Republished from the comments, this letter sent to the Ottawa Sun:
'Bush-league' writingIt is impossible to take Michael Harris seriously as a writer on international affairs. In his column, "Bush-league warning" (Nov. 10), he writes of "the Kurds" and "the Arabs" as inhabitants of Afghanistan. Now there are Kurds and Arabs in Iraq. But in Afghanistan there is no significant resident population of Kurds (there may be some 25,000) or Arabs. Perhaps Mr Harris' remorseless opposition to what the US is doing in Iraq, and to what Canada is doing in Afghanistan, has led him to confuse the two countries.
A further indication of Mr Harris' unfamiliarity with the realities of Afghanistan is that, in his naming of various ethnic groups there, he omits the Hazaras and Tajiks--the largest groups after the Pushtuns (though it is not clear which of the two is more numerous in the absence of a recent census). In 1967 some 5,000 Tajiks apparently spoke a dialect of Arabic but even then the number of Arabic speakers was declining.
Mark
Ottawa
And lets not get started on Pakistan
Pashtun
Afghan
Kurd (I believe)
A state created, not unlike another one we know, as a homeland for those of a certain faith.
It is a very mixed area....
quite pathetic that this man's column get printed as valid commentary in newspapers. Does he get paid to write what is basically an name calling opinion piece ?
How does one get such a job, jazz up your biases with a bunch of inflamatory rhetoric and pass it off as insightful commentary.
How does he know what 'afghans want' ?
And in typical liberal blather there is no analysis of what comes after all the western forces retreat from both afghanistan and iraq. Oh, nothing to worry about here, if we just leave the war will be over...
And by the way, anyone who evens reads at all knows that most of the Afghan 'insurgency' is not made up of local Afghans but foreigners, initially
from Arabia, more recently places like Pakistan.
Don't even get me started on how we takes a swipe at our soldiers with this "burning their fields, destroying their homes, and killing their countrymen" nonsense, as if our soldiers are a bunch of raping pirates. What a pathetic asshole,
boy it sure takes a lot of courage to make hateful comments like that safe in protection of the west, the safety provide by the very people who have just denigrated. Bastard
There seems to be some difference of opinion on the presence of Kurds and Arabs in Afghanistan:
The Kurdish Diaspora:
Communities that have retained their languages and customs are present in Turcomenia (40,000), Azerbaijan (150,000), Armenia (45,000), in Georgia (60,000) Afghanistan (200,000), Lebanon (80,000).
As for Arabs:
Large groups of Sunni Arab living in the vicinity of Bokhara in Central Asia fled to northeastern Afghanistan following Russian conquests in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s they were, with the Uzbek with whom they established close ties, the second most populous ethnic group in present day Kunduz, Takhar and Baghlan provinces. Smaller groups settled in scattered communities as far west as Maimana, Faryab Province.
ALL journalists are know-nothing, liberal-brainwashed, bloviating blowhards, I repeat ALL JOURNALISTS.
Mark Steyn, Hugh Hewitt, et al. are NOT journalists.
DO NOT read any newspapers.
DO NOT listen or watch broadcast news.
The Web is just fine.
Stephen: Actually no Kurds in Pakistan. Main groups in order are:
www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/pk.html
"Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun (Pathan), Baloch [sic], Muhajir (immigrants from India at the time of partition and their descendants)"
Pustuns and Baluchs both live on both sides of border with Afstan (though the Baluch minority in Afstan is very small).
There is a growing insurgency in Baluchistan Province, Pakistan:
mondediplo.com/2006/10/05baluchistan
Mark
Ottawa
Stephen: The figure for 200,000 Kurds in Afstan comes from one Kurdish source and is simply repeated by many others. It is most unlikely to be true.
www.institutkurde.org/en/language/
If anyone has noticed these 200,000 Kurds around Kabul recently I would be amazed. This is a better source:
www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~siamakr/Kurdish/iran-lang.html
As for the Arabs, that was then. My source:
www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=abh
Mark
Ottawa
Thanks for highlighting this Kate.
Michael Harris is the most violently offensive Canadian MSM pinhead I am aware of today. Think of Jack Latyon but with a snarky, sarcastic tone.
On a positive note Toronto Sun guy Salim Mansur wrote an absolutely outstanding Remembrance Day column:
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2006/11/11/2314235.html
Mansur, a Muslim, who must take incredible abuse for his stance, is the anti-Harris.
Stephen: As for Arabs, you did not quote the second para at your source:
"The Arab are pastoralists who raise sheep and grow cotton and wheat. Some among the eastern groups make summer migrations of up to 300 kilometers to reach the lush high pastures in Badakhshan. Government development schemes, especially those which brought large numbers of Pushtun to the area in the 1940s, relegated the Arab to a small proportion of the population and the Arab ceased to hold a monopoly on long distance migration. Bilingual in Dari and Uzbeki, but speaking no Arabic, they continue to identify themselves as Arab although they have had no contact with the Arabs of the Middle East since the late fourteenth century."
In any case the numbers are small now and hardly justify Mr Harris' mentioning them.
Your source, the Library of Congress "Country Studies", also does not even mention Kurds as an ethnic group in Afstan.
countrystudies.us/afghanistan/index.htm
Mark
Ottawa
From The CIA World Factbook......
Pashtun 42%, Tajik 27%, Hazara 9%, Uzbek 9%, Aimak 4%, Turkmen 3%, Baloch 2%, other 4%
Mark Collins: Likewise some black Africans on Zanzibar, and of course in Darfur, Sudan, refer to themselves as 'Arab' as some kind of status symbol, although they are, (for the most part), indistinguishable from the other black Africans around them and hardly 'Arab' by definition.
Just to pile on Mr Harris, in his column he also mentions "the Serakshis, the Torbats" as peoples of Afstan.
Now Google reveals no Serakshis and I have certainly never heard of them. On the other hand Torbat is the name of a town in Afstan but I hardly think the residents qualify as an ethnic group.
www.travelpost.com/ME/Afghanistan/Kapisa/Torbat-e_Khvajeh_Saheb/map/4708886
There are also two Torbats in Iran, just to make things interesting.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Iran
Mark
Ottawa
Cross dressing lightweight, of course this "guy" gets to splain to regular Canadians how the world works.
The MSM is a joke, just like Harris's hair and POS. article!
Who pays these idiots?
In any case the numbers are small now and hardly justify Mr Harris' mentioning them.
So are you saying the Arabs aren't there, or that you don't consider them numerous enough to merit mention by Harris in his attempt to suggest the complexity of peoples and languages captured by the term 'Afghans'?
For what it's worth, this 2002 report from Human Rights Watch records abuses by militias against 'ethnic arabs' in Afghanistan:
Junbish forces [a predominantly Uzbek militia, led by Dostum] partially reoccupied Camp 65, a former military base, amid a heavy buildup of troops and military hardware by the rival parties in and around Mazar [-e-Sharif] in late April and early May. Internally displaced persons whose settlements lay close to the newly established Junbish base were forcibly evicted and their dwellings bulldozed, according to humanitarian aid workers and camp residents; the remains of their demolished homes were clearly visible when Human Rights Watch visited the camp in early June. Most of those who had been evicted-largely ethnic Arabs and Tajiks from Shiram in Sar-e Pul province-relocated on their own to the outskirts of the camp, at a site without easy access to water resources.
Oh yeah baby!
A "report" from Human Rights Watch...that'll be just full of FACTS and accurate analysis!!
MHUH.........