Yes, it's a pain to read through essays and all the details of various circumstances. But the nuance is helpful sometimes... And seems to be important to elaborate in this case.
People don't need to agree or disagree with previous posts. Simply stating more facts and going into details (especially on complex matters of history and culture) is good and helpful.
One of the many failures of nation-building has to do with property disputes. In a WEIRD society like our own (or Germany, or Japan) there’s an office in the city that has survey records and the question of who owns a piece of land is decided by paperwork. If there’s a dispute or a transaction or an agreement that changes someone’s property rights in some way—perhaps you have an easement or you agreed to move the property line-those changes are also duly recorded in the paperwork in the office in the city.
This is not how human cultures work by default. In fact, the process of writing down everyone’s property deeds for the first time is a massive undertaking that is hard to do well and easy to fuck up. The Ottoman Empire made a hash of this when they did it in Palestine and recorded property rights at such a high level of granularity that a single land deed with a single owner might cover a massive expanse of land that spanned multiple villages. Which made no difference to any of the people in Palestine until those “owners” ended up selling that land to Zionists.
Afghanistan, likewise, had lots of land records, many of which dated back to before the Soviet war. Of course, in the intervening decades, a lot of the tribal peoples had property disputes and settled them in a perfectly normal pre-modern way, involving verbal agreements and codes of honor between extended kin groups. And as long as nobody tried anything like governing them from Kabul based on those written land records, it worked for them. Everyone remembered and respected the traditional agreements. Of course, when the US installed a government in Kabul and backed it up with American troops, eventually everyone who had been on the losing side of a property dispute and realized they could get more or better land based on some dusty old paperwork decided to sic the US-backed Kabul government on their neighbors, completely upsetting the balance of life.
Simply put, a human culture that has been urbanized, governable, and legible to a paperwork-based central authority for centuries is an extremely sophisticated thing that takes a ton of effort to invent. If you grow up in that kind of society centuries after the initial work was done, those institutions are almost invisible to you. How else would society function?
