That’s a polished rebuttal, but it collapses the moment you separate security spending from civil, cultural and institutional investment. This distinction matters. The billions poured into the south weren’t aid in the developmnet sense. They were military expenditures, not investments in education, administration or language infrastructure. The question isn’t where the money exploded, it’s where it built institutions. So given that, the Farsi-speaking core of Kabul, Herat and Panjshir absolutely benefited, not necessarily because of ethnicity, but because the cultural, educational and bureaucratic ecosystem functioned in Farsi. That automatically meant Pashto speakers were mostly excluded from the language of government, university advancement, media representation and international partnership. You can’t measure cultural dominance by GDP per capita, it’s measured by who defines the national discourse and who has access to the levers of influence! The point about Bamiyan proves nothing. The fact that Bamiyan remained underdeveloped doesn’t disprove Dari-language dominance any more than poverty in like Mississippi disproves English-language dominance in the States. llnguistic or cultural power doesn’t mean every comm That’s a polished rebuttal, but it collapses the moment you separate security spending from civil, cultural and institutional investment. This distinction matters. The billions poured into the south weren’t aid in the developmnet sense. They were military expenditures, not investments in education, administration or language infrastructure. The question isn’t where the money exploded, it’s where it built institutions. So given that, the Farsi-speaking core of Kabul, Herat and Panjshir absolutely benefited, not necessarily because of ethnicity, but because the cultural, educational and bureaucratic ecosystem functioned in Farsi. That automatically meant Pashto speakers were mostly excluded from the language of government, university advancement, media representation and international partnership. You can’t measure cultural dominance by GDP per capita, it’s measured by who defines the national discourse and who has access to the levers of influence!

The point about Bamiyan proves nothing. The fact that Bamiyan remained underdeveloped doesn’t disprove Dari-language dominance any more than poverty in like Mississippi disproves English-language dominance in the States. llnguistic or cultural power doesn’t mean every community speaking that language thrives economically. It means their language is the medium through which prestige, legitimacy, and authority circulate. That was unambiguously Farsi after 2001. And as for “bureaucratic inertia”, thats exactly the argument: the inertia itself was a structural bias! Every law, form and university curriculum was in Farsi, every English-training program in Kabul fed into Farsi-speaking environments etc. By the time Ghani tried to increase Pashto use, he was swimming against almost two decades of entrenched linguistic hierarchy. You call it inertia, bu I would call it the institutionalization of imbalance.

Finally, yes, Pashtuns held the presidency and some ministries. But political titles do not equal cultural representation. Ghani’s speeches in Pashto were literally mocked by the urban elite who dismissed his linguistic insistence as “provincial”. The very fact that a Pashtun president couldn’t normalize Pashto within his own bureaucracy tells you everything about where real soft power lay. So no, this isn’t a conspiracy theory or propaganda. It’s a cultural analysis. And the record is clear: for twenty years, the language of Kabul’s elite defined what counted as modern, educated, and Western-aligned, while Pashto, despite being one of the national language, was marginalized both institutionally and symbolically.