ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we discussed the fact that when the common enemy, the Soviet invaders and the Afghan communists had gone, the uncertainty within the fractured Afghan state came to the fore. This chapter is a discussion of the politicisation of such uncertainty, in the post communist period, manifesting itself in terms of ethnicity. Ethnicity in Afghanistan, as in most other parts of the world, has been changing, but instead of congruence and coextensiveness with its territory, culture and ethnic population as in some other nation-states, the opposite has happened. The ethnic activists thought of themselves as ‘nations’, who were incorporated by Pashtuns in the middle of the eighteenth century within a territorial state. However, they did not want to or did not understand that incorporation, often by conquest, was the rule almost everywhere in the past. ‘This was the way, the original ethnic states expanded from a much smaller area and began to incorporate through [further wars and] bureaucratic means the outlying population’ (Anthony Smith 1986: 139).
