Imagining Afghanistan : the history and politics of imperial knowledge 9781108491235, 1108491235, 9781108811767, 1108811760

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108491235 DOI: 10.1017/9781108867986 © Nivi Manchanda 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Manchanda, Nivi, 1988– author. Title: Imagining Afghanistan : the history and politics of imperial knowledge / Nivi Manchanda. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019055988 (print) | LCCN 2019055989 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108491235 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781108811767 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108867986 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Afghanistan–Study and teaching–Great Britain. | Afghanistan–Study and teaching–United States. | Afghanistan–Foreign public opinion, British. | Afghanistan–Foreign public opinion, American. | Knowledge, Theory of–Political aspects–Great Britain–History. | Knowledge, Theory of–Political aspects–United States–History. | Public opinion–Great Britain | Public opinion–United States. | Imperialism. Classification: LCC DS355.2 .M36 2020 (print) | LCC DS355.2 (ebook) | DDC 958.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055988 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055989 ISBN 978-1-108-49123-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Imagining Afghanistan

Over time and across different genres, Afghanistan has been presented to the world as potential ally, dangerous enemy, gendered space and mysterious locale. These powerful, if competing, visions seek to make sense of Afghanistan and to render it legible. In this innovative examination, Nivi Manchanda uncovers and critically explores Anglophone practices of knowledge cultivation and representational strategies and argues that Afghanistan occupies a distinctive place in the imperial imagination: over-determined and undertheorised, owing largely to the particular history of imperial intervention in the region. Focusing on representations of gender, state and tribes, Manchanda re-historicises and de-mythologises the study of Afghanistan through a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing and demonstrates how the development of pervasive tropes in Western conceptions of Afghanistan have enabled Western intervention, invasion and bombing in the region from the nineteenth century to the present. nivi manchanda is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include post-colonial theory, histories of race and empire, and gender studies. She is co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (2014) and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Politics.

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Imagining Afghanistan The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge Nivi Manchanda Queen Mary University of London

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For nana, and in loving memory of nani

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But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians. Traders travelling safe routes had been attacked and plundered. Stock thefts had increased in scale and audacity. A party of census officials had disappeared and been found buried in shallow graves. Shots had been fired at a provincial governor during a tour of inspection. There had been clashes with border patrols. The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went; the Empire should take precautionary measures, for there would certainly be war. Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the Frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe. —‘The Magistrate’ in J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for Barbarians, 1980

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction

page viii ix 1

1

The Construction of Afghanistan as a ‘Discursive Regime’

23

2

A Space Contested, or the ‘State’ of Afghanistan

66

3

The Emergency Episteme of the ‘Tribe’ in Afghanistan

105

4

Framed: Portrayals of Afghan Women in the Popular Imaginary

143

5

Subversive Identities: Afghan Masculinities as Societal Threat

180

Coda

221

References Index

230 249

vii

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Figures

I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 4.1

Afghan textbook from the Soviet era Lady Butler, Remnants of an Army Ambush in the Second Anglo-Afghan War Afghanistan: graveyard of empires Mountstuart Elphinstone’s map of Afghanistan Afghan Boundary Commission ‘Whose to pay for the division of Afghanistan?’ ‘Af-Pak’ 2025: a geography of terror ‘Terror attack level: Severe – an attack is highly likely. For security reasons it is now time to ban the burka.’ 4.2 Woman in a burqa C.1 Really Big Coloring Books: Talibani 5

page 2 29 31 38 79 81 83 98 153 163 222

viii

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Acknowledgements

In an interview Fred Moten once intimated that if we think something (a piece of music, a painting, a text) belongs to an individual, it is probably because we didn’t look closely enough. One need not read between the lines to realise that this book too is a product of what academics increasingly label ‘co-production’. It emerges out of an industry renowned for its practices of appropriation, expropriation, silencing and discrediting, and as such it is implicated in those invariably racialised, gendered and classed processes of knowledge production. But it is also a product of intellectual community, political solidarity and enduring friendships. In the past ten years I have amassed innumerable debts: from the early days of my PhD, I had the active and invaluable support of Duncan Bell and Tarak Barkawi at the University of Cambridge. In London, many brilliant generations of PhD students based at the LSE read drafts, shared insights and drinks and made an indelible impact on the project. I am lucky to be able to call Charmaine Chua, Ali Howell, Kerem Nisançioglu, Olivia Rutazibwa, Jesse Crane-Seeber, Paul Kirby, Michael Bloomfield, Kathryn Fisher, Melanie Richter-Montpetit, Rahul Rao, Akanksha Mehta, Ida Roland Birkvad, KellyJo Bluen and Kate Millar my friends, and their influence can be felt palpably on the pages of Imagining Afghanistan. Martin Bayly, Jonathan Ludvig and Kurt Jacobsen read the manuscript in full, and the book is a much stronger piece of scholarship for it. I owe special thanks to James Eastwood and Chris Rossdale for their close reading of countless drafts, hours of conversation and general ability to discuss the minutiae of this project from its inception to its ‘completion’. Words will not do justice to how much I have learned from them over the years, and how much I value their friendship. Lisa Tilley and Sara Salem have been sources of untold wisdom, wit and warmth, and their confidence in this project was often infectious enough for me to overcome my own lingering doubts about it. They have shaped my thinking profoundly, and I hope this book is worthy of their faith in me. There are far more people – some of them close friends, others whose brilliance I’ve only encountered fleetingly at conferences – who have had some input on Imagining Afghanistan ix

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x

Acknowledgements

than I can thank in this space. I hope they will forgive me for their absence, which is only an absence on paper. At Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), I have experienced that rare coalescence of camaraderie and intellectual generosity that has led me, on more than one occasion, to confuse ‘work’ with ‘home’. I am indebted to each one of my current and former colleagues, but I’d have to single out Robbie Shilliam, Engin Isin, Kim Hutchings, Laleh Khalili, Sophie Harman, Clive Gabay, Holly Ryan, Liz Chatterjee, Musab Younis and Peter Brett as pillars of support and inspiration. Sharri Plonski and Kate Hall have been so much more than colleagues, and their presence in my life in the final stages of writing and editing has made the whole process bearable, even enjoyable. At QMUL and beyond, I have had the honour of teaching excellent students who have pushed me to be clearer and more coherent in my writing and thinking. Danny Hayward’s and Zayed El Omari’s assistance has been indispensable at various points in this project. I am also grateful to all those who have helped me chase copyrights, navigate archives and library collections and directed me to the right ‘sources’. My final thanks are reserved for my family, who have ensured that despite many a political disagreement, I have not had to lose my kin. My gratitude for my parents is perhaps overshadowed only by my love for them, even though I must confess that I fail to express either adequately. Seeing how much they have sacrificed has definitively discouraged me from having children of my own. Masi, Markus, Tarini and Kabir are some of my best friends and favourite people. That they also happen to be my immediate family is a stroke of luck unparalleled in any fable of good fortune. Harriet Maltby, John McCambridge, Anna Berezovskaja and Zaya Bulag have been my family of choice, and have graciously endured all that I’ve subjected them to over the last decade. Paul Higate has joked that he is the secret coauthor of this book, and as with so many jokes of that ilk, there is more than a grain of truth in it. Admittedly, in this, as in many other walks of my life, he is a silent co-author. Nonetheless, as a true feminist, he can rest assured in the knowledge that for once it is the man who’s being thanked for his assistance in typing, doing the dishes and generally ensuring the writer’s sanity. All this to say, that I love him with all my heart and he brings me more happiness than I deserve. This book is dedicated to nana, who impels me to be a better person and scholar each day, and to the memory of nani, without whom the book, and much of who I am and what I do, would be unrecognisable. The editors at Cambridge University Press, and Lucy Rhymer in particular, saw merit in this project many years ago and have adeptly shepherded it into its current form. Emily Sharp has been a pleasure to work with, expertly fielding

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Acknowledgements

xi

my million bewildered questions. Lisa Carter and Fiona Little, likewise, have worked tirelessly in the final stages of production. A section of Chapter 1 has been published in Middle East Critique (https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149 .2019.1633745), and some of Chapter 5 has been adapted from an argument I made in Third World Quarterly. While I cannot take the full blame for the structural elisions and erasures that I am (largely) unwittingly implicated in, most mistakes and omissions remain mine.

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Introduction

Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests . . . We should admit rather that power produces knowledge . . . that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose at the same time power relations. —Michel Foucault, 19791

[R]epresentation is the production of the meaning of the concepts in our minds through language. It is the link between concepts and language which enables us to refer to either the ‘real’ world of objects, people, or events, or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and events.

—Stuart Hall, 19972

An Afghan schoolbook, which uses bullets and Kalashnikovs as counting tools, is one of the items prominently on display at the National Army Museum (NAM) in London, housed in its ‘Conflicts of Interest’ gallery, which opened to the public in May 2013. This illustrated children’s textbook references apples and oranges alongside mujahid and jihad and uses rifles along with pencils as numerical aids. The NAM website notes: ‘[T]he book dates from the Islamic year 1356 (c1986) during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Its warlike content is a stark reminder of the lasting legacy of conflict in modern Afghan society’, with the curator Mairead O’Hara further elucidating the way in which war is ‘part of the fabric of daily life’ in Afghanistan. To pre-empt hasty judgement, she explains that while using firearms as tools to learn how to count may seem sinister to us in the West, these objects compose the everyday

1 2

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 27–8. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, vol. 2 (London: Sage, 1997), 5.

1

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2

Introduction

Figure I.1 Afghan textbook from the Soviet era. Image reproduced by Tarini Manchanda

reality of life in Afghanistan. So, while these objects are very different from ‘our everyday objects’, they are the pedestrian objects of everyday life in their society.3 The textbook (Figure I.1), along with the other exhibits displayed, may be read as a laudable attempt to bring the military intervention then under way in Afghanistan into the popular consciousness of the citizens of a country whose army has been embroiled in a long and protracted war ‘over there’.4 What the exhibition and its curators fail to mention is how these textbooks came into being. During the mid 1980s, a project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) printed millions of textbooks in Peshawar that were distributed to schoolchildren across Afghanistan. The textbooks were designed to indoctrinate Afghans against the evils of the Soviet Union and made for immensely powerful propaganda. Specialists from the Afghanistan Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha received $51 million to develop a curriculum, which glorified jihad, celebrated martyrdom and dehumanised

3

4

Both the video and the description, along with a photograph of the textbook, can be found online at www.nam.ac.uk/collection/collection-news/new-afghanistan-objects-on-display (last accessed 13 March 2019). The Afghanistan section of the gallery also includes the memorial wristband for Corporal David Barnsdale, who was killed in an improvised explosive device (IED) strike in 2010, ‘lucky charm’ bracelets and soldiers’ identification badges.

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Introduction

3

foreign invaders.5 Published in Dari and Pashto, these schoolbooks taught the alphabet through Kalashnikovs and counting through guns and bullets, and had elaborate mathematical questions which drew on conflict scenarios, deploying various firearms in inventive ways, for more advanced pupils. One example read: ‘A Kalashnikov bullet travels at 800 meters per second. A mujahid has the forehead of a Russian in his sights 3,200 meters away. How many seconds will it take the bullet to hit the Russian’s forehead?’ Although USAID funding for the project stopped in 1994, multiple copies of the texts remained in circulation in the 1990s and into the 2000s. The Taliban, in another grisly turn, continued using these American-produced textbooks, but, in keeping with their fabricated scripture that denounced all pictorial representation of human images, removed the heads of people depicted in the books.6 What remained were images of decapitated persons carrying Kalashnikovs, poignant pedagogical instruments for eight-year-olds. As a statement on the ways in which knowledge is produced about Afghanistan, this anecdote crystallises three of the key themes that underpin this book. In the first instance, it reflects the complete disavowal of complicity that has characterised imperial policy and strategy with regard to the country. Afghanistan represents an intrinsically violent place in this imaginary, one whose violence ‘we’ have very little to do with.7 Second, running parallel to, and overlapping with, this politics of disavowal is the operation of a ‘grammar of difference’,8 which may be best understood as the implicit hierarchisation and segregation of certain places and peoples based on a Manichaean division of the world into two9. Such logics of difference and distancing are key in 5

6 7

8 9

This is now public knowledge. See for instance Mahmood Mamdani, ‘The Secular Roots of Radical Political Islam’, in Berma Klein Goldewijk, ed., Religion, International Relations and Development Cooperation (Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishing, 2007), 153–60; Joe Stephens and David Ottaway, ‘The ABC’s of Jihad in Afghanistan’, Washington Post, 23 March 2002; and Syed Nadir El Edroos, ‘Learn to Be Taliban: K is for Kalashnikov’, The Express Tribune, 12 March 2011. The military content was included to ‘stimulate resistance against invasion’, in the words of Yaquib Roshan of Nebraska's Afghanistan Center (quoted in Stephens and Ottaway, ‘The ABC’s of Jihad’). But see for instance Anand Gopal, No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), which refers to this book as an example of the scriptural fundamentalism of the Taliban. Stephens and Ottaway, ‘The ABC’s of Jihad’. Throughout the book, I use ‘we’ to signal a certain positionality, that of the ‘Western’ and, more specifically, Anglophone subject. Sara Ahmed has cautioned against the use of this pronoun, which she claims remains bound to a Eurocentric collective construct in which inclusion is premised on a process of violent exclusion: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 17. I nonetheless choose to deploy it, not unreflexively, but rather as a reminder of the ways in which even critical scholars situated in the West are ensnared in the reproduction of colonial hierarchy and relations of domination. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3. Lisa Lowe argues through her reading of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History that in Western theory and philosophy, the world is plotted on a spectrum which ‘permits the

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4

Introduction

constituting Afghanistan as an object of enquiry and intervention and the epistemic and physical violence that accompanies these modes of ‘interaction’ with the Other. Finally, the exhibit and its explication highlight the fundamentally cursory nature of engagement with Afghanistan’s history, politics and society, both historically at the height of empire and in the present day. By ‘cursory’ I mean a hurried, superficial and ‘token’ involvement that is dramatically intensified in periods of conflict. These three themes spliced together provide the broad conceptual scaffolding of this project. At its kernel the project is a study that traces the circuits of imperial knowledge production about Afghanistan in an attempt to re-historicise and de-mystify the dominant narratives about the Afghan state and its peoples. Although these are by no means exhaustive or even the only narratives that have circulated about Afghanistan, the power of British and later American imaginaries at the height of their respective empires makes them uniquely important for understanding the processes of knowledge production that structure and enable colonial interventions. A word here on the scope of the book: my singling out the USA and the UK necessarily amounts to an exclusion of alternative imaginaries, mostly pertinently Soviet ones – as crucial to Afghanistan’s modern history – and Indian and Pakistani ones – as ‘inheritors’ of the geo-political imaginaries of their British colonial predecessors. While I fully acknowledge that there are other geographical imaginaries of Afghanistan that are distinct from the Anglosphere, and that even within the Anglosphere (including in India, Pakistan, Canada and Australia) alternative representations abound,10 my emphasis on Britain and the USA is at once expedient and consistent with my aims. On the one hand, this emphasis helps retain a crisp focus on prepotent narratives that are currently in circulation, not least because of the continuing and dominating presence of British and US forces in Afghanistan. And on the other hand, a critique of British-American Anglophone discourse on Afghanistan assists us in provincialising or ‘vulnerabilising’ this very discourse. If, through sustained critique, we can move beyond

10

colonial subsumption of the “lower” Asian and Mediterranean world into the “higher” expression of Christian Europe, while naturalising indigenous disappearance in the Americas and exempting Africa as “unhistorical” placing the entire continent at the “threshold of world history itself”’: The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 238. For her, this colonial division of humanity can be tracked as colonial difference within the present that is not a fixed binary distinction, but rather is one that operates through multiple modes of spatial difference and temporal development. I would agree, but also posit that this teleological and gradated difference nonetheless relies on a cruder division of the world into ‘developed and developing’, ‘East and West’, ‘north and south’ or any number of dualistic distinctions that when probed further reveal themselves as more complicated and multivariate. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this point and helping me clarify the scope of the manuscript.

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Afghanistan Classified: Research Question(s)

5

this hegemonic discourse and its totalising ambitions, we can prise open the space for other, less straitened, modes of being and understanding. Thus, given this scope of the project, which is delimited to these two imperial behemoths, the time frame is from the nineteenth century to the formal withdrawal of troops in 2014, although since the focus is on the discursive constitution of Afghanistan as an object of empire, periods of heightened imperial activity are foregrounded. A related aim of this book is the refiguring of ‘common-sense’ modes of enquiry and conventional units of analysis in the social sciences and the humanities. Stripped to its essentials, Imagining Afghanistan asks two simple but cardinal questions: ‘how is Afghanistan thought about in a way such that it is possible to invade and bomb it?’ and ‘what are the sources of authority that sanction the discourses that make that act of invasion permissible and possible in the first place?’ Afghanistan Classified: Research Question(s) Academics, politicians, decision-makers and people in all spheres of human interaction present their subjects, construct their analyses and establish meanings. In so doing, they conjure up the world they seek to describe. We have in recent years been privy to an increasing acknowledgement that ‘reality’ is inter-subjective and our experience of it socially produced and mediated, but what precisely does this mean for a global order characterised by entrenched power asymmetries and deepening rifts between the haves and the have-nots? Through an analysis of the practices of knowledge production about Afghanistan, and in particular, the way in which Afghanistan is thought about and represented in and by the Anglophone world, this study spotlights the interlocking and co-constitutive relations between knowledge production, racism and war. With anthropology at the forefront, the last few decades have witnessed the mounting of a significant challenge to the systematic silence and evasion over the imperial-racial origins of the human sciences.11 Imagining Afghanistan partakes in the effervescent conversation about social science’s implication in empire, both past and present, and brings to the table a rather peculiar example 11

For anthropology see especially Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993); and Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). And to choose paradigmatic works from other disciplines: for sociology see George Steinmetz, ed., Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); for economics, Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World’, European Journal of Sociology 47, no. 2 (2005), 297–320; and for philosophy, Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

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Introduction

of this implication.12 This is the story of imperialism in Afghanistan, a story which is perhaps best designated as that which is the ‘same but different’. It is the ‘same’ in that it displays, even exemplifies, a steady, if not quite consistent, lineage of colonial thinking about the Other. Afghanistan, in keeping with the rest of the Third or subaltern world, has been judged, represented and constructed according to those recognisable logics of mystification, hierarchy and fetishism. However, Afghanistan is not merely the Orient of Edward Said’s Orientalism; it is also the disOrient. This difference stems from what I refer to as its quasi-coloniality; Afghanistan is a not-quite colonised entity, situated at the margins of colonial thought, praxis and policy, and it has been subject to a form of the euphemistic ‘indirect rule’ that turned out to be every bit as invasive as ‘direct’ rule but was never fully operationalised.13 Afghanistan, I submit, has been marked by the presence of empire, which mutated into an absence and back again, as if by demand. This book is thus an account of the imperial politics of knowledge production about Afghanistan, a place which, although of immense geo-strategic significance today, remains under-studied or inadequately studied. There are two lacunae in the study of that I have identified, and I aim to make two corresponding moves to address these.14 The first is largely conceptual. As a study fuelled by an interest in ideas, perceptions and representations, the project critiques and challenges the conventional empiricist, and specifically positivist, wisdom of social science in which the world is experienced in terms of an ontological distinction between physical reality and its representation. My perspective is different from the ‘constructivist’ or ‘constructionist’ viewpoint that argues that the world is ‘socially constructed’. The world is socially constructed, but power and privilege – through the practices of representation – ‘socially construct’ non-European Others and ‘bring them into the world’ in specific ways, as subordinate, as ancillaries or as unimportant. If in the age of modern technology, the world has become a ‘picture’ or an ‘exhibition’,15 then this ‘staging of the world’16 circumscribes the very

12 13

14

15

16

Here my interlocutors are largely those working in the fields (or more accurately the fringes) of politics and international studies. On the concept (and misnomer) of ‘indirect rule’ initiated by the British in India, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). At various points in the book I employ the accepted distinction between international relations and International Relations (IR) to refer to global politics and the corresponding discipline respectively. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 115–54; Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

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Afghanistan Classified: Research Question(s)

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conditions of possibility for the Other in interesting and complex ways. My contention is that this modernist metaphysics – where the Other is always represented and (pre-)given a part to play – must be understood as part of the ‘colonising project(s)’.17 This book, then, was conceived as a ‘decolonising’ intervention or ‘corrective’ in the broadest possible sense: it challenges us to rethink and ultimately unlearn the colonising impulses of knowledge production in the Western academy. Through an analysis of popular and academic narratives about Afghanistan – which routinely appear in newspapers, policy documents and academic publications – addressing certain topics including, for instance, the status of women (Chapter 4), the ‘warlike’ nature of the tribes (Chapter 3) and the failure of the Afghan state (Chapter 2), I endeavour to show how these narratives simultaneously present and represent a world; that is, how they concurrently create a reality and allege that they stand ‘independent of that same reality’.18 This is a classic sense-making or ‘nomos-building’ manoeuvre: the bringing of the marginalised subject into being through a generative discourse, the constructed nature of which is immediately disowned and disavowed; and the invention of this subject, through practices of representation, reframed as the ‘discovery’ of the subject. In the assertion of independence by those doing the representing, difference is fossilised through a series of reiterative and enunciative acts, most notably through a proliferation of essentialist tropes and stereotypes about the Other. Distance and disavowal become much easier to sustain in this world-as-exhibition. The first gap operates at the level of theory or meta-theory; the second ‘gap’ is rather less rarefied and has to do with the place Afghanistan occupies in the world described above. Afghanistan’s geo-political salience in the age of the so-called War on Terror is unquestionable, but it remains shrouded in mystery, almost as a sort of obscure(d) object of violence. Afghanistan is mostly dealt with as a ‘policy’ or security problem, seemingly posed uniquely in the twenty-first century. While the last decade has witnessed the growth of some excellent (and much needed) scholarship on the region, these works are mostly historical in orientation.19 What remains missing is a coherent body of work dedicated to analysing how an assemblage of practices of representation and 17

18 19

I am deliberately referring to the ‘project’ as a ‘colonising’ and not a ‘colonial’ one, for three reasons, and firstly to stress the ongoing and the seemingly inexorable nature of colonising practice, foregrounding continuity instead of distinguishing between colonial and post-colonial epochs. Secondly, the concept subsumes under it practices that may not be strictly ‘colonial’ but follow similar logics, such as the ghettoisation of black communities in the USA or the clamping down on Maoists in India. Thirdly, it (re-)centres representation and discourse as key to this hegemonic, but not uncontested, project. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Martin Bayly, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Benjamin Hopkins and Timothy Nunan are exemplary in this regard. This study has benefited greatly from their prolific (and expanding) oeuvres.

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Introduction

interpretation, sometimes deliberate and always political, took root and has come to shape a particular ‘idea’ of Afghanistan in the Anglosphere.20 The unmistakable portent of these representations – and the corresponding ‘idea’ – is of more than academic interest. At its most basic, the carving up and hollowing out of Afghanistan as a policy issue is a prominent manifestation of the academic-military complex, a relationship with a long history but one that has found renewed vigour in the War on Terror. There is a demand for ‘practical’ knowledge, which is produced and utilised overwhelmingly for military purposes.21 Notwithstanding the ethical concerns that the production of academic expertise for purposes of war gives rise to,22 the immediate need for ‘solutions’ to the Afghan ‘problem’ – alternately apprehended as the failure of the state, the upsurge in terrorist activities, the internecine feuding of ‘tribes’ and the plight of women and children – has resulted in what may be called an ‘emergency episteme’. Afghanistan ‘experts’ were born virtually overnight, rushing to fill the vacuum of knowledge that the country found itself in or, more accurately, to correct the vacuum of its own knowledge about Afghanistan that the Global North discovered, as if unexpectedly. The need to rapidly produce and digest material on Afghanistan was especially urgent because the country had been largely neglected in the years immediately before 11 September 2001 (9/11) for reasons of political convenience and imperial indifference, and it reflects something of a trend when it comes to the country. This requirement for ‘quick data’ also signals an underlying imperial anxiety in the face of ambiguity, a danger emanating from what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘partial gaze’ of the coloniser,23 and is in effect a continuation of the legacy of what I ascribe to Afghanistan’s quasi-colonial status. The coloniser’s gaze, always parti pris, is attenuated further in the case of Afghanistan. With the country established as an ancillary to ‘empire proper’, efforts to taxonomise it and make it intelligible have been sporadic and patchy, based on political expediency and colonial caprice. This makes Afghanistan’s position in the wider discursive Orientalist apparatus a curious one: scripted and 20

21 22

23

For an enquiry into the ‘Anglosphere’ as a community of English-speaking states, nations, and societies, conducted from a post-colonial perspective, see Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Vucetic’s Anglosophere encompasses Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but as established the scope of Imagining Afghanistan is rather more limited. Academic ‘intel’ is also, of course, used for non-military ‘management’ of the conflict not least by NGOs, think tanks and diplomats. For an overview see Hugh Gusterson, ‘Do Professional Ethics Matter in War?’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3 April 2010. See also Nancy Lindisfarne, ‘Culture Wars’, Anthropology Today 24, no. 3 (2008), 3–4. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October 28 (1984), 125–33.

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circumscribed according to the logics of Othering, it is nevertheless something of an anomaly in its departure from the recognised genealogies of the sustained and penetrative restructuring of most other (post-)colonial societies. The above-mentioned Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, founded in 1972, is still the world’s only permanent research and training centre devoted solely to the study of Afghanistan.24 Set up to counterbalance the Soviets, following a lull in the 1990s, it found a renewed sense of purpose after 9/11. The centre has since provided ‘training on Afghan history, culture, and language to U.S. Army Human Terrain System teams that were departing for Afghanistan’. It has trained over 600 military and civilian personnel to prepare them for service in Afghanistan. It also helped ‘professionalize’ members of the Afghan National Army between 2008 and 2010.25 Similarly, Indiana University recently inaugurated a National Resource Center for creating Pashto-language materials, focusing on providing ‘key training for U.S. forces in Afghanistan’. Gene Coyle, a retired CIA officer, who has never worked in Afghanistan, serves as director. That requirement is written off as incidental because, as Coyle proclaims: ‘[w]hen a guy stands up and says, “I spent 30 years in the CIA and dealt with hundreds of foreign officials – trust me, this knowledge is really going to help you”, it carries a lot more street cred’.26 Incidentally, the Indiana University programme provides only ten days’ worth of training – enough Pashto and Dari for students to learn the alphabet and ‘basic cultural competence including religious beliefs and appropriate behavior toward women’.27 To problematise the ‘story’ of Afghanistan that emerges from ventures such as these – characterised by desultory interest and superficial engagement – and the silences, erasures and the occasional giant leaps of logic that inhere within it is a second (arguably more important) aim of my study. In a sense, this second lacuna is the lacuna of Afghanistan; under-theorised and overdetermined Afghanistan is hastily and unjustly constituted as a problem needing to be fixed, as a failure that needs to be corrected. Imagining Afghanistan is situated at the interface of geo-politics and culture, and shows how practices of knowledge production about the Other are deeply implicated in the imperial present. A slightly different intellectual map can be drawn of this project, in the form of the two questions that invigorate it, as delineated below. 24

25 26 27

The small private American Institute for Afghan Studies (AIAS) in Boston, founded in 2003, may be considered an exception by some, but its limited mandate and output make it at best a partial exception. According to the website of the Center for Afghanistan Studies, http://world.unomaha.edu/cas/ (last accessed 30 August 2018). Ibid. This information can be viewed on the National Resource Center’s web page, http://newsinfo.iu .edu/news/page/normal/13033.html (last accessed 19 January 2019).

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Introduction

What Is Critique? This text is first and foremost a critique, to employ what has now become a fashionable and over-used term.28 It is a critique of the practices of knowledge production and cultivation about the non-Western world through their particular application within a delimited space: that which we refer to as ‘Afghanistan’. By critiquing these practices and processes of knowledge generation in the Anglosphere, I do not seek to repudiate or overturn the present conceptions of Afghanistan and replace them with more accurate perceptions, but to complicate this ‘truth’ about Afghanistan and also to make a small contribution towards an understanding of how this truth emerged and came to be widely accepted. The book, then, asks vital questions about regimes of power in order to assess claims to truth, not to refute them as simple untruths, but to excavate a more complex story about how some discourses materialise and cohere as hegemonic systems of truth, and in their wake delegitimise and subjugate other discourses and knowledges. The thinkers whose work has most animated this project have all stressed the importance of critique. I tread in their footsteps and underscore that critique is not equivalent to criticism; critique is always active, always by someone and for a purpose.29 I understand critique to be a situated practice that challenges the taken-for-granted and opens fruitful avenues and new ways of thinking about the ubiquitous and coercive knowledges that shape our imperial present. From this vantage critique is best viewed as an insurgent form of scholarship, as a decolonising project of political engagement that recognises the imbrication of the ethical and the epistemological, or the intellectual and the political.30 This is much more than negative polemic, although it may incorporate an element of polemic if the occasion demands. But What Is Afghanistan? The question ‘what is critique?’ is perhaps secondary to a rather more difficult question: ‘what is Afghanistan?’ Afghanistan possesses a singular (but 28 29

30

‘Qu’est-ce que la critique?’ was the title of Michel Foucault’s lecture of 27 May 1978, given before the French Philosophical Society. This is hardly a contentious claim and can be found across the works of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler and Timothy Mitchell, to name a few prominent theorists. I am painfully aware of using ‘decolonising’ as a figurative expression rather than a literal prescription, precisely in a manner that is abhorrent to those at the front lines of the decolonial project in settler colonial sites. Once again, we rub up against the inadequacy of the current vocabulary, even in spaces (at least nominally) committed to a radical politics and social justice. For more on this see Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012), 1–40.

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certainly not a single) function in the imperial imagination(s). Never formally colonised, Afghanistan occupies a position in the Anglophone Orientalist canon that has been largely unstable, its identity and importance in incessant flux. This can be attributed, in no small part, to the rise and fall of imperial interest in Afghanistan. Judged by the holy grail of Western historiography, the story of Afghanistan is essentially one of fits and starts. A bird’s eye view or a crude ‘historical’ survey looks something like this. Terra incognita until Mountstuart Elphinstone’s mission in 1807, Afghanistan first appeared on the colonial map in the early nineteenth century. Following a century of British engagement and retreat, it ‘vanished’ in the mid twentieth century for military and strategic purposes.31 The Soviet invasion of 1978 put it firmly back on the map before it was disappeared again after the formal end of the Cold War. Afghanistan exploded onto the world screen in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. The bouts of ostensibly totalising colonial power succeeded by periods of desertion are indicative of a tension at the heart of the ‘idea’ of Afghanistan, a tension which has prevented a comprehensive corpus of knowledge from emerging. Those studying the country today have inadvertently reproduced the obfuscation and confusion that exists in the British colonial archive. Revisionist historians presently working on Afghanistan, most notably Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Benjamin Hopkins and Nile Green, have been assiduously committed to demonstrating the impact of colonialism on Afghanistan’s polity and its concomitant structures.32 They have also highlighted the entropy and contradiction that have been defining features of British interaction with Afghanistan. While my purpose here is limited to underscoring what is arguably colonialism’s most lasting legacy – the imperial (re)production of Afghanistan as a discursive regime – it would be remiss to overlook the deepseated incertitude that has marked each aspect of the study of Afghanistan, one that begins with the very term ‘Afghan’. The etymology of Afghan can be traced to the Persian term for ‘wailing’ or a ‘raucous or lamenting cry’ – fughan, a perhaps inauspicious, but certainly symptomatic start to the story of Afghanistan.33 Indeed a twenty-first-century commentator suggests that ‘[i]n modern times the term “fughan” most aptly 31

32

33

Although it continued to be a laboratory for experiments in modernisation and humanitarian aid especially in the 1960s. See Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations on a Colonial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Nile Green, ed., Afghanistan in Ink: Literature between Diaspora and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Nile Green, ‘Locating Afghan History’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 1 (2013), 132–4; Nile Green, ‘Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History’, The Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 1 (2008), 171–211; and Benjamin Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Green, ‘Tribe, Diaspora and Sainthood’, 186.

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Introduction

describes the wailing of its women and children’.34 It is interesting to note how Afghanistan was conceived, from the very beginning, through an idiom of scorn. The etiological myth connected to the word ‘Afghan’ is marked by the language of insult – the rowdy, loud, wailing Afghan Other was born by way of an unflattering comparison with the suave Persian self. It was Mughal India that provided the setting for the process of ethnogenesis, and the ultimate congealment of a distinct ‘Afghan’ identity differentiated from and defined against the hegemonic Persian Other.35 However, the word has been dislodged from its original context and was replaced by a ‘Pathan’ identity that took root in English-language texts in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Dari, Uzbek and speakers of the other ‘national’ languages have often referred to Pashto speakers as ‘Afghans’, interpellating a linguistic rather than national identity. This in contrast to the meaning of ‘Afghan’ as ‘citizen of Afghanistan’ postulated in the constitution.36 As Hanifi cogently explains, the ‘most confusing’ dimension of the British colonial archive on Afghanistan has been passed on to the majority of modern scholars – that is, the metonymy and polysemy among the terms ‘Afghan’, ‘Pashtun’ (and its primary variant ‘Pakhtun’) and ‘Pathan’. These labels carry manifold cultural, historiographic and geographic characteristics that distinguish them from each other, but are usually applied either uncritically in unison or interchangeably. Indeed, for Hanifi the commingling of these terms – ‘Afghan’, ‘Pashtun’ and ‘Pathan’ – across multiple genres ‘including archival documents, academic literatures, foreign policy formulations, and popular writings about Afghanistan has been a casual and consistent practice. As such, the labels reflect cultural ambiguities and historical distortions that impede full and objective appraisals of the country and the social groups comprising it.’37 Even if we were to be sceptical of achieving a ‘full and objective appraisal’, the unreflective grafting of the word ‘Afghan’ onto the modern framework of ‘nationality’ is problematic and obscures the troubled history of the term.38 Following standard (English-language) practice, in this book I use ‘Afghans’ to refer to all citizens of the state of Afghanistan and ‘Pashtun’ to refer to Pashto speakers, and refrain from using ‘Pathan’ completely except in explicit reference to colonial or British texts. There are several problems that

34 35 36

37 38

Nazeer Ahmed, ‘Afghanistan: Land of Valor, Land of Sorrow’, PakistanLink, 8 August 2008. Green, ‘Tribe, Diaspora and Sainthood’, 173; and Hanifi, Connecting Histories, 19. See Lutz Rezehak, ‘Ethnic Groups and Structures’, in Thomas Schrott, ed., Dossier on Clan and Tribal Structures in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Ethnic Groups; Pashtunwali; Hazara; Religious Welfare Structures), Austrian Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum, COI Unit, July 2016, www.ecoi.net/en/document/1236701.html (last accessed 16 September 2019). Hanifi, Connecting Histories, 19. For an in-depth assessment of the historical conundrum that underlies the word ‘Afghan’ and its latter appropriation, see Green, ‘Tribe, Diaspora and Sainthood’.

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Power/Knowledge

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arise from this. For instance, some Pashto speakers do not self-identify as ‘Pashtun’; ‘Afghan’ for some has a weak national referent, whereas ‘Pathan’, although an appellation deployed by the British to single out the martial races of Afghanistan, has nevertheless been internalised and used by a number of inhabitants of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border region and therefore cannot be completely overridden as a colonial imposition with no local salience. Nonetheless, I continue to use these terms in the way I do for the sake of clarity, but always with the awareness that the labels do not neatly map onto contemporary usage and, in fact, illuminate the knotty practices of knowledge, the perpetuation of some myths at the costs of others, and the stilted imperial understanding of, and engagement with, Afghanistan. The following section is dedicated to that regime of imperial power which continues to advocate myths selectively, stakes out particular knowledges as credible and deftly manages to elide the historical and cultural contingency of all knowledge production. Power/Knowledge Through the power of representation Afghanistan is introduced to the world, alternately and often concurrently, as potential ally, as dangerous enemy, as gendered space, as an exotic or mysterious locale and as the nemesis of modernity. These competing visions, varying greatly across time and space, nonetheless seek to make sense of Afghanistan, to impose upon it a degree of intelligibility, to render it ‘legible’ to those who come in contact with it.39 Each and every intelligible ordering relies on a ‘system of elements’ or a ‘grid’ in terms of which similarities and differences can be cast and things, peoples, places ordered and organised. Foucault argues that these grids of intelligibility come into being through certain context-dependent and institutionalised constellations of power/knowledge, what he has elsewhere termed an ‘episteme’.40 My contention is that the body of knowledge about Afghanistan displays elements of an episteme – and Afghanistan does indeed have a designated epistemic community attached to it,41 much like any other part of the world – but one that has never been fully institutionalised. This lack of institutionalisation is a key 39

40

41

James Scott’s path-breaking Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) is possibly the single most authoritative treatise on the concept of legibility. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Vintage Books, 1973), xx; and also Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Random House, 2012) and vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (London: Random House, 2012). An epistemic community is ‘a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area’: Peter M. Haas, ‘Epistemic Communities and International-Policy Coordination – Introduction’, International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992), 3.

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Introduction

element in the story of Afghanistan constituting a nebulous and contested ‘grid of intelligibility’ or ‘space of knowledge’, the origins of which lie in the semi- or quasi-colonial nature of the Afghan state. The turbid taxonomies and dissonant representations of Afghanistan that populate the English-speaking public sphere can be viewed as last resorts in the attempt to make sense of a place and a people where the project of domination remains fundamentally incomplete and riven with anxiety.42 In turn, these words and images unleash enormous power, which often has the most intense material repercussions. Afghanistan then finds itself in a vicious cycle of power/knowledge – an uncharted entity recurrently produced as an unknown, leading to ever greater mystification and mythification. These representations of Afghanistan convey more than popular prejudice, and as Derek Gregory and Allen Pred claim about places imaginatively constructed as ‘violent geographies’ in the War on Terror, they ‘spiral through the state apparatus, the military, the market, and even the academy’.43 Afghanistan, conjured up by this disciplinary economy of power, is always already a fledgling discursive regime, never quite fully established – insofar as anything can be ‘fully established’ – but over-determined and construed as somehow innately constituted by a pre-existing lack: the lack of statehood, of modernity, progress and, crucially, of history. Plotted on the axes of alterity and savagery, Afghanistan occupies a curious place, constituted by an unstable hierarchy of difference. The ambivalence and ambiguity that typifies imperial interaction with Afghanistan is most obvious in the sphere of representation: the manner in which Afghanistan is described, depicted and portrayed to the outside world. The passages below are dedicated to expounding the importance of representation to both this book and to the larger understanding of Afghanistan’s place in East–West relations. Restating that all knowledge is socially situated, an ineludible ‘view from somewhere’,44 Imagining Afghanistan foregrounds the practice of representation as both an acutely potent mode and a means of knowledge production. Representations are actively involved in the construction and constitution of the processes and people they aim to describe or capture.45 As Judith Butler affirms, ‘framing’ is a politically saturated act, and representations are 42 43 44

45

This refers primarily to the public sphere in Britain and the USA, as specified above. Derek Gregory and Allen Richard Pred, eds., Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence (London: Routledge, 2007), 3. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. Haraway’s work on the modest witness and situated knowledges, and concerns with modernity, power/knowledge and standpoint theory, have much resonance here. Or as Michael Shapiro puts it: ‘Because the real is never wholly present to us – how it is real for us is always mediated through some representational practice’, quoted in Jutta Weldes, ed., To

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Power/Knowledge

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always ‘acts of power’.46 Representations, with all the ineluctable filtering through of the biases of those doing the representing, are also a specific form of inter-cultural relation by which the Other is defined, delineated and ‘made up’. Representation is productive, processual and performative. It is productive in the sense that representations are implicated in actively creating the objects they seek to portray. It is processual in that representations are not discrete events occurring in a vacuum but through their repetition and reiteration become transformative, with their own ‘looping effects’, in the words of Ian Hacking.47 And finally representation is performative, insofar as it is a ‘signifying act’,48 which delimits and shapes what it claims to find a priori and that which it insists exists ‘out there’ independent of all signification. Taking my cue from Johannes Fabian, I endeavour to show how the act of representing (the Other) is inherently one of conferring difference and creating distance.49 In its attempt to either capture or re-create reality, representation reifies its object, gives shape to it and also sets it apart, both temporally and spatially from the speaking subject. Representation is also understood here as narrative. Hayden White’s pioneering Metahistory demonstrated how narrative has always been governed by tropes and genres, which regulated and produced the most influential nineteenth-century historiographers. White’s argument, that empirical (historical) validity was inseparable from narrative codes that were themselves social and linguistic constructions, is of utmost pertinence here. If narrative is ‘an activity in which politics, tradition, history, and interpretation converge[d]’,50 representation is its quintessential mode. The chapters of this book can then, individually and cumulatively, be understood as an attempt to show how representations of Afghanistan, and the tropes upon which they rely, are crucial to an appreciation of how it is interacted with,

46

47

48 49

50

Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 12. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 1. Representations in this schema are ‘cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and differential framing of violence’ (ibid.). Ian Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, in Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack, eds., Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 351–94. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 30. Fabian, Time and the Other, and ‘Culture, Time and the Object of Anthropology’, Berkshire Review 20 (1985), 7–23, and ‘Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing’, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990), 753–72. See also Dean Maccannell and Juliet Flower Maccannell, ‘The Time of the Sign: A Semiotic Interpretation of Modern Culture’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 17, no. 3 (1984), 184–8. Edward Said, ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989), 221.

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Introduction

thought about and intervened in. Keeping this preliminary conceptual assay in mind, we now move on to the subject of methodology. Methodology or the Madness in This Method Imagining Afghanistan is methodologically and disciplinarily heterodox to the fullest extent possible. This allows me to benefit from and contribute to an array of different traditions that together offer valuable and complementary intellectual resources for thinking through and advancing our understanding of the nature of knowledge production about the Other. Methodological encampment, by which I mean a professed and blinkered allegiance at the outset to ‘inductive’ or ‘deductive’, ‘positive’ or ‘post-positive’ frameworks, not only goes against the spirit of an open-minded academic enquiry, but also risks collapsing the important distinction between ‘method’, as data-gathering techniques or tools, and ‘methodology’, as the philosophical suppositions and ontological justifications that are incorporated into the research process.51 Bearing that in mind, Imagining Afghanistan nevertheless displays clearly identifiable methodological tendencies that can be cued to existing paradigms, as I illustrate below. Starting from the premise that questions concerning epistemology (as theory of knowledge) are invariably intertwined with questions of methodology (as the aforementioned philosophical premises that shape how we go about conducting research) and vice versa, this project is largely ‘interpretive’ in its stance. It is interpretive in the sense that it seeks to obtain a prominent place for questions of hermeneutics in socio-political enquiry. It is also ‘interpretive’ in that it categorically rejects the false dichotomisation of an objective reality and its subjective representation. And finally, it is ‘interpretive’ in that it signals an intellectual, political and ethical positionality that draws attention to the intersubjective, inter-textual and embodied constructions of meaning. However, ‘interpretivism’ and its proponents, especially those who subscribe to it in its ‘weak’ guise, as a qualitative technique that sets it apart from quantitative research, frequently overlook the extent to which power permeates these very inter-subjective practices of meaning-making. The interpellation of the subject is in itself a fraught exercise, one that is buttressed by a host of institutional structures and social practices that work in unison to permit and prohibit. Certain privileged subject-positions are made possible, and others are deemed unreasonable and illegitimate. 51

For an elucidation of the difference between method and methodology, see Patrick Jackson, ‘Can Ethnographic Techniques Tell Us Distinctive Things about World Politics?’, International Political Sociology 2, no. 1 (2008), 91; and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Dvora, ‘“Reading” “Methods” “Texts”: How Research Method Texts Construct Political Science’, Political Research Quarterly 55 (2002), 457–86.

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Insofar as it centres this enabling and inhibiting role of power, my methodological orientation can thus be nested under the broad umbrella of ‘discourse analysis’, although I do not use that label without demur. My reservations stem from the somewhat ironic co-optation of discourse as a depoliticised study of language, semantics and rhetoric.52 Going against the grain to some extent, then, discourse analysis is understood here to mean critical praxis, in its original Foucauldian formulation, which is focused on the rules, systems, rituals and procedures that constitute and are constituted by power’s ‘will to truth’;53 the ‘whole strata of practices’ that undergird the production of truth, including modes of pedagogy, libraries, media and the publication industry.54 Indeed, though the original intentions of critical discourse analysis were quite radical, a more loosely understood ‘textual analysis’ has come to the fore in recent practice, and has somewhat de-barbed it as a method.55 The book draws its inspiration most directly from Foucault’s methodological injunction to problematise the notion of a single and exclusive ‘Truth’ by exposing its historical, political and social contingency and situating it in the pervasive power/knowledge complex sketched out in The Archaeology of Knowledge.56 This archaeological model of discourse analysis eschews a disembodied study of texts and ‘speech-acts’ in favour of focusing on the emergence of (inexorably political) knowledge(s) at the interface of interpretation, language and the material world. Through a historically grounded study of the interlocking modalities of colonial power/knowledge as they manifest themselves in representations of Afghanistan, it foregrounds the sedimentation of meaning attached to ‘Afghanistan’ and its derivatives, in the form of the ‘state’, the ‘tribe’, the ‘Afghan woman’ and the ‘Afghan man’. 52

53

54 55

56

But cf. David Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993); Jennifer Milliken, ‘Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 2 (1999), 225–54; and Derek Hook, ‘Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History: Foucault and Discourse Analysis’, Theory and Psychology 11, no. 4 (2001), 521–47. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). Foucault insists that discourses at their most fundamental are ‘forms of practice’; see also Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structural Anthology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 48. Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, 55. Cf. Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (London: Routledge, 2013), and Lene Hanson, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006). My methodological indebtedness to Foucault should in no way be read as an endorsement of his entire oeuvre. Specifically, Foucault’s vast underestimation of the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human and of socio-political order cannot be brushed under the carpet. For more on this see especially Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

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Introduction

Discourse is not esoteric, neither does it exist in a vacuum. It is by necessity performative, and it does ideological work. Through representation and by actively constructing society, discursive phenomena reproduce and naturalise fundamentally contingent, unequal relations of power. Discourse is also at its crux a violent imposition, and Foucault’s plea in this regard is worth remembering: ‘we must conceive of discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them; and it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity’.57 It is through this violent re-circulation of discourse – always enmeshed in the material arrangements of power – that subjectivities are created, bodies acted upon and both metaphysics and the microphysics of power, along with the resistance to it, operate. In my use of a diverse set of social and cultural artefacts and an eclectic blend of theory and history, I hope to challenge and displace ways of reproducing accepted knowledge frames, as a step towards exploring the ‘potential for imagining alternative possibilities’, especially when looking at political issues concerning the Other.58 In this sense, I am mobilising what Michael Shapiro has called ‘writing-as-method’ in order to disrupt institutionalised forms of recognition, understanding, and ‘doing research’.59 Additionally, by deploying what may be termed ‘montage-as-method’ – selecting, editing and piecing together heterogeneous elements that coalesce to form a contingent and consilient ensemble – my aim is to tell a different story of knowing and assembling, one that challenges the hegemony of accepted traditions of ‘social science’.60 Specifically, this book is concerned with the construction of Afghanistan as a discursive regime. By this I am referring to an ‘idea’ of Afghanistan as a strategically organised ensemble of historico-political knowledges which we associate with, and use to make sense of, the space known as Afghanistan and the people that occupy it. It seeks to disrupt this ostensibly stable and cogent ensemble by shedding light on the discontinuities, ruptures and ambivalence that characterise Afghanistan as a unique discursive regime, with its various elements marshalled in various, sometimes contradictory, ways. By homing in on the ambiguities and contradictions intrinsic to the practices of representation and knowledge cultivation that define Afghanistan as an object of enquiry (and also of intervention), that is, by pointing towards the lack of a sustained 57 58 59 60

Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, 67. Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (London: Routledge, 2012), xv. Shapiro also defines his own approach as ‘posthermeneutic’. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method. Here I am treading familiar methodological waters – oases as opposed to oceans, as they may be – rather than charting new territory. See especially Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method and Hook, ‘Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality’ for more on the dominance of accepted traditions of social science.

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Methodology or the Madness in This Method

19

interaction with Afghanistan, owing in no small part to its quasi-colonial status,61 the task undertaken is an intellectual one that undermines the authority and uproots the unity or coherence of Afghanistan as a discursive regime. It is also a political one, in that I use discourse analysis as a tactics of subversion through a diagnostics of power that undermines hegemonic and essentialised understandings of Afghanistan. Two final methodological caveats are in order here. First, this is not a study that attempts to ‘know’, ‘discover’ or ‘uncover’ a pristine Other, although neither does it prima facie reject all attempts at understanding as exercises of hegemony. Recognising that the ‘Truth’ about the Other is ‘thoroughly imbued with relations of power’,62 and that constructs of knowledge emerge in and through the microphysics of power, is by no means equivalent to a blanket refusal to undertake any and all projects that are concerned with ‘other’ peoples, cultures and states. While there can be no exhaustive representations that are holistic descriptions of some authentic unencumbered ‘real’, and indeed as Linda Tuhiwai Smith has so powerfully argued ‘research’ and ‘imperialism’ have been historically and politically so closely interlinked so as to be almost indistinguishable, through a historically sensitive approach that is committed to what Clifford Geertz has called ‘thickness’, one may yet hope to produce understanding through richness, texture and detail.63 Using methods such as spotting imperial lineages, undertaking genealogies of ostensibly neutral terms and showing how the repertoire of available meaning is always enframed by practices of colonialism, I contribute to the post-colonial approaches and cognate literatures championed by thinkers such as Ann Laura Stoler, Lisa Lowe, Avery Gordon, Timothy Mitchell and Anne McClintock, to name a few preeminent scholars whose work has been particularly influential for the development of my own thought, even if their presence is not always discernible on the pages of this book. Second, and mostly as a disciplinary word of caution, it is undeniable that self-reflexivity and an attendant acknowledgement of our implication in unequal power relations, as ‘experts’, academics and activists located in the Global North, are essential first steps towards a project of decolonisation. However, self-reflexivity often comes with the danger of falling into the trap of self-referentiality, a problem especially palpable in critical International Relations (IR), the discipline in which I have been trained. And students of the human sciences sensitive to these issues have been warned of invoking the

61 63

62 I return to this key point later in the book. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 60. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2013); Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.

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Introduction

‘race, class, sex’ mantra uncritically. One way to deal with such concerns is to be cognisant of the need for the ‘destabilization of epistemic ground’,64 and to step away from what Charles Mills (1997) has called an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ or what Du Bois referred to, more pointedly, as ‘educated ignorance’.65 By this, both are referring to a socially sanctioned ignorance and its concomitant requirement to perpetuate a blinkered vision of the world, one that can be confronted only by practices of un-knowing and un-learning, tasks that are both arduous and uncomfortable. A further related requirement is to engage a range of perspectives and people grappling with similar concerns. My aim here is to extend the ‘niche’ conversation about IR’s shortcomings to one that is geared towards pluralising and democratising interpretations of global politics, to de-centre the ‘exclusionary premise of an imagined Western subject of world politics’,66 and not merely to dismiss the methodological nationalism and individualism that animates most discussions in mainstream IR. This study contributes to a substantial and growing body of work (post-colonial in particular) that takes a similar approach to representation, discourse, knowledge and dominant power in international politics.67 By emphasising the enmeshed modalities of racism, patriarchy and neo-liberal capitalism across multiple dimensions – political, social, economic, cultural, psychological and linguistic – that surface in representations of Afghanistan, the objective is to move beyond the identity/difference nexus and thereby to avoid being entirely consumed by the never-ending loop of self-referentiality. The welding together of different theoretical and methodological templates – including sociology of knowledge, intellectual history, insights furnished from political philosophy, anthropology, critical race theory and post-colonial approaches, such as the subaltern school, which themselves rely on a panoply of thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida and Antonio Gramsci – is critical to questioning and diversifying the prevailing vocabularies through which we make sense of practices of imperialism. While Imagining 64 65

66

67

Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (London: Dover, 1999), 23; Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 11–38. Meera Sabaratnam, ‘IR in Dialogue . . . but Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3 (2011), 782. See especially Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge, 2003); Sankaran Krishna, ed., Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); Himadeep Mupiddi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (London: Hurst, 2012); Robbie Shilliam, ed., International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010).

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Methodology or the Madness in This Method

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Afghanistan speaks to disciplinary outcasts and intellectual punters, it also draws on IR’s relative pliability when challenged by multiple perspectives in an effort to facilitate transdisciplinary conversations and thereby to help overcome political science’s own constitutive exclusions, omissions and erasures. The approach I pursue is one that asks how we think about the Other, in terms both of the processes by which meanings about the Other are produced that impute to them particular identities and subjectivities and of the conditions of possibility that enable certain ways of dealing with ‘Otherness’ and alterity that necessarily preclude alternate interpretive dispositions. My argument is that at least part of the answer to this ‘how’ or ‘how possible’ question, which distinguishes it from ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions,68 lies in practices of knowledge generation and circulation, practices which depend on making the Other legible by classifying, codifying and simplifying. As Rey Chow posits in her acerbic appraisal of the discipline of Area Studies in the American academy, such knowledge about the Other is always instrumental, ‘always returning the results of knowing other cultures to the point of origin, the “eye”/I that is the American state and society’.69 Even if we were to grant that Area Studies has provided much more careful, fine-grained and sophisticated accounts than its progenitors had bargained for, this has not silenced ‘demands for caricatures that can be masqueraded as characterizations’,70 a decidedly severe vexation in the case of Afghanistan, but one which more generally continues to structure relations between Europeans and their Others. To understand and contribute to theorising the power relations still very much extant in East–West relations, I introduce and rely on a range of analytic concepts, of which quasi-coloniality, discursive regime and imperial formation are the most important. In order to present a broad constellation of colonial knowledge that informs multiple sites of engagement, I collate and examine a range of documents, mixing academic articles with NGO reports, political texts and popular artefacts. This slightly unorthodox approach to discourse analysis – interested in multiple discourses and their intersections, divergences and productivity – is best suited to complement my conception of the ‘imperial imaginary’, one that necessarily transcends the parcelisation of knowledge into arbitrary categorisations such as ‘political’, ‘academic’ and ‘popular’. While these distinctions are important and I would not want to collapse them into one monolithic ‘knowledge’, they nevertheless bleed into each other and have 68

69 70

For more on the importance of moving away from ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions to ‘how-possible’ questions, see Roxanne Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of US Counter-Insurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1993), 297–320. See also Jutta Weldes, ‘Constructing National Interests’, European Journal of International Relations 2, no. 3 (1996), 1–23. Chow, The Age of the World Target, 14–15. Gregory and Pred, eds., Violent Geographies, 3.

