Homo Itinerans: Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan 9781789209303

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Key Dates
Introduction
Chapter 1. Reconstructing Afghanistan: Counterinsurgency and Colonial Imaginary
Chapter 2. The State in All Its States: Elections and Democratization
Chapter 3. Educating the Elites: From Geneva to Abu Dhabi
Chapter 4. Rural Development: A Matter of Workshops
Chapter 5. Village Life: Overlapping Solidarities and Confl icts
Chapter 6. Neighbouring Countries: Equivocal Refuges
Chapter 7. Across the Seas: Playing with Categories
Chapter 8. Greece: The Filter of All Hopes
Chapter 9. Europe, Mon Amour Or the Ruses of Itinerancy
Chapter 10. Contested Modernities: A Transnational Anthropology of the Political
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Homo Itinerans

Homo Itinerans Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan

 Alessandro Monsutti Translation from the French by Patrick Camiller

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Alessandro Monsu i

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without wri en permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2020040660

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-929-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-930-3 ebook

To Alice To Lara and Nando My companions of itinerancy

 Contents Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Key Dates Introduction

xii 1

Chapter 1. Reconstructing Afghanistan Counterinsurgency and Colonial Imaginary

8

Chapter 2. The State in All Its States Elections and Democratization

19

Chapter 3. Educating the Elites From Geneva to Abu Dhabi

29

Chapter 4. Rural Development A Matter of Workshops

38

Chapter 5. Village Life Overlapping Solidarities and Conflicts

49

Chapter 6. Neighbouring Countries Equivocal Refuges

59

Chapter 7. Across the Seas Playing with Categories

69

Chapter 8. Greece The Filter of All Hopes

80

Chapter 9. Europe, Mon Amour Or the Ruses of Itinerancy

92

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Contents

Chapter 10. Contested Modernities A Transnational Anthropology of the Political

102

Conclusion

114

References

119

Index

125

 Preface I spent two long periods in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran in the second half of the 1990s as part of the research for my doctoral thesis. Between 2004 and 2006, thanks to a grant from the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, I extended my research to cover Afghans who had gone to live in Europe, North America and Australasia. In 2006, I took part in a collective project funded by the French National Research Agency, entitled ‘Experts, Mediators and Brokers of Good Governance: A Comparative Study in Transnational Practices of Democratization’. This allowed me to address the theme of democracy promotion and to reflect on the role of aid organizations in the political economy of the Afghan conflict and the postconflict reconstruction. A er the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, I occasionally worked as a consultant for various international organizations and nongovernmental organizations. Between 2014 and 2015, I coordinated research sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) concerning the situation of the many Afghans who went to Europe in the hope of lodging a claim for asylum. The sources for this book are therefore multiple. I travelled between the highlands and urban centres of Afghanistan, between the building sites of Tehran and the streets of Manha an, between the refugee camps in Pakistan and the offices of international organizations in Kabul and Geneva, between a detention centre on the Greek island of Lesbos and the Calais Jungle. My research among Afghans took me to four continents and twenty or so countries. This spatial mobility was matched by multiple positioning. I returned to sites where I had been in the past, maintaining uninterrupted contact with individuals I had got to know during my first stays in the region. Depending on the circumstances, I travelled in Afghanistan on foot or in lorries, on muleback or in Land Cruisers. But I also operated in training programmes in Kabul, spent long periods at the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) and worked

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with the office of the UNHCR. Sometimes I tried to blend into the Afghan population, sometimes I assumed the position of international expert or teacher. In this way, I diversified my viewpoint on a protean set of social phenomena and became more familiar with the mindsets in play in Afghanistan, without confining myself to the narrow limits of the national territory alone.

 Acknowledgements My gratitude goes to the many relatives, friends and colleagues who gave me their support or deepened my insight with their reflections: Abdul Karim Abawi, Khadija Abbasi, Haji Barkat Ali, Jean-François Bayart, Julie Billaud, Filipe Calvão, Pierre Centlivres, Micheline CentlivresDemont, Dawn Cha y, Ashil Kaneshka Darmanger, Antonio Donini, Yvan Droz, Catherine Fragnière, Jean-Pierre Jacob, Roman and Vicki Gehring, Françoise Grange Omokaro, Zahed Hamdard, Ghulam Sakhi Khatibi, Salvatore Lombardo, Ewen Macleod, Grégoire Mallard, Isabelle Milbert, Shalini Randeria, Gilbert Rist, Davide Rodogno, Giulia Scale aris, Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff, Shaila Seshia Galvin and Richard Tapper. I benefited from stimulating exchanges with members of the democratization project funded by the French National Research Agency: Laëtitia Atlani-Duault, Romain Bertrand, Giorgio Blundo, Dejan Dimitrijevic, Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, Boris Petric and David Recondo. I spent a wonderful period at the Yale Programme in Agrarian Studies, thanks to my mentors and confederates: Karen Hébert, Kay Mansfield, Keely Maxwell, Laura Sayre, James Sco , K. Sivaramakrishnan and Nandini Sundar. I owe quite special thanks to Michel Agier and Boris Petric, without whom this work would not have seen the light of day. Finally, my thoughts turn gratefully to everyone with whom I rubbed shoulders and shared a moment of itinerancy, however fleeting, during my years of fieldwork. Although my presence may have disturbed their daily lives, the encounters with them transformed my being-in-the-world.

 Key Dates 1747

Ahmad Shah Durrani creates a new political entity between the empires of Safavid Iran, the Shaybanids of Central Asia, and Moghul India (the Sadozai dynasty).

1839–42

First Anglo-Afghan War: defeat of the British; Dost Mohammad (the Mohammadzai dynasty).

1878–80

Second Anglo-Afghan War; Afghanistan becomes a semiprotectorate; Abdur Rahman.

1919

Third Anglo-Afghan War; full independence of Afghanistan; Amanullah king.

1929

Rebellion led by Habibullah; civil war; Nader Shah king.

1963

Constitutional monarchy; Constitution of 1964.

1973

First coup d’état; Afghanistan becomes a republic; Daoud Khan president.

1978

Second coup d’état (communist); Khalq in power; civil war between central government and the Mujahideen.

1979

Soviet intervention; Parcham in power.

1989

Soviet withdrawal.

1992

Fall of pro-Soviet government; civil war between resistance factions.

1996

The Taliban (appeared in the winter of 1995–96) capture Kabul.

2001

International intervention; fall of the Taliban regime.

Key Dates

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xiii

December 2001

Bonn Conference; interim Afghan authority; Hamid Karzai.

June 2002

Emergency Loya Jirga (or Grand Assembly).

December 2003– January 2004

Constituent Loya Jirga; new Constitution.

October 2004

First presidential election; Hamid Karzai victorious.

September 2005

First legislative elections; Parliament.

From 2005 to 2006 Insurrection in south, east and elsewhere (neo-Taliban). February 2006

London Peace Conference on Afghanistan.

August 2009

Second presidential election; re-election of Hamid Karzai marked by massive voting fraud.

January 2010

Second London Conference.

June 2010

Peace Jirga.

September 2010

Second legislative elections, marred by voting fraud.

April 2014

Third presidential election; no candidate wins an absolute majority.

June 2014

Second round between Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani; massive voting fraud; process at a standstill.

September 2014

Power-sharing agreement; Ashraf Ghani becomes President, while a new function in government is created for Abdullah Abdullah.

Winter 2014–2015

Islamic State active in eastern Afghanistan; rivalry with the Taliban.

2015

Massive inflow of refugees into Europe; more than 1.2 million asylum requests in EU countries in course of the year, 14% of them by Afghans; numerous ships capsize in the Mediterranean, with thousands of victims.

June 2015

Taliban a ack on Afghan Parliament.

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Key Dates

September 2015

Taliban take control of Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, for several days; US Air Force bombs a Médecins sans Frontières hospital by mistake.

April 2016

Taliban claim suicide a ack against intelligence service building in Kabul.

July 2016

Islamic State claims a ack on peaceful Hazara demonstration in Kabul; dozens killed.

September 2016

Peace agreement between Afghan government and Hezb-e Islami, a historical resistance faction.

October 2016

New fighting in Kunduz between Taliban and the Afghan National Army.

End of 2016

Taliban estimated to control 20–40% of national territory; Islamic State roots in east of the country add to the complexity; insecurity remains high; more than 600,000 people displaced internally during the year, with a similar number more or less voluntarily repatriated from Pakistan and Iran.

Since summer 2018

Peace talks between the United States (Trump administration) and the Taliban.

October 2018

Third legislative elections (organised a er a delay of three years).

April 2019

Originally scheduled fourth presidential elections are postponed; while provided for in the Constitution, elections of district councils have not been organized since 2004.

September 2019

Presidential elections eventually held.

February 2020

A er a long delay, incumbent President Ashraf Ghani is declared the winner of the elections; his main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, contests the results. In the meantime, the United States and the Taliban sign a peace agreement in Qatar.

Map 0.1. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the countries of origin and first asylum – between conflict and counterinsurgency, rural development and democracy promotion, refuge and exclusion. Map by Catherine Fragnière.

Map 0.2. Europe, the land route – between promise and disenchantment. Map by Catherine Fragnière.

Map 0.3. North America, beyond the seas – street trades. Map by Catherine Fragnière.

Map 0.4. Australia and New Zealand, beyond the seas – boat migrants. Map by Catherine Fragnière.

 Introduction Yet on we went, changing countries o ener than shoes, Through class wars despairing, When there was only injustice and no outrage. —Bertolt Brecht, ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (1939)

‘I come from where I am going!’ the old man said to me in the course of conversation. At the time, I paid li le a ention to the paradox. Perhaps it was simply his answer to one of the questions I had posed as a conscientious ethnographer: we were walking along a road towards Bamyan, in the highlands of central Afghanistan, and I had asked him where he was from originally. Later, however, his enigmatic smile o en came back to me. The twinkle of benevolent irony in his eyes, the chunk of bread and cup of tepid tea from his thermos that he shared without thinking during a pause had eventually convinced me that the statement had a deeper significance. It was the summer of 1996. As part of my doctoral research, I was crisscrossing the Hazarajat in central Afghanistan to gather material about interregional migration. I had just parted from a rather garrulous travelling companion, who claimed to have fought heroically against the Red Army, but was now yelling persistently about the stones that cut into his feet. A er a gruelling trip on a truck and a night on the floor of one of the roadside inns do ed around Afghanistan, I was glad to be able to walk in silent enjoyment of the countryside. For the first time, I was approaching the famous Valley of the Buddhas, which would be destroyed a few years later by the Taliban. Yet it came as a pleasure when I began cha ing with the old man who had appeared from nowhere. His blue turban indicated that he had performed the Shia pilgrimage to Karbala in Iraq, where he would have engaged in silent prayer at the shrine of Husayn ibn Ali, the Imam murdered in 680 CE by troops of the Umayyad Caliph. Rubber slippers over bare feet, a faded parka and a simple bundle thrown over

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one shoulder completed the character. ‘I come from where I am going!’ Perhaps it was a quote from one of the mystic poets that even uneducated peasants know so well. Every creature is destined to return by one path or another to their creator. We are defined not by the place where we were born, but by the road we are taking. Life as actuality, life as a journey. Isn’t Homo afghanicus first of all a Homo itinerans, who moves about to escape violence or to seek be er economic opportunities, who builds up political affiliations to cope with a situation of insecurity, who switches between activities as circumstances demand in order to provide for the needs of his family? Spatial mobility, political fluidity, socioeconomic plasticity: these will be the central themes in the following pages. The image of Afghanistan that I want to convey differs sharply from that of an enclave suspended outside the historicity of its neighbouring regions, a land on the fringes that, though certainly magnificent, remains stubbornly resistant to change. The territory of today’s Afghanistan has not been intellectually and economically turned in on itself, escaping the political developments of the modern age. It is an outward-looking space, an arena where the great political ideologies of the past two hundred years have repeatedly met and clashed. Having crystallized in the late nineteenth century as a buffer state between the Russian and British Empires, within frontiers that have scarcely changed since then, it was one of the very few countries in the Islamic world to preserve a large degree of independence, serving as a reference for Muslims in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent engaged in the struggle against colonial rule. It was directly affected by communism, but was also one of the main birthplaces of radical political Islam. Since the intervention in 2001 by a US-led coalition, it has been one of the largest recipients of international aid and a target for massive promotion of the neoliberal model of peace. Homo itinerans, then, takes more than one form: some flee the violence and try to reach Europe, Australia or North America; others move from country to country, driven by crises and associated job opportunities. But if Afghan society has been durably marked by war and exodus, it also displays the impact of a host of international agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The outflow of refugees is matched by the inflow of experts, who, fresh from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine or East Timor, come to exercise their talents in Afghanistan. This mobility too, involving encounters between combatants and aid workers, villagers and transnational bureaucrats, will be addressed in what follows. But such movement across borders does not occur in a horizontal world. Various forms of itinerancy, expressing global inequalities and power relations, take shape around Afghanistan. Experts relocate from north to south, while asylum seekers travel from south to north; the for-

Introduction •

3

mer promote supposedly universal social and political norms, while the la er, through their mobility, expose the unequal distribution of such resources as economic wellbeing or the possibility of a secure existence. My own Afghan journey began in 1993, as a university student, when I joined a research team in Pakistan headed by Pierre and Micheline Centlivres, two anthropologists who had devoted part of their careers to Afghanistan. Coming as I did from a family with its own history of migration, I had defined myself from childhood with reference to a number of different places and soon became sensitive to the notion of ‘circulation territories’1 developed by Afghans. Those who practise, read or hear about anthropology tend to think of it as the study of localized social groups, but my early research on transnational networks led me to place myself outside this perspective. For in the regional context that interested me, it was difficult to speak of an organic link between society and territory. My aim from the outset was to show that Afghan refugees remained actors in their own destiny, capable, despite the war, of developing strategies based on the mobility and dispersion of family groups. In a series of periods in the field, I also became aware of the major impact that humanitarian action had on the lives of the people among whom I was developing. Afghan reality, I saw, could not be approached in the way I had been taught in ethnographic methodology courses. To be sure, I was still marked by what might be called classical aspects: apprenticeship in a particular language (the Dari Persian spoken in Afghanistan); a ention to kinship, whether through descent or marriage; the collection of life stories illustrating wider social phenomena; and the centrality of participant observation (not without a degree of fetishization). But in studying Afghan society, I conducted my work at a variety of sites, constantly changing the scale and never singling out just one level of observation or analysis: to reconstruct what was happening in a hamlet in the Hazarajat highlands, I spent time on Tehran building sites, a ended weddings in New York and went to barbecues in Adelaide; to understand life in refugee camps in Pakistan and the ways in which people there were repatriated to their country of origin, I visited the offices of ministries and international organizations, in Kabul as well as Geneva. The whole point was to position myself ‘off centre’, epistemologically and ethically, so that I could be er understand the core of the contemporary world (Agier 2016a, 2016b). My research did not concentrate on a community with a clearly defined territory. I let myself be guided by relations that developed over time, in order to bring out the strategies of people who agreed to answer my questions and received me at their home or workplace. I tried to share their everyday existence, investing more energy in observation than in the

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asking of questions. Gradually I managed to reconstitute their most ordinary social links, the hidden logics behind their constant movement and the dispersion of kinship groups, the forms of solidarity that escaped all determinism. The construction of knowledge relies on personal involvement, and the need to maintain intellectual distance does not exclude all affective closeness. In the mid-1990s, the task of following certain individuals with whom I was developing closer relations led me to move between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Then, as their circulation territory grew larger, my research sites diversified to take in Europe, North America and Australia. I did my best to retrace the spatial scales perceived and utilized by the social players, whether refugees or aid workers, Afghans or Italians. For me, therefore, ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ were not preconceived spheres or reference frameworks. Nor did my interest in movement and flows imply indifference to what distant places meant to my interlocutors. My ethnographic work used a procedural approach that placed global dynamics at the heart of the everyday interactive situations I described, observed and analysed. Every place was read as global, while globality was seen as rooted in particular contexts. How did the people in question move around? What were the stages of their migratory journeys? Where did they stay en route? Whom did they approach when they wanted to obtain a job, a residence permit, a visa, an identity card or a passport? How did they go about sending money or goods from one country to another? How did they remain in contact with others despite the unsophisticated technologies at their disposal? What kinds of solidarity could they rely upon? Through these questions, I hoped to elicit the sociocultural resources that my interlocutors mobilized and the strategies they deployed in response to the disruptive impact of war and exile. My itinerant research work on migratory phenomena was disturbed by the a acks of September 2001 in New York and Washington DC, which suddenly brought Afghanistan back to the centre of the international stage a er a decade of oblivion. The US-led military intervention and the fall of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001 brought about spectacular changes. The democratization process driven by the international community led to the holding of several loya jirga or Grand Assemblies (June 2002, September 2003–January 2004 and June 2010), then to presidential elections (October 2004, August 2009 and April and June 2014) and legislative elections (September 2005 and September 2010).2 Dozens, eventually hundreds of organizations arrived in Afghanistan in the wake of the military. Thousands of aid workers and experts in development and the promotion of democracy set up shop in Kabul, in high-security offices rented at great expense. It is this post-2001 period that will be primarily considered in these pages.

Introduction •

5

A new era began for Afghanistan – one initially marked by a wave of optimism. According to the dominant discourse, Afghans were weary a er twenty-five years of war, destruction and forced rese lement; their main aspiration was for peace and social justice. More than a rapid reconstruction of the country’s infrastructure, Afghans had to be given the means to articulate their rejection of violence. It is true that some roads, schools and clinics were built, but it would take years for every district in the capital, Kabul, to be connected to the electricity grid; a (northwestern) section of the road circling the central highlands to link up the country’s main cities is still waiting to be asphalted. The main effort went into educating Afghans in peace by means of workshops on the promotion of democracy, human rights and women’s emancipation. Like many other researchers, I took part – rather circumspectly – in this postconflict reconstruction industry. I did consultancy work for various structures, particularly the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. They were exciting years, which brought me to work closely with a small unit of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees: the Afghanistan Comprehensive Solution Unit (ACSU). Our aim was to show that the movement of Afghans between their place of origin and neighbouring countries could play a positive role in the postconflict process of stabilization, and that it was necessary to think beyond the usual schema involving three and only three solutions to the refugee problem (repatriation to the country of origin, integration into the initial host country and rese lement in a third country). The people at the head of the ACSU wanted to help in modernizing the international refugee protection regime, while for my part I also aimed to question the state-centred model of migration. My motivation was twofold: as an ethnographer, I wanted to use the opportunity to understand the international system be er by playing an active part in it; as a citizen, I hoped to pass on a different way of looking at mobility and to question the idea that sedentariness was the normal state of social life. Although I could not claim to be in the front row, I was able to observe on the spot how aid work and development projects were transforming society. I noted, for example, how the Afghan vocabulary was being enriched with all sorts of English expressions (or Persian translations thereof) from the doxa of development: kâr-e grupi (literally ‘working group’), hoquq-e bashar (‘human rights’), jâm‘a-ye madani (‘civil society’), enkeshâf-e dehât (‘rural development’) and so on. Body techniques – which Marcel Mauss and Norbert Elias have taught us to regard as social phenomena of prime importance – were also being modified, whether through the mixing of men and women in the offices of international organizations, the increasing use of chairs in public places or the evolution of dress codes among government personnel.

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Yet, a er an early period of hope and a number of formal successes, the situation in Afghanistan took another turn for the worse. From 2005, an anti-government uprising began to gain ground. International experts denounced the negligence and corruption of central government, the rampant criminality, and the sharp rise in the production and trafficking of drugs. Obsessed with the question ‘What went wrong?’, the same experts considered that insurgency successes were the corollary of reconstruction failures. However, they found it difficult to question the paradigm guiding their activity. Like many Afghans, I wondered whether the political compromises marking the presidential election in 2014 had sounded the death knell for the democratization process and, more generally, for the hopes of integrating Afghanistan into the international system. The failure of the international reconstruction effort cannot be explained only in terms of mistakes or the complexities of the Afghan context. The country illustrates, in a particularly painful manner, various political, economic and social processes present elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in Europe: violence, migration, militarization of daily life, deregulation of markets, and overlapping sovereignty between state and non-state players. In contrast to the age of Bertolt Brecht, people today do not talk of class struggle, but rather of the rule of law, the promotion of democracy or the emancipation of women. But the political situation demonstrates that a far from negligible section of the Afghan population is not convinced by this panacea that international experts haul around from one crisis-ridden country to another. One segment – less numerous but still quite significant – has even joined a violent rebellion against what they see as an unjust political, social and cultural order, expressing a rejection also to be found in the Middle East and Asia, Africa and Latin America, whose very terms remain difficult to grasp. There is no choice but to recognize that our world is one of growing inequality – notwithstanding the pious wishes of the UN Millennium Development Goals – and that the disparities are becoming increasingly visible. Economic growth benefits the richest, while the rest of world society, particularly the poorest fringes but also the middle classes, experience a stagnation or degradation of their living conditions. Each year, Oxfam publishes a report on the world economy. Since 2015, the most affluent 1% of the world’s population has owned more wealth than the rest of humanity. And in 2016, according to the estimates of this venerable British NGO, eight persons alone possessed the same wealth as the poorest half of the world (Oxfam 2017).3 Faced with these dizzying figures, I cannot help wondering whether the Taliban (and also Islamic State) represent a kind of revolt against evergrowing inequalities, the grimacing face of a global class struggle that

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we must learn to understand in its sociological and political dimensions. In this optic, Afghanistan appears less as a country torn apart by endless conflict than as one of the places where opposition to the UN’s normative model of social life and political organization (which proved incapable of really slashing disparities) has found its sharpest expression. It may be comprehended as a laboratory of globalization, a place where the global hegemonic project became bogged down. Fernand Braudel thought that to dwell on events, great ba les and royal biographies was to remain on the surface of history. Rather, he underlined the importance of incidental facts and routine events for an understanding of long-range structural changes. Thus, mobility – more than political analysis of conflict – became for me the obligatory key to understanding the multiple realities that are woven in and around Afghanistan. All the chapters in this volume are constructed around li le ethnographic vigne es. In a series of impressionist brush strokes presenting scenes of life that I observed among Hazarajat villagers or at a party of expatriates in Kabul, I evoke various places and people to convey particular atmospheres so that the reader can see, hear and feel what everyday life is like for the people I met in the course of two decades of empirical work. Some wear a turban, others a tie; some brandish a rocket-launcher, others a folder stuffed with receipts… Resisting any inclination to exoticism or value judgements, I treated all these individuals as having an equally legitimate place in the multiterritorial social and political logics, the intersecting itinerancies that were of interest to me in my work. Loyalty and emotion in the relations I established with them were a methodological tool, a process of discovery that gave significance to li le facts gleaned almost by chance that make up human lives, whether Afghan, French or Persian. My aim was to highlight one of the greatest riches of the ethnographic approach in comparison with an abstract normative a itude to what society and the state should be. Therefore, the goal of the present work is to cast an unconventional gaze on Afghan society that grasps it in its transnational dimension, while at the same time reflecting on the very practice of ethnography and how to give an account of it in writing.

Notes  1. A term I borrow from Alain Tarrius (1995, 2002).  2. The legislative elections scheduled for 2015 were postponed several times and finally took place in October 2018.  3. See also Nederveen Pieterse (2002).

1  Reconstructing Afghanistan Counterinsurgency and Colonial Imaginary We’re going to take our cue from the counterinsurgency strategy that worked in Iraq! —A US senior officer, Kabul

In the summer of 2004, I was passing through Ghazni and took the opportunity to visit the US Army’s forward operating base (FOB) in the outlying steppe, at an altitude of some 2,200 metres. Guided by a mujâhed who had links with a Hazara commander I had met a few years earlier, I presented myself without an appointment at the entrance to the base. A couple of Afghan militiamen came up to me as I got out of the car. Amused by my perahân-o-tonbân – Afghan-style trousers and long shirttails – and by the way I spoke Persian, they let me pass a er I had given a brief explanation. They knew my guide, who offered them cigare es as I made my way between two rows of barbed wire. A er a few dozen metres, I came to a blockhouse and encountered a couple of incredulous American soldiers. Who was I? What was I doing there? I had a hard time explaining that I was a European researcher with a long experience of Afghanistan, and that I was interested in aid and development issues and would like to meet someone in charge of the Ghazni provincial reconstruction team (PRT), one of the twenty-five civilianmilitary units providing services to the population in particularly insecure parts of the country.

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The young soldiers relaxed a li le once they had searched me and checked my passport. They reported my arrival and we started cha ing as we waited for someone to come and fetch me. One came from Iowa, the other from Missouri. They did not look a day over twenty. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been out of the States’, the first said. With a candour that made me smile, the second told me that he dreamed of studying anthropology and ge ing to know different ways of life. They confessed to being afraid of the unknown world around them; they suffered from the isolation and did not understand the hostility of the Afghan population: ‘Aren’t we here to help them?’ We went on cha ing for more than a quarter of an hour. Then they called their superior again and, having given him some more details, were told to let me enter; someone would be waiting for me inside. So I started walking again, this time between piles of Hesco bastions. No one seemed to be waiting when I got inside the base. I kept moving hesitantly forward. Men in uniform were hurrying around without paying me the least a ention. Ill at ease, I went up to a passing officer: ‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone in charge of the PRT. Can you tell me where I should go?’ He replied phlegmatically that I was in the combat troop sector and should turn around and take a right. I would have expected there to be stricter security regulations. I finally tracked down the non-commissioned officer (NCO) dealing with the local PRT, an imposing Afro-American who had been informed of my presence. He showed me into an air-conditioned shack and offered me a glass of cold water. But he seemed to be on his guard and gave only laconic answers to my questions. He knew that although his superiors thought the provincial reconstruction teams could reach villages inaccessible to most NGOs and win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Afghans, aid organizations were very critical of them for mixing up reconstruction with counterinsurgency activities. Our conversation was leading nowhere and I soon took my leave, but I was intrigued by the li le window it had opened onto the lives of foreign soldiers in Afghanistan. Several years later, in January 2011, I had a very different experience with the US Army. I happened to find myself in the Kulula Pushta district of Kabul, at the home of the French director of an NGO, where the UN Secretary-General’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan and a member of the American top brass were a ending a social occasion. The American was the right-hand man of General Petraeus, a hero of the Iraq war and now commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who was waging military operations under a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) umbrella to extend Afghan government

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influence over the national territory and thereby assist the work of reconstruction, and who also had responsibility for the anti-corruption and anti-drug-trafficking force (Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force or CJIATF-Shafafiyat). Light armoured vehicles suddenly drove into the area and blocked all access to the street. The senior officer, his aide-de-camp and a number of heavily armed men made a speedy exit. All were in civilian dress, including the bodyguards, who were also wearing beards and dark glasses. I wondered about the legality of the procedure. Were they perhaps employed by a private security company working for the US armed forces? At any rate, rumours about these shadowy fighting men were doing the rounds in Kabul and contributing to the widespread distrust of foreign troops. Insurgents resisting the state authority were not the only ones who cared li le about the distinction between military and civilians. The American army relied on the recruitment of sometimes vaguely defined forces from Afghanistan as well as Nepal and Eastern Europe. The other guests at the occasion included an official from the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO), a Frenchman, and a political analyst working for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a German. Both were still young, but had long experience of the country. Also there was a young Afghan from the Central Statistical Agency, who was presented to me as having links to the Afghan royal family. In short, the scene consisted of eight people: the deputy director and a political analyst from UNAMA; the American senior officer and his aidede-camp; the ECHO official; the director of an NGO (the master of the house); a researcher a ached to a Swiss academic institution; and an Afghan civil servant. Apart from the last of these, all had travelled in many parts of the world, leading an itinerant professional life with periodic returns to their country of origin. It was a fairly typical mix for an expatriate party (the customary term for foreign civilian experts in the field of aid and development) in Kabul. Memories came back to me of student lectures on Georges Dumézil’s theory of trifunctionality. Were its figures of the priest, the warrior and the producer not being revived in those of the UN official (plus academic) promoting a social contract based on law and justice, the military man defending the people against its enemies, and the aid worker a ending to the prosperity of the greatest number? I amused myself taking it a stage further, with the figure of the shudra or ‘varlet’, the Afghan supposedly won over to the values of modernity, whose ancillary presence reassured Westerners about their capacity to meet local people and take their viewpoint into consideration.

