After just barely avoiding disastrous collapse, the big Loya Jirga tent in Kabul has been duly taken down and folded away. Afghanistan’s got a new constitution. U.N. and U.S. officials are all smiles. Me – I’m breathing deeply, hoping for the best, and agreeing with weary delegates that any peaceable conclusion is better than none at all. All’s well that ends.

The assembly ran 22 days rather than the scheduled 10. Nearly half the 502 representatives boycotted their only ballot opportunity. Rather than create a formal record of dissent, final ratification was accomplished by having participants stand en masse. Not all did.

Why not? Why was debate so bitter? What factor, hidden at first by pious denial, was the common denominator of dispute?

The answer, as usual in “Afghan-istan,” is ethnicity. Those quotation marks highlight how the country’s name, like its history, has always placed one group above all others. “Afghan” began as a synonym for the Pashtun, the Indo-Iranian ethnic group native to southern – but not northern – Afghanistan. Key question: Will that one group, the Pashtuns, now regain disproportionate control nationwide?

Flashback to pre-conflict 1977 when I lived in northern Afghanistan: I’m in a village of Uzbeks, a Turkic people whose ancestors had dominated the area for five centuries before the mid-19th. I’m outside a mud hut with its owner, the aged and legendary horseman Abdul Ali. He’d been a great champion in buzkashi, the famous equestrian game of Turkic Central Asia. Now he’s old and walks with a stick and talks of the past – not his own but his people’s. We’re sitting on a torn carpet outdoors in the weak fall sun. He points to the dry, rain-dependent fields onto which his Uzbeks have been forced – and then, in the distance, to green, river-irrigated flood plains now farmed by Pashtuns. Here’s what he says into my old reel-to-reel tape recorder:

“Once we had the power. It was our turn then, and from the time of Timur [Tamurlaine] no one could stop us. No one else had so many horses. No one else could ride them so well. Now that time has passed. It’s the turn of the Pashtuns now. They have the power. The turn has passed. Land, money, prestige – it’s all in their hands now.”

It’s a story I heard – and witnessed first-hand – repeatedly in the last years of what’s now remembered as Afghanistan’s pre-conflict “Golden Era.” Only a handful of Westerners had permission to live in the North along the Soviet border, and my work (researching buzkashi) required grass-roots involvement. What I learned – far more vividly than city-based observers dependent on mostly Pashtun government officials – was that non-Pashtuns had been systematically dispossessed of good grass and all that went with it.

“Internal imperialism” was the phrase coined by my academic mentor Louis Dupree to describe the spread of Pashtun control. Beginning from their southern homeland two centuries ago, Pashtun armies repeatedly attacked and finally subdued Uzbeks and other groups – Tajiks, Hazaras, Turkomen – native to the North. They took land, water, livestock, even women. By the 1970s Pashtun control had been consolidated. Pashtun settlers, relocated by Pashtun rulers, benefited from decisions by Pashtun provincial governors and Pashtun-controlled courts. Uzbeks and others, like occupied populations everywhere, endured abuse of power as best they could. (Such, to be fair, is par for Central Asia. Other groups, given the chance, have been as aggrandizing as Pashtuns.)

By 1978, the year my fieldwork ended, Pashtun control seemed like a done deal – so much so that it was taken for granted and thus ignored by embassies in Kabul. Even the deservedly influential Duprees – Louis and his wife Nancy – found it politic not to foreground this awkward fact of Afghan life.

The year 1978 ended more than my fieldwork. The April communist coup shattered old Afghanistan, wrecked institutions of central control, and thus (a positive by-product of disaster?) effectively terminated Pashtun domination of the non-Pashtun North. Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras all rallied to jihad chieftains from their own ethnic groups. Subsequent political ideologies may have changed – most spectacularly on the part of Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum who’s been in bed with every conceivable regime and would-be regime – but newly re-empowered ethnic allegiances seldom wavered. Here’s what almost all of today’s so-called jihadi leaders really have in common: They’re not Pashtuns, and they oppose any re-imposition of Pashtun hegemony.

How deep is this ethnic sentiment? The single most objective Afghan I know is a German-trained psychiatrist – objective in the sense of being able, psychologically, to stand outside himself and his natal circumstances. Such people are rare in any culture; this man happens to be an Uzbek. He likes and supports Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun enthroned by America as Afghanistan’s president and a fellow sophisticate. But he refuses to badmouth fellow Uzbek Dostum with whom, temperamentally, he has nothing in common. Dostum, he tells me, “makes it possible for us Uzbeks to stand up and speak out” after decades of ethnic subordination.

Now take the single most disturbing Afghan I know – disturbing in the sense of being drop-dead beautiful. She belongs to the Pashtun royal family but, like many of her kin, has spent the past quarter-century in Western exile. English is now her favored language; she speaks no Pashto at all. And yet, once back in Afghanistan, she adopts the claims and denials of Pashtun ethnic nationalism. We spoke recently of well-documented Taliban atrocities in the North. The Taliban, I reminded her gently, were ethnic Pashtuns. “No way,” she cried. “No Pashtun could ever do such things.” It was as if my statement of fact had broken some mythic trust or sacred rule.

“Beautiful people,” wrote Tennessee Williams, “make their own rules,” and I always cut some slack for this particular Pashtun princess. But my non-Pashtun friends, from landless peasants to government ministers, feel differently. Pashtuns, they say, made their own rules – and imposed them on everyone else – for much too long. Their collective determination: never again.

Listen, as I did, to the female delegates in this Loya Jirga. They numbered just 20 percent of the total, but their remarks were disproportionately brave and constructive. They suffered the most from years of war; now they’re the most intent on peace – but not at the price of renewed ethnic injustice.

“Everyone is in a rage,” said Habiba Danish last week. Habiba is a 23-year-old ethnic Tajik delegate from the northern province of Takhar. “Why are they [the Pashtuns] not putting our ideas in the constitution? It is discrimination. If they don’t include our ideas in the constitution, we won’t give up our weapons. If they want national unity, we want equal rights.”

Mahsa Toyie, a Tajik representing Herat, accused Pashtuns in league with President Karzai of ignoring other groups’ interests. “This constitution is not for one tribe; it is for the whole country,” she said.

“I came with the ideas of my people, and when we vote we have to answer to our people,” said Hasina, a woman engineer from the northern province of Jowzjan. “The main thing is the language, we want the right to use our Uzbek language.”

Male delegates employed fraternal idioms but spilt along similar lines. “The Pashtuns were in power for years and should now behave like equal brothers,” said one Hazara representative. A Pashtun from Kandahar retorted that his people should be regarded as “elder brothers.”

Finally deals were struck. The presidency (in the Pashtun hands of Hamid Karzai) remains strong, but there’ll be two vice presidents (from other groups) and more checks on executive control. The national anthem will be sung (by those few who know its words) in Pashto, but Persian (spoken by most non-Pashtuns) will also be an “official” language; even Uzbeki and Turkomani will be recognized in their ethnic areas. No, persons with dual citizenship can’t hold ministerial office, but, yes, those who already do (two Pashtuns with U.S. passports) will likely continue. And Islam will be enshrined as the nation’s “sacred” religion – not least because it’s the only rhetorical glue holding ethnically diverse Afghanistan together.

All told, not bad. Hamid Karzai said it best in the closing ceremonies: “I want an Afghanistan where a poor boy from the Baluch tribe can become president.” If so, he must keep his fellow Pashtuns from reverting to assumptions of ethnic superiority. Too many others are saying, never again.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.