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Introduction

important consequences for our study of Afghanistan as both a discursive regime and an imperial formation. Equally, an eclectic, if not comprehensive, archive of sources is best suited to shed light on the ways in which Afghanistan both fits the narrative of the colonised Other and departs from it. When dealing with representations of Afghan women, for instance, I tread the familiar terrain of the discourse of saving brown and/or Muslim women, a fixture in the armoury of Orientalism. This can be juxtaposed with representations of the state, which tell a rather more anomalous story, that of the casting out of the Afghan polity as peripheral and aberrant, even in relation to other (post-) colonial states. In the last analysis, the overall emphasis on representations – and representational practice more generally – of Afghanistan serves two related functions. First, it focuses on a largely neglected aspect of the international: the perpetuation of an asymmetrical and hierarchical world order through the ostensibly neutral act of ‘representing’ the Other. Second, it highlights some of the – heretofore unexamined – paradoxes and theoretical aporias that continue to plague the study of Afghanistan, as an over-determined, but under-studied quasi-colonial entity. Imagining Afghanistan shows how, through the act of representation and related practices of knowledge production, Afghanistan is not merely socially constructed but also socially constricted: defined, delineated and spoken for. In parallel fashion to James Scott’s argument that ethnographic accounts do not – indeed cannot – make the Other wholly legible, that they cannot present a ‘full transcript’ of everyday peasant resistance to hegemony,71 representations of Afghanistan can hope only to portray ‘sound bites’ of information about its people. At times the demand for easy information and instant knowledge precludes anything greater than these sound bites; complexity sacrificed for the sake of brevity. But equally, sound bites – as more than journalistic heuristic devices – are themselves embedded in a system that allows certain things to be uttered and packaged in a certain manner. Moreover, the audience – in this case, the Anglophone public (or the vast majority of it) towards whom these sound bites are directed – hears only what it has been programmed to hear. The representations in their various guises – as narrative, as sound bite and as image – come from somewhere, a somewhere that says as much about the ‘representer’ as it does about the ‘represented’ and their ‘preferred meanings’ and proclivities.

71

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

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The Construction of Afghanistan as a ‘Discursive Regime’

[I]t is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalisation; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability, which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed. —Homi Bhabha, 19831

Left to their own devices, Afghans engage in internecine battles, or simply enjoy freedom – not the kind enforceable by a Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, or Communist Manifesto, but of more ancient derivation – unbothered by government at all. —Stephen Tanner, 20032

The imbrication of knowledge with power is nowhere more obvious than in the realm of learning and pedagogy in the human sciences. The sustained study of distant places and peoples, in a particular manner, has been crucial to the success of colonial ventures, with ‘scholar-practitioners’ often at the helm of these endeavours.3 The recurrent calls for ‘embedded knowledge’ and the deployment of anthropology and other social sciences at the service of ‘empire lite’ are the products of a long and intimate relationship between the military

1 2 3

Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, Screen 24, no. 6 (1983), 19. Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War against the Taliban (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2009), 4. Traditionally the French have been at the forefront of this, with Napoleon Bonaparte’s scientific expedition to Egypt as the first exercise of its kind. The dispatch of an enormous contingent of academics and scientists (savants) to Egypt in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent founding of the Institut d’Égypte (Egyptian Scientific Institute) paved the way for ‘Egyptology’ and then for contemporary ‘Middle East studies’ (or ‘Orientalism’). In the twentieth century there was a burgeoning of institutions in Europe for the specialised production of knowledge of the colonies. The founding mission of the School of Oriental Studies (the ‘African’ was added to its name in 1938) in London was to rival the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris and the famous Oriental schools of Berlin and Petrograd.

23

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Afghanistan as a ‘Discursive Regime’

and the academy or, more euphemistically, between Mars and Minerva.4 The colonial episteme was revivified most recently in the shape of the US Department of Defense’s Human Terrain System (HTS), a programme which ‘manufactures a highly reified version of Afghan society and makes claims of authenticity, often framed within a discourse of “tribe” as an unchanging dimension of Afghan society’.5 In the pages below, I analyse some of the stock tropes that have been deployed, indeed parroted, in contemporary work on Afghanistan that feeds directly into this resuscitated colonial episteme. After focusing on the construction of Afghanistan alternately as the ‘graveyard of empires’, as a ‘buffer’ in the ‘Great Game’ and as a space of disease and pathology in a number of important texts that are the core of the US military’s ‘cultural awareness strategy’, I spend some time analysing one particular book, Afghanistan 101, by Ehsan Entezar, which crystallises the concerns of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, in the ways in which it (re)presents Afghanistan as a space of alterity, pathology and even monstrosity.6 This text is exemplary in its propagation of a certain ‘idea’ of Afghanistan, an idea that is increasingly becoming ‘common sense’, not least because it is underwritten by an entire infrastructure of knowledge-producing entities. Read collectively, these texts and tropes also signal the deep-seated anxiety that produce what Bhabha has called the ‘narcissistic demand for colonial authority’: the desire to make sense of that which is the same but not quite through reductionist strategies of articulation such as stereotyping, euphemisms and caricatures.7 In the context of an intervention in which the need for shorthand essentialisms is especially acute, given the lineage of intermittent imperial engagement with Afghanistan – heightened during times of crisis – these tropes both reflect and engender a set of power relations in which Afghanistan is repetitively constituted as a place of mystery and of inscrutable otherness. This chapter takes as its point of departure Duncan Bell’s claim that ‘[t]he social sciences stand at the nexus of power and knowledge in the modern

4

5

6 7

See, for instance, Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) and Josef Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi, ‘Utile Forms: Power and Knowledge in Small War’, Review of International Studies 40, no. 1 (2014), 3–24. Benjamin Hopkins and Magnus Marsden, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (London: Hurst & Co., 2011), 7. While formally this programme was repealed in 2014, there are now rumours, including some emanating from the US Army, of its being revamped into something bigger called the Global Cultural Network, based at Fort Leavenworth. See www.congress.gov/113/ plaws/publ291/PLAW-113publ291.pdf and https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/ 09/army-misled-congress-and-public-program/81531280/ (both last accessed 13 March 2019). Ehsan M. Entezar, Afghanistan 101: Understanding Afghan Culture (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2007). Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, 128.

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Afghanistan as a ‘Discursive Regime’

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world. Universities and other research institutions have generated, incubated and helped to disseminate forms of knowledge, and programmes for social and political action that have played a fundamental role in shaping the world in which we live.’8 By undertaking a close reading of texts that are at the core of the US military’s ‘cultural awareness’ strategy, my objective is to enumerate the ways in which these accounts perpetuate a particular, reified understanding of the Afghan nation and people. Often written with the explicit (wellintentioned) aim of making Afghanistan easier to comprehend for the Western outsider, this body of work leads to a rather simplistic and ultimately misleading caricature of an enormously complex part of the world.9 It is precisely in this (re)iterative power of discourse, in its capacity to produce the phenomena that it merely claims to be relaying, that the crucial importance of studying texts, tropes and narratives such as these lies. The texts and tropes examined below can be broadly nested under the category of ‘mercenary’ anthropology, understood as the increasing militarisation of anthropology since 2001 and the turn to notions such as ‘culture’ and ‘society’ in the formulation of military and counter-insurgency doctrine.10 While it may be argued that work in this vein can make for soft targets of critique, there are two main reasons why a focus on policy-oriented scholarship that carries the patina of ‘cultural empathy’ is nonetheless important: (i) ‘thin’ anthropology, geared towards training outside actors in the guise of soldiers, aid workers and those employed by the NGO or not-forprofit and charity sectors is the most widely read and circulated literature and therefore continues to inform policy in and towards the region;11 and (ii) much of the critique of this style of work remains tied to and based heavily upon the same logics, if more sophisticated in its analysis. That is, even where there is an acknowledgement that the ‘Afghan’ subject should be ‘heard from’, the role they are allowed to play is pre-assigned, with the speaking part written beforehand.

8 9

10

11

Duncan Bell, ‘Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond’, International Affairs 85, no. 1 (2003), 3. This is not to say that Afghanistan is any more or less complex than any other part of the world; to do so would directly undermine the purpose of this exercise. My intention is merely to argue that platitudes about Afghan tribal codes, mindsets and ideologies stem from a body of knowledge that is explicitly geared towards ‘making sense’ of the Afghans by making some stock assumptions about them and that in the final analysis, a dangerous practice even when it acknowledges the ‘complexity’ of Afghan culture. I borrow this term from Roberto Gonzalez, ‘Towards Mercenary Anthropology? The New US Army Counterinsurgency Manual FM 3-24 and the Military-Anthropology Complex’, Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (2007), 14–19. ‘Thin’ here is meant to signify the opposite of Geertz’s notion of ‘thickness’ mentioned in the Introduction to this book.

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Afghanistan as a ‘Discursive Regime’

A case in point would be Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, which is a well-researched historical account that figures prominently in university syllabi and has been touted as ‘essential reading’ for those interested in the region.12 However, in the very first page of the book Barfield decodes Afghanistan as a problematic political entity by arguing that the country ‘became a failed state’ in the 1990s.13 The book foregrounds the ‘tribal nature’ of Afghan politics and reinstates the importance of understanding this tribal make-up of the country in order to get a handle on its politics and history. While he is more measured in his statements than Ehsan Entezar (analysed at some length below), the frame of reference, or the ‘grid of intelligibility’,14 remains the same, and a thoroughly racialised logic permeates the vocabulary and reasoning used to apprehend Afghan political universe(s) and lifeways. Hence Barfield can write of the power struggle that resulted in the 1980s after the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was disolved: ‘[i]t was not the result of some Afghan penchant for blood feud or tribal rivalries (although these did play a part) but rather the predictable consequence of having armed and funded political-military factions in Pakistan that had long awaited for such an opportunity to arise’.15 On his account, then, some inexplicable ‘Afghan penchant for blood feuds and tribal rivalries’ had a small but important role to play in the political upheaval that resulted from the power vacuum created by the dissolution of the ruling party in Afghanistan. This is not to argue for the irrelevance of feuds and rivalries per se but to demonstrate how widespread the perception of Afghans as innately driven by barbaric ancient traditions is. The point here is not to debate the accuracy of representations nor the ‘authenticity’ of certain forms of social organisation 12

13

14

15

Ronald Neumann, US ambassador to Afghanistan in 2005–7, maintains that the book is of ‘extraordinary importance’. His and other endorsements can be read at http://press.princeton .edu/quotes/q9144.html (last accessed 1 February 2019). Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1. The full paragraph reads: ‘[i]t remained peacefully neutral in the first and second world wars, although it experienced a brief civil war in 1929. But then in the mid twentieth century Afghanistan was transformed into a cockpit for the cold war struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that reached its climax with the Soviet invasion in 1979 and its withdrawal ten years later. In the subsequent civil war that erupted in the 1990s, Afghanistan became a failed state, ignored by the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century it burst back on to the world scene when radical Muslim jihadists planned the 9/11 attack against the United States from there and provoked a U.S. invasion in retaliation. Since that time, a new Afghan government has struggled to bring stability to the country in the face of an Islamist insurgency.’ Ann Laura Stoler has argued that grids of intelligibility were always fashioned from ‘uncertain knowledge’ reflecting colonial anxieties and incertitude and inherently ‘socially contingent’ in ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science 2, nos 1–2 (2002), 87–109. This is a slightly different reading of Michel Foucault’s ‘grid of intelligibility’ as it appears in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 93. Barfield, Afghanistan, 250.

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Graveyard of Empires

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present in Afghanistan – for that leads to a whole other set of questions of experience, authority and interpretation – but to show how the production of knowledge about Afghanistan remains intimately tied to imperial forms of power. In the current imaginary, ‘they’ are always already inherently irrational, guided by unfathomable motives (even when we are told that these are only part of the picture). Barfield tellingly also ends his book by resorting to a familiar metaphor of disease when referring to the Taliban insurgency currently under way in Afghanistan. Thus Barfield, an otherwise acute observer of Afghan politics and evidently well versed in the historical landscape of the country, nevertheless remains embedded to these same logics of distancing and disavowal and fiercely loyal to the very ontological assumptions that define his less nuanced counterparts. Before we direct our attention to one such scholar, the following discussion reviews three of the stock tropes used in the broader discourse on Afghanistan. Graveyard of Empires The euphemistic reference to Afghanistan as the ‘graveyard of empires’ has found a place in most contemporary work on the country. This section conducts an epistemic enquiry into the political valence of this trope, arguing that it is especially ill chosen on three counts. Firstly, it is ahistorical, relying on a selective evocation of history. Related to this ahistoricism, it sets up the past as the ‘key’ to understanding the Afghan present. A simplistic version of this argument is one that stresses the ‘unchanging’ nature of Afghanistan, harking back to the Anglo-Afghan wars of the nineteenth century as not merely shaping the political exigencies of Afghanistan today, but being preordained and definitive guides to the future. Secondly, it is geographically or ‘physically’ deterministic: Afghanistan is constructed as a land of unconquerable terrain, its topography menacing and ultimately unassailable. Not only does this present the physical environment as an immutable entity, but it also feeds into representations of Afghans as rugged warriors, bred to be weathered and austere. Thirdly, it is racialised: Afghans as inhabitants, creators and living relics of this graveyard are constructed as inured to hardship, belligerent and always prepared for combat. Seemingly corroborated with references to Pashtunwali as the stagnant ‘code of honour’ that instils a desire for revenge, and Wahhabi Islam, which glorifies martyrdom and death in battle, the construal of Afghanistan as ‘the graveyard of empires’ becomes a politically charged trope that others the Afghan populace. In alluding to Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, the three AngloAfghan wars (1839–42, 1878–80 and 1919 respectively) and the Soviet invasion of 1978 are adduced as the paradigmatic examples, with occasional reference to Alexander the Great and Chinggis Khan as also having met their

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Afghanistan as a ‘Discursive Regime’

match in Afghanistan.16 An article published in Foreign Affairs in 2001 titled ‘Afghanistan: The Graveyard of Empires’ captures the thrust of much work that portrays Afghanistan as the land that has ostensibly, since time immemorial, been the place where foreign armies ‘go to die’. Thus the author, Milton Bearden, writes of Khyber: This spot, perhaps more than any other, has witnessed the traverse of the world's great armies on campaigns of conquest to and from South and Central Asia. All eventually ran into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribals. Alexander the Great sent his supply trains through the Khyber, then skirted northward with his army to the Konar Valley on his campaign in 327 BC. There he ran into fierce resistance and, struck by an Afghan archer's arrow, barely made it to the Indus River with his life. Genghis Khan and the great Mughal emperors began passing through the Khyber a millennium later and ultimately established the greatest of empires – but only after reaching painful accommodations with the Afghans.17

While there is some ambiguity about the ‘defeat’ suffered by Alexander and Chinggis Khan in Afghanistan, most Western historiography is relatively consistent in its labelling of the British adventures in Afghanistan as a failure. For instance, Thomas Barfield, to give him credit where it is due, takes exception to the graveyard canard, claiming instead that Afghanistan has been a ‘highway of conquest’ since the beginning of recorded history and that only since the nineteenth century can the country be rightly thought of as the burial ground for imperial ambition. He contests that the territory that now comprises Afghanistan was ‘easily conquered and ruled’ by foreign invaders, and posits that the difficulties faced by invading armies including those of Alexander and Chinggis Khan were caused by attacks by rival states and not by rebellions carried out by inhabitants. Although his history of pre-modern Afghanistan is therefore ‘revisionist’ in this sense, he nevertheless ends up subscribing to the notion that modern Afghanistan is somehow particularly predisposed to be impervious to foreign rule. He asks: ‘[H]ow is it that a territory that was historically overrun by every major power in pre-modern times became so indigestible in the last 150 years?’18 and begins his inquisition with the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–42.

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See, for instance, Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010). See also Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (London: John Murray, 2006). Cf. Rob Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: Culture and Pragmatism: A Critical History (London: Hurst & Co., 2011). Milton Bearden, ‘Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires’, Foreign Affairs 80, no. 6 (2001), www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/57411/milton-bearden/afghanistan-graveyard-of-empires (last accessed 20 February 2020). Thomas Barfield, ‘Problems in Establishing Legitimacy in Afghanistan’, Iranian Studies 37, no. 2 (2004), 263.

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Figure 1.1 Lady Butler, Remnants of an Army. The Print Collector/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Indeed, this war is seemingly eternally inscribed in Anglophone institutional memory as the time when ‘[a] horde of “pagan savages” with primitive weapons had routed the world’s greatest power’.19 This memory has been pictorially enshrined and commemorated in a famous Victorian oil painting by Elizabeth Southerend Thompson – better known as Lady Butler – The Remnants of an Army (1879), which depicts an assistant surgeon in the Bengal Army, Dr William Brydon, clinging to the mane of a fatigued and dying horse and advancing solitarily towards Jalalabad fort.20 This melancholic and elegiac painting (Figure 1.1) is partly responsible for the myth that Brydon was the sole survivor of the 16,000 soldiers under the command of Sir William Elphinstone.21 William Dalrymple’s historical account published in 2014, Return of a King: Battle for Afghanistan, deftly perpetuates the graveyard-esque myth. Dalrymple claimed in an interview in 19 20 21

Fernando Gentilini, Afghan Lessons: Culture, Diplomacy and Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: Brookings Press, 2013), 79. The painting, which depicted the rout of the British in 1842, following the First Anglo-Afghan War, is now displayed at the Tate Gallery in London. Brydon was neither the sole survivor, nor the only man who arrived at Jalalabad safely on the eve of 13 January 1842, although the legend of the massacre of William Elphinstone’s army remains etched in many historical and popular accounts. See Gentilini, Afghan Lessons; D. S. Richards, The Savage Frontier: A History of the Anglo-Afghan Wars (London: Macmillan, 1990). Cf. also Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, and Manan Ahmed, ‘Adam's Mirror: The Frontier in the Imperial Imagination’, Economic & Political Weekly 46, no. 13 (2011), 60–5.

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2014 that in spite of the many ‘uncomfortable similarities’ between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the current NATO intervention, the real ‘precedent’ for the present war is the First Anglo-Afghan War. He describes this war as ‘arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the West in the East’, in which an ‘entire army of what was then the most powerful nation in the world was utterly destroyed by poorly-equipped tribesmen’. Despite stating that he finds the argument that Afghanistan is impossible to conquer historically untrue, Dalrymple nevertheless effectively resuscitated the graveyard myth when he conjectured: ‘[a]ny occupying army here will haemorrhage money and blood to little gain, and in the end most throw in the towel, as the British did in 1842, as the Russians did in 1988 and as Nato will do later this year’.22 By exceptionalising Afghanistan as the place where all occupying armies would ‘haemorrhage money and blood’ rather than recognising that intervention on this scale would be expensive and involve bloodshed wherever it is conducted, Dalrymple constitutes Afghanistan as ‘abnormal’, as an indefatigable space excessively prone to warfare. This also glosses over equally unequivocal victories of the ‘East’ over the ‘West’, most spectacularly that of Ethiopia over Italy in the late nineteenth century.23 Nonetheless, in any event, this first war was a patent triumph for the Afghans, and on all accounts the British Army, or more precisely the East India Company army, found itself morally and physically crushed. The Second Anglo-Afghan War on the other hand was a resounding success for the British, and the Third at least a tactical victory for the British Empire. The Second Anglo-Afghan War, fought between the United Kingdom and the Emirate of Afghanistan between 1878 and 1880, ended after the British emerged victorious against the Afghan rebels and the Afghans relinquished all control over their country’s foreign relations and ceded various frontier areas to Britain, as laid out in the Treaty of Gandamak, which the new Emir, Yaqub, was forced to sign on 26 May 1879.24 He also had to permit a permanent British mission in 22

23 24

William Dalrymple, Return of a King: Battle for Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014). Quotations are taken from his BBC interview at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine26483320 (last accessed 20 February 2020). For Dalrymple, Afghanistan then and now is, as the Emir who surrendered to the British reportedly claimed in 1839, ‘a land of only stones and men’. It is also the case as of 2019 that NATO has not ‘thrown in the towel’. For more on this see Raymond Jonas, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Barfield, Afghanistan. The first section of the treaty reads: ‘His Highness the Amir of Afghanistan and its dependencies agrees to conduct his relations with Foreign States in accordance with the advice and wishes of the British Government. His Highness the Amir will enter into no engagements with Foreign States, and will not take up arms against any Foreign State, except with the concurrence of the British Government. On these conditions the British Government will support the Amir against any foreign aggression with money, arms, or troops, to be employed in whatsoever manner the British Government may judge best for this purpose. Should British troops at any time enter Afghanistan for the purpose of repelling foreign

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Figure 1.2 Ambush in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. duncan1980/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

Afghanistan. The Third Anglo-Afghan War, fought between the months of May and August of 1919, ended in an armistice that affirmed the validity of the Durand Line as the political boundary between British India and the Emirate of Afghanistan. The Afghans were allowed to resume conduct of their foreign affairs in return for a ‘promise to not foment trouble’ on the border with British India (see Figure 1.2).25 Given that the British won, at least nominally, two of the three Afghan wars, the popular claim that Afghanistan is either unconquerable or impossible to defeat in battle is uncorroborated at best.26 Moreover, the fact that Afghanistan

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aggression, they will return to their stations in British territory as soon as the object for which they entered has been accomplished.’ See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Gandamak (last accesssed 19 December 2019). Michael Barthorp, Afghan Wars and the North-West Frontier 1839–1947 (London: Cassell, 2002). Some scholars, including Barfield, who buy into the premise if not the terminology of the graveyard metaphor, contest the claim that the British ‘won’ the Third Anglo-Afghan War by emphasising the fact that Amanullah reclaimed control of the country’s foreign policy and titular ‘independence’ from Britain. This overlooks Britain’s growing disenchantment with Afghanistan and the end of the regular subsidies provided by Britain to Afghanistan, which effectively provoked the revolt that spelled the end of Amanullah’s government. For more on

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was never fully colonised, that is its quasi-colonial status, owed as much to British indecisiveness and lack of interest in the country as it did to any ineradicable difficulties in conquering the country or to the Afghans being a particularly formidable enemy. British vacillation and oscillation between the ‘forward’ and ‘close border’ policy with regard to the frontier was documented at the time, and archival research conducted for this book and beyond reveals the detrimental repercussions this had on both the Afghan polity and on relations between high-ranking individual administrators within the colonial apparatus responsible for dealing with Afghanistan.27 While this is explored further in the following chapters, to take one example, a confidential report entitled ‘A Note on the Position of Affairs in Afghanistan’ by W. L. Merewether, written in the summer of 1880, posits: The Affghans require to be ruled by a strong hand. Treated justly and firmly they would soon settle down, and would gladly welcome a period of rest after the years of turmoil, uncertainty and oppressive rule they have had to pass through. The country, though mainly hilly, is far from a poor one. Dost Mohamed’s speech that it ‘produced nothing but men and stones’ has been to readily adopted as a correct statement, but it is very far from being so.

The secret memorandum then proceeds to wax lyrical about the rich soil, the fertile passes and the revenue that could be easily generated by the British in India.28 This and other late nineteenth-century correspondence turns on its head the notion that the people of Afghanistan were intrinsically unruly or indeed that its hilly terrain made it inherently difficult to conquer. This rendering of Afghanistan as a ‘graveyard’ also sidesteps contending visions of Afghanistan, including in the West. The historian Arnold Toynbee, for instance, contends that Afghanistan is best conceived of as the ‘old world’s eastern roundabout’ since it is the place where trade routes from India, Iran and the ‘Eurasian Steppe’ all converged’. He claimed in 1961, that new roads over the Khyber Pass would ‘reinstate Afghanistan in her traditional position in the world’.29 Far from being an inaccessible land of perilous passes,

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this, see Gerald Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’, Asian Affairs 4, no. 1 (1973), 55–65. See Olaf Caroe, The Pathans 550 BC–AD 1957 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1983); George Campbell, Afghan Frontier: The Substance of a Speech Not Delivered (1879). See Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2010, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/afghanenglish/247/ (last accessed 17 January 2020); Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan; and Barfield, Afghanistan. Sir W. L. Merewether, ‘A Note on the Position of Affairs in Afghanistan’, confidential memorandum, 26 July 1880, L/PS/18/A36, and Political and Secret Department Correspondence, 24 July 1880, India Office Records, British Library. Arnold Toynbee, Between Oxus and Jumma (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1961), 4.

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Afghanistan in this imaginary is a central node in global movement of peoples and goods. The graveyard of empires trope is perhaps most convincing and emphatic when it places the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the nine years that followed, at the core of its thesis. Although Soviet Russia’s ‘Afghan misadventure’ was of an entirely different magnitude and intensity from the British forays into Afghanistan, the two nevertheless display elements of commonality and overlap. Before drawing out these parallels, a brief recounting of the buildup to the Soviet invasion is germane to the topic. In 1978 Mohammed Daud Khan, the President of the newly christened Afghan republic, was murdered in a coup that brought the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan to power. One of the two factions of the party, the Khalq, quickly became dominant, sidelined the more moderate Parcham faction and formed a direct alliance with the Soviet Union, abandoning Afghanistan’s erstwhile policy of neutrality. The Khalqis instituted radical land reform, made drastic changes in family law and transformed the education system. Their allegiance to Marxist political ideology also saw them launch a wholesale attack on Islam, one that alienated large portions of the Afghan population. The ruling Khalq faction faced mass resistance, especially in the countryside, which it met with military force, resulting in the country’s provinces erupting in rebellion, and what were initially localised uprisings soon spread with a vengeance across the country. The Soviet Union, disenchanted with and untrusting of the Khalqi leadership, after a failed attempt to remove the leadership indirectly, surmised that the safest option was to assume direct control of Afghanistan. Under the premise of restoring stability to Afghanistan, the Soviet Union invaded in December 1979, deposed the ruling Khalq faction and installed a Parchami, Babrak Karmal, as head of the state.30 Over the next ten years the Soviets engaged in an extensive war with the Afghan populace. Dominant narratives maintain that this decade is testament to, and exemplary of, the region’s propensity for savage internecine warfare, and to the unbreakable warrior spirit of its inhabitants. The Soviet Union, on this account, glibly assumed that it could subdue the population of Afghanistan without much effort and rule the country until such time as a government that was subordinate to Moscow but capable of maintaining order in the country could be found. Instead they were confronted with the force of a countrywide 30

For scholarship that focuses on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan see especially Henry Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985); Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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jihad, which in the words of one commentator is the ‘standard occurrence every time Afghanistan tries to change’.31 The Mujahideen are said to have worn down the Soviets through attrition and in the process to have been instrumental in bringing down the colossus that was the Soviet Union. Therefore, in spite of the Soviet enemy’s superior strength, better organisation and greater air power, the ‘holy warriors’, through grit and determination, and united in the name of God, managed to bring the sprawling empire to its knees. The outcome may be seemingly inexplicable given the asymmetry between the fighting forces, but is entirely predictable according to the prevailing discourse of the graveyard of empires.32 The conflict has been called the ‘Soviet Union’s Vietnam’, and while the analogy is both flippant and misguided in its privileging of American experience as iconic and paradigmatic, it is also revealing. In the first instance, it situates the opposition that the Soviets faced in Afghanistan in context: the Mujahideen can be viewed as percipient political agents that resorted to arms in the face of a foreign invasion rather than as Islamic zealots propelled by an innate thirst for blood and violence. The descriptions of guerrilla warfare and Viet Minh fighters may be firmly embedded in an Orientalist framework that relies on the familiar Othering logics of racialisation and dehumanisation, but the comparison goes some way in debunking the ‘exceptionalist’ myth of an Afghan proclivity to fight without a cause by placing Afghan opposition to the Soviets in the broader context of ‘Third World’ anti-colonial resistance and a struggle for independence. While this narrative may be problematic in its paternalistic ethnocentricism or indeed in its romanticisation of ‘Third World sensibilities’, it nevertheless undermines the standard construal of Afghanistan as unique in its impregnability as well as in its knee-jerk hostility to outside intervention. The analogy also foregrounds the Cold War as the frame of reference, emphasising the way in which the conflict became as much about rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union, with elements of a war by proxy in the manner in which the USA dealt with the Mujahideen. It ultimately underscores the oft-misplaced faith that the superpowers had in their own abilities to effect radical change in distant locales during the Cold War. Afghanistan, much like Vietnam, can be viewed as a sobering moment in a tale of imperial hubris.33 31 32

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Gentilini, Afghan Lessons, 81. Even authors who are sceptical of the use of the graveyard trope buy into some version of this account. See, for instance, two informative books that focus on the Mujahideen side of the equation: Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan – The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower (Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2001), and Lester Grau and Michael Gress, The Soviet–Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002). However, Jonathan Steele in his Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths (London: Counterpoint, 2011) contests even this apparent Afghan victory and argues that the Soviets were largely successful in their military endeavours in Afghanistan.

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The graveyard of empires trope also becomes less convincing when the extent of foreign aid, especially that of the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to the Afghan resistance movement is disclosed. On the second ‘Afghanistan Observance Day’, 21 March 1983, Ronald Reagan, then president of the USA, could remark ‘[T]o watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson – that there are things in this world worth defending.’34 However, by 1986, with the provision of the now legendary Stinger, the man-portable anti-aircraft missile, to the Mujahideen by the CIA and the Saudis, Afghan ‘freedom fighters’ were well placed to match the Soviet arsenal with their own sophisticated weapons system. According to conservative estimates the USA supplied over 250 launcher systems and over 500 Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen, along with the specialised training required to operate the system, and also considerably ramped up their project of overall military assistance.35 The Stinger shifted the balance of power to such an extent that the term ‘Stinger Effect’ has been coined to specifically relay the ‘game-changing’ import of the weapon.36 The Soviet–Afghan War was an indubitably asymmetrical one, but the Mujahideen – though far from pusillanimous – were nevertheless funded and militarily supported adequately enough to question popular representations of them as unarmed but fierce, and essentially antediluvian, militants. The extent of outside involvement and support for Afghan insurgents should not be underestimated. Apart from its supplying of billions of US dollars’ worth of arms to the Mujahideen, the CIA’s involvement was substantial even before the introduction of Stinger missiles.37 34 35

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University of Texas archives, www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/32183e.htm (last accessed 20 February 2020). There is a vast literature on covert American assistance to the Mujahideen, much of it written or unearthed after 11 September 2001. For a detailed exposition of US involvement in the Soviet– Afghan war, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (London: Penguin, 2004). The US congressman Charlie Wilson, who was instrumental in funding the Stingers for the Mujahideen, reportedly claimed that before the introduction of the Stinger, the Mujahideen never won a set-piece battle with the Soviets, and that after it was introduced, the Mujahideen never again lost one. See George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). See also Michael Phillips, ‘Launching the Missile that Made History’, Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2011. However, it should be noted that the extent to which this was a ‘game changer’ is disputed, and there are those who argue that the Stingers merely accelerated a decision that had already been taken. The National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinksi divulged the scope of this in 1997 when speaking about the Carter administration’s Afghan strategy against the Soviets. In his words: ‘[w]e immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Council prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their

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This surface review of the history of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1988 is pertinent to the discussion above because it problematises the notion that Afghanistan is and has always been uniquely poised to repel all invaders. Just as a nominally independent Afghanistan served British interests in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Soviet Russia ultimately lacked the will and resources to continue to hold Afghanistan indefinitely. It is not some trans-historical, congenital Afghan predisposition or ‘antibody’ that brought the end of Soviet rule in Afghanistan. The Soviets withdrew because Afghanistan became an increasingly expensive proposition for an empire that was crumbling from within and that had a new leader with a different vision for his country, but only after it had caused widespread damage and destruction to the Afghan state and its inhabitants over the course of a decade.38 Similarly, although much is made of Afghanistan’s harsh climate and unforgiving terrain, it has a diverse topographical composition and shares a border with six countries. Occupying a large area at the geographical core of Asia, Afghanistan’s deserts, mountains and steppes have been habitually penetrated by caravans and plundering conquerors.39 While this variation in terrain, topography and climate across the country often serves to embolden centrifugal forces, it has not historically precluded occupation. It is to lend credence to the myth that Afghanistan is impenetrable that images of desolate passes, unscalable peaks, bleak winters and intolerable summers are conjured with such gusto. Thus Major Dan, Cold War veteran of the US Marine Corps can write: Afghanistan is not a large country . . . and is not densely populated, but the terrain and people are both ferocious. Mountainous and rocky, Afghanistan has foiled many invaders over the years, from the British in the 19th century to the Russians (Soviets) in the 20th century and to the Americans in the 21st century. Situated on the route from India and Pakistan to the west, Afghanistan has been lusted after but never tamed. The

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actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again – for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujaheddin from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.’ NSA Archive, George Washington University, www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/epi sode-17/brzezinski1.html (last accessed 14 March 2019). This includes over one million civilian deaths and the creation of ten million refugees. See Noor Ahmed Khalili, ‘Afghanistan: Demographic Consequences of War, 1978–87’, Central Asian Survey 10, no. 3 (1991), 101–26. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 5.

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Soviet Army’s defeat after 10 years of failure was a major factor in the break up of the Soviet Union. The United States has fared little better after over a decade of trying.40

Critical political geography as a sub-discipline has made crucial interventions in exposing the ways in which the fields of geopolitics and conventional approaches to political geography rely on a racialised ontological framework to make sense of the world. Environmental and geographic determinism has been critiqued as a racialised discourse, especially in treatises on climate, disease and sanitation in Africa.41 While pre-colonial and colonial discourses on the inherently dangerous nature of the ‘tropics’ owing to inclement climatic conditions and their adverse impact on the constitution of the white man have all but disappeared,42 the resort to a vocabulary that relies heavily on the topographical perils and hibernal climes of a region in constructing it as a figurative necropolis is not much different in either tenor or import. Pictorial depictions such as the above-mentioned Lady Butler’s Remnants of an Army – in which a blood-covered frozen wasteland forms the backdrop to Brydon and his horse – among others of this period, only seem to validate written and verbal accounts of Afghanistan’s treacherous terrain. Compounding the problem are the perfidious, belligerent and quintessentially inward-looking inhabitants of this land. The graveyard topos has been resurrected to claim that the war in Afghanistan is ‘unwinnable’ owing to the flinty nature of the country and its people. Policy documents, such as the Cato Institute’s white paper – tellingly entitled ‘Escaping the Graveyard of Empires: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan’ – on Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan, routinely evoke the danger of forgetting that ‘there’s a reason why it [Afghanistan] has been described as “graveyard of empires”’ and warn that unless America rethinks its operations and scales them down drastically it risks ‘meeting a similar fate’.43 Likewise, the scholar Terry H. Anderson, a long-time critic of American foreign policy in the Middle East, admonishes the

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Major Dan ‘January 13, 1842: Only one survivor of British Army in Afghanistan!’ January 13, 2014: www.historyandheadlines.com/january-13-1842-one-survivor-british-army-afghanistan/ (last accessed 20 February 2020). On the shifting role of geography as a development factor in the public imagination, see Eric Sheppard, ‘Geography, Nature and the Question of Development’, Dialogues in Human Geography 1, no. 1 (2011), 46–75. His argument is that although determinism of the ‘crude’ variety has been superseded by new ‘critical’ approaches, these communities of scholarship also endorse a socio-spatial ontology that underwrites a stageist, teleological conception of economic development, which is enabled by globalising neo-liberal capitalism. Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995) examines this imperial obsession with sanitation and hygiene through a history of soap as an icon of white civilisation. ‘Equatorial’ Africa, in the colonial imagination, was the land of the unclean and impure. Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter, ‘Escaping the “Graveyard of Empires”: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan’, Cato Institute White Paper, 2009.

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Figure 1.3 Afghanistan: graveyard of empires. Liberty Maniacs

Bush administration against its intervention in Afghanistan because Afghans ‘are a fiercely independent people’ and ‘for centuries the rugged terrain has been called the Graveyard of Empires’.44 Cartoons and political satire in the Anglosphere regularly echo this sentiment, aiming to serve as an admonition against an expansive Afghan strategy (see Figure 1.3). The graveyard of empires trope, even for those who are more circumspect about the sweeping nature of its generalisations and/or its applicability before the nineteenth century, is so compelling because it perpetuates the institutionalised convention of superficial engagement with Afghanistan: it is one more 44

Terry H. Anderson, Bush's Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10. Anderson also recites the myth about Brydon, claiming that the British learned about Afghanistan’s graveyardlike qualities the hard way, when their sole soldier escaped the country’s mountains and people ‘wounded and on a dying horse’. Parenthetically, although many commentators have claimed that Afghanistan has been referred to as the graveyard of empires for centuries, this is does not materialise in the archives. Trawling through the India Office Records between 1870 and 1950 reveals zero occurrences of this epithet vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

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way to designate Afghanistan, both historically and contemporaneously, as straightforward and easily digestible. However, the trope is more than a clever misnomer: it pithily weaves together the skeins of geographical determinism, ahistoricism and racialised renditions of the Afghan people. It is a profoundly Othering discourse, whose most virulent detractors are ironically those that object to the word ‘empire’ as being applicable to the current intervention. Therefore, in contrast to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s observation that ‘[s]everal countries have exhausted themselves pounding that country’,45 a reviewer of David Isby’s Afghanistan – Graveyard of Empires: A New History of the Borderland writes: ‘[t]he graveyard of empires metaphor indeed belongs in the graveyard of clichés. The Coalition in Afghanistan is not some imperial conquest, is not the Soviets, and is not the Victorian British. Nor do the Afghans perceive it as such.’46 Afghanistan then remains a graveyard, even if the current intervention is mislabelled as empire.47 As this book seeks to demonstrate, the lazy historiography that references past events in a haphazard way is perhaps par for the course when it comes to Afghanistan. This is because it is symptomatic of a long tradition of what can be called imperial negligence – at least in strategic and military discourse – albeit periodically interrupted by moments of perfervid commitment, that continues to govern Afghanistan’s interaction with the outside world and to shape the knowledge generated about the country and its people. Even in its more watered-down versions, which contend that Afghanistan is not technically ‘unconquerable’ and instead direct attention to the difficulty in imposing a central government, especially but not only by a foreign power, the graveyard moniker remains a racialised construction, an ostensible de-mystification of the Afghan Other that falls back on the civilised/uncivilised bifurcation of the world, for two principal, and mutually constitutive, reasons. Firstly, through its selective evocation of history, or ‘calculated forgetting’,48 Afghanistan is portrayed as an exceptionally intractable part of the world. A partisan amnesia makes it legitimate to claim that Afghanistan was never colonised in spite of multiple sustained efforts. Not only did the British not lose all three Afghan 45 46

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Quoted in Tanner, Afghanistan, 292. Robert Cassidy, ‘David Isby’s Afghanistan – Graveyard of Empires: A New History of the Borderland’, Parameters 41 (2011), 153–5, http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/par ameters/articles/2011summer/bookreviews/isby_afghanistan.pdf (last accessed 20 February 2020). See especially the second volume of BBC Two’s two-part documentary on Afghanistan, ‘The Graveyard of Empires’. (The first volume is called ‘The Great Game’, which is the trope I address in the next section.) I borrow the term from Debra Thomson, who also speaks of ‘racial aphasia’ in a related context: ‘Through, against, and beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race’, in Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London: Routledge, 2014), 43–60.

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wars, but they were also only half-hearted about making Afghanistan part of the British Raj.49 Indeed in 1875 Colonel. H. B. Lumsden, who led a mission to Afghanistan in 1857, dismissed the country and British relations with it as a ‘waste of blood and treasure’.50 And while the Soviet Union was more committed to occupying Afghanistan, this commitment wavered in the face both of a dramatic increase in US- and Saudi-led support for the opposition and an imploding domestic economy. Secondly, it euphemistically upholds and promulgates the already popular image of Afghans as an unruly, backward and fundamentally untameable people. The denizens of Afghanistan, in this narrative, have always been suspicious of foreigners and have become desensitised to war and adversity. This ties into specious reasoning and commentaries on ‘Pashtunwali’ and ‘tribal codes’, which I explore in greater detail in a later chapter.51 The graveyard of empires trope ultimately forecloses debate and limits the range of ‘viable’ options when it comes to Afghanistan. Afghanistan is produced, often adventitiously, as a land of mystery, a vacuum that allows for some measure of distance and impunity from events within and relating to Afghanistan. But this mysterious nature sits with an uneasy overdetermination, even premonitory prevision, of Afghanistan’s future: as an always-already foundering project, as a state destined to crumble, as an inevitable site of failure for all foreign interventions and as an inescapable harbinger for a fate that has already been sealed. Even when it is ‘our’ failure, there is an intrinsic narcissism in the graveyard of empires trope in the very specific manner in which it sets the limits of what can be known about Afghanistan. With its selective reliance on the past, it reduces Afghanistan to a place where the present complex and messy realities can be overridden by a cursory glance at imperial history. At its most potent, in the way that it presents ‘the past’ as the key to Afghanistan’s future and present, the graveyard metaphor is actually an extended allegory for the current practices of knowledge production when it comes to Afghanistan: of suspicious historical accuracy and at least partially attributable to Afghanistan’s ‘quasi-coloniality’, this racialised trope informs current policy decisions and will plausibly continue to impress on future engagement with the country. 49

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See especially Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, and James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). H. B. Lusmden, ‘Rough Notes for a Lecture on Affghanistan and Our Relations with It’, official memorandum, 16994, pp. 1–2, India Office Records, British Library. As I show in Chapter 3, representations of Afghanistan as an atavistic, tribal society are derived largely from insight gleaned selectively from colonial accounts and are used schematically to vindicate the current conceptions of Afghans as existing in a state of nature, seemingly motivated by primeval concerns. These representations are neither products of deep scholarly engagement nor based on ethnographic treatments of intricate social relations.

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The Great Game Afghanistan’s popular reputation as a graveyard of empires finds its academic counterpart in its position in the so-called Great Game, the term given to Anglo-Russian rivalry and jostling for supremacy in Central Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In most modern historiography, Anglo-Russian competition in the region at the time is the master narrative, with the Great Game its central trope or ‘organising principle’. This metanarrative has also given rise to the geopolitical institutionalisation of Afghanistan’s position as a ‘buffer state’, the zone that the British had to strategically defend by way of ensuring the Soviet Union did not encroach on its Indian territory. In spite of the relative absence of ‘the Great Game’ as a term in the archives and official correspondence of the time,52 it continues to be employed widely and has in fact gained currency in the twenty-first century, with multiple scholars increasingly adverting to a ‘New Great Game’ as a way of conceptualising modern geopolitics in Afghanistan and Central Asia.53 This New Great Game, according to its semantic engineers, is the contest between the USA and other NATO countries on the one hand, and Russia on the other, for influence, power, hegemony and profit in Central Asia and the Transcaucasus, a continuation of old dynamics in a different guise, with Afghanistan’s position as a key but truculent potential partner remaining constant.54 The idea of an enduring antagonistic relationship between Russia and Britain in general, and the metaphoric Great Game in particular, has been the source of fierce contention and witness to a concerted effort on the part of historians working on Afghanistan to refute what they refer to as the fallacy of the Great Game. Ben Hopkins observes that the Great Game is the ‘central conceptual prism through which Afghanistan is currently viewed’, a ‘myth’ that ‘mistakenly 52

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For instance, as the historian Nigel Allan states: ‘the term “Great Game” has been thrown about with great abandon in the modern period’. See ‘Defining Place and People in Afghanistan’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 42, no. 88 (2001), 548. ‘However’, he goes on, ‘with the exception of a single utterance in 1834, it did not reappear until 1927’. See also Martin Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge and Anglo-Afghan Relations, 1808–1878 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) for both the relative ‘newness’ of the term and the way in which it has detracted attention from Anglo-Afghan relations to British– Soviet imperial rivalry. For evidence of this burgeoning literature, see Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (New York: Grove Press, 2004); Rein Mullerson, Central Asia: A Chessboard and Player in the New Great Game (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Mohammed E. Ahrari, The New Great Game in Muslim Central Asia (Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002); Muhammad Mazni, The New Great Game: Oil and Gas Politics in Central Eurasia (New York: Raider Publishing International, 2008); and Rob Johnson, Oil, Islam and Conflict: Central Asia since 1945 (London: Reaktion, 2007). Matthew Edwards, ‘The New Great Game and the New Great Gamers: Disciples of Kipling and Mackinder’, Central Asian Survey 22, no. 1 (2003), 83–102.

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over emphasizes the importance of a ‘game” which frankly did not exist’.55 Seymour Becker traces the etymology of the phrase and shows how, for the original architect of the term, Captain Arthur Connolly, the game metaphor ‘signified a contest in which the Russians were Britain’s potential opponents, but the Central Asians were her immediate ones’, and indeed stressed the importance of Anglo-Russian cooperation in the region.56 Moreover, for Connolly the ‘Great Game’ in essence was a noble one with overt ‘humanitarian associations’ and betrayed none of the ‘uneasy adventurist quality’ that is commonly ascribed to the metaphor.57 This is particularly relevant since most contemporary constructions are based on Peter Hopkirk’s definition of the term, set out in his eponymous book, perhaps the most widely read treatise on the ‘Great Game’, as shorthand for a ‘shadowy struggle for political ascendancy’ in Central Asia, especially Afghanistan, between Russia and the United Kingdom.58 Hopkirk for his part has taken the notion from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and like his contemporaries ‘read the Great Game back into the six decades prior to the publication of Kim and forward into the Soviet and post-Soviet era’.59 James Hevia in his pioneering study of the British colonial security state examines how the Great Game metaphor and its proponents have obscured the relation between science and empire by relying on Kipling’s slightly Quixotic rendition of fantasy and romantic adventure as the guiding pillars of Britain’s imperial enterprise.60 Further, as Gerald Morgan insists, the Great Game is a misplaced metaphor that masks and sanitises the enormous violence that actually transpired in the era, including three British invasions of Afghanistan and recurrent clashes on the North-West Frontier. Finally, Martin Bayly in his detailed study of Anglo-Afghan relations between 1808 and 1879 has illustrated how the Great Game as a trope has been both instrumental in and bolstered by the evolution of a certain colonial knowledge community around Afghanistan, one that has retrospectively made a small part of the British narrative of the time into the lynchpin of the ‘story of Afghanistan’.61 My own research points to a British preoccupation with Russian expansion, but this interest remains largely limited to infrastructural and political developments within Russia. The Home Correspondence records in the India Office Records at the British Library, as well as the ‘political and secret department memoranda’ of the 1870s, all equivocate about having British agents in Kabul. Even 55

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Benjamin Hopkins, The Myth of the ‘Great Game’: The Anglo-Sikh Alliance and Rivalry, Centre of South Asian Studies Occasional Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2–4. Seymour Becker, ‘The “Great Game”: The History of an Evocative Phrase’, Asian Affairs 43, no. 1 (2012), 65. 58 59 Ibid. Hopkirk, The Great Game. Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 12. Ibid. Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’; Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination.

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if one were to argue that British policy changed in relation to Afghanistan from one of ‘masterly inactivity’ to a more intrusive one, correspondence between British and Russian agents reveals that the two parties collaborated more often than not on the ‘Affghan question’. In 1874, the Russian Prince Gortachakov wrote to his British counterparts stressing the virtue of a truce and the continuing need to carry on the work of civilisation: If on either side the two Governments exercise their ascendance over the States placed within the range of their natural influence in order to deter them from all aggression, there is reason to hope that no violent collision will occur to disturb the repose of Central Asia, and interfere with the work of civilization which it is the duty and interest of the two great Empires to bring to a favourable issue.62

In light of this sustained scholarly critique, even uprooting, of the Great Game metaphor, its continuing use and especially its revival in present literature through the discourse of the ‘New Great Game’ is striking. Not only is the Great Game a projection onto a diverse range of events that were conceived differently by the historical actors involved, but these actors themselves, not least the British Empire and the Soviet Union, evolved and changed remarkably from when the Great Game supposedly began in the 1830s to when it allegedly ended or was qualitatively transformed after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.63 The Great Game trope is, however, problematic for a multitude of reasons over and above its tenuous historical underpinnings. It is emblematic of the ways in which the practices of knowledge production continue both to attempt to render Afghanistan legible and to shroud ‘it’ in a world of mystifying metaphors. Afghanistan is constructed as a pawn in a game of imperial stratagems, deliberately divested of all agency and deprived of a narrative in which the history of Afghanistan is a history of the Afghans. The Great Game narrative continues to exercise such a hold over the Western – and more specifically, the Anglophone – imagination because it sustains and propagates the familiar pigeonholing of Afghanistan as the land of intrigue, possessed of an exotic, unruly mystique over which great powers vie for dominance and paramountcy. In its indissolubility, the Great Game conceit typifies the inseparability of power relations from relations of knowledge. More specifically, it forms part of a larger colonial effort to normalise a set of power relations by the continued rehearsal of a hoary stereotype. This is what Bhabha calls ‘the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudoscientific 62

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O. T. Burne, ‘Memorandum on the Question of British or Native Agents in Afghanistan’, 20 July 1875, Political and Secret Department Memoranda, India Office Records, British Library; the tone changes to a more conspiratorial one by the late 1880s, as evinced in the ‘Letters from Sir Frederick Roberts Regarding Afghanistan’, 22 May 1885, R/12/LIB/104, India Office Records. British Library. For more on this see Hevia, The Imperial Security State, especially 11–13.

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theories, superstition, spurious authorities and classification’ and is, paradoxically, the only way in which the Other can be made intelligible.64 It prevents us from imagining Afghanistan otherwise. The Great Game also continues to be the abiding narrative because it slots Afghanistan into the established IR problematique of the balance of power. The BBC’s ‘Afghanistan: The Great Game’ (2012), although a meticulously researched historical documentary, is another tribute to British ‘obsession’ with its rivalry with Russia over India to which Afghanistan was considered the key gateway.65 In a world of great power politics and competition, Afghanistan occupied a strategic location as a ‘buffer state’, and the metaphor endures because it provides a convenient reduction of Afghanistan’s political history to an exoteric idiom.66 The ‘gameification’ of Afghan history is a further reminder of Afghanistan’s position in a hierarchical world of ostensibly sovereign states – its existence is contingent on those who control the material and imaginative resources. The Great Game as a structuring discourse establishes that, in a slightly irreverent paraphrasing of Alexander Wendt, Afghanistan is what great powers make of it.67 At its most ruthless, the metaphor is another instance of the trivialising and systematic forgetting of Afghan politics, histories, and lifeworlds.68 It is almost an admission of the flippancy with which Afghanistan continues to be treated by the superpowers; they are free to invade and retreat, engage and disengage as they wish, playing and dropping the Game when they see fit. Ultimately, the trope rests on the implicit assumption that certain (Afghan) subjectivities are both less important and easily manipulable, and in so doing it constructs Afghanistan as a certain type of ‘intervenable’ space, justifying a set of policies and actions towards it. Pathology and Disease Both the Great Game and the graveyard of empires are historical metaphors that are (purportedly) rooted in particular experiences of Afghanistan’s interaction 64

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Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, 131. For Bhabha these strategies are instances of a disavowal of difference that gives rise in its stead to a rupture or splitting of the discourse of Otherness through what he calls ‘mimicry’. This for him is the manifestation of a contradictory colonial economy of desire when dealing with the ‘not quite/not white’. ‘Afghanistan: The Great Game; A Personal View’, BBC Two, 2012. On the Great Game and the balance of power, see Raju Thomas, ‘The South Asian Security Balance in a Western Dominant World’, in Michel Fortman, James Wirtz and T. V. Paul, eds., Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 305–33. Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics, International Organization 6, no. 2 (1992), 391–425. For a coruscating take-down of IR for precisely the reasons listed above, see Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, Alternatives 26, no. 4 (2001), 401–24.

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with the outside world. They are crucial elements in the construction of Afghanistan as an imagined political space or a ‘discursive regime’, and they are in turn complemented by a litany of other metaphors and tropes that imbue with meaning and make possible this idea of Afghanistan. One such leitmotif is that of illness or disease. We have already encountered Dalrymple’s reading of the US-led intervention of Afghanistan – one that ‘haemorrhage[s] money and blood’. Barfield, likewise, refers to the Taliban insurgency as an ‘infection’, one that needs a prolonged course of antibiotics to be fully ‘eliminated’.69 These constitute only two of many references to Afghanistan as a space of disease. Anatomical metaphors are often utilised in policy and even academic discourse on Afghanistan, contributing a sense of urgency to ‘our mission’ to ‘save’ the country.70 The US-led military operation currently under way in Afghanistan changed its name from ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ to ‘Operation Freedom’s Sentinel’ in 2015. There are two meanings of the word ‘sentinel’, the first of which refers to a soldier or a guard. According to the second definition, used widely across the fields of health and medicine, a ‘sentinel’ is an indicator of the presence of disease. This may be a coincidence, but Afghanistan’s subjectivation as a space of interminable and often terminal disease suggests otherwise. The spectre of disease certainly abounds in policy and public discourse around Afghanistan. A New York Times Magazine article titled ‘Warlordistan’ declared in 2003 that the ‘rebuilding of Afghanistan . . . has so far been a sputtering disappointment’ because ‘[l]ike many of its people the nation is missing limbs’.71 In keeping with this spirit, Afghanistan as a nation has been variously depicted as ‘festering’, ‘pathological’ and infested with ‘cancerous growths’.72 For instance, both Time and the Nation (in 2011 and 2006 respectively) have labelled Afghanistan ‘the festering wound’, with the former also defining the US war in Afghanistan as ‘a chronic and oozing pus-filled wound’.73 Richard Holbrooke,

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Barfield, Afghanistan, 325. Although this predates the current NATO intervention, Mikhail Gorbachev in his seminal address in Vladivostok described the conflict in Afghanistan, then in its seventh year, as a ‘bleeding wound’: quoted in Svetlana Slavranskaya and Thomas Blanton, eds., ‘Afghanistan and the Soviet Withdrawal 1989 20 Years Later’, US National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book no. 272, 15 February 2009, www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB272/ (last accessed 20 February 2020). Quoted in Tanner, Afghanistan, 330; for the ways in which the USA has actively contributed to debilitating the Afghan population see Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 90. For some examples of the trope see David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (London: Hurst, 2009); Marwa Farag, ‘Eikenberry Assess U.S. Role in Afghanistan’, Stanford Daily, 31 January 2012; Polly Toynbee, ‘Was the War on Afghanistan Worth It?’, Guardian, 12 November 2002. Mark Thompson, ‘The Festering Wound: U.S. Air Strike Kills at Least 25 Pakistani Troops’, Time, 26 November 2011; and Robert Scheer, ‘Meanwhile Back in Afghanistan’, The Nation, 30 January 2006.

