I visited that Afghani family I mentioned above (father Dari, mother Pashtun) the day after the Taliban were run out of Kabul. A bunch of other Afghans dropped by while I was there. One of them said something that didn't make sense to me at the time, but makes perfect sense now. He said the first thing the new Afghan government should do was to create a strong army. I thought, "This is nuts; haven't these people had enough of war?" but later realized that without a strong central power, the various factions and warlords would continue tearing the country apart. The Afghanis in that room eight years ago were optimistic that the West would help to create that strong power in Afghanistan. I don't know what they're thinking today.
Ever since the puppet regime was established in Afghanistan, the majority of MPs were/are Tajik and Uzbek war lords. Thus the Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group were grossly under-represented. That is why, since the beginning (the Bonn Conference) it was important that the President (Hamid Karzai, as we know) be a Pashtun.