Here is a measure of the complexity of the cultural and political mosaic that is Afghanistan: Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist mastermind who is now the target of U.S. military planners, is an outsider to the country - protected by a Taleban government that appears to represent a minority of Pashto-speaking Afghans from the region bordering Pakistan, who themselves may be a minority of that extraordinarily diverse land.

To many Afghans, Mr. bin Laden's presence is a bitter irony: He is a wealthy Saudi, stripped of his nationality, hiding out in a desperately poor, mountainous country that normally has little love for the Bedouins of the Arabian Desert. . Indeed, many find Mr. bin Laden as alien to his current surroundings as a Portuguese fisherman might be amid Turkish herdsmen in Central Anatolia. . Mr. bin Laden's outsider status is only one of the complications facing the United States as it plans military retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against New York and Washington.

With its many ethnic and religious divisions, the country seems closer to a pre-modern warlord state than a modern nation. Whoever might try to conquer this Afghanistan would have to adjust to its endless diversity. They would have to deal with a profound sense of communal identity and solidarity. Loyalty is expressed toward the family, then to the community, including its religious orientation, then the city or province and, last, to the country.

As a cultural historian of the Iranian world, I traveled extensively in Afghanistan from the late 1960s until the communist takeover in 1977. Since then, in addition to my work as art critic for this newspaper, I have studied the history of that part of the world and published many monographs in scholarly journals. And I remain in contact with Afghan exiles.

The most important and least understood cleavage is between the Pashto speakers, who are mostly Sunni Muslims and have recently been looking to Pakistan for backing, and the Persian speakers - Shiites who look to Iran. . The Pashtuns are officially declared to be the majority in Afghanistan, but some observers believe they are substantially outnumbered by Persian speakers - including those Pashtuns who have long forgotten their own dialect, which is one of the most archaic and difficult Iranian languages.

The Taleban - self-styled students of theology, whose name is the Persian plural of the word for a "student" of the Koranic text - managed to triumph over other factions in the chaotic aftermath of the Russian retreat from Afghanistan in 1989. But by some estimates, they may represent as little as 10 percent of the population. They dominate a land that is a patchwork of human and religious communities.

The largest single common denominator is Persian in its Dari form, "the courtly" speech of the Afghan elite. It has always been the language of culture and literature and is today, as in the past, the country's intercommunal language. Where spoken as a vernacular, it varies as much from the courtly form as a broad Scottish accent does from mellifluous Oxbridge English.

Under the monarchy, toppled in 1973, and during the republican interlude that preceded the Communist takeover of 1977, a precarious cohabitation was in place. The top positions in the administration, the military, the judiciary, were held by town-dwelling Pashtuns largely Persianized in their way of life as in speech. The royal court itself, of pure Pashtun stock, spoke virtually no Pashto.

Their connections with their Pashtun kinsmen living in the southeastern highlands were loose. In only one main city, Kandahar, did one hear Pashto widely spoken on the streets. There, the Pashtun majority represented roughly 75 percent of the city's neighborhoods -roughly, that is, because Afghanistan is not the place where statistics are an exact science.

On the eve of World War II, there had been efforts to transfer Pashtuns to other parts of the country, in particular in the area of Herat, the great Persian metropolis wrested from Iran in the mid-19th century with British backing. But they often backfired. . The Persian culture prevailed. A generation after the migrations of the late 1930s, the Pashto speakers established in cities became Persianized in many of their customs in their speech. The capital, Kabul, is a good illustration of this process. . Persianized or not, the Pashtuns ran the show. They still do. The Persian speakers - called "Fars," or "Farsiwan"- occasionally played a role if they followed the Sunni path of Islam. It made little difference whether they were from the northern Khorasan region with its cities of Herat, Balkh, Mazar-i-Sharif; from Badakhshan, also in the north; from Sistan, south of Khorasan; from the vast highlands of Hazarajat, in the heart of the land, or from the capital, Kabul, one of the oldest Persian-speaking cities in the world. They are now excluded from power.