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Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and arguably the most important diplomat at the time in the region, has likewise, referred to the ‘festering wound of Afghanistan’.74 David Kilkullen’s argument in his Accidental Guerrilla – heralded as a pathbreaking scholarly work of immediate practical consequence – is structured around an extended medical analogy wherein most insurgents suffer from an ‘accidental syndrome’ caused by a ‘pathological’ cycle of infection, contagion, intervention and rejection. To break this cycle of disease, he proposes an alternate counter-insurgency strategy, one aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the local populace: gentle, culturally sensitive ‘armed social work’.75 He also advocates the ‘persistent presence’ of Western troops, but cautions that this presence is not a ‘panacea’.76 Carrying the metaphor forward, he dwells in some detail on what makes Afghanistan such an involuted proposition and on the potential reaction to an ill-conceived intervention: It is this interplay between terrain, population, Taliban, and terrorists that makes Afghanistan such a difficult, dangerous, and complicated environment. It also means that Afghanistan . . . is a source of insight into the patterns – global terrorists exploiting accidental guerrillas, societal antibodies emerging in response to Western intervention, the risk of playing into the hands of an AQ exhaustion strategy – which I have already described in general terms.77

Creating a biopolitical or, in more precise Foucauldian vernacular, a ‘stateracist’78 rift between the ‘enemy’ and the ‘population’, Kilkullen propounds a surgical intervention that is not heavy-handed, expounding on his choices thus: ‘[m]ore particularly, search-and-destroy operations tend to create a popular backlash and contribute to the “antibody response” that generates large numbers of accidental guerrillas and pushes the population and the enemy together’.79 This application of a medical lexicon is a key feature of the counter-insurgency literature where the ‘host nation’ goes through a process of remedial care, from a moribund patient to a convalescent and ultimately ‘self-sufficient’ one. The stages are clearly delineated in the widely hailed counter-insurgency (COIN) manual FM 3-24 as (i) ‘stop the bleeding’, (ii) ‘inpatient care – recovery’ and (iii) ‘outpatient care – movement to self-sufficiency’.80 74

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Gregoria Betizza, ‘Obama, Afghanistan and the Trust Deficit’, Aspen Institute, 29 April 2009, www.aspeninstitute.it/aspenia-online/article/obama-afghanistan-and-trust-deficit (last accessed 20 February 2020); incidentally the article refers to Holbrooke as ‘AfPak’ envoy, a new and contested regional appellation that I dedicate a section to in the next chapter. 76 Kilkullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, especially 30–8. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 41; emphasis added. ‘State-racist’ is an important concept that I revisit and explore in more detail in the next chapter. Kilkullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, 96. United States Army, Army Field Manual 3-24 (United States: Department of the Army, 2006); and United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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Derek Gregory has shown how medicinal rhetoric of a certain kind is essentially therapeutic for the American public, acting as a salve through the optics of rescue operations and surgical procedures. In the case of Afghanistan, it portrays the 2001 intervention as humane and salubrious in an effort to override or mitigate the negative press generated by evidence of torture of detainees in, for instance, Abu Ghraib, and espouses a commitment to and faith in the US armed forces.81 This is closely related to my argument that the medicalisation discourse used habitually, but by no means exclusively, to describe socio-political events and circumstances in Afghanistan, is a profoundly dispossessing one and is far from innocuous.82 The evocative rendering of Afghanistan as being in a state of chronic illness – afflicted and atrophying – is a pernicious political manoeuvre that sanctions, even demands, certain types of ‘intervention’. The labelling of Afghanistan as ‘dysfunctional’ is yet another tactic to deny the country and its people agency by casting them as hapless patients in need of rehabilitation and normalisation.83 The ‘enemy’ is a malignant tumour on a decaying body politic, making our incursions not only desirable and indeed noble, but also vitally indispensable. The commonsense refrain then becomes: we must save Afghanistan from itself, and by so doing save the world from the deadly effects of potential, nay likely, contagion. Exemplifying this trend, in his speech on Afghanistan to the White House in June 2011, President Obama said that he would ‘work with the Pakistani Government to root out the cancer of violent extremism’.84 Not only does this imagery saturate Anglophone discourse outside Afghanistan, but it has also been increasingly internalised by Afghans living in the country. The Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, himself channelled Obama seven years later when he referred to the ‘cancer in the region’, i.e. terrorism, claiming that it needed ‘rooting out’. He also lamented the ‘plague’ of terrorism and

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Derek Gregory, ‘“The Rush to the Intimate”: Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn’, Radical Philosophy 150, no. 4 (2008), 18. The Ottoman Empire’s figurative construal as the ‘sick man of Europe’ serves as the example par excellence, and the COIN manual claims to be generic to all counter-insurgency operations globally. For a few examples of work that use the word ‘dysfunctional’ to describe the current situation in Afghanistan, see Simon Chesterman, ‘Walking Softly in Afghanistan: The Future of UN StateBuilding’, Survival 44, no. 3 (2002), 37–45; Christopher Freeman, ‘Dissonant Discourse: Forging Islamist States through Secular Models – The Case of Afghanistan’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 15, no. 3 (2002), 522–47; Whitney Azoy, Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2011); and Sebastian Mallaby, ‘The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire’, Foreign Affairs 81, no. 2 (2002), 2–7. Office of the Press Secretary, ‘Remarks by the President on the Way Forward’, White House, 22 June 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/22/remarks-presi dent-way-forward-afghanistan (emphasis added; last accessed 23 December 2019).

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extremism in Afghanistan.85 Terrorism in Afghanistan is a multi-focal and metastasising disease that can be ‘rooted out’ and torn asunder only through aptly named ‘surgical strikes’. The border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are considered the epicentre of this disease, the necrotised bits most in need of recuperation or removal. To shift registers from the metaphoric to the literal for a second, research has shown that the number of polio cases and drone strikes closely mirrored each other in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2012.86 There were relatively few polio cases in Afghanistan and Pakistan until mid 2008, and drone strikes were also infrequent. Polio cases hit their peak in 2011–12, as did drone attacks.87 This is not a coincidence, but a result of the ‘fake immunisation’ campaign against hepatitis B that the CIA orchestrated in 2011 in Abbottabad in a failed attempt to obtain the DNA of Osama bin Laden’s relatives.88 When this elaborate campaign was laid bare, vaccination programmes began to be viewed with distrust as a smokescreen for intelligence gathering by the USA ahead of drone strikes. Polio cases continue to rise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in a shocking reversal of the trend observed until 2008. Leaders in Waziristan have declared that their suspicions of immunisation campaigns as ‘being used to spy for America against the Mujahideen’ are founded and instituted ‘a ban on administering polio jabs’.89 Over 3.5 million children have gone unvaccinated as a result of this boycott, with the virus spreading from Pakistan and Afghanistan to further afield in the Middle East.90 Afghanistan may be a space of disease, but the elision of our hand in creating it as such is at least as damaging as the lurid depictions that continue to be peddled about it. But Afghanistan is depicted as the wracked and tortured land of malaise also as part of the more general process of the displacement of Afghan subjectivity in a colonial strategy of using metaphors, tropes, metonymy and euphemisms to create identities that can be labelled ‘actionable’, in both senses of the term, that is, as warranting action towards them and as being of practical value.91

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Ashraf Ghani, #AfghanPresident, https://twitter.com/ashrafghani?lang=en (last accessed 14 March 2019). Jonathan Kennedy, ‘How Drone Strikes and a Fake Vaccination Program Have Inhibited Polio Eradication in Pakistan: An Analysis of National Level Data’, International Journal of Health Services 47, no. 4 (2017), 807–25. Jonathan Kennedy, ‘Pakistan, Polio and the CIA’, London Review of Books Blog, 2017, www .lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/09/08/jonathan-kennedy/pakistan-polio-and-the-cia/ (last accessed 20 February 2018). Saeed Shah, ‘CIA Organised Fake Vaccination Drive to Get Osama bin Laden's Family DNA’, Guardian, 11 July 2011. Haji Mujatba, ‘Pakistan Militants Ban Polio Jabs, Threaten Actions’, Reuters, 16 June 2012. Kennedy, ‘Pakistan, Polio’. For a by no means exhaustive list of works that employ the words ‘malaise’, ‘tortured’ and ‘wracked’, see Douglas Wissing, ‘General Malaise’, Huffington Post, 19 January 2013; Astri

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Indeed, the metaphoric is a ‘process of repression and substitution’ through ‘fixity’,92 and although it has a long imperial pedigree, it is relied on especially heavily as a tactics of appropriation in making sense of Afghanistan and places like it that are almost but not quite in the throttle-hold of empire.93 The colonial desire for ‘fixity’ – the rigid casting of the Other as visible and knowable – effectuated through the ideological operation of stereotyping is particularly intense for these quasi-colonial spaces because they retain an element of mystery in the imperial imaginary. They have never been fully captured by the machinations of imperial sense-making because of a lack of dedicated colonial machinery ‘on the ground’ to translate lived experiences, and the need to label, categorise and fix is amplified in these spaces. The text analysed below shows this affective desire for stereotypes to capture the ‘essence’ of Afghanistan in more detail. Afghanistan 101 Afghanistan 101: Understanding Afghan Culture by Ehsan M. Entezar is a treatise in which Bhabha’s claim that colonial stereotypes cannot be proven and therefore must be repeated – which is the reason for their ambivalence – can be seen brazenly in action.94 It is also one in which a preoccupation with ‘social science’ as abstraction trumps all other considerations. Dr Entezar, an Afghan graduate of Columbia University, has written an eminently influential book which encapsulates many of the concerns of this chapter. It figures in college curricula,95 is required reading for many US soldiers and marines deploying to Afghanistan,96 and is included in the US Navy’s recommended

92 93 94 95

96

Suhrke, ‘A Contradictory Mission? NATO from Stabilization to Combat in Afghanistan’, International Peacekeeping 15, no. 2 (2008), 214–36; Fazel Haq Saikal and William Maley, ‘With the Afghan Refugees in Pakistan’, Quadrant 30, no. 10 (1986), 24; Nancy Roberts, ‘Coping with Wicked Problems: The Case of Afghanistan’, Research in Public Policy Analysis and Management 11 (2001), www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1016/S0732-1317%2801% 2911006-7 (last accessed 20 February 2020); Kakakhel Niaz A. Shah, ‘Women's Rights and the New Constitution of Afghanistan’, International Studies Journal 1 (2004), 57; and Joel Hafvenstein, Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier (Guildford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2007). To cite Bhabha once again: ‘Of Mimicry and Man’; see also Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’. This may be considered to be no longer the case in the age of the American Empire. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’. It is also part of the honours course on ‘Understanding US Foreign Policy toward Afghanistan’ at the University of Maryland, www.universityhonors.umd.edu/Term1308/269T.php (last accessed 1 June 2017). The reading list for the course also includes Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, a gut-wrenching fictionalised account of the treatment of women in Afghanistan discussed below. Some syllabi on which it can be found include ‘Tactical Communication Group’ (which provides ‘culture and language’ training to marines deploying to Afghanistan); ‘Military Officers Afghanistan Reading List’ (where it sits beside Ahmed Rashid, David Kilkullen, Greg

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pre-deployment reading list.97 Entezar has given numerous lectures on Afghan culture to US embassy personnel in Kabul, coalition forces and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and his lecture titled ‘Afghan Culture and Politics’ was mandatory listening for US troops deployed to Afghanistan.98 Notably, Entezar also features in A Different Kind of War, the US Army’s comprehensive history of its campaign Operation Enduring Freedom, which was under way in Afghanistan between October 2001 and September 2005.99 Borrowing its theoretical framework from the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hostede, Afghanistan 101 is a pithy primer to Afghan culture that ‘explains how and why Afghan culture is so drastically different from American and other Western cultures’, ‘provides tips on how Westerners can work effectively with Afghans’, delineates the ‘underlying reasons why Afghans think and behave the way they do’, ‘describes how Afghans deal with social power, expert power’ and various other dimensions of power and authority, ‘explains how Afghans cope with fear of nature, of other men and of the supernatural’, ‘explains why Afghans are loyal first and foremost to their family, and then to their ethnicity, sect, ideology, and region, and only lastly to the state as a whole’, ‘gives an analysis of gender issues in Afghanistan’ and finally ‘provides a comprehensive description of the major ethnic groups in Afghanistan’.100 That the book is successful in accomplishing this arduous task, according to any measure, in fewer than 150 pages is in itself a significant achievement. The glowing reception it has received from its audience is testament both to the popularity of the book and to the way in which Afghanistan is currently being studied and acted upon. A sample of the stellar reviews written on Amazon, mostly by self-identified military and aid workers, gives a clear sense of this. For instance: ‘I train military personnel deploying to Afghanistan and have been purchasing this book as part of my curriculum. It should be required reading for anyone deploying to any tribal society; particularly Afghanistan. I hope the word is spread about this clear, concise, and informative book.’

97 98 99

100

Mortenson and Khaled Hosseini), http://fcw.com/articles/2010/01/11/bookmarks-reading-listsidebar.aspx (last accessed 23 December 2019); and The Joint Multinational Training Command Training Journal 2, a publication of the Joint Multinational Training Command (Grafenwoehr, Germany, 2010), available at http://issuu.com/jmtc/docs/jmtc_tj_2/31 (last accessed 23 December 2019). The reading list is available online at www.public.navy.mil/ia/Documents/AFG_Reading_List .doc (last accessed 14 March 2019). Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 3. Donald Wright, ed., A Different Kind of War: The United States Army in Operation Enduring Freedom, October 2001 to September 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2010). Entezar, Afghanistan 101, back cover.

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Another reviewer remarks: ‘I'm thinking about joining the Peace Corps when I retire from full-time work and go to Afghanistan. I wanted to learn about the culture in the meantime and this is the book to use. It's perfect.’ Yet another eager reviewer writes: A key to understanding another culture: This should be read by all military personnel and anyone interested in understanding a very different culture on its own terms. It helps you understand the real differences of US and Afghan culture and how these differences can be understood and bridged. An important book which benefits from Entezar’s long exposure to both cultures as a resident and teacher . . .

Another specifies how important the book has been in, and should be in, shaping perceptions of the ‘Afghan way’: Excellent book for people being deployed: I purchased this book when I found out I was on my way to Afghanistan. I wanted to understand the culture and way people think before I got here. I was sent to Afghanistan on a mission to train the afghan military and police. This book is a must read for anybody in this type of position. It is almost as if this book was written specifically for my mission. I highly recommend this book for anybody interested in why people are the way they are and how to perceive the Afghan way.

Apropos of my argument, it is of some consequence that this fulsome appreciation comes mostly from those either deployed or about to be deployed in Afghanistan, for instance: ‘I purchased this book for a USMC officer headed to Afghanistan “this time”. He really liked the book and has been passing it around to his Marines. I was pleased to learn the USMC cultural training encompassed concepts in the book.’ Another review reads: A thorough, schematic, and readable approach to the culture of Afghanistan: Entezar’s book is a delightful introduction, with many contemporary examples, to Afghan culture and its implications for those working with Afghans, or offering programs for Afghans. His experience teaching Afghan language and culture to Peace Corps Volunteers, diplomats, and soldiers makes this book a fascinating read with illustrations that come alive to the reader. It should be read by every policy maker, aid worker and soldier who is preparing to travel and live in Afghanistan. One cannot understand, assist, and positively influence Afghans without understanding their culture. A native of Afghanistan, Dr. Entezar returned to his native country and continued his research over the past 30 years. Highly recommended.

The adulatory reviews are specifically complimentary with regard to the practical ingress the book offers to approaching and apprehending Afghanistan for individuals hitherto unfamiliar to the country and its people: ‘This is essential reading for anyone working in Afghanistan. I wish I had read it before my first assignment there. Well constructed and informative. Recommended.’ Finally: A must read before deploying to Afghanistan: I was called to Kabul Afghanistan last August 2012 in response to the Green on Blue murders of 3 of our Border Management

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Task Force contractors. After 26 years in the military I’ve seen plenty of war torn countries but this trip to Afghanistan sent me on a mission to better understand what was obviously an extraordinarily complex and mutifaceted culture. To do this I selected both the excellent history by Thomas Barfield . . . and this more contemporary view of Ehsan M. Entezar. For me it took both books, each unique in their perspective, to capture a satisfactory understanding of the ethnic, religious, tribal and political forces at work in Afghanistan . . . Entezar provides very practical insight into every day Afghan culture and is the minimum must read for the western visitor.

An extended book review-cum-policy prescription published in Foreign Policy in 2011 uses Afghanistan 101 to explicate why aid to Afghanistan has failed to attain the desired consequences. The author, Art Keller, argues: Ehsan Entezar’s Afghanistan 101, dryly academic though its language tends to be, is nevertheless an illuminating guide to the Afghanistan today [sic]. As a scholar born, raised, and educated in Afghanistan before obtaining his doctorate in the United States, Entezar lends the insight of a native son in illuminating the realities of Afghan culture and society, and by doing so, providing some sharp clues as to the likely efficacy of the aid programs that are allegedly ‘building’ Afghanistan [sic].101

Drawing on Entezar as a source of infallible wisdom about the Afghan psyche, the article claims that ‘ethnic strife’ and ‘sectarian splits’ are endemic, that ‘rules are followed only by common Afghans without access to wealth and education’ and that looting and corruption comes naturally to Afghan people, proposing ‘turning off the aid trap’ as the only viable option. In Keller’s words: ‘The willingness of Afghan officials to rob the aid community blind should thus not come as a shock . . . but rather something that foreign aid officials who took the time to investigate the currently prevailing social norms and political and economic realities in Afghanistan should have anticipated.’102 Similarly, in an article in the Joint Force Quarterly, published by the National Defense University, the author Michael Fortune writes of the ‘daunting challenges’ faced by the coalition and explicitly references Entezar to assert that the ‘Afghan culture is not conducive to generating competent, broad-minded leaders’.103 He goes on to claim that ‘while it is probably not possible to completely overhaul the character of these self-serving officials, commanders, and other leaders in [a] dramatic way . . . it still may be feasible to influence the ways these leaders think and operate at a fundamental level’. It thus behoves the coalition to make the Afghans adopt a ‘more altruistic,

101 102 103

Art Keller, ‘Ailing Aid: Afghanistan’, Foreign Policy, 25 February 2011; emphasis added. Ibid. Michael Fortune, ‘The Real Key to Success in Afghanistan: Overlooked, Underrated, Forgotten or Just Too Hard?’, Joint Force Quarterly 65, no. 2 (2012), 12, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/ portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-65.pdf (last accessed 23 December 2019).

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passionate, and caring mindset that extends beyond family, tribe, and ethnicity’ and ‘transform their habit of mind’.104 In light of the above commendation, it is patently evident but nonetheless worth belabouring that this book is read, digested and circulated among people working in Afghanistan and with Afghans. Therefore the fact that this text is widely understood to be providing a window into an ‘extraordinarily complex’ culture and that the author has been credited with explicating and disseminating deep truths about the way in which ‘Afghan culture works’ is one that needs to be engaged with.105 Before launching into a critique of the text itself, some context regarding the scholarly and personal credentials of Ehsan Entezar is apposite. Much of the legitimacy of the book is derived from Entezar’s Afghan background and ethnicity, with the tacit understanding that as a person of Afghan origin he must have access to some profound secret knowledge about the country. As it happens, Entezar’s work is instead largely based on anecdotal evidence with little sustained fieldwork. He appears to have lived in the USA for most of his adult life, having left Afghanistan well before the Taliban came to power. Although he mentions returning to Kabul in 2002 in order to undertake the fieldwork needed for the book, he himself proclaims on multiple occasions in the text that much of what he has argued is based on an ‘intuitive understanding’ of the ‘Afghan culture’. The text is bestrewn with references to his life in the country many decades back, and those limited personal experiences are relied upon to make generalisations about an entire people. A more generous reading of Entezar, one that avoids the pitfalls of falling into a nativist politics of authenticity, could be through the lens of the ‘native informant’. The native informant is a stock figure and a deeply recognisable trope in the colonial archive. Conventionally used in ethnography to describe indigenous people who provide information about non-Western societies to Western anthropologists,106 the category has been developed by post-colonial critics to signal a collaborationist identity that can be interpellated only in and by the West.107 These native informants deploy their knowledge in ways that 104 105

106 107

Ibid. More glowing reviews can be found at www.amazon.com/Afghanistan-101-UnderstandingAfghan-Culture/product-reviews/1425792820/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_1?ie=UTF8&show Viewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending (emphasis added in the quotation above) and www.barnesandnoble.com/w/afghanistan-101-ehsan-m-entezar/1100385227. Slightly more critical reviews can be accessed on goodreads.com, although the object of critique is more often than not the structure and the language as opposed to the content: www.goodreads.com/book/show/3443269-afghanistan-101 (both last accessed 27 May 2017). See Morton H. Fried, ‘The Myth of Tribe’, Natural History 84, no. 4 (1975), 12–20. The ‘native informant’ has been developed in various ways in post-colonial scholarship. For Bhabha, the native informant is a mimic man who is potentially Janus-faced and can end up being menacing and subversive. For Massad, he is a more straightforwardly jaundiced man,

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dovetail with imperial agendas from which they benefit as ‘middlemen’ or intermediaries between imperial power and its native subjects. Conversely, imperial powers tend to turn to the kinds of native informants who can say what they want to hear the loudest. This was also a premeditated colonial strategy to produce hybrid subjects, as explicated in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s (in)famous minute on Indian education. In his own words, Britain was to produce a new ‘class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.108 These new citizens would serve a dual purpose for empire: they would infuse local dialects with Western ideologies as well as provide colonial authorities with ‘inside’ knowledge of the societies they wish to govern. Entezar inhabits this schema effortlessly, marketing his book to his Western audiences as a much-needed corrective to the existing literature in the field which ‘deals with Afghan culture superficially and unsystematically’.109 He postulates that his is among the ‘first attempt[s] to analyze Afghan national culture systematically’, claiming: ‘[a]t best, the existing literature on Afghan culture deals with what I call the surface structure of the Afghan national culture. It provides little information on cultural patterns (deep structure).’110 The starting premise, therefore, is that Afghanistan 101 offers the reader a thick interpretation of Afghan society and culture, setting it apart from the thin, simplistic analyses that are the norm in the field. The final outcome is so far removed from this original intention that it serves as a poignant reminder about the current state of the field vis-à-vis knowledge production about Afghanistan. Afghanistan 101: Understanding Afghan Culture reinforces most prejudices about Afghanistan and perpetuates a rather contorted understanding of the country and the people. A large photograph of a veiled woman adorns the book’s front cover, and the book is dedicated to ‘the widows and orphans of Afghanistan’. The imagery and choice of words, while not particularly imaginative, are certainly revealing. Afghanistan is immediately represented as a country of orphans, widows and veiled women – subject positions associated with vulnerability and the need for protection. The ‘woman question’ always looms large in analyses of Afghanistan, and texts such as these serve to feminise the entire country as a hapless victim, limiting the range of

108 109

and for Spivak he is a metropolitan hybrid, a figure that can be tracked from Kant to Hegel to Marx. See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home‘, Cultural Politics11 (1997), 445–55; Joseph Massad, ‘Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World’, Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002), 361–85, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1999). Macaulay, Thomas Babington. ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835), 236. Thomas Babington Macaulay Selected Writings (1972): 235–51. 110 Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 15. Ibid., 10; emphasis in original.

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viable policy options for those interested in finding a solution to the problems plaguing the region. Indeed, there is a noticeable slippage between calls to liberate Afghanistan as the land of oppressed women and Afghanistan personified as an oppressed woman that is begging to be conquered.111 Since Entezar’s book is principally a comparison between Afghan and American ‘culture’, the latter is subject to a comparable degree of reification, a sound example of the way in which the coloniser and the colonised are coconstituted through practices of stereotyping. In keeping with the Orientalist conceit of the Manichean division of the world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, Afghanistan 101 uncritically essentialises both the West and Afghanistan in a manner that is shockingly facile thirty years after the publication of Said’s Orientalism and the literature it has inspired. As Entezar pits the USA (and the West more generally) against Afghanistan (and the wider Muslim world) and contrasts them against five metrics, some degree of abstraction can, of course, be expected. At times, however, the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’112 or ‘us and them’ framework is bafflingly simplistic and presented without a trace of evidence. For instance, the claim that ‘there is more often a gap between desired and desirable behavior in Afghanistan than there is in the United States’,113 while doing no conceptual or explanatory work, does serve a purpose in implicitly advocating a refashioning of the Afghan subject. The Afghan man is unable to conduct himself in a way that makes his words correspond to his actions.114 Americans, on the other hand, have their thoughts and actions better aligned and could, presumably, impart this wisdom to their Afghan counterparts. To take one example from the text: [i]n the family, the father is the absolute power. He must be obeyed, and his ideas and decisions cannot be challenged. He makes decisions for his family members in marriage, education, and other aspects of life. Disobedience is punished, ranging from verbal abuse to physical punishment to divorce in the case of the wife and disowning in the case of children. Some husbands establish their authority in the early days of their marriage by scaring and intimidating their wives. It is said that a powerful husband should kill a cat (or ‘cat killing’) on the first night of the wedding to teach his wife a lesson. This may seem cruel to a Westerner, but Afghans do not like dogs or cats.115

111 112

113 114 115

A point I explore in greater depth in Chapter 4. Entezar’s position as a native informer allows him to straddle both worlds. For some this ‘insider’ status immunises him against charges of racism. On the contrary, I would submit that Entezar and others like him are but a manifestation of the extent to which Orientalist and racist categories of thought have been internalised in the academy and in politics at large: cf. Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5–6. Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 18. Curiously enough, Entezar’s interlocutors and subjects are overwhelmingly male. Women remain in the backdrop, needing to be saved. Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 32.

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While these gross generalisations appear a tad contrived, even fanciful, it is precisely an over-reliance on proclamations such as this that makes Afghanistan accepted as a perverse land of anachronistic customs and outlandish people. The mainstreaming of Afghanistan as ‘no country for women’ can be traced back to statements of this sort, rather than attributed to the particular policies of an ultra-orthodox regime. Claims of this ilk are also instrumental in effectively precluding any substantive engagement with Afghan history, society or politics and therefore paradoxically contribute to the vacuum of knowledge in which ‘Afghanistan’ finds itself. The conclusion of Entezar’s first chapter, ‘[i]n summary, Afghanistan is a high power distance society where social power is coercive, expert power is nonexistent, decision making is autocratic and consultative, power cannot be separated from wealth, elitism is dominant, age and charisma are respected, and the Afghans respect the authority of the person rather than of the rules’, is revealing. Having argued that Afghans value wealth excessively,116 and that they do not have a tendency to follow rules, Entezar lays out the implications of his analysis. It is worth quoting him at length: One is that persuasion alone is not enough to get anything done without using force as a last resort. Another is that unless proper measures are taken, funds for reconstruction could be misdirected, and abused; the close union of power and wealth leads to corruption in the government, especially at the highest levels. Finally, in the Afghan national culture inequality is defined from below, not from above, suggesting that the level of inequality in Afghan society is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. That is why when the ruler or administrator is weak, people tend to disrespect him and/or disobey the laws, rules and regulations, leading to lawlessness and chaos and even the creation of multiple centers of power. Thus, it is crucial to appoint mature, competent, and strong personalities in the government at all levels, especially in the security forces. It is important to keep in mind that in Afghan culture . . . [it] is the authority of the ruler rather than the authority of the rule that counts.117

Apart from the banalities (it is arguably ‘crucial’ to appoint ‘competent’ people for any position) and the unapologetic essentialism, the principal take-away for those operating in Afghanistan that emerges from the paragraph above is that Afghans are prone to corruption and need to be subject to a ruler who is not afraid to use force. The problem emerges when recommendations such as these are digested without much thought and policies become based on them. The very palpable problem of corruption in Afghanistan, and many countries besides, becomes one of the facets of its ‘culture’ rather than, for 116

117

A comment like this has a macabre quality given the unparalleled degree of Afghan poverty. Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of US$596.30 in 2013, which is equivalent to a meagre 3 per cent of the world average: www.tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/gdp-per-capita (last accessed 17 August 2017). Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 46.

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example, a manifestation of the skewed system of pay and rewards and the concentration of political power and monetary wealth in the hands of an unrepresentative elite. Not only does this lead to a fundamental defeatism about the prospects for change, but it feeds into self-serving mechanisms, and serves as a justification for complacent polices established by Afghanistan’s international donors. Norway’s announcement in 2013 that it would cut aid in order to signal to Kabul ‘that it has not done enough to combat corruption and violence against women’ can be read as one instantiation of the ways in which recommendations such as the above can be problematic and follow directly from the policy prescriptions espoused in Foreign Policy articles of the sort cited earlier.118 Under the Trump administration in 2019, the USA cut aid to Afghanistan by $100 million, citing corruption.119 Without wishing to give more importance to this book than is due, I would claim that the suggestions imparted to Americans and other Westerners working in Afghanistan and with Afghans are symptomatic of a partial, haphazard and ultimately specious engagement with the multifarious cultures, histories, political universes and lifeways of the Afghan people. Therefore, while Afghanistan 101 has not set the terms of engagement, it is part of the larger, hegemonic discourse, making it all the more insidious and resistant to change. The paragraphs above are remarkably reminiscent of (if more simplistic than) old colonial texts on Afghanistan. The idea that Afghans do not understand persuasion but must be met with force is an abiding theme of the British encounter with Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. John William Kaye wrote in 1858: ‘[r]igour is inseparable from the government of such a people. We cannot rein wild horses with silken braids.’120 General Charles Macgregor, the chief of staff of the British military in Kabul about two decades later in 1879, who also suggested that force was the only thing that the Afghans understood, would be less delicate in his prose with regard to the course of action needed to ‘bring them to their senses’ when he imperiously announced to the reigning Afghan leader Sher Ali Khan:

118

119

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www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/04/us-norway-afghanistan-idUSBRE9930L920131004 (last accessed 4 November 2018); this is befitting of the recommendations of Keller’s Foreign Policy article ‘Ailing Aid’, cited above. Lara Jakes, ‘U.S. Cuts $100 Million in Aid to Afghanistan Citing Government Corruption’, New York Times, 23 September 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/world/asia/us-afghani stan-aid.html (last accessed 23 September 2019). John William Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1874). Kaye claimed that Dost Mohammad ‘often resorted, for the due maintenance of his power, to measures of severity incompatible with the character of a humane ruler’ (vol. 2, 123). This is not much different from what Entezar is arguing in the twenty-first century. The obvious interpretation would be that Afghans have really not ‘progressed’ since the 1800s. A more radical rereading would posit that the justification of empire remains the same a century and a half later.

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You shall give in, you have killed Cavi [the British envoy in Kabul] and his hundred men, but we are sending another representative with 10,000 men, and he shall stay there whether you like it or not. We wish one thing from you and that is friendship, but whether we get this or not, we will have your obedience, you may chafe as much as you please, but we will be your masters and you will find that the only escape from our heavy hand will be your entire submission.121

Entezar in his role as native informant seems to have replicated, almost verbatim, the sentiments of the British in Afghanistan at the height of empire. This may be one reason why American servicemen and servicewomen find that the book is easily digestible and speaks to their concerns about ‘Afghan culture’. Alternatively, the trope of the intrepid Afghan warrior who understands nothing other than brute force has been internalised to such an extent that Entezar appears to be saying not much at all. In any event, the text is littered with comparisons and statements that occasionally read like parodies but are entirely sincere, and are received as such by their target audience. A few examples include ‘Americans . . . are more adventurous than Afghans because the former are more tolerant of uncertainty than the latter’122 and ‘Americans are taught to manage their anger. This explains why Afghans get mad and yell in public and in private more than the Americans, the British and other Western societies.’123 Entezar is subtly inuring his Western interlocutors to the lives of the Other.124 However, although this project is clearly not the result of any sustained academic research – the thin evidentiary base on which he builds his comparisons is testament to that – it does fit the conventional wisdom and is therefore accepted at face value rather than questioned as one man’s perception and experience of one or two nations. In the context of the ‘nation-building’ projects that had been undertaken in Afghanistan, the information Entezar imparts to his interlocutors working in the country cannot be dismissed as biased, lacking nuance and hence of little value. On the contrary, the personal anecdotes, accessible language and easy prose devoid of arcane theory make Afghanistan 101 a readable, handy and undemanding ‘guide’ to the country: precisely what it is intended to be. The step-by-step illustration of the differences between Afghans and Americans also appeals to those preparing to go and encounter a foreign land for the first time. A case in point is the paragraph below:

121 124

122 123 Quoted in Barfield, Afghanistan, 142. Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 49. Ibid., 50. He continues, possibly with the intention of not being too harsh on the Afghans: ‘This may seem uncivilized, but it is good for the heart if individuals can express their emotions and get it off their chest. There have not been any studies of Afghan Americans, but according to some studies Japanese Americans suffer more from heart disease than the Japanese because the Japanese society allows its members to express their emotions.’ Ibid., 50–1.

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Afghans, unlike Americans, fear the government. Afghans fear lack of food (quantity), whereas Americans worry about eating less and avoiding unhealthy food (quality). Afghans eat to live while Americans live to eat. Afghans worry more about basic human needs; Americans worry more about individual freedoms and rights. Afghans worry about not just immediate family but also extended family. If Afghans pay more attention to the present rather than the future, Americans pay attention not just to the present but also the future (planning and saving money). Afghans usually accept their parents’ decisions and stay with them until they pass away while Americans often do not. Finally, Afghans worry about their children even after they are grown up, but Americans often do not.125

We see here the Afghans ‘coming into the world’, as it were. They are imagined, conjured up, and produced as the ‘regular constellation of ideas’ that marks them and sets them apart as distinctively Afghan.126 Work such as this, devoid of fine-grained theoretical analyses of the subject at hand or of sedulous ethnographic research, is exactly reflective of the production of knowledge with reference to Afghanistan in the social sciences today. Admittedly, Entezar is a purveyor of Orientalist tropes in a manner that few academics worthy of the name are. However, these very Orientalist tropes, some less self-conscious than others, form the basis of our knowledge about Afghanistan. This is the legacy of multiple decades of a limited and sporadic engagement with the country; through this dominant discourse Afghanistan is conceived of and understood as a buffer in the Great Game, as a space between two meaningful entities, and as fully coming ‘of age’ in the popular imaginary only in the War on Terror. Much of the knowledge about the country remains dependent on texts written during one of those periods – the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century – when Afghanistan was in the spotlight. The exigent demands for ‘immediate’ and ‘accessible’ knowledge against the backdrop of an intervention gone sour have compounded the problem. And in an academic world – especially but not solely in Britain – increasingly governed by ‘impact factors’ and tangible ‘real-world’ implications of research, the appeal of disseminating ever more common-sensical knowledge is only likely to become greater.127 The value of Entezar’s work lies in his bold attempts at making his work immediately policy-relevant by making the Afghans as ‘legible’ as possible.128 The examples he gives all confirm our biases, thereby making his recommendations easier to implement. It has now been drilled into most students of Afghanistan that it is a tribal country with different ethnicities and loyalties. 125 127

128

126 Ibid., 69. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 5. This is not a call for academics to shun all existence outside of their so-called ivory towers. It is merely an acknowledgement of the gradual corporatisation of the academy, especially in Britain, given the demand on scholars to make their world ‘policy-relevant’. To evoke James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) once again.

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Entezar uses this ‘general knowledge’ about Afghanistan and juxtaposes it with claims about America that are homologous (in structure, not content), perfectly performing the dual purpose of his native informant status à la Lord Macaulay. This packaging of information in a manner that chimes with conventional wisdom contributes to the book’s mass appeal.129 Afghans become aware of their ancestry at an early age. By the age of seven, a child knows whether he is Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara . . . Ethnic groups differ in the way they speak, dress, eat, pray, and even where they bury their dead. Ethnic awareness early on is critical for survival in countries such as Afghanistan. One’s ethnicity affects employment, education, marriage, social status, security, and other aspects of life in the country. In the West, on the other hand, ethnic identity is not so important . . . Ethnicity in the West has very little, if any, relevancy in employment, education, and other aspects of life because advancement and promotions are based on merits and qualifications. Neither does ethnicity have bearing when it comes to law reinforcement.130

Comments such as these can be internalised superficially by those going to Afghanistan and needing to learn about ‘it’ as fast as possible. They also reassert the supremacy of those in power, even though the statement about ethnicity or race having no relevance in the West is as contentious as the statement that attentiveness to one’s ethnicity and those of others is crucial for survival in Afghanistan. Indeed, studies on incarceration policies in the USA and hiring practices in the UK all point to pronounced and sustained prejudices against people of colour and minoritised communities. By lulling his reader into a state of complacent superiority at every opportunity, Entezar re-inscribes the logics of Orientalism in a manner that appears almost farcical. The sentence below proves exemplary in this regard: Language is related to ethnicity and is a sensitive issue in Afghanistan. Unlike the West, where it is a means of communication and the key to learning, in Afghanistan people identify with language and use it as a tool for domination. Since Afghans identify with language, an attack on one’s language is tantamount to an attack on the people who speak it.131

Julietta Singh has plotted the violent history of linguistic mastery by Britain and France in their former colonies so methodically that the notion that language is not intimately tied to the wielding of power in and by the West is now fatuous, but that is not our major concern here.132 Instead, it is the dualistic construction of language – as a tool of domination in some places and 129

130 132

The way information is packaged is in itself a key tool of empire. See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), and also Ansorge and Barkawi, ‘Utile Forms’. 131 Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 81; emphasis added. Ibid., 88. Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

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a means of communication in others – that once again diverts attention from the casuistic logic of the statement to the familiar land of Self and Other, where everything that we are, they are not. By choosing examples that are recognisable given their prominence in other questionable knowledge-generating outlets such as the right-wing press in the USA and Britain, Afghanistan 101 becomes a mechanistic reassertion of everything we think we know about Afghanistan. Afghanistan crystallises into the country of domination, oppression, ethnic hatred and ancient customs. No book on Afghanistan, especially of this genre, would be complete without a mention of the role, or lack thereof, of women in the country. Afghanistan 101 portrays a bleak picture of the place, making blanket generalisations about the innate proclivity of ‘Afghan culture’ to be cruel to women and for women to be treated inhumanely: In Afghan culture, women are treated as property. In some parts of the country, women are sold as cattle. One of Khaled Hosseini’s characters in his recent novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, compares his wives with cars, calling the one he likes a Mercedes Benz and the one he dislikes a Russian Volga. It is worth noting in this connection that this novel gives an excellent portrayal of life for Afghan women in society.133

This tirade against the misogyny of ‘Afghan culture’ is followed by customary fulminations against the Taliban and the practices of veiling in Afghanistan. As an aside, it is pertinent to note that Hosseini himself is not only widely acclaimed as a novelist but also recommended in many syllabi and widely extolled as an Afghan expert in the West.134 He has been subject to much censure in Afghanistan for claiming to speak for the Afghan people while being divorced from Afghan ‘reality’ and ‘lived experience’, having left the country at the age of five and never having learned the language(s).135 It is perhaps unsurprising that a short monograph entitled Afghanistan 101 whose author claims to possess the secret to ‘Afghan culture’ does not amount to a rigorous scholarly enterprise. However, even if we were to forgive the shortcomings of the text itself, the more problematic trends that the book heralds remain acute. In the first instance, the popularity of the book is an instantiation of a wider phenomenon that afflicts the study of Afghanistan, namely our reliance on the belief that the ‘key’ to Afghanistan is its ‘culture’. 133 134

135

Afghanistan 101, 89. For instance, it appears alongside Afghanistan 101 as one of the five essential texts on the University of Maryland’s honours course ‘Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy towards Afghanistan’. Moreover, Hosseini’s work is largely based on emotive stereotyping and sophistry, as argued cogently by Janette Edwards in ‘Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation: The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner’, interdisciplinary.net, www.interdisciplinary.net/ati/diversity/multiculturalism/mcb2/edwards%20paper.pdf (last accessed 13 March 2019).

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‘Culture’ has increasingly become a stigmatising catch-all phrase for all kinds of social, political and economic formations, identities and affiliations found in the Global South.136 In other words, ‘culture’ is now used as a metonym for difference, for propping up old distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, couched in a sanitised and seemingly disinterested vocabulary and, most damagingly, as a self-justified amnesty from any meaningful engagement or dialogue with those bracketed off as belonging to ‘another culture’. The recourse to cultural differences is now a popular strategy for exculpation from the failures of intervention in Afghanistan, and studies such as Entezar’s only serve to bolster the myth of the ‘alienness’ of Afghan life. Indeed, how many other countries do we study in this cursory and limited manner? Is there an equivalent ‘101’ for the USA or Britain that is given to foreign troops deployed in the country as ‘essential reading’ or to university students? Can an author realistically write a book titled ‘America 101’ and be widely credited with having access to some deep truths about the land and its people that are not openly available to others through a rare prerogative granted on the basis of having lived in the country a few decades ago?137 Only in the context of the epistemological production of Afghanistan as a vacuum can this book be recommended as a credible source of information on the country. However, a reliance on hollow and impoverished signifiers continues to shape much if not most analysis on the country. Continuing this trend, a report by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit ventures: ‘Afghan society is elitist at its core, populist in its aura, and misogynist in its heart, where women are secondary citizens, always one of four: someone’s daughter, sister, wife or mother.’138 Barfield too can be summoned as evidence once more when he argues: Few peoples in the world, particularly in the Islamic world, have maintained such an unproblematic sense of themselves, their culture, and their superiority as the Afghans. In abstract terms all foreigners, especially non-Muslims, are viewed as inferior to Afghans. Although the great powers might have been militarily, technologically, and economically stronger, because they were non believers, or infidels, their values and way of life were naturally suspect. Afghanistan’s Muslim neighbors, however, fared only slightly better in (Sunni) Afghan eyes. The Uzbeks must have been asleep to allow

136

137 138

On culture as a racialised and expedient tool, especially in the social scientific arsenal of those involved in the Human Terrain System, see Derek Gregory, ‘Dis/ordering the Orient: Scopic Regimes and Modern War’, in Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War (London: Hurst & Co., 2012), 151–76. On the problematic application of ‘cultural lenses’ specifically in the Afghan context in the War on Terror, see Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (London: Hurst & Co., 2009). The appellation ‘America’ would itself be fraught, but it is used by residents of the USA and the wider world. Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, The Dilemma of Women and Leadership in Afghanistan: Lessons and Recommendations, 2014, https://areu.org.af/archives/publication/ 1425 (last accessed 14 March 2019).

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the Russians to occupy central Asia for more than a century; Pakistan is a suspect land of recent Muslim converts from Hinduism (Pashtuns and Baluch excepted) that never should have become a nation; and Iran is a nest of Shiite heretics who speak Persian with a ludicrous accent.139

This is a rather tall claim to make given competing evidence about Afghanistan’s relatively recent entry into the world as a holistic and unified ‘imagined community’. It is also suspect given that ‘Afghans’ also include Uzbeks, Turkmen and Tajiks and have contesting notions of ‘nation’ and nationality, a fact that is completely papered over in this representation of Afghans as exceptionally narcissistic. Perhaps Barfield is referring only to the Pashtun population of Afghanistan? Aside from that, it is rather demonstrative that Barfield’s text is venerated as a tour de force and cited as the definitive text on Afghanistan. This ‘anthropological’ text is bereft of any ethnography, uses no language sources, leans heavily on secondary political science texts to make its core arguments and displays a shockingly poor grasp of the regional and linguistic make-up of the country. In sum, if the Orientalists that Said attacks saw Islam as a ‘cultural synthesis’ that ‘could be studied apart from the economics, sociology, and politics of Islamic peoples’,140 others have taken this ahistoricism and essentialism one step further. Entezar’s work comes off as top candidate in this race for cultural reductionism, in which not only is ‘Afghan culture’ unyoked from the overlapping and interdependent categories of society, politics and economics, but it is an entirely timeless entity – ‘the software of the mind’141 – that, when comprehended correctly, is instrumental in being able to ‘predict human behavior’.142 Culture, then, is the grid of intelligibility that sets one group of (usually geographically bound) people apart from another and enables researchers to predict and contrast the behaviour(s) of these distinct groups. Culture is shorn of all its complexity and contestation both as a category of thought and as an object of study.143 What makes Afghanistan 101 especially powerful, and therefore dangerous, is not the ‘common-sense’ knowledge it exudes about Afghan society but its reception and dissemination in the context of the intervention under way in Afghanistan. Ideas, narratives and discourses

139 141

142 143

140 Barfield, Afghanistan, 42. Said, Orientialism, 11. Entezar, Afghanistan 101, 17; Entezar borrows this from Hofstede’s definition of culture, which is based on a computing metaphor: ‘culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes one human group from another’ (quoted in Afghanistan 101, 19). Ibid., 19; emphasis added. The distinction is borrowed from Raymond Williams’s definition and historicisation of culture as a category in terms of which modern scholars treat ‘a people’ and its emergence as an object of study for anthropology, archaeology, historiography and, more recently, cultural studies. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87–93. See also Massad, Desiring Arabs, 2–3.

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are not passive descriptions and ‘empty rhetoric’. They are deeply implicated in, and constitutive of, the social realities they describe, and when they are ‘mainstreamed’ in the way those contained in Afghanistan 101 have been, they make for a particularly compelling and dangerous justification for certain types of racialised policies and interventions.144 Conclusion Some peoples and traditions are only ever viewed as instrumental objects of enquiry, sometimes of marvel and at other times of disdain. That these traditions may present genuine frameworks of knowledge in their own right, and that these ‘cultures’ are themselves the products of tangled histories, imperial encounters and colonial legacies that often have ramifications that are contradictory and ambivalent for all actors concerned, is a possibility that few studies of Afghanistan entertain. This chapter has sought to show the muted racism at the heart of the work currently published and promulgated by ‘Afghan experts’. The recognition that we need to unpack the understanding of culture as merely something that sets ‘them’ apart from ‘us’, with all the concomitant notions of superiority, hierarchy and asymmetry that underpin this conception of culture, would be the first step towards truly decolonising the production of knowledge. The abundance of rhetorical strategies and analogies – metaphors, metonymy, tropes, similes, etc. – used when speaking and writing of Afghanistan is noteworthy in its promulgation of Afghanistan’s image as a mystical and unfathomable land, putatively intelligible only through equal invocation of fact and fiction, histrionics and history. As Charles Mills has argued in another context, we can see in Anglophone representations of Afghanistan a set of interlocking cognitive processes at work that operate at multiple and sometimes competing levels of overt and tacit background and foreground belief: Eurocentric norming, the development of specific conceptual repertoires and the formulation of theories whose pooled outcome is the erasure of histories and knowledges that do not comply with the stories being narrated.145 As I have shown here, this ‘idea’ of ‘Afghanistan’ – alternately produced as wild, sickly and benighted – is a curated, if polysemous and chaotic one. It stems from an entrenched colonial anxiety to make sense of Afghanistan, a slippery task, aggravated by a history of lackadaisical interest in the country.

144 145

The archetypal example of this is NATO soldiers urinating on the bodies of the Taliban, only to be later criticised for ‘cultural insensitivity’. Charles Mills, ‘Unwriting and Unwhitening the World’, in Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London: Routledge, 2014), 202–14.

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Against this backdrop, the authors examined above fall short even of the criteria by which we judge ‘native informants’. Native informers in colonial contexts are deeply embedded observers of, and participants in their own cultures and societies. In the case of Afghanistan, we see a double injustice – the native informants have themselves fled the country decades before they parlay their childhood memories into scientific expertise, giving their opinions and interpretations from afar. Afghanistan’s quasi-coloniality lends a voyeuristic element to the very ‘cultural translators’ the Anglophone West has come to rely on. There exists a humbler class of native informants who are in their own way central to the project of imagining Afghanistan but are not prominent writers and novelists like Entezar and Hosseini. These include translators and other ‘culture workers’ whose local proficiency has been vital for the functioning – and less frequently the disruption – of the colonial project. Yet this diverse cast of characters who would also travel under the sign of ‘native informant’ are sidelined from processes of hegemonic knowledge production because of their financial vulnerability and, ultimately, their disposability. In 2018 Britain announced the deportation of 150 Afghan interpreters working for the British Army, who had initially been given sanctuary in the UK, unless they each paid £2,400 to the Home Office – a sum most of them could not afford.146 Afghanistan’s precarity in the global arena is reflected in the ways in which knowledge is produced about it, but is also mirrored by that segment of its population that is crucial to the production of a certain type of knowledge, knowledge which is usually subjugated or dismissed. The next chapter digs deeper into the liminality of the Afghan state, and into (the possibility and promise of ) subjugated knowledges.

146

Ewen MacAskill, ‘Afghan Interpreters Working for UK Army “Failed” by Government’, Guardian, 26 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/26/afghan-interpretersuk-army-failed-british-government-commons-report (last accessed 5 February 2019).

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2

A Space Contested, or the ‘State’ of Afghanistan

To the centre of any empire, the frontier is a site of anxiety, of potential harm, of barbarians who could be marching towards the gate. —Manan Ahmed, 20111

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. —W. B. Yeats, 19192

The Afghan state emerges as a problematic outlier in an already highly contentious and divisive debate about the ‘state’ as a unit of analysis in the field of IR, political sociology and cognate disciplines. This chapter interrogates some of the ways in which the Afghan state has been construed in an effort to show how colonialism and its vicissitudes both shaped (what was to become) the state and continue to exert a determining influence on the knowledge produced about it. The back-and-forth of imperial engagement and retreat, alluded to in the introduction to this book and in the previous chapter, has led to partial and fragmentary knowledge and the ineluctable production of Afghanistan as a ‘place in between’, in Rory Stewart’s revealing articulation.3 The current second chapter charts the trajectory of Afghanistan as a ‘spatial formation’: from the inception of the state in the nineteenth 1 2 3

Ahmed, ‘Adam’s Mirror’, 60. William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1991). Rory Stewart, The Places in Between (London: Picador, 2013). Incidentally, John Kerry recommended the book to Hillary Clinton as a window into Afghanistan in January 2009. See ‘Senate Confirmation Hearing for Secretary of State Nominee Hillary Clinton’, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=85454&st=afghanistan&st1= (last accessed 20 February 2020).

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century under the Afghan Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, albeit with strong ‘colonial moorings’,4 to its construction as a ‘buffer’, the dominant narrative of the Great Game in which Afghanistan was imagined as caught between two meaningful and meaning-making entities – the British Empire and Russia (or South and Central Asia). Before conducting a genealogical enquiry into Afghanistan’s existence and development as a particular type of territorial or topographical entity – the ‘frontier state’ – I focus on the discursive production of Afghanistan as a ‘failed’ state. Indeed, the popular apprehension of Afghanistan as a ‘failed’ state has its precedent in the ways in which the British imagined and interacted with ‘the space in between’ their empire and Russia’s in the twentieth century. Anglophone representations of the Afghan state both propound the exceptionalist myth in their depiction of Afghanistan as a unique, and uniquely dangerous or intractable, border-zone and, at the same time, position the country in the accustomed trajectory of fledgling and fragile post-colonial states. This serves as yet another instantiation of the ‘same’ but ‘different’ narrative that is exemplary of Afghanistan’s function in the imperial imaginary. So how has it come to pass that in the present world order, characterised by crises and interventions, Afghanistan is construed as the place not only ‘where empires come to die’ but also where ‘exceptionally bad things happen’? How has Afghanistan become so closely associated with the notion of state collapse? These are urgent questions, important not only for their focus on Afghanistan, as one of the longest-running contemporary conflicts, but also for their wider implications. The processes of knowledge production that determine which states are worthy of the name are the very same ones that help structure and enable colonial interventions around the world. In the quest to answer these questions, two Foucauldian concepts provide the theoretical foils to this chapter. Through a recourse to Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’, I draw out the ways in which the quasi-colonisation of Afghanistan impeded the institutionalisation of the modern scientific mode of governance which is heavily reliant on statistics, codification and classification. This glaring ‘omission’ of the establishment of an invasive state apparatus is now held up as the reason for the signal failure of Afghanistan as a polity, economy and society. A related concept, that of ‘state racism’, is used to analyse the neologism ‘Af-Pak’, popularised by the Obama administration.5 State racist ‘Af-Pak’, in its calculated galvanisation of a popular

4 5

I borrow the term from Hanifi, Connecting Histories. For more on ‘governmentality’ see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France (1978–9), trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), especially 69–72, and for ‘state racism’ see Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (London: Macmillan, 2003).

