576 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 5 / 2015 tribal origin. So, relations based on a combination of parentage and patronage system, operated to a larger or smaller extent at the heart of the state apparatus itself and this frequently turned it into a battle ground between rival lineages. Clearly it was difficult to streamline an administration with these characteristics, and this then constituted a new factor blocking any possible modernisation.3 This general model can help us to better understand traditional Afghan society and, above all, understand why its modernisation has historically been so complicated. It is not surprising that many of the constitutive elements of this model can also assume an extreme nature. Take the fact that the vast majority of Afghan territory could easily be located in tribal areas with a difficult access. Afghanistan is a very mountainous land, and that in itself is a characteristic that favours tribalism and complicates the development of a strong state. In addition to this, it is a border land. Just as in other regions in the classical Islamic world, this land has also historically been a space that stretched between more developed, urbanised and statified regions, such as the Iranian and Indian worlds. Afghan territory has been a transit land between different civilisation areas of civilisations and between different empires since ancient times. This was the case for trade, with the famous Silk Road running through the north of the country, as well as for military expeditions. This condition of border land also brought with it several ambivalent effects. It was the source of considerable economic enrichment, and supplied the resources needed for the flourishing of outstanding cultural life in cities such as Herat, Kabul and Mazar Esh-Sherif, as well as for the development of states based in the region such as those of the Ghaznavids and the Ghurids. But it also condemned the country to periodic destruction and generated a level of ethnic diversity that was very difficult to control. The extreme way in which this combination of tribalism and dependence on distance trading existed, which was so very typical of the classical Islamic world as a whole, also created a very specific type of vulnerability. In the Afghan case it led to changes in trade routes. This was precisely what began to happen with the arrival of the Age of Discovery. European merchants managed to divert a large proportion of the caravan trade from the interior of Asia towards the coasts of the Indian Ocean. The Silk Road then entered into a progressive decline which largely ruined urban life across the whole of Central Asia. The British conquest of India accentuated this decline. A second setback came fast on the heels of the first. The victory of the Safavid Shia dynasty in Persia left the Sunni world split in two and isolated Central Asia from the large cultural and economic centres of the Middle East, which in turn influenced the decline of urbanised areas. The final result was the regression of certain regions to subsistence economies and towards a more tribal organisation. But this regression was merely another clear indicator of 3 Castien Maestro, 2013. Op. cit. 162-171. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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