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We were in a fine house built in the first half of the twentieth century by a bourgeois family in Kabul. The owners lived in Europe and had the rent sent to them there, our host whispered to me. The garden was enlivened with a pergola and a small greenhouse, frail testimony to a prewar world, which contrasted with the neighbouring buildings hastily erected a er 2001. The internal décor was representative of the assorted Afghan handiwork found in many expatriate homes: carpets tied and woven in the province of Turkestan, low chairs and li le wooden chests from Nuristan, blue glass from Herat, a ewer and pewter basin, and so forth. We formed a circle around the wood-burning stove and introduced ourselves to one another. The senior UN official and the general soon had a grip on the discussion. The American, who had been in Afghanistan for six months, declared with authority: ‘We’re going to take our cue from the counterinsurgency strategy that worked in Iraq!’ He told us how he had managed to pacify a town in the north of the country by cultivating the trust of the local population. His model was the ‘Anbar Awakening’ of 2006, when a number of Sunni Arab tribes in western Iraq had formed a coalition against Al Qaeda. In his view, the Pashtun tribes in southern and eastern Afghanistan could be turned in the same way against the Taliban. He expressed himself clearly and precisely, without any bragging. Having wri en a book that drew the lessons of the Vietnam fiasco, he was confident that it was possible to learn from past mistakes to avoid repeating them and that military solutions could be transposed from one operational theatre to another.1 I struck up a conversation with his aide, a smartly dressed lieutenantcolonel, who, like his superior, had graduated from the West Point military academy and held a doctorate from a leading American university. He took out a li le notebook and began to ask me questions about my work, showing a special interest in religious authority in Islam and the mechanisms of corruption. Despite myself, I felt intimidated by this young man, who seemed blinkered by certitudes and by procedures designed to procure measurable results. I spoke of corruption as a social fact rather than a mere disease that could be uprooted from the state and society, as a crosscu ing phenomenon that affected aid circles as much as the Afghan administration. What I said obviously bored him: he took no notes and repeatedly glanced across to his superior, who was now criticizing the compromises that the International Commi ee of the Red Cross had supposedly made with the Taliban. I felt as if I was at an exam, stu ering in search of something to hold his a ention and illustrate the relevance of the anthropological perspective. In vain! Our perspectives were incompatible. He expected from ethnographers like myself a sharp working knowledge

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of local peculiarities, whereas I, rather clumsily, cast doubt on the categories of thought and action that he was using. His perception of the social sciences and their potential usefulness was directly inspired by the Human Terrain System (HTS), which the US Army developed following its intervention in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). During those years, social science researchers were deployed with army units to gain a be er understanding of the local society and, in this way, to improve the effectiveness of military action. The knowledge that anthropologists had of the social and cultural milieu meant that they were particularly sought-a er: not to question the paradigm of intervention, but to bring the necessary discernment to bear on the expectations of local people and thereby counter their support for the resistance. Anthropologists were supposed to broker the counterinsurgency message among Afghan villagers and at the same time to act as cultural advisers to American troops on the ground by passing on their basic knowledge about ethnic and linguistic composition, tribal structures, irrigation problems or even what counted as good manners. This initiative drew a reaction from the executive council of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which, in a declaration issued in October 2007 and a final report published two years later, expressed deep concern that anthropologists collaborating with the HTS were not in a position to respect the AAA’s Code of Ethics. On the one hand, it argued, their approach was incompatible with the fundamental principle of avoiding harm or wrong to the people they studied, since the information they gathered was being used to wage the counterinsurgency campaign. On the other hand, their activity conflicted with their responsibility to the academic world. By blurring the distinction between research and military operations, by causing local people to confuse the two, the use of ‘embedded anthropologists’ was thought to have compromised the security of other researchers in the social sciences. But apart from this condemnation on the basis of ethical principles, other observers adopted a more pragmatic a itude. In their view, the HTS had not been effective either in collecting militarily useful data or in winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, so that in the end the HTS contribution to counterinsurgency and the peace effort had not been convincingly demonstrated. Despite the AAA criticisms and the widespread disapproval among academics, the social sciences remained part of the apparatus available to the military. The explicit mission of the foreign armed forces in Afghanistan was not just to combat the resistance, but also to assist the reconstruction effort, thereby securing local popular support and isolating groups labelled as insurgent. Provincial reconstruction teams were by no

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means a minor accessory; they were at the core of military operations. The US Army set up a special programme to fund its stabilization operations and development projects in Iraq and Afghanistan: the Commander’s Emergency Response Programme (CERP). Its budget for Afghanistan skyrocketed from $40 million in 2004 to approximately $1 billion in 2010. According to the Costs of War Project,2 based at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (Brown University, Providence), the military commitment in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan following the 9/11 a acks had cost the US federal budget a total of $4,800 billion by August 2016. A total of 70% of the US reconstruction funds for Afghanistan were allocated via the Department of Defense, a modest 18% via USAID (the government agency responsible for administering foreign aid and development assistance) and the remainder via the State Department and other public bodies (Johnson, Ramachandran and Walz 2011: 7 and 9). In short, the mission of US troops is not limited to fighting the armed opposition to the central government. The US armed forces are one of the main players in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, and their operations increasingly encroach upon the traditional space of bilateral development agencies of donor countries, when they do not directly compete with them. This is the context in which the expectations that the US lieutenant-colonel had of me, the ethnographer, should be situated. Having spent long periods in Afghan villages and being able to speak the local language, I was a potentially valuable source of information. He did not expect from me any critical reflection on the paradigm of action. Nor was this set-up new. Only academics or diffident aid workers can feign ignorance about the long history of collusion between military interests and the effort to document the lives of local populations. In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was already at the heart of the colonial imaginary. Scholars, diplomats, political operatives, adventurers and travellers took part in the country’s already turbulent political life (Burnes 1986; Elphinstone 1992; Masson 1997, to cite but a few). British gaze eers3 methodically covered its social organization, tribal structures, military alliances and economic activity – and the documents contained in them are still invaluable sources of information. Their authors were players in the Great Game (the established term for the rivalry between the Russian and British Empires) and were therefore deeply implicated in the colonial enterprise. Not surprisingly, curiosity and knowledge went hand in hand with territorial expansion and a will to control. The gaze eers reflect direct experience of the region, but also remarkable erudition. The cultural immersion and linguistic competence of their authors are o en considerably greater than those of researchers who studied the region in later years. More than once, an Afghan has said to me

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that although the British lost their military pre-eminence to the Americans, they remained the brains of the international coalition. Olaf Caroe, a devoted and distinguished servant of the British Raj, offered a good example of orientalist discourse when he compared two tribes inhabiting what is today the Afghan–Pakistani frontier: The nearest I can get to it is to liken the Mahsud to a wolf, the Wazir to a panther. Both are splendid creatures; the panther is slier, sleeker and has more grace; the wolf-pack is more purposeful, more united and more dangerous. (Caroe 1990: 392–93)

He speaks of human beings as if they were wild animals, combining fascination, ‘naturalization’ or even eroticization with an underlying concern for control and surveillance. The Caroe quotation seems to come from a bygone age – and yet it has an echo today in many successful publications. A burgeoning new literature casts an impenitent gaze on the colonial and imperialist past of Europe and North America. Thus, in an article ‘Let’s Be Honest: We Need to Impose Our Imperial Rule on Afghanistan’, published in The Independent on 17 October 2001 as the Anglo-American offensive in Afghanistan was ge ing under way, the British writer and essayist Philip Hensher made no bones about what he thought was an appropriate response to the Afghan crisis.4 In his view, it was beyond doubt that colonial rule had improved the lot of the peoples of India and that the moral superiority of the colonizers had always gone together with a wish to understand other cultures. By contrast, the chaotic situation in present-day Afghanistan was due to the fact that the country had kept its independence from the British Empire and therefore failed to experiment with the virtues of parliamentary democracy. He scoffed at the professors of postcolonial literature who were unable to grasp this point. Convinced that the Afghan people would live be er under colonial rule than under the Taliban regime and that no credible political interlocutor existed in Afghanistan, he dared to use the word ‘viceroy’ for what he thought necessary. Was this just provocative talk from a modish intellectual? Well, in the corridors of the Palace of Nations in Geneva as well as in leading American universities, I have heard very serious people say that Afghan sovereignty should be suspended and the country placed under the United Nations Trusteeship Council, one of the principal organs of the UN, which has been dormant since the early 1990s. Although there have been a number of deeper analyses of political developments since the 1980s (Dorronsoro 2000; Giustozzi 2000, 2007, 2009, ed. 2009; Maley 2002; Rashid 2002; Roy 1985; Rubin 1995), the literature on the insurgency, the peace process and the postwar reconstruction has been dominated by short-term political interests. It oscillates between new-

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wave modernization theory and a naïve validation of local life, a statecentred vision and an idealization of participatory democracy. Readings in terms of ethnicity and tribalism have also experienced a major revival. Thus, the main parties involved in the country’s governance have adopted an ethnic-tribal interpretation of Afghan society and hence of the fighting that has raged there, at the risk of reifying identities and confusing tribal membership with political affiliation. For an illustration of this tendency that reads like a caricature, we have only to look at the site of the Programme for Culture and Conflict Studies (CCS) of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.5 Referring explicitly to the gaze eers of the colonial period, this training programme for active officers in every branch of the US armed forces is based on the conviction that an understanding of the world’s cultures and societies will make it possible to operate more effectively at a military level. As in my conversation with the US general’s aide-de-camp in Kabul, the CCS expects anthropologists to provide detailed information about the local organization of society – whether in Iraq or Afghanistan – and not critical reflection about the forms of knowledge and action underlying the architecture of international relations. The CCS therefore specializes in the analysis of anthropological, ethnographic, social, political and economic data for the purpose of informing army personnel who take strategic and operational decisions. A large part of the information available on the public site consists of genealogies and ethnic or tribal maps. Social groups are seen as miniature nation-states capable of being mapped in separate territories; tribal and ethnic membership determines political alliances. Researchers at this military school do not refer to work that shows that political mobilization on an ethnic basis is a consequence rather than a cause of the conflict.6 I have never felt that patrilineal systems, tribes or ethnic groups in Afghanistan should be thought of as collective actors working consistently towards a political goal. In the contrary, it has seemed to me that the play of alliances is meant to diversify political ties, ensuring that there are always some relatives (direct family members or in-laws) on the winning side. In an uncertain and unpredictable environment, individuals forge temporary alliances in an effort to gain resources, and dissolve them to adapt to everchanging social, political and economic conditions. More than ethnic divisions, the gap between town and country has always struck me in the speech and actual practice of the Afghans I have met in my research. As I see it, the Taliban movement reflects profound changes in the organization of Pashtun society that have taken place in southern Afghanistan: the disappearance of rural elites linked to the monarchical regime; the emergence of a new class of militants, o en from

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poor backgrounds, who legitimize their social ascent in the name of Islam. The Soviets in the 1980s, like the international coalition since 2001, tried to protect the towns and cities as the starting point for social progress, and to subjugate the countryside as the zone where all archaic social tendencies were entrenched. First the Mujahedeen, then the Taliban saw things in the opposite way; the city world, contaminated by the foreign presence, became subject to repression that was at once vengeful and redemptive. These dichotomous visions parallel each other in many ways: the literature of writers such as Hensher or Boot, who reaffirm the virtues of colonialism and imperialism, and the militant ideologies that lay claim to Islam in violently rejecting any external interference. The former conceives of Afghanistan as a place to be educated, having long escaped the temporality of history; the la er see it as a site of resistance, whose moral purity is under threat and needs to be preserved, even if that means resorting to violence. But is it not necessary to move beyond this impasse? Although the diplomatic isolation of Afghanistan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely the result of British policies, colonial literature helped to construct the (still influential) cliché of an indomitable people eluding any centralized power. And the image of a land turned in on itself, where change can only come from outside in the form of support for national elites, continues to pervade numerous official reports and even scholarly works. In most journalistic pieces, but also in many academic texts, Afghanistan embodies the historical resistance to external powers: it is the ‘graveyard of empires’, to quote the famous expression used recently again in the title of a book by an expert working for the RAND Corporation, an American think tank close to military circles (Jones 2009). This viewpoint has been criticized in a convincing manner. Thomas Barfield (2004, 2010) has shown that the territory of today’s Afghanistan was the ‘highway of conquest’ until the middle of the nineteenth century, when modern Afghanistan came into being as a buffer state between the British and Russian Empires. Only then did the very name of the country become fixed, only then was its present territory clearly defined (Noelle 1997; Hanifi 2011). Numerous historians and anthropologists have shown that the image of Afghan intellectual and economic isolation is false. The frontier region with Pakistan, in particular, should not be presented as an enclave of violence and lawlessness. It is and has been open to the outside world, inhabited by peoples who have continually moved around for political or economic reasons (Marsden and Hopkins 2011; Nichols 2008). Afghanistan was not sheltered from British influence in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that the two Afghan wars (1839–42 and 1878–80) largely

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failed to produce a decisive outcome. During his reign (1880–1901), Abdur Rahman succeeded in crushing the internal resistance and went on to construct a relatively strong state thanks to foreign subsidies and, more generally, to integration into colonial markets on the periphery of modern world capitalism (Hanifi 2011). A er it achieved complete diplomatic independence through the Third Afghan War (1919), Afghanistan by no means withdrew into isolation, but constituted a single transnational sphere together with neighbouring regions, remaining in close touch with the development of Muslim modernism in India. As an independent country outside European control, it represented a model of resistance that would reassert itself several decades later for many Muslims in the anti-colonial struggles throughout South Asia and the Middle East.7 The Red Army occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s made it a strategic hotspot for the Western powers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the country lost its importance and was le to its intestine quarrels. However, the a acks of September 2001 in New York and Washington DC suddenly thrust it back onto the international stage. As Mark Duffield (2001) has shown, it became a security priority to promote stability, development and democracy. The image of Afghanistan and Afghans has therefore undergone a curious evolution in the West. Whereas in the 1990s the media praised the heroism of a people resisting the Soviet invader at a high cost to itself, the picture gradually darkened in the 1990s, when the Taliban treatment of women aroused public indignation. A er 2001, both of these opposing perceptions gave way to the idea that the country’s salvation could only come from outside and through the establishment of a strong centralized state. Moreover, beyond all the sharp breaks, the urge to control and the wish to understand have gone hand in hand. The nineteenth-century gaze eers were succeeded by the dull literature produced during the post2001 reconstruction effort. The aid imaginary came to chime with the old colonial imaginary, in which Afghanistan, a rebellious, unstable land, had to be disciplined and brought into the international community.

Notes  1. However, it was a completely temporary solution. A few years later, Anbar largely fell under the control of Islamic State.  2. h p://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar (retrieved 8 June 2020).  3. Recompiled in Adamec 1972/1985.  4. For a voice across the Atlantic that simultaneously asserted the need for American supremacy, see Max Boot (2001).

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 5. h p://www.nps.edu/Programs/CCS/index.html (retrieved 8 June 2020). In January 2015, the site carried precise tribal maps largely disconnected from the reality on the ground. It has since been reorganized, but without any reconsideration of the conceptual approach.  6. Sche er (2003, 2005); Harpviken (1996); and Tapper (2008), who describes how self-designation among nomads in Afghanistan has changed through contact with international organizations and NGOs.  7. See the work of Nile Green: for example, Green (2008 and 2011).

2  The State in All Its States Elections and Democratization The elections will bring a healthy impetus, triggering a series of profound changes in Afghan society. —The UN Secretary-General’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan

It is early October 2004. In a few days, the first presidential elections in the history of Afghanistan will be held. I meet the UN Secretary-General’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan, the number two in the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). I enter the green zone in Kabul, the ultra-high-security area that houses the presidential palace and the offices of UN agencies. The building perimeters are protected by rows of Hesco bastions. It is the kingdom of Humvees and men in khaki, green or grey uniform who operate in front of the guard houses. I present myself at UN Camp B. Having gone through a polite body search and filled in the entry form, I am led across a series of courtyards and long corridors to meet my host. We have friends in common and he is in jovial spirits. Repeatedly switching between Persian and English or French, I find it difficult at first to se le on Italian, the language in which the conversation takes place. He is an imposing figure, an eloquent and charismatic international dignitary, with long experience of conflict situations and above any suspicion of naiveté. He embodies a particular instance of Homo itinerans: the high-level expatriate who moves from one corner of the earth to another as crises dictate. In keeping with his light

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suit, he comes across as optimistic out of moral duty rather than because of his analyses of the political situation. He is programmed, and paid, to believe in change – in other times, one would have said progress – and to promote it. In his view, Afghanistan is in need of shock therapy. The elections will provide both the symbolic and institutional launch for this new departure for society and the state. His words keep opposing the new to the old Afghanistan. He classifies all the political players within this grid, with one small nuance: it is possible to work with some representatives of the old disorder, whereas others must be excluded. It soon appears that, for him, the architects of the new order are all people who have spent a long time abroad and feel at ease speaking English. At the top of his hierarchy is the Minister of Finance, Ashraf Ghani, who has a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University, New York, taught at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, served as an expert at the World Bank and will later become President of the Republic of Afghanistan. My conversation partner diligently sets out his voluntarist vision of social and political change, which will require elite involvement and a strengthening of the central state. As I listen to him, I wonder what contribution I could make to this debate with my experience of the life of Afghan villagers and migrants. How could I make those marginal voices heard? How can I claim the legitimacy to do that? Is it my role? Who and what can the anthropologist’s eye usefully serve? Fortunately, he does not pause to ask my opinion: ‘The elections will bring a healthy impetus, triggering a series of profound changes in Afghan society.’ I take my leave, feeling slightly dazed by his soliloquy. As no one accompanies me through the maze of corridors and courtyards that I negotiated a li le more than an hour ago, I take the opportunity to pull out my camera and snap a few photos of the impressive UNAMA vehicle fleet. My thoughts carry me to India (whose embassy is not far away), to Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the promoters of Subaltern Studies, who see disadvantaged social groups rather than elites as the agents of social and political change. Can they offer an alternative to this projection of hegemony, to this teleological vision of human history? How can it be explained that their voices have no resonance in the aid and development establishment? A er two postponements, the presidential elections finally take place on 9 October 2004. Hamid Karzai, the President of the interim government installed by the international community a er the fall of the Taliban regime in December 2001, is the heavy favourite. His most serious rival, Yonus Qanuni, is close to the late Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. When the historic day arrives, I leave early my lodgings in the Khushal Khan Khana district and stroll through the streets of the capital. Move-

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ment is severely restricted and the mostly male crowd is divided up into small clusters. There is a festive atmosphere, despite the threat of a acks. The Taliban insurgents are opposed to the democratic process, branding it a foreign import, and have announced that they intend to disrupt the vote. I head towards the nearest polling station in a local school. Policemen with kalashnikovs guard the surrounding area; several are wearing riot gear, with visored helmets and transparent polycarbonate shields. They good-humouredly allow people to get close and so I engage them in conversation. They pose proudly for me to photograph them in front of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency board. I become more daring: ‘Can I get into the yard and watch what’s happening in the polling station?’ ‘Sure, you’re our guest!’ the most senior of them replies.

He sends one of his colleagues inside, but the man returns a er a couple of minutes and says that for security reasons, it will unfortunately not be possible. I would have been surprised if it had been. Still, calmness seems to be the order of the day; we are a long way from the armour-plated atmosphere of the green zone. Disciplined male voters queue along the outside wall of the school. Women arrive in small groups, sometimes accompanied by children, and are allowed in immediately. People speak to me spontaneously; they take me for a foreign journalist and are delighted that they can speak with me in Dari. A man in the prime of life, who has a marked Pashto accent, breezily calls over to me: ‘Melal-e Motahed [the UN] want Karzai? We’ll give him to them. But we want results.’ Despite suspected irregularities, the interim president wins on the first round with more than 55% of the vote. Although some foreign observers allege that cases of fraud have marred the election, it is generally hailed as a success. Personally, what strikes me the most is the euphoria surrounding the event. Did I not o en hear the Kabul crowd say things like: ‘It’s the first time we’ve been asked for our opinion’? On the other hand, I do not sense any real enthusiasm for the winner, Hamid Karzai. No one I speak to sees him as the heaven-sent man who will establish order in Afghanistan. By voting for him, the population – so it seems to me – is signing a contract with the international community. The next presidential elections, on 20 August 2009, took place in a very different atmosphere. Hamid Karzai was a candidate to succeed himself. His closest rival was Dr Abdullah, another man close to Massoud. The wave of hope of the early period had not withstood a worsening of security on the ground. The situation of Afghanistan was far from corresponding to the optimistic forecasts made on the day a er the defeat of the

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Taliban. In fact, the Taliban had rebuilt their strength and seemed to enjoy a new popularity in the south and east of the country. They were showing their capacity to resist the most formidable war machine in human history, and they used the most modern communications technology to spread their message. Much more than in 2004, they had a real impact on the holding of the elections. Just a few days before the voting started, two a acks had shaken the capital, at the very heart of the green zone around the presidential palace. While President Karzai adopted an ever more openly anti-Western discourse, many international experts explained the failure of the reconstruction process as being caused by the gangrene of corruption at every level of the administration. The following dilemma continually arose in my conversations with people: should we sidestep the national government, adding to its inability to deliver basic services, or should we stick with the government structures even if it means fuelling the clientelist networks that the big wheels have put in place? The results came in on 26 August: Karzai had won only 40% of the vote. A second round would have to be held. There seemed to have been widespread irregularities; accusations of massive fraud came gushing out from diplomatic and journalistic circles. This time, the UN was visibly disturbed. Rumours even abounded that various options were on the table to remove the outgoing president, who had become too much of a liability for Washington. In this chaotic context, a partial review of the polling process was carried out and tens of thousands of votes were declared invalid. A series of contradictory results, some even giving Karzai an absolute majority, were announced during the course of September. As the confusion reached a climax, a number of Afghan friends told me of their fear that the supporters of Karzai and Abdullah might resort to arms. The US authorities took things very seriously and pushed for a power-sharing agreement. Kabul was the scene of intense diplomatic manoeuvring throughout October. On 21 October, the final results were declared: Karzai 46.7% and Abdullah 30.6%. Under pressure, Karzai reluctantly agreed to a second round of voting. Abdullah accused the independent electoral commission, the national verification body, of not being impartial. When his demands for a change in its composition failed to bear fruit, he dropped a bombshell on 1 November by refusing to take part in the second round. Karzai was declared the winner. Given the outcome, could it be said that the presidential elections gave the impetus for which expatriates sealed off in the green zone had been hoping, or that they ushered in the advances that voters had expected in 2004 in Khushal Khan Khana? The whole process involved a high de-

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gree of external monitoring, with thousands of observers from the four corners of the world. Afghan politics is a transnational affair, in terms of both human and financial resources, and it involves a global circulation of knowhow and personnel. In five years, we had come a long way from the festive atmosphere of 2004. The Afghans with whom I spoke conveyed a sense of frustration, dispossession and even anger. Some talked of the elections – over and above the results – as a ritualized deception, which corresponded more to the fantasies of people representing the international community than to the needs of the population.1 Afghanistan’s infrastructure, already li le developed in the past, had greatly suffered since 1978. Agriculture in particular (with the exception of poppies) remained at low levels of productivity. The employment market was dependent on the foreign presence, while demographic growth, one of the highest in the world, averaged 3.5% between 2005 and 2010.2 The government had hardly any revenue of its own and the national budget was largely tied up with international aid. Faced with questions of political legitimacy and the inevitable shi s in sovereignty resulting from the massive international presence, we could speak without exaggeration of a ‘globalized protectorate’ (Pétric 2005). Many mistakes had been made and no doubt some of them were avoidable. But let us try to suspend any normative viewpoint and address the structural factors at work. A er the US-led intervention and the defeat of the Taliban at the end of 2001, Afghanistan experienced spectacular changes. The democratization process, driven forward under the guidance of the international community, led to the adoption of a new Constitution and the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections. Technically speaking, these were fine achievements. However, in a work analysing the process as a whole, Coburn and Larson (2013) ask whether the elections permi ed the establishment of a legitimate representative government. They criticize those who see the simple fact that they took place as a success; they maintain that the way in which the electoral campaigns and polling were organized was actually a destabilizing factor. Far from se ing a positive dynamic in train, the hype around one-off events – which were supposed to capture the imagination, but ultimately remained out of tune with the political context – worked to the detriment of the structural processes of social change. The presidential elections in 2004, and then in 2009, contributed to the failure of reconstruction by enabling the political elites to consolidate their hold over the resources introduced by international players. This pessimistic analysis is corroborated by the third presidential election, which was held on 5 April 2014. It differed from the two previous elections in that it led to a handover of power: Hamid Karzai, having already been elected twice, could not stand again. It took place in a climate

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of growing uncertainty, with the withdrawal of the international forces scheduled for the end of the year. According to the figures provided by the independent electoral commission, 6.6 million voters turned out at the polls – a sizeable figure in view of the context of violence and the threats made against polling stations. None of the candidates obtained an absolute majority. The perennial Dr Abdullah came first with nearly 45% of votes, and Ashraf Ghani, the former academic and World Bank expert so highly regarded by the UN Secretary-General’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan, secured 31.5% (compared to a mere 2.7% in 2009). The other runners came a long way behind. The contrast between the two leading candidates was more sociological than ethnic. Abdullah drew on the milieux that had come out of the resistance; the local branches and political links he had built up proved their worth. Ghani benefited from strong support in expatriate circles, and the gossip had it that he could also count on clientelist networks developed by the outgoing president. The second round took place on 14 June. Early counts pointed to a remarkable sea change in favour of Ghani. The tension mounted, accusations of fraud flew thick and fast, and Abdullah hinted at the possible creation of two parallel governments. This time, some 8 million voters apparently took part in the poll, but the figure seemed highly implausible to international observers, who pointed out that 21 million voting cards had been issued for a registered electorate of 13 million. The provinces of Paktia, Khost and Paktika, where Ghani won massive support, recorded more votes than the estimated number of voters. The United States, which since 2001 had been closely following the democratic process, could not afford to see it run into the sand. It pressed the two sides to accept a UN-sponsored review of the ballot, and long and difficult talks ended on 20 September 2014 in a political compromise aimed at the establishment of a national unity government. A er three months of deadlock, the two main candidates agreed to share power. Ghani was declared the winner, while Abdullah obtained a new function of Chief Executive Officer of the Republic (not provided for under the Constitution), with the possibility that a constitutional amendment could change this into the office of prime minister. The details of the second round were not officially announced, but it seems that Ghani and Abdullah received approximately 55% and 45%, respectively. In view of the first-round results and the demographic features of Afghanistan, Ghani’s victory in the second round seems mathematically improbable. How should it be interpreted? Did the many infringements of democratic transparency put paid to the dream of normalizing the governance of Afghanistan? How should we understand the opposition be-

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tween Ashraf Ghani and Dr Abdullah? The media o en repeat that the former is Pashtun and the la er Tajik. But is that the right analytic key? To be sure, an ethnic dimension was present. The two electoral lists were explicitly built around the principle of diversity: Ghani was endorsed by Abdul Rashid Dostum, the head of the Uzbek militias (which supported the communist regime until 1992) and a Hazara legal expert. However, no figure linked to resistance circles featured in this alliance. The opposite camp followed the same logic of mixed ethnicity, but it included people who had come out of the anti-Soviet struggle: Abdullah gained the backing of a member of Hezb-e Islami (a party thought of as Islamist and with a Pashtun majority) and of Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, an influential Hazara commander. Elections are central to the legitimacy of a democratic system. But the Afghan state did not have the logistical or financial means to organize the process. The cornerstone of national sovereignty remained under international tutelage. The Afghan population witnessed the staging of democracy, which was ultimately reducible to a political deal clinched by the United States. In their trajectories, Ghani and Abdullah embody different political practices and social projects. I would therefore favour a political and sociological reading of the Afghan presidential election of 2014. More than a dispute between a Pashtun and a Tajik, it was a confrontation between two different forms of redistribution, between an intellectual who had spent the war years abroad and a representative of jihadist circles, between a technocrat whose programme was to build a strong central state and a public figure seasoned in the Afghan art of politics. People had to vote either for a future-looking voluntarist project or for pragmatic management of the equilibria inherited from the conflict. At any event, the election of Ashraf Ghani was a pyrrhic victory. The concessions he had to make to win power and the effective fragmentation of decision-making centres made Afghanistan even more difficult to govern. But at a deeper level, one may wonder whether his vision of the state corresponded to the needs of Afghan society and to the changes in the world around it. His programme of ‘fixing failed states’, to quote the title of a book he coauthored (Ghani and Lockhart 2008), refers to states that do not correspond to the model tested in Europe and North America and involves making them a real part of the international community. Thus, he writes: [O]nly sovereign states – by which we mean states that actually perform the functions that make them sovereign – will allow human progress to continue. (Ghani and Lockhart 2008: 4)

The text as a whole displays a faith in the state as the form of political organization best suited to liberate humanity from poverty and violence, to

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integrate into the global political and economic system the two billion or more people who live in dire poverty because their governments are dysfunctional. The authors call for a global contract among the state, citizens and the market in order to ensure the prosperity of all. Their optimistic vision, in which it is possible to find technical fixes to the ills of the world, remains a ached to the idea that history has a direction, so long as people of good will combine their efforts. The choice between strengthening and circumventing the state sounds like the horns of an impossible dilemma. Beyond that, however, one cannot fail to be struck by the multitude of aid and development workers, and by the uncoordinated, even competitive, relations that prevail among them. The Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock compete with each other for the favours of lenders; the Ministry of Interior and the Independent Directorate of Local Governance are at each other’s throats over their respective mandates, subject to the indecisive arbitration of the president’s office. Multilateral organizations (e.g. the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP) and bilateral agencies (United States Agency for International Development, USAID; United Kingdom Department for International Development, DFID; Japan International Cooperation Agency, JICA; German Agency for Technical Cooperation, GTZ; Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, DDC, etc.) plan their activity without always consulting one another. The US armed forces and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) also propose a whole series of development projects under the aegis of provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs). The NGOs, feeling a threat to their funding, accuse these military–civilian initiatives of being guided by tactical considerations rather than the needs of target populations and of mixing genres in a way that undermines the independence of the aid sector. A newer player occupies an increasingly important place on the Afghan scene: that is, the private development, security and construction companies (Coburn 2016). A senior American officer in ISAF’s anti-corruption task force confided to me that five large US-based corporations – including Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI) and Chemonics – cornered 80% of USAID’s $4 billion Afghan budget for 2011 and that a major part of this imposing sum consisted of expatriate salaries. These companies have made a speciality of Capacity Development Programmes (CDPs), which involve small training and awareness workshops run for the most part by experts parachuted in from North America. Their contribution to the development of Afghanistan remains to be demonstrated, and the juicy contracts seem to be handed out with an egregious lack of transparency.

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The zeitgeist is changing on the Afghan side too. In the period a er the fall of the Taliban, the number of NGOs shot up in an effort to capture aid resources from abroad. In 2005, a year when money was flowing in and the degree of insecurity was still moderate, the Afghan finance ministry reported that 2,400 national and international NGOs were registered throughout the country. Reconstruction funds were allocated as follows: 45% to the UN, 30% to the government, 16% to the private sector and 9% to NGOs.3 It is true that NGOs are the favoured partners of the UN and the government, which commission them to carry out numerous projects. But the gradually reduced funding is leading to a new model, where consortia of private companies (active in construction, logistics and transport, as well as agricultural production) work in conjunction with an NGO. Afghan entrepreneurs and politicians together divide up the tasks, the former handling the revenues, the la er the contacts and contracts. Are we heading towards the privatization of reconstruction and development aid? Is this the end of the NGO era, with an integration of the reconstruction effort into the foreign policy of donor states? The international presence and the reconstruction efforts have resulted in a paradoxical process. On the one hand, the artificial economy linked to an abundance of resources from abroad has allowed businessmen to prosper and warlords to disregard any form of popular authority or legitimacy. On the other hand, the communitarian ideal cherished by lenders and aid agencies has spawned a host of local councils (shuras) that further fragment the politics and economics of the country. Lack of understanding of the local context means that numerous well-intentioned initiatives end in spectacular failure (Coburn 2016). Faced with multiple, double-edged development practices, one would have to be blind to place all the blame on corrupt political elites or leading figures from the anti-Soviet resistance. It has become an urgent ma er to take stock of the adverse effects of the international presence in Afghanistan. For example, coexisting within each Afghan ministry are civil servants paid in the national currency (5,000–30,000 afghanis = US$100–600 a month), ‘superscale’ employees who receive a supplement of several hundred or even several thousand dollars from multilateral or bilateral agencies, and individuals working in programmes directly funded by the World Bank, the UNDP or the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), whose salaries o en amount to several thousand dollars a month. Thus, the Afghan director of a UNDP-supported development programme may receive a basic salary higher than that of a minister or deputy minister, or a UN chauffeur more than a university professor.

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Hamid Karzai’s fruitless a empts to exclude private security companies in the summer of 2010 are a good example of the distortions resulting from the international presence. Given these limitations on the power of the Afghan state, as well as the multiplicity of decision-making centres, Afghanistan appears as a fragmented political space where rival modes of action, legitimation and resource distribution compete with one another; in short, an archipelago of sovereignties!

Notes  1. For an account of electoral observation in Kyrgyzstan, see Pétric (2013).  2. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFAP), the population of Afghanistan will triple between now and 2050, rising from 32.3 million to 97.3 million: retrieved 2 May 2008 from h p://www.unfpa.org/emergencies/ afghanistan/factsheet.htm.  3. See h p://www.irinnews.org/news/2005/05/31/new-code-conduct-regulatengos and h p://pom.peacebuild.ca/NGOAfghanistan.shtml#Anchor-End35326 (retrieved 8 June 2020).

3  Educating the Elites From Geneva to Abu Dhabi Afghans should vote with their feet: you can’t help with reconstruction by living abroad! —An Afghan civil servant, Abu Dhabi

It is May 2014. I find myself in Abu Dhabi, in a luxury hotel overlooking the Corniche Road in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Private beach, swimming pool, fitness centre. I am there to give a course on migration and development issues to civil servants from the Afghan Ministry of Finance. My employer, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, is a empting, like so many other academic institutions, to boost its visibility on the global stage. Alongside master’s degrees and doctorates in various disciplines, the field of continuous training has expanded considerably in recent years. The aim is to offer a series of programmes for an audience a racted by the central hub of Geneva, ranging from employees of international organizations to the civil servants of various countries, human rights activists and private corporate executives. It is an exclusive domain of English. The talk is of ‘leadership’, ‘global governance’, ‘career opportunities’, ‘skills’ (leadership skills, analytical skills and communications skills), familiarization with ‘policy-making tools’, and the ability to take strategic decisions and to develop professional networks. In the end, the point is to acquire the necessary knowledge to enter the international development community, to socialize oneself in a particular

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mould, to become permeated with sociocultural skills, a body language, a state of mind, a terminology – a ‘habitus’, as Pierre Bourdieu would say – as much as, if not more than, with new intellectual knowledge. The master’s degree in development policies and practices is especially geared to ‘professionals who presently hold or are likely to hold key positions in public or private sector organizations, NGOs or civil society associations’.¹ It aims to further the implementation of sound and sustainable development policies that respect cultural and social diversity. In the early period, entrants from around the world were assigned to five countries – Mali, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Peru – before coming together for a final stage of teaching in Geneva. A special subprogramme, designed together with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and the Afghan Ministry of Finance, is meant to educate government cadres from Kabul and to assist in strengthening the Afghan state. Partly to allay fears among the teaching staff and partly to boost the programme in the eyes of potential entrants, the preliminary phase takes place outside Afghanistan. This was how I and two colleagues from the Institute came to travel to Abu Dhabi for the second vintage of this programme, having already spent time in Istanbul in June of the previous year. Whereas in 2013 teachers and participants in the programme had not stayed in the same hotel – reproducing the spatial segregation that exists between expatriates and local staff in Afghanistan – I was pleasantly surprised to find that this time we were all in the same premises, albeit in separate wings. Twenty functionaries from the Ministry of Finance took part in the training programme.² The Afghan government operated the selection, which was largely outside the control of UNITAR and the Graduate Institute. I noted a threefold bias with respect to gender, regional origin and state input. First, women were still very much a minority, even if their number had risen from one to four since the previous year. Although their male colleagues were mostly in their thirties or forties and had responsible positions in the Ministry (o en being heads of a department or subdepartment, such as taxes, customs or coordination with other ministries), women were in general younger and occupied a lower position on the professional ladder. Second, Pashtuns from eastern Afghanistan, such as the Minister himself, were overrepresented. And finally, only two or three participants worked elsewhere than in Kabul, at the branches of the Ministry in Kandahar and Herat. The programme organizers were well aware that political factors were operating behind the scenes, but simple pragmatism obliged them to press ahead; action took priority over reflective analysis and any initiative was preferable to inertia.