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geographical prejudice, perpetuates the production of Afghanistan as a space of exception in an effort to (re)make the region through continued military and epistemic violence.6 In spite of being subject to some very nuanced analyses and penetrating critique, the state continues to be the organising principle of world politics. The distinct but mutually enforcing narratives of the state, as an agent of modernity and a hermetically sealed ‘container of identity’, remain firmly wedded to a methodological nationalism and the teleological logics of all ‘history’, traditionally rendered.7 Not only has the state been granted ontological primacy in the global arena for some time – even if we were to take into account a move away from (neo-)realism and the IR orthodoxy’s conception of the state as a stable if not quite transcendental structure – the twentieth century has also been witness to the congealment of the state and epistemology. Fashioned as a sort of repository of all possible information about the humanity dwelling within its borders, the state since the Victorian era has been viewed as having a monopoly of knowledge about its citizenry: their languages, customs, religions, ‘ethnicities’ are all purveyed by, and under the purview of, the state. The recent challenge to this statist economy of information, with the rise of non-state actors, has seen a backlash in the form of a prima facie discrediting of alternative socio-political formations as illegitimate, anti-national or, worse, terrorist organisations. In this imaginary, with the exception of big corporations, non-statist ways have become de facto ways of non-being, viewed as inherently dangerous, with modern systems of knowledge production steadfastly anchored to the nation state as political actor. The vote by the UK to leave the European Union in 2016 is one materialisation of the retrenchment of state power, as is the rise of nationalist parties in most other countries in the EU. The nation state, even where it is seemingly weakened by the rise of globalisation, continues to be the repertoire of information and loyalty of its denizens. In the words of Thomas Richards, knowledge is inconceivable without the state; the ‘question of the state is a question of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, that the classing of knowledge must be underwritten and directed by the state in its various capacities; that all epistemology became and must remain state epistemology in an economy of

6

7

The essays in Gregory and Pred, eds., Violent Geographies all examine in interesting and important ways the popular manipulation of geography and cartography undertaken so as to sanction (Western) military intervention and political violence in the contemporary world order. On ‘containers of identity’ see Randy Persaud, ‘Situating Race in International Relations: The Dialectics of Civilizational Security in American Immigration’, in Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, eds., Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 2002), 79. Persaud’s argument is that states are viewed as receptacles of different and distinct national identities without careful examination of the processes through which such identities are ‘manufactured, inscribed, hegemonized, and reproduced’.

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controlled information’.8 In the twenty-first century, against the backdrop of a loss of the Weberian monopoly of the (legitimate) use of force, the state has been emboldened and (re)asserted itself specifically in the realm of knowledge – through modes of surveillance, extensive codification and the ‘management’ of its population. In this context of a tacit privileging of the nation state over alternate socio-spatial configurations, Afghanistan, with its seemingly fractured state structure, emerges as an aberration, as a ‘violent geography’, as a ‘savage frontier’ and as a liminal space demarcated by its lack and marginality.9 Building upon Ann Laura Stoler’s conceptualisation of statehood and sovereignty in the colonised periphery as a matter of degree rather than of fact, I submit that Afghanistan is a particular imperial formation but not a unique one.10 The labels applied to the Afghan state – ‘buffer’, ‘frontier’ or ‘failed’ – are essential elements in a story of imperial sense-making. While Stoler directs her attention to the USA as an imperial entity, a macro-polity ‘whose changing technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation’ in order to show how empires, broadly understood, have not usually been – and certainly are not now – clearly bordered polities, my focus is on the other side of the equation: on Afghanistan as one of the zones of exclusion and territorial ambiguity that has been constituted by an imperial macro-polity, that is, Britain (and arguably Russia to a lesser extent), and later by the USA.11 Starting from the premise that empires are ‘scaled genres of rule’ that produce and rely upon differing degrees of sovereignty in their spheres of influence, one can cast a different light on Afghanistan not merely as a place that confounds established narratives of colonisation, but crucially also as a politicised space that is in some ways an exemplary instance of the diverse and variegated manner in which empires carve out their territories and conduct their affairs. After situating Afghanistan in the wider political literature on the state and state failure, the discussion traces the genealogy and cartographic lineage of ‘Afghanistan’ from its appearance ‘on the map’ to the

8 9

10 11

Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of the Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 74. On ‘violent geographies’, see Gregory and Pred, eds., Violent Geographies. There is no dearth of literature on Afghanistan’s ‘savage frontier’. A small sample includes Jules Stewart, The Savage Border: The Story of the North-West Frontier (New York: The History Press, 2013); Richards, The Savage Frontier; Victoria Schofield, Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict, rev. ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010); and Imtiaz Gul, The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier (London: Viking, 2010). Ann Laura Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006), 128. While on the subject, it is worth noting that I use ‘imperial formation’ to refer to those entities that have been constituted by imperial practices, whereas for Stoler the concept of imperial formations refers to the colonising power itself. That is to suggest that Britain, rather than Afghanistan, would be the imperial formation on Stoler’s account.

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current delineation of its borders, including the idea of ‘Af-Pak’ that has gained traction in both policy and academic milieux. Theorising Afghanistan’s Sovereign Failure Afghanistan is for all practical purposes considered a ‘failed state’. The zealous state-building projects undertaken after the intervention in 2001, many abandoned in the face of high costs, disillusionment and a wavering commitment to, and often half-baked conceptions of, ‘nation-building’, are all irrevocably mired in a vocabulary of state fragility, failure, collapse and corruption as almost inherent and a priori conditions of Afghanistan as a political (and territorial) entity. Thus the political commentator Zaman Stanizai strikes a chord with many when he asks, rhetorically referring to Afghanistan’s own past: ‘Can we afford another failed state in Afghanistan?’ and cautions that ‘[t]he country’s fragile political structure, presently held together by a scaffolding of American military and economic assistance, could collapse into a failed state overnight’.12 The danger of Afghanistan returning to its failed status quo – as under the Taliban – continues to ignite the concerns of leaders in the Western world. To pick a few instances, as early as 2002, Tony Blair was complacently indicating Britain’s positive influence on Afghanistan in his news conference with George Bush. He averred: ‘I was grateful for the President's kind words about the contribution Britain has made in Afghanistan’, and continued: ‘[w]e made that willingly, because we believe it is important not just that we root out the last remnants of the Al Qaida terrorist network in Afghanistan but also that we help that country to go from being a failed state, failing its region and its people, to a state that offers some hope of stability and prosperity for the future’.13 In an analogous manner, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, underlined the incalculable value of the NATO intervention in Afghanistan: ‘[a]nd now that brings me to NATO, protecting NATO member states from being attacked by other countries or by attacks coming and emanating from other country [sic]. Afghanistan as a failed state was a safe haven for terrorist groups, for Al Qaida, that actually allowed attacks against our alliance. And that is what we wanted to prevent with this mission in the first place for the future.’14 In 2008 the Atlantic 12

13

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Zaman Stanizai, ‘Can We Afford Another Failed State in Afghanistan? Beyond the 2014 Drawdown’, Huffington Post, 3 March 2014,www.huffingtonpost.com/zaman-stanizai/canwe-afford-another-fai_b_4863736.html (last accessed 20 February 2020); Stanizai, it should be noted, is a professor of political science at California State University, Dominguez Hills. ‘The President’s News Conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom, in Crawford Texas’, 2 April 2002, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ index.php?pid=63297&st=afghanistan&st1=failed+state (last accessed 15 March 2019) ‘The President’s News Conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in BadenBaden, Germany’, 3 April 2009, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ index.php?pid=86049&st=afghanistan&st1=failed+state (last accessed 15 March 2019).

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Council of the USA and the Belfer Center co-issued a brief titled ‘Saving Afghanistan’ that was circulated to members of Congress, stating: ‘Urgent changes are required now to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failing or failed state. Not just the future of the Afghan people is at stake. If Afghanistan fails, the possible strategic consequences will worsen regional instability, do great harm to the fight against Jihadist and religious extremism, and put in grave jeopardy NATO’s future as a credible, cohesive and relevant military alliance.’ The brief concluded: ‘In summary, despite efforts of the Afghan Government and the international community, Afghanistan remains a failing state. It could become a failed state. Were that to happen, the geostrategic consequences would likely prove profound for the West.’15 The widespread use of claims such as this rests on a largely unproblematised notion of the ‘state’ and its sine qua non, ‘sovereignty’. While the need to question the accuracy of these ahistorical conceptions remains vitally important, serious interventions have already been made in the disciplines of politics and sociology and elsewhere. George Steinmetz, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, for instance, have shown how the state, insofar as ‘it’ can be said to ‘exist’, is a mythologised, contradictory and constantly challenged entity.16 Siba Grovogui, and John Hobson and John Sharman have demonstrated that imperial hierarchy and Eurocentric modes of thought resolutely underpin notions of ‘statehood’.17 Timothy Mitchell has strongly advocated rethinking the state as a ‘rhetorical effect’ rather than, as per mainstream accounts, as a self-generated and governing stable structure.18 Jonathan Hill and Branwen Gruffyd-Jones have examined the central assumptions that fortify discourses of statehood, state failure and good governance, and have deftly highlighted their fundamentally Orientalist make-up.19 Similarly, ‘sovereignty’ has come 15

16

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Strategic Advisers Group, ‘Saving Afghanistan: An Appeal and Plan for Urgent Action’, www .belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/Saving%20Afghanistan%20-%20Atlantic% 20Council.pdf (last accessed 15 March 2019). George Steinmetz, ‘The Colonial State as a Social Field: Ethnographic Capital and Native Policy in the German Overseas Empire before 1914’, American Sociological Review 73, no. 4 (2008), 589–612; James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Siba Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); John M. Hobson and Jason C. Sharman, ‘The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics: Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change’, European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1 (2005), 63–98. Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991), 77–96. Jonathan Hill, ‘Beyond the Other? A Postcolonial Critique of the Failed State Thesis’, African Identities 3, no. 2 (2006), 139–54; Branwen Gruffyd-Jones, ‘“Good Governance” and "State Failure”: The Pseudo-Science of Statesmen in Our Times’, in Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London: Routledge, 2014), 62–80.

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under rigorous scrutiny by scholars working in the field of IR and in the groves of academe more generally. Jens Bartelson has examined the historical contingency of sovereignty in some depth, to take one prominent example, while Stephen Krasner has labelled the sovereignty regime ‘organized hypocrisy’ because it is an international norm that is routinely flagrantly violated but is nevertheless held up as a determining precept of the post-colonial world order.20 Lauren Benton, on the basis of a historical study of European empires between 1400 and 1900, argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as ‘networks of corridors and enclaves’, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law.21 In spite of this extensive and burgeoning body of literature, contemporary work on Afghanistan remains impoverished and doggedly married to discourses of state failure and collapse. As with the notion of the ‘tribe’, the subject of Chapter 3, unreflexive epistemologies continue to define debates about the Afghan state. This has consequences for our understanding of the Afghan state and also contributes to the perpetuation of the hollow grammar of ‘failure’ and ‘lack’ in the social sciences more generally. Seemingly free of the racial biases and ethnocentric baggage that were intrinsic to colonial propaganda, talk of state failure is often laden with the same normative assumptions that accompanied more explicitly racial tropes and conceptualisations of world order. The mainstreaming of ‘state failure’, then, is a prominent instance of the manner in which an ‘ontology of difference’ persists in subliminally structuring the current world order, with all its material and ideological reverberations.22 In addition, Afghanistan is the site where discourses of state failure are ligatured with discourses of savagery, Islamic fundamentalism and chronic instability. The Afghan state is not only a failure, but is also constructed as spineless: in constant danger of being hijacked by terrorists, it is a morally, socially and politically bankrupt space of contestation.23 Indeed Afghanistan is the privileged locus where discourses of failure and deviance converge. It is at once part of an excluded South fomenting international instability through terrorism, criminal activity and conflict associated with the ‘axes of evil’, and a

20

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Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, Department of Political Science, 1993); Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). On ‘ontology of difference’, see Gruffyd-Jones, ‘“Good Governance” and “State Failure”’. The frequently aired concerns about Al Qaeda using the Afghan state to its own ends, in spite of Kabul, places an anxiety about the fundamentally incapacitated nature of the Afghan state against the backdrop of a stable and ontologically secure world community of states.

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failure in terms of being able to cater to its own population, as evinced in the form of human development indicators and corruption indices. The Anglophone discourses of state failure, and its concomitant horrors, can be imputed to the partial colonisation of Afghanistan. The modern European state had at its disposal both force and information, to be used towards its population in the manner it deemed appropriate. Its strategies of governance were exported to the colony, and sometimes finessed within, albeit not without violence or resistance. The state in Afghanistan did not fully materialise as a ‘principle for reading reality’ or ‘scheme for intelligibility’; it was never completely exposed to the institutionalisation of the application of governmental reason that occurred in Europe and – to a lesser degree – in parts of the properly colonised world.24 This governmental reason, through the application of technique and the production of statistics, made a host of resources available at the behest of the state.25 However, in Afghanistan there was a definite lack of statistical knowledge within the state, leaving officials unable to formulate techniques or ‘tactics’ that organised or positioned ‘things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means’.26 Michel Foucault termed the application of tactics to arrange and achieve its desired end the ‘arts of governance’ or ‘governmentality’, whose significant historical effect was the governmentalisation of the state.27 Instead of being based on classical notions of divine sovereign right, the arts of governance focused attention on the preservation of the state as a sovereign entity, as opposed to the continuation of a monarchical line. This notion of state preservation is central to contemporary understandings of the state as both actor and set of practices. The repetitious assertion of ‘state failure’ in policy documents often reveals a subterranean, if unacknowledged, channelling of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Thus, for instance, the British Ministry of Defence’s counterinsurgency manual JDP 3-40 (2009) – a crucial document for British troops stationed in Afghanistan – isolates the state’s capability to secure, protect and govern the people as indispensable. It is worth quoting the justification for intervention in those cases where a state has been found wanting: Countries that have a politically significant presence of irregular activity are likely to sit within the spectrum of fragile and failed states. A fragile state still has a viable host nation government, but it has a reduced capability and capacity to secure, protect and govern the population. Without intervention, it is likely to become a failed state. A failed state is where remnants of a host nation, or some form of potential host nation 24 25 26 27

Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 6. Ibid.; see also Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Foucault makes this point in his 1978 lecture. He also conceives of government as ‘the right disposition of things arranged so as to lead to a suitable end’. See ibid., 96. Ibid.

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government, may still exist. However, in such states, the government does not have a monopoly on the use of force, cannot provide security or simple basic services, and is not sufficiently legitimate or effective to protect its borders, citizens or even itself. It may exert a very weak level of governance and rule of law in all or part of the state, but overall, the mechanisms and tools of governance have largely collapsed.28

The manual’s ‘mechanisms and tools of governance’ can be plotted along the same coordinates as the ‘arts of governance’ described by Foucault, and their failure is owed to the state’s incapacity to survey, protect and harness the energies of the population that falls under a defined territory. The Afghan state has yet to complete a full census, while maps of the country remain woefully inadequate, with ‘ethnic maps’ used regularly in place of conventional geographical ones. There were no cadastral surveys undertaken within the framework of the British or major countrywide infrastructural projects. Indeed, even today the establishment of cadastral maps in Afghanistan remains a top priority of the foreign troops based in the country.29 The prosaic everyday social processes we recognise and name as the state were never fully institutionalised in Afghanistan. Boundaries were demarcated and delineated, of which some were respected and many persist, but no authority – neither the British or Russian invaders, nor the native Afghan governments that mediated between these empires and inherited the ‘state’ – exercised complete control over them. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, this is crucial in order for the state to exist as a viable political, social and imaginative entity: By establishing a territorial boundary and exercising absolute control over movement across it, state practices define and help constitute a national entity. Setting up and policing a frontier involves a variety of fairly modern social practices – continuous barbed-wire fencing, passports, immigration laws, inspections, currency control and so on. These mundane arrangements, most of them unknown two hundred or even one hundred years ago, help manufacture an almost transcendental entity, the nation state. This entity comes to seem something much more than the sum of the everyday activities that constitute it, appearing as a structure containing and giving order and meaning to people’s lives.30

James Scott similarly expounds on the importance of these practices, or what he calls ‘state simplifications’, representing techniques for grasping a ‘large

28

29

30

Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine Publication 3-40: Security and Stabilisation; The Military Contribution (JDP 3-40) (2009), 3. This was the MOD’s equivalent and answer to the US counter-insurgency manual FM 3-24. Think tanks and policy institutes based in the West themselves admit to this paucity. See for instance, the EASO Country of Origin Information Report 2017, European Asylum Support Office, Afghanistan: Individuals Targeted under Societal and Legal Norms, www.easo.europa .eu/sites/default/files/publications/coi-Afghanistan-targeting-society.pdf (last accessed 16 March 2019). Mitchell, ‘Limits of the State’, 94.

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and complex reality’. In order for officials to be able to apprehend aspects of the ensemble, this complex reality must necessarily be reduced to what he calls ‘schematic categories’. On Scott’s account the ‘only way to accomplish this is to reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation’.31 This is key to making citizens out of subjects, to make societies legible so as to prepare them for benevolent governance or authoritarian exploitation, as the case may be. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that the Afghan populace is often portrayed as disconnected from and indifferent to the central government. While some of the ‘illegibility’ of the Afghan citizenry can be attributed to acts of resistance of the sort James Scott brilliantly analyses (and often romanticises) in another work focusing on the mountains of South East Asia,32 much of it simply stems from the feeble and patchy attempts at the institutionalisation of a viable state structure in a polity that was technically only delineated in the twentieth century. Occasionally, this was wilful – a weak state in Afghanistan served British interests well at certain historical junctures – but more often than not, it was a symptom of the place Afghanistan occupied both in the colonial mindset and in the colonial order that was created: that of a ‘blip’, a (imperfect) ‘buffer’, at the edge or frontier of the empire. This is most evident when Afghanistan is compared with British India during the same period. As, among others, Bernard Cohn and Christopher Bayly have noted, effective governance in the empire required a close connection between the production of knowledge about human and natural resources and the maintenance of imperial control.33 Cohn has illustrated the ways in which the British ‘reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms’ in India.34 To take one prominent example, to show how this production of knowledge differed qualitatively and quantitatively in Afghanistan, we can briefly contrast how the notions of caste and tribe were approached in the two countries. The notion of caste played much the same role in India as did ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan. ‘Caste’ was conceived of in terms similar to ‘tribe’ in that both were imagined to be socially sanctioned, ingrained traditions and putative lynchpins for the Indian and Afghan sociopolitical universes respectively. However, whereas each aspect of the ‘caste system’ was documented, scrutinised and dissected – indeed caste was ‘systematised’ in India – the ‘tribe’ was not made into the subject of the kind of 31 33

34

32 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 77. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; and Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But see William Pinch, ‘Same Difference in India and Europe‘, History and Theory 38, no. 3 (1999), 389–407, who reviews these two works and points out their incompatibilities. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 162.

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ethnographic and empirical knowledge that the colonial state devoted to and developed around notions of ‘caste’.35 Therefore, while epistemic and on-theground engagement with ‘tribes’ remained cursory and sporadic, as I argue in the next chapter, the caste system was made the object of intense anthropological interest and prolonged sociological treatment. The ‘tribe’ as an analytic category was enunciated – it was paid lip service – but not operationalised. ‘Caste’, on the other hand, was the subject of sustained state simplification. Through these practices of abstraction, sovereign power crystallised disparate modes of thought, contradictory elements and dispersed forms into schematic formulaic knowledges or what Josef Ansorge has termed the ‘technics of politics’.36 In Afghanistan there was often an initiation of or move towards schematisation, but it was almost always abandoned in favour of less profuse engagement.37 The colonial state in India mimicked the European experience of statehood, or at least a version of it, much more closely than the state in Afghanistan, simply because the penetrative faculties of the state as an apparatus were carefully honed: the state was schooled in the art and science of government or ‘the conduct of conduct’.38 In contrast, Afghanistan was (and is) expected to ‘behave like a state’, but was dispossessed of the colonial institutions of statehood. At least initially, the colonial concept of ‘state’ proved to have little traction in the Afghan political universe when decoupled from colonial force and in the face of the infrequent but not unimportant, bolstering of alternate schemes of governance.39 So, whereas in both India and Afghanistan, the nation state is largely (but never exclusively) a colonial creation or a ‘derivative discourse’,40 in Afghanistan even this imitative form was installed as an afterthought and with little consistency. Afghanistan was not witness to directed government or techne in the sense of a ‘practical rationality governed by a conscious goal’.41 This is not

35 36 37 38 39

40 41

On the caste system in India, see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Josef Ansorge, Identify and Sort: How Digital Power Changed World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). This is a theme in Afghanistan’s history and also of this book, one that arises from Afghanistan’s quasi-colonial past. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982), 777–95. One such alternative system of governance, institutionalised on the (now) Pakistani side of the North-West Frontier, was the Sandeman system. See Christian Tripodi, ‘“Good for One but Not the Other”: The “Sandeman System” as Applied to Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier, 1877–1947’, The Journal of Military History 73, no. 3 (2009), 767–802. There is more on this below. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986). Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power (Interview with Paul Rabinow)’, in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), 378.

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Mapping Afghanistan: The Production of a ‘Periphery’

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to buy into the popular conception of Afghanistan as a wild ungovernable void. On the contrary, there exist a number of alternative social and political formations, and localised and quotidian practices, which are dismissed, belittled, forgotten or made invisible in a world where blinkered discourses of state failure and modernity reign.42 If these discourses of state failure and their paraphernalia systemically sideline the rapacious past of colonialism and continue to disavow complicity in the present era of international intervention, they also subject Afghanistan to another violence, that of being generated and cultivated as an exception, both to the colonial order and to the present world order of sovereign (post)colonial states. Mapping Afghanistan: The Production of a ‘Periphery’ What the term ‘Afghanistan’ designates in the colonial archive has varied in time and space. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi claims – on the basis of his sampling of an array of maps produced in the USA, Europe and British India during the nineteenth century – that before the First Anglo-Afghan War ‘Afghanistan’ rarely appeared on maps, and on the occasions when it did, it was dwarfed in consequence by both Kabul and Kandahar.43 Mountstuart Elphinstone’s authoritative map, generated by the first British diplomatic mission to the country, confirms this by emphasising the ‘Kingdom of Caubul’ as the reference and focal point.44 It was his mission that put Afghanistan on the (colonial) map, as it were. It yielded a tremendous amount of information on what had hitherto been terra incognita. The mission was also the first to formulate and invigorate the distinction between settled and nomadic populations, and can be credited with providing both the impetus and the ethos for the birth of a particular territorial notion of space in the colonial imagination with respect to a formerly unknown region.45 Allan similarly concludes on the basis of his reading of a wide range of European historical chronicles of the region that ‘it is very clear that Kabul existed before Afghanistan’.46 The term ‘Afghaunistaun’ surfaces once in Elphinstone’s main text and faintly on the map drawn by 42

43 44

45

46

These include the quamis, sufi tariqats and communities of peripatetic traders; see David B. Edwards, Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Hanifi, Connecting Histories; and Abdul Sabahuddin, History of Afghanistan (New Delhi: Global Vision Publishing House, 2008). Hanifi, Connecting Histories, 18. Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and Its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary, and India: A View of the Afghaun Nation, and a History of the Dooraunee Monarchy, vol. 1 (London: R. Bentley, 1839), 136. Ibid.; and Martin Bayly, ‘Imperial Ontological (In)security: “Buffer States”, International Relations and the Case of Anglo-Afghan Relations, 1808–1878’, European Journal of International Relations 21, no. 4 (2015), 816–40. We will return to this mission in Chapter 3. Allan, ‘Defining Place and People in Afghanistan’, 548.

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his delegation, but pales in comparison to the major cities.47 The name Afghanistan received greater cartographic significance after the First AngloAfghan War, and by the 1860s Afghanistan and Kabul are more evenly – albeit still unequally – represented. In the 1870s and 1880s Afghanistan begins to acquire weight in its own right; however, it is not until the 1890s that Afghanistan as a bounded space materialises on maps.48 In 1879 a memorandum by Major H. Grey which considers the courses open to the British in the region refers to the ‘Afghan Kingdom’, but never to the ‘Afghan state’. In fact, the memorandum urges the ‘break up the Afghan kingdom into small States, directly dependent upon ourselves, like the Protected Seikh States’.49 Until 1898 there is no mention of the Afghan state, merely of the ‘Afghan province’ and of ‘Uzbeg states’ and the ‘Tajik State’. Afghanistan’s nineteenth-century cartographic lineage can be summarised in Hanifi’s lucid turn of phrase: ‘Afghanistan first emerges from within the Kabul radius, then competes with the city for primacy, and finally, the term Afghanistan surmounts and subsumes Kabul’ (see Figure 2.1).50 The creation of borders as demarcated physical boundaries and its corollary, the conjuring of ‘national identity’, symbolise a specific European conception of place, personhood and politics that is usually traced back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The drawing up of boundaries and the establishment of borders through formal and informal colonialism in the ‘Third World’ was rarely smooth or homogeneous, and while sometimes these marches dislodged and replaced indigenous notions of space and subjectivity, more frequently autochthonous communities grappled with this imposition through a spectrum of strategies ranging from subversion to internalisation – a spectrum of strategies that usually resulted in the creation of a hybridised political and social order. Just as important, the presence and suppression of peripheries and grey zones within the colonial periphery, although overlooked or dismissed in much of the literature as anomalous and subject to scant treatment, was, I contend, necessary for the core to define itself and to represent itself as a stable and stabilising force. These liminal spaces and amorphous frontiers were a source of friction and potential decentring for the colonial Self and hence needed to be defined and delimited as exceptional aberrations for the realisation of the symbolic order that the colonial state saw itself as embodying and projecting outwards. 47 48

49 50

Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, vol. 1, 39, to refer to the mountains of Afghanistan, and xiv in the ‘Notice Regarding the Map’. Hanifi, Connecting Histories, 18; this absence is corroborated in the archives at the British Library: Secret Department: Enclosures to Letters from India, L/P&S/5, India Office Records, British Library. Major H. Grey, ‘Memorandum on Afghan Affairs’, Punjab Foreign Office, Uxbridge, 2 November 1879, L/P&S/7, India Office Records, British Library. Hanifi, Connecting Histories, 18.

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Royal Society

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Figure 2.1 Mountstuart Elphinstone’s map of Afghanistan.

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Like other liminal zones and situated frontiers, the emergence of Afghanistan as a bounded territorial space was a long and contested process and exemplified the messy and often contradictory realities of its ‘proto-colonial’ inception.51 The country’s colonial bordering took twenty-six years, beginning in 1871, when Arthur Goldsmid was sent on a mission to establish a boundary between Afghanistan and Persia in Sistan, and it ended, at least on paper, in 1896, when Mortimer Durand’s eponymous line was delineated on the ground between Pakistan and Afghanistan.52 Afghanistan’s first modern frontier was its western border facing Persia, and thus it was against Persia, or present-day Iran, that Afghanistan was originally physically defined and topographically delineated.53 In the narrative of the ‘Great Game’, the hegemonic, albeit largely retrospective, account of the history of the period, both Afghanistan and Persia are represented as buffers between the Russian and British Empires. However, the Goldsmid mission was dispatched before the ubiquitous myth of the Great Game captured the imperial imagination and while the British were still pursuing their policy of ‘mastery inactivity’.54 The Sistani border therefore represented the only one that the Afghans (and the Persians) had some leeway to define for themselves, and that was not simply presented as a fait accompli by the Russians or the British.55 The Goldsmid mission had a limited mandate: it was charged with arbitrating between local states. Although the mission introduced Westphalian norms of statehood through the cartographic depiction of political identity and control, the demarcation of this particular border gave rise to ‘the “indigenization” of European norms and forms of political intercourse’ (see Figure 2.2).56

51

52

53 54

55 56

On these spaces see especially Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geobody of a Nation (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; and Alex Maroya, ‘Rethinking the Nation-State from the Frontier’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2003), 267–92. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, ‘Mapping Afghanistan: Colonial, National, and Post-Colonial Cartographies’, unpublished paper, 2014. On the Goldsmid mission and the Sistan border, see Benjamin Hopkins, ‘Bounds of Identity: The Goldsmid Mission and the Delineation of the Perso-Afghan Border in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 2 (2007), 233–54; on the demarcation of Afghanistan’s frontier, R. Gopalakrishnan, The Geography and Politics of Afghanistan (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1982), 70–113. On the Durand Line, see Hugh Beattie, Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan (Richmond: Curzon, 2002). Hopkins, ‘Bounds of Identity’, 233; the mission, however, was only partially a success, with the final delineation of the Persian Sistan boundary occurring in 1904. Ibid., 234; and Malcolm Yapp, ‘The Legend of the Great Game’, Proceedings of the British Academy 111 (2000), 179–98; see also ‘Political and Secret Letters and Enclosures Received from India, vol. 23’, December 1879, L/PS/7/23, India Office Records, British Library. Hopkins, ‘Bounds of Identity’, 234. Ibid., 235. Interestingly enough, Hopkins contends that in Afghanistan the process of state formation was largely driven and defined exogenously, unlike that in Persia, which had a strong indigenously authored memory of statehood.

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Figure 2.2 Afghan Boundary Commission. duncan1980/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

This was in stark contrast to the delineation of Afghanistan’s other borders, the vast majority of which were established during Abdur Rahman’s reign between 1880 and 1901. Emir Abdur Rahman, also known as the ‘Iron Amir’, is conventionally depicted as a strong ruler who established the writ of the Afghan government in the aftermath of the political and social chaos brought about by the Second Anglo-Afghan War and who strengthened the centre’s hold over other regions.57 These boundaries, however, were in the first instance ‘products of British colonial demands on their client’ Abdur Rahman, who was entirely dependent on the large cash subsidies he received from British India.58 Rahman assented to all boundaries advocated by the British through paper treaties consisting of diagrammed maps and verbal descriptions of particular territories and local populations that were heretofore unstudied. The demarcation of Afghanistan’s north-western border towards Central Asia in the Maimana region by the Afghan Boundary Commission has been read by historians as a minor episode in the Amir’s process of internal reform and modernisation. However, this was largely a British-led process, an ‘instrument

57 58

Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 42. Hanifi, ‘Mapping Afghanistan’, 3; and Hanifi, Connecting Histories, 97–120.

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for building empire at the level of local political organisation’.59 British manipulation of this north-western border signifies the start of the consolidation of the government of Kabul’s authority over previously semiautonomous regions and is a key, albeit overlooked, moment in the establishment of Afghanistan as a quasi-colonial state – subject to British interference but not to full integration in the empire.60 Even so, the heftiest concession paid to the British was perhaps the delineation of Afghanistan’s southern border with Pakistan, in the form of the now notorious Durand Line. In order to ensure that local feuds did not invite Russian interference in their backyard, British officials decided to bring the Pashtun belt under their control. This entailed splitting the belt in half, through the surveying of a ‘scientific frontier’, the 1,200-mile boundary plotted in 1893 that bisected local homelands and the seasonal migration routes of three million pastoralists.61 The official Durand boundary treaties were signed in Persian for Abdur Rahman and in English for the British and applied on the ground in six distinct stages by British and Afghan officials in collaboration.62 The asymmetrical power relations between the British and the Afghans were never in question; the Durand Line deliberately followed a topographic ridge line that could be held at strongpoints blocking mountain passes that the British ascertained as crucial to the defence of their empire (see Figure 2.3).63 Far from delimiting the spatial threshold of British sovereignty, the Durand Line was a manifestation of two distinct types of imperial control. On one side lay India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire; on the other side was Afghanistan, a state ‘created but not occupied by colonial order’, representing what Luke and O Tuathail call a ‘territorially defined statal space’,64 but one that existed ‘without the “benefit”, as it were, of colonial domination’.65 As Hanifi elucidates, the Durand Line represented an increasingly violent international state system that took shape via the twinned forces of global 59

60

61 62 63 64

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Francesca Fuoli, ‘Incorporating North-Western Afghanistan into the British Empire: Experiments in Indirect Rule through the Making of an Imperial Frontier, 1884–87’, Afghanistan 1, no. 1 (2018), 6. This manipulation of Afghans and the bordering process is attested to in the National Archives of India: documents nos. 1–195, Afghan Boundary Commission, Demarcation of the Frontier Line between Hauzi Khan and Maruchak, July 1886, Foreign Department, Secret F, National Archives of India. Nick Cullather, ‘Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State’, The Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (2002), 516. Hanifi, ‘Mapping Afghanistan’, 3. Cullather, ‘Damming Afghanistan’, 517; George McMunn, Afghanistan from Darius to Amanhullah (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1929). Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 169; Timothy W. Luke and Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘On Videocameralistics: The Geopolitics of Failed States, the CNN International and (UN) Governmentality’, Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 4 (1997), 714. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 169–70.

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Figure 2.3 ‘Whose to pay for the division of Afghanistan?’ The Print Collector/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

capitalism and imperialism. The Pashtun regions straddling the Durand Line were generically referred to as the ‘tribal areas’, and since their inauguration, these areas, marked out by colonial fiat, have been periodically subject to administrative reconfiguration to include under their ‘jurisdiction’ other ‘ungovernable tribal spaces’.66 Not only were these permutations of the tribal areas legal grey zones, where the Frontiers Crime Regulation (FCR) Acts was enacted haphazardly in lieu of standardised civil and criminal codes, but the Durand Line also noticeably altered market relations to the detriment of the Afghans. This colonial frontier politically isolated and diverted capital away from Afghanistan and towards British India.67 Therefore both the application of the FCR in the tribal areas across the Durand and its economic repercussions significantly disadvantaged the Afghans. The FCR, a sort of ‘customary law’, introduced by the British in the late nineteenth century and expanded and consolidated in 1901 to mitigate the conflict between ‘British laws and the Pathan code of honour’, were formally repealed in 2018.68 The reason for this repeal is stated in no uncertain terms by the leaders of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) as a

66 67 68

This is an important development and one that I revisit later in the chapter. Hanifi, ‘Mapping Afghanistan’, 4–6. The full legal text of the FCR is available at the British Library: FCR L/PJ/6/579, 1901, India Office Records, British Library.

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‘draconian’ set of laws that ‘violate the fundamental rights of the citizens of this area’.69 The FCR was galvanised by the Raj’s decision to exclude the frontier and its residents from the empire proper while simultaneously staking out its claim on the territory and citizens. The people of this region – Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, Waziristan – were transformed into imperial vassals through this regulation, which denied them access to colonial courts and other governance institutions. Under the disingenuous guise of ‘respecting independence’ railway construction and irrigation projects were denied to the area that came under the FCR. Simultaneously, the recruitment of ‘tribal militias’, who served on outposts and the border between British India and Afghanistan, converted Pashtun farmers and herders into wage labourers, further deepening their dependence on the colonial economic system at almost no cost to the colonial state.70 In its utilisation of indigenous labour for the advancement of empire, FCR is an ingenious colonial artifice, which one of its proponents in 1921 described thus: ‘Not the least wonderful of the many marvellous methods employed in keeping our fickle and excitable neighbours [north of the Durand Line] in order is the use made of the Pathans themselves to protect our marches.’71 The FCR recognised the existence of the council of elders, commonly known as the jirga, but made the British deputy commissioner in charge of nominating and overseeing these elders, with the constitutional right to override any decision he did not agree with. The deputy commissioner was the ultimate arbiter: he could question, overturn and veto any of the jirga’s decisions.72 Another major hindrance in making the jirga an effective part of the FCR was its variation in use of tribal code (Pashtunwali), riwaj (broadly understood as customary law) or Sharia (Islamic law), depending on the tribes and their geographic location.73 The ‘excitable and revengeful temperament of the Pathan and Pathanized population’ further led to many amendments in the FCR that directly prosecute groups of people, ‘families’ and ‘tribes’ rather than the individual committing 69

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Javed Hussein, ‘Draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation to Be Repealed in Fata within a Week: SAFRON Minister’, Dawn, 8 December 2017, www.dawn.com/news/1375339 (last accessed 15 March 2019). ‘File Dealing with the Frontier Crimes Regulation and the N.W.F. Province Security Act, 1939, and Powers of Political Agents and Deputy Commissioners Relative to These’, Mss Eur D696/ 7, microfilm, India Office Records, British Library. Colin Metcalfe Enriquez, ‘The Pathan Borderland: A Consecutive Account of the Country and People on and beyond the Indian Frontier from Chitral to Dera Ismail Khan (1921)’, 2010, Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, 187, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/afghanenglish/187 (last accessed 15 March 2019). ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation 1901’, L/PJ/6/579, file 1815, India Office Records, British Library. For more on this see Farooq Yousaf, ‘Pakistan’s Colonial Legacy’, Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 2 (2019), 172–87.

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the crime. In the spirit of this conjuring up of mass criminality, section 35 of the FCR is amended from ‘When any person is known or believed to have a blood feud, or has occasioned cause of quarrel likely to lead to bloodshed, the Deputy Commissioner may require that person to reside beyond the territory to which this Regulation or any part of it extends, or at such place within that territory as the Deputy Commissioner may deem desirable’ to ‘When any family is known to have a blood feud, or has occasioned cause of quarrel likely to lead to bloodshed, the Deputy Commissioner may require that family or any member of it to reside, &c.’74 Likewise, the section on ‘preventive crimes’ is revisited to raise the maximum sentence of imprisonment, with sections of it applied only to the ‘Pathans’ and the ‘Baluch’. ‘Urban residents and the Hindus’ as well as British subjects and their servants, Europeans, and Americans were also all exempt from the FCR. Ironically, the FCR is often presented as evidence of British flexibility in the face of ‘lawless tribal customs’. And yet communication between those enacting these legislations suggests cleavages between the British and the indigenous people that can too easily be disregarded as ‘cultural differences’. In a letter to the chief secretary to government, Punjab, W. R. H. Merk, Esquire, CSI commissioner and superintendent, Peshawar Division, confesses his bewilderment: The conflict between our laws and the Pathan code of honour must continue till such time as the Pathan changes his nature (and that will not be soon) for we cannot possibly mould our system to fit barbarous and blood-thirsty customs. It is curious that where we do endeavour, to some degree, to meet Pathan ideas on the subject of the misconduct of women, in making adultery by women severely punishable, aggrieved husbands very rarely avail themselves of this provision of the regulation.75

One can be forgiven for reading the FCR not only as a system of punitive rules that not only subjected those under its remit to the mercy of one man, the deputy high commissioner, but also as a colonial project that was directly implicated in systematising exceptionally harsh punishments for women, for relatively minor crimes like adultery and that were not seen to be massively popular with the local populace. That the FCR was unwelcome by those subject to it was attested to when hundreds of Pashtuns protests against the FCR and other discriminatory regulations introduced by the colonial government in Peshawar on 23 April 1930. In what became a major incident, the

74

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Letter no. 126, dated 18 January 1898, from Captain H. S Fox-Strangways, Deputy Commissioner, Hazara, to the Commissioner and Superintendent, Peshawar Division, L/PJ/6/579, file 1815, India Office Records, British Library. Letter no. 129, dated 25 January 1898, from CSI commissioner and superintendent, Peshawar Division, to chief secretary to government, Punjab, W. R. H. Merk, Esquire, L/PJ/6/579, file 1815, India Office Records, British Library.

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British Army’s response was the murder of hundreds of these unarmed Pashtun protesters at the Qissa Khwani Bazaar.76 To return to our discussion, the articulation of state power experienced by the Pashtuns on the southern side of what was to become the North-West Frontier was bureaucratised, whereas the Pashtuns in Afghanistan experienced a highly personalised and autocratic form of state power because of the British and the FCR, but also because of the personality of Abdur Rahman himself. Moreover, a far greater number of Pashtuns in British India had access to a broad set of commercial resources and could participate in networks of economic trade and military labour migrations in mainland South Asia as well as in the Middle East. The legacy of the FCR, as an ad hoc system of penalties and incarceration, has been the institutionalisation of unwarranted punishment, arbitrary curfews and a continued maltreatment of the people living in these ‘frontier regions’. While one would not wish to romanticise or standardise the experience of the Indian colonial subject(s), those on the ‘right’ side of the Durand Line certainly found themselves in a more privileged position, especially with regard to the ability to tap into the global circulations of colonial capital vis-à-vis their Afghan counterparts. Frontier (Govern)mentality The Afghan–Pakistan frontier is regularly depicted as the foremost site of brutality and criminality, as ‘an incubator of chaos and radicalism which threatens the stability of all who come into contract with it’.77 This pervasive image of the frontier as a place of ominous mystery, primeval customs and inescapable savagery is based not only on an intellectually lazy historiography of the region but also on conceptually crude assumptions that underlie what ‘frontiers’ as contested spaces, areas of undefined jurisdiction and amorphous physical form are taken to symbolise. The Durand, a porous border with a troubled history and disputed present has, perhaps predictably, been at the centre of the production and (re)presentation of Afghanistan, both topographically and demographically, as a space with an innately violent disposition. George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India between 1899 and 1905 and British foreign secretary from 1919 to 1924, was the person responsible for the security and defence of the North-West Frontier in its entirety, and remains the colonial authority most intimately associated with the politics of the region.78

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Yousaf, ‘Pakistan’s Colonial Legacy’. Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, 1. David Gilmour, ‘Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online, January 2011, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32680 (last accessed 20 February 2020).

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It was Curzon who moulded the greatly malleable and shifting ‘Afghan frontier’ by filling out the last ‘gaps’ and ‘fixing’ it at the end of the nineteenth century. During the period leading to the consolidation of the haphazard border, Curzon’s spatial scheme for a threefold frontier had come into favour. The first frontier was at the crest of the Hindukush mountain range; the second frontier was in Kabul, where a British emissary was stationed; and the third frontier was the Khyber Pass.79 This transmuting political landscape proffered three physical barriers to any Russian force forging into the Indo-Gangetic plains, a major concern of Curzon’s, who was a soi-disant Russophobe.80 While arguably what constituted the frontier changed in the British spatial imagination after the creation of the state of Afghanistan, as late as 1908 Curzon could speak of the enormous sums that have been spent by us in fortifying the independence of Afghanistan. The result in the case of the Indian Empire is probably without precedent, for it gives to Great Britain not a single or double but a threefold Frontier, (1) the administrative border of British India, (2) the Durand Line, or Frontier of active protection, (3) the Afghan border, which is the outer or advanced strategical Frontier.81

Lord Curzon’s ‘Romanes Lecture’ of 1907 provides the classic, if often overlooked, statement on the geopolitical imagination of colonial officials on the subject of frontiers. He prefaces this key text by pointing out that he had just returned from a continent where he had been in charge of ‘a Land Frontier 5,700 miles in length, certainly the most diversified, the most important, and the most delicately poised in the world’; and that he had, as viceroy there, ‘been called upon to organize, and to conduct the proceedings of, as many as five Boundary Commissions’.82 He then lays out in meticulous detail the pivotal function of the frontier in the imperial imaginary, betraying a sense of disquietude and an urgency in the need to deal with frontier issues generally and the ‘Indian Frontier Problem’ more specifically.83 The critical importance of the subject of frontiers for Curzon and, by extension, for British India cannot be overstated. He explains: ‘Frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every Foreign Office in the civilized world’; and ‘Frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern 79 80 81

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Allan, ‘Defining Place and People in Afghanistan’, 551–2. George Curzon, ‘The Pamirs and the Source of the Oxus’, The Geographical Journal 8, no. 3 (September 1896), 239–60. See also Allan, ‘Defining Place and People in Afghanistan’, 551–2. George Curzon, ‘Text of the 1907 Romanes Lecture on the Subject of Frontiers’, www.dur.ac .uk/resources/ibru/resources/links/curzon.pdf (last accessed 20 February 2020). The Romanes Lecture, delivered annually since 1892 at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, is a prestigious free public disquisition. Curzon’s 1907 lecture was a landmark speech not only on the subject of frontiers, but also as a statement on the indispensability of British universities in general, and Oxford in particular, for the functioning of the British Empire. 83 Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2.

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issues of war or peace, or life or death to nations.’84 To ward off concerns about aggressive imperialism in the periphery, he justifies colonial forays into, and the domination of, distant territories by positing that the ‘process is not so immoral as it might first appear; it is in reality an endeavour, sanctioned by general usage, to introduce formality and decorum into proceedings which, unless thus regulated and diffused, might endanger the peace of nations or too violently shock the conscience of the world’.85 In his rendering of events, the problems faced by the empire were primarily those that were in some way related to frontiers, and this was certainly the case with Afghanistan: We were ourselves at war with Afghanistan in 1839, and again in 1878, we were on the verge of war with Russia in 1878, and again in 1885, over Frontier incidents in Asia. The most arduous struggle in which we have been engaged in India in modern times was waged with Frontier tribes . . . Think, indeed, of what the Indian Frontier Problem, as it is commonly called, has meant and means; the controversies it has provoked, the passions it has aroused; the reputations that have flashed or faded within its sinister shadow.86

Curzon prepares the intellectual terrain on which the Afghan–Pakistan frontier was to be imagined by both future generations of colonial dignitaries and by the wider audiences that continue to be exercised by the problems posed by refractory frontiers and their peoples. Colonial forms of knowledge about the frontier, of which Lord Curzon can be aptly characterised as both architect and avatar, and the tropes that constitute the arsenal of this body of knowledge, continue to inform and to be energised and operationalised by military studies, popular commentaries and journalistic reports on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border today.87 To quote Curzon at some length, as he lays out the qualities that define the model colonial officer on the frontier:

84 87

85 86 Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 20. Ibid. See for instance Andrew Roe, Waging War in Waziristan: The British Struggle in the Land of Bin Laden, 1849–1947 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). Roe’s text is an examination of British security operations on the North-West Frontier, explicitly intended to find parallels with and learn lessons from the past so as to better engage with Afghanistan today. See also Rory Stewart’s aforementioned The Places in Between; Eric Sangar, Historical Experience. Burden or Bonus in Today’s Wars? The British Army and the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan (Freiberg: Rombach, 2013), which aims to (re)discover the ‘enduring value’ of the British imperial enterprise in Afghanistan; Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 5; and Lindisfarne, ‘Culture Wars’. Indeed, Curzon’s ‘august summons’, ‘the Empire calls, as loudly as it ever did, for serious instruments of serious work. The Frontiers of Empire continue to beckon’ (‘Romanes Lecture’, 24), can be said to be honoured by the HTS, which ‘unashamedly hark[s] back to the tradition of the “scholar administrator” which once defined and ruled the Frontier’ (Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 5). The qualities he lays out as essential to the noble enterprise of frontier governmentality once again are paralleled by the Human Terrain Team’s emphasis on ‘increased sociocultural understanding’, ‘liberal warriors’ and ‘embedded social scientists and linguists’.

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Courage and conciliation – for unless they have an instinctive gift of sympathy with the native tribes, they will hardly succeed – patience and tact, initiative and self-restraint, these are the complex qualifications of the modern school of pioneers. To these attainments should be added – for the ideal Frontier officer – a taste for languages, some scientific training and a powerful physique . . . The Frontier officer takes his life in his hands; for there may await him either the knife of the Pathan fanatic, or the more deadly fevers of the African swamp. But the risk is the last thing of which he takes account. He feels the honour of his country in his hands.88

In this vivid colonial imagination, the frontier demands a specific kind of response because it is delineated as a particular space constituted by a certain breed of person. For Curzon, the frontier life engenders certain ‘types of manhood’ in its inhabitants, ‘savage, chivalrous, desperate, adventurous, alluring’, enjoining those level-headed servants of the empire that are at once sensitive and masculine to rein in the passions and violence of frontier peoples.89 The frontier’s construction, both deliberate and inadvertent, as a ‘violent geography’ therefore has a long lineage, one that is constantly built upon and re-inscribed.90 Indeed, Lord Curzon’s justification for colonial involvement in the dangerous periphery is reproduced almost verbatim in the plea for ‘nation-building’ and ‘solving’ the Afghanistan–Pakistan border ‘problem’ in the War on Terror.91 The powerful emotive force of the frontier – under which general geographic label Afghanistan was placed92 – amounted to much more than mere rhetoric and has been instrumental in setting forth a series of policies that both simultaneously attempt(ed) to make Afghanistan intelligible to its colonial authors and incorporated strategies of distancing that produced the country as a black hole, forever impenetrable to its imperial audience. Historically, this manifested itself in an obsession with the institutionalisation of geographic ‘scientific’ boundaries. These boundaries established a cognitive order for the British, allowing them to converse in a political language with which they

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Curzon, ‘Romanes Lecture’, 24. Ibid., 23; see also Caroe, The Pathans, who recurrently romanticises and sentimentalises the lives of the ‘frontier savages’. Gregory and Pred, eds., Violent Geographies. For examples see Anil Hira, ‘The Strategic Quagmire: Why Nation Building in Afghanistan is Failing’, 2009, Policy Update Paper, Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, www.cdfai .org/PDF/The%20Strategic%20Quagmire.pdf (last accessed 20 February 2020); Erich Weede, ‘Nation-Building in the Middle East: The New Imperialism’, paper presented at the conference ‘Global Freedom? The Future of International Governance’, organised by the Liberal Institute of Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Potsdam, Germany, 9–11 November 2007; Martin Weinbaum, ‘Nation Building in Afghanistan: Impediments, Lessons, and Prospects’, prepared for conference ‘Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq’, sponsored by the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 13 April 2004. On the conflation of ‘frontier’ and ‘Afghanistan’, see Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination.

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were familiar.93 The boundary-making process was also constitutive of identities, of people on both sides of the frontier as well as for the British Empire. By setting a limit for ‘established’ British rule, the frontier fossilised identity on the Afghan side as violent, and construed the space beyond the boundary as a site for experimentation and a place of impunity. As Martin Bayly has shown, an aspect of the history of the First Anglo-Afghan War was the effect the experience had in sustaining an image of the Afghans as inherently prone to savagery and violence, an image that persists rather pertinaciously to this day. If in 1837 Governor-General Auckland bewailed the ‘haze of confusion’ that existed beyond Lahore, in the 2000s it is customary to claim that ‘[t]he most remote place on earth has become the most dangerous’ with respect to the Afghan–Pakistan frontier.94 For much for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Afghanistan was a thorn in the side of the British Empire, a politically chaotic non-state that the empire concentrated on isolating, rather than conceiving of it as an entity that legitimated any sort of routinised engagement. Even after all its borders had been demarcated and delineated and ‘Afghanistan’ had emerged as a unified state, there remained an element of equivocation as to what exactly it was; not simply because the British never clove to conquering and governing Afghanistan, but also because Afghanistan as a society, a polity and an ideated space retained more than a trace of ambiguity. The nation state is a unique spatial mode of discipline, and most treatises on Afghanistan recognise that it confounds and disrupts even theoretically sophisticated analyses of nationality and statehood. Imagined and installed as a ‘type’ of political entity by the British, it often failed to conform even to that standard. For instance, although it is now a standard argument that Afghanistan is ‘the typical example of a buffer state’, for much of its existence Afghanistan was not functioning as a buffer state but only became constituted as such, mostly retrospectively, as the British struggled to define the scope and nature of the authority they were projecting over a space they largely failed to comprehend.95 For instance, to return to Curzon momentarily, it was argued that in contrast to Persia, which was a ‘true buffer state’, Afghanistan was an inferior or imperfect one, more of a ‘client-state’ of Great Britain than an equal zone of competition between Britain and Russia:

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Ibid.; see also Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments. Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination; Thomas John and Chris Mason, ‘No Sign until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the Pakistan–Afghanistan Frontier’, International Security 32, no. 4 (2008), 73. On the status of Afghanistan as a buffer state see Gervais Lyons, Afghanistan: The Buffer State; Great Britain and Russia in Central Asia (published with the official sanction of the Army Council; Madras: Hibbingotham & Co.; London: Luza & Co., 1910), R/12/LIB/104, India Office Records, British Library; and for more recent work, Azoy, Buzkashi; and Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination.

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in the Agreement just concluded between Great Britain and Russia about Central Asia the integrity and independence of Persia are once more guaranteed by the two great contracting parties – thereby constituting that country a true buffer State between their respective dominions . . . There is a second type of buffer State lying between two great Powers in which the predominant political influence is acknowledged to belong to one of the two and not to the other.96

Thus the ambiguous political cartography of the Afghan state was buttressed and heightened by the essentially ambivalent and often contradictory relationship it had with its British overlords. What is undeniable, whether they viewed the Afghan state as a buffer or not, is that for the British, Afghanistan was a space of exception with its own frontier mentality that provoked what can be called a ‘frontier governmentality’ in response.97 Frontier governmentality can be conceived of as a disparate set of policies that the British applied in order to govern adequately the frontier region in particular and all of Afghanistan in general. As the passages below show, the frontier itself was divided into different and competing spaces rather than thought of as a unified whole, a space that prompted varying degrees of intervention and where slipshod policies could be implemented with impunity. This frontier governmentality was paradoxical both in theory and practice: it essentially reduced the frontier to yaghestan, an ungovernable tract of land characterised by disorder and haunted by the interminable spectre of chaos, rather than recognising the multiplicity and diversity of the social, moral, political, economic and linguistic forms that populate the region. It also essentialised the frontier as a land of unruly Pashtun tribes that needed to be curtailed and managed, although always from a distance. This amounted to an elision and distortion that precluded the acknowledgement of the frontier’s lived reality – the frontier had never been the sole domain of a single ethnic or tribal group – as well as the fact that it was composed of orderly administered states as well as by regions beyond state or federal jurisdiction. In fact, historically, ‘the character of the Frontier was defined as much by its Baluch as its Pashtun inhabitants; as much by the princely states like Chitral as the area of yaghestan considered outside the control of any state authorities’.98 Moreover, the British themselves subjected different parts of the frontier to entirely different policies, making ‘frontier governmentality’ internally contradictory. For instance, while the frontier was often referred to as being under ‘indirect rule’, parts of it became the sites of some of the most invasive restructuring of

96 97

98

Curzon, ‘Romanes Lecture’, 13. I originally encountered the term in Pak Nung Wong, ‘Frontier Governmentality: The Art of Governing the Self through the Eyes of a Philippine Governing Elite’, Asia-Pacific Social Science Review 10, no. 1 (2010), 103–26; but Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, also employ it. Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 8.

