Ethnic divide threatens in Afghanistan - latimes

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — The sunbaked, shell-pocked ruins of west Kabul stand as silent testament to what happened the last time Afghanistan splintered along ethnic lines.

The country's disastrous civil war in the early 1990s — a conflict that killed at least 100,000 people and helped set the stage for the Taliban's rise to power — reduced whole swaths of the capital to rubble, leaving scars on the landscape that reconstruction efforts have yet to erase.

Memories linger too — stirred, these days, by steadily rising ethnic tensions amid President Hamid Karzai's bid to reach out to the Taliban. .... - Ethnic divide threatens in Afghanistan‎

Chart: Ethnic divisions in Afghanistan