Afghanistan: A Snapshot
Afghanistan is one of the most profoundly unstable countries in the world. Afghanistan is confronted not only with difficult physical and environmental challenges, but is also crippled by the severe effects of complex social and political factors. Writer Amalendu Misra (Misra, 2004) muses that "to reconstruct the story of Afghanistan’s place in the world is to reconstruct a microcosm of international Cold War politics in which Soviet domination, American intervention, Pakistani reassertion, Iranian double-dealing, vicious mujahideen offensives and the Afghan experience all find their place".
Tribes in Afghanistan
For many ordinary Afghanis, identity is established by tribe, rather than belonging to a nation. Many people feel that their sense of belonging is defined by tribal, ethnic, religious and linguistic factors, rather than by their being citizens of the nation of Afghanistan. Larry Goodson explains that "Afghanistan has never been a homogenous nation but rather a collection of disparate groups divided along ethnic, linguistic, religious and racial lines and forced together by the vagaries of geopolitics". The map below shows the distribution of ethnic groups across Afghanistan.
Ethnic groups in Afghanistan (percentages are from Encyclopaedia Iranica and CIA World Factbook)
- 36.4% to 42% Pashtun
- 27% to 33.6% Tajik
- 8% to 9% Hazara
- 8% to 9% Uzbek
- 3.2% to 4% Aimak
- 3% Turkmen
- 1.6% to 4% Baloch
- 4% to 9.2% other (Pashai, Nuristani, Brahui, Hindkowans, Hindustani, etc.)
Religion
Approximately 99% of Afghanistan's population is Muslim. An estimated 80% of the population is Sunni (including the majority Pashtun tribe), while 19% are Shi'a (including the Hazara) (CIA World Factbook). These figures do not distinguish between 'mainstream' practice and other, more fundamentalist practices of Islam, such as the Wahhabiya. It is difficult to pinpoint sectarian tendencies within the population of Afghanistan, although it is widely thought that there is a significant movement of Wahhabism within the ranks of the Taliban, which certainly helps to explain the harsh application of Islamic law by the Taliban.
7000 years of Hazara in Afghanistan