Comparing The Civil War Between Tajiks And The Pashtuns

Ethnic tensions grow between the Pashtuns and the Tajiks over the control of power in the twentieth century. Prior to the twentieth century, Tajiks had no noticeable power in the modern history of Afghanistan. The first Tajik who fought and won a war against a Pashtun king was Habib Allah Kalakani. The war between the Tajiks and the Pashtuns created more ethnic animosities between the two largest minorities in the country. The killings of the entire Kalakani family and his relatives cruelly by the successor Pashtun king further alienated Pashtuns and Tajiks from one another. Furthermore, the civil war of the 1990s once again brought Tajiks and Pashtuns to fight over the control of power in the late twentieth century. The civil war of the 1990s was long and brutal ethnic conflict, which even further deepened the ethnic animosities among all ethnic groups in Afghanistan especially between the Tajiks and the Pashtuns. The tension over the 2014 presidential election created potentially explosive atmosphere between the Pashtuns and Tajiks close to the brink of another war between the two.

They mostly lived in the central region of Afghanistan. Hazaras were the most discriminated ethnicity among all other ethnic groups in the country due to governmental policies (Mousavi 1997, 160-63). They were discriminated indiscriminately by all ethnic groups but mostly by the Pashtuns since they were the power holders and the policy makers. In the late nineteen-century and early twentieth century, majority of the Hazaras were either killed or forcefully driven out of their hometowns from the central Afghanistan to different of regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan by Pashtun administrations (Kaker 2006, 136). Not even lower governmental positions were given to Hazaras before the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in the