, and worth the read. –Head Jundi
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Afghan National Police commander Muhammad Khan. Photograph by Louie Palu.
Letter from Pashmul
Policing Afghanistan
An ethnic-minority force enters a Taliban stronghold.
by Graeme Wood
December 8, 2008
In late 2007, in Pashmul, a tiny cluster of villages in southern Afghanistan, Muhammad Khan began his tenure as the police commander by torching all the hemp in a farmer’s field. Farmers in the area had grown plants up to seven feet tall, and, being teetotallers, like many Afghans, they smoked hashish constantly. Afghan soldiers and policemen in the area also smoked, to the exasperation of the NATO troops who were training them. But Khan wasn’t from Pashmul and he didn’t smoke. He ordered his men to set the harvest ablaze, moved upwind, then turned his back and left, with an expression of indifference.
Khan and his police officers are members of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, identifiable among Afghans because of their Asiatic features; the population they patrol is Pashtun. Hazaras are mostly Shia, with a history of ties to Iran, whereas most Pashtuns are Sunni and have turned to Pakistan for support. Over the past century, the two peoples have fought periodically, and the Hazaras, who are thought to make up between nine and nineteen per cent of Afghanistan’s population—the Pashtuns make up nearly half—have usually lost. On the border between the Hazara heartland, in the country’s mountainous and impoverished center, and the Pashtun plains in the south and east, conflicts over grazing land are common. But, working alongside NATO soldiers, Hazara police units are now operating far to the south of these traditional battlegrounds and deep into Pashtun territory.