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Chaos, terrorism and beyond: proposals for a diagnosis (June 2006)
I - CONCRETE CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES: EXAMPLES
1°) What is al-Qaeda ?
What is the real essence of the entity known as "Al-Qaeda"? Everyone knows that Ford is an industrial firm, the Democratic Party a political party and Citibank a bank - but what is Al-Qaeda? This is a core question that must be addressed and answered correctly. If not, then subsequent counter and anti-terrorism policies and action could be flawed and misdirected..
The U. S. government has consistently presented "al-Qaeda" as a formal structured organization with a hierarchical command. The U. S. makes frequent references to "al-Qaeda" "No. 2" and "No. 3". It notes that "two thirds" of its leadership has been "eliminated", which again suggests some sort of stable or permanent membership. This representations of "al-Qaeda" are reinforced and spread further by various "experts", who blithely estimate the "membership of al-Qaeda" at (for example) 1 200... It is, however, possible to prove that "al-Qaeda" is not an organization; to show that - to stick with terrorism - "al-Qaeda" is not a kind of ETA or IRA, only dedicated to Islamic militancy instead of being Roman Catholic.
Since the August 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, "al-Qaeda" has been the target of the most extensive law enforcement and intelligence dragnet in world history. Our data base indicates that some 7, 000 of its multinational membership have been arrested in more than 60 countries around the globe; themselves nationals from as many countries again, if not more. Moreover, hundreds of secret arrests or assassinations have been conducted in secret, especially in the Arab world.
It should be noted that all of the above took place before the Iraq war in spring 2003 and the subsequent attacks in:
2°) What use is compiling lists?
Outside the Western world, little utility is seen in applying the logic of compilation, that is, compiling lists of individuals and organizations that must be apprehended, killed or outlawed, to combat hostile terrorist or criminal entities today. In today's world, the enemy often has no fixed and definitive identity. Here, I will confine myself solely to Islamic terrorism. In this context, what is the first step to be taken to neutralize the worldwide jihadi current? It is to identify it. Straight off, let us note that:
- of fluid, protean, mutating, hybrid, kaleidoscopic - even headless - entities
- and of individuals who today emerge from traditional, pre-modern, clan-based or tribal societies, and whose identity is one of affiliation, elusive, fuzzy and variable: individual, true, but in no way personal. For instance: Ali bin-Muhammad al-Bagdadi, Ali son of Mohammed from Baghdad. Likewise for the entities in the sphere of Islamic terrorism. Here, for example, are a few generic names (i.e. "automobile" rather than "Ford") frequently found among both Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, which do not refer to any specific structure: Jihad al-islami: Islamic jihad - Hizb Allah: Party of God - Jamiat Islamiya: (or Jama'a, Gamaa, Jemaah, variations due to transcription) Islamic association - Ansar al-Islam: companions (of the Prophet) of Islam - Jund Allah: soldiers of God - Jund al-Islam: soldiers of Islam - Jaish-i-Muhammad: army of Mohammed - Jaish al-Islam: Army of Islam - Takfir wa'l Hijra: anathema and Hegira - Tawhid: unity, absolute monotheism.
In any case, the fact that these entities still appear in the US watch-lists shows undeniably that official America believes the identity of the entities or individuals they contain to be stable, durable and therefore exploitable; that it believes them to have a permanent name or a fixed identity, as in the Western society. Doing this, the logic of compilation perversely suggests that mobile and mutating individuals or entities are stable and identified once and for all. The whole conception behind this logic of compilation is mechanical and static - it prevents understanding the behavioural and temporal dimensions of these entities - thus, detecting any predictive symptom in a chaotic environment.
3°) Is the salafi-jihadi nebula religious, stable and rational?
At present, the dominant form of confrontation opposing the world superpower is a variable coalition of a few thousand, hardcore de-territorialized fanatics. These fanatics are convinced of their metaphysical legitimacy, the necessity of defending themselves from aggression - and that their cause is just and the work of God. They see the USA's attitude in Palestine or in Iraq as a real casus belli, a cause for making war.
