Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes : Foreignness and the Politics of Evacuation 9783031403828, 9783031403835

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Figures
1: Reversing the Gaze
From Benignity and Positivism to Conflict and the Situated Interpreter
Afghan Interpreters
Spaces of Encounter in the Afghan Conflict
Power Dynamics
Time and the Interpreter
Sources and Approaches
References
2: Western Imaginings of Afghanistan
The Graveyard of Empires
One Tribe at a Time
Languages in the Tribal Analysis of Afghanistan
The West’s Knowledge Base About Afghanistan in the Twenty-First Century
Weaponising ‘Culture’
References
3: Spaces of Encounter
Afghan Employees
Western Employers
Recruiting
Tasks and Working Conditions
The Location of the Interpreter
References
4: Naming the ‘Interpreter’: From the NATO Drawdown Until the Evacuation
The ‘Traitor’
The ‘Professional Translator/Interpreter’
The ‘Alien Translator’
Western Cultures of Protection
The ‘Military Interpreter’
The ‘Civil Servant’
The ‘Honorary Veteran’
The ‘Victim’
The ‘Unnamed Interpreters’
References
5: Evacuation
The Evacuation of August 2021
Initial Priorities for Protection
Widening the Protection Net
Identifying Evacuees
Managing the Evacuation
Veterans
Time, Space and Hierarchy
References
6: After the Evacuation
The Afghans Left Behind
Spaces of Encounter in the West
Post-Taliban Afghanistan
References
7: Conclusions
Contextualising
The Local Interpreter
Foreignness
Evacuation
Moving Forward
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LANGUAGES AT WAR

Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes Foreignness and the Politics of Evacuation

Hilary Footitt

Palgrave Studies in Languages at War

Series Editors Hilary Footitt Department of Modern Languages and European Studies University of Reading Reading, UK Michael Kelly Department of Modern Languages University of Southampton Southampton, Hampshire, UK

Languages play a crucial role in conflict. They enable or disrupt communication between the people involved. They express the identities of the participants. They convey representations and interpretations of what is happening. And sometimes language differences are a key part of what the conflict is about. This series brings together books which deal with the role of languages in many different kinds of conflict, including international war, civil war, occupation, peace operations, humanitarian action, the preludes to conflict and its aftermath. The series embraces interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, intercultural communication, history, politics, international relations, peace studies and cultural studies. Books in the series explore conflicts across a range of times and places and analyse the language-related roles and activities involved. The Editors welcome proposals for new contributions, including monographs and edited volumes.

Hilary Footitt

Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes Foreignness and the Politics of Evacuation

Hilary Footitt Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study University of London London, UK

ISSN 2947-5902     ISSN 2947-5910 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Languages at War ISBN 978-3-031-40382-8    ISBN 978-3-031-40383-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © American Photo Archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 4 of this volume reuses some portions of my previously published work, ‘When the armies went back home: Local Interpreters and the Politics of Protection’ in ed. Lucía Ruiz Rosendo and Jesús Baigorri-­ Jalón, Towards an Atlas of the History of Interpreting, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2023: 268–287.

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Contents

1 R  eversing the Gaze  1 2 Western Imaginings of Afghanistan 35 3 S  paces of Encounter 65 4 Naming  the ‘Interpreter’: From the NATO Drawdown Until the Evacuation 97 5 E  vacuation131 6 A  fter the Evacuation163 7 C  onclusions195 I ndex211

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Abbreviations

ACBAR ACI ACRS AIIC ANSF ARAP AWA BAAG CAFOD CIA DFAT DFID DOD EUAA FCDO FET FIT FOB GAC HTT IED INGO IRAP

Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief and Development Afghan Canadian Interpreters Organisation Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence Afghan National Security Forces Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy Association of Wartime Allies British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group Catholic Agency for Overseas Development Central Intelligence Agency Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Department for International Development Department of Defense European Union Agency for Asylum Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Female Engagement Team International Federation of Translators Forward Operating Base Global Affairs Canada Human Terrain Teams Improvised Explosive Devices International Non-Governmental Organisation International Refugee Assistance project ix

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IRCC ISAF ISIS LEC MLAA MOD NATO NGO NOLB PRT RSM SHAPE SIV USCIS WFP

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada International Security Assistance Force Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Locally Employed Civilian Modern Language Association of America Ministry of Defence North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Non-Governmental Organisation No One Left Behind Provincial Reconstruction Team Resolute Support Mission Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe Special Immigrant Visa United States Citizenship and Immigration Services World Food Programme

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 ‘The remnants of an Army’. 1879. Lady Butler( Elizabeth Southerden Butler). National Army Museum. Image at NAM 1969-09-51-237 Fig. 3.1 Members of Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Farah prepare to enter the newly built Bakura District Center in western Afghanistan to assess completed work (November 27, 2012) 71 Fig. 5.1 Evacuees arrive on a Globemaster III aircraft at Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait, August 23 2021. US Air Force Airmen are assisting with evacuation of Americans and Allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan 137 Fig. 5.2 US Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron load passengers aboard a US Air Force C17 Globemaster III in support of the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA), Afghanistan, August 24 2021 146

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1 Reversing the Gaze

This book is concerned with seeing interpreters in war, examining the gaze that is turned on Afghan interpreters by their western employers. We are, as it were, going to look at the West as the West is looking at its Afghan interpreters. Given that few of the western interveners in Afghanistan were fluent speakers of Dari or Pashto, the version of the country and its peoples which they overwhelmingly received was translated to them by locally employed interpreting personnel. In the twenty year conflict, the West’s relationship with Afghan interpreters was arguably the most direct of any which they enjoyed with the peoples of Afghanistan. Whether these relationships were incidental and transactional, or longer lasting and personal, the figure of the Afghan interpreter became both a conduit for western impressions of Afghanistan and a key symbol of Afghanistan for the West. In this study, I am deliberately reversing the gaze, looking away from the normal object of interpreting scholarship, the interpreters, and focusing instead on their employers. I want to explore how western interveners lived with, left behind, evacuated and gave asylum to their Afghan interpreters, and how they represented the ‘otherness’ and ‘foreignness’ of this group with whom they worked. If, as Fabian suggested, the act of representing the Other is inherently one of conferring distance and difference (quoted in Manchanda, 2020), the West was creating the elements of this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Footitt, Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5_1

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otherness out of a relationship which, according to much interpreting scholarship, is essentially predicated on building bridges and aiding understanding. I hope that by treating the West’s assumptions about interpreters as an object of study in its own right, interpreting in war may be more clearly understood as the inevitably politicised endeavour that it is. Reading the story of the West’s imaginary of interpreters in Afghanistan is to engage, the book will argue, with western motivations for foreign invasion, the mechanics of waging kinetic and non-kinetic war, and with the immediate and longer term consequences of all these actions.

F rom Benignity and Positivism to Conflict and the Situated Interpreter Actually seeing interpreters in our stories of international relationships has always been difficult. The orality of interpreting and the assumed highly personal nature of the interpreting encounter has made historicising it problematic. As Delisle and Woodward suggested, ‘The spoken word is evanescent’ (2012, 24). There is of course evidence of interpreters being present at key historical periods—they are represented in Egyptian hieroglyphs (Kurz, 1985) and mentioned in ancient Greek or Latin texts (Vermeer, 1992). The desire to prove that interpreters ‘were there’ has inevitably led to a reliance on documents generated by those in a position to write and circulate the histories concerned, often Western colonisers operating in conflictual situations of marked asymmetrical power. Thus Spanish records of the conquests of the Americas showed that interpreting had indeed taken place within formal and informal relationships between conquerors and conquered—hence the considerable interest in Doňa Marina (La Malinche) whose role with Cortés in Mexico was noted in several records of the period (Greenblatt, 1991; Macnutt, 1977). The difficulty in visualising interpreters as important actors and agents within our stories of international encounters, the effective documentary marginalisation of interpreting, remains equally true in relation to more contemporary events which have produced a much larger range of

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written sources. Whilst the archives of the Second World War for example are abundant, the architecture of the holdings, the ways in which they are collected and presented, offers no easy key to finding the language intermediaries who must inevitably have been there. In the vast Second World War catalogue of the British National Archives at Kew, there are fewer than 170 references to ‘translator’ and ‘interpreter’. The largest group of these files contains captured enemy documents which concentrate on interpreters employed by the Germans—over half are memoranda about or debriefings with Hitler’s chief interpreter, Paul-Otto Schmidt. The next largest category comes from British Security Service files about individual captured interpreters. These personal files depict unreliable and potentially disloyal characters, petty criminals, people with fascist sympathies. Where interpreting is named at all in the Second World War documentary holdings it is a marginal, suspicious and in every way archivally eccentric activity (Footitt & Tobia, 2013, 6). Given this problematic of the invisible, marginal or eccentric interpreter figure in international encounters, it is hardly surprising that the most confident and sustained portrayal of interpreters in the twentieth century focused on cases in which the orality of interpreting had been made visible in the physical embodiment of conference interpretation. Simultaneous interpreting equipment, the earphones and microphones developed by International Business Systems (IBM), was introduced into the League of Nations and the International Labour Office in Geneva before the outbreak of the Second World War. It was however during the Nuremberg trials in 1945/1946 that the physicality of interpreting, with thirty-six interpreters involved, was brought to the attention of a wider public. Gaiba’s work on simultaneous interpretation (1998) positioned these International War Crimes tribunals as a key moment in which the presence of interpreters and the vital role they were playing internationally could finally be explored through official/unofficial documents, photographs and interviews with participants. Studying the origins of simultaneous interpreting in a variety of countries, for example Russia in the 6th Comintern of 1928 (Vejcer, 1999), and in international institutions like the League of Nations and the United Nations (Baigorri-Jalón, 2004), provided a history which at last brought the figure of the

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interpreter out of the archival shadows, and onto the centre of the stage of history. With the development of the Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence (AIIC) from the 1950s onwards, it was possible to follow the biographies of interpreters in international organisations like the United Nations, thereby constructing a personalist interpreting history, divided into generational epochs of interpreting: early years, second generation, new generations (Baigorri-Jalón, 2004). Importantly, this focus on conference interpreting framed the whole practice of interpreting as one largely associated with international meetings and with organisations whose aspirations were general collectivist— peacemaking, reconciliation and diplomacy (Roland, 1999)—and hence axiomatically benign. In addition to the implicit benignity of interpreting in international encounters, interpreting research traditionally favoured positivist and presentist models of investigation which concentrated on processes of cognition and performance (Gran & Taylor, 1990). Angelilli argued that interpreting, unlike Translation Studies, had developed its theory from within the field itself, usually without the overt influence of alternative models and perspectives, becoming ‘a complex field of practice lacking the insights of interdisciplinary research and theory’ (2004, 24). Nevertheless, alongside this approach, there had always been a strand of scholarship which regarded interpreting as situated, related to the contexts of its activity (Anderson, 1976), one which championed a more sociologically informed examination of the practices (e.g. Gile, 1998) and behaviours of interpreters (Pőchhacker, 1995). With the appeal for a ‘cultural turn’ in interpreting (Cronin, 2002) however, interpreting scholarship moved more decisively towards contextualising its enquiries, positioning interpreting within broader cultural, social and ideological perspectives. The growth in community interpreting from the 1990s onwards similarly emphasised the need to situate interpreting within the particular institutions and social contexts in which it took place (Hale, 2007). Sociological insights coming from Translation Studies were seen as increasingly important to understanding interpreting, hence for example the special issue of The Translator (2005, Vol. 11/2) dealing with the relevance of the sociology of Bourdieu to Translation and Interpreting Studies.

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If concentration on simultaneous interpreting in international institutions had associated interpreting historically with negotiation and peace, the events of 9/11 in New York, and subsequent Coalition invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, encouraged a view of interpreting as operating now in much less benign environments, what Tymoczko called ‘translating culture in an age of political violence’ (2009, 179). In early twenty-first century research, a microhistorical approach focused on this language intermediary and contextualised the figure within the specifics of their activities alongside military forces in Iraq (Inghilleri, 2010; Tipton, 2011), or in Guantánamo Bay (Inghilleri, 2008). By positioning interpreters in the economic, political and ethnic frameworks of military force, and taking a Bourdieusian perspective, this scholarship argued for a recognition of the constructed subjectivity of the interpreter figure and for the effects which conflict would have on personal and professional practice. Rather than a neutral language intermediary, Inghilleri for example (2009) saw an interpreter figure who had no real autonomous professional identity, positioned within a military-political field which made it difficult to exercise ethical judgement within anything other than a primarily military understanding of ethics. The concept of interpreters as free neutral agents was replaced by that of interpreters as conduits for army practice, and hence de facto sustainers of the conflict in which they were operating. This situated microhistory was given a broader resonance by Baker’s narrative theory approach to translating/interpreting in war. The personal responsibility of the translator/interpreter figure was widened out to encompass the institutional processes of language mediation, now perceived as in themselves constitutive of war, ‘essential for circulating and resisting the narratives that create the intellectual and moral environment for violent conflict’ (Baker, 2006, 2). Baker’s later work on those linguistic institutions which, she suggested, helped to sustain the ‘war on terror’ called for a holistic critical approach, eschewing more traditional professional criteria like ‘accuracy’, and instead engaging fully with the framing devices which were dehumanising those they claimed to be mediating (Baker, 2010). With this work, research moved well beyond the traditional and axiomatic benignity of interpreting in international

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encounters in order to ask questions about the active role of language mediation in conflict, and beyond this, in dissent and political protest (Baker, 2016). Overtly situating the interpreter in the specifics of conflict opened the door to a welcome international broadening of interest—Todorova and Ruiz Rosendo (2021) for example provided vignettes of conflict interpreting in a wide range of geographical areas: Korea, China, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Lebanon, the Sahel, Italy, Spain, the US and Argentina. In seeking to reflect these cases back into the contemporary training of interpreters, they classified conflicts in ways which included the non-kinetic as well as the kinetic—‘interpreting in conflict zones’ meant an armed conflict; a ‘conflict-related scenario’ was a situation resulting from conflict, for example interpreting in Italy or Greece during the refugee crisis (Ruiz Rosendo & Todorova, 2023, 2). Their work offered case studies in Humanitarian Interpreting in international organisations and tribunals like the International Criminal Court, as well as in work with refugees in national and regional contexts. Relationships on the ground in international aid organisations and refugee support groups necessarily added new perspectives which had not formerly been drawn upon in studies of interpreting in conflict.

Afghan Interpreters The conflict in Afghanistan presented a situation which was in many ways unique for the study of interpreting in war. To begin with it was a lengthy confrontation, starting in 2001, and continuing in a variety of different forms for twenty years, up to the final evacuation in August 2021. Whilst the bulk of NATO forces drew down in 2014, some western troops remained in the country, as did development and cultural agencies associated with the West. Secondly, the Afghan conflict, although dominated numerically by US forces, engaged a large number of different countries—in the field, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) received contributions from forty-two nations. Tragically too, this was a war in which interpreters themselves were being placed in considerable physical danger, a fact which became of such mounting concern to

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professional interpreters in the West that by the January 2009 Assembly of AIIC in Nice (Interview, 15.11.21), they had agreed to set up a working group to raise the issue of interpreter protection and lobby for their support: ‘Professional interpreters started to worry about them as news of their death and injury filtered through the press’ (Fitchett, 2019, 195). This combination of the long time period of the Afghan war, the international involvement of individual NATO countries in the conflict and the increasingly publicised dangers to which interpreters were exposed encouraged scholars (Jones & Askew, 2014; Tălpas, 2016; Ruiz Rosendo & Barea Muñoz, 2017; Moser-Mercer, 2018; Gómez-Amich, 2018, 2021; Ruiz Rosendo, 2020; Snellman, 2023) to investigate the challenges posed to interpreting by experiences in Afghanistan. Ruiz Rosendo and Barea Muñoz (2017), taking a wide canvas of war-­ related scenarios in the Middle East, argued that conflicts were not uniform in nature. Much depended on the chronology of the engagement—emergence, escalation, de-escalation and settlement. These different situations would clearly affect the positionality of interpreters, and there had thus far been no proper taxonomy of interpreters to reflect such variations in different stages of war. Useful potential classifications they suggested might include military linguists, local or civilian interpreters, interpreters working for news agencies or journalists (fixers) and those employed by international organisations like the UN. The ‘ontological narratives’ (Somers & Gibson, 1994; Baker, 2006) of the interpreters themselves, the personal stories they told about their lives, would be, they argued, a rich potential source. The article focused particularly on the extent to which such narratives might challenge frameworks traditionally associated with professional interpreting—ethics, neutrality, solid training, detailed preparation for interpreter tasks. Future research should be undertaken, they argued, with the specific objective of improving interpreter training for these conflict-related roles: ‘Although it is important to humanise the process of interpreting in war, in our opinion it is equally important to professionalize it’ (Ruiz Rosendo & Barea Muñoz, 2017, 198). As well as the voices of the interpreters themselves, this interest in professionalisation could also be explored from the perspective of the employers. A particularly resonant example was the research of Jones and Askew

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on the response of one institution, NATO Headquarters, to establishing an interpreting/translation service in Afghanistan, Meeting the Language Challenges of NATO Operations (2014). Jones, the former head of the Linguistic Service at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), had been responsible for setting up and managing NATO’s language policy and was deputed at various times to monitor the organisation’s linguistic services in overseas engagements like those in Bosnia-­ Herzegovina and Kosovo. The book detailed early attempts to set up a professional linguistic service in Afghanistan in 2003, followed by subsequent efforts by Jones himself in follow-on visits to NATO headquarters there in 2006 and 2008. Using interviews with those involved, the book provided a vivid picture of the circumstances under which Afghan linguistic employees then worked and the difficulties in developing what Jones and Askew saw as the hallmarks of a professional linguistic operation in war: training, rigorous pre-recruitment testing, robust quality control systems, good record-keeping and adequate English language standards, as well as the vital background security checks. By 2008, linguists at NATO Headquarters were receiving training in consecutive and liaison interpreting, ethics and speech analysis, terminology management and translation. The numbers involved were small though—by then, around thirty locally hired linguists were employed in ISAF HQ, alongside three international civilian consultants, and an Afghan head and deputy. Whilst the research was limited to the relatively small Headquarters, largely based in Kabul, it is a particularly interesting snapshot of the processes by which an interpreting/translation operation which would be recognised by linguists outside as a professional one could be mounted within a conflict zone by a key international institution. However, as the war developed in Afghanistan, it was clear that more than thirty language intermediaries were required, and here the direct employers of interpreters in the field would be the military forces of individual NATO countries, relying on two of Ruiz Rosendo and Barea Muñoz’s categories of interpreters—military interpreters and local civilians. Research on the former has tended to focus on the assumed alternative professional codes involved in working as a uniformed and armed soldier who has the primary task of interpreting. The core interest in military professionalisms is that of security so that the integration of an

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interpreter into an army culture can be assumed to be likely to challenge concepts which are basic to the interpreting profession like ethics and neutrality (Tesseur & Footitt, 2019). Snellman for example (2023), who had himself fulfilled this dual role of soldier and interpreter, sought to investigate the ambiguity of the interpreter’s position by interviewing officers in Finland, Denmark and Sweden who had worked with or trained military interpreters. His conclusion was that ‘military interpreters occupy larger spaces for ethical deliberation and decision-making than typically attributed to the interpreter profession’ (27), and that one approach to future training for them might involve a more situated reflection on ethics than was common in traditional interpreter programmes (Delgado Luchner & Kherbiche, 2019). On the whole though, interpreting scholarship about Afghanistan has tended to concentrate more extensively on the second category, that of locally employed civilians, non-military interpreters, either nationals brought in by the army or locally employed civilians recruited from within Afghanistan itself. Many interpreters were employed through private contractors rather than directly by the army—Ferracci (2020) claimed that in 2020 6.4% of the total of locally employed personnel contracted privately were translators/interpreters. Research interest in local interpreters has thus far focused on the ways in which their lived experiences problematise standard notions of interpreter professionalism. Gómez-Amich’s work (2018) used life stories and narrative interviews to try and understand the lives of five local interpreters who had worked with the Spanish forces between 2003 and 2014, examining the profiles of these men, the manner of their recruitment and their own views of the role they had been given. Her conclusion that the experiences of local interpreters on the ground might have much to teach future interpreter trainers implied that a different sort of operational professionalism could eventually be envisaged—‘how to effectively work in dangerous scenarios, how to stay focused under pressure, how to creatively resort to certain strategies based on contextual risk analysis, how to deal with trauma, and how to balance between mediation and neutrality in extreme situations’ (38). Overall, it was evident that ‘the features that characterize conflict zones actively challenge the normative role traditionally assigned to the

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interpreter as an invisible and impartial facilitator of communication’ (Gómez-Amich, 2021, 107). The ways in which the complexity of the interpreting site challenged interpreter professionalism was underlined in Ruiz Rosendo’s broader study (2022). Her seventeen respondents included military officers, a correspondent and a mixture of national interpreters (recruited in Spain) and local interpreters. Rather than drawing general conclusions on the homogenous figure of the interpreter, Ruiz Rosendo highlighted differences in the ways in which the various actors and categories of interpreters interrelated in war. Issues around trust and personal perceptions were thus set within a wider framework of relationships and hierarchies, with a suggestion that future interpreter training would need to take account of these potentially diverse interactions between social identity and military culture. Surrounding this challenging of interpreter professionalism was undoubtedly the lurking shadow of menace and violence. Tālpas for example (2016) argued that we should see the risks faced by members of the military as largely analogous to those attending most interpreter activity in conflict. This perspective of risk created an image of the interpreter as an endangered hybrid professional, an ‘interpreter-soldier’ (246). As Moser-Mercer pointed out however (2018), extending this sort of definition into the realms of interpreter protection was highly contentious in legal terms. Whilst international humanitarian law might prohibit attacks on civilians, it was not clear how far hybrid interpreter-soldiers, wearing the uniforms of their employers, could reasonably fit into this category. If it was unlikely that international humanitarian law could protect interpreters, the responsibility would presumably revert to the individual states which had employed them, and here much depended on the terms of the contracts they had received. For Moser-Mecer, ‘conflict zones are more often than not legal vacuums, where the rule of law has been suspended, functioning governments are non-existent, and lawless behavior abounds’ (308). This considerable body of interpreting research has established the multiple positionings of interpreters in conflict and enabled us to understand something of the experiences and perceptions of linguistic intermediaries. As the work demonstrates, interpreting sites in war are complex,

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with multiple actors involved, and a range of hierarchies inter-reacting on the ground. The ambivalent positioning of the interpreter-soldier, potentially dealing with alternative codes of professionalism, and largely standing outside international frameworks of protection, represents a clear challenge to the norms of professional interpreting with its emphasis on thorough training, neutrality, ethics and careful preparation for assignments. The context of the interpreter paradigm is thus being interrogated and stretched by war: ‘we should not limit our research to traditional understandings of interpreting, given that, in so doing, we risk excluding many of the practices that are vital to the relationships that develop in conflict and post-conflict scenarios’ (Ruiz Rosendo & Todorova, 2023, 4,5). In this book, I seek to build on these insights from interpreting scholars by contextualising Afghan interpreters within broader frameworks, frameworks which are both temporal and conceptual. Previous research has examined interpreter activity between 2003 and 2014 normally, with the exception of the Jones and Askew study (2014), at unspecified dates. This volume on the other hand takes the Evacuation from Afghanistan (August 2021) as the pivot point from which to tell the story of locally employed interpreters viewed from the pre-Evacuation period of loss of employment, fear of violence and long running negotiations with western ex-employers, through to the chaos and mayhem of the Evacuation itself, and on to the aftermath in Europe and the USA, in lives lived in transit hotels and barracks within the asylum and immigration bureaucracies of individual NATO countries. In this perspective, the local interpreter, the Afghan figure normally the physically closest to western personnel, can be perceived both as a key element in relationships between the West and Afghanistan, and as a manifestation of the ways in which Europeans and North Americans represented and understood this foreign ‘other’ over time. Inevitably, locating the Afghan interpreter beyond the previous interpreter paradigm implies placing the research in some sort of dialogue with other relevant disciplines, opening out the conceptual context to ask broader political questions about spaces of encounter (where were the interpreters?) and power dynamics (who controlled the exchanges?). What kind of war was actually being fought during the twenty year

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intervention in Afghanistan? Was it solely kinetic, or were there ‘soft power’ elements in which interpretation and translation were required in non-­military as well as military agencies? To what extent was the local Afghan interpreter a western construct of neo-colonial intervention, and what might postcolonial studies have to tell us about language inequalities on the ground of war?

Spaces of Encounter in the Afghan Conflict The implicit framing of much of the work around conflict interpreters is a distinct and normalised chronology of war: there are ‘conflict zones’ where violent military operations take place, and ‘post conflict zones’ which, as the name indicates, post date the conflict in question and may involve interpreting in humanitarian situations, development work or asylum practices (see the title of Ruiz Rosendo & Todorova, 2023). The first scenario is war, the second peacebuilding. In Afghanistan however, the situation was very different. As Thiessen argued: ‘The Afghan intervention includes an aggressive war-fighting military component and an immense program of peacebuilding project work involving an incredibly diverse troupe of actors’ (2013, 9). For international relations researchers, what was happening in Afghanistan demonstrated a neo-liberal version of peacebuilding, one founded on the belief in a liberal peace, allied to economic transformation, and to the interrelated concepts of human rights and security. Before 2001, according to peacebuilding scholars, the majority of international interveners had claimed to be acting neutrally. With Afghanistan however, it was clear that the foreign peacebuilders in the country were in fact the very same invaders and conquerors who had positioned themselves on one side of the continuing war. This neo-liberal peacebuilding model, with its emphasis on economic marketisation (Paris, 2004, 5), was increasingly shown to be limited in its locally based participation, relying on foreign governments and officials to disemburse finance and to make key decisions on project management. Observing what was happening in Afghanistan, many scholars argued that the neo-liberal peacebuilding project was in crisis (Richmond, 2009; MacGinty, 2008; Duffield, 2007)

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and should be terminated altogether (Jacoby, 2007), or at the least transform itself into a more emancipatory initiative with a defined ‘bottom up’ strategy, and a greater participation for local actors (Richmond, 2007, 2009, 2010). However necessary it might have seemed to amend this neo-liberal model, it was evident that very considerable amounts of money were being dispersed in Afghanistan on what were termed reconstruction efforts. The US Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) argued that it had been planned as early as 2002 to spend 1.8 billion dollars over ten years on development projects relating to education, improvement and accessibility of health care, and much of these monies would be channelled through USAid. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) was still pledging in 2018 to spend £100.1 million in the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust (administered by the World Bank, and including funds from fifteen donors), £20.4 million in multi-­ year humanitarian support and £13 million on bilateral support to education in Afghanistan. The programmes, directly managed by DFID at country or headquarters level, aimed to ‘build a more stable Afghanistan … helping to provide them with greater access to healthcare, education and safe drinking water, as well as helping to create jobs, boosting economic development, and tackling corruption’ (DFID, 2018). Inevitably this level of aid and support could not be delivered without the agency of INGOs employing international workers in the country, or partnering with Afghan groups acquainted with the work of development and humanitarian organisations. The scale of just one part of the international aid effort can be gauged by the membership of the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG) which included some seventeen organisations from well-known INGOs like Action Aid, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Tearfund and Oxfam, to smaller and more focused groups like the UK friends of Aschiana which provided schools for street children and hot meals to around 2000 young people outside Kabul and Mazar. Research on languages in development agencies and NGOs (Footitt et al., 2020; Tesseur, 2023) has stressed how normalised the practice of so-called informal interpreting is on the ground of aid and development projects. NGO workers in the field frequently find themselves

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multitasking both as full-time NGO employees and as development practitioners who are suddenly called upon to act as on the spot interpreters. In studies of the linguistic operation of INGOs, it is evident that staff who are able to speak English (either the language of the donor organisation or one in which other donors are happy to operate) are often expected to act as an informal liaison between the international worker and the local community: ‘So often it was, if we were in the field and I had a colleague with me who was an English speaker, I would be the direct translator between the two, so I would be the first point of contact to either the mayor or the head of the village or the beneficiaries, and then translating back to that person’ (Tesseur, 2023, 114). For Afghan English speakers playing a leading role in a local project, assumptions appeared to be largely the same—they would be willing to multitask, performing their actual job within the programme, but also acting as an informal interpreter when necessary: ‘I found myself turning into a translator for meetings … to make sure that language was not a barrier…. I still do it, even at high level meetings. This is wrong. Why don’t you speak in Pashto or Dari?’ (Interview, 18.11.22). Even when international staff had acquired some language competence, they would turn to informal interpretation for linguistic support if there were communication problems: ‘If I was visiting a project and couldn’t get by with my Dari, then someone from the community would help’ (Interview, 1.2.22). In this neo-liberal model, the space of encounter between Afghans and European/North American interveners was at the same time both military and aid related. Violent warfare coexisted with a wide range of reconstruction and support projects in education, health, infrastructure, economic development and human rights. These were directly financed by NATO governments who either managed the programmes themselves or, more often, implemented them through established western-based INGOs. In both scenarios, local Afghan agencies and community groups worked alongside foreign aid organisations in a pattern which had been common in Western development programmes for many years (Footitt, 2017). The particular context of the war in Afghanistan may thus be said to challenge conventional chronologies of ‘conflict’ and ‘post conflict’,

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and in so doing to broaden our understanding of the spaces of encounter where Afghans acting as interpreters would be found.

Power Dynamics Descriptions of the actual encounter between Afghan interpreter and western intervener have tended to start from within the meeting itself, focusing on the perceptions of the interpreters themselves or on their positionality, for example the social capital which interpreters might possess (Gómez-Amich, 2018) to successfully assist the troops’ mission. Although there is a sense of the outside political environment in which interpreters work—the consequences of having worn a uniform of the NATO military—the implications of their position are largely viewed at a personal interpreter level, the potential clash of loyalties for instance, or the extent to which young male interpreters might have concepts of military masculinities which they share with soldiers from the West (de Jong, 2022). What is missing from approaches like these which start from the interpreter’s own positionality is a sense that we are dealing with an essentially two-sided meeting, an encounter which brings together largely antithetical parties—Afghans and foreign interveners—and crucially that the balance of power between them in these meetings is starkly unequal. Such an observation of power disparities connected to foreign intervention finds its echo of course in the substantial body of research on colonialism and imperialism, as well as more recent research centred on the disputed term ‘postcolonialism’—‘What? Post-colonialism? Have they left?’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 2022, 27). Based on the foundational work of Said and Fanon exploring the ways in which the colonised are brought into existence by the imperial settler, there is here an understanding that a western principle of order is embedded in imperialism and connects social relations, theories of knowledge, western science, trade, notions of sovereignty and the establishment of law in what Nandy termed the ‘code’ or ‘grammar’ of imperialism (1989). If interpreting scholarship has not devoted much attention to this colonialist setting (although see Cronin, 2002; Cáceres Würsig, 2017)

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translation studies scholarship on the other hand has seen an intersection between translation and postcolonial theory precisely in the role which translation has played and continues to play in shaping and taking shape within the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism (Niranjana, 1992, 2). Within this analytical framework, the position of the translator becomes a highly political one: ‘The translator is no longer a mediator between two different poles, but her/his activities are inscribed in cultural overlappings which imply difference’ (Wolf, 2000, 142). Rather than viewing translators, or indeed interpreters, as having subjectivities independent of the colonial or neo-colonial relationships in which they are constructed, postcolonial researchers call on us to investigate the nature and contradictions of the ‘in-betweenness’ (Bhabha, 1994). The history of anthropology and ethnography has traditionally placed the figure of the ‘native informant’ in this ‘third space’—an indigenous person employed to provide information about non-western societies to western researchers or observers. As Fried classically noted, in western dealings with foreign groups, ‘The agents of the state needed somebody to take orders, to convey messages, to link them with the strange society, even to act as a conduit for siphoning off as much of the surplus as they could drain from these poorly organized populations’ (1975, 20). This notion of the ‘native informant’ has of course been extensively critiqued in postcolonial scholarship. He is seen as a figure created by the West, one which could only exist and be understood within western terms of asymmetrical colonial relations. Bhabha represented him as a mimic man, potentially Janus-faced, who might possibly become menacing and subversive (1997). Spivak sought to set the ‘native informant’ within global hybridity, as a speaker for the subaltern in philosophy and culture (1999). The very social, cultural and linguistic capital which the in-between interpreter in Afghanistan is said to possess can be viewed within a context of power relations which for some western participants at least strongly recalled the traditional colonialist positioning. One military cultural adviser in Afghanistan for example explained that he had developed his role, ‘based on the British political officers during the imperial era. To be clear, I am no apologist for empire; however, there were some elements of British rule that I consider were done well’ (Martin, 2014, 9).

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The meeting of interpreter/western intervener accorded a fundamentally secondary status to this ‘in-between’ figure, although they were arguably playing a role which might also offer latent possibilities for subversion. On the whole however, any subversion by the interpreter in the relationship was likely to be subordinate to the overall priorities set by the West— thus interpreters might be in a position to assess the validity of information they had been instructed to obtain from the community, to decide for example whether it was true, or whether it was deliberately feeding misinformation into the western system. Interpreters might equally be able to use the cultural knowledge they uniquely possessed in order to nuance or challenge western perceptions or policies. The nature of the unequal power relationships in Afghanistan however made such critical responses problematic. One NATO officer wondered for example why interpreters in Helmand, handling ‘the vast majority of the interface between foreigners and Helmandis did not take the initiative and tell their British colleagues that they were operating on entirely false assumptions about the country’. But using the position of interpreter to offer an independent and informed critique of western approaches, he speculated, would be difficult given the economic power structures which had been established between employer and employee: ‘they are being paid by the foreigners who utilise their skill-set, thus they have no incentive to challenge the understanding that their “master” has of his environment’ (Martin, 2014, 235). Contextualising locally employed Afghan interpreters entails a recognition that interpreting in war operates within a context of power which is wider than linguistic and cultural exchanges on the ground and perceptions of the interpreters about these. Over the twenty year intervention, Afghan interpreters and western troops and agents met in a fundamentally unequal relationship. The in-between third space of Afghan interpreters, whilst co-constructed by Afghan employees and western employers, was rooted in power disparities which recalled older colonial frameworks.

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Time and the Interpreter Most studies of Afghan interpreters have explored their experiences post hoc, in retrospect and within a strict time envelope of their services with the military. Thus Gómez-Amich hears the narratives of how five local interpreters worked with Spanish forces until the end of 2014 (2018); Ruiz Rosendo questions national and local interpreters as well as military personnel who were all involved at the same time (2022), and de Jong (2022) explores the coming of age narratives constructed by Afghan interpreters during the conflict. Jones and Askew’s text (2014) is particularly interesting in temporal terms in that it mixes observations of practice at the time (2003, 2006, 2008) by a senior professional linguist, with interviews conducted in 2013 after the events with both interpreters and NATO employers: ‘Our intention was … to portray the linguists as individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences and to report their own personal narratives because these narratives feed into their professional lives and it is important to understand them when considering the linguists’ place in the entire organization of peace support operations’ (7). The problem however in these temporal limitations is that ‘interpreters’ in Afghanistan lived an afterlife which clearly post-dated their professional interpreting duties within the conflict. A long time after the exchanges which they mediated had taken place, and their contracts had been terminated, they were still being identified as ‘interpreters’, described solely in terms of this previous time-limited employment. For the Taliban of course, Afghans who had been engaged by the West as linguistic mediators would always be considered as ‘interpreters’ whether or not their actual employment had ceased. This was the crucial descriptor which adhered to them in the years before and after the military drawdown. In 2009 Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader at the time, called on his followers to capture and kill any translator/interpreters who were known to have worked with ISAF: ‘Our policy is that, whoever protects and supports foreigners as translators, they are national traitors for us and the people of Afghanistan. Like the foreign soldiers and other foreign occupiers, they too will be put to death’ (quoted in Ferracci, 2020, 30). As NATO began to withdraw the bulk of its troops in 2014, the Taliban

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listed translators as one of their key future targets. By 2015, they claimed to have killed fifteen interpreters, and during 2016 it was thought that they had assassinated twenty-three more (European Asylum Support Office, 2017). Once you had been an interpreter, you would continue to be identified as such, a long time after the employment had ceased, a fact of which the ex-interpreters themselves were vividly aware. From the West’s perspective too, ex-interpreters from Afghanistan continued to be identified by their past job and called ‘interpreters’ well after NATO troops had left the country. Lobbying groups in the West seeking to protect Afghans used the designation ‘interpreter’ too as an integral part of the case they were mounting. Thus the co-founder of the British support organisation, the Sulha Alliance, was described as someone who had built strong relationships with interpreters when he was serving with them in Afghanistan, and had become an advocate on their behalf when he found out that an interpreter with whom he had worked was now facing deportation (Sulha Alliance, n.d.). After the Evacuation translator/interpreters were named as such and given a relatively high profile in the western media. In the UK, an award-­ winning travelling exhibition of photographs taken by the army veteran and photographer Andy Barnham brought individual ex-interpreters both visually and physically to the notice of the general public as they talked about their lives during the conflict, and the Evacuation, thereby emphasising the primordial debt which it was thought that the government owed to them: ‘They’re not strangers, they helped us. We were over there when we needed them. We now need to recognise it’s our turn to reciprocate and help them’ (Barnham, 2022). In the aftermath of the Evacuation, it was again translator/interpreters who were most prominent in press and media reports. Indeed the designation ‘Interpreter’ seemed to function as a type of shorthand with which to describe the whole group of Afghan refugees. Thus as late as August 2022, the Times was running an article about ‘More than 6,000 Afghans, including hundreds of interpreters who worked alongside British troops and the government during the war, are still stuck in the country one year after the withdrawal…. There are issues finding homes for those who served alongside UK forces, with about 9,000 interpreters still living in hotels…’ (16 August 2022).

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This book engages directly with what we might term the longue durée1 of Afghan interpreters, positioning them beyond the temporal envelope of their interpreting tasks in war and seeing them, as they were seen by both enemies and ex-Allies, as continuing to be ‘interpreters’ throughout the Evacuation and in the aftermath of their lives as refugees. After the Evacuation, Afghan ex-interpreters who had not been able to escape the country were still being hunted down as ‘interpreters’ by the new regime: ‘When the Taliban capture Kabul They warned me that we would kill you because you were a translator with the Americans’(Association of Wartime Allies, 2022, 18). For some people in the West too, translator/ interpreters who had arrived in Europe and North America were marked out as preferential cases by virtue of their past interpreting duties, becoming a special category among refugees, and one that merited particular treatment: ‘the Home Office default setting for supporting all migrants is “survival”: sufficient unto the day and not a penny more. For the former interpreters and their families, we demand a different standard: that they be given the means to thrive, not simply survive’ (Diggins, Spectator, 8 January 2022). Some of the ex-interpreters themselves had clearly expected that their designation as ‘interpreters’ would entitle them to some sort of special consideration in the asylum system: ‘I didn’t receive a warm welcome. There wasn’t any preferential offer to me or to the category of people who were recruited as interpreters for the British Army in Afghanistan’ (Ayeen, 2018). In the longue durée of the Afghan interpreter, spatial distinctions between zones which were violent and others which were quiescent are blurred. The very trajectory of their lives demonstrated Keane’s point that it is no longer easy to separate spaces of war from those of peace: ‘For citizens living in the so-called democratic zone of peace, alas, the world is not so neatly subdivided into peaceful and violent zones. Nor can it become so, thanks in part to the links between the two worlds forged by global arms production and the violence-ridden drug trades’ (1996, 4). This temporal stretching of the location of war was deeply experiential for Afghan ex-interpreters, pursued at home, seeking to escape, or beginning the long process of dealing with the often rebarbative refugee  The ‘long duration’, an approach to history pioneered by Fernand Braudel.

1

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and asylum systems of their host countries. Interpreters in war, this book will argue, should be seen in a longer time frame than their time-limited professional activity with foreign interveners. In the eyes of enemies and allies, interpreters in Afghanistan did not cease to be ‘interpreters’ when their contracts were terminated. The longue durée of the Afghan interpreter can tell us much about the political situatedness of interpreting in war and the personal as opposed to professional consequences of this situatedness. Importantly, it highlights the enduring symbiotic two-way relationship between Afghan interpreters and foreign interveners: ‘We are here because you were there’ (Barnham, 2022).

Sources and Approaches The sources and conceptual approaches I have used to explore Afghan interpreters through western eyes are, echoing Manchanda, ‘methodolgically and disciplinarily heterodox to the fullest extent possible’ (2020, 16). Reversing the gaze in interpreting studies as this book seeks to do encourages us to engage with the ways in which particular contact zones of encounter (Pratt, 2008) are constructed, tracing how the idea of interpreting has been, in Bruno Latour’s formulation, ‘translated’ into the specific context. From this perspective, it is possible to envisage the existence of a developing chain of what Kujamäki calls ‘spaces where mediation practices between two cultures can be assumed to be pertinent’ (2016, 61). Adopting the distinct framing and chronology of particular situations enables us to identify these potential spaces of mediation and establish an ‘archive’ to begin to understand them. The notion of forming an ‘archive’ is key to the methodology I have employed here. Readings influenced by cultural and decolonisation history have of course urged us to see an archive not as a container of passive sources of evidence which we can utilise to investigate the past, but rather as a site of doubt and uncertainty in which we are ourselves implicated. My objective in this has been to bring together a wide range of different sources and set them beside one another. From this perspective, the archive is not an object to be used by us, but rather becomes the subject itself, created by the researcher. Our relationship with the evidence we

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find for our archive will necessarily change—our investigations are no longer ‘an extractive exercise but an ethnographic one’ (Stoler, 2009, 47). Anxieties about hierarchies of evidence and empirical representativity are replaced by a new focus on process: constituting a deliberately heterogeneous range of resources, and with these, employing a variety of analytical techniques. This archive ‘in the ethnographic grain’ (Darnton, 1984, 3) is dependent on the integration of different types of data in order to produce, as Stapp (1990) suggested in his historical ethnography of a Chinese mining community in Idaho, a holistic portrayal. Uribe, writing the history of a road, the so-called trampoline of death in the southern Andean-Amazon region of Putumayo (Colombia), brought together historical documents and photographic material, travel writing, journalism, oral histories and interviews in order to situate characters, events and exchanges within relational practices. His aim was not to assemble these myriad voices and fragments into a single narrative, but rather to place them ‘in the spatial and historical process of frontier-making in the Amazon’ (2017, 211). My ethnographic archive of western representations of Afghan interpreters contains materials which are documentary, oral and visual. In documentary terms, much has been written about the history of the West’s pre-twenty-first century dealings with Afghanistan, the key texts and tropes which served to construct its relationships at the time, and which, as we shall see (Chap. 2), framed and fed into the 2001 intervention. For the 2001–2014 period, there is a body of secondary material from a number of different disciplines—War Studies, Peacebuilding, Development Studies and from the militaries themselves—which comments on the conduct of the conflict and thereby positions Afghans and foreign interveners in assumed relationships. In the years from the drawdown in 2014 until the Evacuation in 2021, reports by journalists, lobbying material on behalf of interpreters (often via social media) and government and parliamentary reports and investigations provide considerable evidence of the ways in which Afghan interpreters were viewed both officially, in the media and through the efforts of a range of advocates on their behalf. The Evacuation and post-Evacuation period is imaged through the same types of sources, with the addition of

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documentary films, the release of key government papers and memoirs by actors involved, both interpreters, ex-soldiers and NGO workers. For oral material, there is now a well-established tradition in interpreting studies of interviewing participants in contemporary conflicts. Kelly and Baker (2013) for example explained in detail how they went about assembling an oral archive in order to investigate the role of languages in peace-making and peace-keeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1995 and 2000, conducting interviews with men and women who had participated in UN and NATO activities. Their approach was to assume that a range of actors, and not just designated ‘interpreters’, would be able to contribute to a history of language relations which clearly changed and developed over time, and their archive thus included interviews with military personnel, as well as language professionals, and local translators and interpreters. In this book, I have followed that lead and widened it slightly. My archive includes interviews with ex-interpreters and members of the military, but also with veterans, lobbyists (from the military and from the world of professional interpreting), members of INGOs and civil rights groups, international relations specialists, key actors in government commissions of inquiry and members of the Afghan diasporic community. The intention here is to investigate the western imaginary of Afghanistan and the place of interpreters within it through a broad understanding of the spaces of encounter in the Afghan conflict and the power dynamics operating at different times from 2014 until today. Visual sources have proved of considerable use in some studies contextualising the figure of the interpreter. Fernández-Ocampo and Wolf (2014) for instance examined the methodological implications of using photographic evidence of interpreters in war and conflict, with examples from colonial meetings, through to the First and Second World War, and on into the Cold War period. This book uses and refers to this type of evidence in order to visualise the network of power relationships and social practices established by the West to frame Afghan interpreters. Beyond the photograph as a source, the interpreter figure in my archive is embodied within a context whose visual language landscape is also indicative of power relations. Formal and informal practices of naming space are of course ubiquitous, exerting what Pratt describes as the ‘power

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of naming’ (2008, 32). The ways in which the West named the spaces of its encounter with Afghans at different times served as a means of separating one group from another, providing a map of linguistic power relations, slightly different in each situation. Ethnographic archives of this type are by definition ‘as much concerned with space as they are with time’ (Burton, 2003, 143), with what Satia terms ‘the whereness of time’ (2020, 285) in its material and spatial forms. In such an ethnographic archive, documents gathered and brought together are in dialogue with each other, available for transversal reading. Guattari suggested that ‘transversality is a dimension that strives to overcome two impasses … (and) tends to be realized when maximum communication is brought between different levels and above all in terms of different directions’ (cited in Brunner & Rhoades, 2010, i). Brunner described it as seeing a map that refuses to trace a firm boundary ‘but becomes populated by the traces of experience that occur through each encounter with it’ (ibid.: ii). The variety of voices we hear in our archive will condition how we begin to develop what Stoler calls ‘grids of intelligibility’ (2009, 37). This ‘montage-as-method’ approach (Manchanda, 2020, 18) which selects, pieces together and lays heterogeneous elements side by side aims to disrupt more traditional social science methodologies which are often incorporated within studies of interpreters in war—the reporting and analysis of the results of interviews or other data collected from or about individuals, with the implicit presumption that the subject positions of the researcher herself are irrelevant to the inquiry. Instead, the method in this book seeks, in Shapiro’s formulation, to show a commitment to ‘an aesthetically thought, politically oriented transdisciplinarity’ (2012, 32) which challenges the hegemony of social science practices. In the Foucault tradition of archaeological discourse analysis, the book seeks to examine discursive frameworks, focusing on the how? rather than the what? or why?—how does the West represent Afghan interpreters, and how might these representations inform us about the nature of the representer and their relations with the represented? As is evident by now, I am not aiming in this book to speak for Afghan interpreters, or to give Afghan interpreters a voice as the Other. My intention instead is to make the West itself the ‘Other’ showing thereby the

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contingent specificity of its understanding of foreignness. In exploring the constructedness of their representation of Afghan interpreters, the aim is to show that other representations of these Afghans were and are possible, that there is potentially a plurality of subject positions, and in short that there are alternatives to the West’s understandings. Inevitably, this is a fundamentally political endeavour. History, as Said argued, ‘is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written’ (2003, xii). In the chapters that follow, I use the term ‘Afghan’ to refer to all citizens of the state of Afghanistan and employ ‘Pashtun’ specifically to mean Pashto speakers. From the beginning of the intervention until the drawdown of troops in 2014, some forty countries were involved at some time or other in the action. The actual extent of their engagement on the ground was however variable. The two largest contributors of troops throughout this period were by far and away the United States and the UK, with the Americans providing well over half of the total ISAF contingent. A brief comparison of the sad statistics of dead and wounded among NATO troops underlines the preponderant role played by these two nations. Thus, the USA suffered 2402 casualties and 20,713 wounded in Afghanistan, and the UK recorded 456 deaths and 2000 wounded soldiers. Other key members of NATO also endured soldier casualties, but the figures—for example Canada 159 deaths, Germany 156, Spain 102, Italy 53—suggest that the size of their military commitment in Afghanistan was somewhat smaller. From the 2014 drawdown of NATO troops until the evacuation in 2021, the main contingents still based in the country were American (some 13,000 troops) and British (some 1000). Given the dominant contribution of the USA and the UK over an extended time period, it seemed reasonable to largely use material from these two countries to explore representations of Afghan interpreters. As Manchanda argued (2020, 4), the British and the later American imaginaries of Afghanistan at the height of their respective imperial powers made them uniquely important in understanding the frameworks of colonial intervention. I am however aware that employing the blanket term ‘West’ to refer principally to the Anglosphere in this context can potentially mask different representations from other NATO interveners, particularly for example those of continental European allies. Where such

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differences seem to be at odds with American or British versions or at least nuance the material, the book has sought to acknowledge this, to include these differences, and investigate them further. With its pivot point as the Evacuation in 2021, the book is organised chronologically. Chapter 2 argues for the importance of understanding how the historic roots of British-Afghan relations in the nineteenth century were translated into western preparations for intervention. The British imperial anthropological framing of Afghanistan metamorphosed into the data-rich Human Terrain System of the US Army. Gathering information about the country in this way was essentially a language-free endeavour, so that weaponising culture ironically diminished the role of the interpreter figure as a means of ‘translating’ Afghanistan to the foreign interveners. Chapter 3 examines the spaces of encounter between Afghan interpreters and their western employers, drawing a landscape of a multilateral operation which is both more complex and more muddled than that generally assumed in previous studies. Those whom the West would employ locally as interpreters are seen as embodied with histories of longstanding insecurity, familial exile and acute economic hardship. On the ground, the multiplicity of agencies and sectors participating at different times in the western intervention provided a wide variety of interpreter posts and an opportunity for employee mobility between them. The recruitment of local interpreters, the tasks assigned to them, the contractual arrangements and the conditions under which they worked were framed by the fundamentally unequal relationship between western employers and Afghan employees. Chapter 4 explores how the ex-interpreter was ‘named’ by the West in the period from the NATO drawdown in 2014 until the evacuation in 2021. Taliban enemies, professional interpreting associations, NATO governments, veteran lobby groups and media outlets all framed ex-­ interpreters in different ways. In doing so, they raised issues which are key both to an understanding of interpreters in conflict—the militarisation of interpreting, the exclusion of informal interpreters, the gendering of interpreting—and to the West’s perceptions of foreignness, contractual and moral responsibilities and rights to asylum.

