There is nothing ancient about Afghanistan, Robert Kaplan says:
It came into existence only in the early 18th century as a buffer between the civilizations of Persia and the Indian Subcontinent. It soon became a buffer between the Czarist empire in Russia and the British Empire in India. The very situation in Afghanistan today, with different spheres of influence being carved out behind the screen of daily warfare, attests to this history. In the south and east, the radical Islamist insurgency is itself a reassertion of the concept of Pushtunistan on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In particular, Baluchistan in the south is becoming a Wild West area of arms bazaars and opium labs. (In fact, most armed insurgents in Afghanistan were trained not in Pakistan’s tribal areas but in Pakistani Baluchistan, further proof that no solution here is possible without military action inside Pakistan.) In Afghanistan’s northeast, tribes in Kunar and Nuristan will fight any outsider, even those from the next valley. In the north, where it is more peaceful, trade is intensifying the links between ethnic-Tajiks and Uzbeks who straddle the border between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Central Asian republics. Western Afghanistan is coming under the political and economic domination of Iran, which supplies the city of Herat with electricity, even as the Iranian rial is the main currency in circulation. The Iranians are sending arms and military trainers into this part of Afghanistan. While the Shiite Iranians are against a takeover of Afghanistan by the Sunni extremist Taliban, they also want to keep Afghanistan weak, and to bleed the Americans as much as they can. (The Spanish contingent of several hundred NATO troops in western Badghis province — in the heart of Afghani Greater Iran — practically never leaves its base.)And yet set against this whole legacy is another tendency, equally as compelling. Throughout the mid-part of the 20th century, Afghanistan had a credible central government under King Zahir Shah that boasted many accomplishments from eradicating malaria to overseeing the construction of a ring road uniting the major cities. Following the chaos of the early- and mid-1990s that came with the collapse of the Soviet puppet regime of Mohammed Najibullah, Afghans yearned so much for a central government that they initially welcomed the tyranny of the Taliban. And today, all polls indicate that Afghans want strong national leadership emanating from Kabul. Indeed, there is a hue and cry for roads, wells, culverts, dams, and other infrastructure that can help with farming. The problem is that decades of strife, in which central authority went from monarchy to communism, to anarchy, to theocracy, to enfeebled democracy, have left tribal affiliations as the only constant.