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Let us take a look back. Early in 2013, the Afghan Minister of Finance visited the city of Jean Calvin to sign the agreement relating to the master’s degree in development policies and practices. On 31 January, in the presence of the Director-General of the United Nations Office in Geneva and other personalities, he gave a lecture in the library of the Palace of Nations entitled ‘The Post-conflict Reconstruction of Afghanistan: The Outlook Beyond 2014’, which sketched out the strategy he had in mind. Holding a doctorate from a Canadian university, the Minister expressed himself with ease, on subjects ranging from the size of mineral reserves in Afghanistan to human rights, democracy and gender issues. He said nothing new. That didn’t ma er: the Executive Director of UNITAR, a jovial and energetic Irishwoman, was over the moon. As a long-serving UN official, she saw this modernist technocrat as a partner with whom it was possible to work and to lay the foundations for a brighter future. In the course of the evening, she asked me whether the Minister had a chance of becoming the next president of Afghanistan. An old Afghan friend standing beside me stridently dismissed any such idea. His argument was strictly sociological: the Minister lacked a popular support base that could give him the necessary influence at the provincial and district levels. My friend, a doctor by training who had worked for years for French NGOs, confided to me later the irritation he felt towards these international officials – people who single out a heaven-sent leader in their own image, instead of trying to grasp how power relations operate in Afghanistan and focusing on structural problems. Still, although the Minister of Finance’s influence scarcely stretched outside Kabul and central government circles, he was an important figure in Afghan politics and inevitably found himself at the centre of polemics. Some saw him as a dynamic reformist, while others accused him of fraud. Suspected of having millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts, he would be branded a ‘big thief’ the following year by President Karzai’s brother, a man who was himself implicated in a number of financial scandals. Such struggles, which can cut families in two, are by no means unusual in Afghanistan. In fact, what baffled me more than these two-way allegations of corruption was the propensity of Western diplomats and experts to sort political players into goodies and baddies, to draw a line between those building the future, with the common good in mind, and those representing the past and its succession of misfortunes, to differentiate between those moving in the direction of history and those opposing it to safeguard private interests. In the end, this normative vision of Afghan society reflected a denial of politics. I asked myself how it weighed not only on the basis for

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reconstruction in Afghanistan, but also on the analysis of sociopolitical processes and educational practices. My position was not free of ambiguity: my being a teacher rather than an ethnographer was the justification for my presence there. Yet it was this dual positioning that gave me the opportunity to observe, while participating in, the externalization of Afghan cadre training. I took as my object of reflection a training programme in which I was myself involved. For a long time now, anthropology has departed from the positivist notion that research can be conducted without affecting the object of study. A concern with the practice of ethnography and the conditions of the production of knowledge has become a routine aspect of the discipline. Anthropologists have accepted the idea that they are part of the world and that they help to change the social phenomena they study by virtue of their mere presence and the questions they pose. Many are those who, like me, navigate between the academic sphere and the world of consultancy. Reflecting the diversity of the places where anthropology is produced, the frontier between ‘academic’ and ‘applied’ research is continually fading. What critical reflection can be produced from this ambivalent and ambiguous positioning? The classical question of how the anthropological gaze can clarify development practices has now shi ed to the question of how involvement in aid, postconflict reconstruction and development projects can affect anthropological practice and theory, and eventually transform the discipline. Nowhere is this new political economy of anthropology more in evidence than in Afghanistan, a country where every researcher rubs shoulders with aid or development agencies as well as the armed forces, o en depending on them to gain access to his or her object of study. In such an environment marked by insecurity and competition, long saturated with projects and money, critical reflection is all the more necessary. On the one hand, those who agree to answer the questions put to them by academics tend to look on them as aid workers or development personnel. How is the work of anthropologists incorporated into the strategies of local people seeking to improve their livelihood? On the other hand, international agencies and NGOs, national governments and military personnel draw on the work of social scientists to understand people’s needs and to define assistance strategies, to promote human rights, women’s emancipation and democracy, to understand power relations and to become capable of influencing them. How does this close relationship affect the researcher’s financial, logistical and intellectual autonomy? The very concept of participant observation, so dear to anthropologists, loses some of its pertinence. Is a higher level of involvement in play? Would it be more appropriate to speak of observant participation? The

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choice between these two labels does not seem to me to be crucial. Rather, we should ask how I negotiate my research practice with such diverse partners as my employer, public funding bodies, other sources of finance, students a ending my courses and the individuals to whom I address questions. In what way is such negotiation necessary to access my object? How does it influence my way of seeing things and therefore my output as an anthropologist? The idea of ethnographic fieldwork, another pillar of the discipline, is also crumbling. The word ‘field’ originally refers to a plot of land with precise limits and dimensions. Does this, even as a metaphor, allow us to grasp the practice of many anthropologists, including those a ached to empirical research? My gaze is not restricted to sites where I can meet Afghan refugees and migrants, whether camps in Pakistan, building sites in Iran or disused factories in Greece. Take, for example, the Maison de la Paix in Geneva, a glass monument celebrating the virtues of transparency, which houses the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and three security-related centres supported by the Swiss Confederation (the Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, the Centre for Security Policy and the International Centre for Humanitarian Demining). The lecture rooms in which I teach there, as well as the nearby Place des Nations area where I go for a walk, allow me to observe the way in which global governance operates. But let us return to Abu Dhabi, to the conference room of a luxury hotel with a private beach, swimming pool and fitness centre. I observe the ritualistic preparation of the room. The air conditioning, the thick carpets, the flipchart and the video projector are all elements marking out a separate space. Everything follows a pre-established liturgy in which those present participate. The officiator is an energetic Italian Swiss. Spick and span, he twirls around in front of the audience. The essence of his pedagogic message can be summed up in one sentence: ‘Keep to your deadlines!’ He stresses the importance of arriving in time, of respecting the time limits for speaking and of understanding the course assignments. His assistant, having checked that the technology is working, sits apart and records the minutes of the meeting. Then those si ing round the table are presented in turn, in a kind of administrative levelling process that is at the same time highly revealing. As I listen a entively, with an eye on the audience, I think of Michel Foucault: a er the disciplining of bodies, the next step is to convince minds. Beyond each speaker’s self-assurance and command of English, the power relations within the group are visible mainly in the other’s reactions, ranging from deferential silence to mocking deprecation. All the men wear a dark well-tailored suit, a tie, a light-coloured shirt and so

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leather shoes. Most of them are closely shaven, while a few have a neatly trimmed moustache or beard. The women are less uniform and more colourful: loose-fi ing trousers and lightweight blouses, a blue, yellow or fuchsia shawl covering their hair, and sandals, salomés or ballet shoes on their feet. Nothing out of the ordinary, it would seem. But anthropology consists in questioning things that seem self-evident. How is it that the men embody a globality copied from UN dress codes, whereas the women incline towards particularity and cultural roots? Yet the women by no means reproduce a local order that subjugates them. They play subtly with the norms of female behaviour prevalent in Afghanistan. On the one hand, they make their public presence acceptable through a display of modesty, speaking only when the teacher asks them something directly, in barely audible voices and with their heads lowered. On the other hand, there are whispered asides followed by suppressed laughter, glimpses of a wayward lock of hair or unfortunate slippage of their shawls just as they are beginning to speak, which can be interpreted as micro-actions testing and renegotiating the boundaries of decorum. Having spoken about the circulation territories, transnational networks and strategic dispersion of Afghan families that I documented in my earlier research, I ask the participants how money transfers from migrants and refugees might be contributing to the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. I get them to split up into smaller groups to consider reforms that might integrate money transfers into development policy. What measures can they think of, as Ministry of Finance workers, to encourage migrants to invest in their country of origin? For example, could the government introduce something like the Persons of Indian Origin Card, defining a special status for people abroad who, though of Afghan origin, do not have Afghan nationality? My remarks elicit contradictory reactions. Everyone says they are struck by my familiarity with the Afghan context. The testimony I collect during the breaks seem to corroborate my analyses. At teatime, a man originally from Nangarhar even comes up and thanks me effusively for helping him to look with fresh eyes at his family’s trajectory. But in the formal context of the course, it is the state that dominates their conceptual framework. I try to make the participants aware of the transnational approach, in which an individual may be a member of several societies at once: that is, a social, political and economic player in his country of origin, while actually living abroad. I suggest a reading of mobility as a resource, not merely the mark of something missing, as an inventive response to insecurity and a precarious economic situation. ‘What’s the point of that?’ they respond.

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Despite – or because of – the foreign military presence and the ubiquitous aid organizations handling national security as much as social services, I find myself confronted with a very Westphalian concept of belonging, in which political legitimacy rests upon a strict correspondence between state, territory and population. The participants are as much a ached to the external sovereignty of the Afghan state (equal in law to any other state on earth) as they are to its internal sovereignty (the idea that it has exclusive authority over its territory and the people living there and that it cannot tolerate interference by any other state). I try to advance the discussion and to provoke reactions: ‘Aren’t we in a curious situation? Isn’t there a clash between the principle of Afghan state sovereignty and the fact that our course is being held in Abu Dhabi?’ One participant gives a peremptory answer: ‘I spent several years in Pakistan as a refugee, but now I’ve gone back to rebuild my country. Afghans should vote with their feet; you can’t help with reconstruction by living abroad!’ For all my doubts that the state is the only means of organizing social existence, I cannot fail to grasp the point he is making; I am tired of how some Afghans abroad talk big, but are unwilling to bear the consequences. Yet when I get him to talk of his own experience and ask him about the lives of those closest to him, he brightens up, tells some anecdotes and reveals that the members of his kinship group with whom he has regular contact are sca ered across the four corners of the world. He takes pride in these global networks. This dimension is part of his lived experience; he can speak of it eloquently, but he refuses to integrate it into any formal analysis of the Afghan situation. Is it that the very source of his social status, the very fact of occupying a responsible function in a state organization, prevents him from linking together his family’s experience and his normative projection? Or is it that the category deconstruction into which I enter in the discussion is too remote from what he expects of such a training programme? I have no right to blame those taking part in the course. They belong to a professional milieu where success partly depends on the cultural capital they can accumulate through continuous training, most of which is provided by aid and development workers. Civil servants at the Afghan Ministry of Finance complete their socialization by incorporating new ways of living and expressing themselves, and they institutionalize this change by acquiring a diploma from a European academic institution operating in partnership with a UN body. The simple fact that the master’s degree in development policies and practices switches between Abu Dhabi, Istanbul and Geneva contributes to its prestige – and hence to theirs. The person with the highest position at the Ministry, who is the discrete but undisputed leader of the group, proceeds to speak just before the

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break. He compliments me by saying that the discussion was of remarkable philosophical depth and he expresses gratitude for that. I see no irony in his tone, but I understand that it would not be a good idea to take the exercise any further. The participants are there to acquire useful instruments, to learn clear procedures for their country’s development that they can bring to bear in their professional practice. This being so, it is difficult to question ready-made ‘peace-building’ without making them feel that I am mocking their expectations. One point came up several times in the discussion: Afghanistan and Japan obtained their independence in the same year. I had o en heard this during my travels in the country without understanding the basis for it. It is true that the Treaty of Rawalpindi (which ended the Third Afghan War and involved full British recognition of Afghan independence) and the Treaty of Versailles (which set sanctions against Germany following the First World War) were signed at almost the same moment, in the summer of 1919. But Japan was then a thriving power on the victorious side of the war, not a country just freeing itself from colonial domination. However, the point at issue was not historical truth, but the place of another Asian nation in the Afghan image of modernity and the model that they thought they should follow. These civil servants may be said to have been displaying a ‘nostalgia for the future’ (to quote the title of a book by Charles Piot [2010]) – a nostalgia turned towards a normative vision of state sovereignty. The concepts of ‘state’ and ‘sovereignty’ occupy a central place in reflections on globalization. Many analyses highlight the erosion of the nation-state as the main bearer of political authority, in an age when new forms of power, represented by financial markets or NGOs, are on the rise. But this never-ending debate on the crisis of the state, which has been well criticized by Bayart (2007), stems from a narrow – or sociocentric – vision of the political order based on the Westphalian model: the state exercises sole authority over a clearly demarcated territory and a population with a common culture and language. In this conception, state and sovereignty, but also territory and bureaucracy, define each other and form a coherent whole. Anthropologists are well placed to go beyond this perspective by historicizing and contextualizing the concepts in question. They know that humanity has lived through a wide variety of political systems and that the social order may exist outside any state structure. Through his research in Amazonia, Pierre Clastres (1990) has gone even further and shown that some societies have been organized in such a way as to prevent the emergence of the state. The normative model for Afghan participants in the master’s degree in development policies and practices may be seen as a bureaucratic projection that was never quite realized. The colonial and

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postcolonial world was always characterized by multiple and stratified sovereignties. Paradoxically, moreover, it was with the end of the colonial empires in the mid-twentieth century that the nation-state model was generalized to the level of the world (Kelly and Kaplan 2001). And since the end of the Cold War, this evolution has been accompanied with an increased visibility of transnational nonstate actors. The case of Afghanistan is both exemplary and unique. Formally, it is a democracy with an elected president and parliament, but it depends entirely on the international presence to deliver social services and to ensure security. Still, the civil servants from the Afghan Ministry of Finance with whom I rubbed shoulders in a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi displayed a formal faith in the merits of the state. A training programme like the master’s degree in development policies and practices makes the Afghan state visible to its own representatives and makes it exist as an entity oriented to a be er future. But was there not a contradiction in finding ourselves outside the national territory in a city that embodied finance capitalism? Did it not lay bare the failed reconstruction of Afghanistan and highlight its extrinsic dimension? However, I could not convince myself that this was a correct dichotomy between internal and external, indigenous and foreign, local and global. During the hours of the actual course, the participants believed in a correspondence between political structure, territory and population, but during the breaks, they distanced themselves from it. They were not consenting victims of an inculcation process originating in the West, but rather actors who knew how to play with, and make fun of, any scales and norms as the circumstances dictated. The training programme for civil servants from the Afghan Ministry of Finance is a means of ge ing them to believe in the existence of the state. But those taking part in it are also capable of being critical, even ironic, about the fantasy that is served up to them. There is a kind of tragic tension between their desire for a state and their actual experience, which remains overshadowed by unfulfilled expectations.

Notes  1. h p://dpp.graduateinstitute.ch/fr/home.html (retrieved on 12 January 2015).  2. For the course on related gender issues, see Billaud (2013).

4  Rural Development A Matter of Workshops 38,000 villages are finally benefiting from reconstruction projects … Afghanistan is on the road of progress. —Hamid Karzai, President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

In the autumn of 2007, I a ended the conference of the National Solidarity Programme (NSP) or Barnâma-ye hambastagi-ye melli in Kabul. The government and aid donors present the NSP as proof of the success of the reconstruction effort and an example to be followed.¹ The NSP dates to the year before the presidential elections in 2004, when it was given the mission of funding rural reconstruction in partnership with local populations. As a cooperative venture involving the World Bank, the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) and some thirty facilitating partners (mostly international NGOs), the NSP is supposed to base itself on such Afghan traditions as hashar and jirga2 and the Islamic traditions of unity, equity and justice. One of the most tangible effects is the establishment of community development councils (CDCs), and the conference I was a ending had several hundred delegates from these councils in every province of Afghanistan. It was held at the very place where the loya jirgas – constituent assemblies – gathered in June 2002 and December 2003/January 2004, a place symbolizing the deliberative practices that accompany the (re)construction of the Afghan state under the aegis of the international community.

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Tuesday 13 November 2007 was a big day, when President Karzai addressed those taking part in the conference. The security measures were meticulous. Everyone had to wait a long time in the early morning cold and to face the authoritarian behaviour of the guards before they could enter the area with the huge tents set aside for meetings. Around 9 am, the sound of a helicopter could be heard. There was excitement in the crowd and a number of people rushed to occupy the front rows of seats. But more than another quarter of an hour passed before Hamid Karzai appeared, almost furtively, through a side entrance. He shook a few hands as he made his way to the platform, accompanied by Ehsan Zia, the Minister of Rural Reconstruction. He addressed the gathering with a deliberate simplicity: ‘Salâm aleikom sâheb, khosh âmadi!’ (‘Good day to you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome!’) He made a sign for everyone to be seated, before si ing himself at the main desk. Two screens, on either side of the room, switched back and forth between images of the speakers and the audience. Several people took the floor: first, an MRRD representative spoke in Pashto, then a smooth-chinned young man wearing a cream-coloured Western-style suit recited a sura from the Koran. Finally, a woman with a bright yellow headscarf delivered a welcoming speech and gave the floor to Minister Zia. Speaking in Persian, he began with the usual greetings to members of the government, the diplomatic corps and UN representatives. He sang the praises of the NSP, emphasizing that for the first time in its history the Afghan people (mardom) was in charge of its own destiny and that in thirty-four provinces, there was close collaboration between the government and the rural population. Some of his sentences were punctuated with applause, but o en the roar of helicopters overhead drowned out his voice. Several CDC delegates then took the floor, expressing themselves, according to their region of origin, in either Pashto or Persian. Karzai’s turn came at last. The audience rose to its feet, but with great courtesy – ‘Mehrabâni!’ (‘Thank you!’) – he immediately asked them to be seated. Several times during his speech, someone in the audience stood up and expressed his support, either by reading a li le note or by expressing himself in verse. The President greeted the delegates in Persian and again bid them welcome. He referred to a recent a ack that had killed a few dozen people, including an influential Shiite Member of Parliament. ‘Ami kâr sâhi nist’ (‘Such a deed is not just’), he thundered, asking for support from the audience. He touched on the diverse geographical origins of the victims, as if to stress that they symbolized the country’s unity in the face of blind violence. He conveyed his sadness, but then went straight on to his hopes for the country’s development: ‘38,000 villages are finally

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benefiting from reconstruction projects. The progress is visible.’ By way of example, he spoke of the electrification drive: ‘I was flying back to Kabul at night when I saw many li le lights on the ground. “Where are we?” I asked a pilot. “We are flying over Afghanistan”, he replied. This progress has been possible thanks to the aid of the international community [jam‘a-ye jehâni], which is helping Afghans despite all the atrocities they have commi ed.’ At various points, Karzai switched to Pashto and then back to Persian. He mentioned international terrorism, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the process initiated at the Bonn Conference, and the new Constitution. He paid homage to the victims of the war, who had grown in number with each passing year and whose sacrifice had made the victory over the Soviets possible. He also spoke of migration, of the Afghan diaspora in London, New York, Washington DC, Sharjah, Mashhad or Islamabad, which had removed living forces from the country: ‘That must not happen again!’ Nevertheless, Afghanistan was ‘on the road of progress [dar râh-e taraki]’ – witness the fact that it was now able to produce sewing needles. He took a biro from his waistcoat pocket and held it up, proudly declaring that it had been made in Afghanistan. A man in a middle row got up to voice his enthusiasm. Karzai guessed his origins and gave him his best wishes in Uzbek. Sustained applause followed. Keeping up the momentum, he showed the audience a pack of electrical switches made in Herat, then a stretch of cable. He ended his speech by saying that it was a patriotic act to buy goods produced in Afghanistan and not only melons. As the crowd shouted hurrahs, he descended from the platform and went among them shaking hands, then walked over to the corner, bowed deeply to the women there and went out. It was 11:30 am. Karzai’s alternation between Persian and Pashto symbolized unity, presenting Afghanistan as the country belonging to Afghans (a term historically reserved for Pashtuns), but the insertion of a few phrases in other languages also assigned a (secondary) place on the national stage to the groups speaking them. His address involved a delicate balance between the appeal to national pride, based on a fairly discreet reference to the victory over the Red Army, and grateful recognition of the role of international aid. This illustrated the tension between the national and the international. In November 2007, Karzai was laying great stress on the la er (referring more to the support of the international community than to the anti-Soviet resistance), but things changed following the elections of August 2009. A er he was accused of benefiting from massive and orchestrated fraud, Karzai fell back on the vaunting of national values and increasingly presented himself as fighting to safeguard Afghan sovereignty in the face of Western interference.

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The presence of foreign troops and aid workers is a sensitive subject in Afghanistan. Thus, over and above political tactics in an ever-changing context, the evolution of Karzai’s positions expresses the ambivalence of a large part of the population, which oscillates between high expectations of the international community and aspirations to greater national independence. A er the formal plenary session, the participants broke up into workshops. The NSP conference was an opportunity for delegates from the CDCs to establish contacts, to perfect their knowledge of procedures and to exchange ideas as well as observations on the strengths and weaknesses of the Programme. But I could not help thinking that another purpose was for them to acquire a shared habitus with people working within similar structures around the country, which would strengthen their sense of belonging to a sociologically distinct group addressed by the President of the Republic and set apart from the rest of the population by virtue of its commitment to development. The workshops (grupkâri or kâr-e grupi: literally, work groups) were the place par excellence where subjectivities were constructed and negotiated in novel ways. The next day, I a ended one of these workshops. Dressed in the Western style, with a jacket but no tie, I sat in a corner without actively participating in the discussion. My presence did not arouse any real curiosity or questions, as the CDC representatives seemed used to having all kinds of experts present during their activities. The organization of the space was halfway between the circle of a village council and the classroom with pupils seated in rows. Those taking part in the workshops sat at tables in a U-shape facing the flipchart, a kind of altar from which the ceremony was organized. A delegate from the east of the country, who was wearing a waistcoat, a pakul (the headdress made famous by Commander Massoud) and sunglasses, opened the proceedings with a long prayer in Arabic, as if to legitimize what would follow. Then he expressed himself in Pashto. The next delegate to take the floor also began with a (shorter) prayer in Arabic, before switching to Persian (‘Khwârhâ-ye aziz, berâdarân-e gerami’: ‘Dear brothers, dear sisters…’). His speech exalted the Afghans’ victory over adversity and glorified religion, then went on to praise the NSP for having brought services directly to the people and sealed the link with the government. The discussion centred on possible improvements in the future, particularly a strengthening of ties between the CDCs and the provincial authorities. Some of the men were wearing turbans, but a good number were bare-headed. Of the several women present, all were strictly veiled, but none wore a head-to-toe burka. When they spoke, the men listened and nodded with ostentatious displays of deference.

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Men and women, local CDC representatives, MRRD functionaries and employees of facilitating partners (FPs): all praised the NSP for having brought democracy to the village level. The mantra-like expressions ‘wahdat-e mardom’ (‘unity of the people’), ‘taraki-ye mardom’ (‘progress of the people’) and ‘bâzsâzi-ye watan’ (‘reconstruction of the fatherland’) were on everyone’s lips. The dividing line between members of FPs and CDCs seemed fuzzy, and I realized with some surprise that certain individuals were both at once. The discussion was structured around a flipchart. The Ministry and NGO organizers noted down the main points, with the idea of reporting them to the leading bodies in the Programme. However, small secondary groups soon formed and it was not long before various grievances were aired. Complaining that they had not received sufficient funds to make a real contribution to the development of their home region, some delegates underlined the need for more ambitious projects at a level higher than the village (roads, district hospitals, etc.). This last point struck me. American and European development manuals published during the Cold War used to refer to the Marshall Plan’s aim of rebuilding infrastructure destroyed during the Second World War, encouraging savings and dynamizing production. Of course, social and economic development was one of the three pillars of the national reconstruction strategy in Afghanistan (the other two being security and governance). But apart from the few examples of manufactured products evoked in Karzai’s speech, the effort seemed to have gone more into educating people for peace than into changing the material conditions of their existence. The dynamic set up by the workshop was supposed to lead to the transformation of Afghan society. But, paradoxically, the delegates tried to make their voices heard against this tendency by criticizing the NSP’s localist bias. Beyond their recriminations about the shortage of funds, most of the delegates I met hoped that reconstruction would focus more energetically on the country’s infrastructure. Apart from the content of debates, the various technical questions and the proposed improvements to the Programme, the way in which these workshops were organized and conducted le a profound impression on those who took part. Gender mixing is not customary in the rural Afghan world. As if to make it more acceptable and less embarrassing, the men and women intensified the politeness of their relations with each other. The delegates seemed to be negotiating multiple identities through their body manners and the terminology they used. They were there as members of CDCs, that is, not of a government body, but of development structures dependent on international aid. Their allegiance was certainly to the MRRD, and hence in theory to the Afghan state, but it was also to

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the World Bank experts who had devised the NSP and to the international community that funded it. This constellation brought with it subtle changes in the modes of socialization or habitus, as Bourdieu (1984: 49) would say; that is, in the enduring systems or ‘structuring structures’ that organize social practices and how they are perceived, but also in the ‘structured structures’ influenced by the division of society into various categories. The itinerancy of individuals is matched by the circulation of body techniques. Apart from differences in their views, the CDC members and MRRD and NGO employees who a ended these workshops agreed on the importance of reproducing the ‘field’ that enabled them to be in proximity to the President of the Republic and to gather beneath the loya jirga tent. It was a situation that enhanced their value and gave them both resources and status. Participation in NSP-related activities involved learning to master a new vocabulary and adopting new kinds of behaviour. This in itself produced new social distinctions. In this sense, the NSP organizers had reason to think that the workshops would result in changes in society. However, the process was taking place in a context charged with power relations, where overt adherence to the aid donors’ principles did not exclude insertion into the segmented structures of solidarity or redistribution networks established by the parties and commanders. During a break in the proceedings, I met the CDC representative from the district of Jaghori, where I had once spent a long time. A young man, with a fine, well-groomed moustache, he was wearing a dark jacket and trousers and an immaculate white shirt. He had just opened an internet café in one of the main bazaars in the district. He had spent several years moving between Iran and Pakistan. He had become familiar with the internet in Indonesia, where he had gone in the (vain) hope of moving on, like many Afghans, to Australia. Having been socialized and educated abroad, and literally connected to the global world through his professional activity, this CDC member embodied the emergent class of men and women whose social and political activities were bound up with the (material and nonmaterial) resources made available by international organizations and NGOs. The NSP is not only a matrix where subjectivities are negotiated, a source of material advantages and prestige. It is also a reflection of power games at the national level, where political legitimacy is partly linked to the capacity to garner and redistribute international aid. During the conference, I heard it said that some representatives of the MRRD and the Ministry of Agriculture were arguing with each other: the former reproached the la er with passivity, while the la er – backed by colleagues in the Ministry of Interior Affairs – accused the former of being intoxicated

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by their special relations with international aid donors and going beyond their prerogatives. In fact, the MRRD was seeking to transform the development councils into tools of local government, while the Ministry of Interior Affairs held that this was not provided for in the Constitution and would encroach upon the prerogatives of existing administrative structures. The contrast played itself out both in the offices of the ministries and in the appearance and gestures of their respective functionaries; it also spoke volumes about the importance of access to international funds in social relationships. The Ministry of Agriculture, at Kart-e Sakhi, occupied an old building that in 2007 still bore the scars of the war. The fairly light security measures testified to the marginal position of the institution. The clerks there seemed overjoyed to have a visitor who gave them an opportunity to talk about a few things over a cup of tea. By contrast, the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development was in a new complex in the south of Kabul, not far from the old Darul Aman palace built in the 1920s under the reform-minded King Amanullah. The security there was worthy of a Western airport. The atmosphere was also very different: the buildings were situated in a well-maintained park, and young moustachioed technocrats with neat jackets seemed to be constantly running from one appointment to another. These two locations and sets of functionaries underlined the heterogeneity of the Afghan state apparatus and the different ways in which various ministries were integrated into global redistribution networks. The MRRD a racted plentiful funds through the NSP and other reconstruction projects; it was clearly a more important locus of power than the Ministry of Agriculture. Neither the Afghan state nor the UN had the appearance of monolithic entities. Each ministry had a different sponsor among the international organizations – an apportionment that was o en diffracted within the ministries themselves. Differences between the MRRD and the Ministry of Agriculture over the role of the CDCs reached an unexpected denouement in the presidential decree of 30 August 2007, which created the Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG). This decision testified to Hamid Karzai’s will to centralize power. Responsibility for the supervision of provincial governors, district leaders and provincial or municipal councils was withdrawn from the Ministry of Interior Affairs and handed over to the new structure, whose explicit mission was to develop links between the population and the government, and to improve the delivery of services at a subnational level. With the IDLG, Karzai also repudiated the ambitions of the MRRD. Some officials in the new body with close links to Karzai accused the MRRD of going it alone and failing to coordinate its activity

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with that of the rest of the government. In opposition to any idea that the CDCs should be turned into local administrative structures, these officials stuck to the provisions in the Constitution of 2004 for the holding of free, direct and secret elections to village councils, district councils and municipal councils, each with a term of three years.3 A decade later, rather ironically, the local bodies in question were still not really functioning. The political and logistical difficulties were such that even the national elections for the lower chamber of Parliament, scheduled to be held in 2015, had been postponed until the summer of 2018. In reality, the Afghan state is a centralized structure, and the devolution of power to regional and local bodies remains very limited. Beyond the speeches advocating be er coordinated reconstruction, good governance, security, development and economic growth, the creation of the IDLG reflects the presidential drive to work in close cooperation with traditional rural elites, in the hope of stabilizing rural areas of the country, rather than relying on men and women convinced of the benefits of democracy and human rights. However, this change of course has not precluded the coexistence of different strategies. At the national conference of the NSP in November 2007, where he praised the support given by the international community, Karzai was manoeuvring behind the scenes to construct a broad coalition for the upcoming presidential elections. The political re-alignment appeared clearly when Karzai managed to gain the backing of several historical leaders from the war period who had previously been hostile to him: men such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq. A er the presidential elections of August 2009, which were marked by allegations of massive fraud, new tensions appeared between Karzai and the foreign powers present in Afghanistan, together with a change of tone between the Afghan government and its international protectors. In this volatile political climate, the NSP lost some of its previous momentum. The government and donors constantly extolled the merits of the Programme in the three phases that succeeded one another between 2003 and 2017. But its political importance seemed to diminish amid the remoulding and renegotiation of alliances, until a new programme finally took its place: the Citizen’s Charter National Priority Programme (CCNPP), which was based on the structures inherited from the NSP, especially the CDCs.4 However, the case of the NSP shows that reconstruction aid is part of what politics is about in Afghanistan. The Programme is one of the many ‘schemes to improve the human condition’ studied by James Sco (1998) and is one more illustration of the ‘will to improve’ described by Tania Murray Li (2007). The logic driving this type of development programme

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is to convince rather than constrain, which is fully in line with Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ (or ‘government of mentalities’). This will to improve is expressed in two-stage projects corresponding to the main tasks of the CDCs: the first task consists in identifying the needs and problems that make intervention necessary, while the second consists in rewriting these problems in technical terms. In the course of this process, the problems lose their political character. In his analysis of an agricultural project in Lesotho, James Ferguson observed that the wheels of development constituted an ‘anti-political machine’, which did not address the political-economic questions bound up with control of the means of production and the structure of inequalities (Ferguson 1994). The aim of the NSP, then, is not so much to transform the material and social conditions in which people live as to educate their bodies and minds. In their planning and actual intervention, aid and development experts tend to neglect the political relationship that produces and reproduces inequalities of status, wealth and power. ‘They focus more on the capacities of the poor than on the practices through which one social group impoverishes another’ (Li 2007: 7). Poverty is seen as an unfortunate situation rather than the result of an asymmetrical relationship, so that providing assistance to vulnerable individuals is enough to endow them with a certain capacity for action. Educating and training people becomes more important than changing social relations. Development programmes are not projects that still have to be completed, but are fragments of reality that have a considerable impact on the social existence of millions of people around the world. In the minds of those who devised it, the NSP’s main aim is to strengthen the capacity for action of local communities and to enable them to define their own development priorities. But if we look beyond the apologias usually found in the official discourse of the various institutional partners, it must be asked what the real consequences of all the projects are on the daily lives of Afghans. There can be no doubt that bridges have been built and wells dug by means of NSP resources. But has the Programme created be er living conditions for the rural populations? Has it brought greater social justice or greater political and economic equality? Has it promoted transparency and encouraged participation by local people? At any event, the scope and purpose of a project like the NSP are not confined to its initial motivation. It needs to be considered beyond its success or failure in terms of postconflict reconstruction and development. Inspired by the idea of promoting a form of decentralization and giving local groups the capacity to implement their projects, the Programme has paradoxically helped to bring to rural areas a bureaucratic machinery combining national and international elements. In the presidential elections of

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2004, Hamid Karzai gave ample displays of support for the NSP. It then seemed to lose its initial aura with the renegotiation of alliances before the elections of 2009. Nevertheless, the NSP served the central government as a means of making itself more visible at a local level. As an Afghan interlocutor said to me one day with a disenchanted ma er-of-factness, ‘it was a subsidy from the international community for Karzai’s first presidential campaign’. Dependence on foreign aid as well as the progress of the insurgency remained dual handicaps limiting the power of the Afghan state. But the NSP was one cog in the vast aid and development machine that reconfigured the subjectivities of local populations, transforming everyone’s social relations and aspirations, and introducing new terminologies and body techniques. It constituted a particular kind of socialization experience. NSP workshop discussions at various levels tried to target enterprising individuals thought likely to become agents of social change by transmi ing certain values to their local communities. Beyond their purely technical dimension, these workshops effectively disseminated such principles as participatory democracy, gender equality and the rejection of corruption. If we follow the thinking of Ferguson and Gupta regarding transnational governmentality (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), the idea of a vertical relationship among the state, civil society, local communities and families is misleading. The popular roots of many associations making up so-called ‘civil society’ are very slender in comparison with their dependence on international sponsors. Seemingly organized in horizontal structures that stretch across international frontiers, these associations and their leaders have fully adopted the discourse on human rights, female emancipation, democracy and transparency. The delicate issue of their popular representativity and legitimacy is passed over in silence. Even if their programmes differ considerably from the kind of centralized organization described by Sco (1998), it is clear that the modernist project of rationalizing human life is no longer confined to the level of states and that to an increasing extent, it is being taken over by transnational networks that adopt statisttype practices in various political spaces. The existence of alternative, or even competitive, resources in the framework of political and social struggles contributes to the emergence of multiple and segmented sovereignties in Afghanistan and other countries in Asia and Africa, but also in the Americas and Europe. Transnational institutions implement statist-type programmes, thereby contributing to the emergence of ‘multiple superimposed forms of sovereignty’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 309). Like any development project, the NSP should not be understood or evaluated solely in terms of its explicit goals. It promotes a pyramidal

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structure of governance that stretches beyond the frontiers of Afghanistan and channels resources whose transnational circulation crystallizes power games among the major figures on the national political stage. However, in a subtler way, it represents the spatial scales as they are perceived and practised by social actors. By paying close a ention to the verbal exchanges and body techniques understood in (always) particular contexts, one places global dynamics at the core of the most everyday interactions, without reducing these to simple reflections of broader logics.