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Chapter 5 examines the two and a half weeks in August 2021 when the Evacuation from Afghanistan took place. It sees how the mounting chaos in the official response of key western governments revealed the carelessness with which local Afghans had been employed—the paucity of data surrounding their identities and employment—and the glaring knowledge deficit among those charged with producing lists of the endangered. On full display were the limits both of western definitions of foreignness and of an employer’s duty of care. The expertise on Afghanistan and the hinterland of knowledge about the country which might have been expected to exist after a twenty year involvement in the country were almost entirely absent. Chapter 6 moves the story on to the continuing lives of Afghan ex-­ interpreters in the West and in Afghanistan. It sees how the West’s understanding of those ‘left behind’ after the evacuation began to widen beyond the designation of ex-military interpreters to include those who had worked, often as informal interpreters, on western-sponsored or western-­ identified projects. The reception and resettlement programmes for Afghans were largely unplanned, and those who had been evacuated found themselves marooned within the bureaucratic delays common to national asylum programmes. Whilst ex-interpreters were often celebrated by the Western media as symbolic of all Afghan refugees, and military groups in particular campaigned for them to have special treatment, their actual experiences in the West largely deprived them of the professional identity and respect they might have enjoyed as interpreters. Chapter 7, the Conclusion, examines the lessons learned from the project, for translator/interpreters, for the West and for future research in the area. The experiences of Afghan interpreters raise pragmatic employment issues which go beyond the Guides and Advice prepared by professional interpreting associations, questions related to the contractual position of interpreters and the extent to which ‘duty of care’ is part of an employer’s responsibility. In future research on interpreting in war, we might want to interrogate more closely the particular context and nature of individual conflicts, engage with the potential power asymmetries in them and look more closely at the implications of gendering interpreting in conflict. For the West, the research demonstrates the dangers in deploying troops without having a robust knowledge base about the regions

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concerned, and without accepting that linguistic communication is an integral part of forming relationships on the ground with local populations. Negative perceptions of ‘foreignness’ framed the status of Afghan interpreters in the field and in their later attempts to claim asylum in the West. By reversing the gaze on the situated interpreter in war, and instead taking the western employer as the object of inquiry, the book calls for a more granular understanding of the spaces of encounter in conflict, for a political engagement with the power relations which frame such encounters and for a greater temporal flexibility in considering the lives of interpreters. Above all, it calls for the West to value and respect the languages of others, to adopt a posture of attention and care when employing foreign personnel and to understand that responsibilities towards such employees are not time-limited.

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Bhabha, H. (1997). The World and the Home. Cultural Politics, 11, 445–455. Brunner, C., & Rhoades, T. (2010). Transversal Fields of Experience. INFLeXions, 4. www.inflexions.org/n4_introhtml Burton, A. (2003). Dwelling in the Archive. Oxford University Press. Cáceres Würsig, I. (2017). Interpreters in History: A Reflection on the Question of Loyalty. In C. Valero-Garcés & R. Tipton (Eds.), Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation (pp.  3–20). Multilingual Matters. Cronin, M. (2002). The Empire Talks Back: Orality, Heteronomy and the Cultural Turn in Interpreting Studies. In M. Tymoczko & E. Gentzler (Eds.), Translation and Power (pp. 45–62). University of Massachusetts Press. Darnton, R. (1984). The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. Vintage. de Jong, S. (2022). Segregated Brotherhood: The Military Masculinities of Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 24(2), 243–263. Delgado Luchner, C., & Kherbiche, L. (2019). Ethics Training for Humanitarian Interpreters Working in Conflict and Post-conflict Settings. Journal of War and Culture Studies, 12(3), 251–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/1752627 2.2019.1644412 Delisle, J., & Woodward, J. (2012). Translators Through History. John Benjamins Publishing Company. DFID. (2018). Afghanistan Profile. www.reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/ dfid-­afghanistan-­profile-­July-­2018 Duffield, M. (2007). Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. Polity. European Asylum Support Office. (2017). Country of Origin Information Report. Afghanistan. Individuals Targeted by Armed Actors in the Conflict. www.coi/ euaa.europe.eu/administration/easo/PLib/Afghanistan_targeting_ conflict.pdf Fernández-Ocampo, A., & Wolf, M. (2014). Framing the Interpreter. Towards a Visual Perspective. Routledge. Ferracci, F. (2020). Interpreting in Conflict Zones: The Case of Afghan Civilian Interpreters Serving the United States. CoMe Journal. Fitchett, L. (2019). Interpreting in Peace and Conflict: Origins, Developing Practices, and Ethics. In M. Kelly, H. Footitt, & M. Salama-Carr (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict (pp.  183–204). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Footitt, H. (2017). International Aid and Development: Hearing Multilingualism, Learning from Intercultural Encounters in the History of Oxfam GB. Language and Cultural Communication, 17(4), 518–533. Footitt, H., Crack, A., & Tesseur, W. (2020). Development NGOs and Languages. Listening, Power and Inclusion. Palgrave Macmillan. Footitt, H., & Tobia, S. (2013). WarTalk. Foreign Languages and the British War Effort in Europe, 1940–47. Palgrave Macmillan. Fried, M. H. (1975). The Myth of the Tribe. Natural History, 84(4), 12–20. Gaiba, F. (1998). Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial. Ottawa University Press. Gile, D. (1998). Norms in Research on Conference Interpreting: A Response to Theo Hermans and Gideon Toury. In Translation and Norms. Current Issues in Language and Society, 5(1–2), 99–107. Gómez-Amich, M. (2018). Life in Conflict: A Series of Narratives by Locally-­ Recruited Interpreters from Afghanistan. Close Encounters in War Journal, 1. Gómez-Amich, M. (2021). Local Interpreters Versus Military Personnel: Perceptions and Expectations Regarding the Local Interpreter’s Role and Agency Within the Afghan Context. In M.  Todorova & L.  Ruiz Rosendo (Eds.), Interpreting Conflict. A Comparative Framework (pp. 85–112). Gran, L., & Taylor, C. (Eds.). (1990). Aspects of Applied and Experimental Research on Conference Interpretation. Camponotto Editore. Greenblatt, S. (1991). Marvelous Possessions. University of Chicago Press. Hale, S. (2007). Community Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan. Inghilleri, M. (2008). The Ethical Task of the Translator in the Geo-political Arena: From Iraq to Guantánamo Bay. Translation Studies, 1(2), 212–223. Inghilleri, M. (2009). Translators in War Zones: Ethics Under Fire in Iraq. In E.  Bielsa & C.  W. Hughes (Eds.), Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (pp. 207–221). Palgrave Macmillan. Inghilleri, M. (2010). “You don’t make war without knowing why”. The Decision to Interpret in Iraq. The Translator, 16(2), 175–196. Jacoby, T. (2007). Hegemony, Modernisation and Post-war Reconstruction. Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations, 21(4), 521–537. Jones, I.  P., & Askew, L. (2014). Meeting the Language Challenges of NATO Operations. Palgrave Macmillan. Keane, J. (1996). Reflections on Violence. Verso. Kelly, M., & Baker, C. (2013). Interpreting the Peace. Peace Operations, Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kujamāki, P., & Footitt, H. (2016). Military History and Translation Studies. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Border Crossings. Translation Studies and Other Disciplines (pp. 49–71). John Benjamins. Kurz, I. (1985). The Rock Tombs of the Princes of Elephantine: Earliest References to Interpretation in Pharaonic Egypt. Babel, 32(2), 73–77. MacGinty, R. (2008). Indigenous Peace-Making Versus the Liberal Peace. Cooperation and Conflict, 43(2), 139–163. Macnutt, F. (Ed.). (1977). Fernando Cortés: His Five Letters of Relation to the Emperor Charles V. Glorieta. Rio Grande Press. Manchanda, N. (2020). Imagining Afghanistan. Cambridge University Press. Martin, M. (2014). An Intimate War. An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict. Hurst and Co. Moser-Mercer, B. (2018). Interpreting in Conflict Zones. In H. Mikkelson & R. Jourdenais (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting (pp. 302–316). Routledge. Nandy, A. (1989). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford University Press. Niranjana, T. (1992). Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context. University of California Press. Paris, R. (2004). At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict. Cambridge University Press. Pőchhacker, F. (1995). Simultaneous Interpreting: A Functionalist Perspective. Hermes: Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 14(14), 31–53. Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge. Richmond, O. (2007). Emancipatory Forms of Human Security and Liberal Peacebuilding. International Journal, 62(3), 458–477. Richmond, O. (2009). A Post-Liberal Peace: Eirenism and the Everyday. Review of International Studies, 35(3), 557–580. Richmond, O. (2010). A Geneology of Peace and Conflict Theory. In O. Richmond (Ed.), Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches (pp. 14–40). Palgrave Macmillan. Roland, R. (1999). Interpreters as Diplomats. Ottawa University Press. Ruiz Rosendo, L. (2020). Interpreting for the Afghanistan Spanish Force. War and Society, 39(1), 42–57. Ruiz Rosendo, L. (2022). Interpreting for the Military: Creating Communities of Practice. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 37, 16–34.

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Ruiz Rosendo, L., & Barea Muñoz, M. (2017). Towards a Typology of Interpreters in War-Related Scenarios in the Middle East. Translation Spaces, 6(2), 182–208. https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.6.2.01rui Ruiz Rosendo, L., & Todorova, M. (2023). Interpreter Training in Conflict and Post-Conflict Scenarios. Routledge. Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism. Penguin Books. Satia, P. (2020). Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire. Allen Lane. Shapiro, M. J. (2012). Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn. Routledge. Snellman, P. (2023). Ethics in Military Interpreter Training. In L. Ruiz Rosendo & M.  Todorova (Eds.), Interpreter Training in Conflict and Post-conflict Scenarios (pp. 17–30). Routledge. Somers, M.  R., & Gibson, G.  D. (1994). Reclaiming the Epistemological “Other”: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (pp. 37–99). Blackwell. Spivak, G. C. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Harvard University Press. Stapp, D. C. (1990). The Historic Ethnography of a Chinese Mining Community in Idaho. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania. https://repository.upenn. edu/dissertations?AA19026653 Stoler, A. L. (2009). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press. Sulha Alliance. (n.d.). https://www.suulha-­alliance.org Tălpas, M. (2016). Words Cut Two Ways: An Overview of the Situation of Afghan Interpreters at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Linguistica Antverpiensia. New Series Themes in Translation Studies, 15. https://doi. org/10.52034/lanstts.v15i401 Tesseur, W. (2023). Translation as Social Justice. Translation Policies and Practices in Non-Governmental Organisations. Routledge. Tesseur, W., & Footitt, H. (2019). Professionalisms at War? Interpreting in Conflict and Post-conflict Situations. Journal of War and Culture Studies, 12(3), 268–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644415 Thiessen, C. (2013). Local Ownership of Peacebuilding in Afghanistan: Shouldering Responsibility for Sustainable Peace and Development. Lexington Books. Tipton, R. (2011). Relationships of Learning Between Military Personnel and Interpreters in Situations of Violent Conflict. In M. Baker & C. Maier (Eds.), Ethics and the Curriculum. Special Issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 5(1), 15–40.

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Todorova, M., & Ruiz Rosendo, L. (2021). Interpreting Conflict. A Comparative Framework. Palgrave Macmillan. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2022). Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples. Bloomsbury Academic. Tymoczko, M. (2009). Translation, Ethics and Ideology in a Violent Globalizing World. In E. Bielsa & C. W. Hughes (Eds.), Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (pp. 171–194). Palgrave Macmillan. Uribe, S. (2017). Frontier Road. Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon. John Wiley & Sons. Vejcer, A. (1999). At the Dawn of Simultaneous Interpretation in Russia. Interpreting International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, 4(1), 23–28. Vermeer, H. (1992). Skizzen zu einer Geschichte der Translation. Verlag fűr interkulturelle Kommunikation. Wolf, M. (2000). The Third Space in Postcolonial Representation. In S. Simon & P. St-Pierre (Eds.), Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (pp. 127–146). University of Ottawa Press.

2 Western Imaginings of Afghanistan

When I attended a seminar in 2010 for British officers going to Afghanistan, I was startled to hear lecturers warmly and repeatedly recommending a book which had originally been published in 1815, Mountstuart Elphinstone’s An account of the Kingdom of Caubal and its dependencies in Persia, Tartary and India. As western forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they indeed brought with them an image of the country and perceptions of its peoples which were largely inherited from previous international dealings with Afghanistan, mainly through British imperial experiences in the nineteenth century. The persistence of these historic imaginings and the ways in which they were translated into the twenty-first century conflict were crucial in framing encounters between NATO forces and Afghan communities, and in determining the role of Afghan intermediaries. Western perspectives on the country would be largely observational rather than dialogic, with Afghanistan noted and classified, rather than communicated with and heard.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Footitt, Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5_2

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The Graveyard of Empires In 2009, in the middle of the conflict in Afghanistan, the American think tank the CATO Institute produced a white paper called, Escaping the “Graveyard of Empires”: a strategy to exit Afghanistan: ‘Although Afghanistan has endured successive waves of Persian, Greek, Arab, Turk, Mongol, British and Soviet invaders, no occupying power has ever successfully conquered it. There’s a reason why it has been described as the “graveyard of empires”, and unless America scales down its objectives, it risks meeting a similar fate’ (Innocent & Carpenter, 2009). So popular had the trope ‘Graveyard of Empires’ become in the twenty-first century that a T-shirt with ‘Afghanistan. Graveyard of Empires’ was available for sale online. The clear implication was that there was something immutable and static in Afghanistan which made it impossible for foreigners to ever conquer the country. The history of Afghanistan was indeed presented as one long recitation of doomed international forays: ‘The British invaded Afghanistan in 1839, suffered a disaster, and yet invaded the country again some forty years later only to make nearly the same mistakes. … Forty years later still, a third war broke the British grip on the country entirely. Sixty years after that, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and ended up in the same tar pit as the British. Now, the United States and NATO are mired in Afghanistan, and the familiar patterns have emerged again’ (Ansary, 2012, 1). Within the Anglophone institutional memory, the West’s historic failure to succeed in Afghanistan was epitomised in Lady Butler’s (Elizabeth Southerden Thompson’s) painting ‘The Remnants of an Army’ (1879) which hangs today in the National Military Museum in London. It depicts a lone soldier from the British Bengal Army, clinging to the mane of his dying horse, apparently the sole survivor of the 16,000 British soldiers killed in the 1842 retreat from Kabul in the first Anglo-­Afghan war. The grammar of this memory positions the then world’s greatest power as being comprehensively and inexplicably routed by ill-­equipped tribesmen Fig. 2.1.

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Fig. 2.1  ‘The remnants of an Army’. 1879. Lady Butler( Elizabeth Southerden Butler). National Army Museum. Image at NAM 1969-09-51-2

Whilst one could argue, as Tripodi does (2010), that Britain’s activities in Afghanistan achieved some strategic successes in geopolitical terms— its continuing hold over India for example—the historical master narrative proposed was that of a ‘great game’ of Anglo-Russian rivalry played out in Afghanistan, with the country itself a mere backdrop for great power activity. In such a vision, the Afghan people themselves were unfortunate and unruly irritants to important imperial manoeuvres. As Barfield noted: ‘the focus on war and visiting conquerors overshadows the country’s own inhabitants, except as the rough warriors who served as speed bumps on the highway of conquest or more recently earned a reputation for making the place ungovernable’ (2010, 1). An integral part of the graveyard of empires trope was the depiction of Afghanistan as a uniquely dangerous border zone, a perpetual periphery, what Rory Stewart called, ‘a place in between’ (2013). Afghanistan was a non-state, lacking what were thought of as the fundamental institutional markers of governance like adequate maps or reliable census data, compared of course with the European version of statehood mimicked in British India. Bayly argued (2018) that the defeat of British forces in 1842 indeed encouraged the emergence of a violent geography, the perception of Afghanistan as a disordered place of exception whose inhabitants were

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inherently violent and intransigent. This sense of a desert of beyond was reinforced by the drawing of the Durand line in 1893 which marked out two sorts of authorities—on the one side India, the jewel in the British imperial crown, and on the other Afghanistan, what Hopkins described as, ‘a state created but not occupied by the colonial order’ (2012). Afghanistan became ‘terra nullius’, beyond the legal authority of any power (Bayly, 274). As time went on, the violence and sheer cartographical remoteness of this frontier area grew in the western imaginary, fed still further by the history of Soviet involvement between 1979 and 1988 which appeared to demonstrate yet again the inevitable graveyard of empires thesis: ‘Afghanistan is not a large country … and is not densely populated, but the terrain and the people are both ferocious. Mountainous and rocky, Afghanistan has foiled many invaders over the years, from the British in the 19th century to the Russians (Soviets) in the 20th century and to the Americans in the 21st century. Situated on the route from India and Pakistan to the west, Afghanistan has been lusted after but never tamed. The Soviet Army’s defeat after 10 years of failure was a major factor in the break up of the Soviet Union. The United States has fared little better’ (Quoted Manchanda, 2020, 36). The Afghanistan which western forces entered in 2001 was thus a space which had been traditionally imagined as violent, ungovernable and irremediably strange. Marked in turn by colonial presence, absence and then partial colonial presence, Afghanistan was characterised in the western imaginary by its apparent exceptionality, its deviation in both cultural and governance terms from western conceptions of what was normal. Unsurprisingly therefore, intervening in the country in 2001 produced a specific sort of anxiety. As Manchanda suggested, rather than Said’s Orientalism, what was exhibited by the West in approaching Afghanistan was an anxiety, the visceral sense of a ‘disOrient’ (2020, 6).

One Tribe at a Time How could western powers begin to understand and deal with a territory like Afghanistan? In 2009, the American Major Jim Gant’s Strategy for success in Afghanistan advocated a particular method by which the, to western

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eyes, unsettling otherness of the country might be managed. His paper entitled One Tribe at a time argued that Afghanistan could best be understood by the West in terms of its particular social organisation: ‘When one says “Afghan people” what I believe they are really saying is ‘tribal member’. Every single Afghan is a part of a tribe and understands how the tribe operates and why. This is key to understand. Understanding and operating within the tribal world is the only way we can ever know who our friends and enemies are, how the Afghan people think and what is important to them. Because, above all, they are tribesmen first (Gant, 2009). Gant’s tribal perception of Afghanistan was to be enormously influential within the US military—General McChrystal, then senior US Commander in Afghanistan, distributed copies of the paper to all his commanders in the country, whilst his successor, General Petraeus, claimed that the paper was so important that he had also shared it widely (Tyson, 2010). This twenty-first century tribal representation of Afghanistan sprang directly from Montstuart Elphinstone’s earlier nineteenth century work, still widely considered in the West as the definitive base for knowledge about Afghanistan—anything written after was seen to be merely a ‘footnote’ to the original book. What Hopkins described as the ‘Elphinstonian episteme’ (2012, 32) would monopolise conceptualisations of Afghanistan in succeeding centuries and provide a framework for later twenty-first century western intervention. Elphinstone’s voluminous 1815 report, Account of the Kingdom of Caubal and its dependencies, was the first account of modern western contact with the country. Elphinstone, a Scotsman, then working for the East India Company, drew together observations of all that he had seen in Afghanistan, in large part through anecdotal musings, some taken from conversations with locals— Elphinstone certainly spoke Persian—some from researchers, European and South Asian, whom he had despatched from Peshawar. His perspective on Afghanistan was essentially an anthropological one, identifying, mapping and describing tribes. In the Elphinstonian vision, the tribes of Afghanistan were broadly analogous to the clans of Scottish history with which he was most familiar: ‘the Situation of the Afghan country appears to me to bear a strong resemblance to that of Scotland in ancient times; the direct power of the King over the towns and the country immediately around; the precarious submission of the nearest clans, and the independence of the remote ones’ (1815, 173).

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In later versions of Elphinstone, this anthropological tribal perspective would be continued, becoming markedly more essentialised, with innate characteristics attributed to particular tribes. Thus, in Churchill’s words, ‘The Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress … Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud … Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid’ (Quoted in Manchanda, 2018, 166). As Leake argued, CIA analyses during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan reflected this same belief in the largely static nature of Afghanistan’s tribal organisation. A US diplomat who had served in Afghanistan in the 1960s recollected in 1995 that, ‘To me, the most important fact is that the Pathans are basically the same as when I first met them. They live in the same places and share the same values. They remain concerned above all with religion, land, lineage and honour’ (Leake, 2018, 250). The pattern of anthropological tribal analysis was thus set. For the West, Afghanistan was a space of encounter which was mapped and classified in a static largely visual presentation comprising complex lists and sub lists of tribes ordered by locality, clan or division, with accompanying maps. In the 1899 Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes of the North-West Frontier of India, compiled by Wolfe Murray, this codification was even more detailed—there were more than twenty tribal entries under the letter ‘A’ for example. The key image in Elphinstone’s book had been a map of the Kingdom of Caubal upon which the word Afghanistan appeared faintly. As Hanifi argued (2018), from then on, the country was brought to western cartographic life. Environmental, cultural and political features were expressed visually alongside this classification of tribes. Much of contemporary western approaches to Afghanistan would rely heavily on the scholarship and analytical frameworks of their predecessors, written some two centuries before, augmented by travelogues and personal memories. Thus, twenty-first century information on Afghanistan from the World Bank or USAid was mediated through detailed maps of discrete tribal areas. The US Naval Postgraduate School’s Program for Culture and Conflict Studies (Naval Postgraduate School, n.d.) offered its students a series of eight ethnic maps with ‘Predominant Tribes by district’ and provided genealogical information for over thirty-four different tribes. As Hopkins and Marsden argued, these maps ‘territorialized

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Afghanistan’s ethnic groups in ways directly reminiscent of the cartographic practices of the British colonial-scholar administrators of the nineteenth century. The maps depicted Afghanistan’s ethnic groups as distinct communities … These timeless, objective differences were all dimensions of their “identities” that directly shaped their political affiliations’ (2013, 9, 10). Monsutti concluded in the Annual Review of Anthropology that ‘The major players in the governance of Afghanistan have adopted an ethnic and tribal interpretation of local society and thus of the conflict’ (2013, 275).

L anguages in the Tribal Analysis of Afghanistan The classification and mapping of Afghanistan’s tribes paid very little attention to the languages of the country. In 1815, Elphinstone had devoted a chapter to the culture and language of the Afghans which he described as ‘Pushtoo’ (1815, 190), adding an annex (Appendix E) on Pushtoo vocabulary. There was a distinction, he claimed, between the Eastern and Western dialects, much like the differences between Scots and English (192). As Bayly suggested, this nineteenth century interest in investigating languages tended to focus on comparative philology (2018, 61), and indeed Elphinstone claimed to have compared 218 Pashto words with what he saw as corresponding ones in ‘Persian, Zend, Pehlevee, Sanscrit, Hindostaunee, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew and Chaldaic’ (1815, 190). Subsequent studies of Afghanistan however made no mention of language as an important part of tribal identity. Wolfe Murray’s Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes (1899) for instance used tribe, clan, division of clan, sub-division of clan, locality of tribe, class or division as its principal indicators. By the twenty-first century, World Bank maps of Afghanistan provided information on poverty levels, and incidences of violence, whilst news agencies like Al Jazeera offered detailed maps of literacy levels across the country. As in the maps from the US Naval Postgraduate School however, there was little engagement with the linguistic diversity of the country.

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Clearly however, throughout the colonial history of Afghanistan there must have been spaces in which the British sought to communicate with local communities in order to manage their imperial occupation. On the whole, the preference had been for colonial officials to make themselves understood without employing language intermediaries. Robert Warburton for example who spent eighteen years in the Kyber from 1879 to 1898 argued that it was vital for the British to be able to speak Dari and Pashto themselves: ‘without command of these two languages the English official is useless’ (Warburton, 1900, 333). He himself was the son of an Afghan aristocrat and a British officer and could speak both languages fluently. Warburton’s case was that employing a middleman, an ‘Arbab’, to take responsibility for communicating in Afghanistan had already proved to be counterproductive on countless occasions: ‘my firm and solemn conviction is that the majority of the wars and fights between the British Government and the independent tribes of the Panjab Border were due entirely to the evil intrigues and machinations of the Arbabs and middlemen who had been employed by us to do our work with the tribesmen’ (37). His view was that any Afghan taken on as an intermediary was going to be untrustworthy: ‘I have the greatest regard for our Asiatic brethren as soldiers, and in any capacity that it pleases Government to employ them except this one. … An Englishman will never intrigue with the trans-border tribesmen against his own Government, and my experience of the Asiatic is that he is certain to do so if he can better himself or injure an enemy or rival by so doing’ (328). Whilst the authorities might opine that it was more expensive for a British officer to act as a linguistic intermediary rather than employing a local to do so, Warburton argued that much greater costs would be incurred in the end because of the political mistakes caused by the interference of Arbabs. His own modus operandi was to spend time listening to the concerns of the communities: ‘When some confidence has been assured, these men will speak of their customs, their feuds or friendships, and of what is going on amongst them—information which is not only extremely interesting, but of great service for the future to the Englishman who listens’ (323). Dispensing with the services of interpreters and middlemen however assumed that there was an imperial cadre capable of learning the languages of Afghanistan. For this to be possible of course language teachers and text

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books were required. At the outset, the grammars which the British used for this purpose were sometimes written with the cooperation of native speakers, and sometimes in isolation from them. In 1847 for example, the St Petersburg-based German scholar Johannes Albrecht Dorn who had never actually been to Afghanistan himself published A Chrestomathy of the Pushtū or Afghan Language, dealing with written rather than spoken Pashto. In a review of the book, Burton regretted that such a grammar had not originated from the British themselves: ‘during our occupation of the country we took so little interest in what was around us, and that the first sensible work published in Pushtū should have appeared in St Petersburgh instead of at London or Calcutta’ (Mairs, 2021). A few years later however, a British soldier, Henry George Raverty, stationed at Peshawar in 1849–1850 and finding himself unable to access any suitable language learning materials, wrote his own Pashto grammar. To produce this, Raverty spoke with Afghans he knew and used the services of an Afghan Arabic scholar and, ‘a clever Mirzā, a native of Kandahar, who is well acquainted with the Pushto dialect, having been born and bred in the Western capital’. By 1867, Henry Bellew, writing his Grammar of the Pukshto Language, reckoned that the number of British officials who could actually speak Pashto ‘were to be counted on the digits’ (Mairs, 2021). Bellew himself acted as an interpreter for the Amir of Afghanistan in 1867 and recorded the fact that numerous Afghans had complained to him about the dearth of English personnel who were language competent: ‘During my residence amongst the Afghans I have, times without number, heard both gentry and peasantry, as well as members of the soldiery, deplore their misfortune in not being able to meet with an official acquainted with their language, to whom they could appeal in matters affecting their interests more or less gravely’ (Mairs, 2021). As Hanifi pointed out however, the framework in which Afghan languages were taught to British officials reproduced the languages in ways explicitly designed to serve the purposes of empire. Thus the colonial exam system presented a truncated version of Pashto, using a twenty-character system, as opposed to the forty-character one used by Raverty, ‘thus erasing at least half of the language’s morphological and phonological spectrum’ (2018, 58). Rather than Raverty’s more academic offering, the developing needs of the British colonial military exam system required simplified versions of the language.

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Although Plunkett’s later Conversation Manual, a collection of phrases in English, Hindustani, Persian and Pashtū (1875) included phrases in Persian and Pashtū which appeared to indicate the possibility of some sort of interpreting exchange—‘Find a man who knows Hindustani’, ‘Speak very slowly’, ‘Speak very distinctly’, ‘Use Persian words in place of Pashtū words as much as you can’, ‘Translate what he says into Persian’, ‘Tell him in Pashtū what I say in Hindustani’ (Mairs, 2021)—those grammars which prepared colonial officers for service in Afghanistan were implicitly intended to enable British officials to speak directly to Afghans without the use of Afghan intermediaries. Despite the emergence of such grammars however, the number of imperial officials who could speak Afghan languages remained small. Tripodi argued (2011) that there was a greater emphasis on British Political Officers acquiring language competences after the 1900s, with candidates expected to have passed exams in Urdu, and possibly Persian, Pashto or Brahui. Practical tests for these might include lengthy interactions with locals, or a detailed cross-examination of tribesmen. There were clearly some enormously gifted linguists among the British officials—one man, reputed to dream in Pashto, ‘would produce some appalling proverb, which would have the rest of the Jirga in stitches and shouting at the hecklers to sit down and shut up’ (34). Nevertheless, their numbers were small, twenty at the most for the whole territory, and the amount of time such men actually served in the country became progressively more limited, perhaps two to three years. The days of Warburton’s eighteen year service were by then well and truly over.

 he West’s Knowledge Base About T Afghanistan in the Twenty-First Century By the mid-twentieth century, Western interest in Afghanistan had largely petered out. Although foreign powers continued some activity in the country, Afghanistan was largely thought of in the West as ‘a blip on the world map’ (Manchanda, 2020, 130) after the declaration of independence in 1919. When the Soviets invaded in 1979 however, the country became an actor in a wider Cold War struggle, with the Americans

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arming and supporting those they termed ‘Afghan freedom fighters’. As President Reagan expressed it, ‘to watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom’ (Quoted, Manchanda, 2020, 131). The US representation here was firmly rooted within the traditional western framework of anthropological tribal analysis. Between the Soviet withdrawal in 1988/1989 and 9/11  in 2001, Afghanistan again disappeared from Western consciousness. Knowledge about the country stayed correspondingly low. Monsutti (2013) pointed out that anthropologists from the West had been unable to conduct fieldwork in Afghanistan during the years of Soviet occupation and thus largely shifted their academic attention to Afghan refugees in Pakistan or in the wider diaspora. The civil war that followed the collapse of the Soviet presence made access to the country problematic for western foreigners. In this situation, the languages of Afghanistan were virtually invisible in western university curricula. The Modern Language Association of America (2002) noted that there were thirteen enrolments in degree programmes of Dari, and four in Pashto in 2002. Immediately after 9/11, even specialist Afghan Study Centres, like the one at Indiana University, were headed up by personnel who had never actually visited the country. One American officer sent for language training before his deployment to Afghanistan discovered that he was actually being taught Arabic rather than Dari or Pashto. Nevertheless, by 2010 ten US universities were offering Pashto language courses, with the military’s Defense Language Institute Foreign Language School at Monterrey, California providing the largest range of pedagogic material, much of it computerbased. Hanifi (2013) interestingly noted a clear continuation in the texts and learning styles created by the American military after 9/11 and the British colonial texts and grammars of the nineteenth century. The British imperial model had largely relied on the language competence of colonial officers. This however could not easily be replicated in 2001. The country knowledge and linguistic base of intervening forces in the twenty-first century were considerably lower. As the former president of the British Academy admitted, Afghanistan studies was ‘an orphan in academia’ (Quoted Bayly, 2018, 282). There was a dearth of up-to-date information, and a lack of experts who had first-hand experience of the

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country and could speak its languages. For some commentators, such knowledge deficits could potentially have been remedied by a conscious return to ethnographic approaches common in the nineteenth century. By reading colonial records, it was thought possible to distil an account of unchanging cultural formations in which the actions of the Taliban and Al Qaeda could be understood as rooted in longstanding cultural predispositions such as Pashtunwali, ‘freedom, honour, revenge, and chivalry’ (Johnson & Mason, 2008, 55). As well as interrogating past texts however, the West turned for more contemporary information about the country to those Afghans who had lived in the West for some time and were thus culturally closer to them. A classic case of this was Dr. Ehsan M. Entezar, an Afghan social science graduate of Columbia University, who had been in the US for most of his adult life since 1980, revisiting Afghanistan between 2002 and 2005. Entezar’s book, Afghanistan 101. Understanding Afghan Culture (2007), would prove to be highly influential in shaping twenty-first century American views of the country. The popular attraction of the book was twofold. Firstly, it had a ring of authenticity coming as it did from the pen of an Afghan: ‘Ehsan Entezar’s Afghanistan 101, dryly academic though its language tends to be, is nevertheless an illuminating guide to the Afghanistan today (sic). As a scholar born, raised and educated in Afghanistan before obtaining his doctorate in the United States, Entezar lends the insight of a native son in illuminating the realities of Afghan culture and society, and by doing so, providing some sharp clues as to the likely efficacy of the aid programmes that are allegedly “building” Afghanistan (sic)’ (Quoted Manchanda, 2020, 52). Secondly, Entezar made the culture of Afghanistan intelligible to his western audience by explicitly comparing it with the culture they knew best, that is to say their own. In this way the book could serve as an accessible primer for those deploying to Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, or dealing with Afghans in the course of the intervention. Entezar’s professional background was in cross-cultural capability—he had worked as a cultural training coordinator for the US Peace Corps from 1963 to 1978. His book adopted what he claimed to be a systematic approach to analysing culture, based on the Geert Hofstede cross-cultural model which sought to explore cultures through structured themes, namely

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Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism and Collectivism and Masculinity or the Gender Gap. Entezar’s study (2007) proposed a direct comparison between the two cultures, the American and Afghan, both of which were reified for the purposes of the text. Thus Afghanistan was portrayed as a high power distance society as opposed to the low power distance West—‘Unlike low PD societies such as the United States where knowledge is power, expert power does not carry much weight in high PD societies such as Afghanistan’ (35), so that ‘rules are not rules to be abided by regardless of who is in charge. Instead, rules are obeyed only if the individual in charge is authoritarian and uses force’ (43). With the theme of uncertainty avoidance, Entezar assumed that cultural perceptions of risk were related to different sorts of political systems, so that ‘The more uncertainty-avoiding cultures such as Afghanistan are associated with unbalanced government and the less avoiding ones such as the United States with balanced government’ (53). The tendency in Afghanistan to respect the old and give them power as well as the primacy apparently accorded to theories and ideologies as opposed to the application of knowledge were attributed to the alleged uncertainty avoidance nature of the society (54, 55). In more uncertainty avoiding cultures, Entezar maintained, there was greater emphasis on experts rather than on managers: ‘traditionally, in Afghanistan, almost all the ministers and other administrators have been experts, rather than managers. … In low UA societies such as the United States, on the other hand, managers … are experts in managing’ (54). Entezar’s discussion of Individualism and Collectivism was framed by the now traditional tribal analysis of the country: ‘Afghanistan is a nation of nations, the analogy of a Chinese box is probably appropriate. … A nation of nations was … created, a grab bag of ethnic groups with little in common historically speaking …’ (78, 79). His appendix provided details of the ethnic groups in Afghanistan: ‘Afghanistan is a mosaic of ethnic groups due to the invasions of the Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Turks over the centuries’ (153). Ethnicity, sect, regionalism and ideology were all said to be part of Afghan nationalism: ‘Afghans generally favor and trust people from their own region in employment, distribution of government funds, tests and exams, marriage, friendship or in minor and major conflicts’ (94). The lessons of this to the West, Entezar claimed, should be for them to acknowledge and understand that teamwork and

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competition would probably be absent in the Afghan workplace, and that ‘The Westerner also needs to keep in mind that befriending an Afghan is like becoming a member of his or her family. … Afghans expect loyalty, support and favoritism. … Afghans usually do not keep personal and business matters separate’ (102). The final theme, addressing Masculinity, interestingly contained the smallest number of direct comparisons between the West and Afghanistan, and indeed Entezar admitted that there was a problematic gender gap in many western societies as well as in Afghanistan (111). Instead, he argued that the essentially subordinate role of women in Afghanistan was reflected through the vocabulary and grammar of Afghan languages—thus in Dari, actions related to women were in the passive voice, and there were no words, he claimed, in either Pashto or Dari for ‘rape’, ‘foreplay’, ‘dating’, ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ (113, 114). Much of this section consisted of the recitation of largely negative Afghan proverbs and dictionary definitions and comparisons between what the Qur’an and Islam said about the education and employment of women and the situation as Entezar saw it in the twenty-first century: ‘In Afghan culture, women are treated as property. In some parts of the country, women are sold as cattle’ (132). For Entezar, languages were part of the whole tribal analysis, related to the drawing of frontiers and internal conflicts: ‘language is and will be a sensitive issue in Afghanistan until the country moves in the direction of becoming a true nation-state’ (91). Whilst in the West, he argued, language was a means of communication, ‘in Afghanistan people identify with language and use it as a tool for domination. Since Afghans identify with language, an attack on one’s language is tantamount to an attack on the people who speak it’ (88). The picture Entezar painted was one of ethnic rivalry where ‘Pashtunisation”’campaigns had sought to make Pashto instruction mandatory in schools and where attempts were made to purify the Pashto language of Dari and Turkic loan words. Arguments before the 1978 Communist coup about one or other language of the country being given official status gave way, according to Entezar, to greater linguistic tolerance, and finally to the new constitution of Hamid Karzai which made all the languages of Afghanistan official. In this analysis, languages were an integral part of geographical conflicts of power. Thus the Pashtun-dominated government of the 1960s tried to increase

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the number of Pashto-speaking provinces, whilst subsequent authorities created new boundaries—‘Only later during the Karzai government was another Hazara-dominated region, Daikundi Province, created. This may not have happened if the second vice president was not a Hazara. Another non-Pashtun region that was made into a separate province during Karzai’s reign is Panjshir, north of Parwan Province where Tajiks reside because the first vice president is a Tajik from Pansjshir’ (91). What is evident throughout Entezar’s book is that the two cultures, Afghan and American, are essentialised, with the US version presented as markedly superior: ‘at the American university level, practical applications of knowledge are emphasized. It is the emphasis on empiricism that explains why so many of the Nobel Prize winners come from the United States’ (143). In comparison, Afghans were positioned as largely passive—the cover of the book represented a veiled Afghan woman, and the text was dedicated to ‘the widows and orphans of Afghanistan’. The essentialization was manichean: ‘Social power is coercive in the Afghan national culture but democratic in the American national culture. … Afghan society is elitist rather than pluralistic’ (140, 141). The resultant policy recommendations from this cultural comparison were that westerners engaging in Afghanistan would have to be prepared to use force: ‘… persuasion is not enough to get anything done without using force as a last resort’ (46), and would need to anticipate the fact that corruption was rife in the country: ‘unless proper measures are taken, funds for reconstruction could be misdirected, and abused; the close union of power and wealth leads to corruption in the government, especially at the highest levels’ (46). Although there were occasional references to the considerable economic disparities between the West and Afghanistan, Afghans had limited access to technology and ‘worry more about basic human needs; Americans worry more about individual freedoms and rights…’, Entezar’s analysis largely positioned culture as being entirely divorced from the contexts of economics, politics, sociology and history. Instead, the methodology presented itself as quasi-scientific, neutral and timeless, claiming to be an exploration of the ‘software of the mind’ (19), with culture conceived as ‘the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes

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one human group from another … the interactive aggregate of common characteristics that influence a group’s response to its environment’ (19). Despite the scientific patina surrounding Entezar’s work however, his study was noticeably light on verifiable evidence. Thus personal anecdotes and reminiscences were used to add credibility to the hypotheses. Passages about the author’s time in Saudi Arabia (53) and his arrival in the USA were offered as evidence respectively of religion in Muslim higher education institutions and marital status in Afghanistan. At one point, he drew on a satirical story in a Dari weekly newspaper published in the US in order to illustrate the domination of men in Afghan society (128). As Manchanda argued (2020, 62), Entezar’s book and the respect with which it was treated are clear evidence of the very considerable knowledge deficit with which western powers embarked on their intervention in 2001. Afghanistan was in effect an epistemological vacuum which could only be filled by the very broadest of cultural generalisations and a largely random selection of cultural ‘facts’ about tribes. Such an approach, masquerading as quasi-scientific, divorced Afghanistan from any deeper contextual analysis of the country and implicitly assumed that future encounters with Afghans were predetermined and unlikely to be dialogic. Culture, presented in this way as an easily accessible grid of intelligibility, could however be mined, extracted and flattened in order to provide large-scale and cost-effective pre-deployment training for the very considerable number of western soldiers bound for Afghanistan. Thus e-learning materials, with lists of cultural do’s and don’ts, were issued to troops who were then subsequently examined on the module through tick boxes of self-assessment in order to gauge the success of the cultural awareness training. In one American version, the don’ts ranged in no particular order from behavioural issues—‘Don’t sit with the soles of your feet facing someone’—gender relations—‘Don’t show a woman attention by addressing, touching, or staring at her’—the political—‘Don’t confront a Muslim on his religious beliefs’—to the personal—‘don’t wear sunglasses indoors’. (TRADOC DCSINT, 2006). Such repackaged cultural ‘facts’ could even be translated into quantifiable risks of potential cultural tension. In a British online training package for example, the online feedback to soldiers took the form of a ‘Cultural Risk Meter’ which registered ‘if their choice has increased or decreased cultural

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tension’, with a dial turning to red or green depending on the student’s decision in the test. Online scenarios immersed the user ‘in an environment populated with real-to-life characters … as close to living a real experience as one can get’. The putative encounter being translated in these was a-linguistic, wholly reliant on the visible, on what could be observed by the soldier—one pre-deployment online training game claimed to ‘reveal the micro expressions and subtle body language of the scenario’s characters’ (LineCo, 2009). Decontextualised ‘facts’ about the culture of Afghanistan’s tribal society were thus extracted and represented for western soldiers in isolation from any sense that they would be entering a country whose peoples spoke as well as acted, who communicated and thought as well as performing the cultural habits which had been presented to the troops online. Information about verbal communication was almost entirely lacking, limited to one or two stock greetings. As Gregory observed, in such general cultural training, ‘The … military is not only redefined. … But also rehabilitated as an innocent and virtuous bystander’ (Gregory, 2008, 12).