But what role does the religious dimension of Islam, play in all this? This, we know since the 1950ies, when the German publicist and political theorist Carl Schmitt determined that any grouping, even religious, became political and polemical when it operated in the perspective of a major confrontation between terrestrial powers. Likewise, what the U. S. government calls "Al-Qaeda" is simply a political-military entity wrapped in an Islamic packaging, but with a political essence: "A religious community, a church, can ask a member of the faithful to die for his faith, to undergo martyrdom, but in order to achieve his own salvation only, and not for his religious community as an organized power in this world; otherwise, this religious community becomes a political organism; its holy wars and its crusades are, like other wars, enterprises founded on a decision of hostility". (Carl Schmitt, Le Nomos de la Terre, PUF, 2001).
But if the political nature of the salafi-jihadi current is hard to grasp, its behaviour, culture and modus operandi seems to be even more misunderstood by those who fight it, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Too often this current is seen as our mirror image, we see it as we would like it to be. However, this current is neither rational nor stable; quite the reverse; on the contrary, it is protean and magical and unlike our own, its intellectual landscape ignores management or marketing.
So, when official America talk about "Al-Qaeda" or the Iraqi insurgents, they suggest an I.R.A.-type organization, with an "Army council", a general staff, and Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi in the role of Officer-in-Command (O. C.) of the Baghdad Brigade. However, the jihadi current is anything but stable and rational. It is changeable, intermittent, chameleon-like. Even if Wahhabis and Salafists reject their Sufi heritage, a thousand years of secret or esoteric practices, invisible brotherhoods and unbreakable initiatory links (tariqas) have given these activists a talent for conspiracy, stealth and hiding their traces. In central Asia and the Caucasus, even Stalin's secret police never managed to dismember the tariqas, which emerged intact around 1990 after seven decades of state atheism, of gulag, torture and summary executions. And let us not forget that Ayman al-Zawahiri was an important Sufi sheik in his native Egypt.
Another example would be the Afghan islamic-tribal chaos, and the Pashtun warlord (from the Ghilzai tribe) Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. From June 1993 to June 1994, Hekmatyar was Prime Minister in Kabul. But, at the same time, his own militia, the Hizb e-Islami, allied to the Hizb e-Wahdat of the afghan-uzbek warlord Abdulrachid Dostom, besieged and bombarded... Kabul, seat of his own government. And Hekmatyar's incredible double-dealing in 1994 is not an isolated case in the region.
- From uncompromising Marxism-Leninism to the Taliban...2
In 1992, Shah Massoud seized Kabul. The Afghan communist regime collapsed. But what became then of the Pashtun generals of the former Afghan Red Army and the Afghan KGB, the KHAD, whether the Khalk fraction (pro-Chinese communist) or the Parcham wing (pro-Soviet)? From 1990 to 1992, these rigid Marxist-Leninists simply transferred their services to the rigidly Salafi Gulbuddin Hekmatyar... after growing their beards. For Pashtuns basically, in tough times, tribal brotherhood is a certitude - stronger even than a religion that often obsesses Westerners3.
Some examples:
- Former artillery commander-in-chief of the Afghan Red Army, general Shahnawaz Tanaï ended up alongside Hekmatyar in 1990 - and in 1995, fighting with the Taliban.
- The Taliban chief "Mullah Borjan" (now dead) is in fact the former communist general Turan Abdurrahman.
- Shah Sawar and Mohammed Akbar, heads of the Taliban intelligence service, are respectively former dignitaries of the Afghan Red Army intelligence and the KHAD.
- Mohammad Gilani, general in chief of the Taliban "air force", also came over from the Communist army. From 1991 to today, the mission of tracking Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar is entrusted to similar chameleons... Or these very same ones, with of course, a modest success...
- From uncompromising salafiya to doing business... with the enemy4
From 1996 to autumn 2001, the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanistan. Only two enclaves in the north of the country were outside their control, one Uzbek and the other Tajik, forming a rather shaky Northern Alliance. The Tajik redoubt was the Valley of Panshir, protected by high mountains breached only by a few gorges. The "bad" Taliban blockaded the "good" Tajiks, whose battle chieftain was the Western press icon Shah Massoud, with both sides apparently fighting a merciless war. However, throughout the entire "blockade", the Taliban supplied the Panshir through daily caravans of hundreds, even thousands, of donkeys, loaded with food, fuel, commodities and spare parts. All the witnesses confirm that it was neither a local initiative, nor a traffic carried out unbeknownst to the heads of the blockade, nor even a case of turning a blind eye: it was a sophisticated system. Each donkey was taxed 10 US dollars for each "round trip". The volume of business was so great that an admiring witness describes the Taliban as "business-friendly" ...
