Ethnic Tajik, Marshal Fahim certainly means to run for presidency on an October 9 poll to make a formidable rival of the Pashtoon incumbent.
Another major political activist, Abdurashid Dustum, of the Uzbek stock, resigned from his post of presidential adviser for the same purpose on Friday. To this day, Dustum is regarded as leader of Afghan Turkestan, an area in the country's north with Tajik and Uzbek ethnic predominance. Mazar-i-Sharif is its central city.
Tomorrow is the deadline for presidential nominations.
General Dustum is amazing in his tenacious political longevity. He sought asylum in Turkey after an escape as the Taliban seized Mazar-i-Sharif late in the 1990s, soon to reappear in the Afghan north and lead ethnic Uzbek forces of the Northern Alliance. The general joined efforts with the U.S. as soon as it launched its anti-terror operation, and honorably contributed to the fall of the Moslem fundamentalist regime. He swore allegiance to U.S.-backed Hamid Karzai, and was amply rewarded by becoming a kind of autocrat in the country's north.
Ahmad Shah Massoud, Northern Alliance military leader, of Tajik ethnicity, was killed by Arab terrorists, September 9, 2001, two days before the appalling American tragedy-sinister symbolism! His assassins were presumably connected to Osama bin Laden. Marshal Fahim succeeded to the fallen warlord as Defense Minister in the internationally recognized Cabinet of Professor Burhaneddin Rabbani, and retained the portfolio as the Karzai government came to office after the Taliban overthrow.
The pro-Soviet regime of Najibullah, a Pashtoon, fell in 1992. President Sebqatullah Mojaddedi, ethnic Tajik, led a first mojaheddin government that violently replaced it, eventually to cede office to Rabbani, another Tajik. An ethnic political hierarchy that has emerged since gives a negligible chance for presidency to non-Pashtoons, who make 40 per cent of the Afghan population. However, ethnic Tajiks now account for 30 per cent of the nation, what with four to five million refugees-Pashtoon, for the most part-staying abroad to this day, mainly in the neighboring Iran and Pakistan. So the ethnic Tajik community is to reckon with, and we cannot rule out its member coming to the Afghan top.
