Chapter 2: The Society and Its Environment

THE REACTIONS OF the Afghans to the invasion of their country by Soviet military forces in December 1979 were in keeping with Afghan responses to numerous earlier invasions. The almost universal resentment of the populace has been expressed in widespread, bitter, and costly guerrilla warfare against the Soviets and the Afghan government.

Although the cultures of Afghanistan are varied, complex, and often poorly understood, perhaps the most interesting question about the country in the mid1980s was why the population responded to the invasion with determination, tenacity, and pugnaciousness. The answers to this question lie in many aspects of the country: its physical environment, population structure, religious traditions, tribes, and ethnicity; the nature of the Afghan family and kin groups; and gender roles.

The people of Afghanistan have adapted to an arid, rugged terrain, extreme climatic conditions, periodic droughts, and successive invasions. Afghans have coped with these difficulties by showing diversity, ingeniousness, and flexibility in subsistence strategies, technology, and religious and social organization. As they may move from one subsistence strategy to another to meet changing environmental and economic conditions, so they may change from one religious sect to another or expand or contract the boundaries of ethnic group, tribe, or lineage to adapt to the changing social environment. Despite this plasticity, certain values and shared identities endure. These include membership in the patrilineal family, with strong family loyalties and squabbles; gender separation, with bellicose males and secluded women; and membership in the Muslim community (umma), with reliance on charismatic religious figures, such as Sufi shaykhs, Airs, and miyans.

The Afghans' guerrilla war affected not only their own country but the entire region as well. By late 1985 the country was severely depopulated; about one third of the population had departed, and the war had claimed many lives. The dramatic drop in population within Afghanistan, coupled with the influx of Afghan refugees to Iran and Pakistan (where they reportedly had one of the highest birth rates in the world), had created a tremendous labor shortage within the country and a potentially volatile situation in the entire region.

This page maintained by Luke Griffin and last updated on 01/14/2002 .