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indigenous society.99 Recognising the ‘independence of tribes’ and governing without disrupting local custom was often a much more involved undertaking in which the (British) colonial state ‘defined what was and was not appropriate and acceptable “tradition”’.100 However, this was localised, as there was no unified or cohesive frontier-wide system of governance institutionalised by the British. The Baluch part of the frontier was subject to the Sandeman system, a method of ‘pacification’ pioneered by Sir Robert Sandeman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which involved, in his own formulation, ‘dealing with the hearts and minds of the people and not only with their fears’ as a prerequisite to ‘be[ing] successful on the frontier’.101 His system, put in place along the Baluch frontier, was concurrently a scheme of conservation and a mode of revolution which partially ‘invented, partially codified, and partially altered tribal “custom” and “tradition”’.102 Its employment along the frontier ensured that the British Indian government became at once protector and adjudicator of tradition, fashioning a tribal universe in accordance with its limited understanding and administrative necessities and then largely withdrawing itself from direct involvement in that universe.103 What is critical for our purposes is that this formed only one aspect of ‘frontier governmentality’, for much of the rest of the frontier was not privy to the Sandeman system and was rather subject to a policy of imperial disengagement.104 The relationship between the FCR and the Sandeman system is hazy too: sometimes the two overlapped, and at other times and in other places, one or the other, or indeed neither was instituted.105 This can be attributed to the nature of British control on the frontier, which was one not of sharp demarcation but of gradations of authority and dominance, with the colonial state abandoning ‘its pretence to power’ in spatial degrees, ebbing from ‘assertions of sovereignty within settled districts to

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100 Ibid., 50–1; cf. Mantena, Alibis of Empire. Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 50–1. Quoted in Tripodi, ‘Good for One but Not the Other’, 767; this statement is destined to live forever in the annals of European military history and especially in counter-insurgency. Indeed, as Hopkins and Marsden (Fragments, 53) show, his system is currently being used by the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, though it is unlikely that they know its provenance. On 18 February 2008 an article by Ashley Bommer appeared in the Washington Post titled ‘Hearts and Minds on the Durand Line’, which advocated the Sandeman system almost verbatim, including the creation of frontier ‘scouts’ acting as the link between tribes and the state, without citing or mentioning him: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2008/02/17/AR2008021701735.html (last accessed 21 July 2019). 103 Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 51. Ibid., 51–2. This distinction between types of ‘tribal management’ coheres with the two different types of policy – ‘forward’ and ‘closed border’ – that defined British vacillation with regard to the extent of engagement with and in Afghanistan from the mid nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Although documents and correspondence at the National Archives in India regularly hint at a preference for the ‘Baluch’ over the ‘Pathan’.

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assertions of paramountcy in the tribal areas and agencies to areas of influence over Afghanistan’.106 These shades of imperial sovereignty, reflected inaccurately on colonial maps, if present at all, were formative for both the delineation of the frontier and for the lifeways of the people inhabiting the region. What was distinctive about frontier governmentality, however, was not the fading degree of colonial authority, but rather the firm belief that the frontier was of a peripheral and, at best, instrumental concern to the British Indian state, a point little explored in scholarship on the region. Although the colonial state invested ample time and effort in delineating a scientific border, for it the frontier on the whole remained a source of ‘essential confusion’, resulting in a lethargic separation between ‘settled’ (read: civilised) and ‘hill’ (read: wild) populations.107 The colonial state attempted to grasp the ‘meaning’ of the frontier in reductive terms and failed, unsurprisingly, in this venture. Those outside the ambit of the Sandeman system, and other localised organised systems of governance, were cast as social, political and economic pariahs, their history consigned to the figurative ash heap. Frontier governmentality was essentially an exercise in delegitimising certain ‘tribal’ mindsets and ways of being. By relegating the frontier to the land of mystery and bedlam, the colonial state carved the frontier, and Afghanistan more generally, as a space of insufficiency. If questions of power always already inhere in questions of knowledge and vice versa, the frontier remained a space of exclusion from power and a place of ‘subjugated knowledges’.108 Moreover, if governmentality is understood to be the sum of organised practices (mentalities, rationalities and techniques) through which subjects are governed, or alternatively the techniques and strategies by which a society is rendered governable,109 the frontier was always a place of un-governmentality and ungovernability. By staking out some sorts of knowledge as tenable and others as less so, the British rendered some peoples less governable than others. Therefore what ultimately distinguished this frontier governmentality – which as I have established relied on multiple modalities of governance and was far from homogeneous – from colonial governmentality was the lack of that empirical and ethnographic knowledge that accompanied more penetrative 106 107

108 109

Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 62. Ibid., 62. Hopkins and Marsden argue that the official or ‘scientific’ border did not map onto an internal frontier, which remained by and large a subject of local knowledge. The location of this ‘inner’ frontier was never established, and the colonial state straddled the line between the ‘norms and forms’ of modern Westphalian statehood and their own limited understandings gleaned from previous forms of political authority on the South Asian subcontinent. They do not, however, dwell on the patchy understanding of the frontier, an understanding that suited British interests in the region. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 11. Thomas Lemke, ‘The Birth of Bio-politics: Michael Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality’, Economy and Society 30, no. 2 (2001), 190–207.

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and holistic colonial projects, along with the notions of mystery, terror and chaos that arose from this lack. Whereas the ethnographic or colonial state sought to define and document each aspect of the area and peoples under its jurisdiction, on the Afghan frontier the British were concerned largely with the management of unruly tribesmen, never seriously intending to convert them into compliant subjects of its empire. The frontier, as a discursive formation, was left fundamentally incomplete, its contours outlined but its substance hazy. The practices of codification, classification, disciplining and surveillance crucial to not merely the colonial, but also the modern state were substituted for perfunctory policies that ensured a level of order and acquiescence that the British state deemed appropriate. As the discussion above has sought to show, the construction of Afghanistan as a frontier enabled a certain way of thinking and a particular set of policies to be enacted towards the country. This ‘frontier governmentality’ cannot be claimed to be unique to Afghanistan, but it did set it apart, quite distinctively, from other, ‘proper’ colonies that fell under British rule. The attempts made at restructuring the society and polity of Afghanistan, although far from infrequent, were almost always unmethodical and erratic. If ‘the struggle to produce citizens out of recalcitrant people accounts for much of what passes for history in modern times’,110 it is of little surprise that both the Afghan state and the Afghan citizenry are written off as an unsuccessful enterprise – a failed state and a people without history.111 It is this very lack of the institutionalisation and operationalisation of a coherent apparatus of categorisation and repression that is now singled out as the prime culprit in the ‘failure’ of the Afghan state. We now move on to an analysis of the ways in which Afghanistan is construed as a site of exception, in the context of the production of many such (un) exceptional zones. ‘Af-Pak’ as Exception(able) The production of Afghanistan as liminal and historically exceptional continues to have far-reaching and deep-seated ramifications today. Afghanistan having been established as a political entity that is tenuous – ‘a space, not a place as the territory is sandwiched high on the frontier of the Indian subcontinent’112 – and as a buffer-state, a moribund political formation particularly susceptible to ‘state death’,113 there have been calls to merge part of Afghanistan with Pakistan,

110 111 112 113

Sankaran Krishna, ‘The Importance of Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory’, Alternatives 18, no. 3 (1993), 416. In Eric Wolf’s haunting locution: see Europe and the People without History. Allan, ‘Defining Place and People in Afghanistan’, 545. Tanisha Fazal, quotted in Bayly, ‘Ontological (In)security’, 4.

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most powerfully captured with the coining of the neologism ‘Af-Pak’ (or AfPak).114 Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, credited with inventing the term, explained the motivation behind it to a military conference in Munich in 2008: First of all, we often call the problem AfPak, as in Afghanistan Pakistan. This is not just an effort to save eight syllables. It is an attempt to indicate and imprint in our DNA the fact that there is one theater of war, straddling an ill-defined border, the Durand Line, and that on the western side of that border, NATO and other forces are able to operate. On the eastern side, it’s the sovereign territory of Pakistan. But it is on the eastern side of this ill-defined border that the international terrorist movement is located.115

The Durand has been declared a defunct border on several occasions. It was first renounced by the Afghan state on 26 July 1949, when a loya jirga was convened in Kabul, following the escalation of a long-standing conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which declared the line unconstitutional.116 It has since been decried as an arbitrary imperial frontier, one that has had no political, socio-economic or imaginative salience for residents on either side of it. On the surface this seems like the most straightforward way to cut the Gordian knot; it recognises the artificiality of the Durand and more generally the arbitrary processes of imperial boundary-making to which the genesis of modern Afghanistan may be traced. In this final section, I want to propose that ‘Af-Pak’ is not, as some of its proponents are prone to claim, a retrospective concession that has taken into account the complex realities of the region and its residents, and which has acknowledged the need for a unified homeland for the Pashtun people.117 The popularity of ‘Af-Pak’, as attested to, principally but not solely, in US 114

115 116 117

Favoured by the Obama administration, it has recently fallen out of favour in the light of fervent protestation by the Pakistan government condemning the conflation of its country with Afghanistan. See Amir Taheri, ‘Pakistan and the Mad Mullahs of the Mountain’, Asharq Alawsat, 1 May 2009. Quoted in Michael Quinon, ‘AfPak’, 18 April 2009, World Wide Words, www .worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-afp1.htm (last accessed 29 December 2017). Aga Amin, ‘Resolving the Afghan–Pakistan Border Question’, Journal of Afghanistan Studies 1 (2004), www.scribd.com/doc/21715514/Durand-Line (last accessed 20 February 2020). The official use of the term by the Obama administration has been echoed by the media, most notably in the creation of the ‘Af-Pak Channel’, a joint project of the Foreign Policy magazine and the New America Foundation launched in August 2009 (www.foreignpolicy.com/afpak, last accessed 15 March 2019). See also the Washington Post series ‘The AfPak War: Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan’, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/ afghanistan-pakistan/index.html (last accessed 1 January 2020), and the many articles and policy reports that use ‘AfPak’ unselfconsciously: Jon Lunn and Ben Smith, ‘The “AfPak Policy” and the Pashtuns‘, Economic Indicators 13 (2010), 10; Najmuddin A. Shaikh, ‘Obama's AfPak Strategy: Will It Succeed in Afghanistan?’, Asia-Pacific Review 17, no. 1 (2010), 29–46; Jeremy W. Holton, ‘The Pashtun Behavior Economy: An Analysis of Decision Making in Tribal Society’, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, Department of National Security Affairs, 2011.

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foreign policy discourse, can be more convincingly read as (yet another) instance of a convenient and expedient measure in dealing with the Afghan or Pashtun ‘problem’. More insidiously, the pejoratively dubbed ‘Af-Pak’, albeit less unsavoury than the alternative ‘Talibanistan’,118 is a lightly camouflaged racist, and as I explain below, particularly a state-racist, manoeuvre in that it seeks to forcefully homogenise a border and its inhabitants in an attempt to ‘isolate the chaos’ both intellectually and on the ground. By cordoning off the region in this way, it becomes easier to sanction and implement certain types of knowledges, in order to justify political and military policies that would otherwise be considered objectionable or as infringing upon the sovereignty of a nation-state. Finally, following directly from the point above, ‘Af-Pak’ in both its framing and its purported aims, as a specific political construction, is an exercise in rendering Afghanistan a ‘space of exception’, a place where a temporal suspension of the rule of law has become the permanent order, producing what Agamben has called a ‘zone of indistinction’. Such zones are non-spaces where ‘everything is truly possible’, and the people living in them are considered outside the remit of ‘politics’, abandoned subjects, not quite animal but not fully human, leading lives that are expendable, or what he terms ‘bare life’.119 For Agamben it is the camp that exemplifies this permanent transitional zone of indistinction, but he could just as easily have been a canny observer of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border zone. Not quite colonised, not quite a sovereign state and not even a designated political precinct, the border zone’s exceptional status segues into the narrative of Afghanistan as a ‘non-place’, forever produced as a part-suspended liminal space, both in academic enquiry and in its practical administration. In ‘Af-Pak’ we find the culmination of the historical trend to constitute Afghanistan as a region that, along with its bordering zones, is distinct because of its social or, more pithily, its ‘tribal’ composition.120 118

119

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Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, eds., Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders between Terror, Politics, and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); see also the video ‘Talibanistan’, featured by National Geographic Channel, which ‘takes you inside the fight on the ground and the skies above the rugged terrain of the forbidden zone called Talibanistan’: channel.nationalgeorgaphic.com/channel/explorer/videos/talibanistan last (last accessed 28 August 2019). Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 38; also Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Homo sacer refers to those who live in this ‘zone of indistinction’ situated between the life of animals (bios) and the politically qualified life of humans (zoe). For a detailed account of the ways in which this frontier region of Afghanistan has been and continues to be ‘perceived and experienced from a variety of different perspectives’, including through the encounters and understandings of ‘colonial states and interventionist powers active in the region, its modern nation-states and its own diverse peoples’, see Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, especially 2–5.

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The mainstreaming of Af-Pak extends beyond popular ventures such as the Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘AfPak’ channel and military projects like the US Department of Defense’s ‘AfPak Hands Program’, which was created in 2009 to ‘develop a cadre of military and senior civilian experts specializing in the complexities of Afghanistan and Pakistan – the language, culture, processes and challenges’.121 The AfPak Hands Program is marketed as a ‘knowledge base’ that works to get ‘expertise from the theater into key billets’.122 Both these undertakings treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as a singular challenge to be surmounted, or a unified theatre of war, possessing one ‘language and culture’. The journal World Affairs launched a symposium titled ‘Afpak 2020’ in 2011, asking four US foreign policy experts focusing on Afghanistan ‘what US policy in the AfPak theater would yield in the next ten years—and what, if anything, Washington might do differently’.123 Similarly, Foreign Policy’s ‘Ultimate AfPak Reading List’ is a comprehensive guide to ‘Af-Pak’ compiled by Peter Bergen, handpicked out of syllabi from the courses he teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.124 I mention this not as a minor cavil about a hastily crafted, seemingly inconsequential neologism, but to point to an axiomatic manifestation of discourse in/as action. An explicit reference in India’s leading newspaper, the Hindustan Times, to ‘AfPak’ as a ‘geography of terror’ and the bleak future it augurs – including a timeline of horror, a ‘nightmare scenario’ that has bin Laden ‘restoring Islamic rule in Delhi’ – (Figure 2.4) betrays exactly these logics. The ‘integrated’ solution – which asserts that the elision of two territories on either side of an ‘ill-defined border’ will help to dismantle the ‘terror infrastructure’ – expressly overlooks the very dissimilar types of states that have come to shape the region and the divergent forms of the modernising processes they have unleashed on its local denizens, arbitrary as the original delineation of the border may have been.125 The expression ‘Af-Pak’ is derogatory, and as 121

122 123

124

125

Donna Miles, ‘“AfPak Hands” Program Pays Dividends in Afghanistan, Pakistan’, American Forces Press Service, 4 January 2012, www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=66671 (last accessed 11 March 2019). Ibid. Victor Davis Hanson, James Traub, Ann Marlowe and Matthieu Aikins, ‘AfPak 2020’, World Affairs, March–April 2011, www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/afpak-2020-symposium (last accessed 15 March 2019). Peter Bergen, ‘The Ultimate AfPak Reading List’, Foreign Policy, 27 June 2013, www .foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/08/the_ultimate_afghan_reading_list?page=0,13 (last accessed 28 August 2019). See John Prados, ‘The AfPak Paradox’, in which the author, a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, argues that this new acronym has entered the vernacular of the Obama administration and that foreign policy moguls correctly view the border as ‘the central front of the war on terrorism’: Foreign Policy in Focus, 1 April 2009, http://fpif.org/ the_afpak_paradox/ (last accessed 1 August 2019).

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Figure 2.4 ‘Af-Pak’ 2025: a geography of terror. The Hindustan Times

Hopkins and Marsden uphold, it ‘offers little in the way of historical sensitivity or cultural knowledge’.126 The utilitarian (for American military and policy purposes) amalgamation of lived spaces is resented by Afghans and Pakistanis alike (much as FCR, its antecedent, was); inhabitants on both sides of the border consider the coinage insulting, as it ignores the manifold and elaborate 126

Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 3.

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self-identifications and socio-political allegiances that they claim.127 More mendaciously, the ‘theater of war . . . call[ed] Afpak with two fronts – an eastern front and a western front’ is used,128 in a move that is both tragic and farcical, to blockade it, raze it and declare it ‘dangerous’ to Pakistan, Afghanistan and the ‘West’. In light of increased military operations and drone strikes in the region, the CIA director Michael Hayden could say to the press in 2008: ‘[w]hat I can tell you about is the situation along the AfPak border, the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, which presents a clear and present danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, and to the West in general, and to the United States, in particular’.129 The politics of naming here is also explicitly linked to both a politics of shaming and a politics built on the premise that some people need not be heard from, indeed that ‘their’ lives are more disposable than ‘ours’. Not only does ‘Af-Pak’ aim to erase the modern history of Afghanistan by declaring it an ‘artificial state’, but it equally portrays the region’s occupants as a historically and currently homogeneous group inhabiting a single undifferentiated space, a move that is not only unhistoric but also one that has caused visible distress to the people inhabiting the region.130 ‘Af-Pak’, devised to signal the need to offer an ‘integrated’ solution to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, and its perceived Al Qaeda associates in Pakistan, has provided precisely the sort of apologia for increased militarism in the region that its inventors had in mind. This clunky appellation – ‘Af-Pak’ – is best conceived as an exemplification of the phenomenon that Foucault referred to as ‘state racism’. In its attempt to erase the differences in cultural dispositions, religious affiliations and political inclinations, to parenthetically lump people together as the ‘enemy’ or ‘terrorist’ populations for the purposes of war, ‘Af-Pak’ is made into a unified theatre of operations against which the chosen or ‘superior’ populations at the home front must be defended.131 Foucault argues that modern warfare is waged in 127

128

129 130 131

See Myra Macdonalds, ‘Afghanistan and Pakistan: Is It Time to Ditch “AfPak”?’, Reuters, 12 October 2009, http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2009/10/12/afghanistan-and-pakistan-is-ittime-to-ditch-afpak/ (last accessed 20 February 2020); ‘Interview with Pervez Musharraf: Obama is “Aiming at the Right Things”’, Spiegel, 7 June 2009, www.spiegel.de/inter national/world/spiegel-interview-with-pervez-musharraf-obama-is-aiming-at-the-right-thingsa-628960.html (last accessed 20 February 2020); cf. Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments, 3. Richard Holbrooke, quoted in Helen Cooper, ‘Choosing Which War to Fight’, New York Times, 24 February 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/weekinreview/24cooper.html?_r=0 (last accessed 20 February 2020). Pierre Tristam, ‘AfPak’, in ‘Middle East Issue Categories’, About News, http://middleeast .about.com/od/a/g/afpak-definition.htm (last accessed 28 August 2017). But cf. Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 2011). For an example, see Sherry Riccihardi, ‘Assignment AfPak’, American Journalism Review, August–September 2009.

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the ‘name of life necessity’, in defence of a distinct population, one that is racialised as the predominant and worthy one. The marshalling and mobilisation of a superordinate population inaugurates in its wake a state racism, that is, a mechanism of ‘introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die . . . a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population’. That, for Foucault, ‘is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras’.132 State racism is primarily a racism directed by a nation state against its own citizens, an ever-present authorised possibility of murder that is intrinsic to the biopolitical state. It is ‘inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States’.133 Although Foucault himself examined the implications of state racism as practised by European states against their own citizens, using Nazi Germany as its grotesque exemplar, he nevertheless acknowledged that it was a broad concept, one that subsumed other political conflicts such as class struggle. State racism and its prerogative, the right ‘to make die’, what Mbembe calls ‘necropolitics’, finds its most deathly and surreptitious manifestation as a tactic applied on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border.134 Not only does state racism in this instance make a distinction between ‘enemy’ populations and the liberal (Western) subject residing at ‘home’, but, more crucially, it inculcates a separation between the ‘civilian’ populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the ‘border’ populations, simplistically conceived of as tribal terrorists and mad jihadis. The hierarchised set of relations that effectively segregate ‘target’ populations in the creation of ‘Af-Pak’ are close to a perfect instantiation of the ways in which the historicopolitical discourses of war contain inherently the discourse of ‘race struggle’ that Foucault has expertly exposed in his lectures. There is a strong affinity between Fanon’s phenomenological lament in relation to the experience of race war and Foucault’s theorisation of state racism, since both focus on the subjugation of a particular population within the ‘racial epidermal schema’ of colonial and intra-state power relations, respectively.135 In ‘Af-Pak’ state racism appears to function at multiple levels: at the level of the West fighting wars in the name of ‘life necessity’ so as to defend its own citizens, and also through the exportation of a state racism to the West’s designated theatre of war, by choosing the populations that have the right to live and those that must be made to die. Equally significantly, this state-racist homogenising of the border through its deliberate revoking of a segment of the population’s ‘right to have rights’ is 132 134 135

133 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254–5. Ibid., 254. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Julian Reid, ‘Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault’, Social Text 86, no. 1 (2006), 145.

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instrumental in carving out the border region, and Afghanistan more generally, as a space of exception.136 As I argue, here Agamben’s ‘bare life’ is (re-) created in all its minutiae: people inhabiting a lawless space randomly subject to drone strikes, transitive populations encamped, disenfranchised and outside the discourse of citizenship. However, these zones of exception and inbetween spaces are necessarily produced in the interstices of empire for the continued operation of the microphysics of power. ‘Af-Pak’ is much more than an arbitrary appellation: it is the social restructuring of the region through a historico-political discourse that stems from a racialised and exclusionary world order, which depends on the necessary production of zones of exception, violent geographies, marginalised peripheries and liminal, even suspended subjectivities. ‘Af-Pak’ can be thought of as a capstone in the anxious topology of power; not fully accepted into the official folds of empire, Afghanistan was nevertheless never quite out of what Stoler calls ‘imperial bounds’,137 but more especially it has always been in an imperial bind. The state’s trajectory from ‘buffer’ to ‘failed’ to non-state in the form of ‘Af-Pak’ is the distinctive but not unique story of the attempts by a precarious empire (both Britain’s and America’s) at taxonomising and categorising. It captures the tension in colonial penetration of the region: at times invasive and intense, at others languid and abandoned. Conclusion Afghanistan has had seventeen different national flags in the twentieth century, apparently the greatest number of any country in the world.138 As early as 1907 Lord Curzon argued about Afghanistan’s north-eastern border that ‘[o]f these artificial expedients it may be laid down that they have no durability, unless they are based upon some intelligible principle of construction or defined by a defensible line, and are administered by an authority capable of preserving order’, and of the Wakhan corridor in particular: ‘[i]t can only last so long as the Amir of Afghanistan, to whom it was handed over, with a special subsidy from Great Britain, fulfils his undertaking to maintain order’.139 Conventional wisdom’s alluring construction of Afghanistan as a failed state thus stems almost tautologically from Afghanistan as a state born of failure. What is distinctive about Afghanistan today is not that it was an arbitrary colonial creation. The carving up of Afghanistan was much like that

136 137 138 139

In Hannah Arendt’s classic expression, found in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966). Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, 140. Allan, ‘Defining Place and People in Afghanistan’, 545. Curzon, ‘Romanes Lecture’, 12.

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of most places in the colonial world. Indeed arguably all states, like continents and other accepted geographically bounded entities, are discretionary constructs and only over time ‘become reified as natural and fundamental building blocks of global geography, rather than being recognized as the constructed, contingent, and often imposed political-geographical units that they are’.140 What makes Afghanistan atypical is its incessant re-creation as an arbitrary blip on the world map, its re-inscription as a space of exception on the fringes of humanity that demands ‘special treatment’. The spatialisation of Afghanistan over time, moreover, is a story of imperial expedience. Its construal at various points as a buffer, a failed state or a theatre of war has meant that colonial power can intervene, bomb from a distance, nation-build and leave, as it sees fit, with impunity. The recursive representation of Afghanistan as somehow characterised by a ‘lack’, as defined by an absence of ‘normality’, is a theme of this book, one that is especially pronounced when it comes to discourses of statehood, nationness and sovereignty. In these multiple constructions as ‘failed’, ‘buffer’ or ‘frontier’ – asserted in accordance with the needs of colonial power at different historical junctures – the Afghan state has been the focal point of much analysis and discussion, and has been almost always found wanting, which has made it easier to relegate it to the space of exception and marginality. Together with other partially colonised liminal zones, including Siam (Thailand), Sudan and Somalia, and possibly Persia (Iran) and the Balkans, Afghanistan is simultaneously produced as a known object and a quintessentially unknowable terrain. The presence of this periphery constitutes the symbolic Other against which a stable Self can be posited. The ambiguous political and geographical cartography of the Afghan state is necessary for the continued propagation of an empire that rests on the dense armature of hazy spatio-legal categories.141 It is also another instantiation of the colonial anxiety to impose order and render intelligible its ‘doubles’ in what Foucault called ‘Other spaces’.142 Once again, Ann Stoler’s words on the creative and seemingly ambivalent idiom of US-led intervention in the twenty-first century are strikingly resonant in the discourse on Afghanistan. This lexicon of US intervention, articulated most fervently in the War on Terror, is revealing, and ‘suggests not a marginal imperial form but a more comprehensive picture of the varied and changing criteria by which empires sanction appropriations, occupations, and dispossessions’.143

140 141 142 143

Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See Gregory and Pred, eds., Violent Geographies. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 22–7. Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, 141.

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Afghanistan’s status at the ‘threshold of vague political status and territorial ambiguity’, then, is fundamental to contemporary technologies of rule and biopolitical governance.144 This chapter has shown the ways in which knowledge production about Afghanistan is a living testament to the country’s peripheral status, in both geographic and political terms, in the colonial world. Afghanistan confounds mainstream post-colonial discourse, which draws its theoretical and empirical significance, research agendas and critiques largely from the experiences of major colonies such as India (for Britain) and Algeria (for France). The Afghan experience also highlights the complexity and ambiguity in colonial cartographic practices and the way in which ‘tricky’ spaces are rendered legible. The history of Afghanistan – when it is engaged with at all – is largely treated as an addendum to this broader and essentialised colonial legacy. The need to hem in Afghanistan as an exclusively peripheral space – an ellipsis rather than a focal point – also prevents an acknowledgement that Afghanistan, or, more accurately, the region that is derisively called ‘Af-Pak’, has been the epicentre of the theorisation and praxis of global – and not merely South Asian – jihad, as Ayesha Jalal and Faisal Devji have argued.145 In bringing this to our attention, these authors seek not to entrench the stereotype of Afghanistan as a lawless space, but to think of it as a central locus of theological and political innovation and resistance, wherein the ‘natives’ have redeployed ideological resources for various ends. Quite apart from the Islamist ideas and practices of jihad, Devji also reminds us that during the anticolonial struggle, this region was also the nucleus of a popular Gandhian peace movement under the leadership of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan (the man known as ‘Frontier Gandhi’) – a rem(a)inder that further unsettles current associations of the region exclusively with a violent Deobandi Islam. But these alternative imaginaries are too complex to be grappled with or paid heed to in a zone labelled a periphery or a frontier. As Alex Maroya notes, ‘the frontier is doubly discriminated against, its story subordinate not only to the sovereign narrative of European history – as Chakrabarty and others have characterised it – but to the history of more “significant” parts of the empire’.146 The exclusion of Afghans from politically qualified life comes as a prerequisite for the successful avoidance of Robert Kaplan’s dystopic developing world, or ‘the Coming Anarchy’ epitomised by ‘the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the

144 145

146

Ibid. Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); I thank an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to these alternative conceptions of Afghanistan. Maroya, ‘Rethinking the Nation-State’, 274.

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unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war’.147 The cartographic anxiety and crisis in geographical or spatial representation that have marked the study of the Afghan state, and the ‘failure’ of Afghanistan to fit into a taxonomy with which the Anglophone epistemic community is familiar, are supplemented by another instance of anxious knowledge generation, articulated most prominently through the notion of the ‘tribe’. This is the subject of Chapter 3.

147

Robert Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Atlantic Monthly 273, no. 2 (1994), 48, www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/ (last accessed 20 February 2020).

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3

The Emergency Episteme of the ‘Tribe’ in Afghanistan

What wonderful men these Firingees are! Three months ago four of them came into the country; now one is at Cabool, one at Candahar, one here, and one at the source of the Oxus! Wullah! Billah! They neither eat, drink, nor sleep; all day long they make sly, and all night they write books! —Murad Beg, 18421

the Pashtun saying that you need to pay seven visits to someone before you can start talking seriously to them is more than just a saying: it’s a fundamental social rule without exceptions.

—Fernando Gentilini, 20132

The cartographic anxiety and crisis in geographical and spatial representation that we encountered in the previous chapter is complemented by an equally acute crisis in the historiographic and sociological study of Afghanistan. In spite of the immense interest taken in the country following the events of 11 September 2001, Afghanistan continues to be a land of relative mystery. Notwithstanding a few exceptional – and immensely valuable – studies including the works of Jon Anderson, Martin Bayly, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi and Benjamin Hopkins, there is a surprising lack of scholarly, or indeed nuanced political, engagement with the history, society and politics of the country. The twenty-first-century world, marked by crises, invasions, terrorism and threats to security, has seen an increasing premium being placed on the role of ‘understanding’ and an urgent need for ‘knowledge’ that can provide solutions to these myriad crises. There has been a rise of a ‘knowledge industry’ in which political pundits surmise on the causes of conflict and proffer solutions that would lead to more security and safety. These practices of a ‘knee-jerk’ knowledge economy have manifested themselves especially conspicuously with reference to Afghanistan since the attacks of 11 September 2001. For the most part, however, this has meant a surfeit of hastily written policy briefs, 1

2

Quoted in Jon W. Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts: A View from the Colonial Ethnography of Afghanistan’, in Richard Harvey Brown, ed., Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse (New York: Aldine Transaction, 1992), 89. Gentilini, Afghan Lessons, 44.

105

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development reports and military manuals and a dearth of systematic academic expertise to go with it. The academy seems either to have abandoned Afghanistan to the policy world or to be contributing to what Jamil Hanifi has called the metaphorical black hole or Bermuda Triangle that ‘absorbs much and produces little’ when it comes to writings on the country.3 Scholarship on Afghanistan that is not strictly relevant to policy is often parasitic on the large body of work on Middle East studies, Islamic studies and studies of the ‘Orient’ more generally. Interestingly, this modern Orientalism is preoccupied by a formalistic concern with method and technique and provides a contrast to the intellectual engagement and substantive interaction that the British exhibited in Afghanistan. This chapter interrogates the historical discourse on Afghanistan and contends that much of the knowledge generated and disseminated about present-day Afghanistan is based on second-hand sources that are often only tangentially concerned with the country as a defined object of enquiry. Whereas most contemporary area studies texts are now examples of granular and nuanced theoretical analyses, the literature on Afghanistan remains tied to the colonial logics of Orientalism, albeit without the benefit of the meaningful encounters that characterised old-school Orientalism. As Imagining Afghanistan shows, much of the writing on Afghanistan continues to be based on the popular and anaemic tropes of ‘failed state’, ‘collapsing economy’, ‘hapless women’ and ‘Islamic culture’, as well as the notion of ‘tribal character’. This chapter is dedicated to a historical investigation of the last of these. As I have intimated above, the perceptible absence of sustained academic study of Afghanistan in part stems from the country’s historical ‘quasi-colonial’ status and in part from its recent exclusion from any geopolitical constellation. The quasi-coloniality that has scourged Afghanistan since its inception is not an incidental aside, safely ensconced in a forgotten past, but rather continues to shape the country’s political and social trajectory in a decisive, if incongruous, manner. Indeed, Afghanistan is largely excluded from all regional blocks,4 an exclusion that can be traced back to the ways in which the British dealt with Afghanistan (alternately) as a frontier and as a buffer, 3

4

M. Jamil Hanifi, ‘An Alternative Approach to Afghanistan’, Zero Anthropology, 2011, https:// zeroanthropology.net/2011/01/29/an-alternative-approach-to-afghanistan/ (last accessed 9 August 2017). No geographical appellation seems to fit Afghanistan. It is sometimes considered a part of the Middle East, at other times of Central Asia (or Eurasia) or South Asia, and occasionally it is said to belong to ‘South-West Asia’, a denomination that is both clunky and nebulous. Afghanistan was included in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 2007 at around the same time George W. Bush was pushing for a ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’, a strategy to counter terror that explicitly included Afghanistan. See Sami E. Baroudi, ‘Arab Intellectuals and the Bush Administration's Campaign for Democracy: The Case of the Greater Middle East Initiative’, The Middle East Journal 61, no. 3 (2007), 390–418.

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incorporating it into the empire if and when they could, and using it as the geographical limit to their power when they thought it in their best interest to do so. To claim that British India had an indelible impact on the future of Afghanistan is not to argue that Afghanistan’s present has been predetermined by the policies of the British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not only is such a unilinear causal logic inescapably reductive when applied to complex world-historical events, but, more interestingly, it is the uncertainty of colonial rule that makes Afghanistan so intriguing as a space of enquiry: the British themselves were largely unsure and indecisive about the fate of Afghanistan, as evinced in their changing policies, attitudes and beliefs when it came to the country. While the British Empire taken as a whole was an unwieldy enterprise riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, nowhere is this more palpable than in its relation with Afghanistan. Afghanistan was to bear the full brunt of the imperial seesaw of hubris and fatigue, not as a passive recipient but as an actor in its own right, albeit in a game where the stakes were ultimately not in its favour.5 As ever, the encounter between the coloniser and the colonised led to the creation of truths, myths, legends and identities in which the two were mutually implicated. This process is analysed below through the unassailable logic of the tribe. The chapter shows how a monolithic and unreflective body of work became the norm with reference to Afghan social organisation, exemplified by this kind of statement: When one says ‘Afghan people’ what I believe they are really saying is ‘tribal member’. Every single Afghan is a part of a tribe and understands how the tribe operates and why. This is key for us to understand. Understanding and operating within the tribal world is the only way we can ever know who our friends and enemies are, how the Afghan people think and what is important to them. Because, above all, they are tribesmen first.6

By tracing the way in which the term ‘tribe’ has been deployed in the Afghan context, the chapter performs two types of intellectual labour. First, by following the evolution of a concept from its use in the early nineteenth century to the literature on Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, wherein the ‘tribes’ seem to have acquired a new-found importance, it undertakes an 5

6

I am aware that the personification of states and the ascription of qualities to them is a problematic practice. However, to completely abstain from all schematisation is not only difficult; it is also undesirable for the purpose of advancing a coherent argument. By resorting to a sort of Spivakian strategic essentialism, I am not positing that what was to become Afghanistan or Britain was a unitary actor, but merely employing a vocabulary that is familiar, while remaining cognisant of the epistemological shortcomings of such a vocabulary. Jim Gant, One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan (Los Angeles, CA: Nine Sisters Imports, 2009), 11, www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2009/2009_one_ tribe_at_a_time.pdf (last accessed 30 May 2017).

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intellectual history of the term. The Afghan ‘tribes’, taken as an object of study, follow an interesting trajectory: initially likened to Scottish clans, they were soon seen as brave and loyal men, but fundamentally different from their British interlocutors – albeit interestingly always superior to the Hindus, who often provided the necessary contrast – only then to be seen as a ‘problem’ that needed to be managed and, finally, as indispensable to a long-term ‘Afghan strategy’.7 And second, the chapter endeavours to describe how that intellectual history is intimately connected to the exigencies of imperialism. My argument is that the ‘tribe’ has become a familiar and accessible idiom – another expedient shorthand – used to make sense of Afghanistan’s diverse and complex social structure, but that in the process the term has veered far from the manner in which it was originally conceived and utilised. In making this argument, I draw upon a number of rich insights, but especially the work of Jon Anderson and Benjamin Hopkins, who have been integral to the interrogation of the practices of historical knowledge production on Afghanistan. The chapter takes as its point of departure this more ‘generalist’ literature, but builds on and harnesses it in order to illuminate a particular instantiation of the way in which knowledge about Afghanistan has been mined, to wit, through the concept of the ‘tribe’. Based on original archival research, this chapter shows not only how the term has become more thoroughly racialised, but also how it now amounts to a conceptually vapid word that has paradoxically been credited with ever more importance in ‘understanding Afghanistan’. Tribe: A Potted History In common parlance, the term ‘tribe’ is used loosely to suggest affiliation with one’s community – as in ‘tribal loyalties’ to intimate affinity with a close-knit group – or more specifically to refer to a non-acephalous community of people in a delimited territory contrasted with central or state organisation. However, there appears to be no accepted definition of ‘tribe’. The term has been largely forsaken by anthropologists or used in very specific instances to delineate particular modes of social organisation and political formation, and never to refer to an entire nation’s social structure.8 It is often used to signal anachronistic hordes of people seemingly resistant to centralised governance, and even the New Oxford American Dictionary contends that:

7

8

This comparison is an underlying theme in Mountstuart Elphinstone’s Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, of Olaf Caroe’s The Pathans and of John William Kaye’s History of the War in Afghanistan. See for instance Morton H. Fried’s The Notion of the Tribe (Menlo Park, CA: Cumings Publishing Company, 1975), 10–12.

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Tribe: A Potted History

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[I]n historical contexts the word tribe is broadly accepted (the area was inhabited by Slavic tribes), but in contemporary contexts it is problematic when used to refer to a community living within a traditional society. It is strongly associated with past attitudes of white colonialists towards so-called primitive or uncivilized peoples living in remote undeveloped places. For this reason it is generally preferable to use alternative terms such as community or people.9

Yet the ‘tribe’ is a notion that is intimately connected to the study and knowledge of the people of Afghanistan. It is a concept with which we (in the ‘West’) make sense of Afghan social organisation, given that we are routinely confronted with images, popular accounts and media reports that depict Afghans (and also often Libyans and Yemenis) as fundamentally ‘tribal’. The ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan is alternately constructed as a security problem, a political threat and as something that needs ‘engaging with’. Often, in support of ‘nation-building’ projects, tribes have been understood as the ‘other’ against which the nation state – still the prime unit of analysis for political scientists and International Relations scholars – is posited. A particular lens through which the early East India Company administrators made sense of the alien people they were encountering, ‘the tribes’ soon became the irrefutable marker of Afghan society, polity and culture. The ‘tribe’, as a generic signifier for most relations and identities in Afghanistan, seems to have displaced the need for a deep theoretical engagement with the changing political and social configurations in the country. This term, widely used in empire and initially deployed to capture a specific network of relations at a given historical juncture, is now entirely de-historicised, losing any conceptual purchase and clarity it may once have had. The story of how ‘knowing the tribes’ came to define the British experience in Afghanistan is a heuristic one that throws into sharp relief the problematic manner in which Afghanistan continues to be imagined and engaged with by the Western academic and policy worlds. The word itself has a troubled history, not merely etymologically, but also more specifically in the Afghan context. The discussion below maps out a brief genealogy of the word and draws attention to its current status in anthropology, which has traditionally been the disciplinary home to ‘tribe’ as an analytic tool, but has increasingly moved away from employing the word as a ‘category’ in strict anthropological terms. The following pages undertake a brief ‘history of the present’,10 in order to demonstrate how an over-reliance on the ‘tribe’ as a trope has led to both an 9 10

New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). This ‘history of the present’ is opposed to what George Lawson has called ‘scripture’ or ‘the mining of the past in order to support suppositions about the present’, which is both how the literature on tribes in Afghanistan is used and the standard practice in International Relations. See George Lawson, ‘The Promise of Historical Sociology in International Relations’, International Studies Review 8, no. 3 (2006), 404.

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over-determination and a simplification of the politics of the region and has in turn constituted Afghanistan as a certain type of ‘intervenable object’, before addressing itself to how this trope emerged historically. In his seminal text The Notion of the Tribe, Morton Fried analyses the birth of the concept and its subsequent application. The roots of the term lie in the Latin tribus and in the Greek word phlye. ‘Tribe’ as a stand-alone term was initially utilised by the state to refer to groups outside its ambit.11 Fried’s main thesis was that the tribes we now study do not represent an organisation that precedes the state, but rather are an ‘invention of the state’.12 Furthermore, the emergence of tribes as cohesive economic systems is relatively recent, as ‘there was no tribal mode of production in pre-state societies’.13 Having problematised the common assumption that tribes both predate the state and stand in opposition to it through a detailed examination of American Indian ‘tribes’, Fried proceeds to deliver a swift blow to the understanding of tribes as groups that possess a shared ideology.14 The crux of Fried’s argument is that the prevalent notion of the tribe is profoundly misleading and has little expository value. The fact that Fried addresses the book to the general public, declaring as early as 1975 that cultural anthropologists had long abandoned the idea of ‘tribe’,15 is telling in itself, and provides a glimpse into the practices of knowledge cultivation and the ebbs and flows that accompany it.16 In the twenty-first century, when ‘tribes’ are accepted as a matter of fact, it is almost a curiosity that close to fifty years ago, a pre-eminent anthropologist could proclaim with some confidence that most anthropologists had jettisoned the notion of the tribe in search of more exacting terms. Fried’s was a plea not to academics but to everybody else because it was already accepted in the scholarly community of which he was a part that the idea that ‘tribe’ had a particular social organisation which stood apart from or in opposition to the state was misleading. He backed up his thesis with what was to become a 11 12

13 16

Fried, The Notion of the Tribe, 10–12. In Fried’s own words: ‘[a]lthough we are accustomed to think about the most ancient forms of human society in terms of tribes, firmly defined and bounded units of this sort actually grew out of the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations by more complexly organized societies. The invention of the state, a tight, class-structured political and economic organization, began a process whereby vaguely defined and grossly overlapping populations were provided with the minimal organization required for their manipulation, even though they had little or no internal organization of their own other than that based on conceptions of kinship. The resultant form was that of the tribe’ (ibid., Preface, unnumbered page). 14 15 Ibid., 47. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 11. Similarly, Elizabeth Colston contends: ‘I do not know what is meant by “Tribal Societies”. “Tribe” and “tribal” are slippery terms despite various attempts to pin them down so that they could be used analytically, “tribe” has been used with reference to the whole span of human groups, with perhaps the exception of the nuclear family.’ See Elizabeth Colston, ‘Political Organizations in Tribal Societies: A Cross-Cultural Comparison’, American Indian Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1986), 5.

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formative study of the American Indian ‘tribes’, in which he dispelled the notion that even in very specific locales these ‘tribes’ can be said to possess a common ideology. Hoping to deliver a lethal blow to the myth of the tribe, he argued that the concept was reductive at best, and should be discarded completely. ‘Tribe’, then, can be added not only to the indefinite number of terms that are (essentially) contested and contentious, but also to the list of terms that have been specifically mined for disreputable political purposes. But ‘tribe’ is also a colonial construct that has attracted its fair share of criticism, not only for its politically suspect instrumentalisation, but equally for its theoretical and conceptual imprecision. The question of contestation in the production of knowledge is particularly pertinent and lies at the heart of the debate about representational practices. It is an issue that exceeds the question of ‘mere’ semantics. The (re-)appropriation and uncritical usurpation of the ‘tribe’ in contemporary political discourse on Afghanistan is undoubtedly one manifestation of the deep-seated processes of silence, erasure and forgetting that invariably accompany the study of ‘far-flung’ places and people. But it is even more than that; it is the specific symptom of the confusion that has marked the study of Afghanistan, in which nebulous notions are relied upon to ‘capture’ and contain, often quite literally, the history, society and culture of an entire people. Richard Tapper’s analysis of the ‘tribe’ underscores the obfuscation that has marked this study of the ‘tribe’ and its functions in a more specifically Afghan and Middle Eastern context. He argues: ‘the nature of indigenous concepts of tribe . . . has too often been obscured by the apparent desire of investigators (anthropologists, historians and administrators) to establish a consistent and stable terminology for political groups’. Lamenting the misperception that such ‘indigenous categories’ are static and coherent entities, he submits that these are, in fact, no more specific than are English terms such as ‘family’ or ‘group’ . . . The ambiguity of the terms and the flexibility of the system are of the essence in everyday negotiations . . . Most of the terms that have been translated as ‘tribe’ contain such ambiguities, and attempts to give them – or tribe – precision as to either level, function, or essence are misdirected.17

However, not only does much of the work done on Afghanistan employ a flattened and crude definition of ‘tribe’: the word itself is credited with doing much of the explanatory legwork when it comes to Afghanistan, and, to

17

Richard Tapper, ‘Anthropologists, Historians and Tribespeople’, in P. S. Khoury and J. Kostiner, eds., Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 56.

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varying extent, a few other Middle Eastern countries.18 The problem is made particularly acute given how little ethnographic work has actually been done on the different ethnic or ‘tribal’ groups in Afghanistan. In 1998 Tapper proclaimed that there had not been a single study of the Durrani tribe – numbering 4–5 million, often touted as the largest ‘tribal’ society on earth – since 1978. While both the numbers and the ‘tribalism’ of the Durrani have been disputed, the lack of actual research is telling given the overwhelming focus on Afghan ‘tribal logics’ today.19 As Alessandro Monsutti has noted in the Pashtun context, a ‘colonial body of literature constructed the romantic representations of an unruly and remote region cut off from the outside world, a trope that remains influential even now’.20 He goes on to show to show early anthropologists – their field world largely a product of empire – themselves transposed notions of tribe from the African context into the Pashtun one, making claims about sedimentary lineage that are still in place today.21 While the discourse of the tribe has remained largely consistent, popular images of Afghans, or more precisely Pashtuns,22 on whom the bulk of historiography has focused, have changed in line with the rise and fall of outside interest in the country. In the nineteenth century, ‘Pathan’ frontier tribesmen were depicted as independent warriors in the British Empire and were prominent in the British (and possibly wider) consciousness as actors in the Great Game that was assumed to define Central Asia at the time.23 After the

18 19

20 21

22

23

Iraq and Yemen are two prominent examples that come to mind. Media coverage of the recent upheaval in South Sudan has also frequently evoked the ‘tribal’ elements of the conflict. Tapper, ‘Anthropologists’. This is not to say that there have not been good reasons for the dearth of ethnographic research: the Soviet invasion, decades of civil war and the lack of easily accessible routes have made Afghanistan a formidable terrain on which to conduct research. Alessandro Monsutti, ‘Anthropologizing Afghanistan: Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42(2013), 271. See also Elizabeth Leake’s discussion of this in regard to the North-West Frontier in the 1930s, The Defiant Border: The Afghan–Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936–65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). As argued in the Introduction, there still exists considerable confusion about who exactly the Afghans, the Pashtuns and the Pathans are and what their relation to each other is. For Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, for instance, Afghans, Pashtuns and Pathans are distinct and separable groups because each group comes to ‘textual light and social life’ in different historical contexts, and each group has its own dynamic historical relationship to Pashto and other languages, including Persian and Indian and Turkic languages. See Hanifi, ‘Quandaries of the Afghan Nation’. In the book as a whole, in keeping with the trend, ‘Pashtun’ is used to refer to Pashto speakers, ‘Pathan’ to refer to those identified by the British as such and ‘Afghan’ to refer to any citizen of Afghanistan. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the words are used interchangeably to remain consistent with the spirit in which they were employed by the British at the time. As the previous chapter has shown, scholars since have argued that the Great Game was far from the only or even the most important narrative at the time. For more on this see Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 34; and Martin Bayly, ‘The “Re-turn” to Empire in IR: Colonial Knowledge Communities and the Construction of the Idea of the Afghan Polity, 1809–38’, Review of International Studies 49, no. 3 (2014), 443–64.

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three Anglo-Afghan wars and with the dismemberment of the British Empire in the mid twentieth century, Afghanistan was largely forgotten by the Western world.24 The second burst of Pashtuns onto the world scene was as freedom fighters battling imperialism and communism in the guise of the Soviet Union, preserved in popular memory through films such as the 1988 blockbuster Rambo III. Although much of the fighting was conducted by non-Pashtuns in Afghanistan, including Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, and the Pashtuns who were most vocal in opposition to the occupation were in fact in Pakistan, the image of the Pathan as ferocious defender of the homeland endured.25 Again, following a lull after the retreat of the Soviet Union, the Pashtuns emerged as Islamic fundamentalists with terrorist inclinations coupled with a penchant for the brutal suppression of women. While this is undeniably a relatively unsophisticated portrayal of the representation of Afghans, it relays something of their gist. The common thread running through these shifting discourses on Afghan males was their construction as warriors: sometimes noble, at other times treacherous, but always hungry for a fight.26 Not only does this onedimensional image mistakenly conflate all Afghan identity with Pathan identity,27 but it also completely bypasses an entire strand of non-violent Pashtun tradition embodied by the Khudai Khidmatgar, or the Red Shirts. As Mukulika Banerjee convincingly explains: ‘between 1930 and 1947 the Pathans, quite against their wild and martial reputation, had employed not rifles and guerrilla tactics but rather the method of disciplined non-violent civil disobedience against the British. Moreover, belying their reputation for feuding and factionalism, they had remained united for almost two decades.’28 More recently, however, there has been a return to the original nineteenthcentury narrative – or what Tapper calls the ‘Kipling version’ – of the Afghans first and foremost as tribesmen, driven by tribal logics and ‘ethnic’ concerns.29 In this vein, Olivier Roy has argued that the rise of the Taliban should be seen as ‘la revanche des Pachtounes’, or the revenge of the Pashtuns, especially the Durrani, in spite of the Taliban’s own insistence that they are an anti-feudal and an ‘anti-tribal’ movement.30 This notion has become so widely accepted 24 25

26 27

28 29

See Cullather, ‘Damming Afghanistan’. Richard Tapper, ‘Studying Pashtuns in Barth’s Shadow’, in Benjamin Hopkins and Magnus Marsden, eds., Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan–Pakistan Frontier (London: Hurst, 2013), 221–38. This will be the concern of Chapter 5. At the risk of repeating myself: the historical discussion below uses ‘Afghan’ interchangeably with ‘Pashtun’ or ‘Pathan’ in order to remain consistent with the historical archive in which it is located. This may appear confusing, but the Persian word ‘Afghan’ was first employed to refer to the Pashtun tribes, which predated the creation of the Afghan state. Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North West Frontier (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2000), 3. 30 Tapper, ‘Studying Pashtuns in Barth’s Shadow’, 228. Roy, quoted in ibid., 227.

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that it was perceived as unproblematic to claim in 2010 that ‘[t]o be a Taliban today means little more than to be a Pashtun tribesman who believes that his fundamental beliefs and customary way of life, including the right to bear arms or defend the tribal homeland and protect its women, are threatened by foreign invaders’.31 In making claims such as this, much of the contemporary writing on Afghanistan’s tribal social structure purports to draw upon a long lineage of historical and anthropological research undertaken by the British in the nineteenth century. It is to this allegedly rich ancestry that the chapter now turns. Mountstuart Elphinstone and the ‘Tribalisation’ of Afghanistan In more ways than one, Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) was the first real scholar of Afghanistan, and his work was to be so pivotal that it would not be a stretch to call him the ‘founding father’ of modern Afghan studies.32 Elphinstone was appointed through family interest to the East India Company and arrived in India in 1796; there he learned Persian and developed a keen interest in Indian history and politics. In 1808 Elphinstone was appointed the first British envoy to the court of Kabul under Shah Shuja by the Indian governor general Lord Minto. Elphinstone’s mission was the inceptive British diplomatic mission to what was to become Afghanistan, and although he failed to secure a friendly alliance with Shuja, who was deposed shortly thereafter, his mission generated a wealth of material that he turned into a detailed report.33 This text – Elphinstone’s enormously influential Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and Its Dependencies, first published in 1815 – still provides the touchstone for much of the academic work done on Afghanistan. Thus even in 2001 it could be stated that ‘Elphinstone’s Kingdom of Caubul is arguably the best book on Afghanistan today.’34 Benjamin Hopkins speaks of the ‘Elphinstonian episteme’ and credits him with the ‘tribalization of Afghan society’, by which he means that Elphinstone’s writings gave ‘the concept [of the tribe] an acceptable permanence which was taken up not only by subsequent imperial administrators, but also by later academics’.35 It is perhaps to be expected, then, that our present-day understanding of Afghanistan as a predominantly tribal society can be traced back to him. The ‘high spirited

31 32 33

34 35

Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values and What It Means to Be Human (London: Penguin, 2011), 262. This patriarchal designation is rather fitting given the subsequent paternalistic nature of the study of Afghanistan. C. A. Bayly, ‘Elphinstone, Mountstuart (1779–1859)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online January 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/8752 (last accessed 20 February 2020). Allan, ‘Defining Place and People in Afghanistan’, 547–8. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 20.

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republics . . . ready to defend their country against a tyrant’36 that Elphinstone wrote of have become so widely acknowledged as the basis of Afghan ‘tribal culture’ that the socio-political context of the Elphinstone era has been largely forgotten. Snippets of phrases from his Account have been re-woven into a mosaic that represents a typically static understanding of Afghanistan. It is through a rather lengthy process of dissemination and dilution that Elphinstone’s insights have become definitive wisdom in Anglophone Afghan studies, albeit not necessarily in their original form. Before delving into this ahistorical appropriation of Elphinstone, a few remarks on his own work are in order. Elphinstone’s Account, which was his report of the first modern British contacts with the Afghan country, was a voluminous exposé of all that he encountered and observed in the country. In Jon Anderson’s words, it provided ‘the most synoptic and in some ways integrated account of Afghanistan and Pakhtun society, history, geography, tribal organization, government, and more briefly, economic life’.37 What then are the major hallmarks of Elphinstone’s work? First, Elphinstone himself based his understanding of ‘the tribe’ on his own personal experience as a Scotsman. The notion of tribe for him was analogous to that of the Scottish notion of clan, and he argues that the Afghan kingdom was remarkably similar to ancient Scotland in its social and political organisation: the situation of the Afghaun country appears to me to bear a strong resemblance to that of Scotland in ancient times; the direct power of the King over the towns and the country immediately around; the precarious submission of the nearest clans, and the independence of the remote ones; the inordinate power and faction of the nobility most connected with the court; and the relations borne by all the great lords to the crown, resemble each other so closely in the two states that it will throw light on the character of the Douraunee government to keep the parallel in view.38

At another point Elphinstone compared early nineteenth-century Afghanistan to Chaucer’s England. This didactic rendering of history was particularly popular with Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, perhaps best epitomised by David Hume and Adam Smith, the latter of whom Elphinstone was purportedly reading while he authored his section on the political and social ordering of Afghan society.39 Elphinstone’s intellectual universe was delineated by the Scottish Enlightenment, and ‘both his conceptualization and understanding of 36

37 38 39

Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, vol. 1, 175. What is less remarked upon are Elphinstone’s comments about the lack of corruption and oppression, which were the hallmark of ‘Asian despotism’. He explicitly praises the ‘organised’ nature of these tribes, whereas the popular image is of Afghanistan as a country of tribal disorder and corruption. As ever the question remains not one of fact, but of emphasis. Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’, 96. Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, vol. 1, 173–4. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 14.

