der relations in Afghanistan is illuminating. On the contrary,
Afghan women have historically shown considerable skill and cre-
ativity in asserting their interests within networks of kinship. A
failure properly to appreciate these complexities was one reason
why Afghanistan’s Marxist rulers erred so catastrophically when
they attempted to restructure gender relations with the blunt instru-
ment of state power.
The Afghan state
The instrumentalities of the Afghan state – using the term not to
describe a territorial unit, but ‘a complex set of institutional
arrangements for rule’ which ‘reserves to itself the business of rule
over a territorially bounded society’ (Poggi, 1978: 1) – developed
in somewhat different stages. The whole process of ‘state forma-
tion’ is very complex, for states can vary in the ways in which they
are structured, in the mix of tasks which they perform, and in the
means by which they seek to secure compliance with their dictates.
Furthermore, the contours of the state at any one time are unlikely
to reflect the application of design principles to some raw material
of state building, but rather the outcomes of discrete decisions by
different people at different times and places.
For this reason, even though a monarchical system existed from
1747 until 1973, dating the birth of Afghan state instrumentalities
is contentious. Some would point to 1747, when the Ahmad Shah
Abdali, a Durrani Pushtun of the Sadozai clan, assembled a tribal
confederation independent of both the Safavid dynasty in Persia,
and the Mughals in India. However, his dynasty, while it ruled
until 1818, was in a state of almost continuous tension with power-
ful tribal khans, and its domestic institutions were weak (Ghani,
1985). In 1826, Dost Muhammad of the Muhammadzai clan estab-
lished his ascendancy, and with only two brief intervals – the
installation of the hapless Sadozai puppet of the British, Shah
Shuja, during the First Anglo–Afghan War from 1839–42 and the
rule of the Tajik Habibullah Kalakani in 1929 – Muhammadzais
occupied the apex of the political system until April 1978. Dost
The Road to War 11