Notes  1. See h ps://www.mrrd.gov.af and h p://www.nspafghanistan.org.  2. ‘Hashar is voluntary collective work to assist neighbours with major projects (the building of a house, for instance) or the improvement of shared infrastructure (an irrigation canal, a well or a bridge). Jirga/shura is a traditional village council consisting of heads of families. According to the NSP, communities are free to elect members to their development councils, who may or may not belong to existing jirga or shura assemblies’ (National Solidarity Programme 2006: viii).  3. See especially Articles 137–41: h p://president.gov.af/sroot_eng.aspx?id=68 (retrieved 8 June 2020).  4. See h p://www.mrrd.gov.af/en/page/69/citizens-charter/introduction and h p://projects.worldbank.org/P160567?lang=en, consulted in October 2017.

5  Village Life Overlapping Solidarities and Conflicts They [nomads] speak the same language as us, but they are savages! —A Pashtun villager, Ghazni province

In the summer of 2004, I returned to Dahmarda. I had spent time there in the mid-1990s when I was doing fieldwork for my doctorate. This li le valley, on the le bank of the River Arghandab flowing towards Kandahar, is part of the majority Hazara district of Jaghori (in Ghazni province). It is bordered by mountains a li le over 3,000 metres high, and gorges enclose it further downstream. Despite important migratory flows, there is still major demographic pressure on the region. It is not easy to practise agriculture there and every plot of land is farmed. The fields are arranged in small terraces, irrigated by kârez, canals that tap water from underground. The landscape is enlivened with a number of orchards. The main crops are wheat, beans, fruit (apples, apricots and mulberries), almonds and walnuts. But the local economy functions mainly thanks to repatriated funds from men working in the Que a coal mines in Pakistan or doing manual jobs in Iran. Dahmarda is almost an ethnic enclave surrounded by the Pashtun areas of Gelan, Shahjoy and Arghandab. During my previous stays there, the valley had been the theatre of profound internal tensions; the two factions vying for pre-eminence had resorted to the use of arms. In 1996, a number of skirmishes and assassinations had claimed a dozen lives (Monsu i

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2005: 55). I was moved to be retracing my steps, but was also on my guard. I had met most of those involved in the conflict, conducting interviews with them on several occasions. However, that degree of mutual knowledge did not reassure me – quite the contrary. They knew I had information that could potentially compromise them. But of course, they also knew I was in contact with the main Hazara commanders at the national level and that to do me harm would probably not serve their interests. I found the family of Mohammad Hasan, where I had o en lodged on my last trip. His father, Akram Ali, was much weakened since the time I had known him as an authoritarian but jovial figure. Now he ate his meals separately, spoke li le and gave a sullen impression. All day long, he kept harping on about the only thing that still seemed dear to his heart: the great pilgrimage to Mecca. He was on bad terms with his son, who accused him of wanting to waste the family’s few resources on an old man’s whim at the end of his days. It was true that pigmented macules covered his face, hands and forearms. They were early symptoms of leprosy. One a ernoon, I was cha ing about one thing or another with a few people in a shop in the bazaar – a key location in village life. A noise in the street disturbed our conversation. Men and women arrived on foot in small groups and from their dress and general appearance, I could see at once that they were Pashtuns. I was worried. What was going on? Was it the prelude to one of those sudden outbreaks of violence that I had witnessed before in Afghanistan? But they looked distraught and had no baggage with them. They were not threatening – far from it. They needed help. One of them accompanied Hasan to his house. I understood that he lived in a village lower down the Arghandab Valley. The two men knew each other. We installed ourselves in the large room: Hasan, his father and a few relatives and neighbours. I crouched down a li le to one side, silent and alert. What must this man think of me? Despite my beard, my round cap and my local dress, I have no pretensions that I can pass for a local. But the visitor was too agitated to pay me much a ention. Pausing only to slurp the hot tea he had been served, he told how some nomads (or Kuchis, as they are now invariably called by aid workers in Afghanistan) had a acked his hamlet and set fire to a number of qal’a (fortified farms housing several patrilineally related units). He said the raiders had been armed by the Taliban and wanted to occupy the villagers’ land: ‘They speak the same language as us [Pashto], but they are savages!’ This report, which I could not verify, won the sympathy of the Hazaras present there, sedentary farmers like himself. We shared a dish of red beans before se ling down for the night. The etique e was that guests – in this case, he and I – should never be le alone. In part, this was a question of politeness: guests might find they needed something. But there was

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also a security side to it: they represented a potential disturbance in the domestic space, where the women had to be able to move freely. So, five or six of us slept side by side on toshaks, thin ma resses that were folded up each morning and put away in a corner of the room. A week later, I happened to be in the bazaar again. The sky was overcast, as it rarely is in the region. A mechanical sound came upstream from the valley, more and more distinctly. Again I was on the alert. But the general atmosphere was more one of rejoicing than of unease. A military convoy approached, a joint patrol of the Afghan army and American forces. I preferred not to have any contact with them. How would I explain my presence in this village on the edge of Hazarajat to a soldier from Nebraska or Tennessee? I passed between two shops and sat down discreetly on a rock a li le higher up. To my surprise, I recognized the Pashtun visitor from the previous evening perched on a light armoured vehicle. He jumped to the ground and moved freely among the Afghan and American soldiers, introducing the local notables who came up to greet them. A crowd of curious villagers hurried into the only street of the bazaar, the children chirping with excitement. I remained at a distance, seated at my observation post. But the atmosphere was relaxed. Here, Pashtun and Hazara villagers, national and foreign soldiers had the same enemy. Politicians and military men, as well as journalists, o en use the ethnic variable to analyse contemporary conflicts, which can no longer be placed in the bipolar logic of the Cold War. From Uganda through Iraq to the former Yugoslavia, communitarianism is repeatedly held up to explain events. Afghanistan has not escaped this tendency. Foreign soldiers and aid workers soon learn to correlate ethnic identities with political alliances: Tajiks are supporters of the late Commander Massoud, Pashtuns are suspected of sympathizing with the Taliban, Hazaras are pro-Iranian and so on. This identity dimension is not absent from the conflict, but it does not explain the political subtleties. The very fragmentation of Afghan society has prevented the formation of large ethnic, regional or religious blocs on a bloody collision course with one another. To be sure, each party to the conflict mostly recruits from one or another ethnic group: Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks. But this should not make us forget the importance of political intermediaries or brokers, who make it possible for different camps to fight each other while keeping lines of communication open. Similar logics operate at the local and national levels. The diversity of economic activity and migratory paths is matched by a diversity of political alliances: to divide up the risks, the members of kinship and neighbourhood groups mostly avoid joining one and the same party; indeed, each tries to develop contacts among his political or military adversaries.1 Thus, three

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brothers from Dahmarda – Mardan Ali, Mohammad Ali and Aziz Ali – explained to me how they had put their heads together before making a differentiated political choice: the first joined Hezb-e Islami, a party that mainly recruited Pashtuns, while the second enrolled in the Nasr and the third in the Sepah, two Khomeinist groups whose ideological closeness did not preclude bi er rivalry for local pre-eminence. In a context of insecurity and uncertainty, the brothers’ explicit aim was to have one of their trio in the victorious faction, so that he could do something to protect the eventual losers. In the past and recent history of Afghanistan, the cement of political coalitions has never been ethnic in character. The story with which I began this chapter is not atypical. No more than the various socioeconomic categories (sedentary mountain farmers, nomadic shepherds, artisans and tradesmen), the Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks and so on do not constitute internally coherent groups on the basis of which we can explain social action and the processes of political mobilization. Far from being collective players with a homogeneous set of cultural traits, these ethnic groups represent a ‘form of social organization’ in which the determining factor is not objective differences, but what the players themselves regard as significant (Barth 1998). Identity is a constantly renewed and renegotiated construct, a political process and not a cultural datum. The boundaries between identities are maintained by a number of emblems or stereotypes that make belonging and exclusion manifest, and that draw on the registers of religious affiliation, socio-occupational trade, physical appearance, style of dress, diet and so on. Conflict situations are the main se ing for the emergence and strengthening of ethnic distinctions. Old socioeconomic complementarities tend to fade as the logic of confrontation over natural and economic resources becomes preponderant. A certain division of labour and a certain distribution of distinct ecological and economic niches disappear. The ‘agents of change’, the ‘new elites’, can profit from this by making use of identity to establish their influence over a segment of society. It is thanks to war, instrumentalized by elites to expand their recruitment base, that the reference to ethnicity becomes increasingly salient. The ethnic dimension of a conflict, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere, is thus more a factor requiring explanation than an explanation itself. Therefore, as I see it, the ethnic prism does not offer a compelling key for an understanding of the Afghan conflict.2 But nor should this lead us to idealize the local group as the primordial level of solidarity. The case of Dahmarda illustrates the extent to which violence can be unleashed within a territorial entity. Multiple logics characterize the politics of the valley. Reflecting what happens in the national space, the villagers form

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temporary alliances to ensure access to resources (land, water, weapons and aid projects), then dissolve in accordance with how the social, political and economic situation develops. The insecurity and complexity prevailing in large swathes of Afghan territory mean that international organizations and NGOs have only indirect access to the rural world. Most o en, they adopt a remote mode of action that passes through various partners. Such is the case with the National Solidarity Programme (NSP), whose local delegates we followed in Kabul in Chapter 4. During its fourteen-year existence (2003–17), the NSP was mainly funded by the World Bank, via the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF),3 and was run by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD). The implementation of the Programme is ensured in each district by thirty Facilitating Partners (FPs), which include a United Nations agency (UN Habitat), twenty or so international NGOs and a handful of national NGOs.4 A veritable bureaucratic empire employing more than 4,000 people, the NSP has the aim of making reconstruction funds directly available to rural populations through the creation of local community development councils (CDCs). Members of these councils, who in principle are elected by secret ballot, have the function of running local development projects. According to the official rhetoric: The National Solidarity Programme (NSP) was created by the Government of Afghanistan to develop the ability of Afghan communities to identify, plan, manage and monitor their own development projects. NSP promotes a new development paradigm whereby communities are empowered to make decisions and manage resources during all stages of the project cycle. The programme will lay the foundation for a sustainable form of inclusive local governance, rural reconstruction, and poverty alleviation.5

The NSP’s pyramidal structure means that each stage of its execution, as well as each of the partners, is theoretically subject to rigorous monitoring and evaluation. The NSP envisages several phases: mobilizing the community to elect the CDC, strengthening the capacities of council members and the local population in general, drawing up a development plan and submi ing it for agreement by the various projects, and, finally, implementing the projects themselves. Assisted and guided by the facilitating partner, the CDC has the task of drawing up a community development plan that sets out the priorities and proposes concrete actions. The Programme brings together a number of institutional actors. The World Bank, not being represented at the level of rural villages, outsources its responsibilities to specialized NGOs. These are officially appointed through a competitive process, which thus creates a nationwide patronage system and power relations.

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Provision has been made for a series of measures to ensure that women participate at all stages of the process (election, decision-making, project implementation). A tripartite agreement has to be signed between the CDCs, the relevant FPs and the provincial bureau of the MRRD. Only two kinds of project are selected: infrastructural improvement (water supply, sewerage, irrigation, medical facilities, schools and environmental management) and development of human capital. The NSP does not fund the construction or rehabilitation of public or religious buildings. A community may receive 10,000 afghanis per family (approx. US$200) up to a maximum total of 3,000,000 afghanis (approx. US$60,000). Thus, to maximize the money coming in, local populations have an interest in forming communities with fewer than three hundred families each. Afghans define a household as comprising those who eat food cooked in the same pot, usually across more than two generations. However, official NSP documents use a definition of the family that only includes ‘the husband, the wife (or wives) and the unmarried children, or a single parent (father or mother) and his/her unmarried children’, which betrays a surprising insensitivity to the Afghan cultural context. For many players or observers, the National Solidarity Programme generates positive effects. The Nixon report (2008), among many others extolling the Programme, stresses the need to look beyond the distinction between governance and development. It presents the CDCs as having sufficient potential to take on greater responsibilities, even if logistical issues still have to be resolved. For that to happen, it would be necessary to formalize the role of the CDCs beyond that which is given to them under the NSP and to encourage them to become real institutions of local government. A vast ‘grey literature’ has developed on possible technical improvements to strengthen women’s participation, to limit interference by commanders coming out of the anti-Soviet resistance and to ensure a genuine process of consultation. Few voices have expressed scepticism about the structure and aims of the NSP. Although she worked for the same institution as Nixon (the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit),6 Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili (2016) considers that the mere election of CDCs is insufficient to create conditions of responsibility and transparency. The legitimacy of the CDCs is supposed to derive from the local population, but their very existence depends on resources provided by the World Bank and channelled through the MRRD and the Facilitating Partners. CDCs therefore compete with existing institutions, such as assemblies of heads of families, which have shown themselves to be relatively effective in arbitrating disputes and furnishing public services.

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In identifying the communities that are to benefit from it, the NSP produces a new division of Afghan territory and modifies the existing principles of social organization. Its own ideal of community and participatory democracy is based on the supposed virtues of civil society, but it is li le suited to the organization of Afghan rural society, where local groups are political arenas marked by intense competition for scarce resources and power struggles among different political players. Let us take again the example of Jaghori district, in the east of Ghazni province, on the southern fringes of Hazarajat. The official boundaries of the district are not precisely defined. In the speech and imagery of local people, as well as in social practices, it is divided into a li le more than twenty regions (manteqas), although these have never been officially recognized. Each manteqa consists of several hamlets (qarias), which are do ed around in the vicinity of irrigated lands. A majority of qarias are inhabited by more than one lineage group, but virtually no lineage group is concentrated within one and the same hamlet. In other words, kinship and residence are not entirely congruent. Inhabitants of the region are linked by numerous overlapping obligations. First, membership of a patrilineal lineage group imposes a number of obligations such as vengeance, mutual financial assistance (especially to put together a dowry) or participation in community ceremonies. They are obligations stemming from a diffuse solidarity and a sense of being linked by the same destiny. The other kinship relations (through mothers, sisters and wives) are generally more supple and less demanding. Second, people in the same hamlet generally share one or two irrigation canals, whose upkeep is their responsibility and whose water is distributed in accordance with a fixed calendar. Access rights, passed from generation to generation together with the land, have been divided among inheritors ever since the canal was constructed. Although this close cooperation and interdependence may lead to conflicts, it means that concessions have to be made. Third, it is possible for several hamlets to join forces to maintain a meeting place (membar) for religious purposes and to pay a mullah for reading the Koran and giving religious instruction. In Jaghori, in addition to these ties of solidarity, security issues shape social relations on an everyday basis. The region suffered relatively li le as a result of fighting during the Soviet occupation. On the other hand, like the rest of Hazarajat, it was affected by profound social and political upheavals and by violent local conflicts that were all the deadlier because each group had varied weaponry at its disposal (automatic rifles, rocketlaunchers and flamethrowers). In the early 1980s, the region endured piti-

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less warfare between two groups: secular intellectuals, o en from welloff families and with links to Maoist-inspired parties, and Khomeinist militants with humbler sociological backgrounds who had o en been trained in Iran. The Khomeinists took control of a large part of Hazarajat in the early 1980s. Despite their ideological closeness and their victory over a common enemy, the two movements inspired by Khomeini – the Sazman-e Nasr (Victory Organization) and the Sepah-ye Pasdaran (Army of Guardians) – also fought ferociously with each other to capture power. The Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Fearing exclusion from the peace talks, the Hazara leaders believed that unity was the only path to salvation. Because of the past upheavals, such unity could be built only on the new ideological basis of Hazara identity. With active support from Iran, the main Shiite factions tried to bury the hatchet and to forge a broad united movement: the Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami-ye Afghanistan (Afghanistan Party of Islamic Unity). Although the party leadership remained in the hands of the religious leaders, it also incorporated a good number of secular intellectuals (soldiers, doctors, teachers and engineers). These made themselves indispensable and acquired a more political role by creating NGOs in charge of health programmes, education or road construction. By turning a page on these recent conflicts, the NSP seeks to promote a degree of collaboration that will bring everyone’s interests into harmony. Considering that the commanders from the anti-Soviet resistance, as well as other actors in that war, have been discredited in the eyes of the population, the NSP aims to strengthen solidarity in the community and to assist the emergence of a new class of notables wedded to the donors’ values. The explicit goal is to foster social cohesion and horizontal cooperation within the Afghan social fabric. In such a tense, fragmented context, it is illusory to aim for a level of solidarity devoid of all power relations, where the interests of all will be perfectly compatible. As we have seen, the fact that optimal NSP funding requires communities of three hundred households is itself a motive for communities to split up. In Jaghori district, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, the number of community development councils established by the NSP considerably exceeds the total number of manteqas. Who are the members of these assemblies? How are they are inserted into the local society? Whom do they represent? What opposition to they encounter? They are invested with a certain power, in the classical sense of the term developed by Max Weber: that is, a capacity to pursue one’s own ends by influencing the actions of others in spite of any resistance one may encounter. Power derives from control over material as well as social resources, which should today be understood to include foreign aid. The

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fact that aid agencies are neutral in their aims and functioning should not prevent them from reflecting on the political issues they represent in the eyes of local players. In many cases, the political factions in a manteqa (o en originating from old parties such as the Nasr and Sepah) have formed distinct CDCs in order to gain access independently to the resources of the NSP. Dahmarda, for example, a territorial and social unit comprising some 450 households, has split into two commi ees corresponding to the two factions that came out of the war. Local politics is structured around a complex laminate of cooperation and competition, where the strongest obligations go together with subtle sources of tension. The structures of solidarity cannot be understood in terms of a concentric model spreading out from an existential core (where relations of kinship and trust coincide) to outer fringes where mistrust is the general rule. In contrast to Marshall Sahlins’ well-known model explaining the social dimension of exchange (Sahlins 1965), violence between relatives and neighbours is not a rare occurrence in Afghanistan. Therefore, the NSP’s ideal of harmonious community development does not suffice to counterbalance the insecurity of past years when various local players fought for power. Far from being spaces of solidarity, local and territorial groups in rural Afghanistan should be seen as political arenas where the population competes as much as it cooperates for the control of scarce resources, water and land, migratory destinations and aid money. The terms ‘village’ and ‘community’ crop up throughout the ‘grey literature’ produced by aid and development organizations; they also appear in Afghan government rhetoric,7 where they denote territorial and social units in the rural world: tribal segments, urban districts, etc. They hardly make it easier to understand the intricacies of solidarities, modes of residence and sca ered lineage groups. Whereas the very concept of ‘community’ has been more or less abandoned in the social sciences, it is being reintroduced in the milieu of aid agencies to inspire actions that, as in the case of the NSP, cause distortions that are all the more dubious because their sponsors do not seem to have anticipated them. The NSP has managed to fuel existing tensions through the introduction of new resources, thereby helping to redefine the social and political geography of the Afghan rural world. It is not uncommon to see the district government housed in a modest office, whether a simple adobe shop in a bazaar or a compound dating from the precommunist period; inside, a turbaned official sips a cup of bi er tea in front of a Hermes typewriter, not far perhaps from an old Soviet jeep. What a contrast with the NGO offices, especially those benefiting from the NSP manna, with their youthful staff, electricity generators and Japanese-made vehicles! Flying the flag of

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the donor countries, these conspicuous organizations tend to blot out the local visibility of the Afghan state, confining it to the sphere of policing and its train of excesses. This situation reflects the variety of multiple, segmented sovereignties that characterize Afghanistan, as they do many other postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa. Reconstruction aid is a resource used in factional struggles. It should be taken into account in any study of the political economy of the Afghan crisis. This crisis cannot be understood through the grid of ethnic analysis. As for local groups, they appear singularly composite and fluid. Far from being a level of primordial solidarity on which the peace process can be grounded and far from constituting communities where the interests of all converge, they are political arenas where different players seek to assert their pre-eminence.

Notes  1. For a more developed discussion, see Monsu i (2005).  2. For a more developed critique of ethnicity as an explanatory key, see Tapper (1988) and Sche er (2003).  3. Three phases succeeded one another, with a total budget of more than US$ 1.5 billion.  4. See h p://www.nspafghanistan.org/facilitating_partners.shtm.  5. National Solidarity Programme 2006.  6. www.areu.org.af.  7. A few complexities of translation should be noted here. In the Persian for CDCs, Shurâ-ye enkeshâf-e qaria, the term corresponding to community refers to a group of houses. ‘Rural development’ is enkeshâf-e dehât, a term known to everyone, but relatively li le used in the Afghan rural world, which has the peculiarity of containing a Persian word (deh) with an Arabic suffix (-ât); it usually designates villages in general and the countryside.

6  Neighbouring Countries Equivocal Refuges If things go badly in Que a, where else can we Hazaras find refuge? —A Pakistani Hazara

In late January 2009, I learned that Husain Ali Yosufi, the Chairman of the Hazara Democratic Party, had been assassinated in Que a by two motorcyclists on his way out of his travel agency. He was not the first person I knew well who died a violent death. I recall that colourful man: his eyes mischievously sparkling behind large glasses, his lips hidden beneath a huge moustache, his florid language strewn with puns and metaphors that I could barely grasp, his humour and cordiality accompanying strong political opinions, his defence of secular values and the Hazara minority. But his killing was only one tragic event among many others that marked the deterioration of the political climate in Que a. The capital of Pakistani Baluchistan lies at an altitude of approximately 1,700 metres, in a river basin surrounded by mountains that rise over 3,000 metres. The landscape is perhaps reminiscent of Kabul. Situated on the frontier with Afghanistan, on the strategic highway linking Central Asia with the Indian Ocean, the city used to accommodate the largest British garrison in the subcontinent. It has been a defensive bastion for some and a place of refuge for others. The first Hazaras made their way there in the late nineteenth century, fleeing the military campaigns waged against them by the Emir of Kabul, Abdur Rahman, between 1891 and

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1893. The new arrivals soon developed good relations with the British authorities. They took part in road and railway construction across the Bolan pass linking the Afghan frontier to the plains of the south. Many joined the British Indian Army, where a Hazara Pioneers infantry regiment was specially created in 1904; it fought in the First World War, at the Ba le of Ypres in Belgium and in the Mesopotamia campaign. Service overseas for the British Empire, in support of its drive for global supremacy, was thus paradoxically a means of political emancipation and social advancement for members of a group that had been marginalized in its homeland. In the 1990s, I repeatedly enjoyed the hospitality of a leading figure in Que a’s Hazara community, who put me up in a small room adjoining his office. Haji Sarwar was a man of elegant bearing, affable and open to discussion. We developed a deep complicity with each other. He liked to appear in my company, as if my presence was a source of prestige that renewed an old contract between his family and the Engrizi (a wide-ranging term eventually used for all Europeans). He would speak to me with pride of his grandfather, who ran away from Afghanistan and enlisted in the British armed forces. Having been demobilized somewhere between Baghdad and Basra a er the armistice in 1918, he crossed Iran on foot, but lingered there for so long that he eventually married a girl from Isfahan. He gave up the idea of returning to his native village and preferred to se le in Que a, under the protection of his British godparents. In the end, he died there in the prime of life during the devastating earthquake of 1935. However, he had run a profitable business, and le his widow and young children reasonably well off. His only son, on reaching adulthood, acquired a lorry and specialized in transporting coal from the mines to sales outlets. He then gradually managed to expand his activities and grew rich as a result. Haji Sarwar was therefore a third-generation Hazara se ler in the capital of Pakistani Baluchistan, but he made frequent trips to Afghanistan. He developed his father’s activities and ended up managing a number of coal mines. He employed numerous workers from his grandfather’s old home region, helping to maintain social relationships across state frontiers. The creation of Pakistan, on 14 August 1947, did not undermine the integration of the Hazaras into the social fabric of Que a; they were recognized as one of the ‘indigenous/local tribes’ in 1962 and this status was confirmed on 15 June 1962. A former Cipaye in the British army, Muhammad Musa Khan, made a brilliant career for himself in the Pakistani armed forces, serving as commander-in-chief between 1958 and 1969 and going on to become Governor of Baluchistan between 1985 and 1991. Such trajectories illustrate the integration of a small community of migrants whose prospects had remained blocked in Afghanistan.

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More than a century of almost uninterrupted migration has made the Hazaras one of the principal communities in the Que a conglomeration. The terrible famine that struck large parts of Afghanistan in the early 1970s, followed by the communist coup in 1978 and the Soviet intervention in 1979, increased the flow across the border. Despite some variations in intensity, there has been a continuum of movement between Hazarajat and Que a. Few Hazaras have stayed in the refugee camps in Pakistan: most have instead preferred to try their luck in an urban se ing, where they can turn to a host community and do not need to rely on refugee aid. Furthermore, many peasants from southern Hazarajat migrate on a seasonal basis, travelling to Que a each winter to work in the coal mines and returning to Afghanistan in early spring to resume their agricultural activity. Thanks to relations they have in the local society, migrants from Afghanistan are able to obtain a Pakistani identity card or even a passport. Que a, then, is a central locus in the Hazaras’ spatiality and migratory circulations, the city itself serving as a stop-off point, a gathering place and a place of refuge. In the event of expulsion from Iran or conflict in Afghanistan, they can always be received there by a relative or friend. On the other hand, the capital of Pakistani Baluchistan offers few opportunities for work other than the coal mines or (for those with some start-up capital) private business. The city was a major hub in the 1980s and 1990s. I spent several long periods there, and it was my starting point for trips to Afghanistan and Iran. A chapter in the book that came out of my thesis is even entitled ‘Que a: The Hazara Refuge’ (Monsu i 2005). Haji Sarwar is keenly aware of this long history: ‘The Hazaras should be grateful to the British and to Pakistan’, he likes to say. ‘If things go badly in Que a, where else can we Hazaras find refuge?’ A gloomy premonition. Following 9/11 and the US intervention in Afghanistan, militant Sunni groups turned increasingly against the Pakistani Shiite minority so that, even in the long-standing refuge of Que a, Hazaras became the target of more and more frequent a acks. In June 2003, unknown assailants ambushed a van carrying eleven Hazara police cadets, lined the passengers up against a wall and machine-gunned them. The next month, during Friday prayers, more than fi y Hazaras were killed and dozens more wounded in an a ack on the city’s main Shiite mosque. And in January 2004, some thirty Shiite pilgrims died when armed men a acked two buses in which they were travelling. It has been estimated that in Que a city alone, 1,400 Hazaras have been murdered by terrorist groups such as the militant Sunni Lashkar-e Jhangvi, which had fought against the Indian armed forces in Kashmir. These groups alternate between bomb a acks and assassinations of public figures thought likely to represent or defend their coreligionists, as well as politicians, business-

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men, intellectuals and journalists such as Husain Ali Yosufi. Civil servants and business leaders are also targeted, as a way of emphasizing that the minority is an ‘alien body’ in Pakistan and cannot hope to count for anything in the state apparatus and the socioeconomic fabric. The social, political and economic trajectory of individuals, as well as their past and present geographical roots, reflect the overlapping of colonial and postcolonial processes – from the British territorial expansion and the construction of the Afghan state in the nineteenth century to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, from the Cold War and the Red Army intervention in Afghanistan to the long warfare between factions coming out of the anti-Soviet resistance. Let us now return to Mardan Ali and his brothers. Each of them responded differently to the conflict and the problems it posed, but each response should be understood in its relationship with the others. Mardan Ali is one of the people who counted most for me during my research in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1990s. Born in the mid-1950s in Dahmarda, he was promised from an early age to the daughter of his father’s brother. As a child, he was disobedient and pugnacious; he got on badly with his stepmother, he said, who favoured her much younger sons, Mohammad Ali and Aziz, over himself. On my very first trip to Afghanistan in the autumn of 1995, I accompanied Mardan Ali on a visit to his family in his native village, Dahmarda. When we arrived at his childhood home, several women hurried up to greet us. Mardan put his head on the shoulder of one of them and she kissed his hair. He nimbly bent down to kiss her right hand. She turned to me and, in a rather unusual gesture, took me affectionately in her arms, whereupon I imitated my companion with a clumsy reverence. She held my hand and said that I was her son, before lowering her voice and adding: ‘This [she indicated Mardan with her cheek] is my stepson.’ It would take me three years to understand the real nature of their relationship. Trying to correlate forms of spatial mobility with relations of solidarity, I reconstituted the genealogy of my main interlocutors. On one day, much like any other, I was interviewing Mohammad Ali, on the assumption that he was Mardan’s half-brother: ‘I think Mardan Ali’s mother was born in the village of Daoud from the same line of descent as your father’s mother. And may I ask you what were the origins of your most respected mother?’ Mohammad Ali looked puzzled and gave no answer. Seeing his reaction, I had a moment of panic: had I touched on a well-kept family secret that younger members of the family were not supposed to know? I quickly thought through the options I had to correct my faux pas, the most obvious of which was to play on my imperfect knowledge of the lan-

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guage. At that moment, the door half-opened and Mardan slipped into the room. I decided to tackle the question head-on: ‘Mardan, my dear friend, I thought your mother tragically died giving birth to you. I’m really sorry if I’ve created a problem.’ At this, Mardan burst out laughing: ‘No, no: Mohammad Ali, Aziz and I all have the same mother.’ He sat down, relishing the effect he had had, and began spontaneously to tell me about his youth: ‘My father had agreed with his brother that I would marry his daughter. I didn’t want to. I asked my mother to support me. But she didn’t. Then I began to tell her that she wasn’t a good mother, that she was behaving like a cruel stepmother.’ At the age of sixteen, Mardan accused some neighbours of stealing irrigation time and had a violent altercation with them: ‘Hit me if you dare, sonny!’ he was told. Furious, Mardan raised the spade he had in his hands and brought it down on the adult man’s shoulder. At the sight of blood, he took fright at the consequences of what he had done. He ran home, hurriedly packed a bag and took off. That was in 1971. He fled to Pakistan, where some relatives of his had se led in Que a. The country was then in the throes of the Bangladesh war of independence and he enlisted without delay in the Pakistani army; he got to know a Que a-born Hazara with origins, like himself, in Jaghori. As their friendship deepened, he visited his house one day and set eyes on his sister: ‘I fell in love on the spot’, he told me. ‘It was her, not my cousin, that I wanted as my wife!’ His father took several years to track him down, then went to Que a to make him return to Dahmarda and marry his cousin. By a mixture of threats and entreaties, he managed to persuade his son to go with him. It was winter. Back home a er all that time, Mardan tried to get his parents to accept his choice – in vain. Fuming with rage, he finally threw himself onto the bukhari (the li le wood-burning stove) and sustained the burns that he now, unbu oning his shirt, proudly showed me: ‘I made my father give in, and I married the woman of my choice!’ Mardan’s brother, ten or more years younger and very different in character, had been listening a entively. Did he know the whole story? In the 1980s, Mardan had moved between Afghanistan (where he spent the summer fighting Soviet occupation forces) and Pakistan (where he went in the winter to work in the coal mines). His wife, though born in Que a, had wanted to se le in the mountains of Hazarajat, thinking that, despite the war, the climate there would help her to cope with the tuberculosis from which she suffered. As for Mohammad Ali, he had gone as a teenager to Pakistan and soon decided to head for Iran. He spent a number of periods there, working as a bricklayer on the building sites of Tehran and Isfahan.

