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The destabilization of Afghanistan over the last 25 years has resulted in four major overlapping transformations: 1. the center has collapsed causing the center-periphery relationship to evaporate, 2. the national market of Afghanistan has disappeared, 3, ethnic, sectarian, and regional cleavages have become more robust and assertive, 4. Islamist ideologies have become powerful transparent forces in the construction of self and political life of Afghans. All these changes have been triggered by the introduction of massive amounts of external material resources (largely by the United States and Saudi Arabia) and Wahabi and other Fundamentalist Islamist ideological orientations. In pre-1978 Afghanistan political power and surplus economic resources were extremely limited and severely circumscribed and there was virtually no institutional access available for groups to contend for them. Subsequently, as increasingly large amounts of resources were rapidly introduced and old structural barriers removed or eased, intense competition for real and potential power has emerged.

Academic literature (especially in anthropology) about socio-cultural diversity in general and ethnic groups encapsulated by nation-states in particular, are replete with accounts of the correlation between heightened ethnic, linguistic, and regional tension and conflict and the competitive introduction of new resources from outside. The political dynamics of Afghanistan during the past twenty-five years vividly illustrate and confirm this causal relationship. Policies and programs for the country’s rehabilitation and reconstruction should be informed by a disciplined understanding of the changing configuration of ethnic, sectarian, and regional contrasts in Afghan polity and the quality and quantity of external resources that have been (and are being) grafted on these variations. The introduction of massive amounts of material resources, Fundamentalist Islamist ideologies and the consequent emergence of new political awareness continue to produce increasing ethnic, sectarian, and regional consciousness and tensions in Afghanistan. Together these developments have become powerful components of innovative political claims and strategies in the volatile Afghan political field

Pre-1978 Afghanistan was a loosely woven state with a tenuous national market. Relationships between its center and periphery and amongst the various ethnic groups, religious sects, and regions were framed in vague and contested notions of national identity. Ethnic, linguistic, sectarian, and regional idioms of identity superseded conceptions of nation and nationality in Afghanistan. Due to general underdevelopment, weak and disinterested center, paucity of economic resources, absence of effective means of communication, and lack of participatory political institutions, the diverse elements of Afghan polity were spared robust interaction with the state, each other, and with the outside world. All this dramatically changed when during the 1980s when the Afghan center, in spite of its enhanced destructive ability, became increasingly unpopular, weak and fragmented by the opposition posed to it by the introduction in the periphery of massive amounts of ideological and destructive resources by outsiders.

The United States and its local oil rich ally, Saudi Arabia, with the facilitation of Pakistan, played a major role in the collapse of the fragile state configuration of Afghanistan. By pouring billions of dollars and massive quantities of weapons into the Afghan periphery through the recruitment, training, and arming of tens of thousands of the so called “freedom fighters” and inventing the ideology for their assembly line “jihad” (holy struggle or war), the United States radically altered the balance of center-periphery relations in the country. These changes converted the relatively peaceful traditional patterns of socio-cultural distinctions into competing and hostile ethno-linguistic, sectarian, and regional cleavages. The prominence of various warlords in the country today is a profound expression of these resource-induced transformations taking the country back to the late eighteenth century.

Afghanistan’s quiescent traditional patterns of ethnic and rudimentary social class distinctions had gradually become noticeable, especially in urban areas, after WWII with the introduction of limited (but significant by Afghan standards) amounts of foreign aid for economic development and military upgrading and modernization. But the introduction and competitive distribution of billions of dollars and massive amounts of means of destruction (overwhelming by Afghan and regional standards) during the decade of the 1980s aggravated ethno-linguistic, sectarian, and regional distinctions and triggered a slide in social class variations in the country. Not only were ethnic and regional distinctions in Afghanistan exacerbated, new political arrangements appeared as well. As an adaptation to the absence of the center, alternative social and political models for local governance in the periphery emerged and assumed increasing autonomy and self-sufficiency. The Afghan center did not only disappear, it became totally irrelevant. These new contrasts and tensions could easily be seen in the policies and behavior of the umbrella organizations of the “mujahidin”, the Afghan opposition factions operating out of Pakistan. Armed confrontation in the field among these groups were not unusual earlier but became widespread after 1989 when the Soviets withdrew and the U.S. substantially downscaled its mujahidin subsidy and supervision. These confrontations gave way to an all out war after the central government of Afghanistan collapsed in April 1992. The Taliban evolved out of the anarchy that followed in the wake of the disappearance of the Afghan center. The post-1978 chaotic social conditions throughout the country allowed milli