Weaponising ‘Culture’ Entezar’s simplistic cultural approach and its manifestation in online troop preparation packages both supported and fed on the ‘cultural turn’ which the US military had developed after their early experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the 1980s through to the late twentieth century, western military understandings of war had been framed by what was then termed a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA), a trope which placed high-level technology at the apex of capability and imagined future conflicts as battles which would be fought from an optical distance, far away from any on-the-ground, face-to-face encounters—the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ‘Shock and Awe’, stands as a classic example of this. In RMA, technological superiority was presumed to ensure a ‘safe’ victory, and above all, one at a considerable distance from the enemy. By the late 1990s, however, with peace-keeping in the Balkans, and particularly in the wake of 9/11, it became evident that soldiers would now be entering foreign space on foot. They would be occupying territory for quite considerable periods of time,

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and fighting enemies who were highly unconventional in military terms, who did not follow the so-called normal rules of military encounter. In this situation, the received orthodoxy of technology and distance seemed irrelevant, and it was at this point that ‘culture’ entered decisively into military thinking. Spearheaded by General Petraeus, ‘cultural awareness’ for the army was conceived as a ‘force multiplier’ (2006, 2). Effective counterinsurgency demanded, it was claimed, an informed understanding of the local foreign culture. Environments should be read culturally: ‘The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counter-insurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place (….) to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close reading” of the environment’ (Kilcullen, 2007). Senior members of the American military recognised that if they wanted to ‘weaponise culture’ (Rafael, 2007) in this way, they would first need to accept the fact that they faced a very serious knowledge gap. General McChrystal who commanded forces in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2010 admitted that, ‘Most of us, me included, had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years’ (quoted in McFate & Laurence, 2015, 2). What was needed was a more granular approach than the one Entezar had offered. There was a difference, it was assumed, between ‘cultural awareness’ with the distribution of basic information ‘culture cards’ (Joseph, 2016, 4) and ‘cultural intelligence’ which reflected a deeper appreciation of how the foreign society worked, an approach which not only described but also allowed for the possibility of change and interventionist action: ‘Despite the frequent use of the term in doctrine and by policy-makers in Washington, DC, “culture” appears to be less relevant than social structure, political and economic systems, and the grievances of the population…’ (McFate & Laurence, 2015, 20). For Petraeus, it was time to rely on ‘social science concepts and extensive research rather than on anecdote, rumor, conjecture, or opinion’ (McFate & Laurence, 2015, ix). A system had to be developed which gave commanders in the field robust operational data which could then be handed on to the next rotation of troops, rather than their having to rely on the current anecdotal and essentially piecemeal information

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which happened to be at their disposal: ‘Even as late as 2009, units would turn over shoeboxes of information in the field (scraps of paper, PowerPoint files, and photographs) to their replacements’ (McFate & Laurence, 2015, 11). The solution proposed was that of viewing the population and realities of Afghanistan through the prism of social science. Professional social scientists would thus be embedded within army units on the ground in what were called ‘Human Terrain Teams’: ‘the fundamental idea of the programme: that the local population should be considered as a critical element of the operational environment in the same way as weather, geographical terrain, or time are evaluated’ (McFate & Laurence, 2015, 6). The official US Army Handbook characterised the programme as having five to nine person teams, ‘to support field commanders by filling their cultural knowledge gap in the current operating environment and providing cultural interpretations of events occurring within their area of operations’ (US Army, 2008, 2). At its height in 2009, forty-two Human Terrain Teams (HTT) were deployed with every brigade, division and corps in Iraq and Afghanistan in what the key originator of the programme described as ‘essentially an experiment in how to conduct social science in support of the military in combat’ (McFate & Laurence, 2015, 17). Reading the environment in order to weaponise culture for the western military thus became an exercise in social science—‘Social Science goes to War’. Each team comprised a team leader, social scientists, research managers and human terrain analysts. The Handbook specified that, ‘The optimum composition of the team would include at least one member of the team (who) will speak the language of the area of operation, one member will be a subject-matter expert of the area, and one team member will be a female to allow the team access to the 50% of the population frequently overlooked in military operations’ (US Army, 2008, 11). In practice however, it proved difficult to recruit suitable candidates with this range of skills: ‘The pool of qualified people—those who had either lived in or studied these countries, who spoke the local languages, who had an advanced academic background in a relevant discipline, and who could handle working with the military in stressful and often austere environments –was very small’ (Callahan, 2015, 96). In the end, social scientists with thematically relevant fieldwork experience from other parts of the

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world were drafted in (Brereton, 2015, 271). In physical terms, applicants also needed to demonstrate that they were fit enough to carry approximately fifty pounds of body armour (McFate & Laurence, 2015, 22). Joseph suggested that in practice HTTs recruited substantial numbers of current and retired military personnel (2016, 7). The number of social scientists with recent experience of living and working in Afghanistan was anyway small and, as Monsutti pointed out (2013), influential bodies in the academic world like the American Anthropological Association maintained that there were serious ethical issues in inviting anthropologists to be embedded within military units in this way, particularly in relation to the founding principle of anthropology which was to do no harm to those being studied (275). One anthropologist recruited to work in Afghanistan said he had gone there with considerable reservations about the whole programme, ‘not least because the contractor’s hiring practices suggested desperation’, but had been lured to the HTT in part by the large salary, but also with the notion that he might be able to help Afghans caught in the middle of the conflict (Callahan, 2015, 97). In the field, members of Human Terrain Teams found themselves in an ambiguous position, one which was in some ways not dissimilar to that of interpreters hired by the military. To begin with they faced the same physical dangers as the rest of the soldiers—three social scientists were killed, and many more wounded (Joseph 2). Their relationship with the military was, as one HTT social scientist described it, ‘parasitic’ (Callahan, 2015, 112), dependent on the whole unit for support and defence. Dealing with military commanders on the ground was difficult, with some HTT reporting that the military and social science cultures were so fundamentally different that communicating positive messages to a unit often proved problematic: ‘This was especially true in trying to alter their overly aggressive operating styles and a tendency to favour Western concepts of efficiency over local cultural norms’ (Joseph, 2016, 5). In professional terms, behaving like an academic social scientist in battlefield conditions was almost impossible. Some described their role as doing, a drive-by ‘windshield ethnography’, or ‘combat ethnography’ (Callahan, 2015, 107, 116). Joseph produced a grid comparing military and social science norms which recalled some of the ongoing discussions in the

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languages world about how interpreting professionalisms could be matched against military norms and expectations (Joseph, 2016, 7 and see also Tesseur & Footitt, 2019). Most importantly, the HTTs, like interpreters, were operating in the context of a foreign military occupation of the country so that any advice they offered on the local population had to be set against the military requirements of the situation, and these requirements were primordial: ‘Occupation helped produce a form of conceptual membrane that severely limited out meaningful consideration of the US impact on the local population’ (Joseph, 2016, 7). As the HTT Handbook made clear, the Teams were there to use social science in order to gather data which would be ‘operationally relevant’ and create ‘an analytic cultural framework for operational planning, decision-making and assessment’ (US Army, 2008, 4). The methodology to be used by these Human Terrain Teams was established as one common to social science inquiry. The HTT Handbook (US Army, 2008) carefully enumerated the sources on which analysis should be based. Firstly, there was field research conducted during unit patrols: ‘Engaging the locals and observing their customs and habits personally is indispensable to collecting accurate data’ (95). By accompanying units on patrol, it would become evident what information they currently had and what sort of additional questions could be usefully posed to the local population. Supporting information might include existing unit reports, news sources, scholarly literature and the contributions of local organisations and offices with whom the army already had links. Participant observation and unstructured or semi-structured interviews would be carried out in what was termed ‘Rapid Assessment mode’ (67): ‘Our missions will provide us anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple of days. You may have the opportunity to return to a location, but most often the reality of the situation is that you will only have the opportunity to visit a village once during a mission and only for a few hours. It is not uncommon to visit two or three villages in a single day. This translates into about 90 minutes per village and a minimum one hour of transit time to and from the village’ (67). Sample semi-structured interview questions were designed to elicit information on the interrelationship between an Afghan official’s background, their affiliations, their values,and how such networks of

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affiliation were intermingled or distinct so that the team could gauge the extent to which individuals in the area were cooperating and communicating with others (113). In the British Imperial tradition which had translated Afghanistan as a melange of different tribes, the Handbook offered a ‘Tribal Research’ questionnaire (115): 1. What is your ethnicity? 2. What is your tribe? 3. Which tribes are under your tribe? 4. Which tribes are above your tribe? 5. Would you write the information for me in Pashto? 6. What is the history of your tribe? 7. In which other villages do people in your village have family? 8. What is your first language? 9. Why is that your first language? In all this it was evident that the Afghans themselves were being treated as objects, as ‘Sources of Human Terrain Information’ (5), a fact of which many Afghans with whom the Teams dealt were fully aware. One HTT researcher recounted how, as he took out his notebook to make notes, an older Afghan man observed, ‘In America, there must be vast libraries filled with these little notebooks. For eight years, every American who has come here has written down everything we said and then left, never to return’ (Callahan, 2015, 104). For HTT members the whole process of doing these semi-structured interviews could be repetitive and tedious: ‘Over six months, I would eventually get very tired of asking the same few things over and over again’ (Callahan, 2015, 105). The relationship between American soldier and local population inevitably took on the features of a series of set pieces: ‘the encounters have a very scripted quality: the soldiers ask the questions they’re required to, the Afghans politely feign ignorance of any insurgents in their area but mention some pressing development needs, the soldier writes these down, both sides shake hands, and part ways’ (Callahan, 2015, 113). Scripted or not, such social science-based encounters on the ground would clearly have to be dependent on languages, on exchanges taking place either by means of a western officer speaking one of the languages

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of Afghanistan, or through the mediation of an intermediary, an interpreter. Although the optimum composition of the HTT suggested that one member should be able to speak the requisite languages, it proved extremely difficult to recruit linguistically able personnel. One American recruit who had recently completed eighteen months field ethnography in Afghanistan and spoke reasonable Dari found that he was posted to eastern Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, where almost no one spoke Dari as a first language (Callahan, 2015, 98). The HTT Handbook implicitly recognised the fact that the desired social science investigation might in practice only take place by using interpreters by devoting two pages (out of a total of one hundred and twenty) to advice on the most productive ways of working with them. Pre-briefing, they suggested, was vital. In the first place, it would enable the interpreter to prepare properly: ‘The more your interpreter knows about what you are trying to achieve or acquire, the more they will be able to assist you in that endeavour’ (US Army, 2008,. 74). Secondly, by letting the interpreter have a preliminary look at the questions the team wanted to pose, it would be possible to ensure that they were culturally appropriate. Responsibility for explaining the nature of the encounter would lie with the interpreter who it was thought, by then, should have worked out a reasonable way of communicating the focus of the meeting—‘a cultural study team that is working with the Coalition in order to better understand the local population. We are students and want to learn as much about the cultural as possible. We are also teachers and must take the cultural information we receive and teach the Coalition, including the security forces what we learned’ (US Army, 2008, 75). The interpreter might also operate as a check to ensure that the questions being asked were easily comprehensible. In addition, the Handbook noted elements of good practice when using interpreters—pausing to enable the interpreter time to translate for example. The objective was to create an agreeable and personal atmosphere for the semi-structured interviews, encouraging the interpreter to translate things in the first person: ‘It gives the interpreter a place of importance, makes things less confusing and is more active’ (US Army, 2008, 76). Despite this advice however, experience in the field indicated that HTT interactions with interpreters were seldom as well planned and

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prepared as the Handbook had advised. One HTT member recalled that his team employed two to three Afghan interpreters on a rotating basis, but that, when travelling to research locations, there was often not enough transport to take the interpreters with them, so that the team was forced to rely on interpreters who were attached to the local US military units they were visiting: ‘These interpreters occasionally did not speak much of the local language, as interpreters were often ethnic Tajiks from Kabul who spoke limited Pashto, and frequently expressed open disdain for the rural, Pashtun population…’ (Brereton, 2015, 271). A conception of social science investigation as an a-linguistic exercise which would produce accurate and stable data through the intervention of a third party was directly called into question by the experiences of HTT personnel on the ground. Social scientists in the programme often expressed concern about the effect that interpreters might be having on the validity of the data they were receiving: ‘What I hear … can never be independent of my biases, or my mood, or even my linguistic limitations, which often force the source’s original message to be dragged through the biases, moods, and limitations of an interpreter’ (Callahan, 2015, 197). One officer who had some competence in Dari observed that his interlocutors seemed unwilling to discuss their religious practices, and then realised that his Hazara interpreter, a practitioner of Shia Islam, was using the word haram or forbidden to describe religious practices, thereby making the local community unwilling to contribute to the discussion: ‘there were probably innumerable instances of impeded research due to linguistic, ethnic, and demographic differences introduced by interpreters that I failed to notice or correct’ (Brereton, 2015, 272). Joseph, reviewing the overall operation of the HTTs, argued that the issue of languages lay at the root of some of the difficulties the programme had met: ‘Most of those trained and actually deployed did not speak Arabic, Dari or Pashto. Even when analysts were Iraqi- or Afghan-­ Americans, teams often found themselves dependent on interpreters. Their often poor quality, I was told by a previously deployed member, while other HTS personnel sat around a lunch table nodding their heads in assent, “is the elephant in the room”’ (Joseph, 2016, 3). Whilst the US approach to weaponising culture took this prescriptive social science-dominated perspective with teams of specialists in which the

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role of languages tended to be secondary or incidental, other NATO countries adopted slightly different ways of weaponising culture in their operations. Given that most had a considerably lighter footprint in Afghanistan than the Americans and smaller budgets, it was not surprising that they eschewed the creation of new purpose-built teams of social scientists. Instead, the tactic was to provide general pre-deployment cultural training for their soldiers, and then to rely on more ad hoc cultural specialists in the field. Whilst there were said to be working groups within NATO trying to elaborate a ‘cultural doctrine’, individual countries in fact developed their own approaches, usually using already established departmental structures. Thus in Germany for example, the psychological operations section was tasked with providing the necessary cultural advice. The UK, with the second largest contingent of troops, set out its strategy in an MOD Joint Doctrine Note (2013) which argued for the importance of training and exploiting ‘specialists who have lived in close proximity to the actors in specific cultures, and who have a deep understanding of the language, customs, values and narratives of that culture’ (iii). This rather more pragmatic approach saw the weaponising of culture as being mediated through the provision of cultural advice to commanders derived from experience rather than from a particular disciplinary methodology. Thus whereas the US Handbook on Human Terrain Teams was primarily interested in ensuring that the social science methodology used was robust and that its results could be communicated easily to commanders in the field, the British equivalent Joint Doctrine Note 4/13 on ‘Culture and Human Terrain’ provided concrete examples of occasions when the input of cultural specialists was deemed to have been decisive. Thus in a case of friction between ISAF and Afghan forces, the cultural specialist involved talked to members of both sides in several locations and concluded that the particular problem had arisen as a result of different understandings about food being provided at joint meetings, an issue which the ISAF and Afghan local commanders then resolved between them: ‘The cultural specialist had provided a unique viewpoint. His language skills and knowledge of Afghan culture were critical in solving this particular issue’ (4–13). Similarly, cultural specialists advised that poppy fields were classically flooded by farmers during ISAF operations as a defence against the possible destruction of the crop, and that there

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was an adverse local reaction when tracked vehicles were used on agricultural land: ‘This knowledge had a direct impact on resupply and casualty evacuation plans’ (3–8). The British model too developed its notion of specialist cultural capability as being overtly linked to language competence. Level 3 cultural specialists were expected to ‘have a level of linguistic ability to work effectively’ (JDN 3–6), measured at the NATO proficiency level of Stanag 3, with Listening at level 3 professional (‘able to understand most formal and informal speech on practical, social, and professional topics, including particular interests and special fields of competence’), and speaking at the same level (‘Able to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and professional topics’). The fact that reading and writing skills were to be graded at level 2 and level 1 respectively underlined the fact that British cultural specialists were intended to be operating in exchanges on the ground between the local population and the commanders, ‘without relying on interpreters’ (3–7). In a sense, the UK approach harked directly back to the Imperial Political Officer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where it was thought to be more secure if communication took place without the need for potentially unreliable interpreters. The presumed hierarchy between linguistic interpreting and cultural advice was demonstrated by the experience of one British officer who had been taught Pashto at the Ministry of Defence’s school at Beaconsfield and was originally deployed as an interpreter: ‘…that role was a waste of trained British personnel; the Beaconsfield linguists were more useful in a kind of political officer role, establishing relationships with Helmandis and attempting to influence them’ (Akam, 2021, 507). In both the British and American versions of weaponising culture, the Afghan people themselves were treated as objects to be researched and observed in order to fill the very considerable western knowledge gap that existed and crucially to produce the desired military effects on the ground. In the US case, the project was framed within a quasi-scientific setting which was designed to give it greater credibility. Critics of this essentially data-rich approach argued that it was conceived in ways which were both arrogant and counter-productive: ‘There exists an overarching belief that sophisticated analytics—using survey methods, experiments and “big

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data”—can be effective substitutes for deep and prolonged immersion and local understanding’ (Kalyvas, 2017, xv). The more limited British model was experiential and ad hoc, aiming to capitalise on personnel who had some understanding of the country, and linking this to some extent at least with an ability to speak the requisite languages. In both cases, the pool of talent from which potential recruits could be drawn was small. Few western anthropologists and ethnographers had had recent experience of working in Afghanistan, and the numbers of those with linguistic capabilities or a willingness to acquire a working knowledge of the requisite languages were not large. Western imaginings of Afghanistan were framed by the nineteenth century colonial mapping of tribal data, a representation which was essentially visual rather than oral. During large parts of the twentieth century, Afghanistan had simply disappeared from the western psychological map, so that when NATO intervened in the country after 9/11, there was a considerable deficit in knowledge and understanding. Attempts to fill this gap included a largely uncritical rereading of nineteenth century canonical texts, an anecdotal extrapolation of cultural ‘facts’ and an attempt to update nineteenth century anthropological approaches by the use of what were seen as more rigorous social science methodologies, or by a reworking of the role of imperial political officers. In this context, the implications of actually communicating with local Afghan communities, and listening to their voices, seemed of largely secondary importance. It was assumed that communication would be handled by the small group of westerners who could speak the languages of Afghanistan, and where this proved impossible because of the shortage of specialists, and as a distinctly second-best option, interpreters would be hastily recruited. The role of interpreters was seldom recognised within the western imaginary, except in so far as it might have had a deleterious effect on the validity of information sought out by imperial political officers or by later social science and cultural specialists. In this largely a-linguistic understanding of Afghanistan, framed by a longstanding knowledge deficit about the country, westerners intervening in Afghanistan paid little regard to the potential position of Afghans they would employ as interpreters, individuals who had their own stories and subjectivities. In the complex and muddled spaces of encounter where

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westerners actually met Afghans during the twenty years of occupation, preconceptions created by western imaginings of Afghanistan would condition their behaviour towards interpreters, and the relationships they developed on the ground.

References Akam, S. (2021). The changing of the guard: The British Army since 9/11. Scribe Publications. Ansary, T. (2012). Games without rules: The often-interrupted history of Afghanistan. Public Affairs. Barfield, T. (2010). Afghanistan: A cultural and political history. Princeton University Press. Bayly, M. J. (2018). Taming the Imperial imagination. Colonial knowledge, international relations, and the Anglo-Afghan encounter, 1808–1878. Cambridge University Press. Brereton, B. G. (2015). Tangi Valley: The limitations of applied anthropology in Afghanistan. In M. McFate & J. H. Laurence (Eds.), Social science goes to war: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan (pp.  265–290). Hurst and Co. Callahan, T. (2015). An anthropologist at war in Afghanistan. In M. McFate & J. H. Laurence (Eds.), Social science goes to war: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan (pp. 91–118). Hurst and Co. Elphinstone, M. (1815). An account of the Kingdom of Caubal, and its dependencies in Persia, Tartary, and India, comprising a view of the Afghan nation, and a history of the Dooraunee monarchy. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown. Entezar, E. M. (2007). Afghanistan 101: Understanding Afghan culture. Xlibris Corporation. Gant, J. (2009). One tribe at a time: A strategy for success in Afghanistan. Nine Sisters Imports, 11. www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/ report/2009/2009_one_tribe_at_a_time.pdf. Gregory, D. (2008). Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn in late modern war. Radical Philosophy, 150, 8–23. Hanifi, S.  M. (2013). A history of linguistic boundary crossing within and around Pashto. In B.  D. Hopkins & M.  Marsden (Eds.), Beyond  Swat: History, society and economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier (pp. 63–76). Hurst and Co..

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Hanifi, S. M. (2018). A genealogy of orientalism in Afghanistan: The colonial image lineage. In T. Keskin (Ed.), Middle East studies after September 11: Neo-­ orientalism, American hegemony and academia. Brill. Hopkins, B. D. (2012). The making of modern Afghanistan. Palgrave Macmillan. Hopkins, B.  D., & Marsden, M. (2013). Rethinking Swat. Militancy and modernity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. In B.  D. Hopkins & M.  Marsden (Eds.), Beyond Swat. History, society and economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. Hurst and Co.. Innocent, M., & Carpenter, T. G. (2009). ‘Escaping the graveyard of empires’: A strategy to exit Afghanistan. Cato Institute White Paper. https://www.cato. org/white-­paper/escaping-­graveyard-­empires-­strategy-­exit-­afghanistan. Johnson, T.  H., & Mason, M.  C. (2008). No sign until the burst of fire: Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. International Security, 32(4), 41–77. Joseph, P. (2016). “Soft power” does not always mean “smart power”: An investigation of human terrain teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Palgrave Communications, 97. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.97 Kalyvas, S. N. (2017). Preface in Mike Martin, An intimate war. An oral history of the Helmand conflict (pp. xiii–xiv). Hurst and Co.. Kilcullen, D. (2007). Religion and insurgency. Small Wars Journal Blog. 12 May. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/religion-­and-­insurgency. Leake, E. (2018). Spooks, tribes, and holy men: The central intelligence agency and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Journal of Contemporary History, 53(1), 240–262. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009416653459 LineCo. (2009). Cultural awareness training for the Ministry of Defence (MOD). www.line.co.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2009/11/mod-­ca_img2.jpg. Mairs, R. (2021). Afghan interpreters: An Occluded History. Everyday Orientalism. everydayotientalism.wordpress.com/2021/08/26/afghan-­ interpreters-­an-­occluded-­history/. Manchanda, N. (2018). The Imperial sociology of the “tribe” in Afghanistan’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 46(2), 165–189. https://doi. org/10.1177/0305829817741269 Manchanda, N. (2020). Imagining Afghanistan. Cambridge University Press. McFate, M., & Laurence, J.  H. (Eds.). (2015). Social science goes to war: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hurst and Co. MOD Joint Doctrine Note. (2013). Culture and Human Terrain 4/13. Modern Language Association of America. (2002). mla.org/content/download/2849/pdf.

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Monsutti, A. (2013). Anthropologizing Afghanistan: Colonial and postcolonial encounters. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 269–285. https://doi. org/10.1146/annurev-­anthro-­092412-­155444 Naval Postgraduate School Programme. (n.d.). Culture and conflict studies, Afghanistan. nps.edu/web/ccs/ethnic-­genealogies. Petraeus, D. (2006). Learning counterinsurgency: Observations from soldiering in Iraq. Military Review, Jan–Feb, 2–12. Rafael, V. (2007). Translation in wartime. Public Culture, 19(2), 239–246. Stewart, R. (2013). The places in between. Picador. Tesseur, W., & Footitt, H. (2019). Professionalisms at war? Interpreting in conflict and post conflict situations. Journal of War and Culture Studies., 12(3), 268–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644415 TRADOC DCSINT. (2006). Handbook, no. 2, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence US Army Training and Doctrine Command. Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Tripodi, C. (2010). Grand strategy and the graveyard of assumptions: Britain and Afghanistan, 1839–1919. The Journal of Strategic Studies, 33(5), 701–725. Trpodi, C. (2011). Edge of empire: The British Political Officer and tribal administration on the North-West Frontier 1877–1947. Ashgate. Tyson, A.  S. (2010). Jim Gant, the Green Beret who could win the war in Afghanistan. Washington Post, 17 January. US Army. (2008). Human terrain team handbook. Human Terrain System, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Warburton, Sir R. (1900). Eighteen years in the Khyber: 1879–1898. John Murray.

3 Spaces of Encounter

The spaces of encounter between the West and Afghanistan from the 2001 invasion until the evacuation in 2021 were framed not only by longstanding western perceptions, but also by the legacy of what had happened within Afghanistan over the previous twenty-five years. Afghans who started working with western forces and agencies embodied the violent disruption and economic penury which they had inherited as an integral part of the country’s recent history. On the ground, the spaces in which Afghans and westerners met were complex, changing, often involving different and overlapping agencies—national (military, diplomatic), multinational (ISAF, NATO) or reconstruction and development groups. As western strategies were modified over the twenty year period, tasks assigned to interpreters would reflect these changes of direction and emphasis. The spaces of encounter were always conflictual—western ‘Zombie narratives’ (de Witte, 2021) of the historical impossibility of ever ‘winning’ a war in Afghanistan and the counter-insurgency tactics the West employed collided violently with legacies of internal strife within the community, and the growing rejection of the western presence. The twenty-first century western invasion of Afghanistan drew on past history and added new dimensions which would directly affect those Afghans who went to work with the West. Interpreters would be located

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within highly contentious spaces of encounter, both inside and outside the physical and metaphorical barbed wire which separated intervening military forces from the Afghan community.

Afghan Employees Afghans employed in any of these spaces brought with them their own stories of the past civil war and of the violence, displacement and poverty through which they and their families might have lived prior to the western intervention. By the time western forces arrived in Afghanistan in 2001, Afghans had experienced two decades of war and conflict. Insecurity and civil war were everyday experiences. From the 1978 overthrow of the centrist government of Mohammad Daud Khan by left-wing military officers, insurgencies led by groups collectively known as the mujahideen (Arabic meaning ‘those who engage in jihad’) disputed the legitimacy of the new government. With the Soviet invasion of the country in December 1979, violence on the ground amplified. Some 100,000 Soviet soldiers kept control of the larger towns, but the mujahideen, increasingly supported by western-derived resources, moved relatively freely across the rest of the country. In 1989 when the Soviets withdrew, there was a violent civil war between different rebel factions, leaving large areas outside Kabul in chaos. In 1996 after the Taliban seized the capital, ethnic groups in the north and south continued to fight on. Living through this period thus meant that you and your family would have experienced directly or indirectly the threat or reality of high levels of violence—by the early 1990s, rough estimates put the number of Afghan casualties at 1.5 million. Tens of thousands of Afghans died of starvation during this period, and hundreds of thousands were killed or injured by landmines—by the end of the twentieth century Afghanistan was one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. Unsurprisingly in this situation, there was a vast exodus of population, constituting one of the biggest refugee crises of the twentieth century. At its peak, the UNHCR estimated that 6.2 million Afghans had fled to Pakistan and Iran, while tens of thousands were resettling in Europe and North America. One Afghan who came to the UK as a teenager in 2001 said

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that his motivation had been the need to escape from the all pervading atmosphere of violence: ‘My friends were being killed by the Taliban. There was a gun culture, and you had no choice other than to pick up a gun. So families forced their teenagers to leave in order to be safe’ (Interview, 14.02.22). This historical context of longstanding insecurity and familial exile necessarily shaped some of the embodied experience of those whom the West would employ. An Afghan interpreter with American and British forces explained how he had lived most of his childhood in exile in Pakistan, arriving there as a nine year old in flight from Soviet invaders— ‘To be a refugee is to be at the bottom of every pile’ (Idrees, 2021, 9). He had been educated in a school in Pakistan sponsored by the United Nations for Afghan refugees: ‘The funding to Afghan schools was limited …. No chairs or desks … .and most of the classes were in tents … I still remember the blue tents with UNHCR written on them …. It had no heating, so was really cold during winter’ (10). It was there as an exile in Pakistan that he first learned English. He returned to Afghanistan in 2002 as a seventeen year old, having seen his country only once during the long years of exile. In this situation of war, continuing conflict and population displacement, it is unsurprising that economic conditions in Afghanistan when the West invaded were some of the worst in the world—the human development report placed it 169th out of 185 countries listed (Human Development Index Trends 1990–2019, 2021). Agriculture, which accounted for 85% of GDP before 1979, had been largely destroyed in the 25  years of war, as was the small manufacturing sector established during the Soviet period. The two main sources of income remained opium production (providing 87% of the world’s opium, and around 60% of GDP) and international assistance including remittances sent from abroad. Most of the Afghans displaced from rural areas had moved into the cities, causing considerable strain on housing, employment and services. Unemployment and economic hardship were thus added to the problem of personal insecurity. Six years after the Coalition invasion, around 35% of the population were living below the poverty line, a figure which would increase to 55% in subsequent years (Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Central Statistics Organization, 2016–2017).

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Given this low economic and employment baseline, working with western agencies was very attractive in monetary terms. ‘Many different people wanted to become interpreters. Firstly, the money was very good … For those who came from very poor backgrounds, the salary on offer was a life-changing amount of money, no tax, free accommodation, free meal. An interpreter got paid enough in a month to feed a family of six for several months’ (Idrees, 2021, 115). Those recruited locally were offered salaries of around $500 a month, about five times the average monthly wage, ‘the equivalent to what an Afghan general would collect’ (Jones & Askew, 2014, 120). One British officer assigned to Helmand recalled interpreters being paid $1200-$1500 a month, in comparison with the $200 then earned by an Afghan soldier or policeman: ‘An unbelievable sum’ (Interview, 12.11.21). One third to one half of those he met had taken the job, he estimated, because they intended to amass a large enough pot of dowry money to permit them to marry into a higher social class: ‘It was social mobility—we were creating a special class with these interpreters’. The level of these salaries offered by western agencies was related to the military’s acute need for language intermediaries, coupled with the perceived shortage of suitable potential candidates—literacy levels in Afghanistan were relatively low. In 2003, the head of the Linguistic Service visiting ISAF Headquarters in Kabul reported (Jones & Askew, 2014, 120) that linguists working there exhibited no particular loyalty to their employer. Their main motivation was to earn a lot of money to support their families and in this situation they were fully aware of the fact that interpreters were in short supply and that ISAF depended on them completely (Jones, 120).

Western Employers From the perspectives of the West, the spaces of encounter with Afghans were created by international and national factors: internal relationships within the multinational coalitions of nations (mandated by the UN through ISAF, and then taken over by NATO after 2003), and the national politics, and public opinions of each participating country. The nature of these spaces of encounter changed in relation to the different

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strategic directions of the West’s mission in Afghanistan and their geographical locations. Over the twenty years, operations developed from the pursuit of relatively limited military objectives, directed from headquarters in the capital Kabul, into a broader Afghan-wide movement in which participating nations were located in areas all over the country. For the West, the period of international engagement from 2001 can be roughly divided into four partially overlapping stages: an initial build-up phase with a ‘light footprint’; a second phase with growing ambitions for state-building (2002–2006); a third phase dominated by increasing local resistance and counter-insurgency (2006–2014); and a fourth phase (2014–2021) when, with the bulk of NATO troops having withdrawn, the much smaller remaining force was focused on training the Afghan army and police to take over when NATO completely withdrew. Strategically, the intervention was soon caught between enemy-centric military activity, increasingly combating Afghan insurgency, and state-­ building initiatives, designed to support the emergence of a viable Afghan government, an objective thought to be achieved largely through the dispersal of international development aid in a process which was, as Suhrke argued, ‘wrapped in a vision of modernization’ (2006, 1). These dichotomous framings—the multinational/national operation and the military/ development strategy—were key markers of the spaces in which western interveners and Afghans would meet. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a multinational mission established by UN National Security Resolution 1386, was initially expected to secure the capital Kabul and facilitate the formation of a transitional Afghan administration. At the request of the UN, NATO took command of this mission in 2003. At its peak, ISAF had 400 military bases in Afghanistan and around 130,000 troops, with some forty-­ two countries participating, including all thirty members of NATO. Whilst the force operated overall under the authorisation of the UN, each national government gave specific mandates to its own armies, and these varied from country to country. At the outset in 2001, the ISAF command rotated every six months among different nations. Coalition members limited their personnel to short tours of duty so that by the time new arrivals had got up to speed they were being expected to train their replacements. The fact that ISAF

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was a collection of different national forces affected both its operational effectiveness and its decision-making processes. A US Air Force fighter pilot charged with running air-support operations at night found he was working with crews from a range of NATO nations and was therefore forced to juggle specific national regulations—German tornado fighter bombers for example could only be used in certain emergencies. He likened ISAF headquarters to a ‘Frankenstein organisation’ that emphasised inclusion over efficiency: ‘it’s going to be very convoluted … It’s kind of like kindergarten where everybody gets to play, everybody gets a speaking part’ (Whitlock, 2021, 107). In this situation, Americans often complained about the Coalition, particularly as the number of US troops deployed at each stage of the conflict vastly outnumbered that of other countries. Derogatory alternative acronyms for ISAF included, ‘I saw Americans fighting’, ‘I suck at fighting’ and ‘In sandals and flip flops’. Other NATO members, acknowledging that the mission was overwhelmingly American, could feel that they were being undervalued by the US. NATO continued to adhere to what Rynning and Hilde (2022) called their coordination strategy which involved seeking compromise between member states in a situation in which some countries, most notably France, were sceptical about taking NATO outside the Euro-­ Atlantic area, and where the continuance of national participation in the whole enterprise depended on the exigencies of local politics and public opinion. The overall lack of cohesion in ISAF’s strategic direction was illustrated by the early decision that different sectors of the security structure in Afghanistan should become the responsibility of particular countries—the US would be in charge of building up the Afghan army, Germany would lead on dealing with strengthening the police force, Italy in taking responsibility for the legal system, the UK in counter-narcotics enforcement and Japan in demobilising and reintegrating the armed militia groups. As the Norwegian government report acerbically noted: ‘Most of these countries had no particular qualifications for dealing with their allotted sectors and there was little effort to coordinate their activities’ (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence, 2018, 28). After October 2003 when the UN paved the way for ISAF to support the government of Afghanistan beyond Kabul, non-American NATO militaries would be located in different areas all over the country.

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Thus in the north, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg contributed forces. In the West, the British, the Italians, and the Dutch were active at different times, whilst in the south, the British and Canadians played major roles. As the physical reach of the West’s operation expanded, and the Afghan insurgency grew more menacing, strategic differences between the US and some of its NATO allies became more pronounced. From 2002, the Americans had launched an initiative to bring together their Civil Affairs Teams, Civil-Military Operations Centres and Coalition armed forces in what became known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) (Fig. 3.1). Some of the impetus for this development originally came from humanitarian organisations and NGOS who had found that the security situation on the ground was too dangerous for them to give adequate support to civilians (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence, 2018, 30). Each PRT was formed of between 50 and 150

Fig. 3.1  Members of Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Farah prepare to enter the newly built Bakura District Center in western Afghanistan to assess completed work (November 27, 2012)

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members and comprised both civilian and military personnel, although the number of non-military staff was always low—around 5 to 10%. PRTs sought to combine counter-insurgency with stabilisation, winning ‘hearts and minds’ as a contribution to the counter-insurgency objectives. The Guidelines identified three areas of activity for them—reconstruction, central government support and stability. According to McHugh and Gostelow in their report to Save the Children (2004, 20), many people within the US defence institutions regarded the PRTs as a means of enhancing stability and security in Afghanistan at relatively low cost and low risk, an alternative to a more substantial deployment of troops. Observers noted that some PRTs appeared to be engaged in intelligence gathering, and all had a ‘reach back’ facility where they could call upon close air support if needed. Some twenty-six PRTs were planned and scheduled to operate in different areas of the country across the thirty-­ four provinces, led by specific members of NATO. It should be said that the size and population distribution in many of the areas they covered raised considerable challenges. Thus for example the Norwegians led a PRT in Faryab province, a region which was two thirds the size of Belgium and had one million inhabitants, 90% of whom lived in rural areas (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence, 2018, 122). Whilst the United States emphasised the anti-terrorist nature of the PRT policy, other NATO countries tended to focus on the alternative aspect of the initiative, that of supporting economic and social development (Rynning & Hilde, 2022, 2), an approach which became known as ‘the Norwegian model’, where development was always strictly separated from military operations. In practice, confusion was easily caused on the ground by mixing combat and reconstruction. The Save the Children report noted for example that in Ghazni Province the US-led PRT was engaged in road and dam reconstruction at the same time as combat activities were continuing in the area: ‘According to civil affairs officers in the PRT, villagers are able to distinguish between the different roles of combat soldiers and PRT members, despite the fact that both groups wear camouflage and bear arms. The difference was said to be that PRT military wear baseball caps rather than helmets, and they try to be

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approachable and friendly when entering villages’ (McHugh & Gostelow, 2004, 23). As well as this uneasy distinction between fighting and development, PRTs operated according to rules established by the particular lead country which sometimes resulted in a cumbersome internal network of criss-crossing lines of accountability. The UK-led PRT in Mazar-­ i-­Sharif for instance included civilian advisers from DFID, the FCO, the US State Department and USAID. Although the PRT was formally led by the military commander, non-military personnel reported directly to their civilian superiors (McHugh & Gostelow, 2004, 25). Quite apart from the key issue of the militarisation of humanitarian aid, it was clear that PRTs offered a means for individual states to ‘fly the flag’ in Afghanistan, providing political cover for governments reluctant to commit more troops, and giving their participation in the Afghan conflict a particular humanitarian branding which could potentially appeal to their own electorates. Given their partial development ethos, PRTs inevitably overlapped to some extent with the work of local NGOs or INGOs. In the years preceding the West’s invasion, NGOs had played a significant role in Afghan society. During the initial stages of the Soviet-Afghan War, humanitarian agencies provided support to Afghan refugees who had fled to Pakistan. By the early 1980s, these agencies were starting to establish cross-border organisations, mostly in areas not under Soviet control since the regime had banned INGOs. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988, there was an expansion of third sector activity in the fields of education, infrastructure, vocational training and mine clearance. The Afghan government’s formal acceptance of NGO operations in 1990 brought with it an increase in NGO coordination bodies, like the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief and Development (ACBAR). When the Taliban came to power however, considerable limits and constraints were imposed upon NGO work—in 1998, for example, thirty-eight INGOS were expelled from the country, and the year before that Oxfam suspended a water-­ supply project in Logar Province as a protest against Taliban policies towards women. After 9/11, most international workers speedily relocated to Pakistan, with INGOS transferring their projects to local Afghan employees. Given the absence of NGOs in Afghanistan in late 2001, the US military became in effect one of the few entities capable of providing

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humanitarian relief. In the early stages of the conflict, the Asian Development Bank, the UN Development Programme and the World Bank jointly called for a moderate scaling up of NGO programmes, a move supported by the Afghan government. Despite the ongoing insecurity in the country, NGO activity continued to expand year on year, and by 2012, some 828 organisations were working in the country, 58% of which were local (Mitchell, 2017). For some western countries, the opportunity to present their intervention in Afghanistan to a domestic audience as development rather than military expenditure became increasingly attractive. Although almost half of the total international civilian aid came from the US, it was possible for smaller national donors, like Norway for example, to raise their visibility through the operation of this ‘aid diplomacy’ (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence, 2018, 87). Many donors in fact chose to channel their contributions through NGOs or private companies rather than through the Afghan government. This ‘off budget’ support meant that the government had little direct control over such resources which were coordinated at levels beyond their authority, in spontaneous donor groups in Kabul, or in large-scale coordination bodies, or donor conferences. In the short term it often appeared faster for donors to use international consultants in the ministries, rather than train Afghan bureaucrats: ‘As time passed, a group of Afghan bureaucrats emerged … who worked for or were at least partially paid by the international community’ (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence, 2018, 85). On the ground, western INGOS adopted a variety of approaches to managing their development work. An emphasis on the need to respect gender and support women’s rights was often an integral part of their relationship with local NGOs. Caritas (Germany) specifically called on local partners to pay attention to gender concerns in their work, although in practice the actual gender balance of projects depended largely on the focus of the programme, with those involving kitchen gardens, handicrafts or carpet-weaving for example tending to achieve a greater gender balance. The INGO’s headquarters’ office in Afghanistan made efforts to employ as many Afghans as possible, with a particular ambition to have Afghan women on the staff. In 2018, twenty-seven headquarters staff

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were national, with seven women, and two additional internationals (Interview, 1.2.22). As well as this interface between PRTs, NGOs, the Afghan administration and local NGOs, NATO members maintained varying levels of formal diplomatic representation in Afghanistan, supported by local workers. Thus, the British and American embassies, situated in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood, the secure sector of Kabul, employed a number of Afghans—in the US case, some 2600 personnel out of the 4000 establishment were non-American. Soft power agencies like the British Council and the Institut Français also developed bases in Kabul, seeking to promote the values of their respective nations through cultural events and language teaching. The British Council for example developed an English-language teaching programme across the whole country. In line with the report on ‘Building Young People’s Resilience to Violent Extremism’ (British Council, 2017), the Council tried to encourage a broader opening to western values through its English language teaching and testing programme, employing some one hundred Afghan teachers including many women. With the drawdown of the majority of NATO troops in 2014, the West’s attention was directed away from development and active counter-­ insurgency towards a much more limited mission, the Resolute Support Mission (RSM), to advise and train Afghan security forces. Again, the operation was a multinational one. At its peak, forty-two countries contributed to the initiative. The US accounted for the largest contingent, with Italy, Germany and Turkey serving in leading roles. RSM forces were located between Kabul and Bagram Airfield. In later lessons learned interviews, American commanders alluded to the problems they had experienced in training recruits who were functionally illiterate. They estimated that only 2 to 5% of Afghan recruits could read at a third grade level: ‘Even simple communications posed a challenge. … When words failed, the troops did a lot of talking with their hands or drawing in the dirt’ (Whitlock, 2021, 57). Outside this official mission for training Afghan security forces, there also remained the unofficial and secret CIA-supported Afghan militia, formed in 2001, ‘the CIA’s army’ (Suhrke & de Lauri, 2019), designed to hunt down and kill terrorists. Such units had no official existence in

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Afghan law and no formal place in the state security apparatus. In 2018, estimates suggested that there were still anywhere from 3000 to over 10,000 of these US-backed fighters. Clearly, such groups operated below the radar, unseen and unaccountable, apparently not bound by the rules and regulations under which national armies or ISAF groups had to operate. The multiplicity of agencies and sectors participating in the West’s intervention meant that Afghans with the requisite skills had an opportunity to work with a range of employers—multinational like ISAF/NATO, national (either military, diplomatic or cultural), INGOs or the Afghan government itself in its ongoing relationship with the West. In practice, some Afghans moved between these agencies. One interpreter for example began his career interpreting with the French army, then worked with an Afghan logistics company supplying the West and finally became a liaison officer in the Ministry of the Interior (Interview, 25.01.22). Another moved from American and US Special Forces to the US Counter-­ Insurgency Academy in Kabul (COIN), and then on to the British Special Air Service (Interview, 28.08.22). Another worked as an interpreter with the UK army in Helmand (July 2007–May 2010) and then took an appointment as a political officer at the British Embassy in Kabul (August 2011–December 2013) (Ayeen, 2018). The spaces of encounter with Afghans changed over the twenty-one year period and were located geographically in different areas at different stages of the conflict. A pattern of multiple agencies offered potential employment to Afghans—multilateral organisations, national contingents, mixed military/development groups and INGOs, NGOs and cultural agencies funded by the West. These spaces of encounter were complex with a potentially large number of actors involved and overlapping jurisdictions.