Persian speakers of the Shiite branch of Islam, which includes a vast proportion of the urban population in the north, have always been conspicuously absent from official positions. But even among the Shiites there are nuances. . Those who get the worst of the deal among the Shiites are the Hazaras. They represent one of the great enigmas of Afghan history. Their features single them out at a glance, even within the highly diverse ethnic mix of Afghanistan. Their narrow eyes, broad noses, their shorter build and yellow complexion bring them close to the populations of Nepal and Tibet than to any of the surrounding groups. The Persian they speak is strikingly archaic.

In Kabul, the Hazaras represent a vast underclass who take the jobs that other groups refuse - as bearers, street sweepers and other common laborers. On the eve of the Soviet invasion, through gritty, hardworking determination, some were beginning to hoist themselves into a small lower-middle-class. They ran very modest hotels and chaykhanas, or "teahouses," the Kabul equivalent of the lowliest coffee shop.

Other important groups remain excluded, first and foremost the Turkic-speaking communities in the northern countryside. They include Uzbeks, the most numerous in the center of the Khorasan region; the Turkmen to the West, and the Kazakhs who sought refuge in the northeastern tip of Afghanistan when the Red Army occupied Central Asia in the 1920s. . Steeped in the ancient traditions of this part of the world, the Kazakhs are active in commerce, speaking Persian when communicating with strangers and staunchly refusing to use Pashto. Their exact numbers are unknown. . The various Turkic speakers are believed to make up 20 percent or more of the population.

Religious differences cut across the patchwork of linguistic groups, complicating the picture further. In Persian-speaking Herat, Sunnis and Shiites are probably represented in equal numbers. The people of Badakhshan also speak Persian, but as members of the Ismaili subdivision of the Shiite faith, they are a world unto themselves.

The Panjshir Valley - also Persian-speaking and largely Sunni in its mountainous redoubts - is a tough, pugnacious place. This was the home of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary guerrilla leader who was assassinated early this month, reportedly by supporters of Mr. bin Laden and the Taleban. All these different religious and ethnic factions have suffered at the hands of the dominant Pashtun regime of the Taleban. Afghan refugees have carried unverifiable reports of massacres in Hazarajat after its conquest by the Taleban, in the area of Yakka Awlang, and near the city of Bamian, whose residents are said to have been enraged by the Taleban's destruction of the large, twin statues of Buddha there.

Within the Pashtun group that holds the reins of power, many have suffered, too. A cultivated Pashto-speaking urbanite in Kabul does not have much in common with the gun-toting tribesman from the southeastern mountains who have gathered around the Taleban clerics.

Also wary of the Taleban are the Pashtun elite of Ghazni, 120 kilometers (75 miles) southwest of Kabul. This city, part-Persian and part-Pashto speaking, was once the great capital of the eastern Iranian world under the sultans of the Ghaznavid dynasty in the 11th and 12th centuries. It is the hometown of a famous 12th-century Persian poet, the Sufi mystic Sanai.

Kabul itself, which had been undergoing an intellectual renaissance in the early 1970s, is now devastated - its fine archaeological museum a half-destroyed, empty shell. Herat in the northwest has suffered untold hardships.

Famine is everywhere. This week, the BBC World Service was interviewing a man who had just arrived in a refugee camp at the limit of the Pakistan border area, now out-of-bounds to foreigners. In a few sentences uttered with the Persian accent of Khorasan (the interviewer did not identify his community or the language he spoke), the exhausted voice said something about the people along the roads, too weak to move.

None of this greatly bothers Mr. bin Laden, whose silence about the famine and drought in Afghanistan has been deafening. Referred to by many Persian speakers as "that Bedouin" - a phrase that echoes ancient memories of the early eighth-century Arab invasion in Khorasan, he would not have manysympathizers should it come to a showdown.

The Taleban would not be there, many Afghan refugees will tell you, without the subsidies of Saudi Arabia and the logistical support of Pakistan, eager to please extremists among the Pashtuns on their side of the border. And, the Afghans add, these two states would never have acted without America's blessing.

Afghan refugees warn that the country's many diverse communities all share one point in common: a fierce pride and sense of dignity. If these traits are respected, foreign troops could be perceived as liberators. The Russians, who treated the people brutally and are remembered for their atrocities, failed to recognize this reality. The Americans are also likely to be blamed if, in their zeal to punish Mr. bin Laden, they kill innocent civilians who have been suffering under a Taleban government that so many of them dislike.

Submitted by Kaushik Sunderrajan

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