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A pious man who respected his elders, he wanted his sons to avoid having to live this migrant’s life. He replicated the matrimonial alliance of his father and grandfather by marrying a woman from the lineage of his mother and her father’s mother. Mardan Ali was considered by people an energetic man but lacking in solidarity, an enterprising spirit but so unpredictable as to be capable of violence. Showing aversion for the religious regime in Iran, he always refused to go there even for a brief visit. Mohammad Ali was seen as a skilled artisan, but as a man who lacked fighting spirit: one could be proud of him, but he was too conciliatory and unlucky in business. I heard his father and uncle lecture him for not wanting to send his teenage son to Iran: ‘Education is a good thing. But to become a man, you have to get away from home; you have to know the open road and the life of the building sites!’ One was both envied and blamed, the other highly regarded but criticized. Yet beyond their differences of character and reputation, the two brothers illustrated different kinds of itinerancy linking Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, which also need to be understood at the level of the domestic group. Afghans are not powerless victims of events beyond their knowledge; they derive a certain advantage from their geographical dispersion and adopt different forms of mobility. The members of family groups seek not only to maximize their interests but also to minimize risks by diversifying their places of residence, types of activity and even political affiliations. As we have seen in the criticisms of Mohammad Ali for refusing to send his son to work in Iran, migration is not only a strategic response to insecurity; it is also a rite of passage to adulthood through which a man becomes a man. Rather than a break, it fits into the image that people have of a man’s journey through life (Monsu i 2007). The population of Jaghori, for example, has been turning to Que a for more than a century. The series of conflicts that have shaken Afghanistan since 1978 have only intensified this relationship and the back-and-forth movement that it involves. To expand their field of social and economic possibilities, many have two homes: one in Que a and another in Jaghori. This spatial diversification explains how the regional economic systems are constituted by a differential utilization of the available ecological and social niches. Salzman (1971), in his description of Baluchi nomads, speaks of a ‘multi-resource economy’: the breeding of goats, sheep and camels; the growing of dates; the caravan trade and pillage (replaced in the twentieth century by labour migration to the economic centres of Iran or the Arabian Peninsula). The movement is not only spatial but also involves shi s from one economic resource to another (for example, from pastureland to date-palm oases perhaps hundreds of kilometres away). Similarly,

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despite the different contexts, the migration of Afghans to Pakistan, Iran or the Gulf States corresponds to a diversification strategy and is not simply the result of violence. Thus, Hazaras fleeing the conquests of Abdur Rahman in the late nineteenth century made their way not only to British India but also to Iran. Concentrated around Mashhad, where they are known as Berberis, the descendants of those refugees have been less consistent than their Que a cousins in maintaining relations with their ancestral homeland. In this respect, there is a striking contrast between Iran and Pakistan; indeed, the relationship is almost the opposite in the two countries. In Iran, Afghans face a xenophobic atmosphere and are restricted to manual activities (Adelkah and Olszewska 2007).1 However, many families try to have one of their members in Iran as a means of financial support – a tendency already quite marked in the 1970s at the time of the oil boom. Young men are o en encouraged by their parents to look for work there and may stay on for several years. On the other hand, men with responsibility for a family sometimes object to leaving for long periods and try to remain closer to their wives and children in their village of origin. Therefore, they prefer to go to Que a, since it allows them to migrate for shorter periods and to be received within a host community. When I was based in Que a, I decided to visit Iran in order to gain a fuller overview of the transnational space in which the people I met day by day were actually moving. I went there for the first time in the spring of 1996, taking the bus from Que a across the high plateaus of Baluchistan. My hopes of contacting Afghans in Iran rested on a few telephone numbers I had jo ed down on a piece of paper. Were they refugees? Were they migrant workers? But I focused on other questions. I was interested in their social strategies and did not try to a ach bureaucratic labels to them, although these were not unimportant, since they structured public policies at the state level and the types of humanitarian intervention adopted by international organizations and NGOs. In search of neutral expressions that would not predetermine my understanding of the social phenomena and mobility strategies in question, I prefer to speak of ‘mobile persons’, ‘itinerants’ or – be er still – Homo itinerans. When I reached Tehran, I booked into an unpretentious hotel not far from the main artery, Khiaban-e Enqelab (Avenue of the Revolution). The next morning, I dialled one of the numbers in the hope of finding some trace of Mohammad Ali. A male voice answered, with a distinctly Iranian intonation. I did not want him to think I was a European, so I simply said that I had just arrived from Pakistan and was a family friend of an Afghan worker, making a couple of li le mistakes in Persian in the hope that he would take me for a Pakistani. He answered drily that I should call back

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later. I therefore plucked up the courage to phone again a er a couple of hours. The success of my trip to Tehran depended on it. I was very curious to meet the last of the three brothers. I had in my pocket a photo of his three-year-old daughter on whom he had still never set eyes, taken six months earlier during my trip to Dahmarda with Mardan Ali. This time I identified the Hazara accent at once: ‘My name is Sekander, I’m a friend of Mardan Ali’s from Dahmarda. He gave me this number…’ A loud exclamation cut me short: ‘Yes, of course. We’ve been expecting you. Where are you now?’ We agreed on a place to meet, quite a long way from my hotel. I was in Iran on a tourist visa and did not want to draw the authorities’ a ention to the Afghans I met; most of them did not have a residence permit. To be sure of shaking off any tail, I jumped into a shared taxi heading in the general direction I wanted. Then I got off, walked a li le down a crowded street, entered a shopping centre, le by another door and hailed a second taxi. This time I made sure that it would remain a private journey. Mohammad Ali was the same age as myself. He was a li le slimmer than his brother, but otherwise looked very similar. He insisted that I should stay at his place in Tehran, which was certainly a godsend for me. So we went back to collect my things from the hotel. He remained in the background, but did not seem too concerned to be showing himself in public with a foreigner. It was not far to the building site where he worked and lived with his comrades from Jaghori. The fortnight I would stay there is one of the best memories from my fieldwork and I repeated the experience in the autumn of 2003, when I again spent a few days in Mohammad Ali’s company. The key for men in Mohammad Ali’s situation was the employment channels they used. They joined temporary work teams around particularly enterprising and competent individuals, and moved from site to site as they received news by word of mouth that new workers were being taken on. The Afghans who go to the Islamic Republic therefore have a good chance of finding work through a relative or neighbour from their home region. Although he was as mobile as Mardan, Mohammad Ali adopted a different form of movement. He first le the family home around the age of fi een and immediately set his sights on Iran. Since then, he had spent most of his life abroad, with brief visits to his family back in Afghanistan. He had been employed by turns in stone quarries, in an industrial flour mill and on building sites as a bricklayer. As he acquired experience of the labour market and solid professional skills, he developed a relationship of trust with several Iranian entrepreneurs, who gave him more and more responsibilities on the sites where he worked. However, he had suffered

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some setbacks and had never managed to put together enough capital to embark on a business venture that was truly his own. Despite his wishes, he seemed doomed to keep living between two worlds, while operating as a protector for young men who came to work alongside him. Mohammad Ali could scarcely hope to bring his family to Iran or plan for long-term integration. Although it is easy for Afghans to find quite well-paid work there through familiar channels, they are excluded from many activities and remain confined to certain manual jobs. The risks of expulsion, harassment and police violence increase as the years go by. Some Hazaras found refuge in Iran in the late nineteenth century as they fled the conflict opposing them to the Emir of Kabul. Se led around the city of Mashhad, in Khorasan province, their descendants are known as Berberis or Khavaris. They form a well-integrated community within the national social fabric and their links with Afghanistan are looser than those of the Que a Hazaras. I once found myself in Mashhad in the mid1990s, where I stayed in a small hotel not far from the mausoleum of Reza, the eighth Imam of Shiism. The affable receptionist was happy to exchange a few words with me and, intrigued by my interest in Afghans, he mentioned in passing that he was a Khavari. Yet he was taken aback when I asked which part of Afghanistan his ancestors had come from. He mumbled: ‘Afghanistan? I don’t know … yes, maybe … but Afghanistan was part of Iran at the time.’ Later that day, I told some Hazaras from Afghanistan about the conversation and they did not conceal their exasperation: ‘Those Khavaris are afraid and hide their origins. They don’t want to be confused with us!’ My interlocutors complained of the racism around them and of the contempt to which they were exposed in daily life. Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, many Afghans had already gone to Iran in search of a job in the then booming economy. In the 1980s and 1990s, they were actually welcomed there, though for different reasons than in Pakistan. The Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan triggered one of the world’s largest forced migrations since the Second World War. By 1990, more than six million Afghans were dispersed in the two neighbouring countries, representing 40% of the global total of refugees under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) mandate. Pakistan, which had not even ratified the 1951 Convention or the 1967 Protocol, was thus the country with the largest number of refugees in the world. The geopolitical context of the time – the campaign against Soviet expansionism – more than humanitarian concerns per se made this situation acceptable to the UNHCR, to the host country and to the Western Bloc, the main source of financial support. By contrast, Iran was snubbed by aid donors, although nearly as many Afghans had been received there and the country had acted swi ly

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to ratify the international policy instruments on refugees. But the Islamic Republic had highlighted its solidarity with fellow Muslims in Afghanistan; Afghans could take their place in a labour market that the terrible war with Iraq had drained of Iranian youth. The situation gradually worsened over the course of the 1990s: access to social services, medical care and education became increasingly difficult; police raids became more frequent; many Afghans had their identity papers confiscated and a growing number were expelled to Afghanistan. In 1999, the Iranian Parliament passed a motion requiring employers to dismiss any foreign worker whose papers were not in order. Some 60,000 Afghans were repatriated on a voluntary basis, but more than 100,000 were forcibly deported in 1999 alone.2 This tendency persisted, with some fluctuations, a er the end of the international intervention in Afghanistan. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid, Afghanistan’s human development indicators – including those for infantile mortality, life expectancy and frequency of violence – are still among the worst in the world. The urban population continues to swell, while the absorption capacity of rural areas is limited because of demographic pressure and the potential of agriculture. Unfortunately for Afghans, their options are considerably more restricted today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. The strategic context has changed and neither Pakistan nor Iran is welcoming to Afghans fleeing their country. They are therefore compelled to find new destinations. Increasing numbers try their luck in Australia and especially Europe – a shi that reflects the changing situation in the two neighbours that used to be the initial countries of reception.

Notes  1. In late 2004, the UNHCR estimated that roughly a million Afghans living in Iran were officially registered, while 500,000 more were residing there illegally (Abbasi-Shavazi and Glazebrook 2006).  2. ‘U.S. Commi ee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 2000 – Iran’, h p:// www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6a8c423.html (retrieved 10 June 2020). See also Adelkhah and Olszewska 2006.

7  Across the Seas Playing with Categories People call me Harry. With my slanting eyes, no one thinks I’m Afghan and a Muslim. —A Hazara migrant, New York

New York, Ground Zero, 11 September 2005. I fight my way through the crowd, along the wire fence that seals off the gaping hole where the new World Trade Center is supposed to rise up. The atmosphere is one of remembrance. A man with a deep voice reads a text evoking the victims of the a ack. I get caught up in the simplicity of the words and the deference of the crowd. I think back to 11 September 2001. It was late a ernoon in Que a: I was at the house of Haji Sarwar, cha ing with him over a hot cup of tea. His brother burst into the room and excitedly announced that the United States was under a ack. We went with him and reached his television just as the second plane was crashing into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We watched in stupefaction as events unfolded and the two skyscrapers collapsed. I was in a Shiite milieu, among people targeted by the same Sunni Islamist groups that seemed to have perpetrated the a acks. It was impossible to a ribute to them the least sympathy for Al Qaeda. Haji Sarwar’s brother shook his head, perplexed, and said to himself: ‘A demonic act … but a brilliant plan! It’s terrible, terrible, but well thought out.’ He was aghast, but not indifferent to the fact that the most powerful country in the world could be struck at its core by the very enemies who threatened his own existence and that of his fellow Hazaras

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in Pakistan. The tragic unleashing of violence could suddenly cause two realities, previously distant from each other, to come crashing together. And there I was, four years later, at the scene of the drama. I was staying at Flushing with Hazrat Ali, Haji Sarwar’s son-in-law. With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, I was extending my research to take in Afghans who had se led in the West. I spent part of 2005 in North America, where I had many contacts, including relatives or friends of people I had met in previous tears in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran. I went to Washington DC, Boston, Montreal and Quebec City, but it was in New York that I stayed the longest. The Afghan community in North America is in the tens of thousands. Coming largely from the urban middle and upper classes, it is well represented in the Bay Area of San Francisco (particularly Fremont), Southern California (Los Angeles and San Diego) and the Washington conurbation (including nearby areas in Virginia and Maryland), but also in Toronto, Montreal and even Vancouver.1 Persons originating from rural areas in Afghanistan have arrived only recently, with the expansion of their migratory networks beyond the Middle East. Nevertheless, given the geographical position of North America, it is almost impossible to reach it clandestinely from Asia. In Canada, for instance, migrants must be sponsored either publicly (by the federal state or a province) or privately (in general by a charitable or community body). As to the United States, one way of immigrating is through the official Diversity Visa Lo ery, which results in the granting of 50,000 permanent residency cards (or Green Cards) per annum. This procedure is open to people from a list of countries that changes every year, the idea being to maintain a degree of diversity in the immigrant population. Some Hazaras qualified on this basis in the second half of the 1990s, sometimes with Pakistani identity documents. Their small community then gradually expanded through family reunification or through the marriage of new arrivals with spouses in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Hazrat Ali lives with his elder brother Latif. Originally from Jaghori district, their parents decided to se le in Que a when they were still children. Latif studied fine arts in Pakistan. A talented designer, he has always dreamed of going to the West and making a career there. Hazrat Ali is a smart cookie. As a young adult, he spent his time moving back and forth between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics, buying various goods and reselling them at a small profit. He speaks especially highly of his periods in Uzbekistan, where the business was not bad and the vodka always flowed freely. To his surprise, he received a US Green Card in the mid-1990s, a er which his elder brother filled in a form to take part in the Diversity Visa Lo ery. Family pressure was such that he was

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obliged to seize the opportunity, without much enthusiasm. Although at the time he only knew a few words of English, Hazrat Ali decided to se le in New York, where he found various people he had known in Que a. He also had the opportunity to meet other migrants from the Middle East. Having se led in the big city some time ago, these have a significant presence in the world of street vendors and small restaurant owners. Although he did not finish school, Hazrat Ali has an inventive mind and is a determined worker. By hiring a pushcart to sell coffee and pastries, he was soon making a tidy income and managed to purchase his own equipment. A er three years he could sponsor his brother, who came with his wife to join him in New York. I followed Hazrat Ali in his daily wandering and adapted to the rhythm of his life. One evening, we went to bed early so that we could get up at 2 am. A er a quick splash, we jumped into his van and set off for Williamsburgh in Brooklyn, to a large garage that – I was told – belonged to a Hassidic Jew, but was run by an Egyptian. It was a real hive of activity, where Greeks, Egyptians, Uzbeks, Afghans and Pakistanis rubbed shoulders with one another. I spo ed a woman well into her fi ies, with hair dyed ash blond, who sat smoking on a canister. But the men, young and not so young, were clearly in the majority. Everyone knew everyone else; they said hello as they passed each other, exchanging sometimes salacious jokes. But they did not waste time: their gestures followed an effective, well-established routine. Hazrat Ali obtained all the supplies he needed from a counter: plain bagels and others with sesame or poppy seeds; doughnuts and muffins; Philadelphia cream cheese; coffee powder and tea bags; milk and sugar. He took everything over to a metal stall, where he slipped on some transparent plastic gloves to cut and spread the bagels. Charmed by the atmosphere and eager to observe the precepts of participant observation, I gave Hazrat Ali a hand, without realizing how slow and awkward I was in comparison. We did not hang around and soon headed for the stack of pushcarts, which occupied a large part of the garage. Hazrat Ali took his out and, with automatic gestures, put into it everything we had just prepared. He pulled it outside the garage, a ached it to his van and told me we could leave. We had been there for barely one hour. He was in a hurry; he wanted to be in time for the last of the night owls. The socioeconomic niche of the pushcarts is not easy to penetrate. The main problem is not to obtain a municipal licence (which costs a few hundred dollars a year), but to break into a largely self-governing fraternity and secure the right to use various places. The most highly prized (certain street corners in Manha an, subway exits, the edges of squares, etc.) can cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is payable to the previous

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occupant when he hands them over. It is an economic as well as a social investment. The successful ones gradually get closer to the most central locations, while making a profit by selling off their previous spot to a younger member of the community. They introduce these newcomers by acting as their mentors, which adds to their own social capital. Hazrat Ali, for example, started out on Flushing Main Street, outside Manha an. A er several years of hard work, he managed to gain control of two spots at subway exits near Times Square: manna from heaven. We arrive there before 5 am. He parks, detaches the pushcart, lights the camping stove, fills a huge paper filter with coffee and makes sure everything is where it should be. As planned, the first well-dressed customers soon show up from nightclubs in the area, sometimes not too steady on their feet. They give their orders, pay without saying any more, then go straight off sipping their hot coffee. Next come the janitors and things change. Hazrat Ali knows them all: ‘How goes it? Have they fixed your plumbing?’ ‘Good morning, see you tomorrow!’

The clientele gradually changes again a er 7 am. Now it is the turn of Midtown white-collar workers – the busiest time for Hazrat Ali. As he bustles around, the speed and precision of his gestures never cease to impress me. He wheels right to fill a paper cup with coffee, places it on the ledge of the li le window he stands behind, suggests a doughnut, takes the money, gives the change, leans over to check the flow of gas and straightens up again to greet a new customer: ‘Good morning, how you doin’?’ Hazrat Ali spots the regulars among the hundreds of passers-by and has a few words for each. He shoots me a complicit glance: ‘People call me Harry. With my slanting eyes, no one thinks I’m Afghan and a Muslim. It’s be er that way – especially since 9/11.’ A er 9 am, things become a li le calmer. He quickly surveys what remains unsold. He hands me a poppy-seed bagel and a large black coffee. Like a sportsman recovering from a great effort, he leans back to support himself and takes in deep breaths: ‘You see, that’s my life!’ He smiles, but I can feel he is weary: ‘Will you write about it in your next book?’ At 11 am, it is time to close the pushcart and hand the spot over to an Egyptian who specializes in hot dogs. On our way back to Williamsburgh, he suddenly starts talking about his wife, Ziba, the daughter of my old friend Haji Sarwar. She died last year in Pakistan of a brain tumour. The illness had been diagnosed a few weeks before the birth of their child, Yasa (the name of the Mongol legal code compiled under Genghis Khan).

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Hazrat Ali fights back his emotions and whispers in a choking voice: ‘She was pure. But you know what people are like: they say an early death is the sign of a sin. I don’t believe it, I really don’t. She was so pure!’ He worries about his son, whom he would like to bring to the United States: ‘But you’ve seen the rhythm of my life. How can I look a er a child? I’d need to get married again. But first I want to have Haji Sarwar’s blessing.’ My thoughts also turn to Ziba. I stayed with the family in Que a, soon a er she married Hazrat Ali. He had gone back to New York, while she remained for the time being with her father and waited for her US visa. Ziba was one of the few young women I met with whom I could have long conversations on more than one occasion. I spent some great moments cha ing with Haji Sarwar. She would bring us a tray with tea and a few li le sweets, then sit down beside her father. Shy at first, she grew bolder as the days went by and asked me questions about the West: ‘What is life like there? Are women really not separated off ? Don’t they spend their days alone at home while their husbands are at work?’ As a mark of trust towards me, but also an expression of tact towards his daughter, Haji Sarwar sometimes le the two of us alone together. He had understood that Ziba wished to address some personal ma ers. Educated and curious though she was, she seemed more uneasy than happy at the idea of leaving the family cocoon and the landmarks of her neighbourhood. A change of continents would come on top of the new status in life a er her marriage, and she was apprehensive about this dual social and spatial shi . She wondered whether women could always have confidence in their husbands, whether their children would have a sufficient affective structure for their lives in American society. I do not know if Ziba had ever read Durkheim, but in her imagination a city like New York was marked by a state of anomie, by the erosion of moral values and the absence of social regulation. In any case, her illness meant that she was never able to confront this reality. As if echoing Ziba’s concerns from a distance, Latif’s wife – who was able to go to New York – said to me during my stay there: ‘Do you know what women’s lives are like in our country?’ I was going to say that I was sure they were difficult. But without giving me time to respond, she added: ‘We are among our sisters, our cousins, our aunts. How much laughter there is during the day, when the men are out! Here, I’m bored. And my husband is not satisfied with things: he goes round and round the house like a lion in a cage.’ Despite years of ethnographic work among Afghans, I had not been expecting such a remark. There is no end to the realization that some of your ideas have been based on preconceptions. And it is difficult to resist

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the media hype that presents the ‘Afghan woman’ as a victim who needs outside help to be freed from male dominance. My a ention turned back to the eight-lane highway on which Hazrat Ali’s van was speeding along. Born in Hazarajat into a family of peasants, he had returned several times to Pakistan a er his move to the United States. People there knew about his successful migration, and this had enabled him to marry a woman from a higher social milieu, the daughter of a notable from one of the oldest Hazara families in Que a. In his case, geographical mobility had been accompanied by social mobility. Such transnational marriages are not uncommon. They o en allow migrants to improve their status within their transnational group: several who have obtained a residence permit or even American citizenship have thus married women from a more privileged social background who would have been inaccessible in their place of origin. Whereas in Afghanistan there is a tendency to hypergamy, in which women ‘marry up’, migration opens new possibilities and helps to redefine hierarchies, social status and gender relations. I met Hazrat Ali again in the spring of 2008 during another trip to New York. He had remarried in Que a and brought over his son and second wife, with whom he had had a li le girl. His business had prospered. Weary from long years of night work, he had recently joined his brother Latif in a pushcart-producing venture. Seated behind the wheel of his Lexus car, he proudly pointed to their workshop in the Astoria district, where they employed a number of migrant workers, not all of whom were Afghans or Pakistanis. Hazrat Ali’s trajectory corresponded to the famous model on display at the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island: the new arrival who gradually works his way up the echelons of American society. His life had taken him from the highlands of central Afghanistan to the Pakistani city of Que a, then to Tashkent and finally New York. His itinerancy had involved numerous trials and tribulations. But by dint of his work and patience, he had come to enjoy economic success and recognition for his entrepreneurial skills within his transnational social networks. Do people talk of him in their homes in Jaghori or Que a? Does his trajectory perhaps fuel the imagination of other migrants? In the framework of my research funded by the MacArthur Foundation, I continued my transnational travels and spent the months of August and September 2006 in Australia and New Zealand. The first Afghans arrived in Australasia as camel drivers, in the final decades of the nineteenth century.2 More recently, in the 1980s and above all the first half of the 1990s, Afghans from the urban middle and upper classes moved to Australia and se led there, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne. A third wave of migration brought people fleeing the Taliban regime between

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1998 and 2001, principally Hazaras from the centre of Afghanistan. A majority of these travelled on a Pakistani passport – in some cases, a forged one procured in Que a – which gave them the right to enter Malaysia and Indonesia without a visa. They then tried to advance further aboard rickety Indonesian vessels. In response to this influx, Australian reception policies became more restrictive and in late 2001, the Conservative government of John Howard introduced the so-called Pacific Solution, a set of strict measures to prevent clandestine arrivals by sea. The main provision was to exclude the territories closest to Indonesia – such as Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef – from the Australian migration zone, making it impossible to lodge a claim for asylum there. At the same time, the navy tightened up its checks and controls. The government in Canberra also gave itself powers to deport asylum seekers to certain small Pacific islands, particularly Manus (in northern Papua New Guinea) and Nauru (a tiny independent state in Micronesia). As in Europe, Australia has been trying to externalize reception and sorting measures, in addition to the various detention centres already in existence.3 Thousands of migrants – mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq – are interned in this way for two to three years. Nevertheless, with the support of human rights groups, many Hazaras have eventually obtained refugee status, o en a er appeals to the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) have reversed decisions made by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.4 This was the case with Mohammad Hanif, who is distantly related by marriage to Mardan Ali and his brothers, although he comes from a more well-off family. When I first met him in the mid-1990s, he and his two older brothers were engaged in profitable business operations between Ghazni, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Que a. However, the worsening conflict between the Taliban (which mainly recruited Pashtuns) and the Hezb-e Wahdat (a majority Hazara Shiite party) severed their trading routes between 1997 and 1998 and ruined their activities. A er trying in vain to reconstitute his capital in Pakistan, Mohammad Hanif tried his luck on the eastern migratory route and managed to set foot on Australian soil in 2000. An asylum seekers’ aid association took him under its wing and soon enabled him to leave the centre where he had initially been detained. He travelled to Perth and then on to the Albany area in southeastern Australia. He found a job there – as did many other Hazaras – in the industrial slaughterhouses. He received a tidy sum in compensation for a work accident that le him physically impaired and, with his commercial experience, he used the money to acquire several plots of building land in Adelaide. He managed to resell these at a profit and convinced a growing

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number of relatives and friends to come and se le in the region, which gave a major boost to his status. During one conversation, Hanif told me in passing that Wali Khan, one of my main interlocutors when I had been living years before in Que a, had been on board the Tampa and had finally se led in New Zealand. On the night of 26–27 August 2001, a few days before the 9/11 a acks, this Norwegian cargo ship had been sailing in international waters to the south of Java and had gone to the assistance of a foundering Indonesian fishing vessel, the Palapa 1. Most of the la er’s 438 passengers (including 26 women and 43 children) were of Afghan and especially Hazara origin and had been trying to reach Australia. As it circulated between the Australian port of Fremantle and Singapore, its captain, Arne Rinnan, had repeatedly asked for permission to disembark the passengers on the nearest land, Christmas Island, a small Australian territory of 135 km2 situated 350 km south of Java. But the Australian authorities maintained that it was not their responsibility to receive these candidates for asylum, since they had transited through another country. Caught in the middle of a diplomatic rumpus involving Norway, Australia and Indonesia, and disturbed by the possibility of a revolt if his ship returned the migrants to Java, the Norwegian captain of the Tampa lost patience with the procrastinations of the Canberra government and eventually entered Australian territorial waters without permission. An Australian commando unit then immediately intervened and took control of the ship’s cargo; most of the migrants were transferred to a naval vessel and taken to Nauru. At this stage, New Zealand became involved and agreed to receive approximately 150 of the Tampa’s passengers. Once recognized as refugees, they benefited in subsequent years from a family reunion programme. It was a er these events that Afghans gained a foothold in New Zealand territory and today they form a se led community, the vast majority of whom live in Auckland.5 Wali Khan, an intellectual commi ed to the defence of the rights of the Hazara minority in Afghanistan and Pakistan, acted as the spokesman for migrants during the Tampa crisis. This gave him a high media profile. Once he had se led in New Zealand, members of his extended family and numerous acquaintances in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere continually asked him to use his contacts with the authorities of his adopted country on their behalf. Unable to respond to this flood of requests, he tried to cut himself off. Rumour had it that he moved to a different town and had even changed his name to put people off the scent. As soon as I arrived in Auckland, I therefore asked the Afghans I met if they knew the whereabouts of Wali Khan. They invariably replied that they did not know anyone with that name. It was a reaction to be expected from people who have learned to mistrust outsiders from the state or

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from humanitarian organizations. To get round this protective screen, I adopted a slightly different approach: ‘In the past I used to know a gentleman called Wali Khan. We became good friends when I was living in Que a. If you happen to come across him, here is the number where I can be reached.’ A few days later, I picked up the phone and heard a voice that had remained familiar over the years: ‘Hello, Sekander. What a surprise to know you are in New Zealand!’ Wali Khan was living in Christchurch with his half-brother, Abdul Hamid, their two wives and their children. I myself was travelling with my wife, who was four months’ pregnant, and with our daughter aged one and a half. It was one of those reunions that are the beauty of the ethnographer’s life. Wali Khan was giving English lessons to young migrants, while Abdul Hamid had become a taxi driver. Their two families contained a total of twelve persons. They took out a well-kept folder and showed it to me: photos of their passage on the Tampa; the asylum seekers seated in rows among the containers; press cu ings about their arrival in New Zealand; reports of a meeting with Helen Clark, the Prime Minister at the time. They sighed. What sacrifices to get where they were now! Wali Khan illustrated the (ultimately rather normal) case of someone who, far from benefiting from the dense network of transnational relations in which he was inserted, had tried to remove himself from it and adopted other ways of meeting the needs of his wife and children. He would have liked to campaign for the social rights of migrants, to fight for political recognition of the Hazaras: ‘But I must think first of feeding my family and educating my children! My father doesn’t understand; he wants me to send him money each month. He thinks I don’t care what happens to him and other members of the family.’ How could Wali Khan explain life in a country such as New Zealand? He spoke to me of his old project for a book showing that the Hazaras have lived since time immemorial in the territory that has become Afghanistan, the ‘land of the Afghans’ or, in other words, of the Pashtuns. He took objection to the very name of the country, which embodied what he described as ‘ethnic fascism’. Given his pangs of conscience that he could not help his relatives in Afghanistan or Pakistan more directly, did he perhaps think that such a book would allow him to give back what he had received? His language seemed even more passionate than had been the case ten years earlier in Que a. Members of a diaspora – that ‘category of practice’, as Rogers Brubaker (2005: 12) would say – sometimes develop more extreme political demands than in their country of origin. In Afghanistan, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks have to get on in one way or another; recourse to

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violence is a form of political action to be used only a er other options have been carefully considered. In any case, violence is not systematically counterposed to the language of legality; the two are intertwined and mutually reinforcing in the struggle to win and maintain access to resources. Beyond the discourse of many intellectuals such as Wali Khan and of social, economic or political imagery that centres on ethnicity, the practices prevalent among Afghans are marked by overlapping solidarities and an effort to diversify alliances. Years later, when I was working on my manuscript and doing some internet research on my period in Australia and New Zealand, I came across some press communiqués that took me a while to grasp. One evening in December 2008, Abdul Hamid had picked up two highly intoxicated partygoers, aged sixteen and nineteen, in his taxi. They tried to rob him and in the altercation that followed, Abdul Hamid was stabbed to death. The two youths then went to a karaoke bar, where they bragged of having ‘dealt with’ a taxi driver. Having escaped the war and gone through all manner of trials, having been rejected by Australia but accepted by New Zealand, having finally reached a point when he thought he was safe and could hope for a peaceful life, Abdul Hamid encountered violence again in the most unexpected circumstances, as the victim of a wanton crime with no political or racist motivation. In their global wandering, Afghans are not content simply to adapt to the local context. They retain ties with their land of origin. They also develop transversal links between the places where they se le, which take material shape in internet forums, in multiple trips between Sweden and the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, as well as in the circulation of marriage candidates. Dispersed in the Middle East, Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, Afghans have established a veritable system of transnational migratory networks. They have preserved, and in some cases developed, relations of mutual aid and solidarity based on the diversification of places of residence and the complementarity of economic activities. But there are limits to the transnationality. The multiple relations, return trips and money transfers mainly link up Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Through family reunions and marriages, the countries furthest from the place of origin also experience a degree of circulation. But this may diminish over the years because of the very high expectations that relatives have of migrants who leave their home country. On the other hand, the transversal exchange links among migrants in the various Western countries, which no longer take place via Afghanistan, seem to become more intense. In view of the structural demographic and economic factors, it is unlikely that the global migratory flows will dry up. New migrants, whether

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Afghan or Iraqi, Moroccan or Senegalese, Haitian or Colombian, will give fresh life to already established transnational links. Thus, one morning in January 2009, I received a telephone call from Mardan Ali’s son, Khodadad, whom I had known in Afghanistan more than thirteen years earlier when he was learning to walk. He had just arrived in a Scandinavian country and had made a claim for asylum. In fact, I had already got wind that he had le home without his parents’ consent and made his way to Greece via Karachi, Iran and Turkey. It was a long and difficult journey for a boy just turned fi een, but it reminds us of the fate shared by numerous Afghans who flee the violence, looking for be er life conditions as well as an opportunity to prove their courage. If Khodadad managed to build a future for himself in Europe, he would be called upon to receive some of his kith and kin there too, thereby helping to expand the vast Afghan global networks and to renew transnational links.

Notes  1. According to the Embassy of Afghanistan, there are more than 300,000 Afghans in the United States, including 40,000 in the Bay Area of San Francisco, 20,000 in the Washington area and 10,000 in Southern California (www .embassyofafghanistan.org, retrieved 20 February 2009; information no longer available on 22 October 2015). Many of these have obtained US citizenship, but the figures provided officially give a considerably smaller total of 95,453 persons of Afghan origin in 2013 (U.S. Census Bureau, factfinder.census.gov, retrieved 22 October 2015). According to the 2011 Census, there were 62,815 persons of Afghan origin in Canada (Statistics Canada, www12.statcan.ca/ census-recensement/index-eng.cfm, retrieved 22 October 2015).  2. Their caravans supplied workers in the isolated desert mines and quarries or on railroad construction projects (see Stevens 1989).  3. One notorious example is the Woomera site in the South Australian desert. Run by a private American company that specializes in prison administration, it is said to have housed as many as 1,500 asylum seekers and to have been the scene of numerous excesses between its opening in 1999 and its closure in 2003.  4. According to the 2011 Census, there were 28,597 persons of Afghan origin in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, www.censusdata.abs.gov.au, retrieved 24 October 2015).  5. According to the 2013 Census, 3,414 Afghans resided in New Zealand, more than 70% of them in the Auckland conurbation (Statistics New Zealand, h p:// www.stats.govt.nz/Census.aspx, retrieved 22 October 2015).

