Afghanistan is perhaps coming out of some decades of unbroken warfare – a war which was also a civil war. Any activity relevant to the constitution and upkeep of legal systems, including the administration of justice, is therefore bound up with the problem of the social order: the congruent articulation – from the perspective of the social actor – of the social, political and economic institutions in the country and their integration in the national state system and the international system regulating relations between states. Based on one and a half year of fieldwork this article is an ethnographic analysis of this situation.