So, the money paid to the Northern Alliance ends up in part - naïve supporters and backers ignoring of course all of it - in the pockets of Mullah Omar and Bin Laden's "Arab-Afghans". Then when in October 2001 the USA launched its attack on Afghanistan and entrusted the task of capturing Bin Laden, Mullah Omah and the Taliban and "Al Qaeda" leadership to the Northern Alliance "freedom fighters", the hunt was a complete failure: does one betray an associate, an accomplice? Thus, focusing solely on terrorism within this chaotic/criminal magma, condemns us to understanding nothing at all about it. On the contrary, we must think about the terrorism/organized crime continuum together; we must not separate aspects of the same wide problem, as there is a real phenomenon of communicating vessels between the different players in this world chaos, these players:
II - DIAGNOSIS
1°) Terrorism : the proper conceptual frame
Today, as we have just seen, the conceptual frame of reference within which terrorism has been studied since its first appearance in the 19th century, namely that of terrorism itself, has become too narrow. Since the bipolar world order was swept aside, terrorism has mutated and to a great extent has moved outside the domain within which it used to be analyzed. The broader domain of the threats, criminal or otherwise, which now threaten human society appears to provide a more suitable framework for defining the extent of terrorism and our conception of what it is. Most of these threats and dangers will originate in lawless zones around the planet: failed States having plunged into temporary or permanent anarchy (Afghanistan, Albania, Liberia, Sierra Leone...); totally anarchic urban sprawls in the developing world (Karachi, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro...), covering thousands of square miles, where entire districts and suburbs are effectively under the control of organized criminal groups, terrorists, traffickers, etc.
1 On this point, see: "US defense spending: the wrong road to force transformation", Anthony Cordesman, The Financial Times, 18 February 2005.
2 On this point, see the interesting study on the "Turkistan Bülteni", 19/12/2001, by the Finnish researcher Anssi Kristian Kullberg, a renowned expert on Central Asia and Afghanistan.
3 This tribal reality also explains the support given, when humanly possible, to the Taliban by the Pakistani regime: in and around 2000, some 16 million "indigenous" Pashtuns were living in Pakistan, originally in the North-west border region, then joined by over 3 million refugee Afghan Pashtuns - in other words, there were more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan itself!
4 See "In conquered Kabul", Tim Judah, New York Review of Books, 20/12/2001.
I - CONCRETE CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES: EXAMPLES
1°) What is al-Qaeda ?
What is the real essence of the entity known as "Al-Qaeda"? Everyone knows that Ford is an industrial firm, the Democratic Party a political party and Citibank a bank - but what is Al-Qaeda? This is a core question that must be addressed and answered correctly. If not, then subsequent counter and anti-terrorism policies and action could be flawed and misdirected..
The U. S. government has consistently presented "al-Qaeda" as a formal structured organization with a hierarchical command. The U. S. makes frequent references to "al-Qaeda" "No. 2" and "No. 3". It notes that "two thirds" of its leadership has been "eliminated", which again suggests some sort of stable or permanent membership. This representations of "al-Qaeda" are reinforced and spread further by various "experts", who blithely estimate the "membership of al-Qaeda" at (for example) 1 200... It is, however, possible to prove that "al-Qaeda" is not an organization; to show that - to stick with terrorism - "al-Qaeda" is not a kind of ETA or IRA, only dedicated to Islamic militancy instead of being Roman Catholic.
