Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
I understand what you are saying but I think you might be overstating it. Everything I've read seems to indicate that the Afghans do think of themselves as Afghans. Taliban & Co are always careful to portray themselves as an Afghan movement, not a Pathan group. No group in the country talks about partition to my knowledge. They have been a definable country for a lot of years. National loyalty may not be the same as ours but it is there. The Indian Army is able to accommodate radically differing identities within an organization that is loyal to the center. Maybe they have something to teach, something along the lines of the Pathan Rifles and Hazara Light Infantry.
Most Syrians think of themselves as Syrian, yet they are in civil war. Same with Lebanon. Same with Iraq. How does one square the idea of an Iraq national identity when the Kurds have a semi-autonomous enclave and when, just a few years ago, there were active campaigns of sectarian cleansing?

So, I'm not saying national identity doesn't exist, I'm saying that on many matters other identities trump national identity. For Afghanistan, the various groups talk about one Afghanistan, but their ideas about how that one Afghanistan should be organized and who should control the levels of power vary widely. If you look, for instance, at voting patterns in Afghanistan they highly correlate to ethnic and/or sectarian identity.