Recruiting The need to recruit translators/interpreters within Afghanistan was made more acute by the paucity of western military personnel with any knowledge of the languages needed. The US Inquiry into intelligence failings

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before and after 9/11 had already signalled the absence of qualified linguists available in key languages including Arabic, Farsi and Pashto (Report of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the terrorist Attacks of September 11 2001, 2002). During a lessons learned interview in 2015, Lieutenant General Flynn (rtd.) lamented the fact that so few members of the American military had been able to speak Afghan languages either at the beginning of the conflict, or as it progressed: ‘…when we get to Afghanistan, there is only one officer on the ISAF staff that could speak Dari … We could not even train five in Dari … Even today we are still in Afghanistan and you go tell me how many actual US members of the military or policy (community), or from State who speak Dari or Pashto…’ (Flynn, 2015, 6, 7). The British case was very similar. When the Head of the Linguistic Service at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) visited ISAF headquarters in 2006 to assess the quality of linguistic support, only three translator/interpreters with a British service background had been found. Two were young RAF personnel who had followed crash courses in Dari at the Defence School of Languages, Beaconsfield, a training which generally lasted 18 months, after which ‘they were expected to accompany flag officers to high-level meetings with their Afghan military counterparts, ministers or even President Karzai’ (Jones & Askew, 2014, 131). In his expert opinion, neither officer was in a position to actually perform the tasks required. The third military interpreter there had been born in Tehran and arrived in the UK at the age of 15. His first language was Farsi. Having joined the Territorial Army, he was assigned to ISAF and subsequently became the commanding General’s main interpreter. Unfortunately, this posting was a public relations disaster: the interpreter had become involved with a military assistant at the Iranian Embassy in Kabul and apparently agreed to hand over classified information. After a trial in London, he was convicted of spying: ‘The Walter Mitty army aide who betrayed Britain to Iran’ (Martin, 2008). The burden of finding translators/interpreters outside the serving military who would be competent and trustworthy led the US and the UK, with the largest deployments of troops, to engage commercial contractors to search out, test and recruit suitable applicants. Mission Essential

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Personnel for example sought American Afghan citizens, or American Afghans with green cards, with a recruiting strapline of ‘Do it for America, do it for Afghanistan, do it for yourself ’. Finding US citizens of this sort for security-cleared positions was not easy. According to the 2000 census, only 7700 US citizens spoke fluent Pashto, and of these only about half met the necessary health and clearance requirements. In the end, Mission Essential Personnel engaged more than 1000 American Afghans. One successful candidate described the pre-deployment preparation he had been given as: ‘we must always be on alert, eyes and ears open, ready to report anything we saw or heard to our superiors but never tell anything to the enemy … In general, besides our work, we were to interpret culture and spread good will toward Americans. I also took a short course to sharpen my Pashto and after a few weeks passed all my exams’ (Azizi, 2019, 16). A whistleblower in the Company however, who took out a lawsuit against Mission Essential Personnel, alleged that there was in fact considerable laxness in the way that the language exams were set, with cases of candidates getting friends or relatives to sit the tests for them (Mosk et al., 2010). What was evident was that contracted linguists with American or British credentials were paid a good deal more than the personnel recruited locally by the contractors. When criticised about this discrepancy in pay, the Company argued that: ‘Local nationals are paid well by the standards of their community. Mission Essential Personnel’s local national aid are (sic) compensated better than doctors and cabinet-­ level officials in Afghanistan’ (quoted in Wikipedia, 2010, note 18). A higher level of security clearance, given to those with attested formal links to the West, affected not only pay, but also the locations in which they would typically work—crucially the distance from the violent front line of conflict—and the types of duties expected of them. Thus, whereas locally employed Afghans were being paid $400 a month, Category One interpreters with US green cards had a salary of around $10,000 a month and were mainly operating in meetings with Afghan elders. Category 2, those with American passports, earned $12,000 a month, whilst Category 3 interpreters with top secret clearance worked largely in high-level conferences. One locally employed interpreter argued that these returning exiles had lived most of their lives outside the country and had no connection with contemporary Afghanistan: ‘they could speak fluent English

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but not Dari or Pashtu’ (Idrees, 202145). Outside commercial contractors were also used to recruit and employ local civilians for embassies—in particular the over one hundred security staff at both the American and UK embassies. British Council teachers in Afghanistan were similarly contracted by an outside agency rather than being directly employed by the Council itself. When armies moved out of Kabul into the rest of the country, it was clearly more difficult for national forces to ensure that they had the translator/interpreters they needed. As in many military exercises, there was a good deal of ad hocery, of ‘making do’ at the outset. Forces contacted possible sources of recruits themselves—thus the French army made overtures to the French lycée in Kabul, the lycée Esteqlal (Andlauer & Müller, 2019, 93). Spanish agencies phoned the Faculty of Spanish at the University of Kabul (Interview, 17.11.21). However, given the relative lack of suitable candidates, and the acute nature of military needs, many Afghans were recruited in a more informal way in Kabul. Abdul Raziq for example described how he met two French soldiers by chance in the street. Although he spoke no French, he understood that the army was looking for linguistic support. Raziq immediately bought himself a French conversation guide and sought employment: ‘There were not all that many francophones, so they were recruiting anglophones as well’.1 After one year working in English with French forces, Raziq had raised his level of spoken French though online courses and practice on the ground and was re-designated as a francophone interpreter (Andlauer & Müller, 2019, 88–90). In this early period, actually getting recruited could depend on chance, on receiving messages about the likelihood of vacancies, and then finding informal networks which would allow access to potential employers. One ultimately successful applicant heard that the Americans were looking for interpreters, but was unclear how he could apply. Finally, he took a job with a construction company at the US base at Bagram and managed to have a chance conversation with an American officer: ‘“Please sir, I want to work for you guys, I would like to be your interpreter”, I said in what I hoped was my best English’ (Idrees, 2021, 54). After a couple of hours  Translation by author.

1

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of questions, he was given a hundred dollars for a taxi to get him home (‘At the time that would feed an Afghan family for a month’) and told to turn up for work the next day. This slightly improvised form of recruitment continued in the field as NATO armies moved out to deploy troops in different parts of Afghanistan. One British soldier in Helmand explained how the process of recording the names of Afghan colleagues who were taken on to work as interpreters with British forces in the field was extremely ad hoc. To begin with, there was no biometric system and staff sergeants who did not speak the requisite languages would be trying to take down names which had been transliterated from the Arabic script. Army records would thus often have multiple errors regarding the employment details of interpreters (Interview, 12.11.21). Often, the supply of recruits was dependent on a particular local contact who might occasionally be tempted to use his position as middleman to demand money from those he supported. At the British base in Camp Souter for example, the Afghan head of interpreters apparently told applicants that they would need to pay him their first month’s salary if they wanted to obtain posts (Idrees, 2021, 63). The sprawling American supply chain provided ample opportunities for personal enrichment on all sides. The Pentagon was paying Afghan and international contractors to deliver between 6000 and 8000 truckloads of fuel, water, ammunition, food and other supplies to the war zone each month, resulting in what a 2010 US congressional report called, ‘a vast protection racket’ (Whitlock, 2021, 187). With these very considerable sums circulating in the country, Afghan middlemen who spoke the relevant languages could find themselves in a position to make large amounts of money. In Bagram for instance, US contractors awarded lucrative contracts were not permitted to leave the base for security reasons, a fact which provided an opportunity for Afghan middlemen to take some advantage of the situation (Idrees, 2021, 116, 117). Lieutenant General Flynn gave the example of a young interpreter, then 21 or 22 years of age: ‘So this commander is using this interpreter and the commander says I need “this” to this Afghan guy he is talking to. The commander says that he will buy “it” from you. The man (who is selling the item) says he will sell the item for a couple of

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hundred dollars. The interpreter then says (to the commander) $20,000. The commander says, okay, no problem. The interpreter gives the man the few hundred dollars and takes the rest of it because he is a savvy businessman. He keeps doing that and keeps doing it and doing it. The money is more and more and he is cutting deals. Everybody loves this interpreter. Everybody thinks the world of him’ (Flynn, 2015, 11, 10). Crucially, there was no tradition of teaching the specific skills and ethics of interpreting in Afghanistan so that those taken on would usually have competence in English (or another European language) and Dari or/and Pashto, but no background at all in translating or interpreting. It was a case of learning these skills on the job: ‘Unfortunately we did not have … .training and we learned from experience. Because you know that in the European countries you have institutes and probably college or university for training the interpreters. In Afghanistan that kind of institution is missing, we do not have that kind of institution. Most of the interpreters who are locally employed and even I think some of the international civilian consultants … those are also Afghans, they come just to Afghanistan and do by experience and learn during their job’ (Jones & Askew, 2014, 130). Reports from the field alluded to the sometimes problematic quality of this interpreting. Thus one Pashto-trained US Army Sergeant claimed that it was not unusual in 2006 in Bagram and Lashkargah to encounter interpreters who were unable to speak Pashto and had limited English. She recalled odd exchanges in which Afghan elders would speak at great length and the interpreter would turn to the American soldiers and translate, ‘He said Okay’. A British journalist who spoke Pashto and was embedded with American troops became so alarmed at the incorrect translations his unit interpreter was giving that he began filming the exchanges: ‘At one stage you can see in the film where the elder talks about the Taliban coming into the village and the fact that the villagers are helpless to do anything about it. And the translator essentially says, “the Taliban are behind that hill, if you want to find them, they’re over there”. Which wasn’t at all what the elder had said’ (quoted in Mosk et al., 2010).

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Tasks and Working Conditions When recruited, Afghans found their tasks and working conditions as translator/interpreters determined by the physical spaces in which they encountered western agencies. The international ISAF headquarters in Kabul for example was located in a protected area, alongside embassies and government offices, with much of the working and living accommodation in prefabricated huts. Afghans working as linguists were originally housed in a couple of small bug-infested rooms in the old officers’ club which often stank from what was alleged to have been the rotting corpses left under the floor. The group had only one computer between them and were expected to produce written translations in pencil in Dari/English. The first ISAF head of the Linguistic Service who visited them noted that: ‘The work was divided into two components: handwritten translations from the local language to English or from English into the vernaculars, Dari or Pashto, which meant that the team of interpreters … was mixed’ (Jones & Askew, 2014, 118). Candidates had initially been given ‘a very short verbal test’, but by autumn 2003 when NATO assumed command, both a verbal and a written test were introduced. The type of work too was expanding, with a greater volume of translation. As ISAF began to move beyond Kabul, interpreters were sent out to accompany officers visiting Afghan ministries which were being re-established in Kabul after being ransacked during the civil war (123). The NATO visitor found the Afghans very bright, with a good command of English—several had studied outside Afghanistan, in Pakistan for instance. The balance in the translator/interpreter cohort reflected the dominance of the Tajiks, after the western-assisted victory of the Northern Alliance, so that Dari was the principal language, with Pashto secondary. Clearly, ‘if NATO was going to expand, as was the plan, to the rest of the country outside of the border of Kabul, we would have to resort to a greater use of the Pashto language. … to be achieved not by dismissing Tajik linguists but increasing the size of the team, which turned out to be the case when I came back the year after. It built up from thirteen guys to 27’ (119). Working with national militaries outside Kabul was a very different experience for interpreters. Some were engaged in liaising with local

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Afghan civilians in order to get a new army base up and running: ‘We had hired some locals to work in the base and make it more liveable: put in plumbing, kitchens and divided rooms … The youngest was five and the oldest seventy … I translated between them and (the US military), introductions and a few minutes to talk….’ (Azizi, 2019, 35). Others would be liaising at meetings between members of the local community and the military forces, or translating informal telephone calls between a western officer and his Pashto contact (Azizi, 2019, 25). Interactions associated for example with checkpoints—‘Can you ask this person if I can search his car?’—were common (Interview, 28.02.22). A task which many interpreters considered integral to their work was helping western forces to be more aware of Afghan cultures and sensitivities: ‘One of their roles was to serve as liaison between the US and Afghan forces/militias and to act as a cultural advisor …. Americans did not understand Afghan culture, especially at the start of the war. They did not take care not to offend the Afghan people, and then they would get offended and confused when the Afghans did things in a different way than the Americans would expect. It was the Afghan interpreters who provided information on cultural issues to avoid misunderstandings between the village, tribal leaders, Afghan forces and US forces. In this way they (the interpreters) ultimately reduced casualties’ (Idrees, 2021, 42, 3). At times, the provision of cultural advice by interpreters was key in averting potentially conflictual situations. Hoedemaekers and Soeters cite the case of an interpreter working with Dutch forces who had to make peace between them and Afghan National Army soldiers after Dutch troops behaved with gross disrespect in a mosque (quoted Tālpas, 2016, 250). Sometimes, this cultural role might involve interpreters changing a message during interpretation in order to correspond with local norms: we were interrogating a detainee picked up during an operation. The Afghan kept going on about something trivial. … and Dan, the American I was interpreting for, was getting irritated … … “Tell him I don’t give a fuck about his bullshit story … Tell him”. “I can’t … That’s a rude word. I mean nobody says that to people”. … “you telling me nobody swears …? “Well not like that … that would be really insulting”.

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“OK just tell him the best way you can”. So I did, politely, tell the Afghan that the soldier did not care. As I talked, Dan stared at me in incredulity. “Jesus…! Are you telling him your life story?” (Idrees, 2021, 56)

Living conditions on the bases varied. Interpreters were often housed together in what was known as the ‘Terp tent’ (Azizi, 2019) with basic bunk beds. They were allowed to access only certain parts of the rest of the garrison site. One American officer noted that Afghans working on his base were not permitted to walk around unescorted because of security concerns—they would be accompanied everywhere by third-country nationals from such places as India, Nepal, the Philippines, Eastern Europe and Kyrgyzstan (Callahan, 2015, 100). Whereas ISAF troops were rotated out as their tour ended, interpreters often found it difficult to get home more than once a year because of the lack of secure transport. Rather than a break between tours, they might find themselves showing a new team around and briefing them as soon as the next cohort arrived (Idrees, 2021, 118). On the front line itself, tasks were directly related to combat, listening in on Taliban radio communications (‘my “Taliban” ear’, Idrees, 2021, 93), or actively participating in the interrogation of prisoners: ‘I already had in one ear a radio tuned to the Afghan National Army frequency and in the other, one tuned to the Taliban frequency. In addition to that I now had to translate for the sergeant major in a vital preliminary interrogation of the prisoner’ (Idrees, 2021, 91). In these sorts of combat situations, the interpreter might find himself wearing uniform, carrying a gun and being as much at risk of death and injury as western troops. Interpreters had become de facto soldiers—one who was blown up by an IED that had killed his British military colleague told a UK Parliamentary enquiry that: ‘We have suffered the same risks and dangers as your soldiers’ (Hottak, 2016–2017). However, in some violent engagements, the interpreter, unlike his NATO companions, was not equipped with appropriate body armour and protection. Another Afghan interpreter blown up by an IED claimed that he had been given ‘a piece of cloth and one small plate to protect my heart’ (Tālpas, 2016, 247). Other interpreters found themselves on patrol and expected to behave exactly like the US

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marines in their unit, carrying and firing weapons: ‘All of the patrols were walking patrols, so I had to patrol with them day and night. Like three days, four days, we were walking for 24 hours or 72 hours…’ (Tālpas, 2016, 248). Accurate figures on interpreter deaths in Afghanistan are hard to come by. Whereas NATO governments kept precise details of their own military casualties, they had no official records of Afghan losses. Until 2008, private companies hiring interpreters had not been obliged to register their deaths. One Afghan on the front line with the US military claimed that he saw body bags of interpreters brought back every day (Interview, 28.02.22) and that the true number of deaths with American forces would have reached 2000. In answer to a Freedom of Information request in 2022, the UK Ministry of Defence reported that a total of twenty-six Afghans working as interpreters with the British forces had died between 2001 and 2018. Twenty of these had been killed in action, three as a result of accidents while on duty and three through enemy action whilst not on duty. A further one hundred and thirty-five had been wounded over this period, one hundred and eleven of these while working on patrol with British troops. The Ministry claimed that they had no information on interpreter casualties after 2018 because any Afghans employed after that date would have been contracted by a third-party provider who was not covered by the current Freedom of Information request (MOD FOI, 2022). In addition to death in combat, locally recruited interpreters were at particular risk of reprisal from their own community, apparently treated with far greater hostility than Afghan civilians working for the West in other roles. In the first place, they were regarded as puppets of the West, collaborators and traitors: ‘They (the Afghan population) used to say, “Here comes the infidels”, in Pashtun. And one day I replied, “I am not an infidel, I am an Afghan, I am also a Muslim”. And they asked, “You are an Afghan? Why are you collaborating with the infidels?”’ (Gómez-­ Amich, 2018, 31). The British MP and former army officer, Tom Tugendhat, noted that during several of the meetings he had with members of the Afghan community, the interpreters would ‘wrap shemaghs around their head or wear dark glasses, even indoors in dark light, in order to mask themselves in some way’ (Tugendhat, 2017c, Q.5). The

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Afghan government itself was said to treat local interpreters hired by western agencies with considerable suspicion, preferring to employ their own interpreters, however poor their English might be. Secondly, the size of salaries offered to interpreters, in comparison with the Afghan average, could provoke considerable jealousy. As one translator/interpreter argued however, the very fact that interpreter lives were at such risk demonstrated the fact that they were, at least in Taliban eyes, vital to the success of NATO operations (Interview, 28.02.22). Outside the military sphere, in work connected with development, interpreters would be multitasking over a slightly different range of requirements. Contractors monitoring US grants and programmes for example expected the translator/interpreters they employed to fulfil multiple tasks—translate Dari/Pashto government documents into English, accompany and translate for Kabul-based personnel on visits to ministries, and trips round the country, and advise visitors on cultural and regional issues (Tālpas, 2016, 252). In the PRTs, they would be operating as liaison with local populations within the maelstrom of conflicting objectives in the initiative—counter-insurgency and development—in situations in which most Afghans found it difficult to distinguish between groups of NATO forces who looked similar, used similar vehicles and often did the same sort of work. INGOs and NGOs based in Afghanistan seldom employed designated linguistic mediators. As is common today in development programmes (Footitt et  al., 2020), the assumption of many INGOs was that the onus for any translating/interpreting that needed to take place lay with the partner organisation, with local Afghan NGO workers who would in effect be multitasking—adding translation/ interpreting to their official role in development programmes (Interview, 1.02.22). Within embassies and diplomatic representations, translators/interpreters would be required for formal meetings at a senior level, or in informal encounters with Afghan visitors. In the cultural institutions, Afghans might find themselves not only translating/interpreting, but also called upon to embody in some sense the cultural values of the West in order to demonstrate their importance. Thus those teaching and testing a western language for a cultural institute like the British Council became de facto translators of the values associated with that country, proclaimed

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by the Council as diversity, inclusion and equality. Such Afghan teachers, often women, were particularly employed in remote rural areas, tasked with performing these values, as it were, through the language. One explained that she was ‘the face of Britain’ in more than fifty schools promoting the English language and British values (Williams, 2021).

The Location of the Interpreter In military terms, the space of encounter between the West and Afghanistan was marked out by security fences and wires, with inside and outside spaces which were totally different. One American officer described his ISAF base as a ‘study in excess’ (Callahan, 2015, 100). There were gyms, dining facilities offering four meals a day, with fresh fruits and vegetables flown in rather than locally sourced, fast food restaurants, coffee shops and massage parlours. All drinking water was provided in half-­ litre plastic bottles, so that 30,000 plastic bottles were thrown away and subsequently burned every day. Beyond the base, the landscape of Afghanistan presented itself to him in a very different way: ‘Leaving the well-tended, orderly FOB (Forward Operating Base) was akin to entering a different world: the chaotic hustle and bustle of the East, with donkey carts carrying proud men wearing imposing grey or black turbans and their burqua-ed women sitting beside them, and everywhere the dusty, dun-coloured Afghan landscape’ (101). The soldiers in the base described it as ‘going over the wire’, but this observer saw something deeper—it was an ‘incredible cognitive shift’. In practice, interpreters occupied this in-between space of profound cognitive dissonance, fully belonging to neither one nor the other world. Within the western territory of their employers, there was often little explicit recognition of the specificity of their interpreting skills. In employment terms, they were set within the much broader category of ‘locally employed civilians’ (LECs) who had always traditionally been needed by western forces in large-scale military operations overseas. The 2021 Report by the French Parliamentary Commission de la défense nationale et des forces armées addressed interpreters as simply one component in the employment of civilians by the French forces, devoting

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only sixteen pages out of one hundred and eighty-three to their particular case. Interpreting was set alongside a variety of other civilian functions which were needed at various times by the army, including security, mechanical support and the provision of hospitality/leisure facilities: ‘One should speak less of civil personnel in the singular than of civil personnel in the plural’ (Assemblée Nationale, 2021, 64).2 In ISAF headquarters, there was only one salary scale for all local employees, whether they acted as interpreters or were performing other tasks. Given this lack of official recognition of interpreting among posts for locally employed civilians, and the range and variety of situations in which translators/ interpreters operated, it appeared difficult for western authorities to say with any certainty exactly how many interpreters they were employing at any one time. The UK Ministry of Defence for example estimated that the total number of locally employed civilians on their bases was 7000, and then surmised that about half of these ‘fulfilled vital roles as interpreters’ (House of Commons Defence Committee, 2018, 3). Arguably, with the weaponisation of culture by the military, there was a greater understanding that interpreters could have a more important role to play beyond that of simply aiding communication. They could assume in effect the traditional role of native informants, a role now accorded more significance by the counter-insurgency strategies of western armies. Having access to the views and attitudes of the local population was of primordial importance, so that the interpreter could be seen by western forces as the ‘only connection to the Afghan population’, ‘your lifeline to Afghanistan’ (Tālpas, 2016, 253). As one American officer, Captain Cummings, advised his fellow platoon leaders, the interpreter was intrinsic to the weaponising of culture. Interpreters would be: • cultural advisor (‘He is not just your mouthpiece or translator—he is your guide to Afghan culture’); • provider of subject-matter on Afghanistan (‘An interpreter knows more about Afghan culture than you ever will’); • lie detector (‘He’ll probably pick up on cultural cues that you may miss’);  Translation by author.

2

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intelligence source; phone operator (‘In most cases he will answer calls for you’); interview organiser (‘He can also set up meetings with locals’); language teacher (‘Your interpreter can also teach your entire platoon Dari or Pashto’ (quoted in Tālpas, 2016, pp. 253, 4).

According to the US Special Operations Advisory Mission, the interpreter as cultural informant was so potentially important to western success in Afghanistan that he should be regarded as a full member of the team and incorporated into discussions: ‘Rather than relegate interpreters to a segregated office space, (one advisory mission) gave its Category 2 interpreter (who has US citizenship and a security clearance) a desk alongside the rest of the team and encouraged him to sit in on weekly meetings and briefings … the … commander sought the interpreter’s recommendation prior to engagements and afterward requested feedback to ensure that his interactions were culturally appropriate’. As one senior staffer observed: ‘I don’t want (the interpreter) to be just a conduit for information. I want (him) to be a thinking conduit for information’ (Todd, 2015, 21). It should however be noted that in this case the interpreter designated to share office space with western operatives was not a local interpreter, but one who had the high level of security clearance that came with US citizenship. However it was certainly true that local interpreters acting as native informants were prized by many westerners as a means of helping them to ‘understand the local context, to be aware of stories that we would perhaps never have heard but which shaped the way people acted, providing western personnel with a “complete cultural lesson”’ (Tugendhat, 2017b, Q.20). Nonetheless, this contribution to the weaponising of culture did not necessarily eliminate the very considerable distance maintained at base and headquarters level between employer and interpreter. Socially, Afghans and westerners lived in watertight compartments. An American review of the most effective way in which the US could advise Afghan Special Security Forces for example pointed to the obviously unusual case of Norwegian officers in the Mission who had routinely chosen to eat with their Afghan colleagues (Todd, 2015, 14). Despite the cultural advisory role which interpreters might now fulfil, they largely continued to

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occupy this uneasy in between space of cognitive dissonance between the two worlds on either side of the wire. From the West’s viewpoint, the position of interpreters was strictly time-limited and the relationship with them was transactional. Interpreter contracts were often ad hoc and, as would be seen in the period after the 2014 NATO drawdown, provided few of the benefits and guarantees that an employee from Europe or the USA might have legitimately expected. Records of their service were often so rudimentary that it seemed difficult for the authorities to arrive at definitive figures of the number of interpreters they had engaged, or indeed of those who had become casualties in their service. The official stance was that whilst western authorities might have some measure of contractual and moral responsibility towards local interpreters, the overriding need for military security meant that the local interpreter in the field had always to be treated with a degree of suspicion as a figure belonging to a world outside that of the interveners. The UK Ministry of Defence’s Joint Doctrine Note on Linguistic Support to Operations listed eight caveats which had to be considered when employing local interpreters, four of which alluded directly to the fact that they were ‘other’, rooted within their own societies and thus inherently less trustworthy in a military context: Locally-employed interpreters cannot normally obtain any security clearance nor have access to classified oral or written information. They will be largely conditioned by their social network, loyalties and associations, and may support one of the parties to a conflict. They may be vulnerable to pressure or threats against themselves or family members. They may exploit their relationship with their employer to further their own agenda or interests. (MOD 1/13, 2013, 3-3)

Whilst there was this clear separation between westerners and local interpreters at an official level and within the geography of most bases and garrisons, it was also evident that on the ground of war, in patrols and during the activity of giving and receiving fire, local interpreters and soldiers from the West lived much more closely with each other and often developed bonds of mutual affection and respect. One officer with the

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Australian army in Afghanistan described how his company had employed several interpreters and how ‘you became close to the one you worked with. He was 22/23, well-educated, smart, happy to share his opinions… he explained about local disputes’ (Interview, 25.01.22). A British officer who deployed to Helmand for six months in 2011 spoke of his ‘strong working relationships with several interpreters’ (Gordon-Finlayson Sulha Alliance, n.d.). The effect of being side by side in life-threatening situations clearly helped to cement longstanding bonds of friendship. Thus one Afghan interpreter with the American army in 2008, finding that his patrol was under fire from the Taliban, saved the life of his Army Captain: ‘They had met just 10 days earlier and have been close friends ever since’ (Myre, 2020). In these cases, the interpreter was no longer occupying a space of cognitive dissonance, but had crossed over the frontier into the military world of comradeship. The difference between these personal experiences and official attitudes towards local interpreters would be thrown into sharp relief after the NATO drawdown of 2014. On the other side of the wire which protected western bases was the world of Afghan communities, and these were often highly suspicious of the activities of Afghans employed by the West, considering them to have de facto rejected the key tenets of their country and faith. One local interpreter described the difficulties he and others regularly encountered when going back home: ‘The role of interpreters didn’t finish on the battlefield. On return to their home towns, they had to fight other issues, support their families economically, fight the ignorance of people who always misunderstood the interpreters, and worry about being kidnapped’ (Idrees, 2021, 43). Informal interpreters who multitasked with INGOs and development and cultural agencies were generally not living in physical spaces which mimicked those of the military bases, with sharply contrasting worlds on either side of the wire. They thus appeared at least initially to be slightly less exposed to community anger than interpreters who had worked with the military. Many had been contracted at arms’ length from western governments or authorities by third-party organisations, and when NATO drew down the bulk of its troops in 2014, their employing organisations—NGOs and cultural agencies—maintained a continuing presence.

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At the end of the day, the relationship between Western employer and Afghan interpreter was envisaged as a temporally restricted one—a range of agencies employed them for a limited time, paying them sums of money which would mark them out in the community as being favoured by an increasingly disliked invader. Contracts given them by the West had limited official standing. Western authorities considered interpreters as expendable, either as one component in the mass of locally employed civilians who worked in a range of skilled or unskilled support functions and who would cease employment at the end of the operation, or as potentially vital cultural informants whose usefulness to their employers naturally came to an end and would be forgotten once their forces had gone home. When the bulk of NATO forces were drawn down in 2014, local interpreters who had worked with the military found their position in Afghanistan to be even more exposed, singled out as Afghans who had betrayed their people by joining a hated foreign tribe: ‘In Afghanistan, the reference was always the ISAFzai … Afghan tribes are often the name of the supposed founder followed by the word son—“zai” … ISAF was just another tribe—the ISAFzai, the sons of ISAF’ (Tugendhat, 2017a, Q.24). In the West, the stage was set for a long-running debate about moral responsibility, duty of care, contractual obligations and national asylum policies, a debate in which the interpreter figure would play a major role. Framed by the participating authorities and groups in very different ways, interpreting in war became both more visible and infinitely more contentious.

References Andlauer, B., & Müller, Q. (2019). Tarjuman: Enquête sur une Trahison française. Bayard Editions. Assemblée Nationale. (2021). Rapport d’information par la Commission de la Défense nationale et des forces armées sur les personnels civils de la Défense. No. 4076. Ayeen, N. (2018). Parliamentary enquiry on locally employed civilians. Written evidence LEC0002.

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Azizi, A. (2019). The interpreter’s war. Andrew Benzie Books. British Council. (2017). Building young people’s resilience to violent extremism in the Middle East and North Africa. All Party Parliamentary Group for the British Council. Callahan, T. (2015). An anthropologist at war in Afghanistan. In M. McFate & J. H. Laurence (Eds.), Social science goes to war. The human terrain system in Iraq and Afghanistan (pp. 91–118). Hurst and Co. de Witte, M. (2021). The US withdrawal from Afghanistan has encouraged the Taliban to stake their future on the battlefield. Stanford News, 19 July. news. stanford.edu/2021/07/19/whats-­next-­afghanistan/. Flynn, M. (2015). Lessons learned record of interview. LL-01-a14. SIGAR. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Footitt, H., Crack, A., & Tesseur, W. (2020). Development NGOs and languages: Listening, power and inclusion. Palgrave Macmillan. Gómez-Amich, M. (2018). Life in conflict: A series of narratives by locally-­ recruited interpreters from Afghanistan. Close Encounters in War, 1, 22–24. Gordon-Finlayson, P. (n.d.). Sulha Alliance. sulha-­alliance.org/about-­us/our-­ team.hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/2020statisticsalannext able2pdf.pdf Hottak, R. (2016–2017). House of Commons, written evidence. Defence Committee: Locally Employed Civilians. LE10001. House of Commons Defence Committee. (2018). Lost in translation? Afghan interpreters and other locally-employed civilians. HC 572. Human Development Index Trends 1990–2019. (2021). Policy Commons. 20 Jan. policycommons.net/artifacts/2239671/human-­development-­index-­tren ds-­1990-­2019/2997724. Idrees, E. (2021). Special forces interpreter: An Afghan on operations with the coalition. Pen and Sword Books. Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Central Statistics Organization (2016–2017). Afghan Living Conditions. washdata.org/sites/default/files/documents/ reports/2018-­07/afghanistan%202016-­17%20analysis/20report.pdf Jones, I. P., & Askew, L. (2014). Meeting the language challenges of NATO operations: Policy, Practice and Professionalization. Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, A. (2008). Walter Mitty army aide who betrayed Britain to Iran. Daily Mail, 14 October. McHugh, G., & Gostelow, L. (2004). Provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. Save the Children.

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Mitchell, D. F. (2017). NGO presence and activity in Afghanistan, 2000–2014: A provincial-level dataset. Stability. International Journal of Security and Development, 6(1). 13 June. https://doi.org/10.5334/sta.497. MOD 1/13. (2013). JointDoctrine note: Linguistic support to operations. DCDC. MOD FOI. (2022). Letter to S. de Jong. request 891960-­[email protected]. 24 October. Mosk, M., Ross, B., & Rhee, J. (2010). Exclusive: Whistleblower claims many US interpreters can’t speak Afghan languages. ABC News. 7 September 2010. https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/afghanistan-­w histlerblower-­c laims-­u s-­ interpreters-­speak-­afghan-­languages/story?id=11578169. Myre, G. (2020). Afghan Interpreter who saved US troops gets American Citizenship. NPR. June 30. npr.org/2020/06/29/884957240/afghan-­ interpreter-­who-­saved-­u-­s-­troops-­gets-­american-­citizenship. Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence. (2018). A good ally: Norway in Afghanistan 2001–2014. Nou8. Report of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the terrorist Attacks of September 11 2001. (2002). House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. http://fas.org/irp/congress/2002-­rpt/911rept.pdf. Rynning, S., & Hilde, P. S. (2022). Operationally agile but strategically lacking: NATO’s bruising years in Afghanistan. LSE Public Policy Review, 2(3), 8. https://doi.org/10.31389/lseppr.55 Suhrke, A. (2006). The limits of Statebuilding: The role of international assistance in Afghanistan. Chr.Michelsen Institute.cmi.no/publications/ 2135-the-limits-of-statebuilding. Suhrke, A., & De Lauri, A. (2019). The CIA’s “Army”: A threat to human rights and an obstacle to peace in Afghanistan. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. August: 1–14. watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2019/ cia-­s-­army-­threat-­human-­rights-­and-­obstacle-­peace-­afghanistan. Tālpas, M. (2016). Words cut both ways. An overview of the situation of Afghan interpreters at the beginning of the 21st century. Linguistica Antverpiensa, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies, 15, 241–259. Todd, C. H. (2015). Best practices for the special operations advisory experience in Afghanistan. Rand Corporation. Tugendhat, T. (2017a. Q.24. Defence Committee Oral Evidence: Locally Employed Civilians. HC 572. 28 November. Tugendhat, T. (2017b). Q.20. Defence committee Oral Evidence: Locally Employed Civilian. HC 572, 28 November.

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Tugendhat, T. (2017c). Q.5. Defence committee oral evidence: Locally employed civilians. HC572. 28 November. Whitlock, C. (2021). The Afghanistan papers: A secret history of the war. Simon and Schuster. Wikipedia Mission Essential. (2010) Setting the record straight: Commentary regarding mission essential. August 2010. Note 18. Williams, D. (2021). “A” is for abandoned: English teachers who worked for the British in Afghanistan fear for their lives as they are left at the mercy of the Taliban. Daily Mail. 2 September.

4 Naming the ‘Interpreter’: From the NATO Drawdown Until the Evacuation

Between the drawdown of the bulk of NATO troops in 2014 and the final Evacuation in 2021 the space of encounter between the West and Afghanistan moved decisively away from the country itself to arrive at the very frontiers of Europe and the USA. In this changed geography, Afghans who had been employees of NATO states became outsiders whose claims for inclusion within the NATO space would be carefully sieved through the bureaucracy of national asylum policies and subjected to a strenuous checking procedure to weed out potential terrorists. Whilst some states drew on previous experience with Iraqi refugees, national schemes were in all cases implicitly light touch, predicated on minimising the direct responsibility of the government concerned. The key was to ‘manage expectations’ and make clear to Afghans that ‘we will not just give you an open-ended ability to come back to (the NATO country)’ (Lopresti, 2017, Q.102). During this period, it was the figure of the interpreter which emerged as the most visible of the locally employed Afghan civilians in public discussions in the West and in formal protection/resettlement schemes. The term ‘interpreter’ was indeed sometimes used as a shorthand way of referring to all those who had formerly been employed: ‘There are about 840 LECs—interpreters and others’ (Iremonger, 2017a, Q.59). The conduct of the 2021 Evacuation from Afghanistan would have its roots at © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Footitt, Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5_4

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least partly in the discursive frameworks employed over these seven years where the interpreter was identified as the only locally employed civilian for whom NATO states accepted some measure of responsibility, but whom they defined for these purposes in very specific and limited ways. From native informants, viewed as necessary for the prosecution of the West’s war aims, interpreters seeking protection in the fortresses of European and American homelands found that they were viewed as uncomfortably foreign and potentially dangerous. The ways in which Afghan interpreters were named from 2014 until 2021 by participants in the debates—the Taliban, western governments, the military, the media, advocacy groups, professional language associations—revealed much about both the positioning of interpreting in war and the West’s understandings of protection and foreignness.

The ‘Traitor’ Many locally employed civilians, in particular those who had been operating directly with the military, had anticipated that they would be in considerable danger when the majority of NATO forces left in 2014. The UNHCR estimated as early as 2009 that one interpreter was being killed every thirty-six hours in gruesome executions posted by the Taliban on Facebook and YouTube (Anderson, 2014). By 2011, an interpreter who had worked for the American, Dutch and Australian militaries was clear that his days in the country were numbered as soon as the Coalition departed: ‘I am worried about my future, what I’m gonna do. If the situation will be critical like now, then I don’t think I can work again…. It will be also very difficult, because in my village everybody knows who I am, and for whom I am working. They will not leave us alone. And if this government is destroyed, we must go to another country. If we will stay here, life will be bitter for us’ (Chann, 2021). The consensus in 2014 was that, ‘While interpreters all have different stories—being shot at, receiving threatening letters at night, receiving threats against family members, kidnappings and living in constant fear of reprisal by the Taliban—they are bound by one common thread: Everyone hates us’ (Matta, 2014).

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From the Taliban point of view there was no distinction between the different armies, NGOS, embassies or cultural bodies for whom Afghans might have been working. For them, an Afghan civilian employed by the West was a national traitor, and any professional linguistic roles which locally employed interpreters performed were regarded as wholly incidental to the political stance which they had taken by accepting employment with the West in the first place. In 2009, Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader at the time, issued an order calling on his followers to capture and kill any Afghans supporting the Coalition: ‘Our policy is that, whoever protects and supports foreigners as translators, they are national traitors for us and the people of Afghanistan. Like the foreign soldiers and other foreign occupiers, they too will be put to death’ (quoted in Bartolini & Ferracci, 2020, 166). Just as NATO prepared to draw down the majority of its troops in 2014, the Taliban statement announcing the commencement of their 2014 ‘Khaibar’ spring offensive listed as future potential targets translators, civilian contractors, administrators and logistics personnel. By 2015, the Taliban claimed to have killed fifteen interpreters as ‘national traitors’, and during 2016 it was thought that they had assassinated twenty-three more (European Asylum Support Office, 2017, 35). The Taliban naming of interpreters as ‘national traitors’ emphasised the primary role of locally employed civilians as enablers of a foreign occupying army. In this guise they were collaborators with the enemy, a positioning which incidentally could draw on ample historical precedents in Europe—French collaborators with the Germans in the Second World War, Jewish Kapos, Quislings in 1940s occupied Europe. In these earlier European cases, aiding a foreign occupier had been considered post-­war as a criminal betrayal of the nation, one often punished by execution or lengthy imprisonment. As Mégret argued however (2021), comparing such situations with that of Afghanistan is problematic—the Taliban themselves after all had a record of cooperating actively with foreign secret services and transnational terrorist networks. But if the Taliban were a tyrannical and fanatical group, they could not plausibly be accused of being a foreign invader, which the West of course undoubtedly was.

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From NATO’s point of view however, the intervention in Afghanistan, unlike that in Iraq, was undertaken on UN-validated grounds and had resulted in the formation of an Afghan government and democratic elections. Arguably therefore, although Afghan sovereignty was partly usurped, those who aided the Coalition could be said to have been working for their own country. This presumption of course required one to accept the western narrative at face value and to discount the fact that the new Afghan government (often viewed as corrupt) was largely propped up by the presence of international forces. If, as Ruiz Rosendo maintained (2022), some communities of practice were in effect established between civilian interpreters with no knowledge of military procedures or interpreting skills, and soldiers with little understanding of the contexts of communication, such internal iterative learning did not affect the major issue as far as the Taliban were concerned. The interpreters were located in close proximity to western foreign forces and were being paid by the West. They were thus traitors to the Taliban on the grounds of their physical (and therefore political) location rather than their particular linguistic skills.

The ‘Professional Translator/Interpreter’ Unsurprisingly, this positioning where the particular functions and skills of translation/interpreting were held to be secondary to the national political contexts in which they operated ran completely counter to the tenets of western-based international associations of translators/interpreters. Their views on the other hand were that the profession of linguistic mediation existed in a neutral space, removed from any specific geographies or temporalities. Rather than a relationship with provincial nationalism, the translator/interpreter figure existed in a supranational arena in which fidelity to the particular text and linguistic interchange was the priority. For the prestigious international association of conference interpreters (AIIC), the tradition had been for interpreters to be defined in a highly compartmentalised way as an elite group of conference interpreters who kept themselves largely apart from the growing band of so-called community interpreters working in social settings like law courts, home

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office interviews or doctors’ practices. Local civilians acting as interpreters in conflict situations had also been initially deemed to be outside the conference interpreting elite—‘These people are not interpreters but taxi drivers, people who know a local language and have a smattering of English’ (Kahane, 2009). By 2007 however when press reports of interpreter deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan started appearing, the then president of AIIC began to seriously address the issue of local interpreters in war who ‘seemed to be treated like cannon fodder, and who had no proper body to speak for them, or insurance’ (Interview, 15.11.21). An early coalition of language supporters—the Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence (AIIC), the International Federation of Interpreters (FIT) and Red T, a not-for-profit organisation lobbying for interpreters in high risk situations—was soon expanded to include another nine groups.1 AIIC, despite the initial reticence of some of its members, argued that whilst local interpreters might not be formally qualified, they were nevertheless members of ‘a larger interpreting/translating community’ (Fitchett, 2019, 195) who occupied a professional and supranational position. The Conflict Zone Field Guide for Civilian Translators/Interpreters and Users of Their Services (2012) which AIIC co-produced sought to emphasise the professional nature of interpreter rights and responsibilities in the hope that militaries might thus be encouraged to offer respect and protection to their language mediators. The Guide called on those employed as translators/interpreters in war to maintain the ‘standards and ethics of the language profession’, and to stay impartial, ‘you cannot be an advocate for any cause’. Crucially, the Guide specifically instructed military employers not to ‘assign tasks not related to Translation/Interpreting’ to language mediators. The lobby group Red T further developed this representation of neutral translators/interpreters into the notion of an overarching international professional status for interpreting in war, proposing a  Including in addition to AIIC, FIT and Red T, the International Association of Professional Interpreters and Translators (IAPTI), Critical Link International (CLI), the World Association of Sign Interpreters (WASLI), the Conférence Internationale Permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes (CIUTI), the European Forum of Sign Language Interpreters (EFSLI), the European Legal Interpreters Association (EULITA), the European Network for Public Service Interpreting and Translation (ENPSIT), the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT_USA) and Global Voices Lingua. 1

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global paradigm in which ‘translators and interpreters can work free from fear of persecution, prosecution, imprisonment, abduction, torture and assassination’ (2021a), a status which they suggested should be guaranteed by a UN Resolution: ‘Ultimately, we seek a special status, similar to that which helps to protect the staff of organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, to protect interpreters in danger worldwide. This is why we are currently advocating in the UN and other international organisations for a declaration which could lead to the specific legal protection of interpreters and end impunity for crimes committed against them’. In this imagining, interpreters were not only language professionals. They were also contributors to a world-wide order of peace: ‘The world cannot function without translators and interpreters’, ‘Protect Translators, Protect Interpreters, Protect the World’ (Red T, 2019). In 2012, Red T initiated an Open Letter Project, calling on international bodies and governments to recognise the importance of interpreters. It also began to reach out to other strategic partners, like Amnesty International and the International Refugee Assistance Project. This global advocacy across language-related bodies and agencies necessarily positioned interpreting as an essentially benign activity, associated with breaking down barriers and promoting peace: ‘True peace results from good communication. Translators and Interpreters in conflict zones are instrumental to this process…’ (Byrnes, 2021). In open letters to NATO and the UN, the relationship between interpreting and peace was constantly stressed: ‘Shared security is due, in no small measure, to the work of local interpreters’ (Red T, 2021b). Peace-focused representations of this sort melded easily into broader discourses on human rights. Thus, the head of translation at Amnesty International’s Language Resource Centre argued that freedom of expression could not exist at all without translators and interpreters (Bagnulo, 2019), and the Chair of PEN International’s International Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee claimed that the vulnerability of interpreters and translators was a direct result of their role as global communicators (Škrabec, 2019). The success of this language lobbying coalition in raising the issue of interpreter protection and safety in war and taking the message out to intergovernmental groups, national governments and the language

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professions was considerable: ‘Prior to the founding of Red T and the AIIC Conflict Zone Interpreter group, there was no awareness-raising as regards protection of T/Is in high-risk settings. Both of our groups, individually and jointly, put this topic on the global radar’ (Hess Interview, 1.7.22). The problem however with these benign supranational positionings of interpreting in war, as Moser-Mercer had already pointed out, was that they tended to side-step the legal complexities of conflict (Moser-­ Mercer, 2018, 308), and above all the disputed definitions of ‘civilian’ in war as they affected interpreters: could interpreters paid by ISAF forces in Afghanistan be legally categorised as civilians at all? In their performance of the role of language mediator, they occupied an unusual position, uniformed but generally unarmed. Thus they would be clothed in the same way as the foreign forces—‘On the day they arrived at the military bases, they were issued uniforms, personal security equipment and rucksacks. The idea was that they would look more like other soldiers, making them more difficult to target. Wearing the Danish flag on their left shoulder, they worked under the same conditions as the other soldiers…’ (Pedersen, 2017, 212). On the other hand, unlike national troops, interpreters were most often, in official terms, unarmed and were forbidden from using force or having access to militarily important documents: ‘Civil personnel recruited locally must not in any circumstances be authorised to use force. In addition, they must never be given a job which implies access to sensitive or classified documents…’2 (Assemblée Nationale, 2021, 38). Commentators seeking to describe this in-between geography of interpreters in war suggested such terms as ‘intermediate solidarities’ (Mégret), ‘segregated brotherhood’ (De Jong, 2022a) or ‘legitimate peripheral participants’ (Ruiz Rosendo, 2022).

The ‘Alien Translator’ The problem of naming the interpreter in war within existing definitional categories was particularly acute for western governments after the majority of their troops had left the country in 2014 and it became clear that  Translation by author.

