Ethnicity in Afghanistan - Thomas Barfield

one of the interesting things about afghanistan which pretty much all people in the world know is afghanistan has lots of ethnic groups it used to be that only anthropologists could tell you well there's uzbeks there's tajiks there's imocs there's pashtuns there's hosars we could put that on an exam and that would be a tricky question today the average reader of an international paper is expected to know these things we're familiar with the ethnic groups of afghanistan but one of the things that we're not familiar with or we make assumptions about is dynamics of how ethnicity works in afghanistan is different than other parts of the world when the international community came into afghanistan after 2001 they had recently dealt with the problem of yugoslavia and what happens in yugoslavia a unitary multi-ethnic state central power declines and every ethnic group wants its own country and eventually they get their own countries but one of the problems is it turns out that every minority that says we're oppressed and we want our own country as soon as this is a country we find there's another minority there and they want their own country and it is so the view is that ethnicity is potentially very divisive it's hard to deal with ethnic conflicts are difficult and that places that have a lot of ethnic groups are prone deficient they're just going to collapse unless they have a very powerful center so when the international community arrived in afghanistan it's set about trying to make a very strong central government structurally i mean not in practice but the president karzai he has a lot of power and the constitution is pretty much based on the constitution that was written for the king in 1964 sort of a royal constitution and the reason for this is well if we don't have a strong center in kabul the place will collapse because look there are all these ethnic groups and they've been fighting each other during the civil war but nobody really looked beyond that to say well these ethnic groups that fighting that are fighting each other what are they looking for what do they want and the interesting thing is whether it was in the soviet war period the civil war period the taliban period or even today no ethnic politician in afghanistan has ever demanded independence for his own people or for amalgamation with co-ethics on the other side there's tajiks and uzbeks in northern afghanistan no afghan uzbek or tajik has ever said why don't we come create a greater uzbekistan a greater tajikistan and of course the uzbeks and uzbekistan would they would be actually fearful of that the last thing they want is having to deal with northern afghans but when we think about it other ethnic politicians another place in yugoslavia for years and years there was push we are serbs we are croatians we deserve our own state nobody in afghanistan has ever said that indeed the only time this has ever happened is with the pashtun areas of the northwest frontier of pakistan as soon as pakistan became independent afghanistan said you have no right to rule over questions there should be a separate pashtunistan state and that was very nationalistic and if you looked at their maps they drew maps of pastunistan that went all the way to the indus river like they ate up half of pakistan this made the pakistani government very nervous but if you looked or asked the question was well do you want to create a state of all pashtuns will it be part of afghanistan they were very unclear because actually they didn't want that there are more push students in pakistan they are in afghanistan if there was a pashtun nation the afghans would be the minority so they weren't keen on that what they were looking for was an independent pashtun state carved out of pakistan but the did not necessarily involve them that's a very different kind of ethnic politics and the other thing that we see in terms of people say well during the civil war you had tajiks fighting uzbeks fighting hazaras fighting push dunes but they they found it the easiest way is to to organize your allies on the basis of locality my kinsmen my co-ethnics so they organized on the basis of ethnic groups so you could say yeah this this militia is largely touching this militia is largely pushed in but if you ask are you fighting in the name of the tajiks are you fighting in the name of the push dunes or the czars they were not they were fighting in their own local interests which meant at any given time they could choose to divide from their co-ethnics and unite with their former enemies or make a deal that had no basis on ethnicity so one of the things that perhaps shouldn't have surprised us if we know understand that afghan ethnicity doesn't have this nationalist tinge to it is how easy it was during the bond accords for them to create a national government at the end of 2001. look at iraq could they ever get the the kurds the shias and the sunnis to agree on anything no but the afghans sat down they agreed they even agreed to bring karzai who was a push dune to be the leader of the country now they had just thrown out the taliban the northern alliance why bring back a pashtun because they understood that was part of the deal so if we understand afghan politics and ethnicity i would say then places like yugoslavia or other places sub-saharan africa rwanda burundi people are if they have a table they're looking to cut it into pieces so that everybody has a part the afghans are not the the afghans are like card players they compete fiercely for every individual pot but win or lose the whole question is there's always going to be another round in this game let's not divide the table up because then the game will end so we find a remarkably practical kind of politics and we're looking for ethnic divisions they're going to divide people make it impossible come to a deal and what we really don't understand is the afghans consider a multi-ethnic state to be a natural state not an imposed state and the whole question is what is my group's power within this particular state and even if it's not good today that may change tomorrow so i'm playing for the long terms and you don't necessarily have to like or love the people that you're you're dealing with but you have to do business with them this makes afghanistan's politics remarkably practical at some level and so when we look at ethnicity in afghanistan one of the things we have to see is that ethnicity varies from one part of the world to another and depending upon what dynamic it takes it can be it can move a state to dissolution very easily or in the afghan case it can actually create a framework in which people are confident to make deals because they know they have the backup of their own locality their own ethnic group so that even if they're not doing so well this time there's always