Afghan officials say that 17 soldiers from the Afghan National Army are dead today in the aftermath of a weekend incident in which Taliban forces ambushed a supply convoy in Badakhshan, in the nation’s far northeast, killing one soldier and capturing 22 others.
Tribal officials had been trying to negotiate the release of the captured soldiers, but eventually were only able to secure the release of 6 out of 22. The other 16 were executed and their bodies turned over to the tribal elders.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid confirmed the toll but disputed the account, claiming that all of the slain had died as a result of the ambush, and that their bodies were abandoned by other soldiers and simply returned by the Taliban. He says one wounded soldier was captured, but did not survive.
Badakhshan Province is a sparsely populated mountain region and has rarely been involved in the Afghan War in any significant way, with very little tradition of Taliban influence, even before the war.
To reach the ultimate conclusion of war — What this world is all about
Why is it that man, the most intelligent mammal on earth, is so morally imbecilic as to allow the highest court in the land, the ultimate decider of all things, to be a brutal, bloody and insane war?
To reach the ultimate conclusion of war — What this world is all about
Why is it that man, the most intelligent mammal on earth, is so morally imbecilic as to allow the highest court in the land, the ultimate decider of all things, to be a brutal, bloody and insane war?
When the British and Russians made Afghanistan into a country, it was a straightforward divide and conquer matter. They took Herat from Iran and the territory south of the ancient Oxus River away from the Turkmen, Uzbeks, and Tajiks. They made a place for all those who did not want to knuckle under to colonialism, gave them a place into which they could escape, so that the colonial armies did not have to fight the hard core. They divided the Pashtuns into three pieces, and one of these was still large enough to dominate the new Afghanistan. The king was always Pashtun. The British made this country wherein the least educated tribe would always be in charge, and gave them weapons to subdue the rest. The poor Hazaras in the central mountains were cut off from their Shia allies, so they have been severely reduced over time, many fled to Quetta.
This article is about Badakshan, and that province is almost totally Tajik, the ancestors of the ancient Persians. The Persian speaking Tajiks are the Afghans most likely to speak foreign languages, and they are the ones who most easily fall in with outside conquers, the ones who would most eagerly embrace secular democracy and industrialization. Most of the great empires of Central Asia have been formed by Turkish conquers, but their beaucracy spoke Persian. From talking with the Persian (Dhari or Pharsi) speaking population of Kabul, the European invaders always think that ruling Afghanistan is going to be a whole lot easier than it turns out to be. When the Taliban government had taken the whole of the country, at the end, just before 11 September 200, Badakshan and the Panjsheer Valley , were the only parts not under control of the Taliban.
Once you start talking about Taliban doing this and that, it becomes even sillier than it has long been to talk about this as a "Taliban" matter, as if that group of religious students still defines the resistance. That has long been a euphemism for a Pashtun tribal resistance. If there is resistance in Badakshan it has become a general rebellion, as anyone who knows the place knows that it eventually will become. This whole show is just another feeding frenzy for corporations and careers; the reasons for going in are a shallow fraud that nobody ever mentions. The Afghans were just to only ones who will still fight back, and what better opponent could be found who could so easily bring the feminists in hard square behind the war?