Afghanistan cannot be compared to the Balkans, said Tom Barfield -- an anthropology professor at Boston University widely considered to be the foremost American expert on Afghanistan -- in a lecture about ethnicity and nationalism yesterday afternoon.
Barfield got a unique opportunity to conduct field research on the pastoral nomads of Afghanistan during the 1970s. Westerners have had a difficult time doing research in the country before or since.
This lack of first-hand experience leads policy makers to use analogies when dealing with unknown regions of the world, Barfield explained.
"Very often, it turns out, they don't know what they're talking about. They don't know geography because they haven't been on the ground," he said, referring not only to the terrain of Afghanistan, but to the societal structures of the nation.
Barfield recounted how policy makers predicted that after the dissolution of the Taliban government, Afghanistan would be divided into ethnic units, just as in the former Yugoslavia.
"No one had informed the Afghans of this inevitability," he said. According to Barfield, no Afghan leader has threatened to break away or to join with another state.
But because of the ethnic clashes in the Balkans, many officials and some scholars are predicting a similar situation to occur in post-Taliban Afghanistan, but Barfield sees the conditions in the two regions as being very different.
"When it comes to conflict, ethnicity is the flavor of the month," he said, explaining away the uninformed speculation of turmoil. "For every new ethnic state we have a new minority demanding independence."
Barfield explained that the lack of ethnic tensions in Afghanistan is due to the way in which Afghans view the concept of ethnicity.
Historically, ethnic groups have had to work together in Central Asia to successfully administer cities, and so have learned how to get along. Therefore, people have regional or tribal associations, but a lack of ethnic identity.
According to Barfield, the concept of ethnicity was imposed from the outside by the Soviet government, in an effort by Joseph Stalin to segment the population.
Hence the division by ethnicity was "based on a unity that the people had never felt among themselves," Barfield said. There was no common identity among people labeled as a particular ethnicity.
It was hard to build ethnic identities around inaccurate histories, and so the people of Afghanistan do not tend to view themselves in ethnic terms.
"Regardless of ethnicities and old grudges, they all see themselves as part of Afghanistan," Barfield said. "The border is arbitrary -- but what border isn't?"
Barfield explained that most Afghan ethnic groups would not want to form their own state because, as smaller nations, they would not be as defensible as if they were incorporated into a larger, multi-ethnic nation.
"Divided into mini-states, they're extremely vulnerable," he said. "One warlord told me, 'We live in a dangerous neighborhood.'"
Barfield believes that Afghans will work together to create a new state. After the past 20 years, he said, they are sick of both warfare and anarchy.