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their former local employees would be at severe risk of reprisals. Some form of protection would therefore need to be considered. Countries which had deployed a larger number of troops in Afghanistan, and which had previous experience with former Iraqi employees—Canada, the USA, the UK for example—tended to establish support programmes in advance of those nations which had a smaller military footprint in the conflict. At this stage, programmes set up by NATO nations to offer some measure of protection to interpreters dealt with issues of exclusions and inclusions to their schemes in rather different ways. Most countries, with the exception of the USA, stipulated that translators/interpreters had to have been directly contracted by the national authority, rather than subcontracted, in order to be acceptable. The US scheme omitted local staff who might have worked for INGOs or were recipients of grants. In general, only staff employed by the country for a specific time—a twelve month employment period was the minimum—were eligible for consideration. The American scheme offering Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), often viewed as the most generous, had been established in response to perceived dangers to those it termed ‘alien translators’: ‘A number of alien translators currently working in Iraq and Afghanistan embedded with units of the US Armed Forces are providing extremely valuable services. Their cooperation and close identification with the US military have put these individuals and their families in danger. This danger will only escalate after US forces leave or reduce their strength in Iraq and Afghanistan’ (Congressional Research Service, 2019). In 2007 the translator/interpreter pathway for Iraq and Afghanistan was expanded to include language mediators employed by US diplomatic missions, as well as by military units. A primary feature of the SIVs programme was the official numerical capping of the number of visas which could be issued in any one year— initially only fifty per year for translators/interpreters. The US Congressional Research Service reported that between 2008 and 2014, only 1189 Afghan translators/interpreters (five hundred and eighteen principals and six hundred and seventy-one dependents) had been accepted. Secondly, the application process was said to be impossible to navigate without English-speaking legal advice. Attachments required

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included such documents as: a letter of recommendation from an American citizen who had supervised the applicant; an HR letter confirming employment by the US government; the applicant’s national ID (Tazkera) with an English translation; where possible the applicant’s Afghan passport; a signed statement in English of the threats faced; where possible, a copy of the contract between the applicant’s employer and the US government; copies of any badges issued; and a biodata sheet containing name, gender, marital status, etc. By 2019 when President Trump added 4000 more places to the overall Afghan SIV Programme, it seemed that only 12,000 Iraqi and Afghan translators/interpreters had received visas since 2008, whilst another 9000 were still in the pipeline, waiting for their applications to be considered, a situation which led the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) to file a lawsuit against the US government (Bartolini & Ferracci, 2020). Much the same history of capped numbers and slow responses characterised the schemes set up by other NATO countries. The British offered an ex gratia redundancy package initially applicable only to interpreters who had been working for them at the date the drawdown was announced by the prime minister, 19 December 2012, and who had been employed for more than 12 months:3 ‘The Government wanted to define the level of responsibility … their assessment was that the people to whom we owed a particular debt were those who had stayed with us until 19 December 2012 when we announced drawdown. We did not owe the same debt to those who had left of their own accord or because they were dismissed for disciplinary or security reasons’ (Iremonger, 2017b, Q.71). Given the situation on the ground however, it was difficult to see that the date chosen had been anything other than arbitrary: ‘Translators stress some of the most intense fighting happened before this period, and they regularly put their lives on the line for the British’ (Daily Mail, 2016–2017). Enquiries by the Daily Mail indeed found several Afghan interpreters claiming that after many years of service their contracts had been deliberately terminated early in order to ensure that they would not  The terms of the relocation scheme were amended in 2018 to include those made redundant on or after 1 May 2006. 3

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qualify for the cut-off date. Certainly, figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request (MOD, 2020) indicated that four hundred and twenty-two interpreters had been dismissed for disciplinary reasons in 2011 and 2012, as compared with two hundred and eighty-eight in the two years immediately before. The reasons for terminating interpreter contracts depended a great deal on individual circumstances at a local level. One in three interpreters employed by UK forces had been dismissed between 2001 and 2014 for disciplinary reasons, without the right of appeal, in processes where the word of a British soldier on the ground was law, and where there was little means of contesting the decision (Hunter, 2021). Thus practices which were acceptable to one regiment could be unacceptable to another and might result in the speedy termination of employment. Numbers admitted to the UK redundancy programme were relatively low: by 2018 fewer than five hundred Afghans had been successful, a fraction of the total number of 7000 local civilians acknowledged as having actually been employed. From 2013 onwards the British operated an additional open-ended Intimidation Scheme designed to support locally employed civilians who believed that they were now in imminent danger. This programme was however designed to be very limited. Whereas, ‘the Government have been prepared to let in a significant number of people under the redundancy scheme, … they are not prepared to let many people in under the scheme that relates to intimidation’ (Lewis, 2017, Q. 29). Up to 2015, only one Afghan had been relocated to the UK under this programme. Extremely long delays were common in all these schemes. One ex-­ interpreter with the French army, Zainullah, waited seven years before he and his family were allowed to legally enter France (Elzas, 2019). Interpreters facing violent threats and despairing of receiving official answers might entrust themselves to people smugglers, ending up, like Nesar, in migrant camps in third countries (Williams & Brown, 2021), and thus falling foul of immigration rules which stipulated that applications should be made from the country of origin. In the same way, Afghans who succeeded in arriving by their own means found themselves held in detention centres—‘the Home Office ignores what I’ve done for this country … I’m being treated like a criminal here’ (cited in Bulman,

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2018). Those who were granted entry would often struggle to ensure that their wives and family could be accorded similar rights, waiting sometimes three years for permission. In all cases, official explanations for the failure to expedite visa issuance turned on the internal politics of national departmental agendas. Established refugee/asylum policies raised concerns about both internal national security and the tricky and potentially costly problems of future resettlement. The fate of ex-interpreters was thus played out in inter-­ ministerial disputes about funding and responsibilities. In the French case: ‘The Home Office was trying at all costs to limit the number of people coming into France, the Ministry of Defence refused to allow the use of empty barracks, the Housing Ministry couldn’t get places in social housing, and … a number of mayors categorically refused to take in Afghans’ (Andlauer & Müller, 2019, 184).4 In the UK, the very considerable time taken to consider individual cases was blamed on the fact that ‘Consideration involves several Government departments who work together to ensure every aspect of the relocation process is complete’ (SulhaNetwork, 2020). A key issue in determining how NATO states dealt with Afghans seeking support was their concern over national security. From being former employees of western forces, paid by and working alongside NATO units, interpreters now found themselves being viewed with considerable suspicion as part of ‘the potential for terrorist groups to exploit the refugee program’ (Congress, 2012). They were in effect caught in what de Jong called ‘the migration-security nexus’ (2022b) where migration is intimately linked to potential insecurity in the host country. Stringent checks were applied to ensure that Afghans were not likely to endanger the safety of those countries to which they sought entry. In the US, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) conducted a biographic security check on each applicant which was then sent on to the State Department’s National Visa Centre where additional biographic and biometric checks were undertaken. The length and complexity of the vetting procedure were illustrated by the case of one Afghan who had initially been considered by the UK as potentially acceptable under the  Translation by author.

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Intimidation Scheme. A thirteen month investigation, ‘security clearance checks, visa approval for all family members, and DNA results’, ended in the applicant being refused: ‘The case was complicated by the fact that the individual had used multiple identities, had a complicated history of activity in Afghanistan, and had previously entered the UK illegally’ (MOD Written Evidence, 2017). Some of the security problems invoked for refusal were spurious. Thus in 2013, Tariq, an Afghan who had worked with American forces for seven years since he was seventeen, was refused a visa on the grounds that he ‘may be a terrorist or may have provided material support to a terrorist organization’. Tariq’s family came from Kandahar, and given that this was a Taliban stronghold, his supporters suspected that the application had been refused by geographical association despite the fact that the applicant himself was still working for the US at Kandahar airfield (Sief, 2013). The irony in this concern over national security was that most translator/interpreters had already been subjected to security-checking in Afghanistan before obtaining their job in the first place. As one suggested: ‘before an interpreter is hired, there is a procedure (…) that we go through—a screening test. That screening clears an interpreter that he is good to go, which means that he is safe, you can rely on him, you can trust your life on him and he is the safest and closest friend you’ve got in the country. Now how come that the same interpreter who has been with you on the front line was safe, would not be safe when he is here (in the UK)?’ (cited in De Jong, 2022b, 229). In fact the security processes which had been conducted in Afghanistan often figured negatively, rather than positively, in later visa discussions, usually mentioned only when there had been some discernible problem in Afghanistan. One interpreter who had worked with the Americans for twelve years failed a counterintelligence screening test after mixing up the western and Afghan calendars when talking about a recent trip to Pakistan. Although recommended strongly by his supervisor, he was fired and denied a visa, with the result that he spent most of his time in hiding from the Taliban (Castillo, 2022). As a consequence of these multiple layers of review, thought to be vital for security, some applicants to the US found that they had been added to a Blacklist database in which officials logged fingerprints, iris scans and personal details of potential troublemakers and terrorists, a development

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which of course made future visa applications from them virtually impossible. An interpreter placed on the Blacklist after failing a six month security screening in Afghanistan argued in 2014 that ‘if you miss one question, you fail. Then they put you on a blacklist or watch list and you lose your job with them and the visa, making it very difficult to find work anywhere in Afghanistan’ (Matta, 2014). Afghan interpreters were thus at one and the same time ex-employees who were likely to be victims of the West’s enemies and also aliens potentially seeking to harm the country for which they had previously worked. The paradox in this was underlined by studies which pointed out that Afghan refugees in the US had already made major contributions to US defence since 9/11, and that the country had anyway, as we have seen (Chaps. 2 and 3), drawn many of its linguistic mediators for the original invasion from the community of Afghan Americans already settled in the USA (Baden, 2018).

Western Cultures of Protection Programmes designed to offer protection to Afghans fearful of reprisals were framed by particular western cultural preconceptions. Official responsibility to protect ex-employees largely hinged on the extent to which Afghans were perceived to be subject to intimidation and danger. The first response of the UK to those who applied was to offer them internal relocation within Afghanistan. The British government’s line was that internal relocation would generally be a safe option, and crucially one which would support the Afghan government’s desire to retain intelligent and competent people within the country to help build the future (Iremonger, 2017c, Q.65). As several commentators pointed out however, there was a considerable difference in the meaning ascribed to ‘internal relocation’ in western and Afghan contexts: ‘If you move in Afghanistan, you have either eloped with someone’s wife or you have murdered someone’ (De Jong, 2017,Q.25). As de Jong suggested, tribal relations, ethnic divisions and cultural practices made it extremely unlikely that any form of internal relocation would provide an interpreter with real safety: ‘a person who relocates within Afghanistan without

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obvious connections to the region is immediately suspect and isolated from essential support structures’ (De Jong, 2017–2019). Afghans who were not considered to be in such severe danger were simply told to change their phone numbers or find a different way to get to work: ‘In this country, someone might be told to change their route to work, but I would have thought it is a completely different kettle of fish in Afghanistan’ (Wilson, 2017,Q.63). A key tenet of the intimidation protection schemes was that applicants seeking relocation outside Afghanistan had to be able to provide credible evidence that they were actually in danger from enemy reprisal. ‘Evidence’ in this western context was primarily assumed to be written. The problem here however concerned both the nature of the threats that ex-­interpreters were receiving and the investigation processes managed by their former NATO employers. As Rafi Hottak argued (Session 2016–2017), he and his fellow interpreters were being threatened by telephone or via deliberately intimidating personal visits, and these clearly could not be proven by written documents. Examination of the validity of interpreter evidence was anyway extremely difficult in the dangerous atmosphere of Afghanistan in the years after 2014. The UK’s Ministry of Defence team for example was based primarily at Hamid Karzai International Airport: ‘It would not be appropriate for the investigator to go to the individual as a westerner would face risks far greater than those faced by locals’ (House of Commons, 2018 Government Response, 10). Investigations were thus conducted by phone or in face-to-face interviews if applicants were willing to take the additional risk of appearing publicly at the office. In the French case, interpreters were initially told to present their documents to the French Embassy in Kabul, but when the relevant department was speedily transferred to Islamabad, their representations had to be made either by taking prohibitively expensive air flights to Pakistan or by exposing themselves and their families to even greater danger by travelling through the insecure province of Nangarhâr (Andlauer & Müller, 2019, 59). In this situation, those seeking protection formed the strong impression that investigators were not only difficult to contact, but that any evidence they did manage to present to them would probably be mislaid or simply not returned (Hottak, 2016–2017). For NATO countries handling these requests at some physical distance, a default position of

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suspicion began to develop: evidence they were receiving might well be forged, or it would not contain the details they required. Pedersen noted that in the Danish case, ‘Key pieces of evidence are letters purportedly from the Taliban threatening the recipient for having aided the enemy. These letters, carrying a standardised Taliban letterhead, are easily forged and the wording is not very specific’ (Pedersen, 2017, 214). An additional cultural misunderstanding between former employers and their Afghan ex-interpreters concerned the very different notions of ‘family’ which both sides held. The UK authorities for example did not recognise the concept of dual marriages or of the extended network which was common to Afghan families: One of the interpreters spoke to me about whether he could apply to come to the UK … He has two wives by Shi’a marriage. I do not know the exact amount of children, but there were children on both sides. That is a very complicated way of trying to calculate what is family. They also have a family adoption system, which is not a legal adoption system—it is a way that people bring themselves, and cousins, back into the family. A definitive figure—I asked for this myself—is very difficult to get. (Penning, 2017b, Q. 46)

The image of an essentially nuclear family—husband/wife and one spouse and their children—underpinned much of the decision-making although it was recognised that such an approach might potentially place a wife and extended family left behind in Afghanistan in an acutely perilous position: ‘a woman on her own in Afghanistan; her husband has left her because he is under threat because he has been working for the British Government. That woman, on her own in the middle of Helmand, is surely a major target for the Taliban’ (Gray, 2017, Q.51). Early on in discussions, other cultural norms around the fate of Afghan interpreters were also evident. One of the initial criteria employed by French investigators to judge suitability for asylum concerned the likelihood of a candidate integrating well into French society. Whether applicants met this bar was determined by a brief questionnaire filled out by French soldiers, some of whom commented on the applicant’s religious beliefs. Clearly an ability to speak reasonable French was central to this

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notion of successful integration and, although implicit rather than explicit in relevant discussions, necessarily represented a considerable barrier for the majority of interpreters with the French forces whose main foreign language had been English (Andlauer & Müller, 2019, 128). Even if the interpreters themselves were fluent in French, there remained official concern about the ability of other family members to integrate fully. In 2013, before the first contingent of interpreters given visas for France actually left Afghanistan, the French ambassador explained to them that Afghan women would not be able to wear burkas in public places in France, and that the schools to which their children would go constituted a ‘means of integrating because they could talk with parents of other pupils. The children can help the adults to integrate in French society’ (Andlauer & Müller, 2019, 134). Three years later, when the cases of most of the French-speaking interpreters had been considered, this criterion of integration into French society was abandoned in favour of the perceived level of danger faced by the ex-interpreters and the duration of their employment with French forces. Interpreters thus found themselves caught in a situation in which asylum claims were judged not according to the service which the applicant might have previously rendered to the West in his home country, but rather on the basis of the anticipated impact which the migrant might have on national security, and the likelihood of their assimilating into the host society. In this context, there was clearly tacit pressure for those applying for visas to demonstrate allegiance to presumed liberal western values in order to be seen as non-threatening, values often evaluated by reference to gender and sexuality. Glover argued that to ‘embody the dominant ideology and concomitant set of values’ was considered by some locally employed civilians as ‘the only strategy to garner success in fighting the most recent wave of securitized discourse around migration’ (cited De Jong, 2022b). From being native informants, prized for what they could tell the western invaders about their own culture, interpreters found that they were required to emphasise the western nature of their own lives and outlooks in order to be deemed acceptable and worthy of protection.

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The ‘Military Interpreter’ This westernising of ex-interpreters for a domestic audience was a hallmark of much of the western media presentation of Afghanistan after 2014. National debates were strongly influenced by the particular rationales which each government had given its public in the first place for fighting the war. As Marchal pointed out (2013), in Britain there had been a longstanding national narrative about the army fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to protect the security of the United Kingdom. The military cost of these wars had been kept firmly in the public consciousness by well-reported ceremonies honouring the fallen in those towns close to the airports to which bodies were flown back— Wootton Basset in 2007 and Brize Norton after 2011. In the UK media, interpreting in the Afghan war was overtly and consistently framed as a military activity which had clearly supported the British army, and it was ex-soldiers who took the lead in pressing for their protection. Interpreters were presented through the crucible of personal combat relationships. Three of the four founders of the Sulha Alliance which lobbied in the UK for Afghan interpreters referenced the experiences they had had themselves of interpreters in the field: ‘Sulha Alliance co-founder Ed spent eight years as an Army Officer including tours of Helmand, Afghanistan and Ukraine, both of which worked shoulder to shoulder with interpreters enabling every action’. Personal relationships with interpreters forged in war became the basis of future commitments to defend them: ‘Sulha Alliance co-founder Peter … is an ex-Army Officer who deployed to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province for a 6 month tour of duty in 2011 where he built strong working relationships with several interpreters’(Sulha Alliance, n.d.). There was often, as one former British soldier noted, lively WhatsApp communication between former interpreters and the officers with whom they had worked (Interview, 12.11.21). Representing Afghan interpreters as comrades in the field of war inevitably militarised them, a tactic which was particularly advantageous if fears of national security had to be challenged. Thus a US marine corps veteran explained that campaigns to defend Afghan locally employed civilians in the USA were best fronted by ‘a retired general (…) to say

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“they (SIV holders) are the most thoroughly vetted of any category of traveler”’ (cited De Jong, 2022b, 228). The powerful US lobby group, No One Left Behind, originally formed by an American veteran and the Afghan interpreter who had saved his life, positioned itself as a military veteran association focused on SIV applicants, making common cause with other national ex-military groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. In the UK, senior military figures militated early on to defend ex-­ interpreters in Afghanistan—General Sir Mike Jackson for example, former Chief of the General Staff, was urging the government not to abandon them in a letter to The Times in 2013 (Jackson, 2013). When the Parliamentary Defence Committee undertook an investigation into the UK’s treatment of locally employed civilians in Afghanistan, MPs who were ex-army officers and had served in Afghanistan were prominent as questioners and witnesses—Mercer, Lopresti, Tugendhat. In the media in the UK, regular stories printed about the fate of the left-behind interpreters described them as fellow soldiers who had acted with uncommon bravery, well beyond their role of interpreting. Captain Aitken recalled how he had relied heavily on his interpreter, ‘And not just for translation…. He probably had more combat experience than even my hardened troop sergeant’ (cited MacAskill, 2018). Media stories about interpreters constantly portrayed them as ‘heroes’, men who had ‘risked their lives’ helping ‘our heroes on the battlefield’ (Williams & Brown, 2020, 18 September, 29 December, 11 August). From 2015 onwards, the Daily Mail’s ‘Betrayal of the Brave’ campaign made specific links between the military heroism of the interpreters and the apparent lack of recognition they were receiving from the UK government. Thus ‘hero translators who were nearly killed serving on the frontline alongside UK troops’ might face deportation, or find it impossible to be reunited with wives and family left back in Afghanistan, despite the fact that they had risked their lives ‘with the Army in Helmand Province’ (Brown & Williams, 2018, 9 June, 8 May). The Danes, with their numerically smaller commitment to interpreters, initially ceded responsibility for protection programmes to the British on the grounds that interpreter contracts had originally been with British-­ based agencies, and that current dangers in Afghanistan were, as the

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British contended, lower than they had been in Iraq. However here, as in the UK, there was pushback from military veterans, more than two hundred of whom signed an open letter to Parliament calling on the Danish government to do more to protect ‘our Afghan comrades’ (The Local, 2015, 17 May 2015). It was clear that pressure from the military to see ex-interpreters as army personnel was strong: ‘…the question of accountability was important within the ranks, in particular among former deployed soldiers in Afghanistan who wanted to support the local interpreters who worked in the frontline with them’ (DIIS, 2014, 2). Afghan interpreters were ‘comrades’ to whom Danish veterans and soldiers owed a particular loyalty: ‘We consider these young men who have sweated, cried, bled, fought and in some cases laid down their lives with us to be our comrades and our close allies. They deserve as much respect and gratitude for their efforts as we do, if not more’ (The Local, 2015, 17 May). Linking the protection of Afghan interpreters to their status as combat heroes clearly introduced related notions of national honour and morality. As former Vice President Mike Pence argued: ‘Protecting and assisting those who have helped the United States and coalition forces is a moral obligation for the American people’ (2007). The General who was head of the British Army from 2006 to 2009, Lord Dannatt, called on the government to recognise a specific debt which was moral: ‘We owe it to those who stood beside us to stand beside them in their hour of need’ (cited in Brown & Williams, 2020, 5 August). In the background of this discussion of honour and morality, there lurked a more pragmatic sense that treating such personnel badly might potentially harm the effectiveness of western countries in future conflicts: ‘I think it is bad for business… We are going to be operating in many of those countries in the future. There is such a thing as an international translators and interpreters union… How we treated the Afghan interpreters will be a feature going forwards’ (Diggins, 2017, Q.41). Inevitably, providing a moral context for the situation of Afghan locally employed civilians provoked historical comparisons with debts which were thought to have been largely unpaid by the West in the past. Thus Dr Jackson told the Senate Armed Services Committee: ‘I think if we look to past involvements, one of the greatest stains on American honor at the end of the Vietnam War was our inability or unwillingness to take care of the people

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who had worked for us…. I think we can take care of people who have exposed themselves to enormous personal and familial risk… There are so many of these Afghans who have been stalwart allies. They deserve everything we can do to take care and protect them’ (Jackson, 2020). In France, the historical ghost which haunted debates on ex-­interpreters was that of the Harkis, the Algerian Moslems who had fought with the French between 1954 and 1962, and who had been, as admitted by President Sarkozy in 2012, scandalously let down by successive French governments. The president of the Association defending Harkis descendants indeed offered help in relocating Afghan families. The assumed equivalence between the past fate of the Harkis and the present situation of Afghan ex-interpreters was publicly articulated in fora like the National Assembly: ‘It would be extremely regrettable if these Afghan interpreters become the new Harkis of the twenty-first century…. France must not make the same errors as in the past’ (Le Grip, 2018).5

The ‘Civil Servant’ In discussions on LEC protection in France however, the interpreter figure was far less militarised. To begin with, France’s history of intervention had been briefer—French troops were never deployed to Iraq, and the French presence in Afghanistan was more modest in size, and relatively short in duration, with troops withdrawn in 2012, two years before other NATO contingents. Commentators suggested that France’s intervention in Afghanistan was in effect a type of compensation for its absence in Iraq, as well as a means of enabling the country to rejoin NATO’s integrated command structure (Jauvert, 2011; Bonneau, 2010). Public messages in France about the rationale for the conflict tended to be focused on the need to defend universal values to which France was historically attached rather than to protect national security. Given the size of the deployment and its duration, French casualties were smaller than those of the British and Americans, and there was little evidence during the  Translation by author.

5

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conflict of the sort of well-publicised public recognition of the military dead of Afghanistan. Instead of ex-army personnel being involved, the Association which came into being in 2016 to support interpreters (Association des interprètes et auxiliaires afghans de l’armée française) was initially founded by lawyers. Relationships between these interpreter supporters and the French military were far more distanced than those in the American and British cases, with interpreters themselves being urged to come up with names of French soldiers they knew who might prove favourable to the overall cause and direct appeals to officers who had served in Afghanistan to come and help in the campaign: ‘ we look to you to ask you to intervene on behalf of the men who served under you and who are now in danger’ (Association, 2017). In this situation, interpreting in Afghanistan was positioned largely outside military frames of reference, associated instead with broader legal issues relating to the state’s responsibility to its employees, irrespective of their origins. The key was employment by the state in general, rather than interpreting and its contextualisation in war. The changing political climate in France during the post-Afghanistan intervention, with a socialist president replaced by one from the centre-­ right, ensured that this equal employment positioning became a cause which could be espoused at different times by the political left or the political right—la France Insoumise on the one hand and Les Républicains on the other. Rather than newspapers mounting campaigns in favour of hero interpreter-­soldiers, the French media were largely dominated by interventions from the Association defending the interpreters and from two journalists, Andlauer and Műller, whose book (2019) Tarjuman (‘translator’ in Dari) bore the subtitle, ‘A French betrayal’. Whilst there were allusions in the French press to the war itself and to the fact that these interpreters had been serving the army in Afghanistan (Szpiner, 2018), there was relatively little attempt to present them as fellow soldiers. Instead, attention was focused on what was seen as the long post-war failure of the French government to discharge its responsibilities, what La Croix called ‘the long road of the Afghan interpreters’ (2019) and Le Nouvel Observateur ‘the interminable French scandal’ (Naudet, 2019). In the highly influential Tarjuman book, roughly eighty-nine percent of the

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work concerned what the authors characterised as ‘the sad history’ of France’s betrayal: the inadequacy of first official responses, the discriminatory and allegedly illegal examination of individual cases, the long trajectory leading to supportive court rulings and the uneven fate of interpreters once they had arrived in France. The warrior interpreter heroes of the American, British and Danish media were the victims of a state employer who was unthinking and inefficient.

The ‘Honorary Veteran’ Those interpreters who managed to arrive in the West during this pre-­ Evacuation period however found that any military ascription which might have been given to them had definite limits. Although they might technically be considered as ‘veterans’, in practice they found themselves placed at one remove from much of the support and recognition which was the norm for national ex-servicemen and women. In the UK, the Sulha Alliance argued that there was an early failure to provide them with the basic welfare support, including aid for mental health or PTSD, which British soldiers resettling into civilian life automatically enjoyed (SulhaNetwork, 2018, 2021): ‘Mental health problems take many forms. Imagine surviving years of work with British Army then being unable to get a meaningful job or living without your family. We help our own vets with these things. Let’s help our former interpreters’ (21.10.19).Whilst British veterans’ charities like Help for Heroes highlighted cases of wounded interpreters, supporting the able-bodied in finding employment opportunities which could use their skills and experience was difficult (SulhaNetwork, 2019, 17 September). Groups like the Sulha Alliance made efforts to open potentially useful channels, for example exploring training opportunities at Bolton College to help ‘ex-Afghan interpreters get back into education’ (SulhaNetwork, 29.06.18). The British veteran employment programme, Joboppo, did not mount a specific programme directed at Afghans until September 2021, and then largely on the initiative of their Director of Veteran Engagement who had himself served in Afghanistan: ‘The plight of former military interpreters and other locally employed staff, many of whom served closely with our

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own service personnel was enough to encourage the Joboppo team to quickly pull the programme together…’. Although they used the same operational model as with their British veterans—an employers’ subplatform and a client platform—they clearly felt it necessary to make a specific case to potential employers in order to promote Afghan applicants: ‘They are vets like any other’ (Interview, 25.01.22). The American group No One Left Behind (NOLB) encapsulated the outsider veteran positioning of Afghan interpreters in its efforts to have the designation ‘Honorary Veteran’ officially awarded to all SIV recipients. The Group, with chapters in ten cities, and helping 1647 people in 2018, offered a wide range of support programmes. In doing so, they had received endorsements from some of the major American veteran groups like American Legion, the Military Officers Association of America, the Heritage Foundation and the 9/11 Commission, but its schemes for Iraqi and Afghan SIV recipients—Welcome Home, Got your back, Wheels, Lost-in-Translation, Medic, and Never Forget—operated quite separately from these agencies. Indeed the co-founder of NOLB, Matt Zeller, claimed that more than 56,000 charities in the US were working to improve the lives of veterans, but none was specifically interested in helping Iraqi and Afghan translators. The attempt to get a congressional bill passed to create a new designation, ‘Honorary Veteran’, aimed in the first place to speed up the allocation of SIVs: ‘The honorary veteran law could shame Congress into issuing more SIVs, which could in turn keep alive No One Left Behind’. The status proposed was indeed honorary—there would be no financial costs attached, and interpreters would have no access to veteran hospitals and services (No one left behind, 2020). Zeller publicly compared his own service in Afghanistan—one year in duration, recognised in the award of a Combat Action Badge and Purple Heart— with that of his interpreter and co-founder of NOLB, Janis Shinwari, who had served nine years with American forces and saved several soldiers’ lives. This initiative to make the link between service as a translator/interpreter and the automatic right to receive a visa continued with NOLB’s work to produce a working definition of ‘foreign interpreter’ for the future use of US military authorities: ‘Foreign interpreter—A local national (non-US citizen) employed by the US Government (USG) or USG contractor/sub-contractor to provide direct foreign cultural and

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language support in the form of spoken translation and/or written translation to USG personnel. An interpreter is eligible for the Department of State Special Immigrant Visa program upon at least (1) year of faithful and valuable service as recorded by a Letter of Employment Recommendation (LOR)/Certificate of Appreciation (CoA) or USG equivalent recognition. Also called a translator, combat translator, cultural advisor, or simply “terp”’ (No one Left Behind, 2020, 8).

The ‘Victim’ The close relationship proposed here between being a translator/interpreter and the sort of active military service which would merit the epithet ‘veteran’, albeit honorary, and thus automatic access to a SIV, implicitly suggested that there was a kind of military masculinity which was equally shared by Afghan interpreters and by western soldiers. De Jong indeed discerned a common ‘boys-become-men’ narrative (2022a) within both groups during the conflict and pointed to the fact that western soldiers and Afghan interpreters appeared to have had similar reasons for enlisting in the first place. The ways in which interpreters represented themselves and were represented in the western media after 2014 however suggested a masculinity which was more attenuated and reactive, one in which fear of imminent danger and urgent calls for outside help understandably predominated. Nevertheless interpreters continued to demonstrate considerable agency in this post-drawdown period, undertaking long and life threatening journeys across continents in order to safeguard their future and that of their families, like Nesar who had served with British forces in Helmand and who crossed Iran and Turkey with his wife in 2019, eventually being marooned in a refugee camp in Lesbos for 18 months (Williams & Brown, 2021). Other interpreters engaged in political activity in the public space in order to try and apply pressure to western governments. A number of demonstrations took place in Kabul as well as in the West in which ex-interpreters joined together to demand visas and protection. Thus in early 2017, around one hundred interpreters demonstrated outside the French Embassy in Kabul calling for ‘protection’ and

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‘solidarity with the endangered interpreters’ (La Croix, 2019). Some of those who had succeeded in escaping to Europe and the USA assumed a prominent role in campaigning for their colleagues left in Afghanistan. In the UK, Rafi Hottak took out a legal case against the British government alleging discrimination on the grounds that Afghan interpreters were being treated less favourably than Iraqis (Feeney, 2015). In the US, Janis Shinwari co-founded the No One Left Behind Group almost as soon as he arrived in America: ‘Can we use this money to start an organization and do for them what you’ve done for me?’ (Kix, 2018). More frequently however western media stories post-2014 portrayed the interpreter as a frightened victim, forced into hiding—‘I know that I am in real danger. I can’t even take up a job. I don’t go to public spaces’— experiencing a protracted and frustrating period of passivity as he waited sometimes for six years to get a positive response to his visa application. Media reports in the US constantly presented interpreters as passive victims being ‘Left Behind’, ‘in limbo’, ‘Left Behind’, ‘cut adrift, ‘Fearing for their lives’, ‘stranded’, for whom ‘Time runs out’. Before the Evacuation, left behind interpreters were represented as victims, casualties of war, political problems which demanded difficult solutions which their former employers were seldom willing to provide.

The ‘Unnamed Interpreters’ The names given most frequently to interpreters in the West during this period—‘alien allies’, ‘military heroes’, ‘outsider veterans’—placed them in a specifically military context as army employees, paid by NATO forces, who had fought alongside them in the field. Only international interpreting/language bodies insisted on the primacy of professional translating and interpreting as a means of characterising them. Locally employed civilians outside this militarised category were either invisible or marginalised in western discussions. Staff who had not been employed directly by the army found that their status as indirectly employed or subcontracted personnel meant that they were excluded from six of the eight NATO resettlement programmes whether they had been interpreters or not (the exceptions being the US and Danish schemes). Those

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locally employed staff not classed as ‘interpreters’ were acceptable in only three of the NATO programmes (German, American and Australian), with five countries unprepared to even consider their cases (De Jong & Sarantidis, 2022). The military positioning of locally employed civilians as interpreters who were de facto combatants, directly employed by the army and engaged in quasi-kinetic activity in the field of war effectively placed all those locally employed Afghans outside this definition in a category of non-combatants. They were ‘civilians’ and therefore not an acknowledged and automatic part of any officially recognised national responsibilities. Afghans who had been engaged by subcontractors, Afghans who had worked in embassies and cultural centres, Afghans who were NGO employees acting as intermediaries between funders and local communities and Afghan teachers spreading knowledge of foreign languages—all of these were de facto ‘civilians’ who would not benefit from the potential support given to those the West had categorised as military translator/interpreters. This discourse of militarisation had the additional consequence of leaving women almost entirely outside the 2014–2021 debates, except in so far as they were spouses or partners of interpreters. Of those Afghan young people granted asylum in the UK from 2009 until mid-2021, under a fifth (18%) of adults were female (Norris & Overton, 2021).This gendering of locally employed civilians in Afghanistan through the naming of interpreters reflected both the relative absence of women in the ranks of interpreters working with the forces and a broader tendency prevalent in western military circles to omit women altogether from visible arenas of war: ‘In the binary categorization of war which forms the basis of mainstream discourses about war, civilian (feminine) is the opposite of combatant (masculine)’ (Khalili, 2011, 1472). The occlusion of women in debates on protection in Afghanistan was particularly ironic given that the conflict had been presented by the West, especially during the Obama presidency, as an intervention designed to promote human rights with a clear civilisational duty to protect vulnerable women. Women indeed had become symbolic markers in the struggle between cultures, with Muslim women implicitly presented in American and European commentaries as oppressed and needing to be rescued through western imperial intervention.

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Arguably, the West’s counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan was an initial attempt to soften (or feminise) some of the traditional assumptions of war-making by emphasising the importance of personal contact with local populations and engagement in humanitarian activity rather than solely in violence and killing. Given that 48% of the population was female, and that this often reached 71% in rural villages, the US Military had given some thought as to how they might specifically influence this component of Afghan society. In March 2010 for example, the US marines had set up their own Female Engagement Team (FET) of American women soldiers to work with Afghan women on the ground. Interestingly, both American and Afghan men seemed to share the view that women were not ‘real’ soldiers and would thus be perceived as non-­ threatening: ‘Your men come to fight, but we know the women are here to help’(cited Pottinger et al., 2010, 4). As Jones argued however, to most of the American military establishment, the FETs were not an important part of US strategy (Jones, 2010). After 2014, when NATO forces withdrew, and attention was focused on training the Afghan military and police, the salience of counter-insurgency, particularly in its feminised forms, diminished. What has been described however as the ‘gender-­ blindness’ (Interview, 24.01.22) of the Evacuation of 2021 was in many ways a legacy of how western governments and their media had framed the landscape of their responsibilities during the previous seven years, focusing on particular definitions of translator/interpreters. Within western debates, the interpreter was recognised solely as a combatant and only then in limited and honorary circumstances. Other Locally Employed Civilians—Afghans who were acting as cultural informants and de facto interpreters for the West—found that their implicit designation as ‘civilian’ would have major consequences for them in the Evacuation of 2021. In the seven year period after the drawdown of NATO forces, interpreters would find that the specific linguistic and cultural competences which had previously made them valuable to the West were no longer of relevance. Instead, if they sought protection from their former employers, they were expected in some measure to westernise themselves, to demonstrate that they were, in western terms, less ‘foreign’ than they had been. From active participants in their own career development many were reduced to a more passive role, although others, motivated by the

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extremity of their situation, embarked on hugely brave and dangerous journeys and militated publicly on behalf of their still stricken colleagues. From the space of cognitive dissonance between the two worlds of the West’s armed garrisons, and Afghanistan beyond the wire, the interpreters now sought access to the ‘at home’ world of the West across the seas and came up against the very same barriers of exclusion which other immigrants typically met. For the West, Afghan interpreters represented a problem which was left over from their intervention and was now embarrassingly being raised in the public arena by the press and by interested advocacy groups. The response was to deal with the issue in a largely piecemeal and minimalist way, setting it within broader national policies of asylum, migration and security. The official line that ‘our job is to ensure that we can be as helpful and as alongside them as possible’ (Penning, 2017a, Q.108) was to be tested to the uttermost limits when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021.

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Iremonger, J. (2017b). Q.71. Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Oral Evidence. HC572. 7 February. Iremonger, J. (2017c). Q.65. Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Oral Evidence. HC572. 7 February. Jackson, C. (2020). United States Committee on Armed Services. www.armed-­ services.senate.gov Jackson, M. (2013). We Must Not Abandon Our Afghan Interpreters. Times, 6 April. Jauvert, V. (2011). Jospin: l’Afghanistan, ce n’était pas notre guerre. Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 September. Jones, A. (2010). Woman to Woman in Afghanistan. The Nation, 27 October. www.thenation.com/article/woman-­woman-­afghanistan Kahane, E. (2009). The AIIC Resolution on Interpreters in War and Conflict Zones. http://aiic.net/page/3196/ Khalili, L. (2011). Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency. Review of International Studies, 37(3), 1471–1491. https://doi.org/10.1017/502602105 1000121Z Kix, P. (2018). Trump left these men behind. One Soldier made It his mission to save them. 16 October. www.gen.medium.com/the-­life-­debt-­65cc 5b33bdde La Croix. (2019). De Kaboul à Paris, le long chemin des interprètes afghans. 7 February. www.la-­croix-­com/France/Kaboul-­Paris-­long-­chemin-­interprètes-­ afghans-­2019-­02-­07.1301000840 Le Grip. (2018). Question Ecrite. 5ème législature, no. 9909, 26 June. Lewis, J. (2017). Q.29. Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Oral Evidence. HC572. 7 February. Lopresti, J. (2017). Q.102. Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Oral Evidence. HC572. 7 February. MacAskill, E. (2018). How two men and a WhatsApp Group rescued scores of Afghan heroes. Guardian, 7 September. Marchal, C. (2013). L’Hommage politique aux soldats français morts en Afghanistan. Une analyse sociologique. L’Harmattan. Matta, B. (2014). Afghan Interpreters demand promised US Visas. Al Jazeera, 1 October. https://www.aljazeera.com.

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Mégret, F. (2021). Intermediate Solidarities: The Case of the Afghan Interpreters. Verfassungsblog on Constitutional Matters. www.verfassungsblog.de/os/­intermediate-­solidarities MOD. (2020). Freedom of Information response to Sara de Jong. 26 October. 6945023-­[email protected] MOD Written Evidence. (2017). Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Update to 7 February. LE10004. Moser-Mercer, B. (2018). Interpreting in Conflict Zones. In H. Mikkelson & R.  Jourdenais (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Interpreting (pp. 302–316). Routledge. Naudet, J.-B. (2019). Interprètes afghans: l’interminable scandale. Nouvel Observateur, 16 July. No One Left Behind. (2020). Recommendations to the Department of State Office of Inspector General. www.nooneleft.org Norris, S., & Overton, I. (2021). Less than Fifth of Afhhan Young People Granted Asylum in UK Since 2009 Were Women or Girls. Action on Armed Violence. https://aoav.org.uk Pedersen, A. (2017). The Interpreters. Survival, 59(3). https://doi.org/10.108 0/00396338.2017.132561 Pence, M. (2007). Iraqi Volunteers, Iraqi Refugees: what is America’s obligation? Committee on Foreign Affairs, Government Publishing Office. 26 March. Penning, M. (2017a). Q.108. Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Oral Evidence. HC572. 7 February. Penning, M. (2017b). Q.46. Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Oral Evidence. HC572. 7 February. Pottinger, M., Jilani, H., & Russo, C. (2010). Half-hearted: Trying to win Afghanistan without Afghan Women. Small Wars Journal. http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/trying-­to-­win-­afghanistan-­without-­afghan-­women Red T. (2019). UN HQ Panel. https://red-­t.org/public-­speaking/protectlinguists-­panel-­discussion-­united-­nations-­new-­york/ Red T. (2021a). https://red-­t.org/about-­us/missions-­vision/ Red T. (2021b). Letter to Secretary General of NATO. May. https://red-­t.org/our-­ work/open-­letters/ Ruiz Rosendo, L. (2022). Interpreting for the Military: Creating Communities of Practice. Journal of Specialised Translation, 37, January.

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Sief, K. (2013). Alleged terrorism ties foil some Afghan Interpreters’ US visa hopes. Washington Post, 23 February. www.washingtonpost.com Škrabec, S. (2019). https://pen-­international.org/news/protect-­linguists-­event-­ un-­headquarters-­new-­york Sulha Alliance. (n.d.). www.sulha-­alliance.org/about-­us/our-­team SulhaNetwork. (2018). 4 May, 29 June. https://twitter.com/SulhaNetwork SulhaNetwork. (2019). 21 October, 17 September. https://twitter.com/ SulhaNetwork SulhaNetwork. (2020, 29 December). https://twitter.com/SulhaNetwork SulhaNetwork. (2021, 16 January). https://twitter.com/SulhaNetwork Szpiner, F. (2018). En Afghanistan, la France a abandonné ceux qui l’avaient servie. Le Figaro, 31 October. https://www.lefigaro.fr The Local. (2015). Danish Vets: give Afghan Interpreters asylum. 17 May. https://www.thelocal.dk Williams, D., & Brown, L. (2020). Daily Mail, 18 September, 29 December, 11 August. www.dailymail.co.uk Williams, D., & Brown, L. (2021). Afghan Military Translator who is trapped with his wife in a “hellhole” Greek refugee camp has been told they can come to the UK. Daily Mail, 16 January. Wilson, P. (2017). Q.63. Lost in Translation? Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. House of Commons Defence Committee. Oral Evidence. HC572. 7 February.

5 Evacuation

‘Evacuation’: ‘the process of moving people from a place of danger to a safer place’. —Oxford English Dictionary

Since the NATO drawdown of 2014, the potential Taliban risk to former Afghan employees was understood in the West as largely relating to ex-­ interpreters. On the whole, public interest in their fate had been something of a niche issue, their cause espoused by ex-army personnel in campaigns which emphasised the exceptional and military nature of their commitment. Western authorities had dealt with the danger to which interpreters were being exposed by setting up support programmes with very specific criteria which contained and limited their direct responsibility to protect locally employed civilians. In most cases, these schemes aimed to restrict the eligibility of interpreters to relocate to Europe or the USA and were characterised by a long and difficult process of application with decision-making spread across different ministries and departments. In August 2021, this would change dramatically. With the rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the plight of Afghans left to face the new regime became an issue of major governmental and public concern in the West, played out on television screens across the world. As crowds © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Footitt, Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5_5

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of frightened civilians rushed to the airport to escape, western governments were forced to make speedy decisions on who, in these circumstances, should be protected, and how they could best manage the sort of Evacuation operations which had not been seen in the West since the Second World War. Groups and individuals with no links to the military—parliamentary representatives, INGOs, university researchers, cultural institutes—became actively involved in attempts to save Afghans they knew who were now in huge danger, and who were directly appealing to them—‘I was getting 200 desperate text messages a day’ (Interview, 24.01.22).

