Hi Roger,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply to my article.

I am informed by my Afghan sources that Afghanistan has been a nation since 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani was its first king. I suppose you are correct, 260 years is not several hundred. However, there is a very big difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan . Afghanistan 's eastern border was originally (and rather arbitrarily) established as a sort of DMZ between the Afghans and the British in India . It was not considered a hard border. Just a line across which the parties agreed to no longer attack each other. Afghanistan was not patched together like Iraq after WWI. However, it was divided by the creation of Pakistan . Beginning in 1947, there was talk of the formation of a country called Pashtunistan, which would have extended as far east as the Indus river, thus carving off a large chunk of what is now Pakistan. The Afghans never took any action on the issue, but it is the primary reason for Pakistan 's historic and ongoing violence towards Afghanistan , and one of the reasons that moderate parties, such as the pro-royal Gailanis, did not receive nearly as much support during the 1980s.

Though the Oxus River in the north does cut through ethnic regions, it nevertheless forms a logical boundary. The Durrand Line, however, has no basis in logic, and even runs through the middle of some Pashtun towns.

Having said all that, I think your point is based on the arrogantly dismissive attitude that the Afghans are too tribal to get along, which is simply not historically true. But that is the attitude that Pakistan likes to promote, and it is also the attitude embraced by Charlie Wilson, who once said to me, "You put 2 Afghans in a room, you end up with 7 factions, these people just can't get along." But then Congressman Wilson has long been one of Pakistan's best friends in Washington .

All the best,
Melissa Roddy

Correction: In the last paragraph of my comment I refer to the splitting of tribes, where more accurately it was the splitting of peoples or ethnic groupings across borders with the USSR and presumably still-colonial India as well.

Dear Ms. Roddy,

You've done the public well with your informative and insightful critique of Charlie Wilson's War. However, there is one egregious error in your piece posted at Alternet that could be taken to undermine the credibility of your argument (Tom Hanks Tells Hollywood Whopper in 'Charlie Wilson's War'). There you state that, "Afghanistan has been a cohesive nation for several hundred years." Whatever the ebbs and flows of tribal relations there over the past several hundred years, you've badly misused the term "nation" in a way that's central to understanding Afghanistan.

First, tribes do not make a nation in the modern sense (American tribal nations were not a nation, but alliances). By definition, they are pre-national and by a long shot. Nation refers to a commonality or sharing of characteristics, including culture, language, geography, history, institutions and economic intercourse. This hardly applies to tribal Afghanistan.

Second, "several hundred years" effectively implies that Afghanistan was the first nation, or among the very first, in the world. Do you really want to make that claim? Historically, nations arose with the development of capitalism because that economic system broke down tribal barriers, pulled disparate people together and (force-) melded populations. It is common in modern times to claim early nation status, such as the French with Joan d'Arc, but these are romantic claims, propagandistic in nature. I wonder if you've fallen into that trap or taken from a source that did.

How does this matter in Afghanistan? Precisely because it is a country that was concocted by Western powers, mainly the British after WWI, to split especially northern tribes from their brethren in the Soviet Union, the Russian Revolution, where they rightfully belonged. I'd have to look it up, but it may have also been to similarly split southern tribes from India. Remember, Pakistan is also a belatedly concocted country. The Soviet move into Afghanistan in ~1979 was in the strategic sense effectively to back a modern middle class-led regime that was trying to turn the country into a nation. The U.S. opposed that, and the rest follows.

Your point about Hekmatyar and the Pakistanis did not require this erroneous claim.