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Afghan society were mediated by that universe’.40 The first British contacts with Afghanistan were a largely Scottish enterprise, in that they were led by Scotsman and reflected their own particular history. Elphinstone’s own immediate successors, most notably Alexander Burnes and Charles Masson, were also Scottish, and what has been called ‘a clear Scots’ sensibility’ runs throughout Elphinstone’s unselfconscious and unproblematised application of ‘clan’ to Pashtun lineages.41 As has now been verified by historians and ethnographers, the differences Elphinstone discerned between what he called ‘republican’ tribes and ‘monarchial’ ones were based on an amalgamation of hearsay evidence, his involvement not only with the Edinburgh Enlightenment but with ‘a Scotland of clearances’ in which clan leaders regularly exchanged kinship for proprietorship, and an affinity for the tribes who were resisting the Afghan monarchy at the court to which he was the company’s envoy.42 His noted preference for ‘republican’ tribes – those who preserved patrilineal institutions and deployed them to ensure their leaders were emasculated, or were entirely acephalous – to ‘monarchial’ ones – in which genealogical ties lose importance relative to the more exigent demands of territory and chieftainship – was thus an inescapably political one, combined with perceptive observation, first-hand acquaintance and a ‘classicist formalism that has a decidedly eighteenth-century ring’.43 Second, as intimated above, much of what was written by Elphinstone was based on hearsay and an ‘intuitive understanding’ of the ‘Afghaun culture’. Large parts of the Account are anecdotal: in effect the musings of one person’s inescapably situated experience that has only retrospectively been granted the status of having laid the intellectual groundwork for the ways in which Afghanistan would be interpreted, known and acted upon for many years to come.44 For instance, it was through his conversation with a local tribesman on the latter’s opinion on strong government that Elphinstone based his generalisation about the tribes’ innate vehemence towards central authority.45 The 40 41 42 43 44

45

Ibid. See also Jane Rendall, ‘Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill’, The Historical Journal 25, no. 1 (1982), 43–69. Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’, 102. Ibid.; cf. S. R. Bakshi, ‘Elphinstone’s Mission to Cabul’, Journal of Indian History 15 (1967), 605–13. Anderson says that such sensibilities ‘virtually disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century’: see Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’, 103. In Hopkins’s words: ‘For its European audience, including company officials it [the Account] set the bounds of what could be known about the Afghans’ (The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 13). Stephen Tanner has called this propensity for warfare Afghanistan’s ‘enduring problem’: see his Afghanistan. The Examiner, in an article titled ‘U.S. Should Focus on Afghanistan’s Tribal Balance’, also cites the Elphinstone quotation, advocating a ‘focus on developing the Afghan tribal balance and let[ting] history run its course’. See www.examiner.com/article/u-s-shouldfocus-on-afghan-tribal-balance (last accessed 1 January 2020).

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Pathan allegedly said: ‘[w]e are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood but we will never be content with a master’, and in response, Elphinstone perfunctorily asserted that there is a ‘reason to fear that the societies into which the nation is divided, possess within themselves a principle of revulsion and disunion, too strong to be overcome, except by such a force as, while it united the whole into one solid body, would crush and obliterate the features of every one of the parts’.46 Nonetheless, Elphinstone had the political perspicacity to locate this innate republicanism in some of the particular tribes he encountered and in their equally particular history and geography – those on the south-east of Afghanistan, along the ‘scientific frontier’ bordering India. Elphinstone was circumspect about the scope of his work; his tome, nonetheless, has been understood as the key to apprehending all of Afghanistan.47 Moreover, his arguments were more often than not explicitly contextualised and anchored to his particular frame of reference. For instance, he observed that the Pashtun tribes most directly under the rule of the Afghan king were likely to have a hierarchical structure and hereditary leaders.48 The minutiae of his rich work have been largely lost in the two hundred-odd years since.49 Finally, what Elphinstone himself conceived his notion of ‘clan’ or ‘tribe’ to convey was vastly different from the ways in which it was picked up and comprehended by future generations of East India Company and colonial administrators. Perhaps most strikingly, it is the lack of an explicit racialisation of ‘tribe’ that sets Elphinstone’s work apart from that of his successors. Written at a time before the ‘white man’s burden’ was fully formulated and internalised by European travellers in distant lands, Elphinstone’s account of the Afghan tribes displayed a fresh intellectual curiosity, relatively unburdened by the essentialism that, while not the sole preserve of the nineteenth century, was certainly institutionalised after his time. Admittedly, the idea of a civilisational hierarchy precedes empire, but Elphinstone’s work drew upon notions of similarity (to an ancient Scottish past), as it were, as much as it did upon notions of difference.50Although

46 47

48 49

50

Quoted in the article in the Examiner cited in n. 45 above. Hopkins argues: ‘[b]asing their larger generalizations about Afghan society on the limited knowledge of these peripheral tribes, Company servants mediated their understanding of Afghanistan through them’ (The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 19; emphasis added). Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, vol. 1, 163. This has been a collective enterprise in which multiple scholars, practitioners and students of Afghanistan have been implicated and therefore cannot merely be attributed to personal interpretation or what Hayden White has called ‘the narcissism of the reader’ when confronted with texts. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 265. It could be claimed that Elphinstone’s account was an Orientalist one but not an explicitly racist one, or alternatively that the category of tribe was reified but not essentialised in his writing. The strategy of Othering through notions of temporality, where the Other always exists in both a

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stadial theory was central to the Scottish Enlightenment,51 and Elphinstone’s text is a ‘conjectural history’ built upon ideas of socio-cultural evolution, the ‘stagist’ notion of progress that underpins his work is based more on the mode of production or subsistence of the society in question than on the colour of the skin of its inhabitants.52 And while the image of ‘tribal disorder and corruption’ featured in his work, it remained relatively unburdened by the dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire and civilisation that took place from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, where theories of human progress became increasingly triumphalist, less nuanced and less accepting of cultural difference.53 Elphinstone’s work – although it should be noted that his embassy reached only as far as Peshawar, from where he dispatched a number of researchers (some European; some co-opted South Asian elites and collaborators) – still provides the touchstone for much of the academic work done on Afghanistan. In sum, therefore, we are to have an entire intellectual edifice constructed upon one man’s (mammoth) study of the land, people, flora and fauna he encountered in the early nineteenth century.54 In the words of Shah Mahmoud Hanifi: ‘Elphinstone’s understanding remains intact and unassailable today, and in that sense his work established the epistemological parameters within which

51

52 53

54

different space and a different time from us, is best expounded by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other. Indeed, arguably, stadial theory was the main and the single most important theoretical contribution made by the Scottish Enlightenment. See Silvia Sebastiani’s The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender and the Limits of Progress (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 55–7. Rendall, ‘Scottish Orientalism’. See Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). The discussion in the following pages elaborates on the importance of Elphinstone’s work. For a summary of his mission and its significance, see Bakshi, ‘Elphinstone’s Mission to Cabul’. Benjamin Hopkins has dedicated a book to the formative influence that the Account of the Kingdom of Caubul had in shaping British perceptions of Afghanistan and its lasting impact: see The Making of Modern Afghanistan. Sir Thomas Edward Colebrook’s The Life of Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), written in 1884, provides a detailed introduction to Elphinstone’s life and work, commemorating his role in British pre-colonial history. In addition, even a cursory survey of the literature on Afghanistan reveals the ubiquity of Elphinstone’s text. For a few noteworthy examples see Caroe, The Pathans, a key text in its own right; Charles Lindholm, ‘Images of the Pathan: The Usefulness of Colonial Ethnography’, European Journal of Sociology 21, no. 2 (1980), 350–61; Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East 1775–1842 (London: Routledge, 2013); Nabi Misdaq, Afghanistan: Political Frailty and External Influence (London: Routledge, 2006); and Rustom Dinshaw Choksey, Mountstuart Elphinstone: The Indian Years, 1796–1827 (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1971). In Richard Tapper’s edited volume The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London: Croon Helm, 1983), each of the chapters on Afghanistan cites Elphinstone.

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Afghanistan has been and can be understood.’55 Louis Dupree, himself considered the foremost scholar of Afghanistan of the Cold War era, made the strong claim that anything articulated in reference to Afghan ‘peoples’ and ‘cultures’ since Elphinstone is merely a ‘footnote’.56 It has also been argued that the ‘real insights’ that Elphinstone’s texts brought to bear have been replaced, over time, by the ‘thin and ironic’ ones of his successors. Whether or not this is the case, it is undeniable that much of what he wrote was revisited and often de-contextualised (or perhaps re-contextualised) by his intellectual progeny, so much so that Elphinstone’s canon has come to be far greater than the sum of its parts. This is neither merely a question of authorship nor one of context, though the two are important elements of the discourse. It is as much a question of how interpretations of interpretations have been instrumental in producing Afghanistan as a ready-made synthesis, an over-determined ‘discursive formation’, in the words of Michel Foucault.57 The changing political climate in British India, the pressure (real or perceived) from Russia and an evolved sense of purpose led to decisive (and shifting) changes in British policy towards the Afghan tribes. This in turn led to new ways of thinking about and ‘managing’ the ‘wild tribes’. And while Elphinstone started from a fresh slate, his scions perpetuated a reified understanding of tribe, selectively gleaned from his colossal Account. The ‘tribe’ became a progressively more essentialised notion, losing its erstwhile fluidity as well as its association with the Scottish clan, and ‘tribalism’ became innately associated with the Afghan ‘character’ and constitution. The irony is that Elphinstone’s notion of tribe was superseded by a less nuanced and complex understanding of the social relations that purportedly constituted Afghan society. A stripped-down version of the notion has become the veritable cornerstone for all knowledge about Afghanistan. Equally ironically, the category of tribe has established its stranglehold on Western conceptions of the Afghan socio-political universe at a time when the field of anthropology is steadily distancing itself from the study of ‘tribes’ by pointing out the immense intellectual and conceptual shortcomings of the notion and of the manner in which it has been applied in the past.58 What we are left with is a watered-down version of Elphinstone’s centuries-old conception of Afghan tribes, which has subsequently been repurposed, first in the (not quite immediate) aftermath of its publication by the officials of the East India Company, as well as those directly in service of the empire, and increasingly after the current intervention in Afghanistan. In spite of the fact that Elphinstone’s Account 55 56 57

Hanifi, ‘Quandaries of the Afghan Nation’, 91; emphasis added. Louis Dupree, ‘Afghanistan iv. Ethnography’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, online ed., 1982, www .iranicaonline.org/articles/afghanistan-iv-ethnography (last accessed 20 February 2020). 58 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 34. There is more on this below.

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would not be classified as a scholarly ethnography in the twenty-first century, or perhaps because of it, he and his contemporaries had managed to establish a connection with the people they were studying. There is now a perceptible and interesting shift, given that not only is the knowledge generated about Afghanistan chiefly second-hand, but it has also lost the intuitive ties and (dated) cultural sensitivity that Elphinstone’s work displayed. While it has been argued that Elphinstone was entirely mistaken in the connections that he was making – the Scottish clan system was markedly different from the Afghan tribal code,59 or Pashtunwali – the result is nevertheless a move away from empathy and towards a discourse that is ever more Othering of the Afghan population.60 The Colonial Era and Its Stereotypes As the discussion above has sought to demonstrate, in an important sense the tribal constitution of Afghanistan was imagined by a Scotsman operating within the intellectual and political milieu of the early nineteenth century.61 From Sir Alexander Burnes to the last governor, Olaf Caroe, Elphinstone’s thought has profoundly impacted upon the work of an entire legion of Anglophone Afghan specialists.62 In the period after Elphinstone, knowledge of the Afghans became increasingly instrumentalised by semi-official colonial 59

60

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Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan; Rendall, ‘Scottish Orientalism’; and Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001). This is akin to what Uday Singh Mehta has called ‘epistemological humility’ in reference to Edmund Burke’s work on India. While the analogy is not entirely accurate, as Burke was a conservative operating in an entirely different context and fiercely critical of British imperialism, the sentiment itself is comparable. See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. It is a point which bears repeating that by ‘imagined’ I expressly do not mean ‘made up’ or ‘fake’. I am referring to the conditions of possibility that have enabled the production and circulation of a certain type of knowledge about Afghanistan. Burnes (1805–41) was an explorer and political officer in India. In January 1832 he set out for a thirteen-month voyage from Ludhiana to Bombay via Bukhara, Mashad, the Caspian Sea and Tehran. The journey so captured the public's imagination that Burnes was welcomed back to England in 1833 as a hero. In 1834 he published an officially sanctioned account of his journey, which also included a narrative of the earlier voyage up the Indus. The book, Travels into Bokhara; Being the Account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary, and Persia, was an instant success, selling 900 copies on the first day. At the end of 1836 Lord Auckland dispatched him on a commercial mission to Kabul. In August 1839 he was one of the three British officers who escorted Shah Shuja into Kabul, although he considered Shuja an ineffectual leader and was critical of British policy towards him. Towards the end of 1841 the political situation deteriorated, and on 2 November 1841 an incensed crowd besieged Burnes’s house in Kabul and murdered him and his younger brother Charles. This marked the beginning of Britain's retreat from Afghanistan. Burnes’s memoir Cabool: Being a Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and Residence in That City in the Years 1836–38, which was published posthumously in 1842, draws heavily on Elphinstone’s work and continues to be cited in

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administrators wrestling with the problem of how to work with and/or control the Afghan population. These contingencies resulted in the development of stereotypes which were each aligned with two opposing courses of action. The first aspect of the colonial literature was therefore the concomitant development of two different stereotypes, each with its attendant policy, as personified in the opinions and work of two high-profile British authors: the administrator Sir George Campbell and his contemporary the political agent and prominent Afghan expert Sir (Dr) Henry Walter Bellew. A second aspect of the colonial literature, seen particularly clearly in Campbell, was a further exacerbation of Elphinstone’s tendency to attribute differing and even contradictory character traits to different Afghan ‘tribes’. Below I examine these different trends and their associated stereotypes. Sir George Campbell (1824–92) was the lieutenant-governor of Bengal and a leading figure in the energetic ‘Punjab School’ of British Indian administrators who saw themselves as ‘looking to the happiness and welfare of the masses’. He said of himself that he was ‘in heart almost a Panjaubee’ and was criticised for being of a ‘revolutionary kind’ by his British peers in India. He published widely on ethnological subjects.63 Campbell acknowledged a significant intellectual debt to Elphinstone.64 He preconised: ‘[s]trange as it may seem, after all our experience of Afghanistan, by far the best account of the country and the people as a whole, in fact I may say the only systematic account of Afghanistan in one view, is Mr. Mountstuart Elphinstone’s “Kingdom of Cabul”, the result of his visit to the Afghan borders in the year 1808’.65 In spite of this lack of a systematic treatment of the land and people in the seventy years since, he posited that ‘[a]ll modern accounts make it clear that the Afghans are still just the same people as they were in Elphinstone’s time, except that, having got rid of the semblance of a king of the whole country, they are even more independent and uncontrollable in their ways than they then were’.66 But he nonetheless warned of the dangers of applying Elphinstone’s Scottish analogy to the Afghans, especially in a military context: ‘I have heard Afghanistan compared to our Scotch Highlands. I have heard it said, “You put down those troublesome Highlanders and turned their hills into delightful

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contemporary work on Afghanistan. See Katherine Prior, ‘Alexander Burnes (1805–1841)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online, 3 January 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4056 (last accessed 3 February 2018). Burnes also serves as the chief British agent in the ‘Great Game’ in Dalrymple’s Return of a King. On Burnes’s enduring impact on Afghanistan studies see Hopkirk, The Great Game. G. Le G. Norgate, ‘Campbell, Sir George (1824–1892)’, rev. David Steele, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online, 23 September 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4499 (last accessed 20 February 2020). 65 66 Campbell, Afghan Frontier, 20–3. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 22–3.

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recreation and shooting grounds – why should not you put down the Afghan tribes in the way?”’67 Instead, Campbell argued that the problem of Afghanistan was of an entirely different scale: that the country was bigger, the mountains higher and the people less acquiescent when faced with authority. Highly critical of the British equivocation with regard to taking a decision about Afghanistan, he believed that Britain ‘must either go back or go forward’.68 However, he asserted on more than one occasion that to ‘go back’ – a ‘close’ policy – was the best option, in order to avoid a veritable hornets’ nest: My experience is, that if you have to deal with hornets only two courses are possible – one, not to stir them up or aggravate them, the other to smoke them out and take the nest. To stir them up, put your hand into the nest and keep it there is not what a wise man would do; yet that is what I am afraid of, if our present position is maintained.69

In keeping with his advocacy of a cautious policy towards the frontier, Campbell emphasised the ‘ungovernable’ nature of the Afghan tribes, borrowing selectively from sources available to him. For instance, he offered what can now be recognised as a bromide: [W]e know by painful experience that the Afghans are a people of a totally different character – turbulent – bred from infancy to the use of arms – and with a passion for independence in which they are exceeded by no people in this world. This love of independence is such as to make them intolerant, not only of foreign rule, but almost of any national, tribal or family rule. They are a people among whom every man would be a law unto himself.70

‘These traits’, he wrote, ‘are not of a passing kind; the Afghans are not to be tamed by subjection and peace; nothing induces them to surrender that love of independence which seems to be the essence of their nature [and the]. . . character of the people occupying so difficult and inaccessible a country’.71 Ironically enough, the conclusion he draws from these connate Afghan characteristics is that Afghans are inherently ‘democratic’ and that ‘indigenous self-governing institutions’ form the ‘ancient law of the Afghan race’.72 For Campbell – who incidentally had never set foot in Afghanistan and spoke not a word of Dari or Pashto – Afghans were not easily manipulated and were astute 67 69

70 72

68 Ibid., 57. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 6. This metaphor is reminiscent of the one Sir William Kaye used when he referred to the Afghans as ‘wild horses’ that could not be reined in by ‘silken braids’. In spite of this, Campbell on the whole was more positive about the tribes and also more cautious in dealing with them. 71 Ibid., 12. Ibid., 2; emphasis added. Ibid., 69–70. This did not prevent him from dwelling upon his naïve, even faintly ludicrous idea of establishing a ‘porter’s lodge’ at the foothills of the Khyber which would grant admittance on the basis of British diktat. In Campbell’s own memorable words: ‘I threw out for consideration that possibly we might establish an easily-garrisoned hill fort at the mouth of the Khyber – a sort of “Porter’s Lodge”, as I described it – where would be kept the key of the gate, and admittance given or refused as we should desire’ (ibid., 40–1).

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political actors rather than religious fanatics: ‘their religion sits very lightly on them. They are more governed by their own customary laws than by the Mahommedan Code, and seem just as ready to sell their swords to an unbeliever as to any one else, even though it is to fight against believers’.73 Campbell’s views were echoed by those of his contemporaries, who also adhered to the ‘close border’ school of thought, and were in favour of pursuing a strategy of ‘masterly inactivity’. Within this school too there were differences in opinion; there were some who believed that the region could mostly be left to its own devices, but the British would be best served by annexing those parts that were not tightly integrated into the kingdom. Writing in 1879, the same year as Campbell, Major H. Grey sent out a memorandum on ‘Afghan Affairs’ that laid out his preferred course of action: the break-up of the Afghan kingdom with the annexation of ‘Haziristan’. He presented his case thus: The annexation of Hazaristan is in this respect different from that of any other portion of the Afghan kingdom, that the province has never been an integral part of that kingdom. It is like Badakshan and the Uzbeg States, inhabited by races distinct from and hostile to the Afghans, and unlike those States, it has never been really incorporated with Afghanistan, but has merely been treated as a hostile tract, to be invaded and plundered at intervals. Thus the hostility which would encounter administration of any really Afghan province would not be met with here; on the contrary, there is every reason to believe, from our experience of 1839, that we should find in the people of Hazaristan a great contrast to the turbulent fanatical Afghans and that the change of rule would be universally hailed by them with pleasure. To recognize the independence of these States [Uzbeg States of Kunduz, Khulm, Tashkurghan, Balkh, Akceh, Shibburghan, Sizplu and Maimunna, and the Tajik State of Badakshan], subject to the general suzerainty of England, would be to secure their hearty adherence to our cause, as subjection to Bokhara or Afghanistan is equally distasteful to them. Such a chain of small States in advance of and supported our province of Hazaristan would offers more satisfactory frontier than an Afghan province filled with dissatisfied and intriguing subjects.74

For Grey, like for Campbell, the Afghans could not be tamed but their neighbours could. They displayed constitutionally different characteristics – ‘a great contrast to the turbulent fanatic Afghans’. We can see here the tactics of ascribing different personality traits to the residents of the region, in line with the imperial strategy: to annex or not, and whom or what to annex. The writings of Campbell can be instructively read in opposition to those of Henry Walter Bellew (1834–92). Bellew was an army medical officer born in Nusserabad, India. As a civil surgeon in Peshawar he became ‘well-known 73 74

Campbell, Afghan Frontier, 25. Major H. Grey, ‘Memorandum on Afghan Affairs’, 2 November 1879, L/PS/18/A30, India Office Records, British Library.

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among the Frontier peoples, whose language he spoke and with whose manners and feelings he was familiar’. Bellew allegedly belonged to ‘the school of dedicated Anglo-Indian officials who helped to build up and consolidate the British empire in India by acquiring a thorough knowledge of indigenous customs and modes of thought’.75 H. W. Bellew was considered to be a leading expert on Afghanistan, with his work consistently being extolled as some of the finest on the region.76 His famous Races of Afghanistan, originally published in 1880, has been called the first real ethnography of the country, and he is said to have been intimately familiar with the language, culture and politics of Afghanistan at a time when Afghanistan was still the land of mystery for most British officials. Bellew himself wrote in 1867 that ‘[t]he officials with the British force who could claim any acquaintance with the Afghan languages were to be counted on the digits’.77 To rectify this inadequacy, he went on to write the Pushto Instructor, which became the primary linguistic guide for British officers in Afghanistan.78 Bellew was more sanguine than Campbell about the prospect of taming the wild Afghan tribes, insisting that everything could be ‘put right’ by rectifying the frontier: But what does the reconstruction of the frontier imply? By reconstruction of the frontier is implied the subjection of the border tribes and the embodiment of schemes for their employment. We must now no longer pursue the course we have hitherto followed. We must now change our policy entirely; we must now alter our tactics altogether. Instead of, as heretofore, settling our border quarrels by expeditions against the offending tribes, we must now, and for the future, take advantage of them to settle our border line. We must, in future, wage war with each offending tribe. We must annex their hills, disarm the people, and reduce the clans to subjection. We must tell them that they are bad neighbours, not fit to be free; that we have tried them for twenty years, and found

75

76 77 78

Bellew published widely, and his works include the Journal of a Political Mission to Afghanistan in 1857 (1862), A Grammar and Dictionary of the Pukkhto or Pukshto Language (1867), Afghanistan and the Afghans (1879) and A New Afghan Question, or, Are the Afghans Israelites? (1881). See D. A. Power, ‘Bellew, Henry Walter (1834–1892)’, rev. James Falkner, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online, May 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2052 (last accessed 4 February 2018). Christine Noell, State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir Dost Muhammad Khan (1826–1863) (London: Routledge, 2012). Henry Walter Bellew, Races of Afghanistan (Calcutta: Thacker Spink and Co., 1880), vii. Written as a corrective, Bellew’s Pushto Instructor paradoxically used only twenty of the forty Pashto characters and relied on English transliteration. Setting aside matters of philology, this is a chilling testament to the nature of knowledge generated about Afghanistan; the first real textbook on Pashto was authored by a person who was only partially versed in the language. See Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, ‘A History of Linguistic Boundary Crossing within and around Pashto’, in Benjamin Hopkins and Magnus Marsden (eds.), Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan–Pakistan Frontier (London: Hurst and Company, 2013), 71; see also Henry George Raverty, Notes on Afghanistan and Baluchistan (Quetta: Gosha-eAdab, 1976).

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them habitually abusing their independence; that they are no longer tolerable as neighbours; and that we now come to take their country under our rule, and to reduce them to subjection.79

Bellew was explicit in his desire not merely to hold the passes but to occupy and control the entire country. He therefore constructed the Afghans as unruly but not ungovernable, arguing that once civilised they would be grateful to be ruled by a legitimate authority, that the ‘anarchy’ could be reined in by an ‘organised system of administration’. For him: ‘the only course which presents itself as promising a remedy is our direct intervention in the affairs of the country’.80 Bellew’s conviction about the urgent need to bring the frontier under British rule and the relative ease with which this could be achieved was not all that set him apart from Campbell. He also ascribed prime importance to the religiosity of the Afghan tribes. Bellew said of the Pathans in Races of Afghanistan that ‘[t]he only common bond of union among them is that of religion, and to this their devotion is of a fanatic kind, owing to the blindness of their ignorance and the general barbarism of their social condition’.81 Those who agreed with Bellew, such as Donald McNabb, the late officiating commissioner of Peshawur, also stressed in 1875 that the ‘semi-savage’ ‘mountain tribes and frontier peoples’ understood and respected only ‘brute force’.82 The contrast between Campbell and Bellew – and those aligned with their respective worldviews – illuminates Paul Titus’s argument about how the British vacillated between two competing policies in Afghanistan – a ‘close border’ and a ‘forward policy’. Those administrators who experienced frequent confrontations with tribal groups while enforcing the more antagonistic ‘forward policy’ developed a negative opinion of the tribes. In contrast, the administrators following the ‘close border’ policies granted the tribes more autonomy and had friendlier relations and therefore a better perception of them.83 Bellew and Campbell both encapsulate one of the two main strategies formulated to grapple with the frontier peoples. One stressed the Afghans’ love of independence and democracy as evidence in favour of a less ambitious policy towards the tribes; the other belaboured the urgent need to bring civilisation to an intractable but not unmanageable people. As Anderson argues, the British were equally guided, and divided, by ‘taken-for-granted, literally common-sense ideas’ that defined the racialised 79 80 81 82 83

Quoted in Campbell, Afghan Frontier. Quoted in O. T. Burne, ‘Memorandum on the Question of British or Native Agents in Afghanistan’, 20 July 1875, L/PS/18/A9, India Office Records, British Library. Bellew, Races of Afghanistan, 12. McNabb, letter to Colonel Burne, also in Burne, ‘Memorandum on the Question of British or Native Agents in Afghanistan’. Paul Titus, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pashtun: Stereotypes, Social Organization and History in Western Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 3 (1998), 657–87.

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worldviews of high Victorian imperialists.84 Even as they arrived at opposing conclusions, Campbell’s and Bellew’s descriptions of the Afghans drew upon a familiar stock of stereotypes mostly inherited from their Scottish predecessors and reworked to align with Victorian preoccupations with ‘character’ and ‘human nature’.85 The literature on the Afghan tribes in the post-Elphinstone nineteenthcentury era saw an increasing reification and stereotyping of the Pashtuns especially in relation to Baluch tribes, the other dominant inhabitants of the Kingdom of Kabul. Elphinstone was the first to draw a distinction between the Pakhtun (or ‘Afghan’) tribes and their Baluch compeers. Later nineteenthcentury work further ossified the Baluch–Pathan distinction and was quicker to attribute distinctions between these groups in terms of inherent character. Campbell himself noted: ‘I may say of the Belooches generally, that it is well known to our political officers that they are in their character materially different from the Afghans, being much less rabidly independent . . . and more amenable to be dealt with through their chiefs.’86 He also added, ‘and though not free from predatory habits, the Belooches are much more tractable and easy to manage than the Afghans. In fact, we have already both by treaty and by occupation complete access to the Belooch country.’87 The contrasting stereotypes of the Baluch and the Pashtun resulted from differences in the social organisation of the two peoples, differences which predated the colonial era but were crystallised and internalised thereafter.88 The British preferred to interact with the Baluch over the Pathan, because the former were thought of as honourable men with a ‘tribal organization’ and the latter as ‘shrewd and unethical’ – stereotypes commonly associated with ‘stranger communities and middlemen minorities’.89 Homi Bhabha’s understanding of the stereotype as a ‘form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’ can be seen at work in the British interaction with, and management of, the Pashtun and Baluch people.90 The repetitious assertion that the Pashtuns are basically ‘ungovernable’ can be attributed to this colonial anxiety. A key development in political use of the ‘tribe’ during this period can be seen in the ‘pacification’ and control of the frontier and its population. The 84 85

86 88 90

Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’, 105. For the Victorian preoccupation with character, see Stefan Collini, ‘The Idea of “Character” in Victorian Political Thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985), 29–50; and Peter Mandler, The English National Character: From Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 87 Campbell, Afghan Frontier, 30–1. Ibid., 61. 89 Titus, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pashtun’. Ibid., 674. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, 18.

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operationalisation of ‘tribe’ by frontier officers reflects the impact that colonial administration had on the genealogy of tribe, of which the reification of the Baluch/Pashtun distinction is one example.91 However, there was still a tendency at this time to account for differences between tribes and the political, economic and social backdrops against which these tribes operated. In an instructive passage on Pathan tribes, Campbell claimed that ‘[t]hey have the character of being avaricious, mercenary, treacherous, and predatory’. He nonetheless went on to explain in considerable detail how each of these characteristics developed – as a result of ‘nature’, ‘necessity’ and ‘situation’.92 Moreover, even as, over time and with enough anxious repetition, British assessments of the people of the frontier began to harden, on the whole, the tribes were not written off as beyond the pale of civilisation. The British in the colonial era still operated with the assumption that ‘their [the tribes’] faults were caused by their institutions and could be alleviated by humanitarian reforms’.93 The Twentieth Century: The Increasing Essentialisation of the Tribe Campbell and Bellew represent a kind of intermediate step between a fairly fluid conception of tribes under Elphinstone and an essentialising discourse on the tribe that matured in the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the significant differences between how the British dealt with the southern and the northern tribes, and between the Pashtun and the Baluch, while periodically registered by nineteenth-century observers, gradually started to recede.94 Over time, the theme of cyclical or countervailing manifestations, one frequently analysed by anthropologists, gave way to increasingly ‘innatist’ understandings of character.95 While ‘character’ was a prominent leitmotif of many mid and late nineteenth-century texts – including Elphinstone’s Kingdom – and not exclusively a twentieth-century concern, the mutation of the discourse around character from a fairly innocuous one into an 91

92 93 94

95

For more on the operationalisation of tribes by frontier officers in colonial times see ‘Border Administration Report on the North-West Frontier Province for the Years 1936–37’, undated, 373f/37, Frontier Branch, Department of External Affairs, National Archives of India. Campbell, Afghan Frontier, 24. Titus, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pashtun’, 663; see also Malcolm Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan 1798–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 471. Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘The Colonial Encounter on the North-West Frontier Province: Myth and Mystification’, Economic and Political Weekly 14, nos. 51–2 (1979), 2902–7; Thomas Holdich, The Indian Borderland 1880–1900 (London: Methuen & Co., 1909), 186; Caroe, The Pathans, 276. Titus, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pashtun’. See also Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’.

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impervious system of classification of different peoples and races is evident by the early twentieth century. This move towards classification can be seen in ‘A Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes on the North-West Frontier of India’ compiled by James Wolfe Murray and published in 1899. The dictionary aims to provide a detailed index the Pathan tribes and their subdivisions. It uses a hierarchical classification that starts with the tribe on top, followed by the clan, the division of the clan, the subdivision of the division, the section of the subdivision and other minor fractions of the section. The entries are alphabetically ordered, from the lesser entity to the greater. The locality of each tribe, clan or division is given in brackets. Some entries are also followed by figures in parentheses, indicating the number of fighting men in that division or fraction. The dictionary concludes with a note explaining the various spiritual titles and denominations used by the Pathans, and a colour map showing the tribal boundaries. It does not, however, include details on Pathan history or genealogy. The front page of the text also includes an ‘explanatory note’ by the compiler which states: ‘the distinction, made by Dr Bellew, between Afghan and Pathan tribes is not observed in the dictionary’.96 This explanatory note does not actually give us any indication of the reasons behind not honouring this distinction, which at that point the British had been not only observing but also using to formulate policy. Although the dictionary showcases a granularity in its codification of tribes: for instance, there are more than twenty tribal entries just under the letter ‘A’, Murray’s ultimate aim as a lieutenant colonel – who at the time was assistant quartermaster general in the intelligence branch – was to the ensure the military utility of the dictionary to colonial officers. To increase this utility he claims, ‘certain cis-frontier Pathan tribes (including the divisions, etc. of the Bangash and Khattaks) have been omitted’.97 The dictionary then is a simplified inventory of the Pashtun population of Afghanistan. But even this level of simplification quickly became too complicated for the British, with officers turning to monosyllabic generalisations of the ‘tribal natives’, often contradicting the writing of their own peers. This is best exemplified in Thomas Holdich’s account of his twenty-year career as surveyor and military officer on India’s western frontier.98 Holdich distinguishes between the Baluch and the Pathan on the basis of their way of fighting, their organisation and their ‘character’. The Pashtuns are portrayed as entrepreneurial, religious and treacherous even towards their relatives, while the Baluch are portrayed as forthright, honest and especially concerned with honour. Holdich echoes the observations of many other colonial

96 97

‘A Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes on the North-West Frontier of India’,1899, L/PS/20/B182, India Office Records, British Library. 98 Ibid. Holdich, The Indian Borderland 1880–1900.

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officials, missionaries and journalists before him, albeit in an ever more essentialist fashion: [T]he Baluch is easier to deal with and to control than the Pathan, owing to his tribal organization, and his freedom from bigoted fanaticism or blind allegiance to his priest. He respects and honours the chief of his clan, who possesses far greater authority in the tribal councils than is the case with the Pathan. The Pathan is a republican of the worst type. He is a law unto himself, and although he is very much under the influence of the Mullah, he has always an eye to business even in his most fanatical outbursts.99

While he keeps this distinction between the Baluch and the Pashtun alive, Holdich’s statements lack the subtlety that characterised Elphinstone’s work,100 and they are even less measured than Campbell’s. He continues: ‘[t]he Pathan will make use of any stratagem or subterfuge that suits his purpose. He will shoot his own relations just as soon as his enemy, possibly sooner – and he will shoot them from behind’.101 If Holdich represents the culmination of the shift in colonial writing by focusing on the inherent ‘character’ of the Afghan people with its ‘natural’ locus in tribalism, then Olaf Caroe’s The Pathans, written in 1957, represents its apogee. Caroe was the last British governor of the North-West Frontier, and his exemplary text, part memoir, part cultural historiography, ostensibly covers the period from 550 BC to AD 1957 and claims to document the life and times of the Pashtun people through the ages. His descriptions are in no way wholly negative,102 but they typify the uniformity with which the Afghans, and the 99 100 101 102

Quoted in Titus, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pashtun’, 663. See, for instance, Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, vol. 1, 162–3 and 247–53. Holdich, The Indian Borderland 1880–1900, 185. This is equally true of the work of those cited above. Elphinstone, Bellew, Campbell and Caroe all speak of the racial superiority of the Afghan in comparison to Indians, for instance. A telling example is an old British Army field manual which explains the Afghans in this manner, which both racialises and genders them, but applauds their good nature in contrast to surly Indians. ‘The Afghans pride themselves on their nomadic proclivities and on those qualities which they complacently regard as military virtues, but which others may stigmatise, with good reason, as brutality . . . Their character is a strange blend of virtues and vices: hardy, brave, proud, active in their habits, simple in their lives, frank and ready to die in obedience to their code of honour, they are yet often faithless and treacherous, generous to a degree, yet devoured by a greed for money, capable of great endurance, and of feats of energy, but constitutionally lazy; merry, cheerful, fond of music, sportsmen all, yet with a vein of sour austerity running though the nation. Their prominent faults are envy of their fellows, instability of purpose, a suspicious temper, intense jealously, bitter vindictiveness, excitability and want of self control. They are capable of strong personal attachments, but never forget a wrong. Grossly credulous, superstitious and bigoted, they know little of their religion, and will not permit their mullas to interfere with their customs. But, if danger threatens from a foreign foe, nothing is easier for the mullas than to kindle a widespread fanaticism, and to unite the clans under the leadership of the church. Impatience is a marked characteristic: they understand, and can take staggering blows but nagging drives them mad. They appreciate highly justice, an open hand, firmness, patience, good humour and the disposition which punishes and is friends again. They are great

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Pathans in particular, came to be viewed by their British overlords. Caroe’s extended metaphorical references to the tribesman as wild predatory creatures have been instrumental in carrying forward and cementing the allegorical construction of Afghanistan as the land of beasts that either need taming or are unsalvageable.103 Not unsurprisingly, the period also saw the development of the political use of ‘tribe’ in the ‘pacification’ and control of the frontier and its population. The operationalisation of ‘tribe’ by frontier officers shows the ways in which colonial knowledge impacted on the genealogy of the term and its subsequent use. In the mid twentieth century, strategic and military interest in Afghanistan petered out and it came to be viewed as a useful, if largely unimportant, laboratory for experiments with ‘modernisation’ theory.104 To many, from the time of the British withdrawal to the early twenty-first century, Afghanistan was largely considered a blip on the world map, except for the brief interlude that was the Soviet intervention.105 As we have already seen, this second cycle of interest in Afghanistan was largely predicated on a glorification of Pashtuns as freedom fighters in the battle against communism. The interest mistakenly collapsed all Afghan identity into ‘Pathan’ identity, and did a great disservice to the Pashtuns’ own long lineage of non-violent dissent. Nonetheless, the martial impression of Pashtuns stuck.

103

104 105

travellers and keen observers, shrewd men of business, good traders, indefatigable in the pursuit of gain, intellectually wide-awake, of active mental ability, and ambitious to a degree. The race, in short is a mass of contradictions, which are accentuated by the strong individuality of the people. Under the harsh conditions of life common to so many of their poorer families, they display as much patience as natives of India, but are unlike the latter, almost universally cheerful, and even humourous. Their honour, if such a word can be used at all in connection with them, seldom extends further than the vindication of their personality, and his little in it of a national or altruistic character. The treachery and guile of Afghans in their dealings with foreigners and enemies, of which so much has been written, are but a phase of Afghan patriotism, of an unscrupulous character, doubtless according to our standards but nevertheless practical in their methods and not wholly successful in its results as we know to our costs.’ ‘Military Report on Afghanistan. Simla: Div of Chief of Staff, Army HQ India, 1906’, L/MIL/17/14/4, India Office Records, British Library. Caroe, The Pathans, 393; see also Evelyn Berkeley Howell, Mizh: A Monograph on the Government’s Relations with the Mahsud Tribe (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 89. See Cullather, ‘Damming Afghanistan’; Nunan, Humanitarian Intervention; Toynbee, Between Oxus and Jumna. Recent historiography has challenged this notion and shown just how invasive and intrusive foreign powers were in this period. The American attempts at ‘modernisation’ in the south and the Soviets’ projects of restructuring in the north had a profound impact on how Afghanistan was imagined as a post-colonial nation. For more on this see Nunan, Humanitarian Intervention.

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The latter half of the twentieth century found the tribes placed, if momentarily, on a pedestal, lionised as holy warriors in the USA, in accordance with the binary logics of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was vilified, and Afghan ‘freedom fighters’ became romanticised in Anglophone public discourse. Thus, on what was celebrated as the second ‘Afghanistan Observance Day’, 21 March 1983, Ronald Reagan, then president of the USA, could remark: ‘to watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson – that there are things in this world worth defending.’106 While the collapse of the Soviet Union saw Western interest in Afghanistan dissipate, the events of 11 September 2001 brought the country firmly back on the ‘map’. This led to a resuscitation of the dualisms and stereotypes discussed above, albeit buttressed by a new grammar of difference and enunciated by more insidious vocabularies of power. ‘Tribal’ Afghanistan in the War on Terror The literature on tribes in Afghanistan, of which scholarship on the Pashtuns, with their cryptic Pashtunwali, forms the bedrock, aptly captures the trajectory taken by the knowledge production, and subsequently the knowledge cultivation, on Afghanistan that takes place in imperial centres. At the time of the initial encounters between the British and the Afghans, the former conceived of the latter as a largely alien people inhabiting an unfamiliar world. As the interaction between these two entities (one established and the other fluid) deepened, first impressions were supplemented by second and third impressions and slowly began to take the shape of a coherent body of knowledge. The first generation of Scottish administrators laid the foundation for this corpus of knowledge, although their original insights were either quickly shunned or simplified for the purpose of ‘usable’ or utile information in the service of the British Empire. In his study of the colonial literature on Pashtuns, Jon Anderson traces the change in the literature from a state of multiplicity to one of conformity.107 He submits that this conformity and consistency of opinion with regard to the Pashtun was a ‘symptom of an intellectual involution which took place as the social distance between the British and Pushtun increased’, with the increasing routinisation and professionalisation of the colonial administration, and also as a result of the refinement of literary techniques such as citing, reusing and updating previous sources.108 106 107 108

University of Texas archives, www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/32183e.htm (last accessed 2 January 2020). Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’, 106–7. Ibid and also Titus, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pashtun’, 663.

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Anderson depicts this process as one of degeneration in which earlier ‘more nuanced’ insights of the (mostly Scottish) administrators gave way to the ‘thin and ironic’ ones of their successors.109 On his account, the fact that the ethnographic material on the frontier tribes was produced not by academics but by political administrators, and that the overwhelming bulk of the published material took the form of personal memoirs, is partly responsible for the lack of good scholarship on Afghanistan. Unfortunately, most contemporary students of Afghanistan have failed entirely to engage with his work, especially in the field of politics and international studies, and this has precluded any attempt to gauge the continuing relevance of Anderson’s research.110 This neglect is regrettable, for the unscholarly nature of the knowledge generated by this generation of British administrators about the Afghan can be viewed as a foretoken, an omen, of what lay ahead. While this academic nescience was hardly particular to Afghanistan at the time, its longevity and persistence are certainly notable. For instance, James Mill’s History of British India, first published in 1817, was decisive in influencing the British image(s) of India, even though Mill himself never visited India. The key difference is that Mill’s ‘philosophical history’ does not continue to exercise power over current perceptions and representations of India, and has in fact been the target of much academic acrimony.111 Increasingly, Afghanistan was studied only to be manipulated, navigated, managed or restrained, but without a corresponding coherent colonial archive to rely upon. In a post-9/11 world, writings that focused on the ‘difficult’ or obdurate nature of the Afghan ‘tribes’ came to be favoured because they helped to devise a cogent plan of action vis-à-vis the abiding ‘problem of the tribes’. We can see the burgeoning of literature focusing on tribal structure as the key to understanding Afghanistan’s social, political and economic organisation that borrows from but also caricatures the experience of the British administrators. In the twenty-first century, Afghanistan is still an object of enquiry about which definitive claims are made by political administrators in need of a ‘quick fix’ to whatever mess they find themselves in. The problem is 109

110 111

Ibid.; incidentally Titus contests Anderson’s interpretation, arguing that ‘the process was in fact a refinement of insight which reflected increased experience in a situation in which all involved came to know the capabilities and limitations of the players. This situation was just one in a larger setting in which colonial rule was increasingly on the defensive as Indians turned its ideologies and institutions against it’ (ibid., n. 13). Crucially, none of the critical, theoretically sophisticated work cited in this chapter has been done by IR scholars. James Mill, History of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). It is interesting to note that Mill argued that it was a methodological imperative to not set food in India, so as to avoid tainting more ‘reasoned’ analysis. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?’, Representations 37 (1992), 1–26.

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compounded by the fact that the work of these modern-day administrators relies heavily on the scholarship of their predecessors, which was either written close to two centuries previously or is presented in the form of travelogues and personal memoirs.112 This is especially the case with the literature on the tribes in Afghanistan, but eventually influences the way in which all aspects of the country are studied, contributing to the abovementioned Bermuda Triangle, that black hole where learned wisdom disappears without a trace, only to be replaced by threadbare clichés.113 A report by the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit that focuses on the status of women explains Pashtunwali like this: One of the most repressive tribal norms in relation to women is perhaps Pashtunwali, ‘the way of Pashtuns’, where the seclusion of women is prevalent and the chaderi or burqa are worn when the Pashtun woman leaves her home. By adhering to Pashtunwali, a Pashtun possesses honour and is therefore able to receive the rights, protection and support of the Pashtun community.114

Here Pashtun honour abuts women’s exclusion and subjugation, an exclusion deduced through her apparel. Moreover, Pashtunwali’s translation to ‘a repressive tribal norm’ is a gross over-simplification of what Antonio Giustozzi, among others, has argued is a complex set of local customs and norms.115 This reading of Afghanistan through the lens of repressive tribal norms has become something of a credo for the American-led intervention. Exemplifying this trend in 2009, the above-mentioned Major Jim Gant asserted that ‘the central cultural fact about Afghanistan is that it is constituted of tribes. Not individuals, not Western-style citizens – but tribes and tribesmen’; and also that ‘the answer to the problems that face the Afghan people, as well as other future threats to US security in the region, will be found in understanding . . . the tribal system of Afghanistan’.116 The fact that these words have been written by a US Army major who wields significant influence in the country is not incidental. Major Jim Gant’s report, titled One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan, has been circulated widely within the US military, the Pentagon and the Congress, and, in the words of the

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For example Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A New History (London: Routledge, 2002); Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Tanner, Afghanistan. Hanifi, ‘An Alternative Approach to Afghanistan’. Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, Women’s Rights, Gender Equality and Transition, 2013, https://areu.org.af/archives/publication/1308 (last accessed 16 March 2019). Antonio Giustozzi, ‘Afghanistan: Taliban’s Organizationand Structure’, Report for Landinfo, Country of Origin Information Centre, August 2017. Gant, One Tribe at a Time; see also Dan Green, ‘Going Tribal: Enlisting Afghanistan’s Tribes’, Small Wars Journal, 2009, www.smallwarsjournal.com (last accessed 19 September 2017).

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Washington Post, ‘lays out a strategy focused on empowering Afghanistan’s ancient tribal system’. Although not an uncontroversial figure, Gant has been described as none other than the ‘Lawrence of Afghanistan’.117 Gant had been assigned to deploy in Iraq, but with senior military and civilian leaders, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, General Stanley McChrystal (the top US commander in Afghanistan at the time) and General David Petraeus (the head of the US Central Command) expressly endorsing Ghis views, he was instead sent back to Afghanistan in 2010 to ‘work on tribal issues’.118 McChrystal distributed copies of One Tribe at a Time to all the commanders in Afghanistan, while Petraeus similarly claimed, ‘Major Jim Gant’s paper is very impressive – so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely.’119 We are told that ‘[i]ntellectually, Gant is driven by a belief that Special Forces soldiers should immerse themselves in the culture of foreign fighters’, and that in Afghanistan’s case this ‘culture’ is overwhelmingly, even exclusively, ‘tribal’.120 In a similar vein, Dr Mike Martin, former British Army officer, whose selfproclaimed intention was to write a ‘non-Orientalist’ account of the war in Helmand, can write without a trace of irony: ‘[t]he early adoption of Islam has generated an exceptional degree of interwovenness between religion and culture that is an enduring theme of Pushtun politics and identity. This feeds into the sense of superiority felt by the Pushtun, particularly those who inhabit the south-west of Afghanistan.’121 Equally unselfconsciously, Thomas Johnson, director of the culture and conflict studies programme at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and ‘a leading expert on the Pashtun tribal areas’, declares: ‘[t]he problem of course is finding people willing to negotiate. Pashtuns generally will not negotiate when they sense they are winning. Hence, you see that the Taliban are “willing” to negotiate, but only after international forces leave the country.’122 These ideas have been most notoriously mobilised in counter-insurgency doctrine, especially in shape of the US Department of Defense’s Human Terrain System (HTS). The HTS, as already explained, is a US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) support programe employing personnel from the social sciences – disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, regional studies and linguistics – to provide military commanders and staff 117

118 121

122

Ann Scott Tyson, ‘Jim Gant, the Green Beret Who Could Win the War in Afghanistan’, Washington Post, 17 January 2010. Note that, as a Green Beret, Gant is part of a long tradition of unconventional warfare. 119 120 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Mike Martin, A Brief History of Helmand (n.p.: Afghan Coin Centre, 2011), 14. Martin was instrumental in designing and implementing the UK’s Culture and Human Terrain Capability and is also author of An Intimate War (London: Hurst, 2014). Quoted in ‘Graeme Smith: Portrait of the Enemy’, Globe and Mail, 22 March 2008.

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with a particular and instrumentalised understanding of the local population (i.e. the ‘human terrain’) in the regions in which they are deployed. The Human Terrain Teams have come under intense criticism because they have deployed anthropological knowledge for dubious (neo-colonial) violent ends. This ‘weaponisation of knowledge’, while certainly not new, is crucial for an understanding of how information and knowledge has been used to control, influence and depict certain peoples as ‘alien others’. This has led to a highly racialised and asymmetrical post-colonial world order that is reproduced through our subconscious biases and ingrained prejudices. The HTS, undergirded by ‘social science’s’ purportedly ‘authentic’ claims about Afghan society and culture, reaffirms our biases and prejudices and revivifies the colonial episteme in the War on Terror. The capstone of this colonial episteme is none other than the discourse of ‘tribe’ configured and utilised as a fixed marker of Afghan identity and society. The ‘tribe’ as ‘unchanging dimension of Afghan society’123 provides impetus and legitimacy to foreign intervention as a necessary modernising impulse in the face of retrograde barbarism. In 2002 the US Army issued a report which penned its ‘initial impressions of operations enduring Freedom and Noble Eagle’. It announced triumphantly that in less than two months it had ‘destroyed a most repressive regime. We fought without convenient bases or ports, 7,000 miles away – and against a landlocked, mountainous and unfamiliar land whose cold peaks and warring tribes had held at bay formidable invading armies from the 19th-century British to the present-day Russians.’ The report then proceeds to argue that the tribal country is likely to ‘become a breeding ground for crime and terrorism if some sort of order is not imposed’ by the US Army, also indexing a disdain for customary law and the ‘proliferation of dangerous technologies’ it engenders.124 Even those critical of the US-led intervention and of the foreign policies of the USA and Britain towards Afghanistan use the ‘tribe’ as a crutch or as a way to describe Afghan socio-political organisation in its entirety. These are people who argue that Afghanistan’s tribal make-up is not necessarily objectionable, and some go as far as suggesting that the tribes are a positive force in the country’s landscape. Professor Akbar Ahmed, hailed by the BBC as ‘the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam’,125 is one singularly prolific example of this group of ‘sympathisers’. Much of his sizable oeuvre has been dedicated to the study of the population straddling the Afghanistan–Pakistan 123 124

125

Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, 7. Conrad C. Crane, ‘The U.S. Army’s Initial Impressions of Operations Enduring Freedom and Noble Eagle 2002’, Final Report, Center for Strategic Leadership, US Army War College, www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army-usawc/csl-oef-report.pdf (last accessed 16 March 2019). As stated on his faculty webpage, www.american.edu/sis/faculty/akbar.cfm (last accessed 30 May 2017).

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border and, as Political Agent of Waziristan in the 1970s, he has had the benefit of considerable first-hand experience in the region. A fervent proponent of inter-faith dialogue and a dedicated critic of the US drone programme, Ahmed nevertheless frames his strident denunciation of US foreign policy visà-vis Afghanistan as a defence of the long-standing tribal systems in place in the country.126 Of the ongoing drone offensives he writes: ‘[f]or a Muslim tribesman, this manner of combat was not only dishonorable but also smacked of sacrilege. By appropriating the powers of God through the drone, in its capacity to see and not be seen and deliver death without warning, trial, or judgment, Americans were by definition blasphemous.’127 More problematically, Ahmed’s writings consciously and perhaps subconsciously draw on the imperial literature which this chapter has catalogued. He cites British colonial administrators including H. W. Bellew and Olaf Caroe on multiple occasions to make a case for ‘the Pathan’s’ fine appearance and indomitable spirit.128 Also deploying the popular – and I hope by now confuted – trope of the ‘graveyard of empires’, Ahmed contends that ‘[t]he world’s greatest conquerors, Alexander, Taimur, and Babar have not succeeded in subjugating the Pathan and have had to come to terms with him to use his passes to the sub-continent. He has made and unmade kings in Kabul. He is aware of being an empire-builder and destroyer.’129 Ahmed makes a distinction between nang (honour) and qalang (rent, taxation) Pashtuns, which is strongly reminiscent of Elphinstone’s report of hearsay to the effect that remoter tribes were more ‘republican’ than those he had encountered directly.130 Moreover, Ahmed’s reification of the Pashtun into these two types is strangely based on an old Pashtun proverb: ‘Honor (nang) ate up the mountains, taxes (qalang) ate up the plains’, which in his own words ‘sums up the historical divide well’.131 He maintains that the nang Pashtuns represent tribal purity and that the qalang are examples of the 126

127 128 129 130

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His book, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2013), is the single best example of this argument. Ibid., 2. See, for instance, ibid., 16; and also Ahmed, ‘The Colonial Encounter’, 2093, 2096. Ahmed, ‘The Colonial Encounter’, 2093. Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘Tribes and States in Waziristan’, in Richard Tapper, ed., The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London: Croon Helm, 1983), 192–211; Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘The Code of the Hills’, Foreign Policy, 6 May 2011. This distinction also finds echoes in Frederick Barth’s work, where he contrasts bar (upper, remote) and kuz (lower, towards the government centre) Pashtuns. Other observers have made similar distinctions: for example, Peter Mayne’s essentialist and rather confusing one between the Pathan as ‘settled’ and Pakhtun as ‘independent’. See Peter Mayne, Journey to the Pathan (New York: Doubleday, 1955). See also Jon W. Anderson, ‘Khan and Khel: Dialectics of Pakhtun Tribalism’, in Tapper, ed., The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan, 128. Ahmed, ‘The Code of the Hills’.