The Evacuation of August 2021 The NATO evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021, after the Taliban takeover, was carried out within a brief and intense time-slot (15 to 29 August), and in a situation of mounting danger and appalling disorder. Over and over again, witnesses at Kabul airport in those August days used words like ‘chaos’, ‘panic’ and ‘desperation’ to describe what was happening over the three phases of the Evacuation operation. Initially from 13–15 August, planes had been flying out of the airport, airlifting NATO nationals. On the 15th, when the Taliban reached Kabul, the airport was overrun with Afghans seeking to escape—‘all hell broke loose … thousands of people just running … a sea of humanity who wanted to evacuate’ (Film, 2022). To begin with, American marines on the ground estimated there were some 5000 people, but this rapidly increased: ‘People were jumping the walls and trying to get in’. There were around 24,000 Afghans in the airport, and untold numbers outside. When a plane appeared, there was ‘mass hysteria’—‘people kind of climbed on the airplane’ (Film, 2022). Ghastly images of Afghans falling off plane wings were captured on film and widely circulated around the world. The Americans then negotiated with the Taliban that one of their special units would be let into the airport in order to clear the runways so that it could function and flights begin again. This they did in what American marines described as ‘a horrific scene’, shooting and running over civilians. The effect was to clear the runways so that the airport could

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function, and the Evacuation itself formally started on 17th. In this second phase, the Americans and British established three gates to the runways—North Gate, East Gate and Abbey Gate—through which they could begin to process potential evacuees, whilst the Taliban provided security outside. An estimated 3000 people were pushing at the gates, ‘in sheer desperation and fear’ in order to escape. In the crowds, conditions were indescribably awful: ‘I saw seven people die of heat and hunger’, ‘It was so crowded there was nowhere to sleep’, ‘Kids were being trampled’, ‘You couldn’t move and it was hard to breathe. It was dreadful’. ‘I stood in the canal for 4 hours. It was full of sewage. People were standing in it just to survive’ (Film, 2022). The gates would open just a few feet to let people through to be processed and led to waiting aircraft. Outside the gates, the pressure continued with scenes of frantic parents passing their children over the barriers, and toddlers whose parents were by then missing being lifted into the arms of marines. On 26 August, there was an ISIS-KP claimed suicide bombing which killed more than one hundred and seventy Afghan civilians outside the gates and thirteen members of the US forces. The Americans, seeking to defend their position, fired into the crowd themselves, injuring more. A young Afghan man described being temporarily knocked unconscious by the bomb blast, and wakening to find his mouth full of sewage water, and his two brothers dead beside him (Film, 2022). At this point, in the third and last phase of the Evacuation, the forces closed the airport gates entirely and processed only those Afghans who had managed to get in. On 27 August, almost all NATO countries finished their evacuation efforts, followed by the UK on 28th and the US on 29th: Major General Donahue, Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, was the last western soldier out of Afghanistan after the twenty year engagement. In descriptions by those involved in the two week Evacuation, both Afghan civilians and western troops, there are clear recurring themes— firstly, the numbers trying to be evacuated, in desperation and fear, were vast, and people were prepared to endure dreadful conditions whilst waiting, risking their lives and those of their families in order to escape. Secondly, the situation on the ground seemed to take the western forces by surprise. ‘By the Sunday, the 15th, Kabul was starting to fall and there was large scale panic around the airfield’ (Middleton, 2022); ‘the

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overwhelming crowd … you could see gaps in the fences and the crowd just kept feeding through. And it wasn’t small numbers. It was literally hundreds of people coming through at a time, pushing past each other. Just kind of think of a rock concert and everyone sort of flooding towards the main stage. It was that but on a much bigger scale. And desperation as well…. Desperation turned into anger you could see as the hours went past. We were in the heat of the day…’ (Adams, 2022). Formal arrangements to process potential evacuees were not immediately put in place—‘we were not open yet for evacuation operations’ (Film, 2022)—particularly during the first period when crowds had flooded over the runways before being beaten back behind walls and barbed wire by the Taliban. Letting people through the gates in the second period involved army personnel looking over the walls at women and children, pleading and screaming, as they held up documents which they imagined would give them the right to join an evacuation flight. Originals or screenshots of official letters, passports, emails and text messages were all being shown for long-distance perusal. American marines, often drafted into this mission at the last moment, had been told that they were to airlift out ‘at-risk Afghans and US citizens’, in what they assumed would be a fairly orderly process. They were unprepared for the chaos which ensued (Film, 2022). Much criticism of the West indeed relates to the general unpreparedness of NATO governments who, not having anticipated a rapid takeover by the Taliban, appeared to have no real contingency plans in place to airlift out vulnerable people. By late 2020, a range of former locally employed civilians had been receiving Taliban death threats, not only military interpreters, but also others associated with the West—one prominent woman activist ‘was told my name was on a list and that I should leave the country as soon as possible … we told the Americans at that stage that they should be giving opportunities to women to leave Afghanistan’ (Interview, 18.11.22). In subsequent analyses in Europe and the USA, the ‘sudden and unexpected’ thesis of Taliban takeover— ‘caught out and surprised by the scale and speed of the fall of Kabul’ (Drax, 2023, Q.57)—became popular as a means of justifying the disorganisation observed on all sides in the Evacuation. It was assumed that this general international failure to predict the speed of the Taliban’s

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conquest of the country explained the radical unpreparedness of western powers. Some critics however have refused to accept the line that responsibility for the chaos of the Evacuation, and its deadly consequences for locally employed civilians, could be shifted quite so easily. From post hoc analyses, three points in time emerged at which NATO countries might have understood that the balance of power in Afghanistan was moving so decisively in favour of the Taliban that the West should begin preparations to protect Afghans potentially in danger. One was the Doha agreement itself signed between the Taliban and the USA in February 2020– a ‘rotten deal’ (Wallace, 2023, Q8), ‘the fuse for disaster in Afghanistan was lit by the Doha agreement’, an agreement which both delegitimised the Afghan government and allowed the Taliban to present ‘a victory narrative’ to its supporters (Australian Senate, 2022, 4.17–4.26). A second potential warning point was President Biden’s speech on 14 April 2021 announcing full American withdrawal which the minority US Senate report (US Senate, 2022) described as heralding a wasted period in which, they claimed, little had been done to adapt to the inevitable changes of circumstance on the ground. Finally, in the days before the Taliban takeover in Kabul, in early/mid July, embassy and intelligence reports were clearly warning of a ‘cascading collapse’ (Bristow, 2022, Q.270). There was some speculation that this failure to anticipate and prepare for the consequences of a Taliban takeover lay at the door of those who had been involved in arming and training the Afghan army since 2014 and who had thus retained a vested interest in believing that the country should have been equipped to resist the Taliban. The British Minister of Defence reflected: ‘Did we have optimism bias in the capacity of the Afghan forces to want to stand against the Taliban, bearing in mind their significant casualty rates?’ (Wallace, 2023, Q.41). Some commentators argued that those further away from the events without such a significant role were far more inclined to view the future of the country negatively. France, for instance, which withdrew its troops in 2012, two years ahead of the full NATO withdrawal, had already flown some eight hundred Afghans to Paris after the cessation of their military operations. In May 2021, three months before the fall of Kabul, they were evacuating Afghans working alongside French diplomatic and aid organisations and indeed

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drawing criticism from other NATO members about seeming unduly pessimistic. The official French line was: ‘…we had the same information as everybody else. It was really the analysis that was different, in the sense that once the Americans decided to leave, we envisaged the worst scenario’ (Mallet, 2021). Whilst it is undoubtedly the case that NATO governments largely failed to take the cue from any of these warning signs, the actual speed of the collapse surprised everyone. Indeed the French Minister of Defence Florence Parly explained that, ‘We knew the dates which had been negotiated between the US and the Taliban in Doha. We knew that the American withdrawal would be 31 August. But no one had anticipated the speed with which the Taliban would get control of the whole country’ (Parly, 2021).1 In the Australian Senate’s investigation of the conduct of the Evacuation, Professor Farrell maintained that: with almost no exceptions, I think everybody was surprised at how quickly the Afghan state collapsed in August 2021. The speed with which the Taliban swept across the country took everyone by surprise. It was anticipated that the Afghan Taliban were clearly making gains on the battlefield but it was anticipated that those gains would unfold over a matter of months. Even right up to 15 August, when the Taliban ended up on the doorstep of Kabul, it was expected that Kabul would hold out for a number of months, because Afghan security forces had pulled back to Kabul. It’s a large city of five million people. There was a concentration of Afghan security forces there. In fact, Kabul fell literally overnight. So the speed of the Taliban advance took everyone by surprise. (2022, 4.54)

There was also an issue relating to the consequences of any earlier western Evacuation which might have further destabilised an already panicking Afghan public: We think, ultimately, [the speed of the Taliban’s takeover] reflects that the Afghan population more broadly believed that the Taliban was eventually going to take control, so therefore you might as well not fight it. Intelligence analysts have talked about this for many years—that it’s really about who has confidence, who is perceived to have the wind behind their backs, and  Author’s translation.

1

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that one step can potentially lead to a cascade. So there was concern about countries conducting visible evacuation efforts. (Jeffrey, 2022)

What is certainly clear is that when western countries mounted their Evacuation efforts in August 2021, they did so as an emergency, in very considerable haste and using whatever resources they had at their disposal. Australia for example employed more than two hundred and fifty of their troops on mission in Afghanistan, Canberra and the United Arab Emirates, whilst the Canadian operation was a mixture of military and civilian flights. Other countries like Denmark, Germany, France, the UK and the US mainly used military/air force transport planes. Stopovers were hastily organised in the United Arab Emirates, in the US Air Base at Ramstein or in Bahrain, Italy, Spain or Kuwait (Fig. 5.1). On the ground at Kabul airport, some 6000 American and 1000 British troops provided security within the airfield, with the Taliban on the perimeter. The

Fig. 5.1  Evacuees arrive on a Globemaster III aircraft at Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait, August 23 2021. US Air Force Airmen are assisting with evacuation of Americans and Allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan

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numbers of people evacuated during this period broadly reflected each nation’s footprint in Afghanistan in the preceding twenty years, with the USA and then the UK airlifting the most. At the airport, forces cooperated in offering places aboard their aircraft to nationals from other countries. Thus for example, the Australians airlifted fifty-two New Zealand citizens and three hundred and ten New Zealand-sponsored Afghans, as well as six hundred and thirty-five British nationals, eighteen US citizens and US-sponsored Afghans and a Singaporean and Fijian citizen (Australian Senate, 2022, 5.65). Finding exact numbers of those actually evacuated in August 2021 is difficult, but the careful work of De Jong and Sarantidis (2022) suggests the sorts of figures in the table below. Country

Number of people evacuated

Australia Canada Denmark ‘Operation Alamo’

4168 (including 2984 Afghans) 3700 (including 2000 Afghans) 1077 (including 236 interpreters and their families) 3000 (including 2600 Afghans) 5374 (including 3849 Afghans, 403 Germans and a number of people from other countries) 1860 (including 436 interpreters, defence/police personnel and family) 15,000 (including c.5000 Afghans) 76,000 Afghans

France ‘Operation APAGAN’ Germany Netherlands UK ‘Operation Pitting’ USA

Initial Priorities for Protection For interpreters still in Afghanistan when the Evacuation began, the key difference between life and death would hinge on the ways in which the West framed its rescue programmes, the extent to which former local employees were speedily identified as being at risk and the efficiency of the operations which authorities mounted to save them. To begin with, western authorities looked to airlift their own nationals and those groups of locally employed Afghans who, from the experience of the previous seven years, seemed likely to need protection. There were however both logistical and definitional problems. The Australians for example closed their embassy in Kabul in May 2021 so that Australian citizens and

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Afghans they had employed were left without any point of contact in the country: ‘In terms of the impact of the embassy closing, I think it’s important that the embassy closing had an impact not only on the NGOs but also on many visa holders, Australian citizens and permanent residents also in Kabul … it had repercussions for many, and I believe that it had repercussions in terms of the evacuation and why it was so chaotic’ (Dale, 2022, 5.26). The UK on the other hand had maintained an embassy presence in Afghanistan and taken over a hotel just outside the airport perimeter, the Baron Hotel, in April 2021 as a processing centre in the event of an emergency evacuation. With the attack on the Abbey Gate, the centre was rapidly moved to the airport itself. Crucially though it was not always easy for Foreign Office officials to assess who, in Home Office terms, qualified as British nationals. The British Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Laurie Bristow, described a growing problem as the days of the airlift went on: ‘At the beginning of the evacuation, relatively straightforward cases passed through…. They were the British nationals who were clearly documented and did not have family members in tow who were not clearly documented. The complexity starts to arise when you have family members—children, spouses and quite possibly other relatives—turning up at the evacuation centre and it is not possible quickly to establish whether they are entitled to travel to the UK’ (2022, Q.440). In this situation, the key decision-making agency was the Home Office and the criteria for selection related to Home Office immigration rules, in particular its obsession with having adequate security-screening in place: ‘people were presenting at the Baron Hotel with much wider family groups of people without documentation, who we could not be sure were relatives at all. Some did not fit into the agreed category of spouse or under-18 children, and we had to draw the line somewhere’ (Q.446). This Home Office distinction between British nationals eligible for an Evacuation flight, and those accompanying family members who were potentially not eligible necessitated formal identity checks in the handling centre, and subsequent biometric fingerprinting checks difficult to conduct outside the embassy building. In some cases, ‘the entitlement of other family members presenting could not be established and the British national lead person chose not to travel on that basis’ (Q.440). At the root of the

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process was the Home Office interpretation, enacted by Foreign Office personnel on the ground, of what constituted British nationality: ‘These were British nationals who were deemed to be a priority for the flight, yet they were left behind.’ ‘No, I am talking about the accompanying family members who were not documented and, in many cases, were not British nationals’. ‘But they were travelling with a British national’. (Q.442, 443)

Afghans with British passports who refused to take a flight because other members of their family were denied permission to travel at the same time had thus, according to the Foreign Office, de facto ceased to be a British responsibility: ‘Left behind is different from choosing to stay behind’ (Q.444). In the case of former Afghan employees, the initial approach tended to assume that protection programmes developed hastily in the months or weeks before the emergency could be used or amended in order to fit the current situation. As late as 14 July, President Biden announced the launch of Operation Allies Refuge to support relocation flights for eligible Afghans who were stuck in the long SIV pipeline, but who could now be flown to the US in order to complete their SIV applications there. The Canadians announced a programme on 23 July 2021 to welcome Afghan ex-employees, but the application processes in Afghanistan were clearly difficult: ‘providing forms that could be opened only in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and requiring that they be signed, scanned and returned, demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to the situation on the ground and placed affected individuals at undue risk’ (Shelson, 2022), particularly given the fact that initial communications had been sent out without being translated into Pashto or Dari. The 2021 war zone of Afghanistan was not conducive to making formal applications of this sort: ‘These folks, who didn’t have Internet access, were in provinces outside of Kabul. To get Internet access, they were going to Internet cafés—which at that point, no doubt had Taliban or sympathizers—to fill out paperwork articulating how they helped Canada join the war against the Taliban, so that they could eventually get their immigration approved and get on those planes’ (Peddle, 2022).

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In the UK, a scheme (the ARAP scheme, Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy), administered by the Ministry of Defence, had been introduced four months before August 2021, designed to run alongside the ex-gratia scheme (introduced in 2013) and to replace the former intimidation scheme which Parliament had deemed useless. This newer programme was aimed at UK government employees, particularly those who had provided linguistic services to the military on or after October 2021 and were now at risk of reprisals. The scheme also recognised that there might be ‘special cases’ beyond this, for example embassy workers, cultural advisers and those in development or counter-terrorism. In practice however, ARAP had been slow getting off the ground—by June 2021, only one locally employed civilian was relocated under the programme, and the first ARAP flight took place as late as 22 June 2021. There were however a large number of applications (approximately 6500) in the pipeline in July 2021. When the Evacuation itself started, the chaos of the emergency context exacerbated already existing problems in these western programmes of support. Given what was happening in Afghanistan, the fact that a scheme like the UK’s ARAP had been introduced some months before might have meant in practice that interpreters who had applied through the programme before August 2021 would be at some disadvantage during the days of Evacuation, waiting for a formal call-forward notification instead of making their own way immediately to the Baron Hotel processing centre as others were then doing. The slowness of the bureaucracy surrounding these programmes caused more difficulties. Thus applicants accepted in May 2021 did not receive call-forward notifications until 21 August 2021 by which time, and after five consecutive days of trying to arrive at the airport, they found themselves unable to get on a flight and were left behind. Other applicants who had received automated responses in May 2021 had still received no follow-up news by mid-August and were forced to stay in Afghanistan. In one case, an applicant was accepted as late as 14 August with very little time to go through the necessary checks, and he too was left behind in Afghanistan. In the mounting confusion, quite different instructions, issued by different ministries, were being received by desperate Afghan ex-employees:

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Applicant A was advised by local staff on 17 May to “be prepared to relocate in as little as two to four weeks” and to “make all necessary personal, domestic and financial arrangements you need to in Afghanistan to facilitate this”. After the applicant had duly sold his house and belongings, he received a letter from the Home Office informing him that his application for a visa had been refused. Despite this, he still received letters calling him forward to the Baron Hotel for evacuation on 22 August, 23 August and 25 August, but was unable to get through the crowds. The Sulha Alliance was subsequently informed that the call forward was an error, and that the Home Office rejection remained extant. (Sulha Alliance Written Evidence, 2023)

It would be fair to say that most western authorities were slow in realising that the context of the Taliban takeover had made it impossible for Afghans to apply for protection through normal bureaucratic channels: ‘If I said to someone in the UK, you need to go online and fill in this form, and if you don’t understand how, just google it, they would probably understand, but that wasn’t the case in Afghanistan. A lot of people didn’t know about ARAP, and those that did didn’t know how to fill it out. The scheme was not matched to the reality of abilities in Afghanistan’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 168). Anyway, as Long argued, ‘any process would have had to be cellphone-based, since any other method would expose the applicant to identity theft, fraud or death’ (2022, 20). Given that Kabul was overrun with Taliban, Afghans could face considerable danger in carrying the required paperwork on their person, or in travelling across the country to obtain passports and birth certificates. Some emails to applicants calling them forward for biometric testing stated that only a tazkira was needed, but that passports and marriage and birth certificates were still required for visas. Other emails mentioned only the need to show a passport. The stipulation that all family members should hold a valid identity document showed little understanding of the situation on the ground—applying for and collecting passports was in practice impossible as soon as Kabul had fallen.

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Widening the Protection Net With the first pictures of the mayhem in Kabul airport reaching television screens in the West, public attention became focused on how the Taliban takeover might affect a broader range of Afghan ex-employees, beyond military interpreters. Afghans who had worked on western sponsored projects to establish tax administration, support female access to education and develop local election systems were reported as receiving direct threats from the Taliban (Adam Smith International, 2023). By 24 August 2021 former senior diplomatic and development staff alerted the British government to the fact that Afghans who had been employed by the embassy, or in PRT teams, or aid programmes should urgently be considered as eligible for protection: ‘Our Afghan colleagues have told us that, when they started working for the UK Government in Kabul or Helmand, either as direct employees or as grantees/contractors/partners, they knew that they were taking some risks. But they never imagined that the Taliban would take over the entire country and that the UK would abandon them in such a fashion’ (Pire et al., 2023). Western academics involved in large publicly funded research projects in Afghanistan found themselves being contacted by Afghan civil society activists, women’s groups and journalists with whom they had worked, urgently begging for protection and support (Interview, 3.12.21). In an atmosphere of enormous tension and crisis, parliamentary representatives, civil society activists, journalists and members of the public fought desperately to defend the lives of local employees they knew. Informal coalitions of interested parties joined together to establish lists of Afghan colleagues in need of protection and followed up their cases by endlessly contacting ministries and potentially sympathetic foreign governments: ‘We contacted Italy, Turkey, Spain, Canada, Albania, Bosnia, Hungary, Slovenia, North Macedonia and Poland’ (Interview, 24.01.22). For them, it was now vital to introduce new and wider categories of at-­ risk civilians:

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(a) At risk due to ethnic or religious or gender identity (Hazaras, Shias, LGBTQI) (b) At risk due to employment—directly or through subcontracts/contracts with foreign donors (unilateral UK Aid or multi-donor aid, of which UK was part, building and estate management, accounts and legal, drivers, translators, nurses, doctors, human rights activists, SGBV support networks, women/girls rights, actors) (c) At risk due to category of work done—sexual gender-based violence, rape survivors, reproductive health, counter-terrorism, translation, informers, reporters, stringers, interpreters, blue collar workers in UK embassies, offices, compounds, security actors, ANSF staff, employees of the previous government (d) At risk due to personal health—injuries or critical health conditions, which need immediate medical attention (e) At risk due to a combination of the above factors (Blitz & Raina, 2023, 26) In the light of this intense public attention, some western authorities moved to widen the parameters of their existing protection programmes. In the Netherlands, on 18 August, a parliamentary motion led by MP Selma Belhaj managed to expand the Dutch Ministry of Defence’s original criteria for protection to include those Afghans who had worked for the Netherlands in a wide range of agencies beyond the military, like development projects, human rights and women’s groups and journalism. The Danes similarly broadened their eligibility rules to include employees of Danish NGOs and locally hired EU and NATO staff. In the UK, on 16 August, the government introduced an additional ‘Special Cases’ scheme as a response to calls from MPs and the media to address the situation of Afghans who were at risk but did not qualify for the ARAP programme: ‘In the week of the 16th, it was decided by those Ministers that, if there was spare capacity on flights … we would look to prioritise additional Afghans who did not fit into the first two categories’ (Casey, 2022, Q.387). Foreign Office Ministers had apparently already tested the category 4 special provisions of ARAP and been advised that they would not cover the broader range of potential Taliban victims— journalists, judges and human rights activists—who were now being

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cited by MPs and the media: ‘people who were not directly employed by the Government but who had worked alongside us or in enabling roles’ (Casey, 2022, Q.398). Broadening criteria however, and introducing new parallel programmes, did not necessarily ease the situation. In the UK, whilst the ARAP scheme had definite published criteria, the newly introduced Special Cases initiative was a good deal vaguer. Thus, if someone had been turned down for the ARAP scheme, they would not automatically be referred to the Foreign Office’s Special Cases list: ‘We never set this up as an application-based scheme. It is very obvious that if we had done that … the demand would have been overwhelming…. We received the bulk of emails from lots of ordinary Afghans…. We set it up in a different way, which was based on the cohorts that we knew would likely to be of particular vulnerability as a result of the Taliban takeover—those on whose behalf MPs had made representations’ (Casey, 2022, Q. 399). The criteria were listed as: ‘contribution to UK objectives, vulnerability; and, in very rare cases, sensitive information or knowledge that individuals held’ (Barton, 2022, Q.403). Post hoc criticism in the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee suggested that this third programme in fact largely added to the existing confusion—‘because we brought this chaos into the system, we were not really prioritising at all. We were basically sucking a finger and sticking it up in the air’ (Bryant, 2022 Q.402).

Identifying Evacuees Successful management of an Evacuation which would offer protection to Afghans in danger would depend firstly on being able to speedily identify which Afghans should be airlifted out (Fig. 5.2). This was a major problem. Across all the western powers which had intervened in Afghanistan there was a severe shortage of basic data on ex-­employees. In the case of the most discussed group, the interpreters, establishing the numbers who had worked with different NATO forces and agencies was, as Chap. 3 indicated, far from easy. The UK Ministry of Defence for example at various times proposed figures of 2821 (in June 2021), and either 7000 (in 2018) or 4, 013 (in September 2021) locally

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Fig. 5.2  US Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron load passengers aboard a US Air Force C17 Globemaster III in support of the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA), Afghanistan, August 24 2021

employed civilians which included interpreters (Sulha Alliance Written Evidence, 2023). In its evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee, the Sulha Alliance pointed to a failure in the UK’s Evacuation efforts to make effective use of the archived information the MOD had accumulated from the previous ex gratia and intimidation schemes and from the histories of applications to ARAP after April 2021 which might have helped them to identify at-risk Afghans and prepare them for Evacuation: ‘The various records of the number of LECSs Employed by the MOD and information on numbers of interpreters and LECs relocated are inconsistent and incomplete’ (Sulha Alliance Written Evidence, 2023). In the case of the USA, the Minority Senate Report on the Evacuation concluded that whilst the US evacuated some 123,000 people, including 6000 Americans, a very large number of the vulnerable (one estimate put

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that at 100,000) were left behind. It pointed out that one of the chief difficulties was the ‘lack of record keeping by DoD (Department of Defense)’ (US Senate, 2022). There had been no central database of applicants for the Afghanistan Special Immigrant Visa (ASIV) so that the original western employers of Afghans had to be emailed for verification of their status; ‘the ASIV unit must search for the contract on a public government website which does not keep a full accounting of all US government contracts’. The SIV programme anyway had a huge backlog (estimated as 17,000) when President Biden took office. Crucially, after eligibility for the SIV’s programme was expanded to include Afghans employed by ISAF or ISAF’s successor mission, neither the State Department nor the Defense Department was able to provide a clear baseline of those potentially eligible. This lack of a central database of those employed by the Americans meant that identifying the potentially vulnerable across multiple departments and agencies was virtually impossible. The failure to have robust lists of locally employed civilians and potentially vulnerable Afghans before the August Evacuation was an issue which was common to many countries whose footprint in Afghanistan had been much smaller than that of the Americans and the British. Those with no major presence in Afghanistan since 2014 might have been expected to be able to consult historic employment archives, but were still, as in the German case, establishing their lists during the Evacuation period itself. As with the British, it was clear that the nature of the contracts under which Afghans had been working was decisive in the inclusion or exclusion of their names from Evacuation lists. Thus personnel employed by the German Society for International Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur internationale Zusammenarbeit, GIZ) were not immediately seen as suitable candidates for Evacuation. Indeed a case brought before the Berlin Administrative Court in August 2021 concerned one Afghan employee, his wife and three children, who had worked for GIZ until September 2017, but who had been refused a visa because his work terminated in 2017. The government case was that if this man’s right to entry was accepted, any Afghan citizen under threat would have the right to enter Germany. The Court ruled that the case did

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not concern ‘any number of Afghan nationals’, but was instead about someone who had been a local employee (Cremer & Hübner, 2022, 14). In Canada, the Afghan Canadian Interpreters organisation (ACI) compiled their own lists and files on those Afghans employed in Canadian missions and, along with fifteen other advocacy groups, sent an open letter to the prime minister on 1 June 2021, warning him that time was running out: ‘ we needed an effective means to get people assessed initially and then more completely processed in either Canada or elsewhere … there was no time or money for passports if people didn’t already have them, and we recommended a refugee-type approach’ (Long, 2022, 20). The Australians on the other hand did appear to have some sense of the numbers of Afghan locally employed civilians they needed to airlift, but had no clear idea of where these ex-employees were currently living: As 12 August, Home Affairs advised DFAT that there were around 425 Afghan LEE with visas, or on hand visa applications … DFAT does not hold a record of the location of where visa applicants lived in Afghanistan. (Australian Senate, 2022, 81)

The comparatively early closure of the embassy made it more difficult to establish lists of the vulnerable and prepare carefully for their departure, signalling ‘a lack of humanitarian consideration for Afghan nationals and apparent lack of planning in this hasty retreat and evacuation from Afghanistan’ (Australian Senate, 76). According to the Support Association for the Women of Afghanistan (SAWA), ‘hundreds of Afghan nationals previously employed by the Embassy, along with interpreters, translators, drivers etc who had supported Australian troops, were left stranded’ (Australian Senate, 75). The information gap on local personnel who had worked alongside NATO was a recurrent theme. Thus the Danish government’s conclusions on Denmark’s role in the Evacuation cited as one of the lessons learned for the future the need to properly register the names of those working with the military and provide them with Danish-ID numbers: ‘The Danish Defence should ensure a uniform mode of registration pursuant to the guidelines concerning the cooperation with interpreters and

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other local staff…. Moreover, the Danish Defence should improve ways to unambiguously confirm a collaborative relationship with local civilians, for example by implementing Danish ID-numbers and registering the primary Danish collaborator’ (Danish Evaluation, 2022, Sub-­ conclusion 36). The picture on late and inadequate lists of personnel however was mixed. Two months before the fall of Kabul, some German agencies appeared to have been able to provide the German government with lists of Afghans who should be evacuated. Thus Caritas Germany reported that their local Afghan office had started preparations for a likely Evacuation in June, drawing up lists sent on to the Ministry of Development and the Ministry of Interior, on the basis of employment information they already possessed about Afghan staff who were entitled to medical benefits. The process was clearly tedious, with details having to be checked and frequent phone calls between Kabul and Germany. Nevertheless, this ‘consolidated holistic approach’, with Caritas HQ supporting local initiatives, the Catholic Church providing pressure and the German Embassy in Islamabad helping out, meant that the twenty-four (out of twenty-seven) Afghan employees who expressed a desire to leave were successfully airlifted out of the country. On 17 August, the local director himself was instructed to evacuate via a WhatsApp group of Germans in Afghanistan and secured a flight to Tashkent (Interview, 1.2.22). However, this level of detailed knowledge about employees in a relatively small agency seemed to be generally lacking across the wider spectrum of government departments and military commands.

Managing the Evacuation Besides uncertainty about the numbers and details of Afghans who should be protected, the organisation of the Evacuation was conditioned by a key institutional factor—the need for cooperation between different interested ministries and departments, often with widely divergent agendas. As ISAF countries reviewed what had happened during the intense two and a half weeks of the Evacuation, a reiterated theme was the difficulty experienced in executing such an operation within existing

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departmental structures. Shelson for example saw three different bodies involved in planning the Canadian airlift: ‘IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) was the department that applications would go through, and they were the ones who were calling people to the airport by email. The Canadian Forces were, in my understanding, manning the gates, and GAC (Global Affairs Canada) had to approve the people who would get inside. So you had three different departments that weren’t all talking to each other’ (2022, 24). There appeared to be no effective partnership—departments ‘were not looking at it as a mission that all three entities should have been taking part in for the end goal of getting our people to Canada’ (Long, 2022, 24). In the UK, the two schemes for welcoming Afghans—the ARAP’s programme and the late introduced Special Cases addition—were run by separate ministries, the MOD in the case of ARAP’s and the FCDO for special cases. The Home Office, with its immigration regulations, was essentially the arbiter in issuing visas and permissions to fly, whilst the army on the ground interacted with Afghans at the airport gates. The Parliamentary Report on the Evacuation was damning in its conclusions: ‘The evacuation required clear decision-making, strong political leadership and tight coordination. We have seen little evidence of this…. It is clearly unacceptable that neither ministers nor civil servants have been able to articulate the operational chain of command involved in conducting a major operation…. Although ministers claimed that they worked closely together, the decision to run the operation through three departments undermined coordination’ (Missing in Action, 2022, Conclusion 9). Beyond the difficulties inherent in complex interdepartmental operations, there were also problems of communication with interested agencies and groups outside government which had precious information on Afghans in peril. The Senate Minority Report in the USA signalled a ‘lack of clear communication’ and noted that in just three days congressional staff had sent over 2500 inquiries about Afghans in need of Evacuation, but that the State Department had been unable to open the emails and adjudicate most cases until the October following the Evacuation (US Senate, 2022, 21). In the UK, members of the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG) found it extremely difficult to engage with government in defence of their Afghan employees: ‘trying to get through

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to people; trying to get your people out because you knew very well that they were at major risk … trying to get them on a list; and then trying to get them to the airport was a major issue’ (Winter, 2022, Q.3). In its conclusions on the Australian conduct of the operation, the Senate Report explicitly recommended ‘the development of formalised protocols for incorporating relevant stakeholder groups into government planning and evacuation processes (for example, legal and advocacy groups working with affected groups and individuals in country)’ (Australian Senate, 2022, 9.56). Given the speed with which events in Kabul were happening, it was perhaps understandable that the crisis teams set up to manage the situation took a little time to establish themselves firmly. In the UK however, the hub directing Evacuation operations, based in the FCDO, seemed perilously ad hoc. A whistleblower claimed that the whole operation had been insufficiently staffed—up to 22 August, only two people were working there, a number increased to six thereafter. The turnover of personnel was apparently high, with night shifts often unallocated, and new staff regularly drafted in who had to be brought up to speed. Ministers and senior officials who should themselves have been directing operations seemed largely divorced from proceedings—the Foreign Secretary and the Permanent Secretary were both away on holiday—and certainly unaware of the speed with which decisions had to be made if Afghan lives were to be saved. Thus for example, the Foreign Secretary demanded that cases should be set out for him in a clear tabular form before he made any decisions, a move which led to valuable time being wasted reformatting information: ‘for the Foreign Secretary to make this request suggests he did not fully understand the situation’ (Marshall, 2022, Written Evidence, 173). The whole rudimentary operation was speedily overtaken by the sheer volume of messages and requests that were being received. On 26 August, there were apparently 4914 unread emails in the ARAP inbox, and these included ‘people who had worked directly for the UK (interpreters, guards, etc.)’ (Marshall, 2022 Written evidence, 91). The numbers seeking assistance through the Special Cases programme were likewise huge: ‘something like 180,000 pieces of correspondence in August, and nearly a quarter of a million in total, with 19,000 on the peak day…’ (Marshall,

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2022 Written Evidence, 319). The figure of applications was estimated as between 75,000 and 150,000 (including dependents), but fewer than 5% of these actually received any assistance. Between 21 and 25 August, ‘there were usually over 5000 unread emails in the inbox at any given moment…. I was struck by many titles including phrases such as “please save my children”’ (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 20). Although emails received an automatic response that the request for assistance had been logged, in practice this was seldom the case. Between 25 August and 1 September, emails were marked as read, a possible manoeuvre to enable the prime minister and foreign secretary to plausibly claim that there were no unread emails, although since the names were not being entered on a spreadsheet, the likelihood that decisions on the applicants had been made was low. The impression given in this hectic period is of separate mailboxes full of anguished requests, with little or no coordination between the systems—‘emails were frequently forwarded between the ARAP, Afghan Special Cases, and generic mailboxes … the result of this confusion between email inboxes was likely that some applicants will not have been considered for evacuation because their email waited days for attention in one of the various inboxes before being forwarded on and waiting again for attention in another’ (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 43). In this situation, Afghan interpreters or guards who might have been entitled to Evacuation under ARAP but who had been deemed ineligible because they were subcontracted rather than directly employed could well have been shuttled from one inbox to another. In the frenzied rush to establish the late-introduced Special Cases scheme, the criteria for inclusion or exclusion had been left unclear. Thus, ‘vulnerability’ to the Taliban potentially encompassed a majority of applicants. ‘Support for UK objectives in Afghanistan’, given the government’s broad aims in the country, also applied to a majority of those seeking help. The final criterion, ‘Significance/Sensitivity’, was only vaguely defined. It could have referred to the prominence of the applicant, or to that of the politician pursuing their case—on 22 or 23 August, one senior member of the Foreign Office processing team described significance as meaning that a British MP had been lobbying on the applicant’s behalf (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 26). The base line to which civil

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servants were working, namely the actual number of places on airplanes available at any one point seemed to be unknown until 24 August when it appeared that soldiers on the spot were making a count of how many people had been called forward in relation to the probable slots available. For those at the sharp end of recommending names for Evacuation, the task was complex and agonising. Crucially, there was a clear knowledge deficit within the group managing the Evacuation: ‘no member of the Afghan Special Cases team had studied Afghanistan, worked on Afghanistan previously, or had a detailed knowledge of Afghanistan’, so that uninformed civil servants were asked to pass judgement on organisations that they had never heard of: ‘there was no ability to process applications in any language other than English. There was no access to a Foreign Office research analyst to provide expert advice’ (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 115). Relatively junior staff were thus making decisions about the future of Afghans from a range of disparate agencies about which they knew very little—NGOs, the Afghan Women’s football team, the Afghan Paralympics team and Afghan Human Rights organisations. Marshall, the whistleblower, for example was forced to request information on individual Afghans on a case-by-case basis from Tom Tugendhat, the Chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee, ‘because he clearly knew much more about Afghanistan than the FCDO staff dealing with the crisis’ (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 116). The whole operation was being run by people who could not speak Dari or Pashto, and there was no recourse to former members of staff who might have possessed these language skills, so that basic and serious errors were made: ‘the Dari text on the “call-up” emails inviting Afghans for evacuation was inaccurate. The Dari said that a printed version of the email was necessary to enter the airport but in fact a digital copy on the phone was fine … this reflects our lack of experience as no one spoke Dari and therefore no one noticed this problem’ (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 76). Whilst, notoriously, Evacuation was accorded to the staff and animals of the Nowzad animal protection agency, clearly outwith the scheme’s basic criteria, staff with limited information struggled to make comparative judgements on different sorts of organisation within the remit of the programme. The Nomad Group for example combined several separate for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, with activities ranging from

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security, women’s empowerment and development. Staff initially considered that the Taliban would be less likely to target a private company of this sort, but by the time a final list of names was sent to the Home Office, it was clear that Nomad employees were in fact being subjected to ferocious Taliban threats. The director of the organisation was told that there were no more places on evacuation planes, but that he and his staff would be granted visas for the UK if they travelled to the border with Pakistan. When the group arrived there however, visas were only offered to the British director and one other person, and the twenty-five remaining staff only got out of Afghanistan when they were given Australian visas. The Director, refusing to leave unless all his employees were evacuated, was arrested by the Taliban, along with members of his staff, and kept in prison for six weeks. Attempts to raise the Nomad case earlier had been dismissed as being too political (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 247). Representations for the Special Cases category were being received from MPs on behalf of several different cohorts—Chevening scholars, women’s rights activists—and from media organisations like Sky and the BBC. MPs described a ‘deeply distressing situation’ in which they were on phone calls early in the morning and late at night trying to get people out. In Afghanistan itself, the British Ambassador made a personal promise to the one hundred and twenty-five guards and their families at the embassy, employed by GardaWorld, that he would get them evacuated (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 167). By 25 August, the volume of desperate requests from senior UK figures to help Afghans stranded in the country was so high that only those coming from a Secretary of State were treated at that stage as worthy of consideration. In the mounting chaos, the concept of any hierarchy for priority evacuation foundered on the difficulty of establishing meaningful lists of applicants and the attendant bureaucracy in sending this information to the Home Office for processing. On the ground in the airport in Kabul, IT support for the British troops who were bearing the brunt of processing applications was initially poor. There was a severe shortage of computers—on the evening of 21 August, only one computer for every two soldiers was available, and no passwords had been sent: ‘The failure to issue soldiers with sufficient

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computers for over 12 hours clearly delayed the issuing of travel documents, it will therefore have reduced the chance of selected Afghans being evacuated, and consequently may directly result in the deaths of people’ (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 80). The order of names on the final spreadsheets for ‘call-up’ to the airport was entirely arbitrary, but became in effect the order in which potential evacuees were summoned for evacuation, with soldiers at the airport proceeding down the spreadsheet in the order they had been given ‘a profoundly flawed approach to prioritisation’ which was clearly not their fault (Marshall, 2022 Written Evidence, 65, 71, 72). In effect, eighteen year old soldiers were making life and death decisions on a minute-by-minute basis: ‘There was one Afghan who spoke good English and he was showing me pictures of him in America. He didn’t have any paperwork and he was crying. He lifted his top and showed me scars from the Taliban. He was on his knees, crying and begging, but I couldn’t let him through…. They’d show their ID cards, but that wasn’t enough. They were begging. They knew they were dead if they didn’t get on a flight, but we couldn’t process them on just an ID card’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 148). What was evident throughout the West’s response to the Evacuation was the paucity of data, the lack of robust archival evidence around the identity and status of those Afghans who had been employed by or helped the ISAF war effort over twenty years. In the second place, there was generally a glaring knowledge deficit among those who were charged with producing lists of the endangered. Expert specialist advice on Afghanistan was usually absent, and there appeared to be scant provision of the language skills in Dari and Pashto which might have eased communication. The ‘duty of care’ owed by an employer was interpreted at least initially as relating solely to those locally employed civilians who had been directly employed by the Ministries of Defence in the particular countries. Civilians whose employment had been subcontracted to third parties or who were working for third-party aid agencies, although paid for by European or American aid money, were often forgotten or not prioritised. Thirdly, a plethora of schemes, often introduced during the actual weeks of the Evacuation, were managed by different ministries, and their criteria for the acceptance of Afghan applications were often unclear.

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Inter-ministerial bureaucracy, and conflicts between the agendas of different departments, slowed and often muddled the emergency operation. Concerns about limiting immigration and upholding national security were played out in arguments about definitions of ‘national’, and the acceptable size of accompanying families, within an atmosphere of intense and active lobbying as politicians, the media, aid agencies, educational organisations and individuals with links to Afghan groups tried to ensure that their contacts in the country were brought to safety.

Veterans In this situation of slow official responses and acute danger, some ex-­ interpreters who had worked closely with western soldiers reactivated their personal contacts with them, inhabiting a space of encounter which had now become virtual. In what some veterans described as their ‘WhatsApp War’, or ‘Digital Dunkirk’, ‘veterans who had fought in the country more than a decade ago now volunteered to come back to the conflict, but they did so in a way that was a first in military history. They joined the war via their phones, laptops, and social media accounts’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 177). After finding it impossible to get any form of government help to enable their Afghan colleagues to be evacuated, some veterans decided to adopt more direct forms of support: ‘I was reaching out to the Defence Secretary, to the Prime Minister’s Office, to Afghans, and then basically I found the best way of working was to go back to the tactical level, and use people that I knew, … guys on the ground’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 180). Given the difficulties of contacting the FCDO operations’ centre, and getting speedy decisions, alternative informal networks involving ex-military personnel and people in Afghanistan suddenly came into being to rescue endangered Afghans and bring them to safety. Information on escape plans was exchanged digitally from kitchens and living rooms— ‘I’d give the evacuees quick clear briefs over WhatsApp’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 180)—with Google maps marked out to indicate known Taliban checkpoints. Afghans who had been identified would be collected into

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‘packets’ and then taken to the airport. In effect, ex-veterans were often working full-time both in their current jobs and in efforts to rescue former Afghan colleagues, what one described as ‘evacuation moonlighting’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 178). In the US, independent veteran groups, non-governmental organisations and civil society associations like Evacuate Our Allies Coalition got involved at a micro level in similar direct rescue operations, in some cases actually funding planes to fly to Afghanistan and bring their Afghan friends out of the country. Ackerman described private efforts to charter an A320 airbus—‘Within hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to a first A320.The money seems to flow from everywhere—from (entrepreneurs), from the Rockefeller Foundation; people want to help’ (2022, 22). Task Force Pineapple, led by a retired Green Beret, in collaboration with US Special Forces and the US Embassy, rescued some five hundred Afghan special operators and their families. As in Britain, these escape plans were coordinated by text or phone, communicating with trusted personnel still in Afghanistan and organising convoys of minibuses which would take interpreters, activists and journalists through both Taliban and American checkpoints to whichever plane was likely to be available: ‘a non-Afghan passport holder will be riding in each bus— we have four journalists: two Americans, a Canadian, and an Australian, who’ve volunteered to ride in the buses to help them through the Taliban checkpoints’ (Ackerman, 2022, 23). The contrast between the limitations of official government programmes and the relative success of these unofficial alternative strategies seemed clear to the veterans involved: ‘Digital Dunkirk should never have been necessary. It existed because government programmes had failed, but into this void stepped soldiers and veterans and civilians who knew that they owed the Afghan people their time, and effort’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 197). For some of these veterans at least, ‘Digital Dunkirk’ seemed to be an opportunity to vindicate their war in Afghanistan and repay the debts they felt were owed: ‘Afghanistan was a very formative experience for a whole generation of us’, ‘I’m not really proud of what I did on tour, but I’m incredibly proud of what veterans did during the airlift’ (Wood & Jones, 2023, 196, 197).

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Time, Space and Hierarchy What happened to locally employed civilians in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover was in many ways a direct legacy of how they had been considered by the West during the preceding twenty year war. There was vanishingly little formal information on the identity, past employment and addresses of those who had worked with ISAF forces or western governments. Databases of directly employed personnel were in most cases defective. Details on those subcontracted or working alongside western cultural or development projects were even less visible. Although there were notable exceptions—Caritas Germany for example with its full employment/health benefit records—the overall position was that of institutional ignorance. Refugee schemes which had been set up before August 2021 to support those who might potentially find themselves in danger—ARAPs in the UK, SIVs in the USA—largely operated on a minimalist agenda, understaffed, accepting relatively few applicants and producing enormous backlogs of unanswered requests. What might therefore have been a useful archive to consult when seeking to prioritise evacuees in an emergency was often unusable and in practice worked at cross purposes to new programmes introduced in the dark days of the Evacuation. The failure to maintain robust employment details of Afghans contrasted vividly with the effort ISAF had made to identify and keep records of potential enemy personnel. The American Senate Report noted how the bureaucratic flux in which locally employed civilians found themselves was starkly at odds with the sophisticated tracking of Afghan enemies which the US had perfected: ‘in 20 years of operations in Afghanistan, the US military had the fingerprints of most high value targets and could easily identify them on the battlefield. Yet somehow, DoD could not figure out how to maintain a similar database to identify the very Afghans who risked their lives to help us succeed’ (US Senate, 2022, 27). Whether the rapidity of the fall of Kabul could have been predicted or not, evidence shows that preparations for the final NATO exodus from Afghanistan, where these existed, were largely military—the logistics of a potential Evacuation—and focused at least initially on the safety of

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national passport holders. Western countries feared that a large influx of Afghan refugees could pose threats to immigration policies and to national security. The fact that the military and cultural objectives of ISAF in Afghanistan could only have been realised with the active support of locally employed Afghans—translators, interpreters, embassy and cultural agency staff, development and aid workers and human rights and women’s rights advocates—seldom appeared to be uppermost in the minds of those who managed Evacuation operations. In many of the countries concerned, national coordination of the Evacuation suffered from departmental rivalry. In some cases, the organisation was ad hoc, seemingly understaffed and, despite the twenty year experience of living and working in the country, deficient in expert knowledge of Afghanistan and of its languages. Official communication strategies with Afghans in danger tended to rely initially on untranslated material and to prioritise email interchanges which were difficult to access in the context of a collapsing society. National representatives in parliaments and congresses became heavily involved in lobbying for particular cases of endangered Afghans and, with the support of media outlets and civil society organisations, created a storm of anguished concern about locally employed civilians which would extend beyond the pre-­Evacuation campaigns on behalf of military translator/interpreters. Veterans in the West however continued not only to raise the specific cases of those Afghans who had translated and interpreted for them, but also created informal and parallel initiatives in order to rescue their former colleagues when official channels seemed to be blocked. The fact that a range of countries involved in the NATO operations— the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Canada—speedily established official inquiries on the conduct of the Evacuation demonstrates the importance that the events of August 2021 would hold in the minds and imaginations of the general public in the West. The extent to which these conclusions would serve to affect attitudes towards locally employed civilians in the future and to shape contractual relationships with interpreters is discussed in the next chapters. What is not in doubt however is that the Evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021 highlighted the ways in which the West defined in practice such key concepts as ‘foreignness’, ‘moral responsibility’ and an employer’s ‘duty of care’. It challenged too

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how far the West’s hinterland of knowledge about Afghanistan had actually developed and whether such knowledge could be usefully and effectively operationalised to promote peaceful outcomes. For one American military veteran, the Evacuation represented for the West a collapse of time, space and hierarchy: Time has collapsed as those of us who fought in Afghanistan years ago have found ourselves thrown back into that conflict with an intensity as though we’d never left. Space has collapsed, as those of us coordinating these evacuations are spread across the world…. And hierarchy has collapsed, as from the president of the United States on down, we are all subject to the vicissitudes of this catastrophic withdrawal. (Ackerman, 2022, 101)

For western governments and the general public, the past, some of the legacies of the West’s intervention in Afghanistan, were laid startlingly bare by the Evacuation. People across the West were linked, if at least fleetingly, with Afghan colleagues with whom they had worked, or about whom they knew something, and with advocacy groups across the US and Europe who were seeking to support Afghans in danger. As governments struggled to rise to the demands of the emergency, parliamentary representatives and lobby groups around the world loudly demanded that the lives of Afghans who had put themselves in danger should be valued by the West at least as much as those of Europeans and Americans.

