A disgusting vat of filth that no self-respecting intelligent person would wade into.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
So the sixty four thousand dollar question is: why hasn't Afghanistan fallen apart? Why isn't it splintering apart like a wooden ship against a reef? Why is Iraq having 'ethnic' trouble and not Afghanistan? Once we invaded Afghanistan I was convinced Afghanistan would split into at least four parts (Pashto, Persian, Turkish and Baluchi - if not more). Many experts reached the same conclusion. But Afghanistan has really been a war mainly against the Taliban, with many Pashto siding with the government against their fellow ethnic brethren.

Afghanistan hasn't fallen apart because it has never been knitted strongly together. Even now, you have a central government without much authority outside Kabul, and various local strongmen controlling other provinces. It's fairly clear that Karzai would not be able to hold power if our troops were not there in Kabul, which is just to say that the army is just another militia with fancier uniforms. Because the central government has little power, there's less reason for the provinces to overly break away.

Why has the violence in Iraq been between the Shiites and Sunnis of the same ethnic group, when they have never had a civil war before, and they just overthrew a secular Arab nationalist government?

Religious differences are more salient than ethnic divisions there (see, e.g., Northern Ireland or Israel). Iraq didn't have a civil war when it was under Ottoman rule because it was under Ottoman rule. I think it would be an interesting question to look at the extent to which there was Iraqi nationalism in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Maybe someone has done this. I suspect you'd see that people living then in what is now Iraq did not think of themselves as Iraqis. Then the British came along. It's pretty widely accepted that the British left a state that did not cohere very well. I would surmise that the basic reason you didn't have a civil war from then until now is that you had authoritarian rulers putting a tight lid on dissent, etc. Surely other developments have made things worse, too (the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the rise of Saudi Wahhabism).