Since the August 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, "al-Qaeda" has been the target of the most extensive law enforcement and intelligence dragnet in world history. Our data base indicates that some 7, 000 of its multinational membership have been arrested in more than 60 countries around the globe; themselves nationals from as many countries again, if not more. Moreover, hundreds of secret arrests or assassinations have been conducted in secret, especially in the Arab world.
| The worldwide freezing of "al-Qaeda" funds [Source: July 2003 report of the group of United Nations experts responsible for monitoring application of UN resolutions on the fight against terrorism] Since its first attacks in August 2001, 59.2 million dollars held by "al-Qaeda", by linked companies or entities, or by individuals identified as its "members", have been frozen or confiscated in one hundred and twenty-nine countries worldwide. 70% in Europe, Eurasia or North America, 21% in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Emirates, etc.); 8% in south-east Asia. |
It should be noted that all of the above took place before the Iraq war in spring 2003 and the subsequent attacks in:
- Riyadh (Saudi Arabia, May 2003, 35 killed; November 2003, 17 killed)
- Casablanca (Morocco, May 2003, 45 killed)
- Jakarta (Indonesia, August 2003, 12 killed)
- Istanbul (Turkey, November 2003, 69 killed)
- Madrid (Spain, March 2004, 202 killed)
- Taba (Egypt, october 2004, ± 35 killed)
- London (UK, july 2005, 58 killed)
- Charm el-Cheikh (Egypt, july 2005, ± 90 killed)
- Bali (Indonesia, october 2005, ± 30 killed)
- Amman (Jordan, november 2005, ± 60 killed)
- Dahab (Egypt, april 2006, ± 30 killed)
2°) What use is compiling lists?
Outside the Western world, little utility is seen in applying the logic of compilation, that is, compiling lists of individuals and organizations that must be apprehended, killed or outlawed, to combat hostile terrorist or criminal entities today. In today's world, the enemy often has no fixed and definitive identity. Here, I will confine myself solely to Islamic terrorism. In this context, what is the first step to be taken to neutralize the worldwide jihadi current? It is to identify it. Straight off, let us note that:
- Collecting information is not thinking: we cannot put together an effective strategy for combating terrorism or organized crime by simply collecting data (open or secret), even if it is then processed by computer.
This is because the basis for collecting this information - i.e. programming the computers - is not the essence of the entity being considered, but the prejudices of the programmers and the instructions they receive. Bold plans, sophisticated electronic systems, leading-edge investigative capacities are therefore useless if the thinking of the people devising or programming them is wrong or incorrect.1
Consider, for example, the "Echelon" network, which is said to be capable of intercepting millions of telephone calls, faxes and e-mails throughout the world every day. This computer network did not detect the planning and preparation for the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, simply because the keywords programmed into the system to trigger an alert were inadequate. In the phase of coalescence, when 12,000 to 15,000 Arab veterans battle-hardened by the Afghan jihad were creating their networks, the electronic devices did not pick up any firm indications that would have made it possible to stop the terrorists before they committed the September 2001 attacks. During this long preparatory phase, running from Bin Laden's declaration of war (August 23 1996) to 9/11 (that is, five years and one month, longer than the entire duration of the First World War), the huge electronic barrier that was supposed to protect the United States did not prove to be particularly useful. - The next dimension is time. Watch-lists, aimed at informing the officials involved, are updated according to the data collected, in other words, according to the news. But what we call news always lags behind reality. By its very nature, information is useless for anticipating events. For instance: in the real life, no proactive operation is based on news or on media reporting. Like traders at the stock exchange, when armies fight, they need data that is genuinely "real-time", a point that demonstrates that information on the one hand and real-time on the other have different chronological rhythms. From this standpoint, we can see how the paralyzing and inefficient logic of compilation inevitably puts anyone practicing it into the situation of a tourist planning a trip by consulting a guide that is already out of date.
- of fluid, protean, mutating, hybrid, kaleidoscopic - even headless - entities
- and of individuals who today emerge from traditional, pre-modern, clan-based or tribal societies, and whose identity is one of affiliation, elusive, fuzzy and variable: individual, true, but in no way personal. For instance: Ali bin-Muhammad al-Bagdadi, Ali son of Mohammed from Baghdad. Likewise for the entities in the sphere of Islamic terrorism. Here, for example, are a few generic names (i.e. "automobile" rather than "Ford") frequently found among both Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, which do not refer to any specific structure: Jihad al-islami: Islamic jihad - Hizb Allah: Party of God - Jamiat Islamiya: (or Jama'a, Gamaa, Jemaah, variations due to transcription) Islamic association - Ansar al-Islam: companions (of the Prophet) of Islam - Jund Allah: soldiers of God - Jund al-Islam: soldiers of Islam - Jaish-i-Muhammad: army of Mohammed - Jaish al-Islam: Army of Islam - Takfir wa'l Hijra: anathema and Hegira - Tawhid: unity, absolute monotheism.