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Blitz, B., & Raina, N. (2023). Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Defence Committee. HC 725. Written Evidence. AFG0010. Bristow, L. (2022). Q.270, 440, 442, 443, 444, 446. Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. HC 169/685. Bryant, C. (2022). Q.402. Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. HC 169/685. Casey, N. (2022). Q.387, 398, 399. Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. HC 169/685. Cremer, H., & Hübner, C. (2022). Responsibility for Basic Human Rights Following the Withdrawal from Afghanistan: On Germany’s Duty to Protect Particularly Vulnerable Afghans. German Institute for Human Rights. https:// nbn-­resolving.org/urn:de: 0168-­ssoar-­78421-­1 Dale, S. (2022). 5.26. Refugee Advice and Casework Service. Australia’s Engagement in Afghanistan. Interim Report, Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, Commonwealth of Australia. 456. De Jong, S., & Sarantidis, D. (2022). Divided in Leaving Together; The Resettlement of Afghan Locally Employed Staff. IGDC Working Report and Briefings 2, Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, University of York. Drax, R. (2023). Q7. Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Defence Committee. HC 725. Evaluation, D. (2022). Evaluation of the Danish Evacuation from Afghanistan. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Farrell, T. (2022). Australia’s Engagement in Afghanistan. Interim Report, Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, Commonwealth of Australia. Film. (2022). Escape from Kabul Airport. Dir. Jamie Roberts. BBC Iplayer. Jeffrey, H. (2022). Australia’s Engagement in Afghanistan. Interim Report, Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, Commonwealth of Australia. 456. Long, W. (2022). Honouring Canada’s Legacy in Afghanistan: Responding to the Humanitarian Crisis and Helping People Reach Safety. Report of Special Committee on Afghanistan, House of Commons: 20. Mallet, V. (2021). Why France Was more Clear-Eyed About Afghanistan than the US. Financial Times, 31 August. https://www.ft.com

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Marshall, R. (2022) Written Evidence. Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. HC 169/685. AFG0038. Middleton, D., Lt. Col. (2022). Interview. Imperial War Museum. 37073. Missing in Action. (2022). UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. HC 169/685. Parly, F. (2021). Commission de la défense nationale et des forces armées. Compte rendu, 14 Sept. Peddle, S. (2022). Honouring Canada’s Legacy in Afghanistan: Responding to the Humanitarian Crisis and Helping People Reach Safety. Report of Special Committee on Afghanistan, House of Commons: 21. Pire, L.-H., Hearn, S., Hearn, A., & Leverment, H. (2023). Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Defence Committee. HC 725. Written Evidence. AFG0009. Shelson, C. (2022). Honouring Canada’s Legacy in Afghanistan: Responding to the Humanitarian Crisis and Helping People Reach Safety. Report of Special Committee on Afghanistan, House of Commons: 21. Sulha Alliance Written Evidence. (2023). Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Defence Committee. HC 725. AFG0015. US Senate. (2022). Left Behind. A Brief Assessment of the Biden Administration’s Strategic Failures During the Afghanistan Evacuation. Committee on Foreign Relations. Minority Report. Wallace, B. (2023). Q.8, Q.41 Withdrawal from Afghanistan. House of Commons Defence Committee. HC 725. Winter, E. (2022). Afghanistan: UK Support for Aid Workers and the Afghan People. House of Commons. HC 919. Wood, L., & Jones, G. (2023). Escape from Kabul. The Inside Story. Hodder and Stoughton.

6 After the Evacuation

Publicity in the West around the chaotic Evacuation in August 2021 had brought a wider group of endangered Afghan civilians into the civic conversation as western lobbyists from parliament, development agencies, universities and the media championed their cause alongside the longer established veteran advocacy for military interpreters. In the immediate aftermath of the Evacuation however, attention on those left behind initially refocused on the fate of ex-interpreters and their families. Gradually however this concern widened out once more to include western responsibility for other groups who had worked with ISAF during the twenty year intervention and were currently in hiding. The spaces of encounter between westerners and Afghans were now located in the West itself, largely within refugee settings like asylum centres and hotels. Here, ex-­ interpreters, no longer intermediaries as they had been in Afghanistan, lost both the professional and military identities which had marked them out before 2021, becoming instead part of a larger mass of ‘immigrants’. In the western imagination, post-Taliban Afghanistan was perceived as a catastrophe, its peoples plunged into hunger and penury. As Taliban measures to restrict women’s rights were enacted, this western image of Afghan disaster was specifically gendered through a presentation which in effect helped to reinterpret aspects of the original western intervention and some of its moral repercussions. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Footitt, Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5_6

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The Afghans Left Behind On the whole, estimates of the numbers of endangered Afghans left behind after the Evacuation tended to come not from governments, but from associations and advocacy groups and from those translators/interpreters who had escaped to the West before 2021. The US Association of Wartime Allies (AWA) for example, formed in 2019, proposed to use the numbers of those who had formerly applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) as a starting point to assess the problem. According to these data, there were 78,000 applicants in the SIV pipeline who were still waiting for answers to their requests when Kabul fell. They estimated in April 2023 that at this rate it would take thirty-one years to clear the backlog. In 2022 and 2023 AWA conducted surveys of these ‘left behind Afghans’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022. Feb., 1), with 3988 responses in February 2022 and 1934 in June 2022. The typical profile of the Afghans in the survey was that of a thirty-four year old male with a twenty-three year old wife and between one and two children. The evidence AWA collected pointed to the violence and economic hardship which such Afghans were now facing—in the six months since the Evacuation, AWA concluded that nearly 30% of their respondents had been imprisoned by the Taliban, and 52% had been stopped and questioned, whilst 88% claimed that they had lost their job because of previous employment with the Americans, and 94% intimated that they were suffering economic hardship (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022, Feb.). The stories behind these figures, as illustrated by comments offered by the Afghans themselves, attested graphically to the profound effect on their lives of having been left behind: ‘We are suffering the worse days of our life. I never go outside of my living area. I have (not) left home since the Taliban took over the country … Some of my (family) has provided food and other necessities for me and my kids. I have faced economic hardship. I will not be able to (feed) my kids in near future, and I lost my job furthermore I cannot walk freely in the city/village because the Taliban will arrest me’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022, Feb., 3). The most frequent post formerly held by those responding was that of interpreter, with an average service of two years and three months: ‘I am

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a woman it is extremely hard for me to live afterward in Afghanistan because I have worked with USG (US Government) as Translator, in these days TBs (Talibans) are killing women who have worked before…. I know I will be killed so please I am kindly requesting of you to work on my case … please help me and save me as I have three little kids please’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022. Feb.,8); ‘When the Taliban capture Kabul They warned me that we would kill you because you were a translator with the Americans. For this reason I leave my house and hide in the house of my relatives’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022. Feb., 8); ‘I am under serious threat because Taliban have been searching for those who have worked for the US government especially linguists, Taliban targets people who had affiliations with US government in an appropriate time and find different excuses for their killings and then make it Seems as they were not involved in the killings’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022. Feb., 7). This notion of the ‘Left behind’ as relating primarily to combat interpreters who still deserved to be defended by western governments remained strong among military circles in the West. Thus in the US, some veterans deliberately sought to maintain links with interpreters with whom they had worked. In August 2022, out of 1450 ex-military personnel questioned by AWA, 34.8% said that they were still in contact with their ‘interpreter or other Afghan’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022. August, 9). Army veterans spoke of their continuing commitment to those whom they regarded as service colleagues: ‘I am a retired US Army soldier working to get my interpreter, Zabi, to the US and his family safely out of Afghanistan. I contacted my detachment commander and he agreed to sign a P2 work verification for Zabi covering 2009–2010 when he worked with me as an interpreter’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022. August, 29); ‘I have been working since July to get my interpreter’s family out of Afghanistan. One younger brother is in the US now but his wife and kids are still back in the country. Mom, Dad and another younger brother are still in hiding as well’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022. August, 32). In the UK, the SulhaAlliance, with its strong veteran co-leadership, continued the fight to bring Afghan interpreters home, stressing the importance of seeing them as fellow combatants who would be as worthy

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of medals as any of their British army colleagues. With informed presentations to parliamentary committees, the provision of up-to-date information on how interpreters were now being treated, exhibitions and messages of personal solidarity from British veterans, the Alliance refused to allow the case of interpreters as fellow soldiers to be forgotten. In December 2022, an Afghan-Scottish veteran posted a picture on Twitter of four Afghans who had worked with the British army holding up placards: ‘UK do more’, ‘We are in the high risk’, ‘We left behind. Help us’, ‘We left behind. Help’ (SulhaAlliance, 2022). In 2023, Dan Jarvis MP, a former major in the Parachute Regiment, was still calling for proper support and official recognition for his wartime Afghan colleagues: ‘Afghans who served and sacrificed alongside me are desperate—from the soldier who rescued an injured British officer but has waited more than a year for a decision, to the captain with seven family members executed, who was rejected outright’. This was a debt of honour, he argued, owed to fellow combatants: ‘There is an Afghan saying: “brader ba brader, essobesh barabar”. Roughly translated, it means: “Between friends, the account should be settled”’ (2023). In Australia too, veterans groups like Forsaken Fighters militated to ensure former interpreters were brought to safety—‘A triumph of mateship over a government that acted with too little too late’ (Banville, 2022). In France, the interpreter support association compiled a list of one hundred and seventy Afghans who had not been able to fly out of Kabul including one who, after working with French forces for seven years, had failed to obtain a visa and thus found himself perilously exposed in Afghanistan: ‘Since the Taliban arrived three days ago I stay hidden at home. I don’t know what will happen to us here in Afghanistan. I’m married with four children. I’m worried for myself and for my family. Our work wasn’t secret. People are going to say to the Taliban that I worked for the army. Everyone knows’ (Tchoubar, 2021).1 In Canada where 5000 places had been reserved for the family members of interpreters, none had actually arrived by mid-2022: ‘This is what our families are going through in Afghanistan. For example, the Taliban raided the house of one of our former interpreters. His brother burned all  Author’s translation.

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the documents, and he was only able to send one of his brothers to Pakistan. He tells me he cannot afford all of his family members travelling to Pakistan at the same time and arranging for them to live there. His family is still living in Afghanistan, and they do not know what will happen to them tomorrow. They constantly change their location’ (Faizi, 2022). Whilst direct evacuations of the ‘Left Behind’ from Afghanistan ceased on 29 August 2021, some countries (Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, the USA and Australia) continued indirect relocations through Pakistan, Iran or via Qatar. In April 2023 however, many of these refugees, including former interpreters, found themselves in hotel rooms in Pakistan, supported by veterans groups like the Sulha Alliance, but still waiting to be finally brought to safety: ‘This is my sin that I worked with British forces. I am like a prisoner and we are not safe in Pakistan’ (Bancroft & Bulman, 2023). Gradually however as time went on, the seemingly shared public assumption that those ‘Left Behind’ were largely military interpreters began to be challenged as broader categories of Afghans at risk were admitted into the wider civic conversation in the West. The AWA’s August 2022 report for example argued that, ‘Often when the public thinks of “helping those who helped the military” their imagination will jump to the interpreters, but there are many others who are eligible for an SIV who worked in several other support roles on military bases. These “other” supporters were just as vital to the operational success of US focus in Afghanistan’ (Association of Wartime Allies, 2022, 5). Attention began to shift away from an exclusive concern with military interpreters to take in a wider range of those left behind, including Afghans who had been employed directly or indirectly by the West in non-kinetic roles. In some cases too, nationals of the NATO countries involved were also marooned in Afghanistan two months after the Evacuation. One group of sixty British nationals for example—engineers, taxi drivers, restaurant workers, a cancer biologist, business owners and IT specialists—had returned to Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 to try to bring their relatives back to safety as Kabul fell. Unsuccessful in securing flights out, they were now struggling to contact Foreign Office staff and finding it impossible to deal with newly re-imposed immigration rules for visas

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which required their family members to complete impossible tasks: ‘My wife would need to pass an English language test to meet the visa requirements, but there are no language courses for women in Afghanistan and no test centres’ (Gentleman, 2021). As press interest started to focus in more detail on a wider group of Afghan Locally Employed Civilians, public perceptions of the twenty year war were implicitly challenged. As argued in Chap. 3, non-military spaces of encounter had brought westerners and Afghans together in the neo-liberal version of peacebuilding which the West had prosecuted in Afghanistan, so that Afghans were employed in international organisations, embassies, development projects, cultural initiatives and human rights groups. All these spaces had borne the impress of western influence, directly or indirectly funded by the West, and translating, at least to some extent, western values and ideals. In these spaces, Afghans had necessarily mediated between western employers and their local communities, in effect often acting in these situations as informal interpreters. A BBC File on 4 Report in January 2023 for example, following the fate of four Afghan ex-employees, included the cases of an embassy driver, a BBC journalist and a British Council teacher alongside that of an Afghan who had worked directly with the military (File on 4, 2023). A Guardian special report in January 2022 provided a snapshot of some of these non-military ‘Left Behind’ Afghans who were now receiving media attention. A contractor, left in Afghanistan after the Evacuation, had participated in British government-funded projects and worked for the UN, DFID and the consultancy agency Adam Smith International. A security guard for the British Embassy, employed under contract by Garda World, along with one hundred and eighty of his colleagues, argued that guards from the French, German and Australian embassies had all been airlifted, unlike him and his co-workers: ‘Most of us have already sold our possessions … so that we’ve got money to buy food…. If anyone found out that I had worked for the British government it would be very dangerous. One of my former colleagues has already been badly beaten. We don’t leave the house very often now’. A man employed on a UK-funded programme on human rights and cultural projects described the fear in which he was living: ‘They (the Taliban) are seeking revenge against those who worked with foreign institutions … Two months ago,

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I heard that the Taliban were looking for me and they came asking for me at my previous house. After that, I hid. Whenever I feel there is a new threat, if I get an unexplained phone call, or a warning, we’re forced to move from one place to another…. In the past three months, we’ve moved many times’ (Guardian, 2022). Afghans who had been involved in development projects funded by the West also found themselves at grave risk. ‘Abdul’, in hiding since August 2021, had worked for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development on a UK Department for International Development (DFID) project funded and branded as such under the Helmand Growth Programme. As the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG) argued, ‘The UK government paid his salary. UK objectives in Afghanistan included governance and socio-­ economic development as part of a stabilisation strategy which required working closely with Afghan government officials. UK military and security interventions provided the space for these civilian efforts to take place, with UK military and civilian officials working side by side in the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team’ (BAAG, 2022, Case Study 1). In some cases, DFID itself had been the direct employer. ‘Fatima’ for example worked for eight years in Kabul, managing development and stabilisation programmes under the UK National Security Strategy for Afghanistan. She had grown up in Pakistan and was one of the very few women working for DFID in Afghanistan. Despite providing documents, including performance assessments, to prove that she was a direct employee of DFID, her application to come to the UK was refused on the grounds that she was a contracted employee (BAAG, 2022. Case Study 2). Laure-Hélène Piron, a former UK government official who had led a development team for the British Embassy in Kabul and recruited Afghans to work on the programmes, argued that one of the problems for local employees contributing to development or civil society projects was the nature of their contracts—they were subcontracted and were often employed by development contractors which had subsequently merged or changed their names during the twenty years of western intervention. One man for example had originally been recruited by a development contractor, GRM International, which was then taken over by another

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contractor, Palladium. In this sort of case, contacting American or European headquarters personnel or their employee departments to verify contracts was clearly very difficult (Worley, 2021a). The point remained however that the Taliban were unlikely to make such fine distinctions between different sorts of contract: ‘The Taliban do not see the difference between Afghan civilians who worked with us, and those who were directly employed by the British government, and nor should we’ (Piron, cited in Worley, 2021b). The problematic definition of ‘contracted’ was also relevant to the fate of Afghan teachers who had worked for the British Council in Afghanistan. These members of staff were employed under a UK-funded scheme to teach British values of diversity, inclusion and equality in hard to reach rural areas of Afghanistan, using an ‘English for Afghanistan’ course widely publicised on YouTube and Facebook, with over two million viewers. In the Evacuation, a distinction seemed to have operated between full-time permanent staff living in Kabul and contracted teachers in the field. Given that the British Council headquarters was based in the British Embassy, the Taliban would clearly have considered the organisation as a whole, and all of its former employees, in exactly the same way as they regarded British troops or UK government personnel: ‘Because I work for the Council I am perceived as promoting Christianity in schools. Many people see me as a British spy. The mullah in our local mosque preaches that anyone supporting the British Council and teaching its language is an infidel…’ (Ghulam, 2021). Twenty of the one hundred Afghan employees left behind were women. As one argued, ‘ I was the local face of Britain in more than 50 schools promoting the English language and British values which makes me and my family targets not only for the Taliban but Islamic State too—they want to make an example of us’ (Williams & Nichol, 2021). In the wake of press interest and a public petition, the teachers were finally given permission in June 2022 to apply online to come to Britain, although there was no speedy resolution as to how they would actually be able to leave the country. Thus ironically, Afghans employed to translate British values of diversity and inclusion were themselves excluded from protection: ‘The people we asked, the people we recruited to teach our values countrywide were left behind, and the reason they were left behind was due to a failed process, which

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undermines everything about the values we were trying to teach and share across the country’ (File on 4, 2023). Many Afghan journalists who worked for the BBC in a similar public-­ facing role were also left behind. During the twenty-year western intervention, the BBC had put in place a considerable media presence in Afghanistan with BBC Pashto, the World Service and a network of local reporters whose faces were often well-known. In December 2022, eight Afghan journalists who had been left behind and refused relocation appealed to the UK High Court on the grounds that they had been considered ineligible for the ARAP programme because they were not directly employed by the government. They had in fact worked for the BBC World Service which of course received around one hundred million pounds per year from the Foreign Office. In his ruling, the High Court Judge concluded that the caseworker concerned had ‘erred in confining their decisions to the issue of whether working for the BBC amounted to working for HMG (His Majesty’s government), at the expense of considering whether … a journalist working for the BBC or any other news organisation could be said to have worked alongside an HMG department, in partnership with or closely supporting that department’ (Siddique, 2023). This same issue of staff working alongside western-identified interests also affected Afghans who had been prominent in civil society organisations. As the executive director of the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group explained: ‘I’d argue that the high profile (that) many of the civil society activists have got has been generated partly by the support of funding given to them by not just the British but other governments, taking them to conferences, asking them to do media work, etc.’ (cited in Worley, 2021a). Again, the actual number of Afghan civil society and development workers potentially at risk was unknown. The Director of the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group pointed out that, ‘There used to be a system where you could register with the British embassy and they would know where you were, who you were, what you were doing, etc. Although that continued informally, it did not continue formally’ (Winter, 2022, Q.7). In the UK, five months after the Evacuation, there was however some official recognition of the fact that the category ‘Left Behind’ had to be

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considered more broadly as one referring to Afghans who might have been employed by bodies other than the Ministry of Defence. In January 2022, a new programme, the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), was introduced, intended to run alongside the existing ARAP scheme. The ACRS aimed to protect those who had assisted UK efforts in Afghanistan and ‘stood up for values such as democracy, women’s rights, freedom of speech, and rule of law’. The Pathway 3 of the scheme was expressly designed ‘ to offer a route to resettlement for those at risk who supported the UK and international community effort in Afghanistan, as well as those who are particularly vulnerable, such as women and girls at risk and members of minority groups. In the first year of this pathway, the government is considering eligible, at-risk people for resettlement from 3 groups: British Council contractors, GardaWorld contractors and Chevening alumni’ (ACRS, 2022).

Spaces of Encounter in the West With eligibility criteria often in flux in this way, establishing the numbers of Afghan refugees who actually arrived in the West after August 2021 depends on the time period being used and the extent to which promises to resettle locally employed civilians became caught up in the practicalities of national bureaucracies. Thus the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister announced in September 2021 that Canada would ultimately admit some 40,000 Afghans, although up to May 2022 the country had in fact only accepted 12,605. Countries whose footprint in Afghanistan had been relatively light dealt with smaller numbers of refugees than those like the USA and the UK whose presence had been more substantial and long term: France welcomed 396 and the Netherlands 2000, whilst the UK’s figures were 16,000 and the USA’s 76,000 (De Jong & Sarantidis, 2022). The space of encounter where Afghans and westerners now met was framed by national immigration processes which dictated such key issues as residence rights for the newly arrived Afghans, and the extent to which their families would be permitted to join them. Across NATO, there was no consistency as to the immigration or protection status offered to

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Afghans. In some countries the right to remain was open-ended, in others it was temporary and restricted. Thus Afghans relocated to the UK under the ARAP scheme automatically got indefinite Leave to Remain which meant that they were not forced to wait for the usual five years. Australia and Canada provided similar pathways to permanent residence, and Afghans admitted to the US under the SIV (Special Immigrant Visa) Scheme were immediately eligible for a green card. In Denmark however, the residency permit only lasted two years and could not be extended; in the Netherlands, it was restricted to five years, and in Germany, it was initially valid for three years (De Jong & Sarantidis, 2022). The likelihood of family members, potentially still in danger in Afghanistan, being welcomed to Europe and the USA was variable, but in practice very limited. Post-Evacuation, EU countries had suspended all deportations to Afghanistan because the situation there was so perilous. At the same time however, Denmark discontinued any further resettlement of Afghans, and the Netherlands moved to tighten its eligibility criteria. Although other countries announced additional resettlement opportunities, details about the operation and numbers accepted under these schemes were difficult to assess. The common discourse of exceptionality and protectionism which often frames national debates on immigration rapidly resurfaced. Thus the Australian government warned Afghan nationals not to come to Australia by boat as they would not be accepted. In France, visas were only issued conditionally if applicants had organised their own flights and accommodation and found a sponsor in France. In the case of Germany, Afghans wanting resettlement were told to obtain security clearance from German authorities, an impossible task given that there was no longer any German diplomatic representation in the country. The Canadian government required Afghan applicants to provide biometric data before being issued with travel documents, a stipulation which was unrealistic in the context of post-Taliban Afghanistan and would have meant their travelling to a third country like Pakistan (De Jong & Sarantidis, 2022). As late as January 2023, more than one hundred charities and activists called on the British government to reunite families which had been separated during the Evacuation: ‘It’s been 18 months since families were torn apart when Kabul fell. The government has effectively abandoned Afghans, leaving them without a process to

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reunite with loved ones who are at risk despite repeated promises made’ (cited in Taylor, 2023). For Afghans seeking to make new lives in the West, the slowness and bureaucracy of the refugee/asylum processes in which they now found themselves were a major impediment. In Australia where decisions traditionally took months or years, it was reported that former interpreters had been killed in Afghanistan whilst they were waiting for visa decisions and that Afghans with family members already in Australia were still marooned in refugee camps in Texas. In France, up to December 2021, there was a backlog of more than 3500 family reunification cases, with an average waiting time of three and a half years. In Germany, more than 4000 Afghans who had a right to family reunification were on a waiting list to submit an application, with a total of only one hundred applications per month being processed in September 2021. In the UK, only 15% of applications to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Scheme received a decision by March 2022. Within these official discursive framings of immigration policy, the actual physical spaces of encounter between Afghans and westerners initially took the form of sizeable holding areas which would accommodate large groups—disused barracks, hotels or asylum centres. In some cases immediately after the mass Evacuation, Afghans were flown to temporary holding camps for processing like Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo for example. The American strategy in general was to place their Afghan guests in a network of domestic and international army bases, including the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst facility in New Jersey, Fort Pickett (Virginia), Fort Lee (Virginia) and Marine Base Quantico (Virginia). The Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst expected to host 3500 evacuees, but by September 2021, it was expecting to receive 13,000 (Webb, 2022). The Department of Defense’s Inspectorate reported that Afghans were housed in existing military villages, with another village of tents being added to supplement the accommodation. Each evacuee was issued with a wristband with a unique identification number, and biographical information on them was entered in a department database. The tent facilities had originally been open-plan, but the Afghan evacuees had soon made it clear that privacy was vital to them, so that the authorities subsequently created wood and drywall private rooms within the tents. The military

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provided recreational activities, with outdoor spaces in each village, a children’s playground and a gym with separate areas for men and women and women-only hours. Each section of the base had a prayer room, and there was medical care on site. The programme at the New Jersey base was designed to ensure that there was ‘Afghan evacuee engagement’. To assist this, military personnel with Afghan experience were drafted in to serve as cultural advisors. The Department of Defense had  created an Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands Program in 2009 to train a group of experts in the requisite languages and cultures, and although the scheme closed in 2020, it was possible to draft ex-alumni into the bases to help. In addition, ‘A cultural advisor and a translator responded to incidents within the villages, and they translated … and provided appropriate cultural context for the situation and for dispute resolution’ (Inspector General, 2022, 13). Attempts were made to establish a volunteer programme with Afghan evacuees—advice on Afghan cuisine, barbershops/beauty salons, English and fitness classes. In the UK, Afghans initially found themselves in hotels, pending permanent accommodation being offered them by local authorities. Even allowing for the problems posed by the still extant danger of Covid infection in the UK, the temporary arrangements for housing refugees were slipshod. Whilst hotel groups were obviously pleased to have their rooms filled, it was evident that staff had been given minimal briefing as to what to expect. In one hotel, managers were informed that an unspecified number of babies and children were arriving and so had to rush out to buy cots, baby formula, bottles and nappies: ‘What have we got ourselves into…. Many of the arrivals had nothing but the clothes they were wearing’ (McBain, 2021). Information about benefits payments or school applications was supposed to be handled by central government departments but, in practice, navigating British bureaucracy was so difficult that hotel personnel often felt obliged to assist. In one case, it took two and a half weeks for a Home Office representative to visit a hotel. Providing appropriate food was challenging—one chef went out and bought Afghan and Persian cookbooks himself. In most families, only the men who had worked directly with the British could speak English and hotel staff turned to Google Translate on their phones in order to communicate.

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In this early stage of resettlement, those Afghans who had traditionally been represented as the closest to the West’s war experience, the ex-­ interpreters, were generally the most visible in press and media reports. One of the reasons for this was undoubtedly the fact that their greater competence in English made it easier for journalists to interview them and relate their stories. In this period, human interest pieces about Afghan refugees often focused specifically on the fate of military interpreters who had managed to arrive in the West. Thus for example the BBC aired a long-running story in December 2021 about an ex-interpreter with the British forces, Burhan Vesal. They talked to him in hiding in Kabul and then interviewed him and his family when they had arrived in the UK and were quarantined in a hotel near the airport. The piece struck a chord with a woman living in Aberdeen whose mother had been an interpreter with the British army in the Second World War, so that the story concluded with the ex-interpreter and his family being offered a home in Aberdeen (Manning & Kemp, 2021). In the US too, press coverage was given to Afghan interpreters who were being reunited with their former American servicemen colleagues: ‘Crowds gathered in Weddington, North Carolina, on Wednesday to welcome Johnny and his family to their new community after one man and his family offered them a home until they get on their feet…. In Weddington, Johnny reunited with Sgt. Mike Verado, who was catastrophically injured by an IED in Afghanistan. Johnny was Verado’s translator then. Now, they will be living down the street from each other’ (Griffin & Westfall, 2021). Ex-interpreters who arrived in the West before the Evacuation and were more settled in  local communities were portrayed in the press as offering valuable support to new arrivals. Thus two translators who had joined the US Air Force Reserve in 2016 and 2018 were assigned to support Afghans temporarily housed at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico which they had renamed Aman Omid Village: ‘Sofizada had the unique opportunity to welcome his own family to Aman Omid Village. His four brothers, two sisters and parents came through the village’ (Air Force, 2021). Another ex-translator with the American military in Kandahar Province had emigrated to the US in 2016 where he was supported by the Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement Services in Wisconsin. The organisation then asked him to volunteer to interpret

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with new Afghan arrivals and subsequently made this a paid appointment: ‘We are grateful to be working with Sayed, who, for many years, was a client of our refugee program’ (Lucero, 2022). For Afghans accommodated in these refugee spaces, whether interpreters or not, conditions were difficult. The hotels in the UK for example were often situated close to busy main roads, so that children could not be let out to play, and independent travel to other places was limited. The Refugee Council noted in October 2021 that delays in receiving biometric residency permits or prepaid debit cards left many evacuees unable to access the benefits to which they were entitled. Refugees faced a kind of postcode lottery—in some areas children could be enrolled in schools, supported by local authorities or charities, in others, they were stuck inside hotels with nothing to do: ‘One thing that has been consistent is the lack of planning from central government, the lack of good quality coordination, the lack of clear information’ (cited McBain, 2021). In the absence of more official support, some local councils set up Amazon wishlists, inviting members of the public to donate essential items, and British diplomats who had worked in Afghanistan formed WhatsApp groups to offer practical advice on writing CVs and applying for jobs (Gentleman, 2022). Rather than short-term stays in temporary accommodation, Afghans often found themselves being moved from one hotel to another, sometimes in different cities, as hotel chains gradually reverted post-Covid to their normal tourist clientele. The overall failure to organise a process which would be both friendly and workable was an example of what one ex-veteran observer described as ‘no joined up thinking’ (Interview, 25.01.22). In particular, apart from the ad hoc use of ex-interpreters, there appeared to be an absence of the type of organised linguistic and cultural support which might have helped to prepare staff working in the bridging hotels and ease some of the concerns of the traumatised refugees. Key organisations in the Afghan diaspora in the UK were apparently not called upon for help in the weeks immediately preceding or following the Evacuation, so that groups with a wealth of potential knowledge and experience could not offer early and direct inputs. The excellent briefing note on Afghan Cultural Awareness produced by the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association appeared only in October 2021 but offered practical details for those providing

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services to Afghan refugees, including greetings and social interaction, etiquette and food. Information was given on Afghan use of social media (Facebook and Twitter), and the ways in which they might access their favourite TV channels (Tolo TV/News, Ariana TV, Lemar).Thoughtful guidance on mental health issues included: ‘Be sensitive. There is generally a high occurrence of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder amongst refugees. The “firsts” that they experience (Eid, New Year—celebrated on 21 March, birthdays) will be the hardest given the survivor’s guilt they will face’ (Afghanistan and Central Asian Association, 2021). The guidance was at pains to point out how mistaken it was to regard all Afghans as the same. There was an incredible diversity within Afghan society: ‘Do not assume that all Afghans follow a conservative interpretation of Islam! Some family dynamics are more egalitarian, whilst others are based on some form of a hierarchy’ (Afghanistan and Central Asian Association, 2021). This same point had been observed by visitors to the hotels who had been able to speak with the Afghan guests themselves. As McBain argued: ‘One of the many dehumanising aspects of becoming an asylum-seeker or refugee—a statistic, a political symbol—is the assumption that there is no tension in bringing together people who in ordinary circumstances would never meet, people who span fraught ethnic, economic and political divides…’(McBain, 2021). The transition from temporary holding accommodation to more permanent housing within a community was often very difficult. In the USA for example, a milestone was reached in December 2021 when the number resettled in American communities (37,000) surpassed the 35,000 still in limbo on the bases. A lack of affordable housing, cutbacks to the refugee programme under President Trump and the sheer number of refugees involved presented a challenge. A network of religious non-profit organisations, refugee groups and veteran associations offered support as many Afghans tried to move to areas like Northern California, Washington DC and Houston where there were already established Afghan communities. Problems in transition arrangements were evident in the UK as well. The government’s Afghan resettlement programme, Operation Warm Welcome, was designed to ensure that those relocated could easily access

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healthcare, housing, education (including English language support) and employment advice (Afghan Policy Statement, 2023). The theory was that the Minister for Afghan Resettlement would work closely with local authorities in order to find appropriate accommodation as quickly as possible. Councils could receive £20,520 per person over three years, with up to £4500 per child for education, £850 to cover adult English language provision and £2600 for healthcare (Hansard, 2021, 683). In practice, relations with local authorities, vital if the Afghans were to be given permanent accommodation, were disorganised. Councils across the country found that the Home Office was moving families into their areas with insufficient warning—an issue given added poignancy when a five-­ year old child fell to his death from the window of a hotel in Sheffield. As one council leader from Greenwich put it, ‘There was a huge mismatch between the rhetoric of senior government politicians and their actions to support those people’ (Townsend, 2021). The initial distribution of refugees was uneven—4000 were sent to London where a larger number of empty hotels were located. One London council was given only a couple of days’ notice that 2000 Afghans (including nine hundred children) were going to be housed in its hotels and had to work at speed to try and find temporary school places. The acute housing shortage in the capital however made it unlikely that permanent homes would be found in London. In March 2022, the chief executive of the Refugee Council warned that ‘many of the people who fled Afghanistan to the UK are still not getting the warm welcome they were promised’, whilst the Labour leader of Newcastle city council characterised Operation Warm Welcome as ‘about as welcoming as a cold bucket of sick’ (cited Gentleman, 2022). Progress in finding permanent homes for Afghan refugees was slow and largely dependent on sympathetic local authorities being able to find suitable accommodation. All fifteen authorities in Yorkshire agreed to take refugees, with forty-four households offered places by October 2021. In Cumbria, which proposed to take one hundred and thirty-seven people, the county council described a ‘chaotic’ system in which Afghan families arrived there unannounced, sometimes allocated numbers rather than names by the Home Office. Birmingham promised to take eighty families and Herefordshire one hundred and seventy-seven. In Scotland and Wales, seventy-six and fifty families respectively were allocated

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housing. Given the apparent difficulty in finding accommodation across the country, it was inevitable that some of the housing finally offered was of a relatively poor standard. In addition, Afghans might find themselves accommodated miles away from the sort of support networks which were vital if they were going to establish successful future lives. One ex-­ interpreter for example was sent to ‘the depths of Scotland, 90 miles away from a mosque, and at a real distance from a hospital (for his pregnant wife)’ (Interview, 25.01.02). By March 2022, only 4000 refugees had actually been rehoused in the UK, and in August 2022, the Home Office was beginning to advise people to find their own rented accommodation on Rightmove. The disruption in the lives of these refugees had been sudden and unexpected, fleeing at very short notice without time to pack. For such people who had suffered the trauma of Evacuation, and who remained full of anxiety about relatives who had not escaped with them, languishing for so long in UK hotels was a deeply depressing experience: ‘people are literally stuck in these rooms, they can’t cook, they are just living on takeaways … although you’ve got the freedom to go out and about, you still don’t feel you are contributing towards the community … you feel like you are just stuck in one place … it doesn’t feel like home’ (cited in Quadri, 2022). In these enervating living conditions, some commentators argued that ex-interpreters should be treated as a specific and separate category among Afghan evacuees: ‘the Home Office default setting for supporting all migrants is “survival”: sufficient unto the day and not a penny more. For the former interpreters and their families, we demand a different standard: that they be given the means to thrive, not simply survive…. Many of the Afghans who served with us were among the brightest and best of that country’ (Diggins, 2022). It was implicitly assumed that ex-­ translator/interpreters, in addition to their linguistic competence, would be well-qualified people who would expect ‘proper jobs, not stacking shelves’ (Interview, 25.01.22). In the apparent absence of organised government and local authority support, British veterans stepped in to provide networks for some of these ex-interpreters—‘ virtual veterans’ communities … a common family of translator/interpreters on the whatsapp’ (Interview, 25.01.22)—and added them into the military JobOppO employment agency for British ex-soldiers: ‘JobOppO was founded to

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plug veterans into roles but the Afghans are one and the same in my book … They deserve the same treatment as former personnel do’ (Layton, 2021). However despite the apparent linguistic and educational advantages of ex-interpreters as compared with other Afghan refugees, it was still difficult for them to find suitable employment opportunities. Whilst their spoken English was generally good, their written English could potentially be weaker: ‘Sometimes their English level had dropped off because they had not been recently using it’ (Interview, 25.01.22). One Afghan long settled in the UK who was asked to interpret for former military interpreters in asylum tribunals noted that, ‘the person was an interpreter for seven or eight years but could not communicate in court. They understand English, but not the language of the court … We must remember that there is a language issue, because their expertise was very specific’ (cited in Moore, 2022). The Evacuation necessarily increased demand from local authorities for Pashto and Dari interpreters to help with the resettlement of Afghan refugees, but these paid posts were infrequent, and it was not always easy for ex-military interpreters to be in a position to apply. One Afghan with an MA in International Relations and attested language abilities after working with the British Royal Marines and the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs discovered that he would have to obtain UK community interpreting qualifications if he wanted to work as an interpreter in the UK. The lack of qualifications which were recognised in the UK was a real impediment; ‘That’s why I ended up in a warehouse. And I’m the person who can speak six languages, but the talent, the skills, and the knowledge (are) all wasted here’ (cited in Moore, 2022). Interpreters who had risked their lives through their association with the West either found that they had been housed in remote areas of Scotland or Wales with very few job opportunities on offer or that when they approached local job centres their qualifications were considered insufficient. As de Jong commented: ‘You might meet one of them if you order an Uber taxi in Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle or Plymouth, as driving taxis has become their main source of employment’ (2022). In this space of encounter in the West, interpreters who had worked closely with western forces and agencies found themselves doubly

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deprived of their identities—their identity as a military combatant, working alongside fellow soldiers who had vigorously supported their relocation to Europe or the USA, and also their professional identity as employees recruited to interpret between westerners and the local community in often dangerous and violent circumstances. Despite the sustained efforts of ex-military personnel arguing that the status of their interpreters should be seen as different from that of other Afghan evacuees, ex-interpreters inevitably found themselves living within exactly the same constraints and limitations as other refugees from Afghanistan. Hussein, an ex-translator with the British army in Helmand, had been traumatised by his four day ordeal escaping from Afghanistan—his children were so terrified that their first days in a hotel in London were spent watching cartoons on television. By November 2021, he and his family were still living in a hotel and had received no news whatsoever of where they might end up permanently. His wife, from a conservative part of rural Jalalabad, could speak no English and found adjustment particularly difficult. At the end of January 2022, with no permanent accommodation yet on offer, Hussein contacted the jobcentre, looking to apply for work as a translator. By then, his children were attending a local school, and a charity had given the family £100 of Primark vouchers for clothes. Although missing Afghanistan, Hussein was trying optimistically to view Evacuation and the hardships of resettlement as marking the beginning of a new phase for him and his family—‘Our neighbours would have killed us if we’d stayed. That’s why we came…. I don’t think Afghanistan will ever be rebuilt in my lifetime. I’ve told my children that here they can become scientists, dancers, pilots, doctors, politicians, engineers. They will work here, and pay back the support they’re getting now’ (cited Gentleman, 2022). By spring 2023 however, the debate in the UK on Afghan refugees who were still living in bridging hotels became far more toxic, implicitly and wrongly associated with an entirely separate issue—the approximately 50,000 asylum seekers then accommodated in other hotels, waiting for decisions on their applications for refugee status. The Veterans Minister, Johnny Mercer, himself an ex-soldier who had served in Afghanistan, announced that the 8000 Afghans still living in hotels by then were going to be given notice that henceforth they would not receive

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a second offer of housing if they rejected the first. Many of those likely to be affected, half of whom were children, were in hotels in London and the likelihood of alternative accommodation being found there was slight. Thus forty families with one hundred and fifty children who had lived for more than a year in west London were set to be transplanted two hundred miles away to Wetherby in Yorkshire, a move which would cause major disruption to their children’s education as they prepared to sit GCSEs (Syal, 2023). This sense that Afghan refugees who had supported the West were now problems to be dealt with as expeditiously as possible contrasted vividly with the apparently more generous attitude towards Ukrainians seeking support in the UK after the invasion of their country. The Sulha Alliance for example pointed out that 208,304 visas had been granted to Ukrainians as opposed to 22,833 Afghans in the ARAP and ACRS programmes (SulhaAlliance, 2022). Whilst it is difficult to make direct comparisons, there was evidence, as De Coninck (2022) argued, that European publics tended to differentiate between the ‘symbolic threat’ represented by different groups of immigrants, and that they might potentially have seen themselves as more threatened by migrants from outside Europe. Value systems, world views, ethnicities and indeed presence at major mass events consumed by western audiences (like for example football matches) could play a role in this, he suggested, as did the greater geographic proximity to an aggressor in the Ukrainian case. For some Afghans it was clear that there was indeed a disparity in the ways in which the two groups of refugees, Afghan and Ukrainian, were now being treated. In March 2022, former Afghan interpreters began a hunger strike on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to protest about what they saw as this inequality, in particular the failure to allow Afghan family members to join them in Canada: ‘I appreciate what is being done for Ukrainians but we wanted to be treated the same as other countries … our process stopped as soon as the Ukrainians started’ (Woolf, 2022). For some Afghans in the UK, what had happened to them in their dealings with the West was a grim warning of what might await Ukrainians: ‘Don’t deal with NATO. It’ll be the same thing. They lied in 2001- “we won’t turn our backs on you”’ (Interview, 14.02.22).

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In the western imagining, the presence of Afghans in NATO countries was now largely divorced from recent history, from the West’s twenty-­ year intervention in Afghanistan. From being key actors in the western civic conversation about the conflict in Afghanistan, perceived as the Afghans closest to the West and as comrades in battle, interpreters now found that they were lost within an undifferentiated mass of Afghan refugees which as a whole was increasingly visible to publics in the West in what Chapman described as ‘the hypervisibility of the refugee’ (2023). The link between the past and the present of Afghan interpreters, set out so dramatically in Barnham and de Jong’s award winning photographic exhibition, ‘We are here because you were there’ (2022), had been definitively lost.

Post-Taliban Afghanistan Gradually media attention in the West moved away from those who had been left behind, now considered in much broader terms, beyond military interpreters, to focus instead on the state of the country itself after the western departure. Rather than the past—with the embarrassing responsibilities of failed intervention—discussions centred on Afghanistan post-Taliban imaged now as a totally collapsed society and economy. With the suspension of foreign aid and the confiscation of Afghan foreign reserves held in the US, economic disintegration was imminent, worsened by the liquidity problem, a severe drought and the prospect of freezing winter temperatures. Afghanistan was thus represented as a humanitarian disaster area which could only be saved by donations from the West. UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs called urgently on donors to contribute to life-saving aid. The representative of the World Food Programme (WFP) argued that, ‘Afghanistan is on borrowed time. In my long career, I’ve never before seen a crisis unfold at this pace and scale. We are witnessing a new depth of destitution…’. The country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council in Afghanistan warned that, ‘As the economy spirals and the banking system is at risk of collapse, the impact on Afghans across the country who are already struggling to

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survive will be catastrophic’ (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2021). As the desperate economic situation in Afghanistan continued, there was a considerable exodus of those left behind to face this economic emergency, an exodus which western authorities endeavoured to keep at a distance from their own responsibilities. European states, keen to restrict the numbers of Afghans arriving at their borders, pledged humanitarian aid and support to those countries within the region which were actually receiving large groups of Afghans. Given the huge influx of Afghan refugees however, these states too were beginning to harden their position on immigrants from Afghanistan. Between January and July of 2022, the UN’s emergency aid coordination body pointed out that 46,300 Afghans had been expelled or deported from Pakistan and 462,000 from Iran. Turkey, which hosted the largest refugee population in the world, deported 32,000 Afghans in the first six months of 2022. Afghans seeking to arrive in Europe by irregular migrant routes would meet with harsh treatment—the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) noted that the approval rate for Afghan asylum seekers in Europe dropped to 53% in May 2022, its lowest since July 2021, compared to 97% of Ukrainian applicants over this same period (Nashed, 2022). Future engagement with Afghanistan, it was thought in the West, had to be essentially pragmatic, designed to alleviate the humanitarian suffering which was represented as the sole responsibility of the new Taliban regime. The British prime minister for example declared in November 2021 that: ‘We must also engage with the Taliban. This is slightly controversial, but I am strongly of the view, when Kabul fell … that there was no point in the UK just standing on the sidelines … They may not speak for all Afghans … but they are some kind of authority … The UK must try to engage, for the sake of the people you are talking about, if we are to get aid through’ (International Development Committee, 2022, 76). The sense that doors should be kept open for humanitarian reasons was underlined by a reported visit of UK representatives to Afghanistan on 5 October 2021 and 10 February 2022 to hold talks with senior Taliban officials, and the fact that at the end of January 2022, the Norwegian government hosted three days of talks with the Taliban alongside western diplomats (International Development Committee, 2022, 91). Whilst

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the international community was clearly conflicted about offering any support to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the consensus position, emphasised by media stories of desperate starvation, was that aid could not be denied to those explicitly portrayed as innocent victims of the Taliban—in particular starving women and children. For some commentators, this newly discovered pragmatism reflected a slightly guilty acceptance that the recent Evacuation of Afghans had necessarily removed from the country many of the more competent and educated members of society: ‘For very good reasons, we have facilitated the extraction of over 100.000 of Afghanistan’s best brains, and thereby significantly damaged Afghanistan’s ability to succeed in the future’ (Cowan, 2022, Q.21). In addition, it was possible that a slightly broader comparative perspective might be indicating that the Taliban were, in the last analysis, perhaps no more conservative than Islamic states like Saudi Arabia which were considered as allies by the West. This pragmatic engagement with the Taliban to try and alleviate humanitarian suffering and ensure immigrant flows were rapidly controlled soon assumed a gendered quality, as it became clear that the Taliban were enacting more and more measures to restrict the lives of women: no cabinet positions were given to them, and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs was speedily abolished. Girls were banned from school post-6th grade, and in December 2022 it was announced that women would no longer be able to go to university. They had to cover their faces, were banned from parks and strongly discouraged from going out without an accompanying male. On 24 December 2022, the Taliban banned all women from working in national or international NGOs. The shocked reaction from those outside the country attested to what had largely been the unsung and unrecognised work of women over the past twenty years. For the head of the UN refugee agency, women NGO workers across Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces had been at the forefront of efforts to find solutions for Afghans affected by four decades of conflict and persecution. The UN Secretary-General pointed out that the NGO ban would undermine the efforts of all organisations helping Afghanistan’s most vulnerable communities, and the head of the UN Development Programme claimed that the restriction would accelerate Afghanistan’s backslide into poverty.