8  Greece The Filter of All Hopes I’m finished now. Twelve years of my life in this country pursuing a dream that never came true … I’m no longer a child and will never become a man! —An Afghan in Athens

In January 2015, I found myself in Greece for a project sponsored by the UNHCR. The UN agency had asked a team of researchers, consisting of Antonio Donini, Giulia Scale aris and myself, to document the situation of Afghans in a number of European countries and the divergent practices for the definition of refugee status (Scale aris, Monsu i and Donini 2019). One of the aims of the project was to start a debate among the competent national authorities about the harmonization of procedures, the development of more consistent responses and hence the improvement of conditions for a population considered particularly vulnerable. Since the 1990s, Afghans have been one of the main groups of asylum seekers in the EU. While nearly all of them transit through Greece, the Balkans or Italy, they hope to reach northern Europe – Germany, Belgium, Sweden and the United Kingdom – and to register their claims there. They differ from other asylum seekers in two essential respects: the proportion of women is relatively low and the proportion of unaccompanied minors is relatively high. The head and other members of the protection department of the UN agency for refugees gave me a warm welcome in Athens, even if they seemed a li le puzzled about what my sociological viewpoint could con-

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tribute to their work. They explained in detail the reform of asylum procedures under way in Greece. The country was bearing the full force of the public debt crisis and was in the midst of election fever. The authorities faced a dilemma with regard to asylum: on the one hand, they had to apply the austerity measures demanded by the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund); on the other hand, they had been asked to draw up new legislation on asylum that complied with EU norms. The reform was being carried out without the necessary funds, at a moment when the overstaffed civil service was in the middle of a crash weight-loss programme. Formally speaking, however, the reform was a success, with asylum acceptance rates for Afghans rising from 1% in 2009 to more than 60% in 2013. The reality I soon discovered on the ground hardly reflected this spectacular statistical increase. On Wednesday, 28 January 2015, I visited the reception centre run by the Greek authorities at Mytilene, the main town on the island of Lesbos. The local representative of the UN refugee agency introduced me to the middle-aged chief of police, who, though looking disgruntled, was not indifferent to the plight of people landing on the shores of his country. He seemed almost happy to let me see for myself the absurdity of the situation and the poor conditions that his team had to work under. We walked to the brand-new reception centre funded by the EU. ‘No staff !’ my guide commented soberly. ‘The EU only pays for the infrastructure, not the wages.’ I came to the adjoining site, where the Iraqis, Afghans and fellow itinerants were crammed in behind barbed wire. First, I spoke to the young doctor in charge of the small Doctors of the World team that ran the dispensary. She said cheerfully: ‘At least here they are safe!’ I looked around and found it difficult to share her good spirits. I was approached by a group of Iraqi Kurds. As I did not have access to their living quarters, they asked to borrow my mobile phone so that they could take some photos inside, insisting that I needed to know the conditions there. Did they take me for a UN representative or a journalist? They returned with a series of sickening images: gu ed ma resses, blocked toilets, sinks coming away from the walls and so on. When I asked if there was anyone from Afghanistan, two young men barely twenty years of age came up to me. Wearing simple tracksuits and a scarf around their necks, they were soaked, covered with mud and chilled to the bone. Though suspicious at first, they never stopped talking when they realized that I spoke Persian. Reza and Mahdi were originally from central Afghanistan, a region where I had once spent some time, but they had grown up in Iran. They had crossed the sea at night and landed in Lesbos that very morning.

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They spoke of the harassment they had suffered as they were growing up in Iran, of their lack of confidence in the political and economic future of Afghanistan, of their sense that their families had assigned them a mission to succeed in life, of their hopes to obtain legal status in Germany, Sweden or somewhere and to start a family by bringing over a girl from their native village. As if to convince themselves, they kept repeating: ‘It’s not Europe here, no, it’s not Europe!’ They seemed incredulous rather than disenchanted or indignant. They had been expecting something different in Europe and reacted with a kind of defensive denial to the mismatch between their hopes and the reality that confronted them there. They had not yet reached the heart of Europe, the place where people would listen to their suffering. My research tasks also took me to Patras, the port of departure for Italy on the northern coast of the Peloponnese. I knew that the famous camp visited by Michel Agier and Sarah Prestianni in 2009 had been pulled down (Agier and Prestianni 2011), and in order to find out how the life of itinerants was being organized, I approached an NGO running one of the country’s few accommodation centres for families and unaccompanied minors. I went with a social worker to a small place where young itinerants were offered some daytime activities and were able to access the internet or take a shower. To my great surprise, I found Moa there – a Norwegian doctoral student I had met a few years before at a conference – as well as a group of (mostly Hazara) Afghans, either minors or young adults. Many had been born in Iran or had gone there at a very early age. With no residence permit or prospects for the future, they had been at constant risk of expulsion to their virtually unknown country of origin and had therefore decided to give Europe a try in a massive Drang nach Westen. Some came from the old Hazara refuge of Que a in Pakistan, where they had become the target of a acks by extremist Sunni groups. Others had le Afghanistan and transited through Pakistan or Iran, where they had been able to stay a year or two working and saving money for their long haul to Europe. Was this a case of ‘mixed migration’ involving both refugees and economic migrants? Or does that concept not cover the nuances of a situation that needs to be placed in a transnational framework? The Office of the UNHCR has invoked it for the purpose of distinguishing refugees from others who follow the same migratory routes, on the grounds that the two groups have different reasons to leave their places of origin and distinct needs for protection. But whatever the categories used by state bureaucracies and UN agencies, the boundaries between people seeking a be er life and people fleeing violence have always seemed to me too fuzzy, or even irrelevant, to illuminate the social practices and strategies

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that I observe. This is why I thought it necessary to invent a term of my own by speaking of ‘itinerants’. But the question remains: why did the Hazaras, particularly those living in Iran, produce such large numbers of unaccompanied minors and young adults? Whether in Afghanistan, Iran or Pakistan, many Hazaras considered that their political, social and economic future was blocked in the region, and so they sent their young people off on the perilous routes to Europe and Australasia. They were mistrustful of the Afghan government, which had repressed them in the past, they suffered discrimination from the authorities and population in Iran, and they felt abandoned by the police to terrorist violence in Pakistan. Out of bravado, a young man just sprouting a li le fluff on his lip offered to show me the places where he and his travelling companions spent their nights: two abandoned factories – they called them Sherkat-e Surkh (‘the red factory’) and Sherkat-e Chobi (‘the wood factory’) – which lay opposite the port installations in Patras. I was only too happy to be given this opportunity. He was probably surprised to see me accept so readily, with no regard for the rules of courtesy that require one to turn down the first invitation. But he was as good as his word. Moa came with us: she whispered to me that she had never been there in the weeks since she arrived in Patras. We walked for twenty minutes along a railway line. The living conditions I saw were appalling: bashed-in corrugated iron roofs, cement walls with large patches of damp, floors covered with broken glass, puddles of stagnant water and heaps of refuse le by previous generations of itinerants. However, there were a few modest signs of an obstinate resolve to make a home out of these inhospitable spaces. I saw a stove for boiling water put together from sheets of corrugated iron, a hosepipe that could be used for showers, a couple of saucepans and some cutlery passed on by strangers from the past, clothes hung up to dry on some string between two posts. I was taken up into an air duct more than five metres high – a stifling area with a few blankets smelling of mould and sweat. It was where my interlocutors went at night a er removing the ladder to hide from police checks. Only those with some money contacted people smugglers, who put them up in apartments prior to a sea crossing to Italy. The young people I was with spoke of them with envy. ‘What were you hoping for when you came here?’ I asked. ‘What did you expect to find?’ ‘I was hoping for a new life [zendegi-ye tâza]. This is certainly not how I imagined Europe’, said the seventeen-year-old Husain Bakhsh, whose brother had been killed the previous year in a sectarian ambush in Que a.

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He and his comrades mentioned a few simple but basic things, such as the possibility of a good education, the chance to start a family, freedom from being insulted in the street because they were from Afghanistan, or freedom from having to fear for their lives because they were Shiites. This was all a long way from the dichotomy between refugees and economic migrants. How could these young men be accused of trying to take improper advantage of the EU asylum system? I looked around and asked them if they had fulfilled their aspirations; they shook their heads and stared blankly ahead. But at the end of their terrible journey, they hoped to have some possibilities of which they could only dream in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran; they imagined marrying a girl from their native village and bringing her to Europe, or being in a position to receive their aged parents. Their spatial and social trajectory would be held up to the younger generation as an example of success. Although there was o en no more than two or three years between them, I could sense a slight tension between the minors (zer-e sin) and the young adults (bâlâ-ye sin). I had never heard these terms during my periods in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, where people o en have only a rough idea of their date of birth. A minor jokingly pointed to a young man of twenty-two and said he was the big boss there, the elder of their group. The person in question, Taher Ali, was one of those who had come from Afghanistan. He had done li le more than cross Iran, but he had to spend several months in Turkey doing a manual job to earn enough for his onward journey. He began speaking playfully: ‘These boys grew up in Iran; they’re just kids who needs someone to guide them.’ However, he added, more seriously and with a touch of envy, that they might obtain refugee status more easily because of their age. We went on talking. He had no family in Europe. He had heard that two or three people from his valley were in Germany, but he did not have their addresses. He found a way of telephoning home from time to time. ‘But it’s difficult, you know. What can I say to my mother?’ He scanned the factory hall and continued: ‘That I’m living on a garbage heap? That’s what bothers me most: lying to my family. So I say I’ve found a nice room and am eating well. But it’s tricky: I can’t raise their expectations – otherwise, they’ll start asking me to send money to Afghanistan.’ Lack of prospects in Iran, growing violence in Pakistan, the shadows of the past, distrust of the present government in Afghanistan, fear of the Taliban: all of these factors push these youngsters onto the perilous routes to Europe. They take risks and they are willing to reimburse, economically and socially, the families who have sometimes sold their possessions to fund the trip. There can be no doubt: successful migration means reaching Germany or Sweden. Reform of the asylum system in

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Greece and a high chance of gaining protected status there are quite simply irrelevant. In their eyes, spatial movement goes hand in hand with social, economic and political emancipation. Their quest for meaning and recognition needs to be borne in mind. Their motives and ambitions cannot be understood within an exclusively materialist model limited to questions of security or in terms of a dichotomy between political and economic causes of migration. Mobility partakes of a subtle blend of competition and moral economy. On the one hand, the journey to Europe is seen as a schooling in life, where only the strongest emerge successful. On the other hand, the geographical dispersion of domestic units is seen as a way of distributing risks at a collective level and providing a degree of social, economic and political insurance. Unaccompanied Hazara minors and young adults therefore have a dual mission: to prove their worth by facing assorted trials and tribulations; and to prepare a be er future for a community under various pressures in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. Furthermore, the world of itinerancy involves not only people but also services, goods and money; it is inseparable from a transnational network of exchange and redistribution among young migrants and their families back home in Afghanistan or in first-asylum countries (Pakistan or Iran). Although my young interlocutors o en mentioned their wish to break the grip of their families, they knew that if they were successful, they would be expected to engage in forms of redistribution such as money transfers and the reception of newcomers. Migration is therefore impregnated with a code of conduct that entails mutual obligations and responsibilities, a value system that defines what it means for such unaccompanied minors and young adults to succeed in their journey and be recognized as men of quality. At the other end of the social spectrum are individuals such as Liaqat Ali. He has lived for years in Greece and, together with a few others, has created an umbrella organization for migrants of various origins. Thanks to his knowledge of languages (he is fluent in Greek and English), he is an important intermediary for Afghans in transit, but he is also seen as an invaluable interlocutor by the national authorities and international organizations. He stands at the junction point between Greek society and the underground world of itinerancy – a position not free of ambiguity. Some regard him as a good example of integration, but others sometimes suspect him of selectively distributing the resources to which he has access. One a ernoon, I accompanied Liaqat Ali to Athens to gain a be er idea of his activities. We went to an abandoned apartment block not far from Acharon Street, where many migrants from the Middle East are concentrated. As we reached the stairwell, the odour of urine hit me and I trod

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on a syringe lying in the dark among the other rubbish. We went up to the first floor, where two mothers were living with their children aged five to seventeen. They had been parked there one night by people smugglers, who had led them across the Turkish-Greek border. They had done their best to make their two rooms habitable: an old carpet, a few blankets, a gas stove. Slices of toast lay on a scarf, having been moistened to make them so er before they were heated over the flame. We all sat cross-legged and started cha ing. Liaqat Ali introduced me as a researcher who had been working for years with Afghan refugees and had come to Greece under the auspices of the UNHCR. The two women spoke freely and volubly. What did they expect of me? Did they think I could make it easier for them to migrate to northern Europe? For my part, I was burning with curiosity. Where were the fathers? Had they gone off without leaving an address? Had they disappeared during the conflict in Afghanistan? Had they remained behind for tactical reasons or had they gone ahead to see how the land lay? But such questions were too sensitive to be asked. If I quizzed the women directly, I would receive no answers and would simply make them suspicious; they would probably stop talking to me so spontaneously. Even Liaqat Ali knew nothing of what had become of the husbands of our interlocutors. Respect for the pain of unwanted separation? Or a well-kept secret regarding migration strategies? The younger woman, who must have been aged around thirty-five, had used part of her savings to send her seven-year-old daughter to Finland, where her sister was living. She said bluntly that, as an unaccompanied minor, the daughter would be more likely to have her request for asylum accepted. She had handed her over to a people smuggler, who had arranged for her to take a flight to Finland. She did not know the details, only that it had cost her €3,000. As soon as her daughter’s situation was regularized, she would be able to make a claim for family reunion. The mother ran her hand affectionately through the hair of the twelveyear-old son beside her: ‘He plays football well.’ She wanted to give him the means to become a professional player – ‘the new Zlatan!’, she added dreamily, with reference to the famous Swedish star with an immigrant background. The other mother, who was a li le older, barely concealed her irritation: ‘She’s got money, she can make plans.’ She explained to me amid sobs that the plastic bag in which she had had all her valuables had fallen into the sea. The li le dinghy had suddenly pitched and she had dropped the bag to clutch at her youngest child. And she screamed in a head voice: ‘What can I do now? We’re stuck!’ Once again, the categories used by states and aid agencies to manage migration seemed to have no purchase.

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I also spent many a ernoons and evenings in Areos Park in Athens (which Afghans o en call Park-e Aleksandar because it is off Leoforos Alexandras Avenue). Dozens of Afghans gather there late in the day to play football or volleyball. It is one of the meeting places do ed along the migratory routes of Afghans and Iraqis, Syrians and Eritreans, Somalis and Congolese, one of the informal places to crash that are continually changing in response to police checks and the hostility of nearby areas. New arrivals will have picked up a few place names along the way, and this vital information tells them where to find compatriots, to exchange the latest news about Afghan politics, migratory trajectories and the chances of an asylum request being accepted by one country or another. Some Africans take part in the sporting activity alongside the Afghans, in a fleeting fraternity brought together by the fortunes of travel. The women and children remain seated at a distance. The players joke and argue over a foul or a mistimed pass. But the faces are serious when I strike up a conversation with a group of men standing on the edge of the volleyball court. Some of them look at me with suspicion, but three or four speak passionately about how they have been treated in Greece. My interlocutors are older than the young men I met in Patras; they are in their thirties and have mostly been in Greece for a long time. Omid is one of the most vehement. His eyes roll in their sockets. He taps my chest with the back of his hand to punctuate each of his sentences. Originally from Mazar-e Sharif, he spent part of his childhood as a refugee in Pakistan. He arrived in Greece twelve years ago, having lived for six years in Iran. He made one a empt to reach Italy by sea, then tried the land route across the Balkans, without success. Registered as an asylum seeker, he complains that he has been unable to renew the document proving that his file is under consideration by the competent authorities. As if to give greater weight to what he is saying, he takes a li le plastic bag from his jacket pocket and extracts a sheet of paper folded in four: ‘I went to the police at least five times to renew it. Each time they told me to come back the next day – until the deadline passed. What can I do? Now my document is out of date, I risk being arrested and expelled.’ He was still a minor when he arrived, but then it was almost impossible to obtain refugee status in Greece. He feels bad that he lost his drive and could not bring himself to continue his travels. He loses his calm when I ask him about the new asylum system in Greece: ‘What difference do the reforms make to me? I’ve been in Greece for so long. I wander around aimlessly, living dar ba dar [literally: from door to door]. All that stuff has come too late for me.’ His conversation with me takes a cathartic turn. His eyes mist over, his voice becomes more strident: ‘I’m finished now. Twelve years of my life

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in this country pursuing a dream that never came true … I’m no longer a child and will never become a man! Who would give their daughter to someone like me?’ I am moved but also disturbed by his words. Several people who have been listening move away. My approach and my questions suddenly seem out of place. Only rarely did I feel in Afghanistan as forcefully as I do now that my presence was unwarranted. I wish I could find the words to comfort Omid, whose name paradoxically means ‘Hope’. I wish I had the power to offer solutions. I too am on the verge of tears, which makes me furious with myself. Always this temptation to play the demiurge! Soon I’ll go back to my hotel, make myself comfortable, put my notes in order and look at my emails. Still, I cling to the idea that ethnography can be more than an author’s game and that research can be a civic act. Faced with these scraps of life, bureaucratic categories fall apart. Part of the trauma for the Afghans I meet does not stem either from the violence raging in their land of origin or from their lack of integration in the first country of asylum. Displacement itself is a source of tensions and suffering. But it is not always due to abuses at the hands of people smugglers, who are so unfailingly reviled in the Western media and accused of exploiting human distress. Omid lashes out at the arbitrary policies of the EU and its Member States. As I listen, I cannot help thinking that the nation-state project has not brought a real improvement in the human condition. Why has humanity not tried other ways of organizing collective life? These lively doubts about how the categories of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are conceived, about the human cost of the definitions inspiring the practice of nation-states and the UN or their adequacy to the ambitions and trajectories of the itinerants I met in Lesbos or Athens, soon led to misunderstandings with UNHCR employees in Greece and at the Geneva headquarters. In their view, transparency was a blessing: states and asylum candidates had compatible interests; it was therefore essential to promote communication among the different actors and to explain to asylum seekers the legal options they had at their disposal. Our interlocutors did not doubt for a moment that the persons in real need of international protection should stick to the same terms that define the regime applicable to refugees. Let us go back a few months. In Malmö in July 2014, the UNHCR organized a workshop to mark the official launch of the project entrusted to my colleagues and myself. A senior official in the Swedish Migration Agency questioned Safa, a young Hazara refugee, before the workshop participants, who consisted of representatives from various European asylum authorities, UNHCR employees and the research team. The official

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crossed his legs, placed his hands on his knees, tilted his head and asked his questions in a so voice. The refugee answered without hesitation, but in a considered voice. The exchanges took place in Swedish, although it soon transpired that Safa also spoke fluent English – the language of the meeting. The presider punctuated the answers he received by nodding his head to show that they met his expectations. He turned to the audience to translate. I was so stunned that I could hardly suppress a fit of laughter. It felt as if I was a ending a theatrical performance, a staging of ‘The Good Asylum Seeker’ that celebrated one individual’s capacity to integrate. But did this not minimize the structural obstacles that asylum candidates face? It felt like a ceremony of adherence to the rules of the dominant, who were trying to control the public space and to convey the image they wanted to give of themselves and their bureaucratic practices. Was this a hegemonic situation in which the dominated (the asylum seekers) subscribed to the values of the dominant (the guardians of asylum)? The dialogue I started with Safa during the break soon convinced me of the opposite. He was astonished to hear me speak Hazaragi and his facial expression underwent an immediate change. Sure that the people around him could not understand, he did not hesitate to express his doubts about the asylum system that he had just been praising to the skies. Having dropped the mask he had been made to wear, he rapidly assumed a different social role on behalf of his peers, who had been less fortunate in their contacts with the administration. Without directly challenging the legitimacy of the asylum procedures, he knew how to use the official discourse in a way of his own, which was not the same as that of his interlocutor from the Swedish Migration Agency. Those taking part in the Malmö meeting, whether they worked for national bodies or for the UNHCR, based themselves on the conception of migration that I have repeatedly questioned, which draws a watertight distinction between refugees and economic migrants. The la er, it is suggested, leave home in the hope of improving their quality of life, whereas the former are forced to flee to save their lives or to preserve their liberty; if members of the two categories move along the same routes and use the same methods, it is possible to speak of ‘mixed migration’. The very existence of the UNHCR rests upon the idea that refugees, being fundamentally different from migrants, should be and are treated in a different way under international law. The mission of the UN agency is therefore to sort the two categories, identifying persons who can claim one or another form of international protection. Simplification is unavoidable if one is to intervene in policy-making processes. For me as a researcher, the understanding of social phenomena cannot be structured in accordance with legal categories, however legitimate

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these may be. A bureaucratic, state-centred vision of social life lies hidden behind the declared intention of humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering. Strategies cannot be understood at the level of individuals alone but must be placed in the framework of the domestic unit, or even of the extended solidarity group. Different modes of itinerancy develop, but they form a system whose deep logic consists in the diversification of itineraries and destinations, legal statuses, political affiliations and economic activities. Although Afghans have been coming to Greece for years and in some periods, such as 2014, have been the largest group among asylum seekers, most of the people I met in the parks of Athens or at the reception centre on the island of Lesbos opposite Turkey dream of continuing their journey to northern Europe. It might be said that they are highly likely to receive some form of protection in Greece. But what does that ma er, since no accompanying measures have been introduced there and no policy of socio-occupational integration has been provided for? Some of the asylum seekers are city people. They o en travel as a family or in groups of families; that is the case for members of the emergent middle class, whose lifestyle was linked to the international presence in Afghanistan. They feel threatened following the withdrawal of many aid agencies and the majority of foreign troops. They have sold or rented out their properties to finance their trip to Europe. Others are unaccompanied minors or young male adults, most of them Hazaras. While some set off from their country of origin, many were born or grew up as refugees in Iran or Pakistan. Many Pashtuns from rural areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan are also among the candidates for asylum. Mostly aged between twenty and thirty-five, they are caught in a pincer movement between the government and the insurgency; they leave in the hope that their families will be able to join them in the future. The men in question are fleeing the war as much as compulsory enlistment. If they remain in their villages, they will be obliged to take sides, either for the government or for the insurgency. Neutrality is not an option. They are escaping from a conflict that is not theirs, from a binary choice in which neither of the two alternatives is acceptable in their eyes. The individuals I met may be performing the humanitarian order, but they are also subverting it. They are forced to display the vulnerability that national and international institutions expect from refugees seeking goodwill and assistance, but in parallel to this public performance, they also develop ‘arts of resistance’, to use James Sco ’s expression. As in the example of Safa, they are in no position to contest the legitimacy of the conceptualization and governance of migration by nation-states and international organizations. Compelled in public to acquiesce in the prevailing

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juridical and bureaucratic order, they turn the tables behind the scenes and develop other strategies beneath a veil of opacity. To be sure, researchers on forced migration meet extremely vulnerable people and document situations of extreme human suffering. It is therefore difficult to justify a detached perspective, which would have no relevance to policies for aiding, receiving and integrating asylum seekers. However, the danger is that researchers will accept the framework of reference and action employed by the institutions structuring the field of asylum, whether nation-states, the EU or the UN. It is intellectually otiose and ethically dubious to slip into the concepts and priorities defined by decision-makers and practitioners, doing so in the name of some ‘effectiveness in the field’, or to identify fields of study, pose research questions and formulate hypotheses in response to the concerns of the UNHCR. Perhaps it is time to put in a plea for ‘policy-irrelevant’ research, which breaks with the categories of thought and action employed by decision-makers (Bakewell 2008). In shaking off the conventions of applied research and the constraints of practical efficacy, it may perhaps be possible to contest what is taken for granted, to challenge the assumptions underlying the whole field of refugee regimes. Such an approach might allow us to render the invisible visible, to take apart the mechanisms through which the distinction between forced and voluntary migration (which is of interest to us here) impoverishes policy debates in Europe and elsewhere while taking public opinion hostage. In this way, researchers would genuinely become citizens and might hope to bring fundamental changes to the lives of the men and women categorized as asylum seekers. It appears a forlorn hope when I switch on the television or listen to what my neighbours are saying. Despite numerous demonstrations of solidarity, hostility to asylum seekers seems to be spreading in France, Switzerland and Italy, where the population is becoming used to the daily suspension of basic rights for certain categories of persons. Following Hage (2016), how should we analyse the importance that migratory issues have acquired in European and North American political discourse and in public perceptions? How should we understand the rejection of migrants? If we take the so-called European migration crisis of 2015, how can we explain the fact that some of the most affluent sections of the world’s population feel threatened by a handful of asylum seekers? Ultimately, how can we explain that the ‘sense of being in a state of siege’ has become ubiquitous in the Western world?

9  Europe, Mon Amour Or the Ruses of Itinerancy You’re not like the people here. I’d have said you were an Afghan. —An asylum seeker from Kandahar

It is July 2015 in Friuli. I drive past the familiar billboards: ‘Alta Val Torre Terska Dolina TARCENTO TARCINT Medaglia d’Oro al Merito Civile’, welcoming me, in a mixture of Italian, Friulian and Slovenian, to the commune of Tarcento, which was honoured with a gold medal of merit in connection with the earthquakes of May and September 1976. I have always wondered what merit a village can have for being devastated in that way. The road then winds up through green hills to the foot of a ruined castle mound – the ‘ugly castle’, or cjiscjelat, as it is known here. All that is le is a section of the dungeon, since it was stormed and demolished during the peasant revolt on ‘Cruel Fat Thursday’ in February 1511, when numbers of aristocrats were put to death against a backdrop of carnival. As the multilingual signs indicate, we are in the far northeast of Italy, in a frontier area shaped by natural disasters and wars. The places bear marks of destruction in the remote and recent past. But I feel calm: it is a return to the sources of my paternal family. Lucien Febvre, the great historian who founded the Annales school, once said that the only way to understand the history of the world is through deep knowledge of one region, however small. For me, this point of reference – more intellectual

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than identity-based – has been Friuli, a land of borders and passage, on the outer edge of the powers that have controlled it over the centuries, from La Serenissima to the House of Habsburg and then the Italian Republic. It is late a ernoon. I leave my luggage at the rebuilt house inherited from my grandmother’s family and head off for the li le ritual with which I like to mark my arrival, at the mechanically operated fountain that delivers still or sparkling water for a modest price. My mouth drops at the sight of a crowd already waiting there. To avoid having to queue up, my first idea is to drive on and return a er dark. But then I change my mind: there are a dozen or so people, most of them in their thirties; their appearance is familiar to me, but their presence there is surprising, out of context. I need to be sure, so I get out of the car and walk up to them – yes, they are Afghan and Pakistani asylum seekers. It is holiday time and I want to rest and revitalize myself. I long to take a step back, to isolate myself mentally from my difficult research, but it is so much part of the world in which we live that it catches hold of me again. A tense-looking woman in her sixties fills her bo les from the fountain. ‘Bondì’, I say to her. Good a ernoon. As if relieved at my presence, she replies that she will soon be finished and make way for me. I look at the young men surrounding her and greet them in turn: ‘As-salâmu aleikum.’ My words have the li le effect I intended. The woman looks puzzled and gives me a furtive nod of her head, while I start cha ing in Persian with the group of men. They try to size me up, astonished and suspicious. But soon they are jostling one another to find out who I am. The questions come thick and fast: ‘Are you from here?’ ‘Ah, so you live in Switzerland?’ ‘Have you worked in Afghanistan?’ I briefly explain my family history and the work I do, before concluding: ‘I’m a traveller [mosâfer], like you!’ Almost straight away I regret my final words. How can I compare my life to theirs? I have come here for a few weeks’ rest, whereas they le their homes months ago, maybe even years. They are Pashtuns from southern and eastern Afghanistan. One says he is from Pakistan, but the others interrupt him in a friendly way and say that that makes no difference. Their trajectories differ from those of the young Hazaras I met in Patras, who by and large came from refugee populations in Pakistan or Iran and were doggedly trying to cross to Italy by sea. These young men are older on average – several already have a family of their own – and nearly all le their homeland with no previous experience of exile. They fled the violence and forced conscription that was ravaging rural areas in the provinces of Kandahar and Ghazni, Wardak and Nangarhar, where the Taliban insurgency was strong and neutrality was not an option. They crossed Iran and Turkey, then bypassed Greece to face the many pitfalls of the land route through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Austria, before entering Italy in the northeast.

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I have the impression that they have adopted a minimalist strategy: they no longer hope to reach Germany or Sweden and say they would be content to be accepted in Italy. Receiving public benefits, many have spent the winter in hotels in Adriatic resorts le seasonally vacant by tourists. Once the weather improved, they kept moving to where spare accommodation was available. One tells me he spent several weeks in a holiday camp in Forni Avoltri, a mountain village close to the Austrian border. A er this first unexpected encounter, I went a number of times to the hotel where forty or so Afghan and Pakistani asylum seekers were living. In early August, I invited three of them to go with me and my two children, aged ten and eight, to a concert in Stella, an abandoned hamlet above Tarcento. Having been persuaded, Akmal from Kandahar, Gul Agha from Wardak and Mahmud from Nangarhar climbed into my estate car. Along the way, I talked about local history: the past wars and conflicts, the migration of many Friulans to various parts of the world, the earthquakes of 1976 and the American reconstruction aid during the Cold War. I told them that my grandfather had le at the age of nine to go on foot to Germany to work in brick factories. I said that a small group of people wanted to give a new lease of life to Stella by means of cultural activities. At an altitude of nearly 700 metres, 400 souls had lived there in 1900, but fewer than ten remained a century later. A Slovenian dialect had been spoken, but it had now fallen out of use. Perhaps I was speaking above all to myself, to my kith and kin, to my neighbours. I stated my heuristic – but also moral and political – parti pris that we were all itinerants, I voiced my wish to bring out the convergence of people’s destinies and I expressed my aversion to all who let themselves be carried away by the regional or national sirens of cultural homogeneity. As the road snaked its way up a series of hairpin bends, views opened over the vast plain below: ‘On a fine day you can see the sea in the distance.’ Gul Agha sighed: he would so much have liked to go to the beach, to listen to the waves and scour the endless horizon. Akmal interrupted him: ‘The sea? What I saw in Turkey is enough for me!’ These words made me think of a young Afghan refugee I met in Perth. Having been imprisoned and beaten by the Taliban, he had found a way to leave Afghanistan and travel to Indonesia. He spent days and days on the high seas in a fishermen’s boat. He had been close to tears as he said: ‘I’ll never go on a boat again. If I have to choose, I’ll even prefer prison and Taliban beatings!’ I was also reminded of Oleg Ermakov’s book on his experiences as a Red Army soldier, Hiver en Afghanistan (1977), where he writes that, being used to the sight of endless plains, he was most afraid of the harsh mountains of the Hindu Kush and their hidden, unassailable Afghan fighters. To each his own phobias, to each his own dreams. Mahmud, curled up in

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the rear compartment, remained silent. Gul Agha and Akmal were more talkative. They marvelled at the beauty of the landscape: ‘What a wonderful place, so green!’ Astonished that such riches were not more exploited, they laughed without any real joy: ‘Let them bring us here instead of the hotels where we just mope around.’ Ah, he dreamed, once the shrubbery was cleared away, life could begin again here with a few sheep and a few goats. ‘Only in the summer, though! Imagine what it’s like in the winter with metres of snow’, Gul Agha broke in, still with the climate of his native Wardak in mind. When we arrived in Stella itself, many acquaintances said hello to me. But no one paid a ention to my companions, no one welcomed them, no one showed any interest in exchanging a few words with them. We ate chicken legs, polenta and beans. A young woman gave a talk on her plan to revive local agriculture, then there was a poetry recital, then Luigi Maieron, a regional author and composer, sang some simple tales in Friulian – the memory of his parents, love for a girl, tree leaves dancing in the wind, the beauty of the mountains. ‘Sestu om o furmie?’ ‘Are you a man or an ant?’ Standing upright or crawling on the ground: you have to choose. But sometimes men turn into ants: they stubbornly clear a way through all the obstacles, across mountains, seas and frontiers. Luigi Maieron told of an emigrant’s return a er fi een years in Argentina: My house, I enter at the back, as silent as a thief My wife, flabbergasted, drops her container of Vim I see my son, already so tall, playing with three friends I look for a family, look for a village And I know I am an orphan’s father And I know he has lost his father I take out a sombrero: ‘Here, this is for you!’ ‘And what about us, mummy?’ the three others say.

