Late last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced an invitation to to meet with militant leaders Mullah Mohammed Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.  He even stated that he is willing to travel to their location to see the insurgent leaders.  Heymatyar and Mohammed Omar have been among the top five in the U.S. intelligence community's list of enemy high value targets in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001.  The American State Department advised against such overtures, citing the two leaders as terrorists responsible for the deaths of countless Americans and Afghans.  Why is Karzai willing to negotiate with them and even offer them roles in the government?  As I wrote about last week, there have been significant setbacks in Afghanistan, which were compellingly demonstrated by a suicide bombing that killed 30 Afghans in Kabul the same day of Karzai's announcement.  How can any government reconstruct a shattered economy and stem out-of-control narcotics trafficking without even being able to prevent mass casualty attacks in its own capital?  More fundamentally, the Taliban is not only a religious movement.  It is also a political movement on behalf of a repressed ethnic group.

The Pashtun people are the largest ethnic and linguistic community of the ethnically diverse country. About half the population is Pashtun, and they are concentrated in the east and south, the former stronghold of the Taliban. The Dari-speaking Tajiks are the second-largest community, making up about a quarter of the population. The Tajiks account for most of the educated elite and possess substantial wealth. They wield considerable political influence, and are related to the inhabitants of the neighboring Tajikistan.

Tensions between the Pashtuns and Tajiks complicate efforts at multiethnic democracy. The Pashtuns are by far the largest ethnic group in the country, but their political and economic disenfranchisement threatens a backlash against the wealthier and more powerful Tajiks. At the same time, Tajiks, possibly threatened by such a prospect, may use their position of advantage to maintain their influence in Afghanistan. In fact, all of the minority races may still feel resentment and apprehension toward the Pashtun majority, from which the repressive Taliban regime was comprised.

About 11 percent of the population are Turkic, mostly Uzbek and Turkmen, who live in the northern plains as farmers and herders. These Turkic races are related to the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan that border the north of Afghanistan. Finally, the Hazara, a Mongoloid people of central Afghanistan, are a sufficiently large minority to wield noteworthy amounts of power.

A significant point about the Hazara is that they are part of the Shia sect of Islam, while the rest of the country is largely Sunni. The differences between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan do not seem to currently motivate the serious sorts of divisions that they do among Middle Eastern Muslims. In the time of the Taliban, the Hazara were particular targets of oppression, which Rory Stewart documented in his The Places in Between. Today, the Hazara area of the country is one of the most stable and free from violence. However, given historical Shia-Sunni tensions and the contemporary tensions elsewhere in the world, religious persecution of the Hazara minority remains a potential threat.

President Karzai's own ethnicity as a Pashtun has made it possible for him to be a "unity, not a divider" for Afghanistan.  The presidential election came down to the ethnic lines outlined by the four major ethnic groups I just overviewed.  The top four candidates were President Karzai, his leading opponent, ethnic Tajik Yunis Qanuni, the Hazara candidate Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, and the Uzbek general, Rashid Dostum. While there were many other candidates, only these four broke into double digits.  Of the four, Karzai was the only one to win significant numbers of votes in provinces not dominated by his own ethnicity.  It is uncertain whether Afghanistan would enjoy even the level of stability it has now if one of the ethnic minority leaders had won or if Karzai had not been able to reach out to minority groups for support.

Thus, the outreach to the Taliban extremists is about more than incorporating Islamist fundamentalism back into Afghan governance.  It is about providing a structure for underprivileged groups to have nonviolent ways to take part in the government.  Two of the most remote Pashtun provinces, Zabul and Oruzgan (where Taliban leader Mohammed Omar was born), had the lowest voter turnout levels in the country in the 2004 presidential election.  Thus, the historical marginalization of these tribal groups remains.  Karzai's outreach represents an important truth about Afghan politics.  The Taliban are more than a temporary radical regime.  They are an ethnic movement that taps certain needs of the society that must be addressed before a viable, sustainable democracy evolves.