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Interpreters who had earlier embodied in western eyes the closest relationship between the West and Afghanistan were now overtaken by public and media interest in the fate of women who in many ways came to represent for the West the new face of Taliban Afghanistan (e.g. Wintour, 2022). The BBC for example broadcast a series of accounts given by different women in Afghanistan of how their current lives had changed: a student training to be a mid-wife; a nineteen year old audiobook narrator from Kabul who had voiced novels, books for children and religious texts; a dressmaker from a central province in Afghanistan who had formerly been the family’s breadwinner; an aid worker in the remote Badakhshan region who could no longer work; a psychologist/teacher who was clandestinely giving classes to girls in a secret school; an aspiring writer who ran an online book club; and a former police officer and university student who had been in hiding since August 2021. With the exception of one of these witnesses, a teacher at a madrassa (religious school), all of the women described how their lives had been curtailed since the Taliban takeover: ‘women are literally being erased from public life’ (BBC 1, 2023). Although Afghan women were now being accorded much more media attention in the West, the ways in which they were framed were substantially the same as before and during the western occupation. As Manchanda suggested, the tendency had always been to offer a teleological reading of history where Afghanistan was assumed to be behind the modernity of the West, in a positioning symbolised most dramatically by the visibly veiled and restricted woman, ‘needing to be rescued and normalised’ (2020, 144). The woman as trope of the backwardness and savagery of the Taliban implicitly pointed to a before and an after—the pre-August 2021 period when western intervention had sought to create some elements of liberation for women and the post-Taliban time when women were denied any agency at all. Quite apart from the issue of assuming that women in the West were free and that western definitions of feminism could be seen as universal and unproblematically worthy of export, the newly prominent place given to Afghan women in the western media potentially opened the way to a more benign interpretation of what the West’s motives for being in Afghanistan in the first place had actually been. Rather than an aggressive armed initiative, the objective of

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their presence might now be said to have had a greater moral imperative, that of empowering and liberating women. The question of how the West might discharge its responsibilities to Afghan women after August 2021 was in practice largely subsumed in pragmatic issues of available finance and the implications of establishing some sort of diplomatic relationship with the Taliban administration. In 2023, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) cut almost £6m in funding to a programme which had been aimed at supporting vulnerable women and girls and providing a lifeline to those facing the risk of early marriage, violence and other forms of exploitation. The CEO of Save the Children UK which was running the project protested that, ‘The decision to cut millions in funding to Afghan children sends a stark message to the world that the UK is turning its back on the most vulnerable children and families in one of the world’s most challenging contexts. The UK’s rhetoric that it supports women and girls in Afghanistan now rings hollow’ (cited in Wintour, 2023). Prominent Afghan women who had left the country before the Taliban takeover, or during the Evacuation, found themselves engaged in difficult discussions with UK government authorities on what the next steps forward diplomatically should be. One experienced female activist decided to call an end to these conversations because of what she viewed as the unacceptable approach the government was preparing to take: ‘I won’t talk now to the FCDO after a meeting when one employee whose focus was on Afghanistan said, “We have no choice- we have to work with them”’. The Ministry, she claimed, was consulting different groups to see how they could use sharia law to work with the Afghan administration, without having any real understanding, she felt, about the varied dimensions of sharia law (Interview, 18.11.22). Which women actually had the right to speak out in the West on behalf of their sisters in Afghanistan was unclear. Before the Evacuation, there was already a generation of exiled Afghan women in the West but, like all exiles, their understanding of contemporary problems in the country was likely to have become more limited and hence also their potential entitlement to speak for others. In many cases however, it seemed that the women who were newly arrived after the Evacuation were still too traumatised by the whole experience to speak out: ‘People

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who have been evacuated can only talk about their experience for a short time. They retreat into silence’ (Interview, 17.01.2022). Nevertheless, the western gendering of Afghanistan post-Taliban may be said to have operated as an effort to reinterpret both the West’s intervention in the country and its continuing moral responsibilities: ‘Democracy has been dangled in front of them for the last 20 years’ (Interview, 24.01.22). In this new debate on women, moral responsibility and victimhood, some women challenged the position of the military interpreter as a special and particularly deserving case. Interpreters had clearly received powerful support from ex-military colleagues in the West from 2014 onwards which contrasted sharply, they argued, with the general lack of attention paid to the dangers faced by women: ‘The level of threat was not different for different groups, and translator/interpreters were not threatened in the same way as women’. In comparison with women, the Afghan interpreter had enjoyed a measure of preferential consideration in the West: ‘They were supported by the military, but women didn’t have this type of support’ (Interview, 18.11.22). Inexorably, the role which interpreters had been given as close combatants for whom the West had particular moral responsibilities was overtaken by the post-Taliban western gendering of Afghanistan. Col. Diggins, one of the founder members of the veterans’ support group, the SulhaAlliance, which had consistently militated in favour of military interpreters, argued that the West’s overriding moral debt to Afghanistan now lay in the defence of women’s rights, a defence which might in some way vindicate what had happened during the preceding twenty years: ‘The debacle of August 2021 caused many to question the West’s intervention. Doing right by Afghan women now will help to reinforce that our purpose was moral and we sought a better future for Afghanistan’ (2023).

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Afghanistan and Central Asian Association. (2021). Afghan Cultural Awareness Information. 5 October. https://acaa.org.uk Air Force. (2021). Afghan Translators, Air Force Reservists, Assist Refugees. Air Force Military News, 27 November. https://www.af.mil/News/ Association of Wartime Allies. (2022). On the Ground Report. February, August. https://www.wartimeallies.co BAAG. (2022). Case Studies on the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) and Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS). Case Study 1, 2. Bancroft, H., & Bulman, M. (2023). Abandoned by the Country they served: hundreds of Afghans eligible for UK stranded in Pakistan. Independent, 1 April. https://www.independent.co.uk Banville, K. (2022). Forsaken Fighters: A Triumph of Mateship Over a Government that Acted with Too Little Too Late. Australian Veteran News, 17 January. https://www.australianveterannews.com Barnham, A., & de Jong, S. (2022). We Are Here Because You Were There: Afghan Interpreters in the UK. https://www.york.ac.uk/social-­science-­research-­impact/ migration-­network/news/2022/we-­are-­here-­because-­ you-­ were-­there/ BBC1. (2023). Afghan Women Share What Their Lives Are Really Like Under the Taliban. 24 January. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live Chapman, E. (2023). The Tongues and Eyes of the British Forces: Between the Hypervisibility of the Refugee, the Invisibility of the Translator and the Obscured Violence of the Border. Civil Wars. Review of Barnham and de Jong. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2190211 Cowan, J. (2022). Q.21. Oral Evidence. Afghanistan: UK Support for Aid Workers and the Afghan People. Report. House of Commons. HC 919. De Coninck, D. (2022). The Refugee Paradox During Wartime in Europe: How Ukrainian and Afghan Refugees Are (Not) Alike. International Migration Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183221116874 de Jong, S. (2022). Once Deployed, Now Unemployed: Afghan Interpreters Seek Jobs in UK. Context, Thomson Reuters Foundation, 11 August. https:// www.contextnews De Jong, S., & Sarantidis, D. (2022). Divided in Leaving Together: The Resettlement of Afghan Locally Employed Staff. IGDC Working Report and Briefings 2, Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, University of York. Diggins, S. (2022). Letter. Spectator, 8 January. https://www.spectator.co.uk Diggins, S. (2023). Letter. New Statesman, 17–23 February. https://www.newstatesman.com

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Faizi, G. (2022). Honouring Canada’s Legacy in Afghanistan: Responding to the Humanitarian Crisis and Helping People Reach Safety. Report of Special Committee on Afghanistan. House of Commons, 66. File on 4. (2023). Abandoned in Afghanistan. Radio 4, 10, 15 January. Gentleman, A. (2021). Britons Left in Afghanistan Plead for Help to Get Them and Their Families Out. Guardian, 8 October. https://www.theguardian.com Gentleman, A. (2022). Welcome to Britain … Now What? Afghan Families on Their Lives in Limbo. Guardian, 26 March. https://www.theguardian.com Ghulam, A. (2021). Save the British Council Educators from the Taliban. Petition. www.change.org Griffin, J., & Westfall, A. (2021). “First in, last out”: North Carolina Community Welcomes Afghan Translator Who Served the 82nd Airborne. Fox News, 15 October. https://www.foxnews.com Guardian. (2022). The Left Behind. Thousands of Afghans Are Stuck in Hiding After the Taliban Takeover Last Year. Here are the Stories of the People Unable to Escape. 17 January. https://www.theguardian.com Hansard. (2021). Vol. 700, column 683. 13 September. Inspector General. (2022). Management Advisory: DoD Support for the Relocation of Afghan Nationals at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. US Department of Defense. International Development Committee. (2022). Afghanistan: UK Support for Aid Workers and the Afghan People. Report. House of Commons. HC 919. Jarvis, D. (2023). Britain Promised to Move Heaven and Earth for All Who Helped Us in Afghanistan. It Wasn’t True. Guardian, 9 March. https://theguardian.com Layton, J. (2021). British Veteran Won’t Stop Until He Finds His Afghan Friends Jobs in the UK. Metro, 18 October. https://www.metro.co.uk Lucero, S. (2022). Afghan Refugee Who Served as Interpreter for US Army Helps Catholic Charities Welcome New Arrivals. The Compass, 7 January. https://www.thecompassnews.org/ Manchanda, N. (2020). Imagining Afghanistan. Cambridge University Press. Manning, L., & Kemp, P. (2021). The “ kind heart” Who Gave an Afghan Family a New Home. BBC News, 3 December. https://www.bbc.co.uk McBain, S. (2021). Inside the UK Hotel that Became Home to 150 Refugees. New Statesman, 9 December. https://www.newstatesman.com Moore, M. (2022). Relocating from Afghanistan. How Can Former Military Interpreters Transfer Their Skills to Language Work in the UK? The Linguist, 60(6). www.ciol.org.uk/the-­linguist

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Nashed, M. (2022). One Year on, Few Options for Afghans Escaping Hunger and Taliban Persecution. New Humanitarian, 10 August. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org Quadri, S. (2022). Afghanistan Evacuee Feels “stuck” in London Hotel Room as He Awaits Permanent Accommodation. Evening Standard, 5 February. https://www.standard.co.uk Siddique, H. (2023). Court Allows Review of UK Visa Rejections for Ex-BBC Journalists in Afghanistan. Guardian, 13 February. https://www.theguardian.com SulhaAliance. (2022). Twitter, 20 December. SulhaAlliance. (2022). Twitter, 16 December. Jamal Barak. Syal, R. (2023). Afghan Refugees Settled in London Told to Uproot Families and Move. Guardian, 2 February. https://www.theguardian.com Taylor, D. (2023). UK Government Urged to Honour Pledge to Afghan Refugees’ Families. Guardian, 17 January. https://www.theguardian.com Tchoubar, P. (2021). Les interprètes afghans attendent toujours de savoir s’ils pourront être évacués de Kaboul. Les Observateurs, 18 August. Townsend, M. (2021). “Send us home” Beg Afghan Refugees in UK Hotels. Observer, 10 October. https://theguardian.com/observer United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (2021). UN and Humanitarian Partners Scale Up Life-Saving Response to Crisis in Afghanistan and Call on All Donors to Urgently Turn Pledges into Reality. OCHA, 6 October. https://onocha.org Webb, J. (2022). Afghan Resettlement Exceeded $620 Million at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. Military Times, 7 February. https://www.militarytimes.com Williams, D., & Nichol, M. (2021). Anger as Afghan Teachers Are “abandoned to the Taliban” After They Were Left Behind During Kabul Withdrawal. Daily Mail, 26 December. https://dailmail.co.uk Winter, E. (2022). Q.7. Afghanistan: UK Support for Aid Workers and the Afghan People. House of Commons International Development Committee. HC 919. Wintour, P. (2022). “I am losing hope”. Tears of Afghan Women Living Under Taliban Rule. Guardian, 14 June. https://www.theguardian.com Wintour, P. (2023). UK Aid Cuts Could Force Closure of Afghan Project Supporting Women and Girls. Guardian, 24 March. https://www.theguardian.com

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Woolf, M. (2022). “Treat our families as well as Ukrainians fleeing to Canada”: Afghan Interpreters. City News Everywhere, 12 April. https://www.kitchener. citynews.ca Worley, W. (2021a). Afghan Aid Workers Targeted by Taliban But Excluded from UK. Devex, 17 August. https://www.devex.com Worley, W. (2021b). “I will be killed”: Afghan Aid Workers Left Stranded by UK Government. Devex, 4 October. https://www.devex.com

7 Conclusions

The risk taken in this book has been to reverse the gaze, to look at the employers of interpreters in war and the ways in which they perceived local Afghan interpreters, rather than to concentrate primarily on the interpreters themselves. The story of how western interveners lived with, left behind, evacuated and gave asylum to their interpreters shows how the West represented ‘foreignness’ and ‘protection’, and how they imagined Afghanistan and its peoples. During the twenty year conflict, the spaces of encounter between Afghans and western groups moved from on the ground meetings in complex and muddled multilateral operations, through to an arm’s length relationship in which ex-interpreters were framed in a variety of ways by actors in the war, culminating finally with encounters between them at the frontiers of the West, and then within its very borders. Whether the risk of reversing the gaze in this way has ultimately been worth taking depends on what we in the West might be able to learn about employing translator/interpreters in war and about representing the foreign ‘other’.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Footitt, Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5_7

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Contextualising As Margaret Atwood memorably expressed it, ‘Context is all’ (2010). Context in this book has been understood in two ways. It refers firstly to the detailed particularities of an individual conflict and secondly to a broad conceptual landscape in which the readings of other disciplines on war can inform and modify some of our own approaches. It assumes that there is not one given and unique space of war in which translator/interpreters are called to serve. Interpreting in war is radically dependent on context, on the spaces of encounter which are created, on the composition and disposition of forces in the war, the length of the engagement and the possibly changing purposes and strategies of its operation. Thus for example in the case of the West’s intervention in Afghanistan, the war involved a multilateral force, with governments and armies from a large number of countries, each with their own national terms of engagement, deployed to different areas of the country and accorded, at least at the outset, distinct missions. Internal relations between the participants in the Coalition were sometimes difficult, and perceptions of the mission were framed over time in different ways in order to meet the exigencies of changing national public opinions. Chronologically, this twenty year intervention went through stages from ‘light footprint’ to state-building initiatives, to counter-insurgency, to a drawdown of the bulk of NATO troops in 2014 and finally to a chaotic Evacuation in 2021. Importantly, it was a war fought in both kinetic terms—the initial invasion and later counter-insurgency operations against local resistance—and through non-kinetic means with western financed state-building projects which funded development initiatives and cultural and human rights activities. These dichotomous framings—the multinational/national operation and the military/development strategy—were key markers of the spaces in which western interveners and Afghans would meet. The role and activity of civilians recruited to translate/interpret are also conditioned by the context of each conflict. Local interpreters have their own histories and subjectivities and do not come innocently to the spaces of encounter created in war. They bring with them their personal stories of what has preceded the particular armed struggle. In the case of

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Afghanistan, an historical context of longstanding insecurity, violence, poverty and familial exile shaped the embodied experience of many of those whom the West would employ. On the ground too, the type of conflict being fought determined the professional trajectory of local interpreters. Thus in Afghanistan, the range of potential western employers—ISAF Headquarters in Kabul, national militaries outside the capital either in bases or on the front line of conflict, development NGOs and cultural/human rights agencies—offered the possibility of very different posts, and indeed of some mobility between them. In Afghanistan, interpreters could find themselves in a variety of working environments ranging from opulently resourced American bases, to the frontline of extremely perilous armed combat; from western embassies and offices to operations in rural areas, negotiating between western INGOs and local communities. This book has argued too that there are potential analytical gains in viewing context additionally as a site of interdisciplinary debate about war, opening ourselves out to the insights of other disciplines which study conflict and the role of intermediate groups within it. Engaging with the epistemologies of these disciplines, most pertinently in this book with International Relations and Post Colonial Studies, can help us to consider interpretive frameworks outside those which are more traditionally used in translation/interpreting studies, encouraging us to extend and challenge the intellectual boundaries within which we work. Thus approaches in International Relations have emphasised the need to see war-making as wider than simply military operations in the field. Versions of neoliberal peace building, promoting economic transformation and developing human rights, were strongly supported by the West during the Afghan war, and the amounts of money dispersed were considerable. Such development efforts were in practice an integral part of western military counter-insurgency. In this scenario, international interveners were no longer neutral peacemakers—they were at one and the same time foreign combatants in an ongoing and continuing war, as well as peace builders ostensibly reconstructing the country. Any spaces of encounter in war, whether kinetic or non-kinetic, bring together antithetical parties in a meeting in which the balance of power is starkly unequal. In this situation interpreters find themselves to be

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actors in an essentially asymmetrical relationship. Approaches in colonialism and postcolonialism studies have indeed identified an in-between third space, one occupied by indigenous people, ‘native informants’, who were traditionally employed by colonisers to provide information about their societies in order to help outside observers from the West understand and rule. In the extensive literature about this figure, these ‘native informants’, products of colonial invention, have been problematised variously as mimics of the colonisers or as potential speakers for the subaltern. Such positionings arguably become all the more relevant with the twenty-first century weaponising of culture by western militaries seeking cultural advice in the interests of effective counter-insurgency. Locally employed interpreters, the book has concluded, inevitably operate within a political context of power which affects and positions all those involved. Contextualising the interpreter in war thus requires us to particularise, to accept the proposition that conflicts and wars are not sui generis, but rather dependent on specific circumstances and constituted by distinct components. Such a realisation historicises the interpreter and may help us to uncover complexities in their activities and relationships. By seeing the exploration of context additionally as a reading and borrowing of the potential insights of other relevant disciplines, the conceptual parameters of war and the third space of local interpreters may also be extended and stretched.

The Local Interpreter Locally employed translator/interpreters in war typically lack professional qualifications and training before actually assuming their role. In Afghanistan, those working in ISAF headquarters in Kabul did receive some instruction in consecutive and liaison interpreting, ethics and speech analysis in 2008. Up to that point, ‘not only had the students not been trained in certain basic techniques, but they had little understanding of professional ethics’ (Jones & Askew, 2014, 156). In most cases however civilians were recruited as interpreters, often in a haphazard manner, on the basis that they could speak English or one of the other languages urgently required. Nevertheless, such personnel were usually

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called, both by their employers and by those outside in the world of translation/interpreting, ‘Translators’, ‘Interpreters’, ‘Translator/ Interpreters’ or in military slang ‘Terps’. These civilian language mediators had considerable visibility in their employment, as opposed to Afghans who worked outside the military sphere—with contractors, PRTs, INGOs or diplomatic and cultural agencies—and who were frequently using their language skills as an unpaid addition to the job for which they had been primarily recruited. In such cases, a distinction has often been made between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ translation/interpreting practices (Tesseur, 2023, 113), based on the extent to which translation or interpreting is considered as the principal part of an employee’s post. In a sense however, multitasking could be said to have been common in both spheres. Afghans who worked with the military were not only engaged in interpreting oral exchanges between soldiers and the local community. They were often called upon to listen in to radio communications with the Taliban and to interrogate prisoners, acting in these capacities in effect as potential informers. AIIC’s Field Guide for Civilian Translators/Interpreters and Users of their Services in Conflict Zones specifically alludes to the responsibility to remain impartial and to refuse tasks unrelated to translating or interpreting. Their later paper on Tips and Hands-on Strategies reiterates the cardinal need for interpreter impartiality: ‘Your heart may not always be impartial but your voice must be—you might be helping make a historical record of events. Truth matters’. In this vision, the role of the interpreter in war is circumscribed and essentially neutral: ‘Do your job as best you can, but just your job and nothing more. You are not a social worker, you are not a caregiver … you are not an activist of a cause or a spokesperson, just the interpreter’ (AIIC, n.d., 2). But as was clear from both the Taliban reaction to interpreters working with the military and from groups in the West who advocated on their behalf, military interpreters were by no means considered to be neutral and impartial. In uniform and working alongside western troops, they were ‘national traitors’ or ‘our heroes on the battlefield’, depending on the particular viewpoint. Whilst some western countries positioned interpreters in more general terms—the French naming them as civil servants for example—the overwhelming tendency of ex-employers and of

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advocacy groups after 2014 was to militarise the figure of the interpreter, associating their fate with issues of morality and with the debts of honour owed to former soldiers. Increasingly, as physical dangers in Afghanistan mounted, the left behind local interpreter was closely associated with veterans’ groups in the West who argued for them to be regarded as a priority category for Evacuation and asylum by virtue of their military service. Two consequences of this militarisation could be particularly relevant for future studies of translating/interpreting in war. To begin with, the western discourse of interpreters as soldiers established a clear dividing line between those who had worked with the armed forces and those outside the military, employed by other organisations as subcontracted linguistic intermediaries, or as multitaskers in non-kinetic groups and agencies. Such locally employed civilians outside the militarised category were either invisible or marginalised in western discussions and excluded from many NATO resettlement programmes. Secondly, militarisation in this context implied a clear gendering of interpreting, with an implicit distinction between soldiers (with whom interpreters were now counted) and non-soldiers or civilians, among whom of course were many women who had been active in a wide range of development, human rights and cultural agencies. What has been described as the ‘gender-blindness’ of the Evacuation of 2021 (Interview, 24.01.22) has its origins at least partly in this militarisation of interpreting in western discourse. For the highly effective coalition of professional interpreting and language groups which came together to support interpreters in war, the West’s militarisation of linguistic mediation presented something of a challenge. Arguing for the benignity of translation and interpreting, for its close association with peace and for a supranational definition of its place and value clearly fitted uneasily alongside media campaigns which were drawing their strength from descriptions of the interpreter as soldier, national hero and veteran. Attempts to blur the boundaries between these two positions tended to carve out some sort of intermediate inbetween ground which translator/interpreters might occupy— ‘intermediate solidarities’ (Mégret, 2021), ‘segregated brotherhood’ (De Jong, 2022), ‘legitimate peripheral participants’ (Ruiz Rosendo, 2022).

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The ambiguity of the interpreter in war however, at the root of previous discussions on interpreter protection in conflict, was further deepened by the advocacy and campaigning which took place in western countries from 2014 until the Evacuation. Raising the national profile of military interpreters in Afghanistan through their public militarisation added to the difficulties of representing them as a neutral special category, like journalists, who were in need of an overarching international professional status, a new global paradigm. In looking at the interpreter through western eyes, this book has deliberately engaged with what we might term the longue durée of Afghan interpreters, arguing that we should see them beyond the temporal envelope of their employment in war, in a longer time-frame as they were of course regarded by both the Taliban and by western advocates. For the Taliban, local interpreters did not cease to be interpreters after NATO had left the country. They continued to be identified primarily by the role which they had played during the period of the western occupation and were hunted down and punished because of it. For western veterans’ lobby groups too, local interpreters continued being marked by the period of their employment, designated in this way several years after their service with the military had ceased. For endangered ex-interpreters, and for governments dealing with Evacuation and establishing resettlement and asylum policies, there was some value in clinging on to this label as an indicator of special cases, and as a possible means of identifying priorities and limiting responsibilities. Following the post-translation/interpreting lives of local Afghans as they played out in relationships with their former western employers emphasises the fact that acting as a language intermediary in war marks out all those who participate. The politics of power in which local interpreters are necessarily engaged are not necessarily time-limited. There is an afterlife for local interpreters as much as for those western soldiers who return home, and to forget this by concentrating solely on the years of their employment is arguably to sanitise the risks, pressures and above all lethal consequences of their engagement.

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Foreignness The ways in which we construct our notions of foreignness, the processes of ‘othering’, the book has contended, contribute to how we represent and relate to language intermediaries in war. Our imaginings of countries beyond our own are rooted in a history of perceptions which condition both our understanding of the foreign other and the means by which we relate to them. Thus western imaginings of Afghanistan were framed by the ‘graveyard of empires’ trope in which invaders have perpetually been repelled by savage tribesmen in a uniquely dangerous and lawless border area. The longstanding western method of approaching the mystery of Afghanistan was, from the British imperial colonisers on into the twenty-­ first century, an anthropological one, with lists and cartographies of tribes. Traditionally this was a mute representation, dependent on the outside observation of supposed tribal characteristics, and largely divorced from oral communication or dialogue. The history of linguistic interchange in this situation positioned the languages of Afghanistan as tools of colonial control, preferably guarded by imperial political officers since intermediaries coming from the Afghan communities themselves were seen as untrustworthy and likely to pursue non-western agendas. By the twenty-first century, the knowledge base about Afghanistan in the West was extremely modest, with relatively little informed scholarship and few people with the requisite language skills. After 9/11, the West therefore turned for more contemporary information to Afghans they believed could be trusted, namely those who were culturally close to them and had lived in the West for some time. In these contributions, languages were generally integrated into the historic and now traditional tribal analysis which had characterised traditional western perspectives of Afghanistan. Although armies of the West were increasingly intent on introducing culture into these approaches, culture as a grid of intelligibility was largely mediated through what was conceived of as the quasi-scientific methodology of the social sciences. On the ground, this too was largely mute, with ‘factual’ information collected without dialogue or linguistic engagement.

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During the twenty year conflict which followed the West’s invasion, NATO powers initially sought to rely on Afghans who lived outside the country and were therefore culturally closer to the West, to provide the translation and interpreting services they urgently needed. Contractors, primarily in the US and the UK, were paid substantial sums of money to recruit suitable personnel. In this context, trustworthiness (that is to say broad acceptance of western goals and objectives) often appeared to be more directly important than competence in Afghan languages, a fact demonstrated by the different grades of pay accorded to those close to the West (passport/green card holders) in comparison with locally employed civilians. On the whole too, it was the locally employed interpreters who tended to be deployed in more dangerous front line situations. On the ground, the experience of local Afghan interpreters, largely recruited in an improvised and ad hoc manner, was usually one of physical separation from western colleagues, kept apart on the bases, and frequently under surveillance by nationals from a third country. In practice interpreters were often viewed as incidental to operations, so that there were failures to provide transport for them, or to ensure that the Afghan interpreters designated for a particular task were actually first language speakers of the particular regions concerned. The casualness with which locally recruited Afghan interpreters were regarded by their western employers was evident in the nature of their contractual arrangements. Records of the personnel taken on were slipshod or virtually non-existent, a fact which became of extreme relevance in the dangerous period from 2014 onwards. It was difficult to establish how many local interpreters had been killed or injured in the course of the war, or the numbers of those who were disciplined or dismissed. Across the western deployment, there was no agreed standard of disciplinary procedures, so that Afghans might be summarily dismissed in one area for conduct which would have been perfectly acceptable in another. After the drawdown of NATO troops in 2014, some western countries took steps to limit their possible future liability for interpreters by introducing coda to their redundancy packages, stipulating specific and limited periods of service. Between 2014 and the Evacuation of 2021 when local interpreters were known to be at extreme risk of Taliban reprisals, western schemes

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offering them protection were usually restricted. Typically, they were slow in response and in some cases barely operative. Thus the British Intimidation Scheme designed to support interpreters who were perceived to be under threat had actually relocated only one Afghan up to 2015. Questions about the status of evidence presented by the interpreters, wholly inappropriate offers to relocate Afghans within the country itself, and concerns about the notion of family responsibility in Afghanistan became mixed up with the key issue of national security. Thus Afghans who had worked with western forces and agencies, and who had been security-checked in order to do this, found themselves having to jump additional and increasingly high hurdles to obtain admittance to the West. From being interpreters, employed for their linguistic skills and knowledge of the cultures of Afghanistan, Afghans seeking protection discovered that their claims to asylum would often be implicitly judged on the extent to which they could demonstrate some allegiance to liberal western values as a symbol of their presumed intention to integrate in the societies to which they might be admitted.

Evacuation Despite warnings as to the likely situation when NATO abandoned the country, the speed with which the Taliban gained power seemed to take most western countries by surprise. Where preparations for an Evacuation existed, they were largely military—the logistics of evacuating—and at the outset focused on airlifting out nationals of the countries concerned. In most cases, coordination of the Evacuation in NATO countries was ad hoc and often understaffed. Strikingly, central hubs directing the operation appeared to lack personnel with expert knowledge of Afghanistan who could speak the necessary languages. Very often official communication strategies with those Afghans in danger initially relied on untranslated material. The failure to maintain up to date and detailed lists of locally employed civilians made it difficult to identify and communicate with many of those most in need. In the hectic atmosphere of the Evacuation, inter-agency planning in the West between the ministries involved—Departments of Defence, State/Foreign Office departments

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and ministries of Home Affairs—was chaotic, with a plethora of schemes, some introduced during the actual weeks of the Evacuation, whose criteria were frequently unclear. Messages with urgent pleas from Afghans left behind mounted up unread in departmental mailboxes. As well as the speed and disorganisation in which the Evacuation was mounted, key factors in delaying responses to requests for protection were the particular national policies on asylum and immigration, intimately connected to fears about internal security. In an atmosphere of considerable distress and anguish, the media and political representatives raised individual cases and called on their governments to act in a more open-handed way. Veterans’ organisations in particular lobbied forcefully on behalf of ex-interpreter colleagues and occasionally became personally involved in funding and managing parallel rescue flights. For western governments, these two weeks in August represented in many ways the legacy of their past approaches to those Afghans with whom they had worked over twenty years. For governments in the West, interpreters were foreigners to be kept at arms’ length in the field as potentially untrustworthy employees, invisible alike in employment records and in death statistics, and regarded as possible security dangers if ever allowed into Europe or the USA. After the Evacuation, the same problem of lack of information about former employees made it difficult to establish a clear idea of how many Afghans still at risk remained to be airlifted, and how contact with them could be established. The politics of asylum in western countries created an often hostile framework for these issues, with a backlog of requests, and intransigence about how far family members of those at risk could now be welcomed. In the immediate weeks after the Evacuation, media attention in the West initially refocused on the experiences of interpreters who had worked for the army, both because their language skills made them suitable interviewees and because of the continued and powerful advocacy of veterans’ associations. Gradually however, public attention widened to include the experiences of other groups which had worked with the West, dramatically glimpsed during the discussions on Evacuation and now understood to be still at risk—British Council teachers, development workers, embassy guards, women civil rights activists.

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The reception accorded to Afghans airlifted to the West in the Evacuation was slightly different in each NATO country. The US for example initially accommodated its Afghan guests in some of their larger domestic barracks, repurposed for the occasion. In the UK, Afghans were housed in hotels, pending permanent accommodation being offered by local authorities. These temporary arrangements were often haphazard, with hotel managements poorly briefed, and Afghan families finding themselves located close to busy major roads with independent family travel impossible. In most cases, the transition from asylum centres, barracks or hotels to houses or flats within local communities was difficult. In December 2021, for example, 37,000 Afghans had been resettled in the USA, but this still left some 35,000 still on the bases. Long-term cuts in social housing which had resulted in limited accommodation for British nationals made it difficult for local authorities in the UK to provide the number of houses which were required. As time went on, and debates on immigration in many western countries became more toxic, Afghan refugees were increasingly represented as problems to be dealt with as expeditiously as possible, compared with the apparently warmer welcome reserved for recent Ukrainian refugees. By spring 2023, those Afghans still remaining in bridging hotels in the UK were implicitly associated with an entirely separate immigration issue concerning the approximately 50,000 asylum seekers also accommodated in hotels who were waiting for decisions on their asylum applications. Thus, Afghans who had worked alongside and supported the West’s activities in Afghanistan were told that they would have to accept whatever accommodation was now offered to them even if it was at a considerable distance from the places in which they and their children had been establishing some sort of life for nearly two years.

Moving Forward Engaging in more detail with context in future translation/interpreting studies of war could help us to develop a broader understanding of how the positionality, subjectivity and role of interpreters in conflict change in relation to the contours of a specific war situation. Further comparative

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contextual research between different settings may indeed point to those factors which are vital in determining how the interpreter acts and is viewed in war. In allowing our own analyses to be widened by paying attention to relevant developments in other disciplines, translation/interpreting scholarship may find itself in a stronger position to contribute a distinct language dimension to research in International Relations and War Studies. Conflict, after all, remains at the centre of concerns for many disciplines and few have thus far sought to incorporate insights which translation/interpreting scholarship could uniquely bring. In many conflict situations, it is clear that the interpreter figure is unlikely to have received professional training for the job. In some cases, particularly in parallel ‘soft power’ agencies like NGOs or development and cultural organisations, they may not even have been designated as language mediators but are simply being called upon to add translating/ interpreting to their main duties. A wider optic on what constitutes translating/interpreting in conflict situations could lead us to examine the nature of such organisations and groups as hidden employers of translator/interpreters. In many cases, whether kinetic or non-kinetic, interpreting is marked by multitasking rather than a focused concentration on purely linguistic mediation. Thus the military interpreter may provide information on enemy radio frequencies, interrogate prisoners and actually fight alongside soldier colleagues, and the NGO worker or human rights defender can find themselves having to liaise between donors and local communities who cannot easily communicate with each other. It may therefore be time to review the extent to which common distinctions often used in interpreting, like ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, are still fit for purpose in increasingly complex war situations. In previous studies of translation/interpreting in war, the figure of the interpreter has implicitly been normalised as male. The reasons for this relate both to recruitment patterns in many armies and to a more general academic concentration on the military positioning of interpreting. A reluctance to examine the issue of gender in future studies however could serve to replicate the well-established tendency in western military circles to omit women altogether from visible arenas of war—men are military combatants, and women are non-combatants, civilians. Attempts by professional interpreting and language associations to propose a clearer link

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between interpreting in conflict and peace building surely argue for the need to begin to challenge mono definitions of ‘combatant’ and ‘civilian’, thereby raising important issues related to gender. Approaching the interpreter as a temporally bounded figure, operating solely within the time parameters of a particular military operation, risks detaching the individuals concerned from their background and past histories, often of vital importance for local interpreters. It also removes interpreters from the post-conflict consequences of their role and hence from issues of personal and institutional responsibility. It may be that a life-story framework could enable us in the future to see the translator/ interpreter more clearly as a figure enmeshed in the circumstances which have created the particular war and its aftermath, with lives which are often painfully disturbed as a result of their commitment. The perspectives of those who employ interpreters in war are strongly influenced by the histories of their past engagements in the particular country or region. What has been evident in this study is the impact which such histories have on contemporary attitudes to languages and hence to translating/interpreting. In the case of the West and Afghanistan, inherited colonial perceptions framed the area as one which could be apprehended through the accumulation of visual tribal ‘facts’, an approach which effectively discounted the orality of future encounters, an attitude given additional credence by the historic suspicion of linguistic intermediaries drawn from the community. Factors to consider in future studies exploring the interpreter-employer relationship may indeed be the linguistic attitudes of employers and how these relate to the frames of perception created by historic relationships with the peoples and region of operation. Whilst much attention has rightly been paid to the professional rights and responsibilities of both parties in the field—employers and interpreters—there has been relatively less interest in the actual details of their contractual relationship. This study however has indicated the importance of recognising the interpreter in war as a bona fide participant whose injuries and fatalities need to be officially recorded in the same way as those of national soldiers, and whose employment terms should make clear the contractual responsibilities of their employers. The chaos and confusion attending the Evacuation in 2021 were at least partly a result

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of the failure across NATO to have the sort of properly maintained and up-to-date employment archive for locally employed civilians that they undoubtedly had for their own troops. Although the likelihood of western states accepting their duty of care as employers seems slight at the moment—the more probable scenario is of their seeking to legally distance themselves through more subcontracting—the specific limitations of contractual obligations towards interpreters in sites of war frame their activity and professional practice and are therefore issues with which future studies of interpreting should surely engage. Reversing the gaze away from the translator/interpreter, perceiving interpreting in Afghanistan through the eyes of the West, has been an attempt to understand the relationship of the interpreter figure to western constructions of foreignness, protection, responsibility and asylum. The West has been the subject of this study with the interpreter figure a focus through which we can interrogate the process of western ‘othering’. As we look in the mirror at the gaze which is returned to us from the West, we see uncomfortably laid out histories which are a-linguistic, culture which is weaponised without language and a paucity of informed expertise on the country. There is above all a radical disconnect between intervention and its consequences and responsibilities, and a culpable carelessness in the terms in which local civilians are employed. Protecting those employees closest to the West, like interpreters, became embroiled in the national politics of asylum in a process through which ex-­ interpreters metamorphosed from allies, to become firstly victims and then largely unwanted and forgotten immigrants. The gaze which is returned to us from the West is a brief one, a glance turning rapidly away to look at other conflicts and different foreigners. But of course the image returned to us by the mirror reveals other actors—groups of westerners engaged in long-term advocacy for interpreters, journalists and parliamentary representatives refusing to let those left behind be forgotten, and above all Afghans, formerly employed by the West, sometimes accepting but more often robustly rejecting the ways in which they are represented, fully cognisant of the gap which has opened out between them as foreigners, and the West: ‘You said “we won’t turn our backs on you”. You lied. The internationals have lied to us’ (Interview, 14.02.22).

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References AIIC. (n.d.). Tips and Hands-on Strategies to Cope with Interpreting Over the Long Term in Situations of Conflict. AIIC Project to help Interpreters in Conflict Zones (ICZ). https://www.aiic.org/document/10288/tips%20and%20 strategies.pdf Atwood, M. (2010). The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart. De Jong, S. (2022). Segregated Brotherhood: The Military Masculinities of Afghan Interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 24(2), 243–263. https://doi. org/10.1080/146742.2022.2053296 Jones, I.  P., & Askew, L. (2014). Meeting the Language Challenges of NATO Operations. Policy, Practice and Professionalization. Palgrave Macmillan. Mégret, F. (2021). Intermediate Solidarities: The Case of the Afghan Interpreters. Verfassungsblog on Constitutional Matters. www.verfassungsblog.de/os/-­ intermediate-­solidarities Ruiz Rosendo, L. (2022). Interpreting for the Military: Creating Communities of Practice. Journal of Specialised Translation, 37 Jan. Tesseur, W. (2023). Translation as Social Justice. Translation Policies and Practices in Non-Governmental Organisations. Routledge.

Index

A

Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), 172, 183 Afghanistan economic conditions, 67 exodus from, 158 government of, 70 knowledge base about, 44–51, 202 post-Taliban, 163, 173, 184–189 suspension foreign aid, 184 western gendering of, 189 Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP), 141, 142, 144–146, 150–152, 158, 171–173, 183 Afghans American, 14, 78 civil society organisations, 159, 171

left behind, 111, 164–172, 205 lives prior to 2001, 66 reception, 27, 206 refugees, 19, 27, 45, 67, 73, 109, 159, 172, 176, 178, 179, 181–185, 206 resettlement, 178 Amnesty International, 102 Army ex-officers, 113, 114 relationship with interpreters, 113, 159 Association des Interprètes et auxiliaires afghans de l’armée française, 117 Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence (AIIC), 4, 7, 100, 101, 199 Association of Wartime Allies (AWA), 148, 164, 165, 167

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Footitt, Afghan Interpreters Through Western Eyes, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40383-5

211

212 Index

Asylum policies biometric checks, 107 family members, 108, 112, 139, 140, 142, 166–168, 173, 174, 183, 205 security concerns, 84 toxic debates, 182, 206 Australia, 137, 159, 166, 167, 173, 174

specialists, 59–61 training, 46, 51, 59 Weaponising, 26, 51–62, 88, 89, 198 D

Belgium, 71, 72 Bellew, Henry, 43 British Broadcasting corporation (BBC), 154, 168, 171, 176, 187 British Council, 75, 79, 86, 168, 170, 172, 205 Butler, Lady Elizabeth, 36

Dari, 1, 14, 42, 45, 48, 50, 57, 58, 77, 79, 81, 82, 86, 89, 117, 140, 153, 155, 181 Defence School of Languages, 77 Denmark, 9, 137, 148, 159, 173 Department for International Development (DFID), 13, 73, 168, 169 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), 148 Development Afghan employees, 150 contracts, 169

C

E

Canada, 25, 71, 104, 140, 143, 148, 150, 159, 166, 167, 172, 173, 183 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 40, 75 Colonialism/post colonialism studies, 198 Context of analytical frameworks, 16, 40 of conflict, 11, 14, 196 Contractors, 9, 54, 77–80, 86, 99, 119, 143, 168–170, 172, 199, 203 Mission Essential Personnel, 77–78 Culture

Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 35, 39–41 Employer, 1, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 26–28, 68–76, 79, 87, 89, 90, 92, 101, 105, 110, 111, 118, 119, 121, 123, 147, 155, 159, 168, 169, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203, 207–209 duty of care, 27, 155, 159, 209 Entezar, Ehsan M., 46–52 Evacuate our Allies Coalition, 157 Evacuation communication, 14, 60, 150, 204 identifying evacuees, 145–149 management, 145 phases, 132

B

 Index 

priorities, 154, 200 volume of messages, 151 widening protection, 143–145

213

142, 150, 154, 175, 179, 180 Human Terrain System/Teams (HTT), 26, 53–58

F

Farsi, 77 Female Engagement Team (FET), 123 Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), 150, 151, 153, 156, 188 Foreignness, 1, 25–28, 98, 159, 195, 202–204, 209 histories of perception, 202 Forsaken Fighters, 166 France, 71, 137, 167 history of intervention, 116 state as employer, 118 G

Gender gender blindness, 123, 200 women’s rights, 74, 154, 159, 163, 172, 189 Germany, 25, 59, 70, 71, 74, 75, 137, 147, 149, 159, 167, 173, 174 Global Affairs Canada (GAC), 150 H

Help for Heroes, 118 Home Office, 20, 100–101, 106, 107, 139, 140,

I

INGO, 13, 14, 23, 73, 74, 76, 86, 91, 104, 132, 197, 199 Institut Français, 75 International Refugee Assistance Project, 102, 105 International relations, 12, 23, 181, 197, 207 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 6, 8, 18, 25, 59, 65, 68–70, 76, 77, 82, 84, 87, 88, 92, 103, 147, 149, 150, 155, 158, 159, 163, 197, 198 Interpreter ambiguity of position, 9, 201 community attitudes towards, 91, 208 contracts, 90, 106, 114 data on, 58 deaths of, 85, 101 demonstrations by, 120 identities post Evacuation, 22 left behind, 114 living conditions, 84, 180 motivations to work with NATO, 76, 183 multitasking, 86, 199, 207 naming of, 99, 122 pay, 80 professional training, 207 protection, 7, 10, 102, 201 recording of names, 80

214 Index

Interpreter (cont.) recruitment, 9, 26, 80, 207 situated, 2–6, 28 tasks, 7 traitor, 85, 99, 100, 199 uniform, 10, 15, 199 victim, 109, 118, 121, 209 visibility, 199 working conditions, 82 Interpreting cultural turn, 4 formal/informal, 13 gendering, 27 marginalisation, 2 quality of in field, 81 scholarship, 1, 2, 4, 9, 15, 207 Intimidation scheme, 106, 108, 141, 146 Italy, 6, 25, 70, 75, 137, 143 K

Kabul, 8, 13, 20, 36, 58, 66, 68–70, 74–77, 79, 82, 110, 120, 132–140, 142, 143, 149, 151, 154, 158, 164–167, 169, 170, 173, 176, 185, 187, 197, 198 Kinetic/non-kinetic, 2, 6, 12, 167, 196, 197, 200, 207

Longue Durée, 20, 21, 201 Luxembourg, 71 M

Militarisation discourse, 122 N

NATO coordination strategy, 70 drawdown, 25, 26, 75, 90, 91, 97–124, 131, 203 Netherlands, 144, 167, 172, 173 New Zealand, 138 Non-governmental organization (NGO), 13, 14, 23, 71, 73–76, 86, 91, 99, 122, 139, 144, 153, 184, 186, 197, 207 No One Left Behind (NOLB), 114, 119, 120 Norway, 74 Norwegian model, 72 O

Operation Allies Refuge, 140 P

L

Languages, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12–14, 23, 28, 41–46, 48, 51, 53, 55–61, 68, 75–78, 80–82, 86, 87, 89, 98, 101–104, 112, 120–122, 153, 155, 159, 168, 170, 175, 179, 181, 198–205, 207–209

Pashto, 1, 14, 25, 41–43, 45, 48, 56, 58, 60, 77, 78, 81–83, 89, 140, 153, 155, 171, 181 Peacebuilding, 12, 22, 168 PEN International, 102 Petraeus, David, 52

 Index 

Political officers, 16, 60, 61, 76, 202 Power colonialism, 198 native informant, 198 Protection assimilation, 112 cultures of, 109–112 evidence, 110 relocation, 110, 140 understandings of ‘family,’ 142 Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT), 71–73, 75, 86, 143, 169, 199

215

Spaces of encounter, 11–15, 23, 26, 28, 61, 65–92, 163, 168, 172–184, 195–197 Spain, 10, 25, 71, 137, 143 Special Cases scheme, 144, 152 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), 104, 105, 114, 119, 120, 140, 147, 158, 164, 167, 173 Special Operations Advisory Mission, 89 Sulha Alliance, 19, 113, 118, 142, 146, 167, 183 Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), 8, 77

R

Raverty, Henry George, 43 Reception cultural support, 117 numbers, 174 transfer to permanent accommodation, 206 UK hotels, 180 US bases, 79 Red T, 101–103 Redundancy programme, 106 Resolute Support Mission (RSM), 75 Reversing the gaze, 1–28, 195, 209 S

Social sciences, 24, 46, 52–55, 57–59, 61, 202 Soviets, 36, 38, 40, 44, 45, 66, 67, 73

T

Taliban, 18, 20, 26, 46, 66, 67, 73, 81, 84, 86, 91, 98–100, 108, 111, 124, 131–137, 140, 142–145, 152, 154–158, 163–166, 168–170, 185–188, 199, 201, 203, 204 Tarjuman, 117 Tribe, 38–42, 50, 56, 92, 202 Turkey, 75, 120, 143, 185 U

United Kingdom (UK), 13, 19, 25, 36, 43, 59, 60, 66, 70, 76, 77, 79, 84, 85, 88, 90, 104, 106–111, 113–115, 118, 121, 122, 133, 137–139, 141–146, 150–152, 154, 158, 159, 165–167, 169–183, 185, 188, 203, 206

216 Index

United States of America (USA), 2, 11, 25, 36, 50, 56, 78, 90, 97, 104, 109, 113, 119, 121, 131, 134, 135, 138, 146, 150, 155, 158, 167, 172, 173, 178, 182, 205, 206 V

Veteran groups, 119, 157 ‘Honorary,’ 119 support networks, 144, 180 WhatsApp War, 156

W

Warburton, Robert, 42, 44 West caveats in employing local interpreters, 90 counter insurgency, 123 engagement post-Taliban, 186 Imaginings of Afghanistan, 35–62, 202 light footprint in Afghanistan, 69, 196 ‘The Other,’ 1, 24, 90 state building, 69, 196 training police/army, 69 World Bank, 13, 40, 41, 74