PESHAWAR: A few miles outside Kandahar, the southern Afghan desert city that is the spiritual and administrative centre of the Taliban, lies the shrine of Ahmad Shah Durrani. He is the king who in the mid-eighteenth century first imposed some kind of unity on the disparate tribes of what was to become Afghanistan.

For centuries waves of conquest had washed over the region, leaving the genes of dozens of races but no sense of unity. Instead, in addition to stunning ruins, the main legacy of the Greeks, the Ghaznavid Turks, the Mongols, the Mughals and the Persians was a bewildering variety of ethnic, cultural and religious groups.

Durrani’s first success was to unite his own tribes - the Pashtuns (or Pathans as Rudyard Kipling called them) who lived in the south and east of what was to become his empire. That done, he set about conquering more territory. By the time he died he had conquered Kabul, the high central city that was famed for its melons, climate and trade, and set up a rudimentary administration. Over the next two centuries his descendants expanded the empire’s territory. They pushed up to the Oxus river in the north, the Persian empire to the west, and fought the Sikhs, and then the British, in the east.

But though the conquests brought riches, they also brought grave problems. Much of the territory the Durrani Pashtuns added to their empire was populated by other ethnic groups - closer to the Turks or the Persians than to the Aryan-descended Pashtuns, and often Shias unlike the Sunni Pashtuns. Few of the new subjects spoke Pashto - the Pashtun language - preferring Dari, a version of Persian, or Turkic dialects instead. They did not want to be governed by Pashtuns then and they do not now.

After two failed campaigns to subdue the Afghan kings and in effect turn them into vassals of the Raj, the British gave up. The Russians, who had also failed to establish their influence over Kabul, gave up too. Moscow and London concluded a non-aggression pact and agreed the bounds of modern-day Afghanistan.

In half of the country Pashtuns predominated and supported their tribal kinsmen on the throne; in the rest dozens of ethnic groups vied with them, and each other, for autonomy and power. In many ways, the opposition forces battling the Taliban are the latest incarnation of the guerrilla bandits who have resisted the Pashtun hegemony for 250 years. As in the time of Ahmed Shah Durrani, they are spread in a broad arc from the western city of Herat across to the far north-eastern corner of the country. Each has its own militia army and its own commanders.

There are the Uzbeks, of Turkic descent, who are largely loyal to General Abdul Rasheed Dostum. There are the Tajiks, of predominantly Persian descent, who themselves are split into a variety of sub-groupings. They were held together by guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud who was assassinated on the eve of the Sept 11 attack but are now less solidly behind his successor, General Fahim. And then there are the Hazaras, who are Shias of Mongol stock based in the highlands of the centre of the country.

Together these groups populate about a third of Afghanistan and comprise 40-50 per cent of the population. In the absence of a decent census for decades, no one knows the precise demography. The Taliban are, in many ways, the latest incarnation of aggressive Pashtun empire-building. Their higher command, and most of their footsoldiers, are drawn exclusively from the southern and eastern Pashtun tribes.

But even with the heirs to Durrani’s empire there are divisions. Some are long-standing - such as the rivalry between southern Pashtuns (the Durrani clans) and the eastern Ghilzai Pashtun clans (often known as Pakhtuns because of their harsher pronunciation of the rough-edged Pashto language). Other fractures are more recent. There are splits between different Pashtoon groups who fought for different factions against the Soviet forces and still bear grudges.

There are divisions within the groups, Pashtun or otherwise, who sided with one or other Soviet-backed Marxist groups when, in the late Seventies, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan split into ‘Khalqis’ and ‘Parchamis’. There are splits between the relatively urbanized Pashtuns in Jalalabad and Kabul and the more rootsy Pashtuns of Kandahar or the remote villages. There are different degrees of religious observance and belief too.

And personal allegiances play a major role too. Many Afghan fighters’ primary loyalty is to their commander, whichever side he is on, as long as he keeps them paid and supplied with enough flat bread, mutton and tea to keep them marching over Afghanistan’s desiccated hills. Some Pashtuns - those attached to the group founded by academic Professor Abdul Rasul Abu Sayyaf - are even fighting for the opposition.

“You can rent Afghanistan,” one commander said last week, ”but you can’t buy it.” All last week, in large houses in the wealthy Peshawar suburb of Hyatabad or in sweaty, small rooms in the rubbish-strewn alleys of the refugee camps, Afghan commanders were talking to each other. From Dubai, Rome, Paris, America, all the old leaders of Afghanistan’s various militias had returned and were holding court. Abdul Haq, rotund and avuncular; Qazi Amin Wakol, sharp-eyed and bearded; the smooth, elegant, effortlessly superior Pir Ahmed Shah Gilani; the slim-handed francophone Haji Zarman - all greeted the men who came to see them, listened to their pledges of support and made offers and counter-offers.

On two things they all agreed: first, that the American air strikes had made the task of winning wavering Taliban commanders over far harder by turning the hardline Muslim militia from villains into victims and, second, that a decision by the allies to use ground troops would mean the coalition’s war was no longer against terrorism but against Afghanistan. Then there would be only one thing for the disparate factions of the country to do: fight the invader. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.