The notion that bin Laden would hang out in Chitral’s Kalash valleys is absurd. There are plenty of places such as in Dir, lower Chitral, or Kohistan which would be far more hospitable to him and also where there are far fewer foreigners and presence of nosy outsiders.

The link today between the Kalash of Chitral and the Kalasha who reside mainly in the Waygal valley of Nuristan province but also in some smaller valley systems to the east, west and southeast of the main Waygal valley is nil.

The Waygal valley Kalasha express no affinity for the population in Chitral although they do for Kalash-ala speakers in Tregam and Ghaziabad district of Kunar.

Within the Waygal valley the people formerly referred to themselves as the “seven village Kalasha” to describe the communities in the valley as they defined themselves. But within the Waygal valley they further distinguished between the Vai who now reside in the northern villages of the Waygal valley and the Chimi-Nishey dwellers or the four villages of the lower valley. Beyond a dialectical variation between the two regions of the valley there was also different economic practices that were reflected in the types of cheese that were produced. Today, these people often refer to the division between the northern communities and the southern ones based on the types of cheese that they formerly (and may still) produce.

To make the situation even more complicated, in the Waygal valley and central Pech remain scattered households of the populations who resided before the Vai and Kalasha moved in.

Georg Morgenstierne, the great Norwegian historical linguist visited the area in the early and middle 20th century and managed to collect linguistic data on many of the small populations of autochthonus peoples who could be found in the middle Pech and some of the side valleys.

And even today the range of cultural, linguistic and political diversity in both the lowlands and highlands of Kunar and Nuristan is far, far greater than appreciated by the practitioners who are operating there.

One is hard-pressed to understand how much positive can be accomplished without an appreciation of this diversity and the factors that promote the continued salience of these ethnic, linguistic and political distinctions.