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inevitable corruption of idyllic tribal lifestyle by the rapacious modern state.132 He proceeds to postulate: ‘more than anything, the nang prize their freedom. Even under British rule, the authority's jurisdiction rarely exceeded more than 100 yards on either side of the main roads. In the most profound sense, the nang people were probably among the freest in the world.’133 Ahmed, then, unwittingly contributes to the buoying-up of an ill-fitting anthropological term, one that is employed and harnessed by Western militaries to placate the Afghan populace in counter-insurgency operations.134 Ahmed also invokes the popular trope of Pashtun people as inherently revenge-seeking. On his account, the USA is perceived as being on ‘the warpath against Islam’, and therefore has activated ‘the code of revenge’ against itself. As evidence adduced to support this argument, Ahmed makes recourse to an old Pashtun saying: ‘I took revenge after 100 years, and I took it too soon.’135 Ahmed, the great defender of the Pashtun people, ends up essentialising them by reducing them to tribal, unassuming, god-fearing, simple men. In romanticising the lifeways of these ‘tribal’ peoples, he merely reproduces the fissure between ‘us’ and ‘them’, even while claiming to be on ‘their’ side, as it were. As is the norm in traditional Orientalist narratives, ‘their’ worlds are accessed through antiquated traditions and their thoughts deciphered through anachronistic proverbs and dubious aphorisms.136 132

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135 136

Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘Tribes and States in Waziristan’. See also Nancy Tapper, ‘Abd Al-Rahman’s North-West Frontier: The Pashtun Colonisation of Afghan Turkistan’, in Richard Tapper, ed., The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London: Croon Helm, 1983), 233–61; and in the same volume Anderson, ‘Khan and Khel’. This is evocative of James Scott’s argument about the Malay peasantry in his Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed also shows how in South-East Asia colonial empires constructed ‘tribes’ to explain local relationships, to create hierarchies and to establish ‘stable, enduring, genealogically and culturally coherent units’ that were more easily understood and governed. After being colonially constructed, however, these ‘tribes’ took a life of their own. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 209. For more on this see the now infamous COIN manual, with particular attention to the way in which ‘population-centric warfare’ is articulated. According to the manual, a focus on ‘tribal culture’ gives the US military an edge in its efforts to win Afghan hearts and minds:, www.hsdl .org/?view&did=468442 (last accessed 16 March 2019). David Price’s Weaponizing Anthropology (London: Counterpunch, 2011) explores eloquently the mobilisation of anthropological knowledge for the spurious purposes of war and intervention. Ahmed, ‘The Code of the Hills’. One of the recurring quotations in Ahmed’s work belongs to the Pakistani leader Wali Khan, who in the early 1970s purportedly claimed: ‘I have been a Pathan for 6,000 years; a Muslim for 1,300 years; and a Pakistani for 25.’ Ahmed has argued that this is testimony to the fact that tribal identity is supreme for Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, in a research poll conducted in 2009, 72 per cent of the population identified as Afghan first and then with other ethnic identities. While this does not necessarily prove that Afghans are a ‘nationalistic’ people, we can safely infer that ‘nationhood’ as imagined community is certainly as salient in Afghanistan as in other competing identities, just as in other parts of the world. The poll can

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There are other ‘sympathisers’ whose writing on Afghanistan is equally problematic. In his Wars of Afghanistan, Peter Tomsen describes Afghanistan’s political community as a ‘tribal incubator’,137 uncritically regurgitating the taxonomies that were devised to make Afghanistan’s diverse social structures legible in the colonial era. In this diplomatic history, Tomsen posits that violence was ‘an accepted and expected option in Afghan tribal politics when consensus was out of reach’,138 claims that the country is ‘the land of the blood feud’,139 frequently invokes references to Afghanistan’s ‘tribal fighters’ and goes as far as to argue that ‘fragmented, tribal Afghanistan’ exists in a ‘Hobbesian state of chaos’.140 Stephen Tanner, who similarly identifies the ‘tribes’ as the major obstacle to Afghan nationhood, argues: ‘In the early 1800s the tribes fell away from the concept of Afghan nationhood that had once seemed so promising under Ahmad Shah Durrani. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the people actually devolved back into local tribal government, blissfully unaware of how the rest of the world was evolving.’141 For him the ‘tribes’ – and how to manage them – remain Afghanistan’s ‘enduring problem’. David B. Edwards draws attention to what he calls the ‘fault lines’ of Afghanistan, ‘tribes’, ‘Islam’ and ‘princely rule’, which on his account are competing loyalties exhibited by the Afghan people and the cause for the ‘incomplete’ centralisation of the Afghan state. Elphinstone and Bellew are alluded to as authorities on the ‘unruly’ and ‘recalcitrant’ tribes of the frontier.142 While the former British foreign secretary David Miliband can hardly be said to command the authority and expertise of the authors cited above, he nevertheless advances an argument strongly redolent of colonial scholarship in his 2010 article for the New York Review of Books. Citing lessons from Britain’s experience in the nineteenth century and the Soviet Union’s in the twentieth, he dwells on the vital importance of ‘working with the tribes’.143 As this chapter has sought to show, this has increasingly become the standard story: ‘working with the tribes’, ‘engaging the tribes’ and ‘understanding tribal matters’ are the sine qua non of a ‘successful Afghan strategy’ making tribes actionable on the basis of scintillas of evidence rather than reams of it. In the same spirit, the New

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be accessed at http://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1083a1Afghanistan2009.pdf (last accessed 19 September 2017). Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan; incidentally, a book review in Foreign Policy, 30 November 2012, claims that ‘the tribal situation in Afghanistan is clearly defined’ in the text. See www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/11/30/book-review-the-wars-of-afghanistan/ (last accessed 20 February 2020). 139 Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 5. Ibid., 214. 141 Tanner, Afghanistan, 130, 326. Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 127. David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). David Miliband, ‘How to End the War in Afghanistan’, New York Review of Books, 29 April 2010.

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York Times extolled the Afghan tribes as America’s ‘new hope’, providing a number of ‘infographics’. A prominent, self-proclaimed guide to ‘understanding Afghanistan’s tribes’ featured in the New York Times in 2011, but focused exclusively on the Pashtuns. The article admits that Pashtuns constitute only about 38 per cent of the Afghan population and yet Pashtunwali, ‘a traditional unwritten code of conduct that has governed tribal affairs for thousands of years’, is credited with ‘[u]nifying the whole structure of tribal authority’.144 Not only do we see a disproportionate amount of attention directed towards Pashtuns to the detriment of other groups, but this sort of media coverage has fed into visual representations of Afghanistan as a country divided along tribal or ethnic lines. ‘Ethnic’ maps now proliferate and figure prominently in country reports published by the World Bank and USAID, among other organisations. The US Naval Postgraduate School in its programme on ‘culture and conflict studies’ uses many of these maps in its courses on Afghanistan to help its students navigate social difference.145 Not only are these maps unavoidably arbitrary political acts, but, in an effort to render Afghanistan legible, they also serve to reify difference on the basis of categories that may have little resonance on the ground.146 And as argued in the previous chapter, while (neo-)colonial practices of cartography are problematic for a number of reasons, and continue to be the subject of critique,147 given the lack of sustained surveys and data in Afghanistan, even the nominal accuracy of these ‘tribal’ maps is disputable. This lack of evidence was admitted to by the colonial surveyors themselves, but has since long been forgotten and tribal boundaries have transubstantiated into self-evident truths.148 Conclusion Through the particular articulation of the concept of ‘tribe’, this discussion has sought to show that the discourse on Afghanistan is both typical and atypical 144 145 146

147

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Ruhulla Khapalwak and David Rhode, ‘A Look at America’s New Hope: The Afghan Tribes’, New York Times, 30 January 2010. These are all available to view online at www.nps.edu/programs/ccs/Docs/PDF%20Maps/ RCSouthTribalmap07.pdf (last accessed 28 August 2019). See, for instance, Nancy Lindisfarne, ‘Exceptional Pashtuns’, in Benjamin Hopkins and Magnus Marsden, eds., Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan– Pakistan Frontier (London: Hurst, 2013), 123. John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-coded World (New York: Routledge, 2004); Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See the note accompanying the ‘ill-defined’ ‘tribal boundaries’ in the nineteenth-century map that appears in ‘A Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes on the North-West Frontier of India’ for more along these lines.

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of imperial modes of thought, and thus continues telling our ‘same but different’ story about Afghanistan. It is typical in that the notion of ‘tribe’, not unlike those of ‘race’, ‘caste’ and ‘ethnicity’ found elsewhere in the colonies, has been mined and instrumentalised in the service of empire.149 This has far-reaching implications for the study of imperialism, and for knowledge production in global politics more generally, which resonates with important work done on colonial concepts, framing and imaginings. Tracing the genealogy of ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan, however, also reveals the ways in which Afghanistan as a discursive regime is exceptional. It is distinctive in the way it has been carved out in accordance with the cadences of colonial interest in the region. Unlike that expressed in colonial India, imperial interest in Afghanistan ebbed and flowed, alternating between long periods of apathy and short concentrated bouts of intense concern and involvement. As such, this has led to a sort of ‘emergency episteme’ of the Afghan tribe, a familiar convocation of alterity at the behest of empire, but without the intellectual, economic and emotional energies that were expended in the construction of other idioms of difference such as race, caste and ethno-nationalism. Moreover, the colonial genealogy of this concept has been largely elided. There has been a distinct paucity of resources devoted to studying the region and therefore only limited local knowledge, a lack (until recently) of any profound academic engagement with the country and, most importantly, a disconnect between practitioners, scholars and local populations. Even at the height of imperial involvement in Afghanistan, there were no monographic studies of tribes, few or no income and production surveys and no colonial ethnography on religious leadership and other networks of the kind that were vital in mobilising armed resistance to the British.150 Consequently, the imperative to churn out massive amounts of ‘knowledge’ and be acquainted with the ‘facts’ about Afghanistan – in a compressed period of time, for immediate political purposes – has become an enduring feature of 149

150

Nicholas Dirks’s above-mentioned Castes of Mind is an excellent example of a work similarly dedicated to the evolution of a concept: that of caste in British India. He demonstrates that caste, in the way it is currently conceived, was the product of a concrete historical encounter between the colonisers and the colonised. His contention is not that caste was invented by the British but that it was under the British that the vocabulary of caste became the only one capable of imagining the Indian political universe(s). Although literature on the inadequacy of the concept of caste as a ‘guide’ to Indian culture continues to proliferate, there is no equivalent work on the notion of tribe. But see Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), for an account of how the British handled and literally ‘made up’ tribal difference with their Mandate in Iraq, based on their experience in Afghanistan, and often implemented policies to align with their notion of ‘indigenous tribal authority’. Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’, 103; the FCR too was enacted in a rush with the imperative that ‘it shall come into force at once’, unleashing in its wake resistance and confusion: ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation 1901’, L/PJ/6/579, file 1815, India Office Records, Asian & African Collections, British Library.

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‘scholarship’ on Afghanistan. As Anderson has indicated, nearly all the colonial ethnography that emerged on the North-West Frontier of British India, and Afghanistan more generally, was gathered, sifted and culled for political intelligence. In his own words: ‘in direct service of imperial design, it [the ethnography of the frontier] was a genuine handmaiden of imperialism by comparison to the camp follower of anthropological ethnography’.151 This accounts for the change in the literature from a state of multiplicity to one of conformity.152 Over time and with repetition, any nuanced appreciations of social relations, intuitive and incomplete as they may have been, gave way to a generalised and abstracted understanding of tribal or Afghan ‘character’ that in effect was ‘a list of traits that only restated the problem’.153 The abstracted conception of Afghan character came to figure prominently in the official colonial institutional memory, and by the time the British Empire collapsed, all understanding of Afghanistan came to rely heavily on this trope, as a ‘common-sense’ crutch for the necessary articulation of difference.154 As Bhabha reminds us, the processes of subjectification that these tropes and stereotypes unleash always affect both colonial subjects – coloniser and colonised.155 But as this chapter has shown, while the practices of citation, reusing and rehashing old material have led to a less subtle, more detached understanding of Afghan social relations, they have also unwittingly compounded a problem that has plagued the study of Afghanistan from the outset: that of limited data and weak scholarly engagement. We now inhabit an intellectual world in which ‘Afghan tribes’ are studied and acted upon unproblematically – one that pays no heed to the fact that both those terms have contestable and profoundly complex histories.156 Counter-insurgency doctrines are contemporary manifestations

151 152 153 154

155 156

Anderson, ‘Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts’, 89. Ibid., 106–7. Engagement with Anderson’s rich ethnographic texts would have led to a far more insightful body of work on Afghanistan. Ibid., 92. Charles Lindholm explores the prominence of this trope and its increasing control over British institutional memory, and also shows how these stereotypes reflected British concerns and anxieties (if not quite in these words) in his ‘Images of the Pathan’. Recently, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi has argued that Afghan elites have ‘uncritically absorbed and reproduced colonial frameworks of reckoning’ about themselves and their homelands (‘Quandaries of the Afghan Nation’, 86); while in The Making of Modern Afghanistan, Hopkins contends that the colonial state only partially penetrated the Afghan (self-)imaginary, and that even this happened only many decades after ‘Afghanistan’ was thought up by the British. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, 18–20. The Tribal Engagement Workshop, sponsored by Small Wars Foundation, the US Joint Forces Command Joint Irregular Warfare Center, the US Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare, the US Army/US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center and Noetic Group, conducted on 24–25 March 2010, which assessed the value of a ‘tribal engagement approach to Afghanistan’, is one particularly disgraceful example.

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of colonial knowledge and current practices in the arsenal of (neo-)imperial power that have reinvigorated these forms of knowledge. It should thus come as no surprise that, in a context of social distance that marks the current intervention, hastily applied and decontextualised notions of ‘tribal character’ have continued to obscure more than they reveal. Based on an out-dated paradigm, they dangerously masquerade as a guide to practice. Against the politically charged backdrop of war and an invasion in which foreign forces are committed to an avid restructuring of the Afghan polity, in a way that is sensitive to prevailing cultural mores and customs, any new account of Afghanistan that overlooks the shaky architectures of colonial power/knowledge – built around personal memoirs, travelogues and hearsay – that have given shape to the claims about Afghan ‘tribalism’, constitutes a lapse that is bound to have a mighty material fallout. The upshot of this tortured historical and contemporary understanding of the ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan – and its use as the dominant optic with which to make sense of the country – extends much beyond Afghanistan itself. The ‘tribe’ as a concept emerged as a legacy of colonial knowledge but now functions as part of the wider grammar of neo-colonial power. Contemporary imperial practices have reinvigorated these forms of knowledge, something we can see in racialised dynamics and demands of the bolstered ‘far-right’ in Western Europe and North America. The tribe as an ‘invented tradition’157 is a political project, one which has profound implications the USA’s longest war.158 While these ‘imagined communities’159 may indeed have salience on the ground, the manner in which ‘tribes’ are denied a synchronicity – they are ‘unchanging’ and ‘different’ from us – contributes to a distancing and reification that does a disservice both to the Afghan peoples and to more fine-grained understandings of ‘tribe’ as a term. In order to overcome these provincial colonial knowledges and the violence they perform in the Global South, we must question what constitutes legitimate ‘knowledge’ and ‘authority’ and be aware of, and agitate against, the multiple and layered prejudices, violences, and erasures that structure the lives on the ‘wrong’ side of the colonial equation. This attempt to dethrone the concept of the tribe in Afghanistan is but a small step in that direction.

157 158

159

Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For the myriad ways in which colonial knowledge about Afghanistan affects both intervention under way in the country today and also the discipline of IR more broadly see Martin Bayly’s Taming the Imperial Imagination, especially the conclusion. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). The ways in which locals over the years have resisted and creatively interacted with both the ‘tribe’ as a concept, and with (neo-)colonial intervention in general is beyond the scope of this project but would make a worthy future intellectual pursuit.

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Framed Portrayals of Afghan Women in the Popular Imaginary

Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror . . . because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan . . . because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us . . . Fighting brutality against women and children . . . is the acceptance of our common humanity. —Laura Bush, 20011

We discover then that power is present in the most delicate mechanisms of social exchange: not only in the State, in classes, in groups, but even in fashion, public opinion, entertainment, sports, news, family and private relations, and even in the liberating impulses which attempt to counteract it. —Roland Barthes, 19772

The chapters of this book thus far have shown that representations and the categories they create and uphold come from ‘somewhere’: they have histories that can be traced and trajectories that can be plotted, in this instance in line with the practices of (quasi-)colonialism and the concomitant nexus of power/ knowledge. The book has also demonstrated that tropes do ideological work. They are performative, and instrumental to the vital intellectual labour involved in the creation of identities and bestowing of subjectivities. Through their circulation, dissemination and reiteration, these tropes and the stereotypes they engender are gradually accepted as ‘the truth’. This chapter focuses on one particular trope – that of the brown and, more specifically, Muslim woman – in order to parse not merely the Orientalist dynamics at play in its operation, but also the ideological and affective worlds it both taps into and perpetuates. This chapter continues telling our ‘same but different’ story about Afghanistan, but, in contrast to the previous chapters – which have mostly focused on the difference of Afghanistan from other colonised spaces – it centres on the 1 2

Laura Bush, ‘Radio Address to the Nation: The Taliban’s War against Women’, 17 November 2001, www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/rm/2001/6206.htm (last accessed 14 September 2017). Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, ‘Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977’, October 4, no. 1 (1979), 4.

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possible points of similarity and sameness, via an analysis of pernicious cultural stereotypes that enjoy widespread currency. By anatomising a stereotype that has wide resonance, the chapter also shows how the Western subject comes into being through contact with the Other. The fixing of the identity of the Afghan woman is, in effect, a series of reifications that correspondingly essentialise the Western woman as an actor with a uniform worldview, a unitary subjectivity, and a homogenous positionality. The chapter examines Anglo-American portrayals of Afghan women after 9/11 in order to (i) show how a discourse of ‘saving women’ constitutes Afghanistan, and its women in particular, as an object of ‘empirical’ knowledge and physical intervention; and (ii) argue that the preoccupation with the markers of physical or visible difference – evident in the declaration that the clothes these women wear are windows to ‘their’ mindsets, souls and lifeways – is an overt tactic in the preservation of the Self. The positing of the Other woman as fundamentally, indeed visibly, different is used to cast her as either intrinsically suspicious or as needing to be rescued and ‘normalised’. My approach thus far has been heterodox, drawing on a wide range of diverse thinkers, and this chapter continues firmly in that vein. Continually building on the conceptual framework that has been established, it adds texture to the tapestry by including insights from feminist theory, especially from those working on the intersections between race and gender from a psychoanalytic perspective. Attention to psychoanalysis serves to better situate the conversation about how the Western subject is constituted through their contact with the Other. The mutual implication of coloniser and colonised has been a theme of Imagining Afghanistan, and the current chapter seeks to show how representations, most prominently through their affective dimensions, are vital to this co-constitution. These deeper incursions into psychoanalytic theory also help in analysing the gendered and racialised inflections in the politics of sympathy and the politics of visibility. Sympathy confers distance, requires inequalities of position and possibility to function effectively and is basic to the funding and founding of imperial enterprises. Visibility, too, lends itself to the precepts of empire: marking certain bodies as fundamentally different (in some registers, and the same or similar in others), makes it easier to designate them as dangerous, as flawed or as needing ‘modification’, and thus paradoxically to show sympathy for them. Here I address the impulse to ‘save’ and ‘change’ Afghan society, by saving its women, whereas the next chapter, on masculinities, examines that which has been reckoned irredeemable or beyond repair.3

3

The fact that salvation narratives always revolve around rescuing women is interesting in itself and says something about ‘us’.

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Both, however, point to the ambivalences and ruptures that inhere within these discourses. My focus here is the exploration and critique of the mobilisation of ‘the Afghan woman’ (as representational trope) as a vehicle for the stigmatisation of Afghanistan, the region and Islam. Stories about the treatment of ‘the Afghan woman’ bring about a particularly significant kind of Othering, for they both position Afghanistan as the pre-modern and, through the projection of unwanted anti-feminist qualities onto the quasi-colonised, mount an a priori defence of Anglo-American societies against accusations of the prevalence of patriarchy, misogyny, rape culture and ‘toxic masculinity’. These are the designated problems of the Other woman. They are not, at least not systemically, the problems of the ‘West’. This gesture of distancing and disavowal denies the complexity and specificity of women's experiences both ‘there’ and ‘here’, reducing women-identified people in both contexts to an undifferentiated mass, with homogeneous (if not identical) experiences and opinions. ‘The woman’ works as a pivotal trope in the Othering of Afghanistan, and thus its deconstruction is essential to my project of re-historicising and demythologising Afghanistan as an object of enquiry. Since the chapter is concerned with analysing the myriad ways in which Afghan women have been represented in the Anglo-American West, it examines an array of articles and commentaries in leading British and American newspapers; a few popular documentary films produced in the Anglophone world; and some policy documents including USAID press releases, Department for International Development reports and World Bank country reports. The time frame is this century, although, where relevant, comparisons will be drawn with the past, especially to show how perceptions have (or have not) shifted over time. The source selection is deliberately (and inescapably) selective, and is curated with the hope of most accurately encapsulating the dominant perceptions of Afghan women and the hegemonic discourses that have emerged as a result. These discourses are by no means unequivocally stable or ‘steady’: disagreements, tensions and differences in opinions are discernible not only among different newspapers but also within the same publication(s). Even so, there is a distinct arc followed by these popular portrayals, a certain way in which Afghan women are seen, and implicit assumptions that are common to most, if by no means all, representations of women in Afghanistan. Moreover, the differences that do appear attest to the contradictory economy of (post-) colonial representation, or what Bhabha refers to as the inescapable ‘ambivalence’ of colonial discourse, an ambivalence made possible by the very presence of the colonised Other within the textual structure that destabilises the colonial text’s claim for absolute authority or authenticity – as it

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is always mediated and shot through with our preconceptions and notions about the ways of the Other.4 Finally, my intention is not to dispute the accuracy or veracity of the representations of Afghan women in an absolute sense; it is not, that is, to ‘argue with the real’, in the words of Judith Butler.5 Nor is it to contend that representations form a matrix of intelligibility that is necessarily skewed and exclusionary, and which hence only captures ‘a part of the picture’. Rather, by exploring the ways in which Afghan women have been represented and discursively constructed by and in the Anglophone world, the goal is to both highlight and deconstruct the discursive strategies at play in an effort to show how they are embedded in the wider economy of Orientalist knowledge production. Economies of Social Control and the Creation of ‘the Other Woman’ Information about the Other is often accessed and mediated through a range of ‘secondary sources’ – books, magazines, newspapers, films, music and other popular conduits of knowledge dissemination. This is certainly true of life in Afghanistan, a familiarity with which, for most of us in the West, has been acquired through our incessant interaction with images and writings about the country and its peoples. Given the extent and frequency with which certain representations, tropes and images are circulated in the public sphere, it is unsurprising that there has emerged a consensus concerning what the situation ‘on the ground’ is in Afghanistan. This consensus can be seen most clearly in the general understanding of Afghan women, which is conditioned and effectuated in not-so-subtle ways by the various media and policy portrayals. The lives of Afghan women, and their plight and misery, enter into our everyday consciousness and seamlessly coalesce with what we already ‘know’ about Afghanistan – as the land of no hope, of devastation, of backwardness and barbarity. Afghan women are widely portrayed and perceived as victims of gross injustice, of the evils of a male-dominated, hyper-masculine society and of ‘Islam’ as a system of social and political organisation that has been impressionistically labelled ‘anti-woman’. There is now an acknowledged need for the transformation of Afghan society, through ‘modernisation’ by education, a change in mindset and the ‘de-Islamisation’ of women.6 4 5 6

Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’. Butler, Bodies That Matter. Her arguments on materiality and gender performativity, more generally, are relevant in this context. Examples include Caroline B. Fleming, ‘“Even in Dreams, They are Coming”: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Education of Women in Afghanistan’, William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 11, no. 3 (2005), 597–617; Alia Rabi Akbar, Crises Confronting Afghan Women: Under the Shadow of Terror (Indianapolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing, 2010); and Hira, ‘The Strategic Quagmire’.

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Economies of Social Control and ‘the Other Woman’

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The woman continues to be the trope most extensively used to inform the world of the backwardness and brutality of the government and people (read: men) of Afghanistan. Women ‘shrouded in billowing clouds of blue’7 have become the hallmark of the Taliban’s extremism and violent repression. Books, articles, photographs, paintings, travelogues and personal memoirs that attest to Afghanistan’s savagery and underdevelopment, and which express their hope that Western intervention will continue to civilise and modernise Afghanistan, proliferate in the public sphere. This is the nature and extent of Afghanistan’s tryst with the ‘hypermodern, technologically advanced media age’8 – always second-hand, always and inescapably representational. This acquired ‘understanding’ of the women of Afghanistan is, in a sense, the archetypal example of what Baudrillard refers to as ‘simulacra’: the significations of culture and media that are involved in the breakdown of the distinction between representation and reality, or as those modes of representation that construct perceived reality.9 Gendered images of women as hapless victims are key elements in the symbolic arsenal of the racially inflected project of ‘nation-building’ in the developing world, and these images were certainly instrumental in the construction of Afghanistan as a certain type of ‘intervenable’ object.10 For instance, in 2004 the San Francisco Chronicle postulated that ‘as women emerge from the shadows, so will Afghanistan itself’, a (scarcely) veiled reference to the veil itself.11 The symbolism of ‘shadows’ is also significant: trading on the familiar tropes of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, Afghanistan here is not naturally a ‘dark’ place, but rather has been cast into the shadows and can return to a state of ‘light’ or enlightenment, once the veil is lifted by its Western emancipators. Or consider one of the most iconic, even ubiquitous, images: that found on the cover of the August 2010 edition of the Time magazine. The cover story narrated the tribulations of a girl who had been brutalised by the Taliban. The front page was a close-up of her face, with her nose and ears cut off – an almost gratuitously gruesome image. And although the political impetus to save Afghan women has subsided, at least in the higher echelons of US and NATO foreign policy, in April 2014 Time had yet another cover dedicated to Afghan woman in their chadoris, this one entitled ‘The Taliban’s Campaign of Fear’. Another widely circulated artefact is a video 7 8 9 10

11

Rina Amiri, ‘Muslim Women as Symbols – And Pawns’, New York Times, 27 November 2001. Dana Cloud, ‘“To Veil the Threat of Terror”: Afghan Women and the Clash of Civilizations in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004), 296. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). See James Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building 1954–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), on how ‘state-building’ is, in its very conception, a racialised venture. Cloud, ‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’, 296.

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called ‘Islam in action’, which captures, in graphic detail, the stoning of an Afghan woman (guilty of adultery) by the Taliban in January 2011.12 Examples from popular media outlets such as these are mirrored in the realm of ‘policy’ and ‘international development’. In 2014 the Afghanistan Resarch and Evaluation Unit issued a report on ‘lessons and recommendations’ vis-àvis Afghan women. The lessons are grim: ‘“women either at home or in the grave” is one the commonly believed and practiced norms’, we are told, and it concludes: ‘In a society where women are second-class citizens, an institution dealing with women’s affairs alone cannot be but secondary and thus unimportant, weak and even ridiculed.’13 These narratives form a palimpsest on which inscriptions and re-inscriptions tell the story of an Afghan woman who has been essentialised, her story has been told, her life dissected as if all the women in Afghanistan have had only one experience; as if they were homogeneous, for all purposes one woman, oppressed and suppressed in equal measure by the Taliban. The Afghan woman is, in Chandra Mohanty’s memorable phrase, ‘the average third world woman’ par excellence: ‘she leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimised etc’.14 To reassert, this is not to say that Anglophone discourses on Afghan women are unequivocal or unanimous, but rather that, through the dissemination of knowledge, concepts, and common sense, the Afghan woman is made to occupy the position of exteriority, as external to us and as a target to be acted upon. Moreover, even taking into account some ambiguity and malleability, representations of the Afghan woman, as a subset of the alternately depraved and benighted Middle Eastern or Islamic woman, have remained relatively consistent and unchanging since 9/11 and over the course of military intervention in Afghanistan. There are some common themes that run across the body of representation that this chapter focuses on, and they tie into the larger concerns of the book as a whole in various ways. One recurrent theme or motif that accompanies more ‘substantive’ critiques and highlights the alleged plight of Afghan women is 12

13

14

Incidentally, this video was the first hit that came (as of December 2017) on Google UK when I typed the words ‘Afghan woman’ in the search box: www.apostatesofislam.com/media/ stoning.htm. The video, released by the Afghan security forces, ‘shows a woman wearing a blue burkah buried up to her waist as a baying crowd hurl rocks at her head and body’: ‘Shocking Footage Emerges of the Taliban Stoning Couple to Death’, Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2011. Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, ‘The Dilemma of Women and Leadership in Afghanistan: Lessons and Recommendations’, 2014, https://areu.org.af/archives/publication/ 1425 (last accessed 23 September 2019). Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, part 1, Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (Spring 1984), 334.

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V(e)ilification in the Anglosphere

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the somewhat insistent focus on the sartorial: the dress, make-up and physical appearance of the women being represented are decisive to the formation of impressions and often feed directly into policy prescriptions. A related trope, which figures prominently in both scholarly and popular discourse, is the veil, and especially the chadori or the burqa; this therefore warrants extended treatment.15 Long the focus of a fervid interest in the West, the veil has increasingly become an extended metaphor, an emblem that far exceeds its significance as a garment.16 However, although the veil has figured extensively in contemporary analyses, especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and has been used in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to justify and popularise the intervention in Afghanistan, much of the imaginative edifice that vilified the veil was already in place and was merely built upon with a renewed vigour in the twenty-first century. The next section examines the function of the veil in the imperial imaginary. V(e)ilification in the Anglosphere The veil or the burqa has been a source of Western fascination and censure for centuries. Now a new fascination and censure play out, with the violence of Islam somehow understood to be refracted through the nefarious influence of the burqa. For some time now, Middle Eastern politicians have been judged to be either enlightened leaders or barbaric despots according to their stance on the veil.17 While not much was written on practices of veiling in Afghanistan before 9/11, the little that was seems to echo these sentiments. For instance, Nancy Dupree, widely considered one of the foremost experts on the region, argued in 1986 that Ahmed Shah Durrani (reigned 1747–72), the aforementioned founder of the state of modern Afghanistan, considered women inferior

15

16 17

Chador and chadri are the preferred terms in Afghanistan. Burqa (or indeed ‘burka’) is an imported word, largely unknown to Afghans. I am conscious of the argument against using it in the Afghan context. I continue to do so, not as a way of sanctioning a neo-colonial vocabulary to define indigenous customs, but as an ironic reminder of the difficulty in finding ‘neutral’ language and as a re-instatement of the inescapability of colonial categories and taxonomies in the face of the hegemonic and homogenising drive to make the Other legible. I also use it for the purposes of consistency, given that it is the word used by most Afghanistan experts, who continue to be my principal interlocutors. This may be the case just as much for those who don it as it is for those in the West who write about it. Kemal Ataturk’s image as a progressive ruler owes much to his views on the veil. Similarly, Iran’s policy of compulsory unveiling under Reza Shah, widely despised at home, was nevertheless extolled as a step towards modernity. On Turkey see Nilufer Göle, ‘Secularism Is a Women's Affair’, New Perspectives Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2008), 35–7, and on Iran Sanam Vakil, Women and Politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Action and Reaction (New York: Continuum, 2011).

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and subservient to men, but nevertheless deserving of ‘just treatment’.18 She substantiates her claim by pointing to the ‘liberal’ credentials of Ahmed Shah’s wife, Bobo Jan, claiming that ‘[i]n fact she was the first Afghan queen to appear in public in European dress without a veil’.19 Similarly King Amanullah (reigned 1919–29), on the basis of his policies and thoughts on the veil, is often deemed to be progressive: At a public function, Amanullah said that Islam did not require women to cover their bodies or wear any special kind of veil. At the conclusion of the speech, Queen Soraya tore off her veil in public and the wives of other officials present at the meeting followed this example. Throughout her husband’s reign, Queen Soraya wore wide-brimmed hats with a diaphanous veil attached to them.20

Saturated with a particular kind of meaning, then, the veil has been an object of signification for some time now, and its association with the lack of freedom and autonomy in the eyes of its Western observers is a long-standing one.21 Nevertheless – in spite of the fact that this perception of the veil as a symbol of women’s oppression and subservience is not one that emerged in the twentyfirst century – the disapprobation and opprobrium that the veil or the burqa now receives are entirely unprecedented. The change is not merely one of degree: it represents an essential alteration in the burqa’s function as symptom and paradigm of what is perceived to be a fundamentally different, even diametrically opposed and implicitly dangerous, form of social, cultural and political organisation. As I argue later in the chapter, this attitude towards the veil overlooks the multiple ways in which Afghan women have used, manipulated and interacted with the garment, and serves as yet another instantiation of the cursory nature of imperial engagement with Afghanistan’s history, society and ‘culture’. Without detracting from the very real violence – physical, emotional and epistemic – that women in Afghanistan are often subject to, the assumption that all women are born into, and must endure, a constant state of dolour (one exemplified by the veil) is one that reveals as much, if not more, about those 18

19 21

Nancy Hatch Dupree, Women of Afghanistan (Liestal: Stiftung Bibliotheca Afghanica, 1986); and Huma Ahmed Ghosh, ‘A History of Women in Afghanistan: Lessons Learnt for the Future or Yesterdays and Tomorrow: Women in Afghanistan’, Journal of International Women's Studies 4, no. 3 (2002), 3. 20 Dupree, Women of Afghanistan, 12. Ibid. For the importance of the veil in the Middle East, see for instance Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Bruce Ingham, ‘Approaches to the Study of Dress in the Middle East’, in Nancy LindisfarneTapper and Bruce Ingham, eds., Languages of Dress in the Middle East (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), 1.

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doing the representing as it does the ones represented. From this point of view, the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee writes an evocative commentary, tellingly titled ‘Behind the Burka, about the Evils of the Full Veil’.22 Not coincidentally, her article was published on 28 September 2001, ten days before the official US-led intervention commenced in Afghanistan and a day after the USA covertly inserted members of the CIA's Special Activities Division (codename: Jawbreaker) in order to prepare the ground for US Special Operations to enter the Panjshir valley and begin operations against the Taliban.23 Her forceful opening paragraph sets the tone for both her future writing and more generally for the ethical necessity of the intervention in Afghanistan: Something horrible flits across the background in scenes from Afghanistan, scuttling out of sight. There it is, a brief blue or black flash, a grotesque Scream 1, 2 and 3 personified – a woman. The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille, is more than an instrument of persecution, it is a public tarring and feathering of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation.24

The bestial – or worse, insect-like – lexicon strips women of their humanity in precisely the way that Toynbee accuses the veil of operating. Women ‘flit’ and ‘scuttle’, their movements of a piece with those of a bat or beetle in a manner that makes their very humanity invisible. This is a rhetorical move, of course; Toynbee linguistically conceals the Afghan woman’s humanity so that she – the Western feminist – can savour the righteous pleasure of asserting it with the supposedly revelatory phrase that follows: ‘a woman’. Her commentary functions as a deliberate rhetorical unveiling, one that underlies the assumption that the veil necessarily renders women invisible as people, making it ‘our’ exclusive right and duty to unveil, unmanacle and exhume. Indeed, in a different article Toynbee claims that ‘[s]hrouded in pale blue prisons with tiny grilles restricting their vision, even women who in communist times wore miniskirts were buried alive in these stifling pleated gowns’.25 The stale reprise of ‘grille’, usually a word reserved for metal bars or wires, is at once more than figurative and pre-figurative. It is worth asking at this juncture: whose ‘rampant desire’? Western desire, it would seem. In ‘The Line and Light’, Jacques Lacan talks about the story of an 22 23 24 25

Polly Toynbee, ‘Behind the Burka, about the Evils of the Full Veil’, Guardian, 28 September 2001. See the American special operations website at www.americanspecialops.com/cia-special-oper ations/jawbreaker/ (last accessed 8 December 2017). Toynbee, ‘Behind the Burka’. Polly Toynbee, ‘Was the War on Afghanistan Worth It?’, Guardian, 12 November 2002.

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artist who was so talented that he was able to deceive birds with his painting of grapes. A second painting by the artist was able to deceive humans. This second painting was of a curtain, behind which the viewer would imagine the supposed masterpiece that could deceive any human was located. The viewer would be so desperate to see the picture that he would credit the curtain with reality. For Lacan, the ‘gaze’ of a viewer is equivalent to what we desire to see. Are we so desperate to see the Afghan woman that the burqa acquires some profound reality for us?26 Toynbee’s overt piecing together of the gaze with desire makes it difficult to come to any other conclusion. Pre-empting accusations of Islamophobia, she argues that ‘[p]rimitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same’.27 However, both the tenor and content of her op-ed prevent the allegation of Islamophobia from being an unfair one, for her writing categorically denies the possibility that the burqa may be something other than a ‘sinister’ and ‘grotesque’ ‘instrument of persecution’, while insisting on its centrality to Islam’s misogynistic and retrogressive workings. A few weeks later, the unveiling of Afghan women by foreign troops in November 2001 was celebrated by the Bush government as a symbol of Operation Enduring Freedom’s unbridled success in rescuing Afghan women from the ‘waking nightmare’ of Taliban rule.28 The burqa here, and in the instances examined below, functions as synecdoche – as a particular kind of rhetorical trope, one that operates through ‘conceptual substitution’.29 Even when not spelt out, the burqa stands for Islamic oppression, suppressed women and a system of entrenched patriarchy difficult for ‘us’ to apprehend. Literature on the veil (or the burqa) continues to burgeon, and it remains the target of attack in a number of creative and subtle ways. For instance, in 2008 the Guardian published an article about a Taliban acid attack on schoolgirls.30 Although the piece is ostensibly an exercise in ‘neutral’ reportage, not an op-ed or commentary, the preoccupation with the burqa is evident. We are told that ‘a teacher named Nuskaal . . . was burned through her burka’. The relevance of this reference to the burqa is not immediately obvious, and may even strike some as superfluous, but the burqa is in fact critical to the framing 26 27 28 29

30

See Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Richard Feldstein (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). Toynbee, ‘Behind the Burka’. George W. Bush, ‘President Signs Afghan Women and Children Relief Act’, 2001, http:// whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/20011212-9.html (last accessed 16 March 2019). On synecdoche as a ‘master trope’, see Kenneth Burke’s excellent A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1945), especially 503–8. On the difference between metonymy and synecdoche see Armin Burkhardt and Brigitte Nerlich, Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and Other Tropes (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010). ‘Afghan Police Hold Taliban Militants over Acid Attack on Schoolgirls’, Guardian, 25 November 2008.

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Figure 4.1 ‘Terror attack level: Severe – an attack is highly likely. For security reasons it is now time to ban the burka.’ Panos Pictures

of the piece, and to its readers’ reactions. By explicitly drawing attention to a woman’s agony caused by third-degree burns through her burqa, the almost hostile futility of the garment is underlined. The burqa becomes more than just a symbol of oppression: it actively makes women not only susceptible to crime, violence and injustice, but also points to the futility of the protection the burqa is supposed to provide. The year 2014 witnessed an incident that uncloaks this hostility and divulges not the burqa’s futility, but its alleged active material reality as an instrument of danger and destruction. Britain First, the far-right nationalist British political party, in an attempt to bolster its high-profile ‘ban the burka’ campaign, circulated a photograph (by the Canadian photographer Lana Slezic) of a woman in a burqa brandishing a gun with the caption: ‘Terror attack level: Severe – an attack is highly likely. For security reasons it is now time to ban the burka’ (see Figure 4.1).31 The same image was posted on Facebook by the Australian senator Jacqui Lambie, generating thousands of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ in turn.32 The photograph happens to be of Afghanistan’s first female officer, 31 32

Heather Saul, ‘Britain First Picture: Photographer “Horrified” after First Afghan Policewoman Killed by Taliban Used for “Ban the Burka” Campaign’, Independent, 20 September 2014. Ibid.

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Lieutenant Colonel Malai Kakar, who was shot dead on her way to work by the Taliban in 2008.33 Lieutenant Colonel Kakar, head of Kandahar’s Department of Crime Against Women, was a policewoman renowned for her agitation against the Taliban and for her women’s rights activism.34 Slezic has declared shock and dismay at being alerted to the co-optation and distortion of her photograph, claiming that Britain First and Jacqui Lambie used the image for ‘inflammatory’ purposes, and that the image’s popularity heralds a disturbing trend. She was unequivocal in her denunciation: ‘[e]verything she [Malai Kakar] stood for, everything she fought for, for herself, her family, her daughters and future of her country, everything has been desecrated by how Jacqui Lambie and Britain First have used this photograph’. She added: ‘I was horrified because it’s a complete misrepresentation of the truth. It insults everything she stood for, it insults her and her family and suggests a story that is opposite of the truth.’35 Slezic noted that Kakar would be in uniform in the office but would be expected to wear a burqa when she went out. The original photograph was taken as part of a series capturing various aspects of her life: at home, in the field at work and dealing with women who frequently broached issues of rape and domestic violence with her.36 Lana Slezic emailed both Britain First and Jacqui Lambie explaining the context of her photograph and asking them to remove the photograph from their pages, because it both infringed intellectual copyright and went entirely against the spirit in which the photograph was taken. According to the Independent, ‘Ms Lambie later dismissed Slezic’s comments as a gross overreaction’ and the reports as ‘disgusting, unprofessional beat up’.37 Britain First declined to comment. In this deliberate and audacious misapprehension of the burqa as an object of immanent threat, we see the re-creation of the imaginative geography of the East versus the West, wherein the burqa becomes a barometer for measuring, and a key tool in maintaining Afghanistan’s position as a place of violence and perversity. In yet another cruel turn of events in 2017, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) Country of Origin Information Report declared that female police officers are viewed ‘as little more than prostitutes’ by the native population.38 But the immense moral culpability assigned to the burqa signals a revulsion that can also be read as a reflection of our unconscious desire: we loathe what 33 34 35 38

Ibid. John Burnes, ‘Taliban Claim Responsibility in Killing of Key Female Afghan Officer’, New York Times, 28 September 2008. 36 37 Saul, ‘Britain First Picture’. Ibid. Ibid. European Asylum Support Office, Afghanistan: Individuals Targeted under Societal and Legal Norms, EASO Country of Origin Information Report, 2017, 37, www.easo.europa.eu/sites/ default/files/publications/coi-Afghanistan-targeting-society.pdf (last accessed 16 March 2019).

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we cannot comprehend and thus what we secretly want. Maybe we, rather than the local population, see in the Afghan police woman an odalisque. In the Lacanian schema, the burqa functions as the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire. In a different context, when speaking of the ‘Jew’, Žižek, drawing on Lacan, claims that is ‘not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves from so-called “anti-Semitic prejudices” and learn to see Jews as they really are – in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so calledprejudices’.39 Instead, he argues, we ‘must confront ourselves with the how the ideological figure of the “Jew” is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire’.40 This does not amount to simply feeding our ‘unconscious prejudices with additional rationalizations’. For Žižek, the ‘proper answer’ to antiSemitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but that ‘the antiSemitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews’;41 the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistencies in our own ideological system. The relation between the ‘Jew’ and the veiled Afghan woman is homologous: our understandings of both are always already filtered through by our unconscious desires and by our subconscious persuasions, which may or may not have something to do with what Afghan women (or Jews) actually are like. The imaginative leap that we must take is not to rationalise the burqa as potentially more than a symbol of oppression, but to actively divest the burqa of the intrinsic culpability we have imbued it with. In a provocatively titled piece – ‘Allure Must Be Covered. Individuality Peeks Through’ – Ruth Fremson of the New York Times explains, in a somewhat different vein, the ‘meaning’ of the veil: ‘[w]hether they call it “observing purdah” or “hijab”, the meaning is the same: a traditional woman’s obligation to hide her physical beauty from men to whom she is not related’.42 The burqa according to Fremson can be best described as ‘a swirl of colored fabric that covers everything except a woman’s eyes, erasing not just her allure but her individuality’.43 How a ‘a swirl of colored fabric’ can lead to the ‘erasure’ of someone’s ‘individuality’, and thereby a complete negation of their personhood, is a question worth asking. The answer, I contend, lies partly in the implicit assumption that only ‘we’ possess individuality. The notion that we are unique, possessed of a subjectivity, unlike ‘them’, who can be denuded of it at our insistence, is a key Orientalist postulate that betrays an anxiety about ‘our’ status as much as ‘theirs’ and 39 40 42 43

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 48. Zizek’s own confessed – and ideological – antipathy to refugees ironically exposes him to the very same charge. 41 Ibid. Ibid., 48–50. Ruth Fremson, ‘Allure Must Be Covered. Individuality Peeks Through’, New York Times, 4 November 2001. Ibid.

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which therefore must be continually reiterated. And it lies partly in the glib conflation of ‘individuality’ with ‘visibility’ where the force of the ocular is considered vital to the rendering of the Other as legible and knowable: if we cannot see them, we cannot know them, and what we cannot see either does not exist or is dangerous. All women in burqas are then an undifferentiated mass without individual personalities. Experts on veiling practices and the social mores that accompany them have suggested our reading of the veil may be inaccurate, or at least heavily biased. Among others, Lila Abu-Lughod has argued that, for many women in the Middle East, ‘veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women’.44 In a specifically twenty-first-century Afghan context, Julie Billaud has shown how the veil has helped Afghan women negotiate public space and indeed has been a tool of empowerment as opposed to a weapon of subjugation.45 For Jennifer Fluri the economic and corporeal ‘liberation’ of Afghan women occurs at the site and scale of the body, and public unveiling is nothing more than an insistence that Afghan women take on the markers of white, Western femininity.46 She argues that in Afghanistan wearing the burqa is a fluid process: the removal of the burqa actually occurs as a commonplace, everyday activity when women (who wear the burqa) cross the threshold of home into the public street and back again.47 The contention of these authors is that dress fulfils a social purpose, that people around the world wear the form of dress that is appropriate for their social communities and indeed that people readily and not-so-readily wear certain dresses and adhere by codes for vastly different reasons. The burqa is worn by women who are guided by shared standards, social norms, religious beliefs and moral ideas. It is not a garment that is worn exclusively by women who are forced or coerced into it. While the state imposition of the veil by the Taliban that lasted five years is undeniably objectionable and takes away from the claim to willingness, veiling itself should ‘not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency’.48 It is this a priori dismissal of the burqa as a signifier of male tyranny that is problematic, a dismissal that belies a deep 44 45 46

47 48

Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002), 785. Julie Billaud, ‘Visible under the Veil: Dissimulation, Performance and Agency in an Islamic Public Space’, Journal of International Women's Studies 11, no. 1 (2013), 120–35. Jennifer Fluri, ‘The Beautiful “Other”: A Critical Examination of “Western” Representations of Afghan Feminine Corporeal Modernity’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 16, no. 3 (2009), 241–57. See also Helen Kinsella, ‘Sex as the Secret: Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’, International Theory 11, no. 1 (2019), 26–47. Fluri, ‘The Beautiful “Other”’, 244. Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?’, 786.

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unease with lifeways and worldviews at odds with our own. Moreover, the different and changing functions that the burqa serves in different Islamic countries are not taken into consideration; the denunciation of all veiling is yet another manifestation of the surface engagement with Afghan politics and society, where the experience of the veiled Afghan woman is extrapolated from the ‘veiled Muslim woman’, most notably on the basis of deductions from the policy of compulsory veiling as it exists in Saudi Arabia. In the broader context of imperial power/knowledge’s strategies of distancing, ultimately ‘the significant political-ethical problem the burqa raises is how to deal with cultural “others”’.49 Perhaps what is most invidious about this inability to grasp and interact with cultural difference is that it implicitly denies the existence and possibility of any common experience with the Other: by construing the burqa, and those who wear it, as ‘essentially’ and ‘necessarily’ alien, the very idea of shared experience is made inconceivable. This ‘fundamental difference’ has been hypostatised and is now a common theme in most popular representations of Afghan women. For Aihwa Ong, this is the great irony of Western feminism, for if there can be no shared subjectivity with persons who stand for the Other, ‘the claim to a common kinship with non-Western woman is at best, tenuous, at worst, non-existent’.50 Those who refuse to condemn the burqa as nothing more than a tool in the apparatus of Islamic subjugation of women are accused of cultural relativism, or even more damningly, of indifference and selfishness.51 In an ironic perpetuation of binaries and oppositions, the only avenue out of reductionism and cultural essentialism appears to be that of cultural and (according to some) moral relativism. This ‘lack of options’ for those who want to be culturally sensitive and find a platform where the historical, political and social context of their subjects of representation can be addressed adequately and not shut down prima facie attests to the power of representations and the might of hegemonising narratives – a dominance that suppresses dissent so subtly and convincingly that alternative modes of thought and being become unimaginable. For many feminists, the main bone of contention is that the rhetoric flagrantly disregards the subjugation of women in the USA, and the West

49 50

51

Ibid. Aihwa Ong, ‘Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in NonWestern Societies’, Inscriptions 3–4 (1988), 79–93; Aihwa Ong, ‘State versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia’, American Ethnologist 17, no. 2 (1990), 258–76. For a prominent example see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (New York: Free Press, 2006). See also Deborah Rodriguez and Kristen Ohlson, Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes behind the Veil (New York: Random House, 2007); cf. Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?’

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more generally, which takes multiple forms but most often presents itself in ideological constructions of a domesticated womanhood and in economic disparity between men and women.52 Moreover, these narratives subtly inculcate a disposition that promotes the belief that women’s liberation occurs at the moment that women sexualise themselves – or participate (knowingly or unknowingly) in men’s sexual objectification of womanhood. The more interesting point to be made is how this rhetoric construes Afghanistan as a nation that has failed all its people, and above all the people who need to be looked after most urgently. World Bank and United Nations reports repeatedly conjure the dire situation of the disabled, elderly and children (in addition to, or more often as ‘subsets’ of, women) in Afghanistan so as to make an appeal to ‘humanity’ and to enlist more people in nationbuilding and modernisation projects in the country.53 A US State Department ‘Report on the Taliban’s War against Women’ explicitly condemns the burqa as akin to a physical handicap, a disabling device.54 According to the report, this ‘voluminous, tent-like full-body outer garment that covers them from head to toe . . . is so thick it that the wearer finds it difficult to breathe; the small mesh panel permitted for seeing allows such limited vision that even crossing the street safely is difficult’. It also directly links the burqa to the immiseration of Afghan women, announcing: ‘The burqa is not only a physical and psychological burden on some Afghan women, it is a significant economic burden as well. Many women cannot afford the cost of one. In some cases, whole neighborhoods share a single garment, and women must wait days for their turn to go out.’ If our inclination were to disregard this as a single, if pretty egregious, example our reaction would be precipitate. For, about ten years later, the British Parliament’s report to the House of Commons on ‘The UK's Foreign Policy Approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan’ reproduces not just this sentiment but also the language of a 2001 US State Department report. It opines:

52 53

54

Cloud, ‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’, 289; this, tellingly, often circles around contentious debates about sexual and reproductive justice. Andrew Beath, Christia Fotini and Ruben Enikolopov, ‘Empowering Women: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 1 November 2012, https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/1813-9450-6269 (last accessed 17 January 2020); World Bank, National Reconstruction and Poverty Reduction – The Role of Women in Afghanistan's Future (Washington DC: World Bank, 1 March 2005); United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and Kabul Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Harmful Traditional Practices and Implementation of the Law on Elimination of Violence against Women in Afghanistan (Geneva, 9 December 2010). US Department of State, ‘Report on the Taliban's War against Women’, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 17 November 2001, https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/drl/rls/6185.htm (last accessed 16 March 2019).

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Once the Taliban seized Kabul in September 1996, their war on women’s rights began with a vengeance . . . The compulsory wearing of the burqa in public spaces was not only a physical and psychological burden but an economic one, as many Afghan women could not afford the cost of the garment and had no choice but to share with their neighbours, thus being confined within the home for days.55

The ‘liberation’ of Afghan women appears more like a ‘copy-paste’ fiasco than an unfeigned effort to assist in improving their material lived realities. Even those who are critical of the current attempts to ‘liberate’ Afghan women – without always giving them a say in the matter – out of respect for ‘Eastern cultures and customs’ cannot escape the ingrained assumptions of a teleological reading of history, where the countries in the East are understood to be merely ‘behind’ (not least in the temporal sense of the word) the West. The framework used for evaluating the East vis-à-vis the West is always one that is diachronic and not synchronic. This is what Rebecca Karl refers to as the ‘familiar normative picture of the modern world’, where the ‘East’ is staged in a temporal hierarchy of difference and spatial distance from the putative centre of the world: Euro-America or the ‘West’.56 Within this diachronic rendering, Afghanistan, insofar as there is space for it at all, is emplaced on the bottom rung. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption is that the country is stuck in the ‘Middle Ages’, with its polity, society and ‘culture’ interpreted as conspicuously and calamitously old-fashioned. And thus even those who are sensitive to Afghan ‘culture’ cannot refrain from making statements to this effect: In Western society of the 14th century, it was perfectly acceptable for men to go off to war, leaving their mates locked in rude iron ‘chastity belts’ with padlocks for years at a time. In Western society of the 14th century, it was common practice among powerful families to contract a 12-year old girl to marriage. Is the practice of women wearing the burka in Afghanistan more primitive than the past customs of Europe?57

The sentiments behind this portrayal may contrast sharply with some of the more ‘hostile’ representations, but in both cases Afghan women are depicted as fundamentally different from ‘us’, at least insofar as they are located in a different temporal frame from us; at best their present condition is reflective of our pasts. By making a direct comparison between the chastity belt and the burqa the author sees them as symbols of identical oppression: both

55

56 57

House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, ‘The UK's Foreign Policy Approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan’, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmfaff/ 514/514.pdf (last accessed 16 March 2019) Karl, Staging the World, 5. Jon Chuckman, ‘The Parable of the Hatchet or the Nonsense of Nation Building in Afghanistan’, Dissident Voice, 11 March 2006, http://dissidentvoice.org/Mar06/Chuckman11.htm (last accessed 30 April 2012.