In any case, the fact that these entities still appear in the US watch-lists shows undeniably that official America believes the identity of the entities or individuals they contain to be stable, durable and therefore exploitable; that it believes them to have a permanent name or a fixed identity, as in the Western society. Doing this, the logic of compilation perversely suggests that mobile and mutating individuals or entities are stable and identified once and for all. The whole conception behind this logic of compilation is mechanical and static - it prevents understanding the behavioural and temporal dimensions of these entities - thus, detecting any predictive symptom in a chaotic environment.
3°) Is the salafi-jihadi nebula religious, stable and rational?
At present, the dominant form of confrontation opposing the world superpower is a variable coalition of a few thousand, hardcore de-territorialized fanatics. These fanatics are convinced of their metaphysical legitimacy, the necessity of defending themselves from aggression - and that their cause is just and the work of God. They see the USA's attitude in Palestine or in Iraq as a real casus belli, a cause for making war.
But what role does the religious dimension of Islam, play in all this? This, we know since the 1950ies, when the German publicist and political theorist Carl Schmitt determined that any grouping, even religious, became political and polemical when it operated in the perspective of a major confrontation between terrestrial powers. Likewise, what the U. S. government calls "Al-Qaeda" is simply a political-military entity wrapped in an Islamic packaging, but with a political essence: "A religious community, a church, can ask a member of the faithful to die for his faith, to undergo martyrdom, but in order to achieve his own salvation only, and not for his religious community as an organized power in this world; otherwise, this religious community becomes a political organism; its holy wars and its crusades are, like other wars, enterprises founded on a decision of hostility". (Carl Schmitt, Le Nomos de la Terre, PUF, 2001).
But if the political nature of the salafi-jihadi current is hard to grasp, its behaviour, culture and modus operandi seems to be even more misunderstood by those who fight it, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Too often this current is seen as our mirror image, we see it as we would like it to be. However, this current is neither rational nor stable; quite the reverse; on the contrary, it is protean and magical and unlike our own, its intellectual landscape ignores management or marketing.
So, when official America talk about "Al-Qaeda" or the Iraqi insurgents, they suggest an I.R.A.-type organization, with an "Army council", a general staff, and Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi in the role of Officer-in-Command (O. C.) of the Baghdad Brigade. However, the jihadi current is anything but stable and rational. It is changeable, intermittent, chameleon-like. Even if Wahhabis and Salafists reject their Sufi heritage, a thousand years of secret or esoteric practices, invisible brotherhoods and unbreakable initiatory links (tariqas) have given these activists a talent for conspiracy, stealth and hiding their traces. In central Asia and the Caucasus, even Stalin's secret police never managed to dismember the tariqas, which emerged intact around 1990 after seven decades of state atheism, of gulag, torture and summary executions. And let us not forget that Ayman al-Zawahiri was an important Sufi sheik in his native Egypt.
Another example would be the Afghan islamic-tribal chaos, and the Pashtun warlord (from the Ghilzai tribe) Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. From June 1993 to June 1994, Hekmatyar was Prime Minister in Kabul. But, at the same time, his own militia, the Hizb e-Islami, allied to the Hizb e-Wahdat of the afghan-uzbek warlord Abdulrachid Dostom, besieged and bombarded... Kabul, seat of his own government. And Hekmatyar's incredible double-dealing in 1994 is not an isolated case in the region.
- From uncompromising Marxism-Leninism to the Taliban...2
In 1992, Shah Massoud seized Kabul. The Afghan communist regime collapsed. But what became then of the Pashtun generals of the former Afghan Red Army and the Afghan KGB, the KHAD, whether the Khalk fraction (pro-Chinese communist) or the Parcham wing (pro-Soviet)? From 1990 to 1992, these rigid Marxist-Leninists simply transferred their services to the rigidly Salafi Gulbuddin Hekmatyar... after growing their beards. For Pashtuns basically, in tough times, tribal brotherhood is a certitude - stronger even than a religion that often obsesses Westerners3.
