The peoples of Afghanistan
While ‘Afghanistan’ can be translated as ‘Land of the Afghans’, to
read this as ‘Land of the Pushtuns’ would risk detracting from its
social and cultural diversity. It was to recognise this diversity that
the 1964 Constitution explicitly stated in Article 1 that ‘The Afghan
Nation is composed of all those individuals who possess the citi-
zenship of the State of Afghanistan in accordance with the pro-
visions of the law. The word Afghan shall apply to each such
individual.’ It is in this sense that the word ‘Afghan’ is used in this
book, that is, with no ethnic connotations. In a recent monograph,
Mousavi has argued that the term ‘Afghanistani’ should be used for
these purposes, since the word ‘Afghan’ connotes ‘Pushtun’
(Mousavi, 1997: 5–10). While this was certainly the sense in which
the word ‘Afghan’ was used in major nineteenth-century works
(and continues to be used in parts of Afghanistan), such usage has
now almost completely died out in English-language sources.
The population of Afghanistan has never been counted in a com-
plete census, but the results of a partial census in 1979, adjusted to
take account of other relevant data, suggested a population of
approximately 13.05 million, including around 800,000 nomads
(Eighmy, 1990: 10). This population was in no sense homogen-
eous, and indeed it is something of a misnomer to talk of ‘Afghan
society’, for the term suggests a degree of coherent structure which
was never really present. Rather, Afghanistan has encompassed a
kaleidoscopic collection of ‘micro-societies’ (often identified by
the label qawm, or ‘network’), with porous and flexible bound-
aries. One scholar even went so far as to dub Afghanistan a
‘Nation of Minorities’ (Jawad, 1992). Ethnicity, religion, occupa-
tion, and gender have historically offered to Afghans a range of
bases upon which they may seek to identify with their fellows, and
while some of these are effectively ascriptive – that is, unchange-
able, or changeable only at enormous social cost – the relative
emphasis given to one over another is frequently a matter of stra-
tegic choice. The following observations should be read with this
qualification in mind.
8 The Afghanistan Wars