another round history will always move itself uh forward at a different pace and provide new opportunities and outcomes when i mentioned uh uh uh playing cards i i don't compare the afghans to poker players or they it's more of an american game but uh the idea is is is the same you're sitting around the table you're competing for resources that are there they're going to be winners and losers and the afghans have had a state people say well it's an artificial state but it's been an artificial state for more than 250 years it was founded in the mid-18th century and the boundaries that it has have been stable for at least the past 200 years so we have to ask ourselves what allows this to occur certainly not the power of the central government certainly not coercion and a lot of it has to do with if you're a card player there has to be a game to play solitaire is a game played by one person but win or lose you get nothing out of it and when the afghans look about ethnicity they tend to think about it nationalist ethnicity if you want to think about it is romantic you your ethnic group needs a prestigious history we are all in this together there's that we have a shared commonality a heart that we all have it in together and very often we find that poets and and historians are leaders in these kind because they're creating the sort of ethnic heritage the afghans look upon this as practical but they live in a land where almost all marriages are arranged you may not like your spouse but there's good reasons that you should be married and perhaps you'll come to like or even love that person but that's not the key element in an afghan politics it's the same way you may not like the people that you're dealing with but you understand that afghanistan lives in a very dangerous neighborhood if you divide into small mini states you will be eaten by your neighbors also if you're small mini states who's going to give you money they understand that a state needs to be of a certain size a certain importance and it's very useful even for an ethnic politician if you're in herat and dealing with iran which is your next door neighbor is to say i love to help you out but kabul won't let me it's a very good excuse and so people begin to rely on the fact that even if they do not like other ethnic groups that the um the composition of the state that they have is advantageous for everyone and when they look around uh they see the possibility of of states that can fall apart and they're not really willing to take that risk it could fall apart certainly but only sort of in extremis as long as there's money and power to hold it together afghan politicians are not interested in tearing the country apart when we when we look at afghanistan particularly focusing on ethnic groups what we're really looking at is the dynamics of rural afghanistan which still composes 75 perhaps 80 percent of the population so it's the majority of the population but the impetus for change in afghanistan has always come from its cities and its educated elite the first push to modernize afghanistan did not come from foreigners but came in the 1920s when afghanistan received its full independence from britain after launching a small war against british india and there the afghan emir really wanted to push the country forward he failed and there was a period of reaction and so what we found is there's there's periods of progressive governments in the reaction but that the progressive governments have always been led by an educated elite in kabul and despite their small numbers these people have been remarkably influential but one of the interesting questions that comes now over the past 10 years is that people who are interested in changing afghanistan are probably now a much larger percentage of the country one of the things that we forget is that the majority of afghans were born after 1989 after the soviets left for them the soviet war is their grandfather's war and even the taliban are a very distant memory yes they were ruling when they were children so we we have an enormous number of people um who have a greater much greater interest in afghanistan's future than they do in its past and the whole question is where do they want to take the country with so many people now moving from the rural areas to the cities one of the things we have to ask is well what's what's the cultural disposition what's the political disposition of this new urban population is it simply rural people living in higher density populations or with opportunities that are available is it a people that are looking to a different way and one of the things that's really quite striking is communications before the war the only telephone you would find in a rural provincial afghan setting was in the governor's palace one phone now every afghan has at least one cell phone when i returned to visit the nomads that i hadn't seen for 20 years and i said well here i am they said yeah we heard you were coming i said how did somebody called us from virginia they said to expect you in three days this shows you how internationally people can be connected if you want to know the price of the sheep you don't have to walk two days to the bazaar to find out you get on the phone and somebody will tell you and then you decide whether it's worth coming in and in kabul today there are no street signs so when people are visiting um they always say well where are you living where are you living and they get directions on the phone and that's entirely new the internet is is also new so you have you have a population that's really you know interested in breaking afghanistan into the wider world that really wants to see peace and one of the things that's only just begun to be realized is afghanistan is it's true right now one of the poorest countries on earth but intrinsically it is not a poor country it has some of the largest undeveloped mineral resources in the world the afghans have sold the rights for one copper mine to the chinese for three billion dollars and the chinese have said we'll build a railway to take it out the indians have said we will spend 12 billion dollars to build an iron and steel complex in central afghanistan the afghans have also noticed that they are the center of the eurasian inland eurasian overland transport hub so the whole question there might be is afghanistan about to move out of this old traditional sheep raising wheat raising economy and into the modern world and are we too focused on afghanistan's past and not enough on its future potential you

Channel: Serious Science

Views: 87,323

Rating: 4.9033055 out of 5

Keywords: science, lecture, Serious Science, Ethnic Group (Literature Subject), Politics (TV Genre), Afghanistan (Country), History

Id: UCVIl6_9jz8

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/zumzumman]

Great perspective. Thanks for sharing.