ABSTRACT
Any tribal and ethnic Afghan, depending on the situation, can choose between group advantages and personal interests. Family, tribal and ethnic links are far more important than an ideology like communism or Wahhabism. As it will be seen in this and following chapters, communist ideology, despite the communist takeover of Afghanistan and the full force of Soviet might, did not succeed in uniting even members of the communist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). When in the segmentary conscious Afghan society group interest is chosen, as it is alleged that members of minority ethnic and linguistic groups wanted to use the utopian ideology of communism to improve their own and their groups’ standing, that choice too led to suspicion, disunity and war. The individual and group distrust that is created permeates all levels of Afghan society, from the monarchs down to enlightened intellectuals and party demagogues. Thus modernist intellectuals are as much prisoners of their
upbringing as are the rural tribesmen and peasants. As we shall see in this book, at the base of it all lay the cultural, linguistic and ethnic issues.