Some examples:
- Former artillery commander-in-chief of the Afghan Red Army, general Shahnawaz Tanaï ended up alongside Hekmatyar in 1990 - and in 1995, fighting with the Taliban.
- The Taliban chief "Mullah Borjan" (now dead) is in fact the former communist general Turan Abdurrahman.
- Shah Sawar and Mohammed Akbar, heads of the Taliban intelligence service, are respectively former dignitaries of the Afghan Red Army intelligence and the KHAD.
- Mohammad Gilani, general in chief of the Taliban "air force", also came over from the Communist army. From 1991 to today, the mission of tracking Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar is entrusted to similar chameleons... Or these very same ones, with of course, a modest success...
- From uncompromising salafiya to doing business... with the enemy4
From 1996 to autumn 2001, the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanistan. Only two enclaves in the north of the country were outside their control, one Uzbek and the other Tajik, forming a rather shaky Northern Alliance. The Tajik redoubt was the Valley of Panshir, protected by high mountains breached only by a few gorges. The "bad" Taliban blockaded the "good" Tajiks, whose battle chieftain was the Western press icon Shah Massoud, with both sides apparently fighting a merciless war. However, throughout the entire "blockade", the Taliban supplied the Panshir through daily caravans of hundreds, even thousands, of donkeys, loaded with food, fuel, commodities and spare parts. All the witnesses confirm that it was neither a local initiative, nor a traffic carried out unbeknownst to the heads of the blockade, nor even a case of turning a blind eye: it was a sophisticated system. Each donkey was taxed 10 US dollars for each "round trip". The volume of business was so great that an admiring witness describes the Taliban as "business-friendly" ...
So, the money paid to the Northern Alliance ends up in part - naïve supporters and backers ignoring of course all of it - in the pockets of Mullah Omar and Bin Laden's "Arab-Afghans". Then when in October 2001 the USA launched its attack on Afghanistan and entrusted the task of capturing Bin Laden, Mullah Omah and the Taliban and "Al Qaeda" leadership to the Northern Alliance "freedom fighters", the hunt was a complete failure: does one betray an associate, an accomplice? Thus, focusing solely on terrorism within this chaotic/criminal magma, condemns us to understanding nothing at all about it. On the contrary, we must think about the terrorism/organized crime continuum together; we must not separate aspects of the same wide problem, as there is a real phenomenon of communicating vessels between the different players in this world chaos, these players:
- having common harmonies
- frequenting common lands and territories
- having a common (submerged) economy
- offering real opportunities for symbiosis, despite having different biological systems.
II - DIAGNOSIS
1°) Terrorism : the proper conceptual frame
Today, as we have just seen, the conceptual frame of reference within which terrorism has been studied since its first appearance in the 19th century, namely that of terrorism itself, has become too narrow. Since the bipolar world order was swept aside, terrorism has mutated and to a great extent has moved outside the domain within which it used to be analyzed. The broader domain of the threats, criminal or otherwise, which now threaten human society appears to provide a more suitable framework for defining the extent of terrorism and our conception of what it is. Most of these threats and dangers will originate in lawless zones around the planet: failed States having plunged into temporary or permanent anarchy (Afghanistan, Albania, Liberia, Sierra Leone...); totally anarchic urban sprawls in the developing world (Karachi, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro...), covering thousands of square miles, where entire districts and suburbs are effectively under the control of organized criminal groups, terrorists, traffickers, etc.
1 On this point, see: "US defense spending: the wrong road to force transformation", Anthony Cordesman, The Financial Times, 18 February 2005.
2 On this point, see the interesting study on the "Turkistan Bülteni", 19/12/2001, by the Finnish researcher Anssi Kristian Kullberg, a renowned expert on Central Asia and Afghanistan.
3 This tribal reality also explains the support given, when humanly possible, to the Taliban by the Pakistani regime: in and around 2000, some 16 million "indigenous" Pashtuns were living in Pakistan, originally in the North-west border region, then joined by over 3 million refugee Afghan Pashtuns - in other words, there were more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan itself!
4 See "In conquered Kabul", Tim Judah, New York Review of Books, 20/12/2001.