the influence of schools of religious thought – modernist, radical,
or ultraconservative – which have flourished elsewhere in the
Muslim world. The Islam of the intelligentsia was and is different
from the Islam of the village prayer-leader or mullah, and this is
central to an understanding of the dynamics of the Afghanistan
conflict.
The Afghan economy has always been dominated by agricultural
and pastoral activity, in which the bulk of the population is
engaged. While only 12 per cent of the land is arable, that land is
intensively exploited. In the relatively small number of cities –
Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e Sharif – one found
a certain amount of secondary industry, but little in the way of
heavy industry (see Nägler, 1971; Fry, 1974). In contrast to the
situation in neighbouring Pakistan, rural ‘society’ was not in any
meaningful sense ‘feudal’, for rural notables – tribal khans, village
maleks and the like – were not ‘lords’ with ‘subjects’, as in
European feudal orders (Pipes, 1999: 105–7), but rather partici-
pants in complex local politics in which collective institutions of
consensus-building (known variously as jirgahsor shuras) played
key roles. A social order which is structured in this way is likely to
prove resilient in the face of external assaults, for it derives its
cohesion from self-sustaining institutions of governance rather than
from the leadership of individuals who can be eliminated in a
decapitating strike.
Politics of this type was an exclusively male preserve: in
Afghanistan, most women have performed strictly circumscribed
social roles based on the economy of the household. While Afghan
popular tradition has venerated particular women as moral leaders
(notably Malalai, who challenged the British, and more recently
Nihad, a Kabul schoolgirl killed while demonstrating against the
Soviet invasion), it was only in urban areas, and then only from
1959, that women had much opportunity to move beyond the
realm of the household and occupy a corner of the public sphere
(see Dupree, 1984; Rahimi, 1986; Tapper, 1991; Dupree, 1992;
Centlivres-Demont, 1994; Maley, 1996; Dupree, 1998). However,
this does not mean that a crudely patriarchal interpretation of gen-
10 The Afghanistan Wars