[Sherman Logan]

More importantly, Pashtuns aren’t really Afghans. A great many of them live in Pakistan and most of them think of themselves as Pashtun before Afghan or Pakistani.

The author sort of dances around this, but there is a good reason why Pakistan originally supported the Taliban.

If Pashtuns focus on Pashtun nationalism, it requires disassembling the Pakistani state so there can be a Pashtun nation-state.

If Afghan Pashtuns can be encouraged to focus on their Islamic rather than Pashtun identity, maybe they’ll go try to take over Afghanistan and run it under sharia instead.

[Sherman Logan]

Actually there are something like 25M Pashtuns in Pakistan (about 16% of the population) as compared to ~13M in Afghanistan.

[xzins]

the individual obligations and collective expectations dictated by the Pashtunwali, whose core tenets include self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, forgiveness and tolerance. Among Pashtuns, group consensus remains the primary source of power, not a hierarchical central administration. According to Afghan scholar M. Jamil Hani, Pashtun culture is bottom-up, forming a series of concentric rings surrounding the individual, consisting of family, extended-family, clan, tribe, confederacy and major cultural-linguistic group, all of which resist central government influence.

The author seems to be saying that Pastun culture has a historic inclination to resist outside interference from those attempting to impose anything on the Pastuns. I assume he includes sharia and the taliban in those interfering forces.