Learn from Afghanistan bacha log. Learn from them. The dead state of Afghanistan can teach us many lessons. Only a small sampling is listed here.
Zillion provinces do not help in reducing extreme hatred between Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras.
Zillion provinces do not help in making the government more efficient. In fact Afghan government wouldn't even exist any longer if it was not for the crutches imported from USA.
Zillion provinces do not help end the uncouth tribalism, it extends the tribal disease.
Pashutns are the dominant race / ethnicity in Afghanistan, and see how trribly they have treated ethnic minorities during the golden but shortened era of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
So fear Allah, and stop importing failed ideas from dead states.
Pashtuns have always treated nuristanis and hazaras, just to mention a few, like crap even before the "islamic emirate of afghanistan" came into being in 1996 so I think it extends beyond our amir-ul-momineen wanna be mullah omar.
It was not zillion provinces, but warloridism [private armies like bugti] that doomed afghanistan! Feudalism is a similar curse of a stakeholder who is not loyal to the state but to this small patch of land.
In UK, they are run by districts and they are running fine not to mention the east coast of the US is full with tiny states unlike the bigger states of the west coast but still we have 48 provinces / states with a strong local govt system. Certainly, One Unit didn't work but I guess you are a bacha log yourself since you might not know about it!