I did my best to translate, line by line, trying to convey the sarcastic dimension of the story. Gul Agha, whose wife and four children had remained back home, was visibly ill at ease. He had not seen them for more than a year. He reacted vehemently, insisting that something like that was not possible in Afghanistan. Akmal was lost in thought: he looked with tenderness at my son, then finally went over and hugged him gently. He asked Gul Agha to take a photo of them: ‘I’ll send the picture to my wife and children.’ He noted with astonishment that my children did not speak Italian – or hardly any. Did that bother him? Did he see in it the future of his own children if he got them to come to Europe? I took the three buddies back to their hotel. At the entrance to the terrace, two carabinieri stood calmly cha ing with some customers. Akmal with agility jumped from the rear door of my estate car. A part of me

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wanted the men in uniform to come up and question me about my movements, about my vehicle loaded with people, about my links with Afghans, but they only shot us a quick, uninterested glance. As in Stella, my new Afghan friends seemed transparent. Afghan itinerants o en try to operate in the administrative and humanitarian interstices of the countries through which they travel. This relative invisibility, hard though it is to bear, allows them some room for manoeuvre. But in this corner of the EU, I cannot stop thinking that their presence is seen as a kind of visual pollution. Here, invisibility is not a way of avoiding repressive or protective obstacles to mobility; it is undergone as part of a social economy, of a gaze, or nongaze, that objectifies itinerants and ultimately drives them into an inexorable otherness (Willen 2007). Before he turns and goes, Akmal thanks me with a brisk accolade: ‘You’re not like the people here. I’d have said you were an Afghan.’ Solidarity, hospitality and a sense of honour are values he has scarcely found among Europeans on the Balkan route or in Italy. Although he le his country in the hope of rebuilding his life in a more peaceful part of the world, his experience of the West has not been one of humanist benevolence. Whereas Reza and Mahdi, at the reception centre in Lesbos, initially responded with cognitive denial to the discord between hopes and realities, Akmal dares to pass judgement: Europeans do not behave decently, Afghans have higher moral standards. The crisscrossing destinies of Homo itinerans, yesterday and today. Afghans fleeing violence, poverty and insecurity find themselves in the tracks of my ancestors. Italians forgetful of their migrant past see asylum seekers as undesirables, as nonpersons. Itinerants sometimes seek out invisibility as a protection against arbitrariness, or they may be subjected to it by the state and the population in the countries through which they travel. According to Nicholas de Genova (2013), border checks and the application of immigration laws offer a spectacle that casts the presence of migrants and refugees as illegal and illegitimate. The search for ‘illegals’ then justifies the essentialization of inequalities as racial and cultural categories. The more that discursive formations and political or media images stoke anti-immigrant hostility, the more the real process of migrant inclusion develops beneath the surface, through the subordination of migrant labour. It is Sunday, 13 November 2015. My itinerancy takes me to Calais, in northern France, to visit the ‘jungle’ in the east of the city, not far from the port facilities. Is this ‘the scene of exclusion and the obscene of inclusion’, as de Genova puts it? Here, 4,500 itinerants from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan live cheek by jowl in precarious conditions. I am accompanied by Boris, a colleague who has worked in Central Asia

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and with whom I have been collaborating for more than fi een years. It is late a ernoon when we arrive at the site. Darkness is falling; there is a persistent icy wind and intermi ent rain. We thread our way between the police vehicles of the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité), the Republican Security Companies, and spot a group of men, Sudanese from Darfur, who are lining up behind a white van. A couple of retired people are handing out bread. We exchange a few words with them. They work with a local association and have been helping asylum seekers and refugees for a good fi een years. ‘Where can we find Afghans?’ I ask. ‘Don’t go there’, the old man replies, ‘they might be aggressive.’ In the preceding days, asylum seekers and human rights activists have been protesting against the precarious conditions. The media present the Jungle as an improvised camp with virtually no services, where asylum candidates converge in the hope of crossing the Channel and se ing foot on British soil. Is it an anomalous place that the authorities are content to seal off with a security cordon, a site where the rule of law is suspended and social life is reduced to its simplest expression? Guided by a volunteer, a law student spending time in Calais, Boris and I thread our way past portable toilets and along a muddy track between tents and makeshi shelters. We come to an Eritrean-Ethiopian church made of tarpaulin nailed to wooden supports, then notice a row of covered stalls containing a bakery, several grocery shops and a few eateries. Most of the traders seem to be Afghans. I join a bread queue and take the opportunity to strike up a conversation. Many of the customers are Arabic or Kurdish speakers from Iraq or Syria. As for the Afghans, they are mostly Pashtuns from southern or eastern regions. It soon becomes clear that their trajectories are not the same. Some le Afghanistan several years ago and have spent time in Iran or Turkey before arriving in Europe; others arrived in Calais only a few months a er they le their home province, Kunar or Wardak. But all are fleeing a war that is not theirs, an armed conflict between a government from which they receive no service and a faction-ridden insurgency that has become increasingly brutal since the emergence of Islamic State. In a gesture of hospitality, the baker refuses at first to accept the money I hand over to him. I have to insist, using the expression suited to this kind of situation: ‘Haq-e mardom na mekhorom!’ (‘I don’t eat what is others’ by right!’) Even in what is supposed to be this social void, a sense of honour and hospitality has not disappeared. During the course of the evening, we hear the ghastly news of a series of terrorist a acks in Paris. Islamist groups are immediately suspected and the next day, all the talk is of the potential political consequences for refugees and asylum seekers, many of whom are Muslims. A fire devastated a part of the Jungle during the night and many are wondering whether

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it was a far-right reprisal operation. I go to a restaurant where I was the previous night. It is run by three partners, who, though Pashto-speaking, come from different provinces of Afghanistan. However, a factor more unifying than their geographical or tribal origin is the long experience they all have of mobility. One of them, Ehsanullah, spent seven years in England, but he has also travelled in many other European countries. He spontaneously shows me an identity card for foreigners issued by the Italian Republic, which allows him to move freely within the Schengen area. ‘How come you stay here in the Jungle and don’t try your luck somewhere more welcoming?’ I ask him. ‘It’s true I sleep in a tent here’, he replies, ‘and that it’s cold and windy. But I have my own business and can make a li le money. One day, I hope, I’ll have saved enough to bring my family over.’ I sense a touch of defiance, and more than a li le sadness, in his voice. The search for independence comes at a price. His aim is not to make it to England and se le there – not yet, at least. He dwells in itinerancy. At the other end of the spectrum are people like Faraidun, a twentyyear-old man who roams the Jungle alone. Having heard me speak Persian, he asks me to help him. He le his village north of Kabul in the spring of 2014 and was separated from his travelling companions between Paris and Lille during a police check on their train. He has been in Calais since yesterday a ernoon: he spent the night in a rough tarpaulin shelter, protecting himself as best he could against the cold under blankets smelling of mould. He has been told of buses hired by the authorities to take asylum seekers to state-run reception centres. ‘Don’t go there’, one of the two youngsters with whom I have been speaking breaks in. ‘They’ll register you and you’ll be trapped; what they want is to break us all up.’ Like other places do ed around Europe, the Calais Jungle and the abandoned factories of Patras are sites of both exclusion and refuge. The itinerants living there – whether labelled illegal migrants, asylum seekers, refugees or squa ers – organize the sites and give them a meaning (Agier and Prestianni 2011). Although the Jungle has given cold comfort to Faraidun, it represents an economic niche for people such as Ehsanullah. His case makes me understand that its bric-à-brac of tents and makeshi shelters cannot be simply wri en off as a point of transit, a nonplace. Indeed, it is a space where itinerants inhabit the margins of society in the country through which they pass, a useful stopover point, an island in a vast European archipelago made up of roadside markers, on a journey strewn with administrative obstacles. Far from being just a dead end for migrants planning to reach Britain, it is a performative experience of urban existence, a microcosm, a place where various itinerants – originally from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Eritrea – reinvent

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their social relations out of solidarity and mutual aid, but also out of competition and relations of power and exploitation. While some try to continue their journey as quickly as possible, others remain for longer in the Jungle; it gives them some possibility of doing business, in a circumambient society that can hardly find a place for them. Many who come here know that they will be among people with whom they share the experience of itinerancy, that they will be able to pick up information about migratory routes and the ever-changing asylum regimes of EU countries. Quite a few – including Afghans whose ancestors fought against the British Empire – do hope to make it to the United Kingdom, but not all the potential asylum seekers in Calais dream of ending up there. The grading of destinations is constantly changing. It depends on whether they can turn to a community already established there, on whether they will have access to social services and on whether they will have chances to enter the educational system and the labour market. In 2015, many of my interlocutors were turning their eyes in the direction of Scandinavia. The Calais Jungle, then, is not merely a cul-de-sac brimming with people who want to reach Britain, the no-man’s-land, or no-society-land, so o en described in the media. It seems to me more like a matrix where novel links are created, a sorting station, but also a crucible – with severe constraints, to be sure – for the recomposition of social relations. Two temporalites meet each other there: the perilous but gripping temporality of travel, mobility and border crossings, and the pernicious, exhausting temporality of the long wait. Of course, there is exclusion – how can that be denied? – but there is also a furtive and fleeting kind of integration. Of course, the living conditions are deplorable, but it is a place with a buzz, where itinerants can socialize with one another, where some can develop economic activities and others can get first-hand information about migration routes and conditions in various host countries. The EritreanEthiopian church, the mosques, the restaurants, bakeries and li le grocery stores constitute the embryo of an urban existence. A er nearly forty years of conflicts, which caused one of the largest forced population transfers since the Second World War, Afghanistan does not seem to be heading towards a be er future. Although no section of the population escaped the outward flow during those four rending decades, three categories of people have been overrepresented in recent years. First, there are unaccompanied minors and unmarried young men, who have o en spent some time in Iran or Pakistan and who feel caught between their country of origin (which offers no educational or educational prospects) and their country of first asylum (where they are condemned, at best, to remain in low-grade jobs and have li le or no hope

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of social recognition). Second, there are men from rural areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan, who feel trapped between the government and the insurgency, fleeing violence and forcible recruitment on both sides in a conflict that they no longer recognize as theirs. And, third, there are the urban dwellers, whose lives in Afghanistan were bound up with the international presence in Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif or Herat. Many of these lost their sources of income as a whole series of aid and development programmes were broken off. They fear reprisals from sections of the population who accuse them of collaboration with forces from abroad. These three categories have different profiles and trajectories, but all face problems of protection. They are evidently not the first generation of Afghans to be fleeing violence and poverty, but successive generations of refugees and asylum seekers have not been mobile in the same ways. Whereas older groups found refuge in Pakistan or Iran, the hope of reaching Europe has become a distinguishing feature of the new generations. It is a costly journey, both economically and emotionally, for the individuals themselves and for the families who remain behind. Moreover, to set foot in the EU does not necessarily mean deliverance. Itinerants can feel the suspicion of sections of the population there, and they struggle to understand the administrative procedures they have to undergo. They are mistrustful of asylum agencies and those who represent them. Many will be sent back to their country of origin. Faced with the stigma of failure, unable to repay the debts they incurred to fund their migration, powerless to re-enter a society with no job prospects, most will then try to leave again, o en in even more precarious conditions than before (Schuster and Majidi 2013, 2015). Lesbos, Friuli and Calais are three sites on a long trek between an uncertain present and an uncertain future – with no final destination in sight. Beyond the spatial dimension, we can also glimpse a moral journey, from the initial defensive denial of Reza and Mahdi, who could not accept that Europe would welcome them by shu ing them away, through Akmal’s negative ethical judgement on Europeans, to Ehsanullah’s loss of confidence in Europe and his entrepreneurial efforts on the margins of the surrounding society. Three places, three moments, three a itudes: incredulity and denial, frustration and disavowal, and engaged withdrawal and reinvention of the social. Paradoxically, then, we arrive at a kind of cosmopolitanism from below, what the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno called ‘engaged withdrawal’ (2004): exodus conceived as detachment from the state, as an act of resistance to the dominant society. Reza, Mahdi, Akmal and Ehsanullah experienced in their bodies the suffering of war and displacement. All were fleeing violence or injustice and all aspired to a be er life. Instead of

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simply labelling them as job-seeking migrants or refugees in need of protection, I see them as witnesses to the world in which we live and evolve – a world marked by growing inequalities and a landscape of exclusion that we pretend not to see. The arrival en masse in Europe of Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Eritreans and Sub-Saharan Africans is not only the result of regional conflicts or a hunt for work. The people knocking on Europe’s door are telling us something and we need to listen to it; they are displaying their moral fatigue at the growing gap between the richest and poorest segments of humanity. They are actors in the realm of politics, revealing through their itinerancy the extent to which our global order is immoral.

10  Contested Modernities A Transnational Anthropology of the Political Afghanistan is not yet politically or socially ripe for the advent of democracy. —The director of the Open Society Institute, Kabul

In 1995, as part of my doctoral research, I was on the point of leaving for Pakistan and Afghanistan. A middle manager at the International Commi ee of the Red Cross, who had long experience of the region, warned me with a touch of commiseration: ‘You can go mad in Afghanistan!’ And he added a memorable maxim: ‘Never trust an Afghan!’ I laughed and said I was already mad, throwing in that I never trusted anyone, not even him and his advice. But his words have o en come back to me, evoking as they do the drama of an endless war and the forced displacement of millions, the harshness of social relations and the competition for scarce resources. At the same time, they reflect a perspective to which I am mentally resistant: an opaque Afghanistan eluding any a empt at rationalization, a realm still impervious to the political and intellectual developments taking place in the rest of the world. In Geneva and Kabul, I have constantly heard international officials speak of Afghanistan as an arena where tradition and modernity confront each other. In their view, the country is divided into two camps. In one are those who work with the UN and the major NGOs, embodying hopes for future change, subscribing to human rights and believing in the virtues of democracy. To the other are assigned those who oppose the

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foreign presence and cling to an obsolete vision of village life, preferring the tribal order to the rule of law or – worse still – sheltering behind a purist conception of religion to spurn the advancement of female education and emancipation. To be sure, everyone admits that on the ground, the distinction between agents of change and retrograde forces is complicated by the widespread presence of corruption, nepotism and ethnoregional solidarity. Nevertheless, thousands of experts who spend some time in Afghanistan frame their activity within a contest between the values of modernity and the archaic remains of tradition. This conception has its pendant among Afghan intellectuals. Did I not hear the young and ambitious director of the Open Society Institute in Kabul tell me with frustration in her voice that ‘Afghanistan is not yet politically or socially ripe for the advent of democracy’? The fact that she said ‘not yet’ reflected her belief that history has a direction and that the forms of political organization developed in the West should serve as a model for the future of her country. This projection of a unified world developing historically on the basis of the European model has been taken on board by a section of the Afghan elites. We should resist the temptation to think of ideologies as localized phenomena; Eurocentrism is not, in the end, the exclusive preserve of Europeans. Many young Afghans working for a UN agency or an international NGO consider that the main obstacles to progress in Afghanistan are the general lack of education and submissiveness to age-old habits and customs. Although everyone acknowledges the Taliban capacity for resistance, they remain convinced that the Taliban are ultimately no more than a troublesome anachronism. The main thrust of this book is against such an interpretation of the Afghan crisis. My reflections are based on a simple principle that I learned in my introductory courses in anthropology: every society is equally traditional or – what amounts to the same thing – equally modern. Part of my inspiration comes from postcolonial literature, which challenges the forms of knowledge and the social identities inherited from colonial rule. I analyse Afghanistan as a space of contested sovereignties, where large fringes of the population do not yearn for the future dreamed up for them by the promoters of liberal peace and international development. Afghanistan is also a transnational arena of segmented moralities, which serves as my starting point to question the teleological grand narrative of modernization and democratization. In placing my analyses at different scales, I adopt a meticulous approach that focuses on what makes people do what they do and on how the outcome of their action in turn impacts on its preconditions. As Anne-Christine Trémon writes with reference to the work of Anna Tsing (2000):

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Rather than choose one level of analysis – local or global – it is necessary to trace how the definition of new types of locality operates. The ethnographer should be less a chronicler situating his/her work in evident given localities than an investigator asking how diverse localities are produced. (Trémon 2012: 260)

Here, the various scales (to follow an increasingly common terminology) are weighted on the side of the actors, of Homo itinerans: that is, the young men I met on Tehran building sites or in the disused factories of Patras, the civil servants from the Afghan Ministry of Finance who a ended my teaching course in Abu Dhabi, American military men and experts in good governance, and, last but not least, myself. All travel intensively, but in contrasting modes that illustrate the power relations characterizing the contemporary world in all its brutality, and also unexpected expressions of social vitality. From a village in Hazarajat to the Calais Jungle, my ethnographic vigne es aim to reconstruct the different kinds of mobility, which reflect injustice and suffering, but also subversion of the classical forms of political territoriality, as well as protest against the global distribution of wealth and security. I could refer here to a number of authors, but Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) is one of those who have most influenced my thinking. In his effort to ‘provincialize’ Europe, he recognizes that it is futile to conceive of the political institutions and ideas of today’s world – nation-state, democracy, citizenship, public administration, human rights and civil society – without reference to their intellectual genealogy in the West. But he criticizes what he calls historicism: that is, the kind of thinking that justifies the rule of colonial empires in the nineteenth century by promoting the idea that modernity was born in Europe before it spread to the rest of the world. The evolutionary paradigm dies hard. It suggests that the time of world history is unified with respect to the Western model and that human societies are not really contemporary with one another, but occupy positions on a linear evolutionary scale. The social, political and economic developments undergone by Britain, France and Germany, and then by the United States, form the horizon to which other parts of the earth should aspire. Therefore, there is no salvation for Afghanistan outside the framework of liberal democracy. Chakrabarty also emphasizes that the European colonizers preached to their colonial subjects the virtues of a humanist universalism that they were first to flout in practice. Was this an accident of history, a case of unfortunate excesses that do not dent the legitimacy of Enlightenment ideals? Or is it not that human rights violations commi ed on the social and political margins, by people who forbade them in the imperial heartlands, were inherent in the political project of modernity? The la er thesis,

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argued by Walter Mignolo (2011), understands modernity as a complex narrative that celebrates the achievements of Western civilization while systematically concealing another programme, a dark side that – following Anibal Quijano – he calls ‘coloniality’.1 The supposedly universal ideal of progress and human rights is inseparable from the expansionist logic of capitalism and the brutal extraction of resources, where human life is a good whose utility can be calculated like that of anything else, to be thrown away or replaced when necessary. In this interpretation, colonialism is only a particular historical expression of the power relations that marked the expansion of the West. The social categories and forms of discrimination stemming from it continue to persist – including in societies that did not directly undergo European rule – even if today they are expressed under the cover of competitiveness, reward for merit, equal opportunity, individual responsibility or good governance. Following the example of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which led what he describes as a genuine theoretical revolution, Mignolo calls for epistemic disobedience as a necessary stage in the reinvention of social life on new foundations. In their way, Afghan itinerants are also bearers of this epistemic and ethical disobedience. In criticizing assumptions that the European cultural, political and economic model will eventually establish itself worldwide, some authors reject the very idea of such homogenization and adopt a relativist position. They highlight the existence of several traditions of equal dignity. According to Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000), for example, modernity – that is, the break from belief in a world obeying a transcendent order and the adoption of a scientific approach that involves constant questioning – does not signify Westernization. In order to resist the thrust of colonial powers, societies in East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Islamic world and elsewhere o en absorbed certain ideas, but reinterpreted them in a way that changed them. Eisenstadt thus speaks of ‘multiple modernities’ deployed along historical and cultural lines of their own. This interpretive approach is praiseworthy, especially because it emphasizes that anti-Western reactions are intrinsically modern – a characteristic that some observers have recognized in political Islam, whether of the Taliban or the Islamic State variety. But does not its insistence on the diversity of cultural legacies risk conjuring away the global power relations that have marked the world since at least the sixteenth century? For my part, I prefer Shalini Randeria’s image of ‘entangled modernity’ (Randeria 2006), which offers a relational understanding of European and American political, economic and intellectual developments, both past and present. In this view, modernity has from the beginning resulted from a complex process of interactions among different parts of the world.2 It is

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not simply a global enterprise, but one based upon unequal political and economic relations. The people I met in Ghazni, Athens and New York spoke in their way of these entanglements. However, despite the influence of postcolonial and decolonial critiques in academia, it must be said that what has inspired the postconflict reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and many other countries around the world is a normative vision of modernity. Insurgency, drug-trafficking and corruption lead UN circles to consider Afghanistan a ‘failed state’ – an image that, together with the idea that Afghanistan is a source of regional instability and international dangers, has given rise to a certain type of intervention. The stated aim has been to address a geographically limited problem that has potentially global implications. For the political or economic advisers, aid workers and development experts who people international organizations and NGOs, the promotion of peace involves rebuilding the state, reforming the judicial sector, rationalizing public administration, and reorganizing the police and armed forces. Whether they are Afghan, Salvadorian or Norwegian, their commitment is to what Oliver Richmond (2011) calls ‘liberal peace’, a hegemonic approach that seeks to implant the characteristic institutions of Western liberal democracies. Their state-centred vision involves a will to change cultural and social norms, even at the level of family structures, so that these conform to a supposedly more equitable model. Paradoxically, this universalist ideal goes hand in hand with a romantic and depoliticized conception of the local, which conflicts with the tangled itinerancies described in this book. The ethnographic approach makes it possible to deconstruct the grand narrative of modernization and the idea that the state is indispensable to the organization of social life. Are we dealing with a mere fantasy, a form of cosmopolitanism disconnected from the everyday realities of the Afghan population? Or, on the contrary, is it an important element in the way in which today’s world is governed? To account for what is happening in Afghanistan, it is as essential to analyse in meticulous detail how liberal peace is promoted on the ground, and to examine the social behaviour of the experts who travel from country to country and form a global epistemic community, as it is to study the evolution of political alliances, electoral logics or the armed insurgency. The state in Afghanistan does not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The confused situation there illustrates the shi s in sovereignty and legitimacy bound up with the stronger role and growing visibility of players above, below and across nation-states, whether international organizations and NGOs, Islamist networks or organized criminal groups.

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Figure 10.1. Transnational networks and power in Afghanistan. Figure by the author, adapted from Monsu i 2012.

Tightly squeezed into their normative viewpoint, many observers refrain from analysing the structural factors in play or questioning the paradigm of liberal peace. To examine the political economy of today’s Afghanistan, should we not turn our backs on analyses that focus on a struggle between tradition and modernity, or on cupidity, religious fanaticism and tribal/ethnic tensions? The following chart is an alternative a empt to grasp the complexity of power in Afghanistan: it highlights circulation and features four transnational networks that channel material and nonmaterial resources. These networks overlap with one another on the ground and should be understood as ideal types. The migratory networks are linked to the movement of millions of peoples among Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, but also Western Europe, Australasia and North America. Mobility has always been part of the Afghan social and cultural landscape: nomads who move their herds season by season in search of be er pastures, profiting from opportunities along the way to trade with sedentary populations; mountain people who go down to the city or lowland regions to find seasonal employment; pilgrims, fugitives or conquerors. Nor is itinerancy peculiar to those who move around; it also marks economic life, the material culture and aspirations of people residing in a mountain village in Afghanistan or a suburban district in Pakistan. The war that tore Afghanistan apart following the communist coup in April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of 1979 gave a more tragic and massive dimension to these population movements. In 1990, the UN High

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Commissioner for Refugees counted 6.22 million Afghan refugees abroad, mainly divided between Pakistan and Iran, as well as 1.5 million displaced persons inside the country. Afghans then represented 40% of the total numbers falling under the UN agency’s mandate. The Soviet troop withdrawal (1989), the capture of Kabul by resistance forces (1992) and then the US-led international intervention and the fall of the Taliban regime (2001) led to large waves of returns. Nevertheless, a large number of people of Afghan origin are still living abroad. The UNHCR calculated in 2015 that, with a total of more than 2.5 million, they formed the second-largest refugee population in the world, a er the Syrians.3 Besides, repatriation does not necessarily mean the end of displacement. Afghans have developed highly effective social strategies based on the dispersion and continual movement of members of kinship and solidarity groups (Monsu i 2005). Those who go abroad save money and acquire new skills, as well as developing new political demands. They send considerable sums to their close relatives back home, and the existence of these transfers helps us to understand that the flight from violence is not always inconsistent with a genuine migratory strategy. They have important social, political and economic consequences for Afghanistan. They stimulate and orient future population movement, since itinerants – whether the immigration service in the host country labels them refugees or migrants – provide people living in their region of origin with information about the possibilities open to them in various places. The sending of money therefore reveals the existence of social networks linking places far apart from one other. In the Afghan context, mobility is not only a painful consequence of war; it has also become a strategy to diversify the means of subsistence and to spread risks. It is integral to the political economy of the country and blurs the relationship between population and territory. For many young men, migration is a rite of passage to adulthood, a way of affirming their autonomy and constructing their masculinity (Monsu i 2007). The commercial networks involve activities ranging from the import of current consumption goods to the trafficking of drugs. Afghanistan is the theatre of intense trading that, though very profitable, does not contribute much to state revenues. The size of the drugs economy in particular cannot be overemphasized. We should remember that roughly 90% of the heroin in today’s world originates in Afghanistan and the production of opium poppies, far from diminishing, reached a new record level in 2014. In 2009, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated the global opiates market at $68 billion, of which $60 billion was generated by production in Afghanistan (UNODC 2011, 2015). Afghan farmers are said to have earned in 2010 the relatively modest amount of

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$440 million from the trade, the largest profits being pocketed by transnational criminal organizations. The UN considers that the insurgency is the main factor behind the increase in the production and smuggling of narcotics. It is true that poppy-growing is concentrated in the southern provinces, where anti-government forces are the most active. But the export routes are remarkably varied and cross regions where the Taliban do not have much of a presence. The flow of opiates from Afghanistan takes place almost equally through Pakistan (30%), Iran (40%) and the Central Asian republics (30%). In view of these figures, the drug economy appears to be a crosscu ing phenomenon that cannot be explained by the actions of only one party in the conflict. Contraband also involves the import and transit of all kinds of manufactured goods in current use. In 1965, Kabul and Islamabad signed an agreement on transit trade – renewed in the summer of 2010 – which enables Afghanistan, as a landlocked country, to import goods through Pakistan duty-free, and Pakistan to export its products to Central Asia through Afghanistan. The aim, laudable enough, is to support the development of Afghan trade and to integrate it into the regional economy, but numerous products imported into Afghanistan fuel smuggling activities to neighbouring countries. The government tries to exert control over the crossborder trade as a way of boosting its revenue. Thus, in year 1387 of the Afghan calendar (corresponding to the period from March 2008 to March 2009), it was able to collect 18,860 million afghanis in taxes (nearly $400 million) – the equivalent of 68% of internal taxes. However, even that is marginal for the national budget, which is highly dependent on international aid. Contraband and the drugs trade permeate all sectors of Afghan society and generate enormous profits. It is difficult to touch this economy rooted in insecurity without threatening multiple interests that stretch far beyond the national frontiers. The armed networks include the insurgents (who receive weapons, money, fighters and logistical support from a milieu of sympathizers) and the jihadist commanders (who have agreed to collaborate with the central state without disarming their followers). But we also need to consider the foreign troops, who have been present in their tens of thousands and draw on a whole parallel distribution network, and the private security companies, which employ a lot of people in Afghanistan and sell their services to international organizations and NGOs, embassies and large corporations. All of these form part of the national political and economic landscape. Their influence on Afghan society goes well beyond security ma ers: it is visible in knock-on effects such as the flight of the urban middle classes a er the (partial) withdrawal of foreign military forces and many aid agencies in 2014 and in the a empts of many Af-

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ghans, devoid of prospects and lacking support in Pakistan or Iran, to make their way to Europe. The rising power of the Taliban – which took Kabul in September 1996 – marked the end of a gradual evolution that saw Islamist movements become the main political force in the region. A er the 9/11 a acks triggered the US-led military intervention, the Taliban were rapidly driven from the capital and other urban centres, but they were able to rebuild their forces in their bastions in the south and east of the country. The Afghan insurgency has close relations with militant Sunni groups in Pakistan. In order to understand the success of these movements, the political-military longevity of the Taliban and the later emergence of Islamic State, we need to take into account the profound changes in social organization on both sides of the Durand Line, the frontier inherited from the colonial period that today separates Afghanistan and Pakistan. The combined effects of war and international aid, including the massive refugee movement and the migration of workers to the Arabian Peninsula, have shaken the equilibrium in countless villages. The emergence of the Taliban, and then of Islamic State, expresses the fragmentation of traditional forms of authority and the rise of a new political class that legitimizes itself in the name of the supranational values of Islam. A new generation of leaders is challenging the power of the political elites tied to the old monarchical establishment and the landowners. The struggle of Islamist militants against the United States, using new information and communication technologies to broadcast their message ever more effectively, has given them a worldwide visibility. Apart from their armed resistance, they adopt an ethical discourse to condemn not only the political domination of the West but also its drive to export the supposedly universal values of democracy and human rights. They share the transnational level of activity with humanitarian organizations (Devji 2005), while positioning themselves on the opposite side of the political chessboard. The last type of network is precisely that of the aid organizations. The Afghan population has long experience of their activity, since in the 1980s some of the Western government aid to the anti-Soviet resistance passed through the hands of NGOs. Many of these began operations in the region with programmes for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Some then gradually extended their compass to Afghanistan, access to it being controlled by the Pakistan intelligence services. In this Cold War context, it was difficult not to be instrumentalized politically. The geopolitical importance of Afghanistan declined a er the break-up of the USSR, but the year 2001 marked the beginning of an aid rush far greater than anything seen in the previous decades (Monsu i 2013).

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Alongside a few old hands, young inexperienced graduates were flown in from Canada, France and Germany, while many diaspora Afghans returned to Kabul a er a long absence. The expectations were extremely high. Hamid Karzai, then President of the interim government, did not hesitate to claim that within a decade, the Afghan capital would become a new Dubai. With the hindsight gained in just a few years, such optimistic projections came to appear u erly fantastical. The contract of mutual trust between the international organizations and NGOs and the Afghan population gradually crumbled. In 2005, Ramazan Bashardost, an intellectual educated in France, was forced to resign as Minister of Planning when he said that the NGOs were worse than the warlords. Although his assertion caused uproar among expatriates, it did not fail to win some approval in Afghan public opinion. Beyond the up-and-down popularity of the UN and NGOs, the case of Afghanistan is at once exemplary and unique. The country is formally a democracy, with an elected president and parliament, but the government depends almost entirely on foreign aid for security and for social protection programmes. A vast transnational bureaucracy has established itself in Kabul. My aim is not to pass a positive or negative judgement on this, but rather to emphasize that aid workers, just as much as migrants, traffickers and insurgents, are an integral part of the transnational political economy of Afghanistan. No player is on the good or the bad side of history. All develop in a political arena where power stems from the control of material, social and discursive resources – in which foreign aid, human rights and democracy, as well as the values conveyed by transnational Islam, must be included. The UN and NGOs remain one of the main employment opportunities for young educated people in Kabul, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif. The fact that aid organizations declare themselves neutral should not stop us reflecting on the political and economic issues that they stand for in the eyes of local and international actors. Migratory, commercial, armed and humanitarian networks may all be seen as facets of what is habitually known as globalization. They channel transnational resources that can be used in social and political struggles. They represent the vast range of multiple and segmented sovereignties characteristic of Afghanistan and many other postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa. The nation-state has probably never been the main locus of sovereignty in large parts of the world where other legitimate forms of government have expressed themselves. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2006) advocate an ethnographic approach to power practices that involves studying informal structures such as illegal networks, insurgencies, self-defence groups and – we should add – foreign armed forces. Aid and development organizations should also be included in such a

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research programme, for they participate in the governance of countries like Afghanistan in the name of an expert rationality that aims to improve the living conditions of the population. Throughout its history, the Afghan state’s capacity to provide public services has been shaped by external intervention – it already received British subsidies in the nineteenth century – which, though limiting its sovereignty, may also help to assert it (Barfield 2010; Hanifi 2011). Unable to generate sufficient revenue of its own, the Afghan government can construct a certain legitimacy only by associating itself with the distribution of international aid. Far from being an abstract entity, the conjunction of the state and its international partners is rendered visible by a whole series of specific bureaucratic practices. On the one hand, a fragmented state apparatus, whose multiple entities more o en compete than cooperate with one another, coexists alongside other sovereignties. On the other hand, the strengthened forms of transnational governance do not prevent the nation-state from continuing to be the organizational entity of international politics today. On the first point, a difference in degrees of sovereignty is not a new phenomenon; it already characterized the colonial empires. The second point is perhaps more essential if we are to grasp the peculiarities of the contemporary period. Instead of heralding the end of the nation-state, the coexistence between states with heterogeneous characteristics and a transnational governance with multiple faces may be one of the particularities of today’s world. More than the other social sciences, anthropology provides the means to complicate and challenge any linear discourse regarding global political history. Afghanistan, supposedly on the margins of the world, is a good case in point: the country is at the forefront of a number of contemporary processes. According to Jean and John Comaroff (2012), the modernity of what is called the South is not an awkward copy of an original that hatched in the West; rather, the geography and chronology linking centre and periphery need to be reversed, since the South feels the consequences of global forces more rapidly and violently, perhaps prefiguring what will happen later in the North. I would venture to extend their argument to Afghanistan. It is wrong to think that the country suffers a historical lag vis-à-vis the European and American world, which it might partly close by applying the principles of good governance. I do not subscribe to the dichotomic vision of tradition and modernity, in which those who promote peace, education and economic growth stand sharply opposed to those who work at undermining the postconflict reconstruction process. The daily life of the Afghan people is shaped by political forces and moral principles that compete with one another. Although the neoliberal economic model associated with the

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democratic political system imposed itself a er the collapse of the Soviet Union as the only possibility in a large part of the world – with notable exceptions such as China – it encountered strong resistance in Afghanistan. The authority of the central government, supported financially, militarily and logistically by the Western powers and the UN, clashed with insurgents fighting for a different social and political contract. Large sections of the population were not convinced of the merits of the programmes run by international organizations and NGOs to foster democracy, human rights and women’s emancipation. Those organizations remain dependent on Western donors. But despite the billions and billions of dollars spent since 2001,4 it is by no means easy for them to disseminate the values they espouse in the Afghan public domain, to win hearts and minds outside the urban centres, and to obtain the consent of rural populations necessary for the kind of cultural hegemony – to use Gramscian language (Gramsci 1975) – that leads a national society in its entirety to accept the ideology of the ruling class. In this sense, the recent history of Afghanistan may be interpreted as the failure of a hegemonic project of liberal peace and democracy, or even as the reflection of a new kind of globalized class struggle. Afghanistan has been approached here as a transnational and global political arena, where many kinds of circulation develop and unravel. The crosscu ing gaze of the anthropologist has reconstructed this multiple circulation by repeatedly moving from place to place: from a village in Hazarajat to a hotel in Abu Dhabi, from a Tehran building site to a Lesbos reception centre. However, the changing optic is not immediately related to the anthropological perspective, but rather to what the people encountered during my travels said to me and did. The networks of which I speak should not be conceived within a fla ened horizontal space. The different mobilities, of the rich and the poor, speak to us of inequality, but also of inventiveness. Homo itinerans is neither a poetic abstraction nor an ideal type; he or she presents different forms of both power and subversion, which are bound up with the imposed universalism that inspires the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and the way in which asylum is seen at an international level.

