If ASM had survived... everything would be different, and so different it's hard to even imagine clearly what might have happened. For one thing it would have been harder for the United States to have followed the traditional strategy (going right back to the Raj) of imposing a series of suitably pro-modernity Pashtun strongmen on the country and hoping that this time it really would bear state-building fruit. As for Abdullah... for all his faults, that rigged poll was clearly the point at which the credibility of the 'national' government collapsed amongst most minorities.
Do you think there was ever any realistic possibility, if things had been done differently, that Afghanistan could have been successfully stabilized, either as a confederation with a great deal of autonomy for different ethnic groups/tribes in their local areas, or alternatively broken up (similar to Yugoslavia) into multiple states for different ethnic groups (e.g. maybe a Pashtun state, a separate Hazara state, an Uzbek, state, maybe some more), as an alternative to maintaining the fiction that Afghanistan was a unified "country" that could be meaningfully ruled over by a central government sitting in Kabul? Some better alternative to that pro-modernity Pashtun strongman, who doesn't actually have support (or control) of the Pashtun areas, and who naturally has their popularity and the effectiveness of their rule limited in the non-Pashtun areas by virtue of the strongman being Pashtun?
Poll
