ABSTRACT
This chapter dwells briefly on changing conceptions concerning the Afghan nation, in all of which an explicit ethno-political salience looms large. But ethnicity in Afghanistan has always had to live and negotiate with two other varieties of immense consequence: Islam and tribe. The chapter examines shifts and changes in the conception of the Afghan nation in formal official discourse: constitutional documents from 1923 up until 2004. It draws upon principally the boundary approach pioneered by Fredrick Barth. Boundary as idea and as social-cultural fact in Barth's rendering speaks of deep continual fluidity as characteristic of ethnicity in the Afghan context. Barnett Rubin's meticulous examination of the Afghan state controlling elite, shows the near absolute control of the Muhammadzai lineage of the Durrani tribe of the Pashtuns, to the conspicuous exclusion of all others from positions of power. The Afghan state founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani depended almost entirely for military and political support on tribal mobilization.