Notes  1. See, for example, Quijano 2007.  2. Goody (1996), for instance, speaks of a historical oscillation between different regions of Eurasia.  3. h p://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e486eb6.html (retrieved 15 June 2020).  4. See h p://costsofwar.org (retrieved 15 June 2020).

 Conclusion I hate any sentimental a achment to the past, as well as the technocratic cult of the future. Both are grounded upon a static, linear concept of time (that is what the backward-looking have in common with technocrats). —Aldo van Eyck, ‘The Interior of Time’ (1967)

It was 31 July 1996, my birthday. I spent the night in an abandoned shop at Do Ab-e Mikh-Zarrin, halfway between Bamyan and Doshi. I was with a few chance companions, introduced to me the day before by an NGO vaccinator with whom I had been roaming the region. The day began badly: a wasp stung me on the wrist as I was shaking my blanket. My thoughts turned to home, to Alice. What would she have done, allergic as she is to wasp stings, here in an isolated corner of the Hindu Kush? Along with the most intimate desires, my nostalgia took forms centred on food: more than wine, my throat craved a sour lemonade and salted Gruyère. Having said goodbye to my night-time companions, I quickly swallowed some hot tea and a slice of bread toasted on the wood fire. I negotiated a price with the driver of a KamAZ, the Soviet army truck that was then king of the roads in Hazarajat. He had brought a wheat load from Mazar-e Sharif for the UNDP and was trying to make a profit on the return trip by carrying as many passengers as possible towards the big city in northern Afghanistan. I cheerfully threw my bag in the back of the lorry and climbed in beside it. Despite the bumps in the road, which slowly churn up my insides, I like these open-air journeys when people have nothing else to do than chat. A swaying crowd: a young militiaman showed up with a menacing air. He shouted for me to get off the lorry and pointed his gun straight at me. I jumped down and landed among two or three others. Discreetly, I walked around the vehicle. The young combatant did not seem to realize

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I was a foreigner. The driver, who did know, nodded unobtrusively for me to get into the cabin and whispered that I should conceal myself behind the seats. A er a seemingly endless wait, he and his assistant came back, started the engine and drove off. He angrily explained what had happened: the local commander had the nice habit of demanding money from anyone travelling through his territory. Do Ab-e Mikh-Zarrin is on the road linking Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif. The commander had just received an ultimatum from Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum: he must not hold up the movement of people and goods along this key axis for the forces fighting the Taliban, at the very moment when the Taliban were laying siege to the capital. Upset to be losing a juicy source of income, he had therefore opted for a different tactic and tried to make travellers use his own vehicles. I thanked Jawad, the driver, for his help. A jovial young man, who lived in Mazar-e Sharif, he gave me a vigorous tap on the knee: ‘Don’t mention it, you’re my guest!’ We had to shout to make ourselves heard above the music, engine noise and jolting of the old lorry. But our troubles were not over yet. Later in the morning, we came across a KamAZ parked at the side of the road; the driver called to us and asked for help. No sooner has Jawad stopped than a man with a Kalashnikov, aged around thirty, suddenly appeared and forced us to take the broken-down vehicle in tow. He climbed into the cabin and noticed a packet of cigare es in my shirt pocket. In a voice that seemed to suggest he wanted to start a conversation, as if there was nothing abnormal in the situation, he asked me to give him one. I ra led back, between my teeth: ‘Segret na mekashom!’ (‘I don’t smoke!’). Taken aback, he leaned towards me and looked more closely at my pocket, but he did not insist. Instinctively, I knew that sharing cigare es went together with exchanging a few words. He would very soon have realized that I was a foreigner. Would he have offered me a bed and something to eat? It’s possible. But the experience earlier on was enough for me and I was glad I did not have to test the hospitality of Sayed Mansur Naderi’s fighters. We entered the Kilagay camp, where the carcasses of helicopters and armoured vehicles had been le in a heap exposed to the sun and wind. Was this where Tarkovsky’s film Stalker was shot? Here, though, his ubiquitous water had given way to the sand that got into my eyes, nose and ears. The militiamen were not particularly aggressive, but they made Jawad repair their lorry before le ing us drive on two hours later. With a touch of bravado, Jawad could not stop himself calling out: ‘So, isn’t “thank you” part of your vocabulary?!’ When we reached Pul-e Khumri, I separated from my guardian angel of the day. He categorically refused to accept payment: ‘Mehmân hasti!’ (‘You are my guest’).

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It was a fleeting yet significant encounter: I would have liked to spend more time with him. I continue in a shared taxi to Mazar-e Sharif, where I arrived without any problems at the end of the day. A er months of roaming the dales and peaks of Hazarajat, I was back in a city once more. I could finally call home, at the end of a journey that had changed me. ‘I come from where I’m going!’ Perhaps for the wise old man in Bamyan, it is more the journey than the destination (even a dream one) that defines us. I had reached my destination, safe and sound. Not all the itinerants I had come across could say the same. And yet, my feelings were ambivalent, divided between satisfaction with a job done and fear of monotony, between relief and nostalgia. Years later, I read a Facebook post by Zari, a young Afghan woman who had just applied for asylum in Germany. She defined herself by using the terms âwâragi (which may be translated as ‘wandering’) and âwâra (‘wanderer’). ‘Âwâragi’, she wrote, ‘means being born in Tehran, expelled to Kabul, and finding myself in Berlin; but nowhere do you live your life.’ That li le sentence elicited a number of responses. Shafiqa, just arrived in Australia, wrote: ‘Remain an itinerant [âwâra], there is death in immobility.’ Zari: ‘I feel sad when I think of being an âwâra.’ Shafiqa: ‘Wandering is in our generation’s blood. Just imagine: in three decades we have experienced enough misfortunes for three centuries.’ Zari: ‘During these three decades, three generations have become wanderers and a fourth is taking to the road. We are homeless, suspended, without an identity.’ Suraya, a young woman living in the United States, joined in: ‘Dear Zari, there’s no life beyond that; our life is what life is.’ Zari: ‘Our life – endless wandering.’ Hashmat contributed a li le piece of free verse: ‘We should carry our identity under our arm when we set off, for the walls of our hostel are putrid and we wander in streets that do not warmly welcome us.’ Zari: ‘These streets that do not warmly welcome us and these putrid walls that do not bear our identity.’ Hashmat: ‘These putrid walls have crumbled, thousands and thousands of the missing will come up from the soil.’ Kusha, who lives in India: ‘Âwâragi, that means being uprooted.’ Munira: ‘I was born in Kabul, I asked for asylum in Hamburg, but that’s only the beginning of my story. Next I was tossed to Norway and had to start all over again. I was tossed to England and had to start all over again. I was tossed to Scotland and had to start all over again. And maybe I’ll soon be tossed somewhere else. Maybe life is nothing but that, endless uprooting.’

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Sadiq: ‘We are a wandering generation.’ Shafiqa: ‘A wandering generation, always in between two moves. Even if we were no longer tossed from country to country, the simple fact that our minds are rootless would be enough to stop us remaining in one place, even in the country that grants us asylum. There is death in immobility.’ Âwâragi, itinerancy, âwâra, Homo itinerans. To be sure, these young Afghans speak of being uprooted, of lacking the material as well as mental capacity to se le in one place and build their lives there. It is exhausting, painful and unbearable. At the same time, ‘there is death in immobility’. In the autumn of 2009, I taught political anthropology of Afghanistan at Yale University. A young female student, squaring her shoulders, told me she had spent six months in the Afghan section of the State Department in Washington DC. She asked whether she would learn anything new from my course. Without managing to hide my sarcasm, I replied that I would be very happy if she would agree to give the other students the benefit of her experience. As for me, I said, I had been working on Afghanistan for more than fi een years and the main thing I had accumulated was doubts. So, the semester would be more about doubts than certainties, more about questions than recipes. The present book has stuck to this philosophy. In building it around li le ethnographic vigne es, I wanted to show the multiple facets of the Afghan crisis, focusing on the various forms of mobility and bringing out the various scales. Homo itinerans: Afghans migrating around the world, expatriates moving from one crisis to another, a researcher passing from mountain village to refugee camp and then to the office of a UN agency. All evolve in the present world, all develop transnational ties, all cross frontiers and acquire the ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ that, as Michel Agier puts it, is becoming the condition of the greatest number (Agier 2016a). But the multiple modes of itinerancy, far from leveling social relations, reveal the increasingly blatant inequalities that mark the contemporary world. Afghanistan is an arena, at once local and global, where different conceptions of social life and the political contract encounter one another. Some Afghans organize their discourse with reference to the past, legitimizing their actions by Islam, an ideal of village harmony and the symbolic capital amassed during the anti-Soviet struggle. Others, with their eyes fixed on the future, place state-building, human rights and women’s emancipation at the heart of their rhetoric. But all are engaged in political jousting with the contemporary issues that face Afghanistan and the globalized world. Inspired by the great Dutch architect I quoted at the beginning of this section, I try to understand political developments in Afghanistan without referring to an idealized past or to a future modelled

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on the West. My aim is to escape all teleology and to avoid characterizing as retrograde the political forces that are resisting the governmental and social project sponsored by the United Nations and the United States. Afghanistan has been a theatre of struggle among the main ideologies of our time, from colonialism to Marxism and nationalism, and from liberalism to Islamism – with any number of variants in each of these families, as the conflict between the Taliban and Islamic State testifies. Nor should we forget the whole aid industry. Although I cannot identify with the Taliban social project or the form of their revolt against injustices, I have more sympathy for the modes of subversion implicit in the Afghans’ polymorphous mobility than I do for the circulation of the ‘humanitarian aristocrats’; it seems to me more creative, in spite of the suffering and mistrust that characterize relations among migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. I hope that this short work will help to demolish some of the certainties surrounding a country that crystallizes contradictory fantasies – from fascination with the nomadic and tribal way of life to repugnance for the extremism of Islamist militants. It should be read first of all as a mark of gratitude and respect for the people I met along the way, who took me into their homes, offered me a meal and answered my questions. That in itself conveys a message of scepticism towards any claim to teach Afghans what living together really means.

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 Index 9/11; 11 September 2001, 13, 17, 61, 69–70, 72, 76, 110 Abdullah, Abdullah; Dr Abdullah, xiii, xiv, 21, 22, 24, 25 Abdur Rahman (Emir), xii, 17, 59, 65 Abu Dhabi, 29, 30, 33, 35, 37, 104, 113 academic and applied research, 32, 91 Afghanistan, ix, x, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118 Afghans, ix, xiii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 15, 17, 23, 29, 35, 40, 41, 43, 46, 54, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 90, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 108, 111, 117, 118 agents of change, 52, 103 aid, 5, 8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 26, 27, 32, 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, 53, 57, 58, 61, 67, 78, 94, 99, 100, 110, 118 foreign, 13, 47, 56, 68, 111 international, 2, 23, 32, 35, 40, 42, 43, 44, 109, 110, 112

organizations; agencies; associations, ix, 9, 27, 57, 75, 86, 90, 109, 110, 111 workers, 2, 4, 10, 13, 26, 27, 32, 35, 41, 50, 51, 106, 111 Al Qaeda, 11, 40, 69 alliances, 15, 25, 45, 47 diversification, 78 matrimonial, 64 military, 13 political, 15, 51, 106 temporary, 53 anthropology; anthropologists, 3, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 32, 33, 34, 36, 102, 103, 112, 113, 117 applied research. See academic and applied research Arabian Peninsula, 64, 107, 110 armed forces; army; foreign troops, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 26, 32, 40, 41, 51, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 90, 94, 106, 109, 111 Asia, 6, 36, 47, 58, 70, 111 Central, xii, 59, 70, 96, 109 East, 105 Eurasia, 113 South, 17 asylum, ix, xiii, xv, 75, 76, 79, 81, 84–91, 99, 100, 113, 116, 117 seekers, 2, 75, 77, 79, 80, 87–91, 92–100, 118 Athens, 80, 85, 87, 88, 90, 106

126

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Index

Australia; Australasia, ix, xvi, 2, 4, 43, 68, 74–79, 83, 107, 116 Austria, 93, 94 awâra; awâragi, 116–117. See also Homo itinerans; itinerancy; itinerants Balkans, 80, 87 Baluchistan, 59, 60, 61, 65 Bamyan, 1, 114, 116 Berberis; Khavaris, 65, 67 body techniques, 5, 43, 47, 48 borders, 2, 61, 86, 93, 96, 99, 109 Britain, xii, 6, 14, 16, 36, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 97, 98, 99, 104, 112 British Empire; British Raj, 2, 13, 14, 16, 60, 99 brokers. See intermediaries bureaucracy; bureaucrats, 2, 36, 46, 53, 65, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 111, 112 Calais; Calais Jungle, ix, 96–99, 100, 104 Canada, 70, 79, 111 central power; centralization; decentralization, 16, 17, 44, 45, 46, 47 change (social and political), 2, 4, 7, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 32, 43, 47, 52, 91, 102, 103, 105, 106, 110 circulation (migrants), 23, 43, 48, 78, 107, 113, 118 territories, 3, 4, 34 cities; towns, 5, 15, 16, 71, 73, 90, 107, 114, 116 civil servants; civil service, 10, 27, 29, 35, 36, 37, 62, 81, 104 civil society, 5, 30, 47, 55, 104 class struggle, 6, 113 Cold War, 17, 37, 42, 51, 62, 94, 110 colonialism (colonial enterprise/expansion/imaginary/rule), 2, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 36, 37, 62, 103, 104, 105, 110, 112, 118 coloniality; decolonial critique, 105, 106 communist coup (1978), xii, 61, 107 community development councils (CDCs), 38–48, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58 companies, private, 10, 26, 27, 28, 79, 109

competition, 13, 26, 28, 32, 47, 53, 55, 57, 85, 99, 102, 105, 112 conflict; war, ix, xii, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 25, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 75, 78, 86, 90, 92, 94. 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 107, 108, 109, 110, 118 Constitution (of Afghanistan), xii, xiii, xiv, 23, 24, 40, 44, 45 consultants; consultancy, ix, 5, 32 continuous training. See training programmes contraband. See smuggling cooperation, 45, 55, 56, 57, 112 corruption; anti-corruption, 6, 10, 11, 22, 26, 27, 31, 47, 103, 106 cosmopolitanism, 100, 106, 117 counterinsurgency, xv, 8, 9, 11, 12 country of asylum; country of reception; host country, 5, 67, 68, 78, 85, 88, 99, 108, 117 country of origin; home country, 3, 5, 10, 34, 77, 78, 82, 90, 96, 99, 100 countryside; country; rural areas, 1, 15, 16, 45, 46, 58, 68, 70, 90, 93, 100 Dahmarda, 49, 52, 57, 62, 63, 66 decentralization. See central power democracy; democratization, xi, 4, 6, 14, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 37, 42, 45, 47, 102, 103, 104, 106, 110, 111, 113 participatory, 15, 47, 55 promotion, ix, xv, 5, 6 destinations, 57, 68, 90, 99, 100, 116. See also country of asylum development, xv, 4, 5, 8, 10, 13, 17, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38–48, 53, 54, 57, 58, 68, 100, 103, 104, 106, 111. See also Millennium Development Goals diaspora, 40, 77, 111 dispersion (of domestic, family and kinship groups), 3, 4, 34, 64, 67, 78, 85, 108

Index •

distrust. See trust diversification (political, economic, migratory, spatial, and so forth), 15, 25, 51, 64, 65, 78, 90, 108 Diversity Visa Lo ery (USA), 70 domestic units; domestic groups, 51, 64, 85, 90 donors, 13, 25, 38, 43, 44, 45, 56, 58, 67 drug; trafficking, trade, 6, 10, 106, 108, 109 education, 2, 5, 16, 29, 30, 32, 42, 43, 46, 56, 64, 68, 73, 77, 84, 99, 103, 111, 112 elections, xiii, xiv, 4, 6, 7, 19–25, 28, 37, 38, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 81, 106, 111 elites, 15, 16, 20, 23, 27, 29, 45, 52, 103, 110 emancipation, 60, 85 women’s and female, 5, 6, 32, 47, 103, 113, 117 employment, 10, 23, 27, 53, 60, 66, 68, 74, 107, 109, 111. See also market; job engaged withdrawal, 100 England, 98, 116 English (language), 5, 19, 20, 29, 33, 71, 77, 85, 89 epistemic disobedience, 105 ethnicity; ethnic groups; ethnic identity, 12, 15, 24, 25, 49, 51, 52, 58, 77, 78, 107 ethnography; ethnographer; ethnographic work, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 15, 32, 33, 73, 77, 88, 104, 106, 117 Europe, ix, xiii, xv, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 17, 25, 35, 47, 60, 65, 68, 75, 78, 79, 80–86, 90, 91, 92, 95–101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 110, 112 exclusion, xv, 52, 56, 96, 98, 99, 101 exile, 4, 93 expatriates, 7, 10, 11, 19, 22, 24, 26, 30, 111, 117 experts; expertise, ix, x, 2, 4, 6, 10, 16, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 31, 41, 43, 46, 103, 104, 106

127

facilitating partners (FPs), 38, 42, 43, 53, 54, 58 family reunification; family reunion, 70, 76, 78, 86 farmers, 50, 52, 108 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 27 foreign troops. See armed forces fragmentation (of Afghanistan), 25, 27, 28, 51, 56, 110, 112 France, 91, 96, 104, 111 fraud, electoral, xiii, 21, 22, 24, 31, 40, 45 Friuli, 92, 93, 95, 100 gaze eers, 13, 15, 17 gender, 30, 31, 37, 42, 47, 74 Geneva, ix, 3, 14, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 88, 102 Germany, 36, 78, 80, 82, 84, 94, 104, 111, 116 Ghazni, 8, 49, 55, 75, 93, 106 global dynamics and everyday interactions, 4, 48. See also scale globalization; global enterprise; global world; global political history; global political arena; global political and economic system, 7, 26, 36, 43, 106, 111, 112, 113 global circulation, 23 global distribution of wealth and security, 104 global networks, 35, 44, 79 globalized protectorate, 23 immorality of global order, 101 governance, ix, 15, 24, 26, 29, 33, 42, 44, 45, 48, 53, 54, 90, 104, 105, 112 global governance, 29, 33 government (of Afghanistan), xii, xiii, xiv, 5, 6, 9, 13, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 53, 54, 57, 83, 84, 90, 97, 100, 109, 111, 112, 113, 118 governmentality, 46, 47 Grand Assembly. See loya jirga graveyard of empires, 16

128

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Index

Greece, ix, 33, 79, 80–81, 85–88, 90, 93 habitus, 30, 41, 43 hamlets, 3, 50, 55 Hazarajat, 1, 3, 7, 51, 55, 56, 61, 63, 74, 104, 113, 114, 116 Hazaras, xiv, 8, 25, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85, 88, 90, 93 hearts and minds, winning, 9, 12, 113 hegemony, 20, 113 Herat, 11, 30, 40, 75, 100, 111 Homo itinerans, 2, 19, 65, 96, 104, 113, 117. See also itinerancy; itinerants; awâra host country. See country of asylum human rights, 5, 29, 31, 32, 45, 47, 75, 97, 102, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 117 Human Terrain System (HTS), 12 humanitarian action; humanitarian aid; humanitarian organizations, 3, 10, 65, 67, 77, 90, 96, 110, 111, 118 identity, 15, 42, 51, 52, 56, 93, 103, 116 identity card; identity papers; identity documents, 4, 61, 68, 70, 98. See also passports immobility, 116, 117 imperialism, 16 Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG) (Afghanistan), 26, 44, 45 India; Indian subcontinent, xii, 2, 14, 17, 20, 34, 65, 105, 116 Indonesia, 43, 75, 76, 94 inequality, 2, 6, 46, 96, 101, 113, 117 infrastructure, 5, 23, 42, 48, 81 injustice. See justice insecurity, xiv, 2, 27, 32, 34, 52, 53, 57, 64, 96, 109 insurgency; rebellion; uprising, xii, 6, 17, 21, 47, 90, 93, 97, 100, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113. See also resistance intellectuals (in Afghan politics), 25, 56, 62, 76, 78, 103, 111

interest (maximizing), 64 intermediaries; brokers, 51, 85 international community, 4, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47 international organizations; international agencies, ix, 2, 3, 5, 18, 29, 32, 43, 44, 53, 65, 85, 90, 106, 109, 111, 113 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 9, 26 intervention, 65, 106, 112 Soviet (1979), xii, 61, 62 US-led (2001), xii, 2, 4, 12, 23, 61, 68, 108, 110 Iran, ix, xii, xiv, xv, 4, 33, 43, 49, 51, 56, 60–68, 70, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 90, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, 107, 108, 109, 110 Iraq; Iraqis, 1, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 51, 68, 75, 79, 81, 87, 96, 98, 101 irrigation, 12, 48, 54, 55, 63 Islam, 2, 11, 16, 38, 105, 110, 111, 117 militants, networks, 2, 105 Islamic State, xiii, xiv, 6, 17, 97, 105, 110, 118 Islamic world, 106, 110, 118 Islamism; political Islam, 2, 25, 69, 97, 105, 106, 110, 118 isolation (of Afghanistan), 16, 17 Italy, 80, 82, 83, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96 itinerancy, xi, 2, 4, 7, 10, 43, 64, 74, 85, 90, 92, 96, 98, 99, 101, 106, 107, 117. See also awâra itinerants, 65, 81, 82, 83, 88, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 105, 108, 116. See also Homo itinerans; awâra Jaghori, 43, 49, 55, 56, 63, 64, 66, 70, 74 jirga; shura, xiii, 38, 48. See also loya jirga job, 2, 4, 49, 67, 75, 84, 99, 100, 101 justice; injustice, 1, 5, 10, 38, 46, 100, 104, 118 Kabul, ix, xii, xiv, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 19, 21, 22, 30, 31, 38, 40, 44, 53,

Index •

59, 67, 98, 100, 102, 103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116 Karzai, Hamid, xiii, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 31, 38–42, 44, 45, 47, 111 Khavaris. See Berberis kinship; relatives, 3, 4, 15, 35, 50, 51, 55, 57, 61, 63, 66, 70, 76, 77, 78, 108 legitimacy (social and political), 16, 23, 25, 27, 28, 35, 43, 47, 54, 90, 106, 110, 111, 112, 117 Lesbos, ix, 81, 88, 90, 96, 100, 113 liberalism; neoliberalism, 2, 103, 104, 106, 107, 112, 113, 118 lineage, 55, 57, 64 local community; local group, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 58 local and global, 4, 37, 104, 117 loya jirga; Grand Assembly, xiii, 4, 38, 43 manteqa, 55–57 market, 6, 17, 26, 36 employment, job, labour, 23, 66, 99 marriage, 3, 70, 73, 74, 75, 78 masculinity, 108 Mashhad, 40, 65, 67 Mazar-e Sharif, 75, 87, 100, 111, 114, 115, 116 Middle East, 2, 6, 17, 70, 71, 78, 85 migration; migrants, xvi, 1, 3, 5, 6, 20, 29, 33, 34, 40, 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 108, 110, 111, 118 economic, 82, 84, 89 forced, 67, 91 integration (migrants), 6, 60, 67, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91, 99 invisibility (migrants), 96 mixed, 82, 89 voluntary, 91 Millennium Development Goals, 6 Ministry of Agriculture (Afghanistan), 26, 43, 44 Ministry of Finance (Afghanistan), 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 104

129

Ministry of Interior (Afghanistan), 26, 43, 44 Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) (Afghanistan), 26, 44, 53 minors, 82, 84, 87 unaccompanied, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 99 mistrust. See trust mobility; movement, ix, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 34, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 74, 85, 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 107, 108, 110, 113, 115, 117, 118 mobilization, political, 15, 52 modernism, Muslim, 17 modernity, 10, 36, 102–107, 112 entangled modernities, 105 multiple modernities, 105 modernization, 103, 106 theory, 15 money transfers, 4, 34, 78, 84, 85, 108 morality, 14, 16, 20, 73, 94, 96, 100, 101, 103, 112 moral economy, 85 National Solidarity Programme (NSP), 38–48, 53, 54, 58 Nauru, 75, 76 neighbourhood; neighbours, 48, 50, 51, 57, 63, 66, 73 networks armed, 109–110, 111 clientelist, 3, 34, 74, 77, 107 commercial, 108–109, 111 distribution, redistribution, 43, 44, 109 global, transnational, 22, 24, 35, 47, 79, 85, 111, 113 humanitarian, aid, 110–111 Islamist, 106 migratory, 70, 78, 107–108, 111 professional, 29 social, 74, 108 New York, 3, 4, 17, 20, 40, 69, 70–74, 106 New Zealand, xvi, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79

130

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Index

nomads, 18, 49, 50, 52, 64, 107, 118 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), ix, 2, 6, 9, 10, 18, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 42, 43, 53, 56, 57, 65, 82, 102, 103, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114 North America, ix, xvi, 2, 4, 14, 25, 26, 70, 78, 91, 107 Norway, 76, 116 Pakistan; Pakistanis, ix, xiv, xv, 3, 4, 13, 14, 16, 33, 35, 43, 49, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 90, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 102, 107, 108, 109, 110 participant observation, 3, 32, 71 participation, 55 NSP, 43, 46 women’s, 54 parties, political, 25, 43, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 75 Pashtuns; Pashto (language), 11, 15, 21, 25, 30, 39, 40, 41, 49, 50, 51, 52, 75, 77, 90, 93, 97, 98 passports, 4, 9, 61, 75. See also identity card Patras, 82, 83, 87, 93, 98, 104 patrilineal group; patrilineal system, 15, 50, 55 patronage, 53 peace, 5, 12, 14, 42, 58 agreement, talks, xiv, 56 building, promotion, 36, 106, 112 liberal, neoliberal model, 2, 103, 106, 107, 113 people smugglers, 83, 86, 88 Persian (language), 3, 4, 7, 8, 19, 39, 40, 41, 58, 65, 81, 93, 98 policy-irrelevant research, 91 political economy, ix, 32, 58, 107, 108, 111 population local, 11, 13, 38, 47, 53, 54 rural, 39, 46, 53, 113 postcolonial world; postcolonial countries, 37, 58, 62, 111

postcolonialism, 14, 103, 106 postconflict reconstruction, ix, 5, 14, 32, 46, 106, 112 postwar reconstruction. See postconflict reconstruction poverty, 25, 26, 46, 53, 96, 100 power relations, 2, 31, 32, 33, 43, 53, 56, 104, 105 president (of Afghanistan), xii, xiii, xiv, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 111. See also elections Program for Culture and Conflict Studies (CSS), Monterey, 15 provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), 8, 9, 12, 26 pushcarts, 71, 72, 74 Que a, 49, 59–65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83 rebellion. See insurgency reconstruction, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 22, 23, 27, 29, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 53, 58, 94, 113 postconflict, ix, 5, 14, 31, 32, 46, 106, 112 rural, 38, 53 Red Army, 1, 17, 40, 56, 62, 94 redistribution, 25, 43, 44, 85 refuge, xv, 59, 61, 67, 82, 98, 100 refugees, xiii, 2, 3, 4, 33, 34, 35, 65, 67, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 108, 110, 118. See also United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Afghan refugees, 3, 33, 86, 94, 108 international regime, 5, 67, 68, 91 refugee camps, ix, 3, 61, 117 refugees and economic migrants, 82, 84, 88, 89 three solutions, 5 relatives. See kinship resistance. See also insurgency colonial time, 16, 17 dominant society, 100

Index •

internal, 17 post-2001, xiv, 12, 16, 62, 103, 110, 113 Soviet period, xii, xiv, 24, 25, 27, 40, 54, 56, 108, 110 resources, 3, 4, 15, 23, 27, 28, 34, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 78, 85, 102, 105, 107, 111 risk (minimizing, distributing, spreading), 51, 64, 85, 108 rite of passage, 64, 108 rule of law, 6, 97, 103 rural areas. See countryside Russian Empire, 2, 13, 16 scale, 3, 4, 37, 48, 103, 104, 117. See also global dynamics and everyday interactions Scandinavia, 79, 99 security, 21, 26, 28, 35, 37, 39, 42, 44, 45, 51, 55, 85, 97, 104, 109, 111 sedentariness, 5 sedentary farmers, 50, 52, 107 Shiite, 39, 56, 61, 69, 75, 84 shura. See loya jirga slaughterhouses, 75 smuggling; contraband, 109 social groups, 3, 15, 20, 46 social relations; social links, 4, 44, 46, 47, 55, 60, 99, 102, 117 solidarity, 4, 43, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 64, 68, 78, 90, 91, 96, 99, 103, 108 Southern California, 70, 79 sovereignty, 6, 14, 23, 25, 28, 35, 36, 37, 40, 47, 58, 103, 106, 111, 112 Soviet Union; Soviets, xii, 16, 17, 40, 61, 67, 108, 113 intervention; invasion; occupation, xii, 55, 63, 67, 107 withdrawal, xii, 56, 108 state (the), 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 17, 19, 20, 25, 26, 34, 35, 36, 37, 47, 62, 65, 76, 82, 86, 88, 90, 96, 100, 106, 112, 117 Afghan state, 25, 28, 30, 35, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 47, 58, 62, 106, 108, 112 failed states, 25, 106

131

nation-state, 15, 36, 37, 88, 90, 91, 104, 106, 108, 111, 112 Westphalian model, 35, 36 strategies (of people), 3, 4, 32, 34, 64, 65, 82, 86, 90, 91, 94, 108 street vendors, 71 Subaltern Studies, 20 subjectivities, 41, 43, 47 subversion, 104, 113, 118 Sunni, 11, 61, 69, 82, 110 Sweden, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 94 Switzerland, 10, 33, 91, 93 Syria; Syrians, 87, 96, 97, 98, 101, 108 Tajiks, 25, 51, 52, 77 Taliban, ix, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 4, 6, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 40, 50, 51, 74, 75, 84, 93, 94, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 115, 118 Tampa, 76–77 Tehran, ix, 3, 63, 65, 66, 104, 113, 116 territoriality, 104 terrorist a acks in Paris (November 2015), 97 towns. See cities training programmes; continuous training, ix, 15, 26, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 46 trafficking; traffickers (drugs), 6, 10, 106, 108, 111 transit, 76, 80, 82, 85, 98, 109 transnationalism, 2, 3, 7, 17, 23, 34, 37, 47, 48, 65, 74, 77, 78, 79, 82, 85, 102 – 103, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 117 transparency, 24, 26, 33, 46, 47, 54, 88 tribalism; tribes, 12, 13, 15, 18, 57, 98, 103, 107, 118 trust; distrust; mistrust, 10, 11, 57, 66, 73, 76, 83, 84, 100, 102, 111, 118 Turkey, 79, 84, 90, 93, 94, 97 UN Habitat, 53 United Kingdom, 78, 80, 99 United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), 10, 19, 20

132

•

Index

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 26, 27, 114 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), ix, x, 67, 68, 80, 81, 82, 86, 88, 89, 91, 108 United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), 30, 31 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 108 United States, xiv, 9, 13, 22, 24, 25, 26, 69, 70, 73, 74, 78, 79, 104, 110, 116, 118 US Army, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 26 US-led coalition, military intervention, 2, 4, 23, 61, 108, 110 universalism, 3, 104, 105, 106, 110, 113 uprising. See insurgency

village; villagers, 2, 7, 9, 12, 13, 20, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 48, 49–53, 57, 58, 60, 62, 65, 82, 84, 90, 92, 94, 103, 104, 107, 110, 113, 117 visa, 4, 66, 70, 73, 75 war. See conflict warlords, 27, 111 Washington DC, 40, 70, 79, 117 West (the), 17, 37, 67, 70, 73, 78, 91, 96, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 118 workshop, 5, 26, 38, 41–43, 47, 74, 88 World Bank, 20, 24, 26, 27, 38, 43, 53, 54 young adults, 70, 82, 83, 84, 85