AfghanWire Podcast #1
Around Afghanistan with Vanni Cappelli
March 5th-March 18th 2007
And finally, AfghanWire heard from Vanni Cappelli, a freelance journalist who has covered conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia since the early 1990s. He is a co-founder and the current president of the Afghanistan Foreign Press Association.
Vanni will speak to us each fortnight for the podcast in a regular slot entitled Around Afghanistan with Vanni Cappelli. He spoke from New York on the sociological implications of the campaign waged over the past few years against the tribal leadership and moderate government supporters in southern Afghanistan:
“The attempted assassination of Mullah Naqibullah last week is one more outrage in a pattern of targeted assassinations of leading Pashtun figures by the Taliban. As a political tactic, it is bound to backfire because it is against the spirit of Pashtunwali, which is of course essentially the code by which Pashtun life is ordered, though it is of course under assault from fundamentalist forces.
Politics in Afghanistan has traditionally varied between consensus, mediation, and warrior-style conflict, but assassination has not usually been a tactic in this. Historically, even deposed kings were exiled or blinded rather than being killed, though this of course included hesitation to kill people because of family considerations since rival kings were members of the same extended family.
The departure in this hesitancy to assassinate leading figures which is represented over the last five years or so by the assassination of Abdul Haq, Qari Baba, the former governor of Ghazni, governor Taniwal of Khost and a string of pro-Karzai clerics. This is a departure which as a terror tactic is bound to fail because the Pashtun with their fierce sense of nang, or honour, and the requirement of badal, revenge, are perhaps the hardest people on earth to intimidate.
It is hard to justify such targeted assassinations either under Pashtunwali or under Islamic considerations, even when one has distorted Islam, as fundamental Islamism does. This is proven by the fact that all reports are that Mullah Naqibullah is raring to take the fight to the Taliban as he never has before, when he recovers.
So, by being so egregious and taking this tactic which is so against the essential spirit of the Pashtun tribes, in my opinion the Taliban are engaging in a counter-productive activity.”
That’s all from us at AfghanWire. Remember to look out for the next podcast. Details will appear on the website at www.afghanwire.com. Until then, good bye.
AFGHANWIRE MEDIA BLOG
Sunday, 18 March 2007
