Here's the Problem - And Here, and Here, and Over Here

There's been no end of talk lately about how the Taliban slip in and out of Pakistan to wage guerrilla war in southern Afghanistan. Sounds pretty simple: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Taliban. Actually it's a little more complex than that. Nobody, it seems, is too eager to mention Pashtunistan, the "land of the Pashtun."

The Taliban are mainly ethnic Pashtuns. So is Hamid Karzai. But Pashtunistan isn't neatly in Afghanistan. Almost half of it is in Pakistan. Here's a map:

Now the green bits are the Pashtun homeland and you can see from the numbers above that there are actually more Pashtuns living in Pakistan than there are in Afghanistan. These people even have their own flag:


So, when the Taliban slip across the border into Paksitan, they're not running away from home they're still very much at home with their own people. See how that makes the problem much more difficult?