Post 1: Afghanistan

While doing my project on Afghanistan, I decided to research the tribes in Afghanistan, because I wanted to find out a way to unite the tribes so that they could be a nation with out civil war and fighting. At first, I knew almost nothing about tribal Afghanistan, I actually didn't even know that there were tribes in Afghanistan. I started researching and did not find much information that helped me much until I found a map that list all 13 of the Afghan tribes. I noticed how they were all seperated, but I still did not start researching the individual tribes (I probably should have done more research about the big tribes such as the Pashtuns or the Baluch.) Understanding the individual cultures of the tribes would have given me a large advantage to figuring out what would help them to unite.

Then, I decided to research a certain topic concerning the tribes: developing a military together in order to bring peace and order to the country. General David Richards in BBC News states that the issue with the Afghanistan military is that "We need to put more military effort into the country." Asian affairs expert Selig Harrison takes it a step further explaining to NPR News that the United States are supporting the Tajiks to enter the military. "How are we going to build an Afghan army... if we have an army dominated by a minority so that the Pashtuns don't want to join it?" To me, this says that the tribes are obviously not going to work together. They seem stubborn and ignorant to me, because if they did work together and participate in the military together, they could lower the chaos rate. I think that the tribes of Afghanistan are the root cause of most of the problems going on in Afghanistan, especially the civil war.

Afghanistan is far from united, with 13 large tribes that fill up over half of Afghanistan, they have hardly any unity or patriatism toward the country itself, but rather, loyalty to their own individual tribes, who dictate the tribesmen's ideas and personal beliefs. So how can Afghanistan really unite these tribes into the "United Country of Afghanistan"? Through war? No, war would probably tear these countries apart even more. Actually, if you look back in history at the German and Italian states, they were very different until nationalism brought the states together. The same thing needs to happen with Afghanistan: nationalism needs to bring the tribes together in things such as the military and other things. This may lead to the tribes uniting like Italy and Germany.