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Chapter 2 continues...
The people of Afghanistan are thus divided along ethnic and linguistic lines as well as sectarian, tribal and racial divisions. Although 90 percent of the population follow Sunni Islam as their religious faith yet local customs and tribal influences lead to variations in practice.
Goodson20 argues that the creation and transformation of ethnic consciousness are rarely assignable to discrete causes or specific dates because groups have constantly re-examined and redefined themselves. Foreign invasions, especially the devastating Mongol and Timurid campaigns, altered the indigenous population profile both by inflicting heavy native casualties and by infusing new blood into the region. He argues that after the Durrani ascendancy in the mid-eighteenth century there was no substantial foreign presence in the country until the Soviets intervened in 1979, and it was in this period that the Pashtun tribes finally emerged as the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan. This period in Afghan history according to him, was a period of anarchy characterised by the absence of any central authority with continuous power struggle between various clans and families of the Pashtun Durrani tribe. Tribal rebellion regularly threatened to destabilise the government in Kabul and created trouble for the British North–West Frontier of India (now Pakistan). Goodson regards the period of anarchy in the nineteenth century, which developed the growth of ethnic consciousness in Afghanistan led to foundations for ethnic relationships in Afghanistan today. However, he feels that these social pressures did not occur in a vacuum for there were tremendous political pressures from external sources as well. In Afghanistan it was apparent by the late 1990s that ethnic arguments were increasingly deployed in political agitations and there was a visible tendency towards ethnicisation of the conflict.
Afghanistan is often dubbed as the “Crossroad of Empires.” Stephen Tanner22 notes that Afghanistan has always found itself at the hinge of imperial ambitions since the beginning of recorded history, from the world’s first trans-continental superpower, the Persian Empire (see Map on “The Persian Empire in 490 B.C.), to the latest, the United States.
To be continued...