1. Wajdi, Traditional Jirgas, 263. [BACK]

2. Ibid., 93, 98, 146, 151, 159. [BACK]

3. For details, see Sharq, Memoirs, 211-19. To make sure that the scheme was real, on 3 March 1993 I held a telephone conversation with the author, Dr. Mohammad Hassan Sharq, who now lives in Laguna Hills, California. He stuck to the words in his book on the subject and, further, disclosed for the first time the names of those “who, to defeat the mujahideen, split Afghanistan, and consolidate the Soviet order in Afghanistan, had undertaken to implement the scheme.” He named the following:

Najibullah and Sulaiman Laweq, for the Pashtun “nationality”;
Babrak Karmal, Najmuddin Kawyani, and Farid Mazdak, for the Tajik ``nationality'';
Sultan Ali Kishtmand and Nabi Zadah, for the Hazara ``nationality'';
Sayyed Ikram Paigeer and Abdur Rashid Dostum, for the Uzbek and Turkomen ``nationality'';
Sattar Purduli, for the Baluch “nationality.”

Under the Ministry of Tribes, Ministry of Nationalities, and later under a separate administration for northern Afghanistan, the Central Council for the Hazara Nationality, and the Central Council for Nomads, these men spent billions of afghanis free of state audit “to embroil the Pashtuns with the Tajiks, and the Uzbeks and the Hazaras with the Pashtuns.” They had a similar program for embroiling the Sunnis with the Shi’as. Sharq, Memoirs, 212. [BACK]

4. E. B. Taylor, quoted in Schusky and Culbert, Understanding Culture, 35. [BACK]

5. Sharq, Memoirs, 233. This reference is in the errata to the volume. [BACK]

6. Seeing no foreign soldiers fighting them but only the Afghans defending their land, the Central Asian soldiers of the Soviet Union not only did not war with the mujahideen but joined them. A group that had done so told them, “Since you fight well, go on fighting. We are with you. You should be grateful that you are free. Our fathers were also free. The Russians who invaded your land, had also invaded our fatherland. If you didn’t fight, your fatherland would become like our fatherland, and you would become as slaves as we have become. The Russians are in great difficulty; don’t shun resisting them” (Zadran, History of Afghanistan, 709-12). [BACK]