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retrogressive and ‘de-sexualising’. The politics of distancing and deferral is manifest here: it is only though the removal of the burqa and the figurative unveiling of Afghanistan that the transcendence of the (dis)order of premodernity can be achieved. The removal of the Taliban was a step in the right direction, but much needs to be done to bring Afghanistan ‘into the twenty-first century’. And thus it was proclaimed in 2002 that we should ‘[i]magine Afghanistan today as something like England under a weak King John, with the recent loya jirga much like the warlords at Runnymede writing the Magna Carta: a start, but hardly Athens in the golden age’.58 Teleological narratives of progress ossify distance and reify difference even as they promise a brighter future. It is the lure of intervention through a promise of a better future, or of any future at all in this case – a future only made possible through Western intervention and through a complementary change in attire. In his column for the New York Times, Rod Nordland strikes a rare balance between the plaintive and the jubilant as he covers the painful story of Bibi Aisha, the girl with the lacerated nose made famous by Time magazine: ‘Aisha dressed up for her last day in Kabul in a bright pink pantsuit with tassels and beads, and she hugged the other girls and women in the shelter. She said she was very happy and excited to be going to America.’ Happiness, empowerment and liberation are conflated, and simplistically equated, with a sartorial transformation.59 This conflation is in no way unique to Nordland’s work. Here are the words of another New York Times columnist: ‘[i]n Mahmud-eRaqi, 12 teenage girls sat around a small trunk filled with beauticians’ tools – combs, boxes of hair dye, scissors, nail polish, hairspray – and watched closely as the instructor sat one of the girls in a desk chair and demonstrated how to cut off split ends evenly’. For Alissa J. Rubin, while ‘[i]n most places in the world this scene would hardly be a sign of women’s liberation’, in Afghanistan it is – by implication – precisely that. Rubin’s interlocutor, Biboli, is described as a sixteen-year-old girl with ‘long brown hair barely covered by a thin veil’.60 This comment about her head being covered only ‘barely’ by a ‘thin veil’ is neither incidental nor unremarkable, for it belies the largely uncontroversial belief that more cover means less liberation and less cover is equal to more liberation for women. In this spectrum from veil to freedom, Biboli with her ‘long brown hair barely covered by a thin veil’ is already a step above on the ladder of liberation, compared with most Afghan women.61 58 59 60 61

Toynbee, ‘Was the War on Afghanistan Worth It?’ Rod Nordland, ‘Portrait of Pain Ignites Debates over Afghan War’, New York Times, 4 August 2010. Alissa J. Rubin, ‘Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains’, New York Times, 30 July 2010. For a good example see the popular film The Beauty Academy of Kabul (2004). The film, subtitled ‘After Decades of War and the Taliban, Afghan Women Need a Makeover’, is based on this very premise. There’s the customary aestheticisation of the unveiling of Afghan women,

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In keeping with this theme, the women who are (re)presented as strong or with personalities of their own are predictably ‘Western’ in their outlook, attitude and dress.62 In an article published by the Guardian in January 2002, not long after the intervention, we are introduced to Suhaila Siddiqi, who is referred to as ‘the woman who stood up to the Taliban’.63 Suzanne Goldenberg, the author, posits that ‘there are not many women in Afghanistan who can claim to have fought the Taliban head on. Suhaila Siddiqi did – and the Taliban lost.’ When the ‘religious zealots’ took Kabul in 1996, Siddiqi was banished to her home. But eight months later, ‘the Taliban came crawling, begging for her surgical skills to treat their daughters and wives’. She consented, but only on the condition that she and her sister ‘be granted absolution from wearing the burka, the all-concealing shroud that the Taliban made mandatory for all Afghan women’. The ‘victory’, according to the columnist, lies not in Ms Siddiqi’s resumption of her medical practice. Rather, it appears to lie in the fact that she managed to avoid wearing the burqa and that this culminated in the ‘defeat of the Taliban’. Very much in line with neo-liberal feminist norms that fail to engage with collective politics on any level, an individualised act of resistance (worthy as it may be) is accorded the status of a great social victory. And a preference for the superficial over the substantive rears its head again: Though spectrally thin and well into her 60s, Siddiqi is exceedingly glamorous and conducts herself with the confidence of a woman used to giving orders. Pencilled-on eyebrows arc across a high, domed forehead, and her greying bouffant hair is covered with a gauzy veil. Her long slim fingers seem unsuited to the messy business of abdominal surgery – her speciality – and she is always impeccably dressed in a wellcut shalwar kameez.

Ms Siddiqi’s appearance, so very central to the ‘liberated Afghan woman’ in this social imaginary, is a tangible expression of her ‘normalcy’. She typifies the ‘ideal’ Afghan woman: at once an Easterner and acceptable, even palatable, to a liberal Western audience. Her hair is covered, but only partially by a ‘gauzy’ veil, and she has ‘pencilled-on eyebrows’.64 Her difference is neither extreme nor threatening. And without the burqa, which as pointed out by another journalist is understood to be ‘both a symbol and a source of the oppression of Muslim women’, Siddiqi is almost (but not quite) one of ‘us’.65

62 63 64 65

and a very clear message that Afghan women can become ‘subjects’ and ‘real people’ only once they ‘make themselves up’ replete with lipstick and Western hairstyles. For a good example of this assumption see Gopal, No Good Men among the Living. Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘The Woman Who Stood Up to the Taliban’, Guardian, 24 January 2002. Ibid. Toby Young, ‘By Refusing to Ban the Burka, Damian Greene Is Supporting the Humiliation of Millions of British Women’, Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2010.

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Suhaila Siddiqi is, in point of fact, the perfect prototype of resistance against symbolic Islamic oppression: ‘the Good Muslim’ who confronts and defeats ‘the Bad Muslim’. What is unfortunate is that her even more commendable commitment to working as a doctor in the face of considerable political adversity is made out to be less significant than her choice of clothes. To drill the point home, Salim Tawana, a surgeon at the Wazir Akbar Khan, the city’s largest civilian hospital, also remarks that ‘[s]he was very brave . . . she never once wore a burka’.66 A piece written by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times in April 2009 echoes the sentiment and displays a similar conflation of agency, progress and Western clothing. Of a protest staged in Kabul by women, Filkins writes: ‘[i]t was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men.67 But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy in meaning.’68 Moreover, the rather pedestrian fact that most men are also illiterate, impoverished and relatively ‘unfree’ is obscured; the suffering of the Afghan people is astonishingly often construed as consisting exclusively in the travails of the country’s women and children.69 Unfortunately – as would be expected in a nation ravaged by war and poverty – oppression, illiteracy and insecurity are hardly a female prerogative (see Figure 4.2). These media representations are far from disconnected from the realm of policy. The bleeding together and seamless suturing of one with the other can be seen in the way ‘liberation’ from the Taliban and the burqa were ‘marketed’ both in the popular media and by politicians, especially in the USA. For instance, one documentary, Shaira Shah’s Beneath the Veil – an ‘undercover’ investigation of the crimes of the Taliban, in her own words, in which a beauty salon is described as the ‘most subversive place of all’ – was first aired in June 2001 on Britain’s Channel 4 and shortly afterwards in August 2001 on CNN, when it was barely watched and made little impact.70 When it was televised 66 67

68 69 70

Goldenberg, ‘The Woman Who Stood Up to the Taliban’. Karen Ruddy deals with the recurring theme of illiteracy and education in her excellent unpublished PhD thesis, ‘Decolonizing Literacies: Transnational Feminism, Legacies of Coloniality and Pedagogies of Transformation’, in which she contends that the preoccupation with making the Afghan female population literate is nothing but a way to legitimise the intervention. More precisely, she argues that the figure of the ‘illiterate third world woman’ serves as a ruse: it at once justifies war abroad and propagates an exceptionalism that conceals continuing gender, sexual, colonial, racial and class disparities at ‘home’. Dexter Filkins, ‘Afghan Women Protest New Law on Home Life’, New York Times, 15 April 2009; emphasis added. On this, see also Laleh Khalili, ‘Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency’, Review of International Studies 37, no. 4 (2011), 1471–91. Ellen McLarney, ‘The Burqa in Vogue: Fashioning Afghanistan’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 5, no. 1 (2009), 3.

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Figure 4.2 Woman in a burqa. Here we see the figurative imprisonment of the burqa subtended by the physical imprisonment of metal bars. Craig F. Walker/Denver Post via Getty Images

again immediately after 9/11, it became CNN’s most watched documentary ever, with a television audience of five and a half million viewers.71 As McLarney notes, Beneath the Veil was shown at least ten times on CNN, in seeming synchrony with US military strategy. It was aired on 6 October 2001, the day before the USA invaded Afghanistan, and again on 17 November, the day the State Department released its ‘Report on the Taliban’s War against Women’ and when First Lady Laura Bush delivered her ‘Radio Address to the Nation’. The report and the radio address make women’s dress and the burqa in particular the centrepiece of their analysis (along with some emphasis on women’s education) and suggest that the burqa limits freedom of movement and hence violates ‘the basic principles of international human rights law’. The report also connects this contravention of human rights law to restrictions on make-up and nail polish.72 Similarly, a USAID report titled ‘A Woman in Man’s Clothing’ lauds the decision of a woman who chooses to don ‘a wrapped turban and solid colored knee-length tops with loose-fitting trousers’ 71 72

Christine McCarthy McMorris, ‘Grappling with Islam: Bush and the Burqa’, Religion in the News 5, no. 1 (2002), 14–29. McLarney, ‘The Burqa in Vogue’; US Department of State, ‘Report on the Taliban’s War against Women’; and Bush, ‘Radio Address to the Nation’.

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instead of the ‘mobile prisons’73 or ‘sky-blue burqas that flow in the wind’,74 (con)fusing agency with a choice of clothes and accoutrements. Hillary Clinton partakes in this narrative, reiterating the need to rescue Afghan women from ‘barbarism’ and launching a strategy to achieve that goal. Her choice of words is instructive: ‘I also believe very strongly, as is apparent in what I say about this issue [women’s rights and involvement]. To that end, I unveiled our Women's Action Plan.’75 Given the history and context within which this statement was occurred, the blurring of the metaphorical with the literal is scarcely unexpected. To take another noteworthy instance, in a US Senate hearing in 2005, Senator Barbara Boxer made an impassioned plea that the USA continue to work towards saving the women of Afghanistan.76 She prefaced her discussion of the burqa with the following: I want to talk a minute about Afghanistan. I have a very soft spot for Afghanistan. I think our country does. This is a nation that was crushed by the Taliban, and it was the tragedy of 9/11 that led to their liberation, because otherwise, we were not doing that much. I was aware – not of my own work, but because of the work of many feminists in America – I was very aware of what the Taliban was doing.

Recognising that the USA was not involved in ‘liberating’ the women before 2001, she argued: ‘[s]o when we had what I call this “accidental liberation”, it was this amazing opportunity to free those good people. And I think that Hamid Karzai is really an extraordinary human being.’77 While the changing perceptions of Karzai is the subject of the next chapter, we see here the once again the operation of the burqa as synecdoche: the ‘liberation’ of women from the Taliban is simply the liberation of unveiling. Her running together of invisibility, oppression, the burqa and inhumanity is a typical rhetorical move, one that posits the West as saviour, installing agency and humanity where none existed: The last point I would make is, if you ever, sort of, get tired of hearing about the condition of women in Afghanistan, just put on a burqa, once, for 15 minutes, and keep it on, even though you’re going to want to pull it right off . . . the sense that you have is of being completely invisible and having no soul and no humanity whatsoever. And I think if everyone could do that – I wish everyone could do that, who’s interested in foreign policy, to understand what it means to women throughout the world who are made to feel invisible. 73 74 75

76 77

For ‘mobile prisons’, see Toynbee, ‘Was the War on Afghanistan Worth It?’ ‘A Woman in Man’s Clothing’, 25 January 2012, USAID, www.usaid.gov/results-data/successstories/woman-man%E2%80%99s-clothing (last accessed 14 September 2017). Speech by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, 2010, www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/ 01/28/secretary_clinton_speech_at_afghanistan_conference_100084.html (last accessed 16 March 2019). ‘Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate. One Hundred Nineth [sic] Congress First Session’, 2 March 2005. Ibid.

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Senator Boxer ended her statement with a strange admixture of gusto and lamentation: ‘[s]o there’s so much to this, liberating the woman there, because it’s going to mean so much for democracy, so much for economics; and frankly, it’s going to mean so much for our spirit, because, if we do that, we’re helping, you know, half the world’s population just by fostering equality’.78 But Boxer also, unwittingly, captured the quiddity of what is at stake in the ‘liberation’ of the Other women: the reassertion of the stability, morality and ‘spirit’ of the Self. This is the subject of the next section. The Pedagogy of Pi(e)ty The denial of the agency and of a voice to the Other woman (and by extension to Afghanistan) is evident in media discourse and goes beyond a fetishistic obsession with the veil. Representations of Afghan women are filtered through with an almost didactic politics of affect. The message is that Afghan women need to be saved, educated and taught how to question their customs and their culture even when this message is packaged in the rhetoric of global ‘sisterhood’. For instance, the ‘protection’ and ‘winning hearts and minds’ of their Afghan ‘sisters’ are said to be the aim of the Female Engagement Teams of the US Marine Corps. In a BBC drama series about a female British solider in Afghanistan called Our Girl, the protagonist refers to an Afghan woman whom she is saving as her ‘soul sister’.79 But perhaps, as with the burqa, the most obvious and distinguished sphere of this circulation of the politics of affect is the print media, led by prominent newspapers in Britain and the USA. In a 2011 article tellingly entitled ‘For Afghan Woman, Justice Runs into Unforgiving Wall of Custom’, Alissa Rubin of the New York Times writes of the horrific ordeal faced by an Afghan woman called Gulnaz who was forced into marrying a man who had raped her, after having been imprisoned for adultery.80 According to Rubin, the lack of a positive ending to Gulnaz’s story revealed the ways in which even ‘efforts guided by the best intentions to redress violence against women here run up against the limits of change in a society where cultural practices are so powerful that few can resist them, not even the president’. She continues: ‘[t]he decision from the government of President Hamid Karzai is all the more poignant coming as Western forces prepare to leave Afghanistan, underscoring the unfinished business of 78 79

80

Ibid. See the NATO-backed report by Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam, ‘Seeking Out Their Afghan Sisters: Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan’, 1 March 2014, www.nato.int/issues/ women_nato/2014/5096-seeking-out-their-afghan-sisters.pdf; and for the BBC series, www .bbc.co.uk/programmes/p010r4kr (both last accessed 14 September 2017). Alissa J. Rubin, ‘For Afghan Woman, Justice Runs into Unforgivable Wall of Custom’, New York Times, 1 December 2011.

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advancing women’s rights here, and raising questions of what will happen in the future to other women like Gulnaz’. ‘Their customs’ which sanction violence against women are so resolutely stagnant that no higher power, ‘not even the president’, can override them. We can see here the almost congenital Othering of the Afghan in Western representational practices, but also the fear that ‘they’ will revert to these customs as soon as ‘we’ leave. Even as it reveals the post-9/11 political investment in Karzai as the ‘good guy’, the article is unequivocal in pointing out that the agency and momentum came from outside Afghanistan: ‘[i]ndeed, what prompted the government to act at all was a grass-roots movement that began after Gulnaz was featured in a documentary film commissioned by the European Union’, which then paradoxically blocked the film’s release after it was completed. Rubin, while critical of the European Union’s decision, draws the following conclusions, eschewing a more pixelated version of the story she had so punctiliously painted: Gulnaz’s case shows the power of cultural norms. On the one hand, the public campaign for the woman prompted the pardon, which ensures that she will be able to bring up her daughter outside prison. On the other hand, the fact the only imaginable solution to the situation of a woman with an illegitimate child was to have her marry the father – even if he is a rapist – is testament to the rigid belief here that a woman is respectable only if she is embedded within a family.81

Through her evocation of the ‘power of cultural norms’, Rubin is, even if inadvertently, propagating the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, pitting the Western cultural norm of civil society, public participation and women’s rights against the hidebound Afghan and Islamic cultural norm of the repression of women and the supremacy of men. The issue at stake is not her invocation of ‘cultural norms’ per se (and it is worth noting that Gulnaz was not in fact forced to marry her rapist, although the CNN and other news sources continued to report that she was into 201582), but the manner in which this cultural difference is perceived and imagined. For instance, one cannot help being struck by the familiar motif of the malleability and flexibility of ‘our’ culture and the absolute immutability and unyielding nature of ‘theirs’. The note on which Rubin ends her commentary highlights the superiority of ‘our’ norms and social organisation: ‘[b]oth Ms. Malpas and Ms. Motley said that a shelter had been found for Gulnaz and that they hoped she would go there. But whether such a western option can prevail over Afghan custom . . . is far from clear.’ There is no moral ambiguity here, no pause for thought. The ‘western 81 82

Ibid. Nick Patton Walsh, ‘An Afghan Nightmare: Forced to Marry Your Rapist’, CNN, 8 April 2015, https://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/07/asia/afghanistan-gulnaz-rape-marriage/index.html (last accessed 17 March 2019).

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option’ imagined as refuge, shelter and protection ought to prevail over Afghan custom, but it may not be able to do so in the face of the latter’s obduracy. The discourse of universal human rights has once again morphed into an exclusively Western prerogative. Additionally, the journalistic preoccupation with the veil and the anxiety it signalled about ‘their backward customs’ permeates into a more generic ‘need to protect’ and into the policy sphere, with organisations like Human Rights Watch and Chatham House subtending the same discourse of safety and shelter.83 Kimberley Motley, the lawyer cited above, covers the same story in the Washington Post, writing of the ‘immorality of Afghanistan’s moral crimes’ and betraying the same deep-rooted anxiety about Other and the same belief that ‘we’ can save these women.84 She sedulously walks her readers through the horrors of life in Afghanistan, articulating her belief in the good the USA is doing there. Her op-ed starts powerfully, with her client Gulnaz pleading for help: ‘Please help us’. Those were the first words that my client, Gulnaz, said when I met her inside the Kabul prison that was home to hundreds of women, many of whom, like her, were locked away for so-called moral crimes – adultery or running away from home. The frail 20-year-old clung to her baby, who was conceived through rape and born on the prison floor, where mother and child had lived for nearly two years.

The emotive imagery – the helplessness of a ‘frail 20-year-old’ ‘clinging’ to her baby – is characteristic of much of the popular writing done on Afghan women in its use of affect or the deployment of what Richard Rorty, in a different context, has called ‘sentimental education’.85 Lauren Berlant’s exegesis of the ‘cruel optimism’ of neo-liberalism is instructive in this case. 83

84 85

Human Rights Watch, ‘Moral Crimes in Afghanistan’, www.hrw.org/report/2012/03/28/i-hadrun-away/imprisonment-women-and-girls-moral-crimes-afghanistan#; and Chatham House, ‘Protecting Women’s Rights in Afghanistan: A Roundtable’, 16 October 2013, www.chathamhouse .org/file/protecting-womens-rights-afghanistan (both last accessed 17 March 2019). Kimberley Motley, ‘The Immorality of Afghanistan’s “Moral Crimes”’, Washington Post, 20 January 2012. Rorty’s argument is that support for human rights ought to be cultivated through an education in sentimentality, which is a manipulation of our emotions to manufacture affect and feelings of sympathy. See Richard Rorty, ‘Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality’, in S. Shute and S. Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 111–34. For a powerful critique of Rorty’s ‘sentimental education’, see Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007). Douzinas claims that Rorty’s ‘sentimental education’ is nothing but a ‘pedagogy of pity’, with the assumed premise that ‘“our” culture, society and politics’ are the ideal that others should aspire to achieve. ‘The pragmatist’s emphasis on efficiency and results means that a standard of civilisation must be set as the blueprint and aim. For Rorty, this is American liberal culture. In a post-modern repetition of the methods of early social anthropology, Rorty believes that we must understand the ways and travails of others in order to help them efficiently become like us’ (72). While this may not do justice to Rorty’s more nuanced work, it certainly captures the sentiment behind the newspaper articles quoted above.

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Calling public spheres ‘affect worlds’, she argues that affect and emotion condition our sense of belonging and take precedence over modes of rational or deliberative thought in the modern world.86 While she exposes this promise of neo-liberal policies as a (Lacanian) fantasy, the ‘sentimentality’ of discourse about Afghan women betrays the same logics, where individuals create an attachment or ‘clusters of promises’ towards ‘desired object-ideas’ even when these promises are unlikely to be fulfilled. In the discourse of ‘saving’ Afghan women, we have a promise that is unlikely to be fulfilled, indeed that cannot be fulfilled – stemming from the fundamentally different nature of the Other. We must save that which essentially cannot be saved, and in this lie both the fantasy and the ironic justification for Western intervention. This also ties into the politics of deferral and the discussion of the backwardness of Afghan women, as the hope is that perhaps we can save them in ‘the future’, warranting a sort of imperialism in perpetuity. In the Afghan context, this contradiction not only sanctions intervention, but always already offers a way out: if we don’t succeed, it is because they are too different, too retrogressive and too obdurate to be saved. This ‘Western’ impunity – a sort of ‘get out of jail free card’ – is another recurrent theme in the construction of Afghanistan as a quasi-colonial discursive regime. The vulnerability, even inadequacy of the Average Afghan Woman also serves to re-inscribe the logics of paternalism, so central to this project of ‘liberation’. Thus, Motley notes: ‘[m]y illiterate client told me of her experience of going to court with her illegitimate daughter and not understanding the legal process’. The eradication of this illiteracy and lack of understanding is allegedly precisely what the USA went to war for: Standing up for the rights of women like Gulnaz was part of the reason the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place. In 2001, one of the key political arguments that President George W. Bush’s administration used to support the military deployment was stopping the terrorists, for whom ‘the brutal oppression of women’ was a ‘central goal’. In November 2001, Congress passed a bill noting Taliban oppression of women and stressing the need for Afghan women to have better access to health care and education.87

And yet, even judged by their own standards, the intervention’s goals seem chimerical at best. A UNESCO survey conducted in 2017 found that 84 per 86 87

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Motley, ‘The Immorality of Afghanistan’s “Moral Crimes”’; in George Bush’s words: ‘Why are they resisting so hard; what is it about democracy they can’t stand? Well, what they can’t stand about democracy is this: Democracy is the exact opposite of what they believe. They believe they can impose their will; they believe there’s no freedom of religion; they believe there’s no women's rights. They have a dark vision of the world, and that's why they’re resisting so mightily’: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46&st=afghan&st1=women (last accessed 14 September 2017).

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cent of Afghan women were still illiterate, with literacy rates being assessed as 1.6 per cent for women in some southern provinces.88 More perniciously, this strategic mobilisation of an investment in women’s rights is a profoundly Othering move, framing the invasion as a noble one, justified by a need to ‘stand up for the rights of an Afghan woman’ in a place where women cannot stand up for themselves.89 Thus ‘[w]hile Gulnaz’s case brought international media attention to the plight of Afghan rape victims, inside Afghanistan, gross violations of human rights are “business as usual”’. This reduction of crime against women, indeed of gross violations of human rights to a way of life in Afghanistan, to ‘business as usual’, is indicative of a country-wide inurement to rape and violence, further strengthening an ontological divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’.90 Karzai’s acceptance of the pardon application and exoneration of Gulnaz on the basis that the initial decision was a ‘misjudgement’ is read by Motley as tacit acceptance of the fact that Afghan ‘cultural norms’ are ‘long overdue for an overhaul’. The overthrow of an entire culture is needed, and Karzai’s decision is nothing less than ‘a significant recognition of the persecution that Afghan women have long endured under the veil of cultural appeasement’.91 The explanation of the ‘pardon’, however, is intriguing: the suffering of Afghan women at the hands of the Taliban and due to laws that explicitly discriminate against them is explicable to a Western audience (at least from Motley’s perspective) only as the persecution of women ‘under a veil of cultural appeasement’. In spite of the orotund rhetoric that adds little by way of analytic value, this sentence does serve its purpose in simplistically holding an entire ‘culture’ accountable for specific instances of injustice and in metaphorically assigning culpability to the ‘veil’ for the violence perpetrated against women in Afghanistan. As demonstrated in the case of the FCR, this cultural blame-game also is based on a calculated forgetting of ‘our’ own implication in systematising, even enshrining in law, crimes such as adultery and their associated punishments for women. This latent superciliousness, and its attendant disconnect, surface towards the end of the piece, when Motley claims that Gulnaz’s case had a ‘suitable ending’. After 88

89 90

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UNESCO Office in Kabul, ‘Youth and Adult Education’, 2017, UNESCO, www.unesco.org/ new/en/kabul/education/youth-and-adult-education/enhancement-of-literacy-in-afghanistan-iii/ (last accessed 17 March 2019). Judith Butler’s Frames of War provides a good analysis of the Other function of a strategic investment in women’s rights. A related instance is the coverage, especially in the British media, of how troops had difficulties in understanding, and therefore were educated about, the homosexual dynamics in the Afghan army and police. As we see in the next chapter, on this account ‘they’ engage in pederasty, whereas ‘we’ have ‘normal’ intercourse. Knowledge of the Other is curiously transmogrified and presented as a handbook of outlandish practices. Motley, ‘The Immorality of Afghanistan’s “Moral Crimes”’.

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over a decade of imprisonment for the ‘crime’ of having been raped, the mere notion of a happy, or even a suitable, ending is absurd. Curiously enough, we are never once told what Gulnaz herself thinks of this – does she consider it a suitable ending? But, as Gayatri Spivak has elucidated, the subaltern may be able to talk, but can only ever be spoken for.92 And if the subaltern is listened to, it is always as ‘one woman’ pleading to be saved. That there may exist a cacophony of voices (and just as many ears) is a possibility that remains too dangerous to be entertained in the voyeuristic economy of Orientalism. We can see this ‘homogenising’ of the Afghan woman in a 2009 op-ed by Thomas Friedman titled ‘Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No’.93 Friedman opens by saying, ‘I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here?’ and ‘[w]ho cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created missiles.’ Although Friedman begins by lambasting the US intervention in Afghanistan, construing it as a country that should not matter to the USA, he very soon metamorphoses from the Machiavellian prince to a peddler of affect. He says he owes his transformation to ‘something very powerful’: I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of ‘Three Cups of Tea’, open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, ‘let’s just get out of here’.

Friedman displays a classic tendency to romanticise development efforts, and the backdrop against which they are implemented, when writing of the intervention in Afghanistan. A nameless ‘remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains’ provides the idyllic setting, delighted ‘little Afghan girls’ stand in for the helpless victims turned gleeful beneficiaries of American largesse – this is the perfect feel-good justification for the invasion. No stranger to the vocabularies of Othering, Friedman equates the building of the school to ‘put[ting] a new, one-story school on the moon’, while reasserting the bynow platitudinous refrain that ‘Mortenson’s efforts reminded us about what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about.’ This may, in fact, have been a more perspicacious statement than Friedman intended, given that large chunks of Mortenson’s efforts were discredited and significant parts of writing were later proved to be fabricated – to such an extent that Mortenson’s co-author David Relin ended up committing suicide when the allegations of fraud and

92 93

Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson, ed., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 271–316. Thomas Friedman, ‘Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No’, New York Times, 18 July 2009.

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misconducted were proved.94 The ‘essence of the war on terrorism’ then takes on a more ominous hue. However, Mortenson’s reasons for ‘devot[ing] his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan’ are themselves worthy of comment: ‘when a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent’. And not only will the girl bear fewer children (read: militants in waiting), but also When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.

Putting aside the fact that Mortenson did not actually build all the schools he claimed he had, a few things emerge from this. Not only are Mortenson’s words naïve, bordering on the patronising, but they also betray a rather ambiguous ‘feminism’. The women’s first priority will continue to be the bearing of sons, albeit peace-loving, non-militant ones. The role of these sons will be to bring home food, quaintly wrapped in newspapers. The newspapers will then be read to their mother, who will invariably learn of the cruel exploitation of women in Afghanistan. With a few deft sentences, Mortenson captures the crux of Said’s arguments in Orientalism: he homogenises and generalises the experience of an entire people on the basis of a wistful example, and perhaps his own experience (both lived and imagined) of Afghanistan. An insidious patriarchy is at play, but ‘our’ paternalism is benign, whereas ‘theirs’ is barbaric. Friedman’s words at the close of the article bring the lesson home: ‘when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral – as if they were their first dolls – it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away”. Not yet.’95 These final sentences are a succinct expression of all the assumptions implicit in the piece. In the first instance, the repetitive use of ‘little Afghan girls’ reveals a patriarchal tendency towards infantilisation, making the girls diminutive in their very existence. Friedman’s choice of words (‘crouching’; ‘clutching tightly’) reinforces this notion of 94

95

John Krakeur, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (New York: Anchor Books, 2011); it’s worth noting that Three Cups of Tea was required reading for most senior US military staff. Several top military commanders – including Admiral Mike Mullen (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2007–11), General Stanley McChrystal (commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan, 2009–10) and General David Petraeus (McChrystal’s replacement in Afghanistan until 2011) publicly declared their support for Mortenson and Central Asia Institute, invited him to lecture at military bases across the USA and Afghanistan and ordered their soldiers to read his book. See Ruddy, ‘Decolonizing Literacies’, 2. Friedman, ‘Teacher, Can We Leave Now?’; emphasis added.

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diminutiveness, while also constructing the girls as wholeheartedly appreciative of this gift of learning bestowed upon them by a US admiral, eclipsing the obvious reason for the US military presence in Afghanistan. It also contains inherent within it, if the need arises, the very same ‘get out of jail free card’ – it is not yet time to leave, but we already have our reasons to leave, for there are only so many schools one can build on the moon. Notwithstanding the accusation of captiousness, it is worth mentioning that even the repetition of ‘Afghan’ in ‘little Afghan girls’ is not wholly innocuous. The reiteration of ‘Afghan’ serves to highlight the essentialised difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Given the likelihood of girls in an Afghan village being Afghan, this seemingly gratuitous enunciation creates, or deepens, a gulf. The effect on the reader of this discursive distancing is that of a heightened sensitivity and appreciation of American ‘development’ endeavours in the country – in accordance with the pedagogy of pity that Friedman is disseminating – but a curious desensitisation to the backdrop of violence and death against which these endeavours take place and the particular historicalpolitical context in which they are embedded. The more subtle, but no less problematic, conversation to be had about the half-hearted ‘development enterprise’ in Afghanistan falls by the wayside. Kirk Semple also touches upon the urgent need to rescue Afghan women and echoes the idea that the fall of the Taliban has seen the situation of women improving drastically: ‘[s]ince the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, a more egalitarian notion of women’s rights has begun to take hold, founded in the country’s new Constitution and promoted by the newly created Ministry of Women’s Affairs and a small community of women’s advocates’.96 The New York Times finds the self-same sentiments recorded by USAID, the United States Institute for Peace, the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit and the British House of Commons.97 The women Semple interviews all express their 96 97

Kirk Semple, ‘Afghan Women Slowly Gaining Protection’ (also published as ‘Protecting Women from Abuse’), New York Times, 2 March 2009. United States Agency for International Development, ‘Strengthening Education in Afghanistan’, August 2017,www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1871/Strengthening_Educa tion_in_Afghanistan_II_SEA_II_-_August_2017.pdf (last accessed 15 March 2019), which claims that USAID has improved women’s lives and helped Afghanistan ‘become a more responsible and intregrated member of the region and the world’; United States Institute of Peace, ‘Peace Education in Afghanistan’, www.usip.org/programs/peace-education-afghanistan (last accessed 10 January 2020),which celebrates its ‘developing and institutionalizing’ education programmes and the benefits they have accrued to men and women; Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, Women’s Rights, Gender Equality and Transition, which explores the ‘gains made by Afghan women and girls’ because of the intervention; and International Development Committee, ‘Afghanistan: Development Progress and Prospects after 2014’, House of Commons, 2014, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmint dev/403/403.pdf, which claims that ‘our work’ supports ‘Afghan women’s empowerment’ (last accessed 17 March 2019).

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discontent with the current socio-political circumstances of the female populace, but equally with the cultures, tradition and customs of Afghanistan. For, as his interviewee, Manizha Naderi, director of Women for Afghan Women, a New York-based human rights organisation, claims: ‘simply put, this is a patriarchal society’. She continues: ‘[w]omen are the property of men. This is tradition.’ Mary Akrami, director of the Afghan Women Skills Development Center, seems to agree, arguing that ‘[t]here is a culture of silence’ in Afghanistan. The image of Afghanistan as a place where women are brutalised, and have always been, is interestingly not merely held by Westerners or those confronted by an ‘alien culture’, but is increasingly propounded by the Afghan diaspora – those who have been educated or brought up in the Western world.98 Indeed, that we may be replacing a culture of silence with our own culture of silencing may be worth pondering. As such, whereas Women for Afghan Women runs a laudable operation, helping clients in shelters find new husbands, it nevertheless markets its own work as an operation that circumvents Afghanistan’s immutable customs and traditions. Of the men who marry their clients, it says ‘[t]he men could not afford the customary bride price, making them more accommodating of women who deviated from tradition’.99 The women the organisation deals with are described as largely helpless and rather timid. Semple ventures that ‘[i]n a recent interview, Mariam, a waifish teenager with a meek voice, said she had feared “that no one would marry me again”’.100 In constructing the women in the shelter (and beyond) as hopeless victims imprisoned within the confines of the impregnable fortress that is Afghan culture and history, not only is the complex existence and development of an entire people reified, but also the very women who are allegedly being ‘rescued’ are denied any agency and experience other than that which we have already assigned to them. In another column, Alissa J. Rubin writes: ‘Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has also pledged that she will not desert Afghan women.’101 Although the sentiment behind the statement may in fact be heartfelt, even noble, it is difficult to imagine how Ms Clinton intends to ‘not desert’ the entire female population of a country that she has visited once. It is equally difficult to imagine what, indeed, the consequences of her ‘desertion’ are likely to be for the average woman in Afghanistan. Inasmuch as this is an offer of ‘moral support’, its impact on Afghan women is likely to be tepid, at best. The effect on the American populace, however, may be of a different order. With more tact and ostensible cultural sensitivity than Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton 98 99 101

Functioning as ‘native informers’ not a million miles away from Ehsan Entezar and Khaled Hosseini in Chapter 1. 100 Semple, ‘Afghan Women Slowly Gaining Protection’. Ibid. Rubin, ‘Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains’.

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employs a strategy of distancing not entirely dissimilar to the one deployed above by Friedman, most notably through her express commitment to the liberation of women in Afghanistan. This notional, if not quite farcical, commitment to human rights and liberty is often buttressed by an ahistorical rendering of the Afghan past.102 Even without an investment in recovering the disappeared histories of Afghanistan, a brief glance at the events of the past can provide context and ‘thickness’, problematising (mis)understandings and claims such as: [Afghan women] have long led exceptionally constrained lives. The combination of male-dominated tribal culture in which women have been treated as little more than chattel, combined with a conservative practice of Islam and a nationwide lack of education, meant that long before the Taliban arrived in the mid-1990s, women had few opportunities beyond the home.103

Riding roughshod over ‘history’, sweeping generalisations about ‘tribal culture’ of the sort discussed earlier in the book and a blanket dismal of the Afghan past including periods in which Afghan women may have had some ‘opportunities beyond the home’ – for instance under the Soviet regime or under Ahmed Shah Durrani – propagate the impression that Afghanistan has been stuck in time, that the country as a whole is something of an anachronism.104 The result is a sense of urgency and an ‘acknowledgement’ of the pressing need to change the status quo in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s ‘medieval barbarity’ must be rooted out, goes the argument, and the women must be granted protection – from the anti-woman traditions and the men in favour of them. The palpable yardstick for this is clothing: ‘lipstick liberation’ based on a sort of aestheticisation of the Afghan woman. It provides a fitting continuation of the Afghan story, in which not only has imperial engagement with Afghanistan been superficial, but it has also been limited to the realm of the superficial. Conclusion In a prescient analysis of feminism, Ong argues that the Other, for those Western feminists who are concerned with the global political realm, is not patriarchy but the non-Western woman. This is because of the roots of feminism: as an oppositional subculture produced within Western knowledge, feminism is based on the idea that ‘enlightened reason has been a critical force 102 103 104

For an example guilty of exactly this, see Schofield, Afghan Frontier. Rubin, ‘Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains’. Although, as ever, this ‘history’ is invoked selectively. There are also many claims about how Afghan women once wore miniskirts and how through intervention we must ensure that we can return them to this seraphic past.

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in social emancipation’.105 While there is something to be said for this position,106 her claim that Western feminism is a ‘field defined by historicism’ does not do justice to the breath of the field today.107 And yet if we were to look for offenders, the historicism and ahistorical tendencies that much feminist analysis is prone to are nowhere more evident than in the work done on Afghanistan.108 Afghanistan brings to the fore a ‘whole set of questionable assumptions, anxieties, and prejudices embedded in the notion of Islamic fundamentalism’,109 a set of assumptions that reifies Afghan history and ‘Muslim culture’ and which superimposes the neat image of a medieval land of barbaric men and tyrannised women over the messy history of the region, as well as the complex political, economic and social dynamics that are constitutive of that history. Very little attention has been paid to the material conditions that may be equally responsible for the inequality of the sexes in Afghanistan. Years of war, the overt militarisation of society, debilitating poverty and an economy largely based on drugs have each had devastating consequences for the people of Afghanistan, both men and women. Indeed, most analyses barely touch on ‘the context of persistent war, rampant ethnic and tribal violence, and the complete unraveling of Afghanistan’s complicated social fabric that resulted from the country’s incorporation into the Cold War’.110 Repeated but intermittent foreign intervention and the legacy of 105 106

107

108

109 110

Ong, ‘Colonialism and Modernity’, 262. Cf. Debra K. Heikes, Rationality and Feminist Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2010), who argues that reason can be thought beyond its masculinist and colonialist Enlightenment heritage. Donna Haraway is particularly insightful on this topic, as somebody suitably ethically interested in rigorous intersectional feminism, yet aware of the myriad benefits that women (and humanity) have enjoyed as a result of the Enlightenment. See especially ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988), 575–99; and Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989). Written before the 1990s, Ong’s work could not take into account the work of the ‘third-wave’ feminists who celebrate women’s multiple and sometimes contradictory identities around the world. Stacy Gillis’s Third Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007) provides an excellent analysis of the contributions of third-wave feminism to a field that had been dominated by Euro-centrism. It also overlooks the work done by black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Christina Sharpe and bell hooks who write against the denial of their very ‘femaleness’ by white liberal feminists. This of course goes much beyond feminism, prompting Shah Mahmoud Hanifi to claim: ‘[t]here is no country on earth more subject to misrepresentations based upon Orientalism than Afghanistan’: see ‘A Genealogy of Orientalism in Afghanistan: The Colonial Image Lineage’, in Tugrul Keskin, ed., Middle East Studies after September 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50–80. Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, ‘Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of CounterInsurgency’, Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002), 340–1. Ibid., 348. Suspending our judgement on the use of ‘tribal’ for a minute. For Afghanistan’s turbulent experience in the Cold War, see Coll, Ghost Wars; and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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British imperialism have probably compounded the problems and led to further destabilisation of this quasi-colonial country. At this juncture, a clarification is in order. My writing on women, and gender more broadly, can (and has been) misunderstood as characterised by an unfair focus on Western constructions of Afghan women’s oppression, effectively making it difficult for Afghan feminists to expose and arraign local forms of patriarchy and the curtailment of the rights and agency that these entail.111 In the first instance, a critique of the Taliban is most certainly needed, but this critique cannot be disarticulated from a critique of the (global) structural conditions that produce local patriarchy rather than simply the denunciation of local patriarchs. In the second, the challenge is always to find a vocabulary which allows us to be critical of Western femo-nationalism and homo-nationalism without losing sight of the reality of local (that is, while simultaneously not diverting attention from global) patriarchies and queerphobias.112 This challenge is compounded when local feminisms and forms of resistance to both local and global structures of oppression are deliberately removed from our collective purview. In 2017 the US government denied an Afghan all-girls robotic team visas to the FIRST Global Challenge, also called the ‘Robotics Olympics’. The team of six teenage girls from Herat were unable to compete.113 In the same year, the European Asylum Support Office published a report, Afghanistan: Individuals Targeted under Societal and Legal Norms, which explores the plight of residents of a small neighbourhood outside Kabul called Zanabad. The report refers to Zanabad as the ‘hill of widows’, ‘a small community of 500 women, “shunned” by society, who live together with their children on the outskirts of Kabul and survive on $150 per year from the government, and from sewing, chores, and begging’.114 The Afghan Analysts Network, a small NGO based in Kabul and Germany, portrays Zanabad in an altogether different light.115 The author of the report, Naheed Esar, translates ‘Zanabad’ as ‘women’s town’, and her research is based on her ethnography of, and interviews with, women living in Zanabad.

111 112 113

114 115

Afiya Shehrbano Zia, ‘Performance Anxiety: Women’s Sexed Bodies in Pakistan’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 19, no. 3 (2017), 296–310. Once again, I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer, this time for encouraging me to explore these critiques. Amanda Ericson, ‘U.S. Denies Visas for Afghanistan’s All-Girl Robotics Team’, Washington Post, 4 July 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/02/afghanistans-allgirl-robotics-team-wont-be-allowed-to-come-the-u-s/?utm_term=.273d9feed552 (last accessed 17 March 2019). European Asylum Support Office, Afghanistan: Individuals Targeted under Societal and Legal Norms, 62. Naheed Esar, ‘Covering for Each Other in Zanabad: The Defiant Widows of the Hill’, Afghan Analysts Network, 7 May 2015, www.afghanistan-analysts.org/covering-for-each-other-inzanabad-the-defiant-widows-of-the-hill/ (last accessed 17 March 2019).

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She tells a story of ‘defiance’, ‘sisterhood’, ‘security’ and ‘overcoming’. Zanabad is painted as an oasis of feminism rather than a place where ‘shunned women’ are doomed to a life of ‘begging and alms’. The report, which documents how the widows fought for the respect of the citizens of Kabul and beyond, and eventually triumphed, ends on a high note: ‘the widows of Zanabad have challenged, with their unusual decision to take matters into their own hands, the pervasive idea that widows have no independent identity, cannot survive without protection and cannot be economically productive. They have not only re-gained their social status, but they gave the community they live in a very special, feminine identity.’116 The preceding discussion which highlights the ways in which Afghan women have been represented in the Anglo-American public sphere bumps up against these rather different representations.117 Not infrequently, the more ‘common-sense’ representations are riddled with a tension between the attempt to achieve an ‘objective’ portrayal and the projection of pre-conceived notions of a ‘Third World’ or ‘Islamic’ woman, always already ‘backward’, ‘traditional’ and expectantly waiting to be saved. This colonial fear of the Other inheres in the optics and locutionary practices through which the Other is conjured – as seen in the examples above. Western feminist representations of non-Western women continually echo this anxiety, most prominently in the NGO and development literature, or in what Ong calls ‘women in development studies’. She claims that there are self-styled approaches within this feminism, linked by a basic – and classic – concern with problems of sexual inequality and difference in non-Western societies, problems perceived as ‘the failure to achieve modernity’.118 To make her point, Ong focuses on the ways in which ‘non-Western women are taken as an unproblematic universal category’, arguing that ‘feminists mainly differ over whether modernization of the capitalist or socialist kind will emancipate or reinforce systems of gender inequality found in the Third World’.119 116 117

118

Ibid. The work done by the feminist organisation Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) gets surprisingly little publicity. Tahmeena Faryal (an alias she uses), who documented her secret return to Afghanistan from Pakistan, claimed that ’no woman she met on her mission complained about the burqa; rather, they described the insult of their daily lives and the theft of their identities . . . In a society where everyday survival became, and has continued to be, an almost insurmountable task, fighting back has been severely constrained.’ Likewise a new campaign called ‘Where’s My Name’, launched by Afghan feminists for greater publicity and for an acknowledgement that their names are important to them as individuals, has been given almost no airtime or media coverage. See J. Ann Tickner, ‘Feminist Perspectives on 9/11’, International Studies Perspective 3, no. 4 (2002), 341–2, and Jennifer Fluri, ‘Feminist-Nation Building in Afghanistan: An Examination of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)’, Feminist Review 89, no. 1 (2008), 34–54. 119 Ong, ‘Colonialism and Modernity’. Ibid.

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This ‘Orientalism’, however, aims to be totalising not only for the represented, but also for the ‘representers’, even if it rarely succeeds. The Western woman is left equally unproblematised, the embodiment of an undifferentiated ‘culture of liberation’; a fixed economic, social and political standard against which the Other is measured. Even difference of opinion over whether modernisation of the ‘capitalist or socialist kind’ will lead to emancipation has been flattened to a thin consensus over the best path to follow.120 In fact, this Othering is vital to the functioning (and self-legitimation) of a (post-)colonial order, an order that appears to ‘overcome internal difference and set[s] up the difference as something outside’.121 By setting up difference as something immanently outside, in this case as something fundamental to the women in and of Afghanistan, Western representations become implicated in the justification for intervention – justifications in the name of a mission that seemingly serves to transcend the divide between Self and Other, but which in effect fortifies the barrier between the ‘within’ and the ‘without’. The presence of figurative outsiders – who become insiders122 – is indicative of the robustness of the fortification and the continual expansion of ‘walled-off spaces’ in the global arena.123 This chapter has put forward a critique of the mobilisation of the feminine as the litmus test for progressive modernity in discourses concerning Afghanistan. It has contextualised the histories involved in using women as emblems in this way: deepening the imperial mandate but always present with an ‘escape route’. It has also examined the workings of a contradictory economy of knowledge production, showing how the Orientalising of Afghan patriarchy serves to project unwanted cultural values onto the ‘Other’ – a project that absolves Anglo-American societies of misogyny by constructing them as ‘good guys’ fighting for oppressed veiled women. Indeed, in this vein, the chapter has provided an analysis of how conventional accounts of Afghan women have led to the somewhat ineludible normalisation of the ‘Western woman’ in contrast to the aberrant and problematic figure of the Afghan woman.124 When the 120

121 122 123

124

This is a manufactured consensus: one that shrinks the political space and suppresses dissent even before it emerges. See Jacques Rancière’s Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010). Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 171. The ones that are ‘like us’ – the ‘unveiled’ Afghan women who wear make-up and speak in English, for instance. And contraction. This is not a stable divide: the boundaries are fluid but the division of the world and its people into two remains unchanged. The shift from Agamben’s (specific) Jew to the (generic) Musselman is an example of how difference may be overcome by one set of people or races, only to be replaced by another Other, always within an overarching Self/Other framework that cannot be transcended. See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 68. See Jasbir K. Puar’s writing on ‘disciplined homosexuality’, in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

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Afghan woman is constructed as the ‘exception’, the Western woman becomes the default norm against which this aberration is posited. This nullifies the complexity of the lived worlds of Afghan women, but it also standardises and evens out the differences in the experiences, mindsets and subjectivities of women in and of the West. Afghanistan’s construction as a discursive regime and a particular kind of imperial formation hinges on the hegemonic affirmation of the Self, which is in turn dependent on disavowal of culpability in the production of its racialised and gendered Others. The next chapter analyses this further, through a ‘media ethnography’ of the Afghan man.

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5

Subversive Identities Afghan Masculinities as Societal Threat

Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people . . . You go into Afghanistan, you’ve got guys who slapped women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. —Lt Gen. James Mattis, 20051

War and knowledge enable and foster each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that poses danger to the ‘self’ and the ‘eye’ that is the nation.

—Rey Chow, 20062

Following on from the previous chapter on women and the ‘moral panic’ surrounding discussions of the veil, this chapter continues analysing the production of the (quasi-)colonised as a stable or ‘fixed reality’ through the establishment of the stereotype as an ‘arrested, fetishistic mode of representation’.3 The previous chapter examined the portrayals of Afghan women in the popular imaginary of the Anglophone West, bringing to the fore the notion that representations of sexual and cultural difference are always already mutually implicated, co-constitutive and overlapping registers. This final chapter foregrounds the same logics by focusing instead on the Afghan male. Scholars of empire have argued that the colonial economy of power has always relied on a discursive emphasis on colonised masculinities as perceived threats to white British women; monstrous and menacing, these black and brown masculinities needed to be corralled and quashed.4 The words ‘Afghan man’ conjure up a certain image, a pathologised figure, at once freakishly effeminate and 1 2 4

Quoted in Himadeep Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 57. 3 Chow, The Age of the World Target, 36. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, 29. See Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); also Ann Laura Stoler, who shows that a preoccupation with degeneracy’ in colonial contexts has been crucial in suturing racial and sexual anxieties so as to produce unconventional sex as a danger to the body politic: ‘Cultivating Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves’, in Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Taylor and Francis, 2000), 87–119.

180

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monstrously misogynistic, that is now associated with most males in Afghanistan. The chapter seeks to analyse how the discourse on masculinities is deployed in the Afghan context, examining, in particular, how the Pashtun male has been constructed and represented in mainstream Western accounts. In doing so, it grapples with the theoretically thorny problematique of gender by recognising that the logics of femininity and masculinity are always already coconstitutive. The question of what qualifies as ‘gender’ is, in Judith Butler’s words, ‘itself already a question that attests to a pervasively normative operation of power, a fugitive operation of “what will be the case” under the rubric of “what is the case”. Thus, the very description of the field of gender is in no sense prior to, or separable from, the question of its normative operation.’5 This normative operation of power can be seen at work in the creation of identities and the production of (projected) subjectivities in thinking about both Afghan men and women. The chapter first examines the figure of the ‘militant’ Afghan man, most strikingly captured by descriptions of the Taliban, and juxtaposes it with the less popular though still familiar trope of the ‘damned’ Afghan man, embodied in the figure of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in order to underscore and critically interrogate the specific power relations that make possible the very notion of a ‘Queer Pashtun’ – relations that continue to be sutured and underpinned by an inescapably Orientalist ontology and that constitute Afghanistan as a particular discursive regime. Much important work has been done to show how our understanding of the Orient (and following naturally from this, of the ‘Occident’) is structured around a set of hierarchical binaries, through, for instance, metaphors of order/disorder, light/darkness and normal/perverse, and how these dichotomies create an understanding of the Orient as the less desirable half in these binarisms. Here I focus on the last of these dichotomous binaries – that of normal vs perverse – to examine how, in spite of violent disagreements and contrasting rhetorics, more often than not, the Other is apprehended as a place of monstrosity, a ‘living tableau of queerness’6 that needs to be disciplined and domesticated through both ‘actual’ and epistemic violence. More specifically, I explore the ways in which the narrative of ‘perverse’, ‘terrorist’ masculinities are deployed and have in turn been instrumentalised in justifying occupation in Afghanistan, and also in Iraq.7 Often scholarship that deals with ‘constructions

5 6 7

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), xxii. Said, Orientalism, 103. I am predominantly concerned with Afghanistan but there is a burgeoning body of work that critically examines counterinsurgency discourse in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and the particular construal of insurgents as the source of disorder and chaos, the sole antidote to which is an unwavering commitment to counter-insurgency in the ‘heart of darkness’. See, for instance, Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War (London: Hurst and Co., 2012), especially Hugh Gusterson, ‘Can the Insurgent Speak?’, 83–104.

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of the enemy’ misses the ambivalences and ambiguities inherent in representations of the Other, a theme of this book that we return to in some depth here. I apply and extend Jasbir Puar’s notion of ‘homonationalism’, as a conceptual frame or an analytics of power that enables the acceptance of certain types of white ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ bodies and explicitly disavows other (raced, sexed and classed) bodies as unworthy of protection by nation-states, to the ways in which the male subject of the American-led intervention in Afghanistan has been interpreted and made legible.8 In contrast to Nikhil Singh’s declaration that ‘the barbarian and the terrorist are specters haunting the liberal-democratic imagination: it is what we are not, what we cannot trust, and therefore what we must subjugate’,9 I argue that subjugation is only one of the ways in which ‘Otherness’ in the shape of terrorists and barbarians is confronted. The almost obsessive focus on understanding the Arab or Islamic ‘mind’ underscores a desire to more than subjugate and annihilate; it also fundamentally signals a desire to remake in our image these putative ‘terrorist’ populations. The project is at its heart a biopolitical one – one intimated by constant references to the sexual preferences and positionality of the enemy Other. Through analysis of post-intervention newspaper articles published in Great Britain and the USA, my objective is to map certain trends in contemporary Western thinking about Afghan males, to tease out the assumptions inherent in them and to show how these influential accounts constitute crucial elements of an Orientalist discourse, albeit one that is not always uniform or predictable. As with the representations of Afghan women, the differences between media coverage in the UK and the USA are subtle but perceptible. However, as the chapter seeks to show, British newspapers across the spectrum, including left-leaning and liberal ones such as the Guardian, are more or less equally implicated in the promulgation of a skewed notion of the lifeways of men in Afghanistan.10 Notwithstanding these differences, an enquiry into portrayals of Afghan men in the Western media and in policy reports reveals the connate imbrication of race and gender. Representations of cultural and sexual difference are co-constitutive; the ‘Other’ is always already both racialised and gendered. Indeed, the existence of one binary is predicated on the other in important ways.11 There is an inextricable link between the masculinist and colonialist 8 9 10 11

Jasbir Puar, ‘Rethinking Homonationalism’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013), 336–9. Nikhil Pal Singh, ‘The Afterlife of Fascism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006), 71–93. ‘Skewed’ is used here in its original sense as ‘asymmetrical’ or lop-sided, not to mean ‘distorted’ or necessarily misrepresented. See Patricia Owens, ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism and the Pink Elephant: Torture, Sex, Orientalism’, in Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War (London: Hurst and Co., 2012), 245–62.

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subject position that the Western ‘representer’ occupies in relation to the ‘represented’: its Orientalist others. This is as true of depictions of Afghan men by women situated in the West as it is of representations of Afghan women by Western men. To play with Gayatri Spivak’s classic formulation, the narrative is no longer only limited to white men saving brown women from brown men, but also includes white women who have joined white men in saving brown women from brown men and also from themselves.12 Yet, if it is important to be cognisant of the racial, gender and class dimensions of the issue at stake, it is nevertheless equally crucial to avoid invoking the mantra of race, class and gender mantra. Indeed an awareness of the ‘complex and indeterminate relations by which subjectivity is constituted in the overdetermined spaces between relations of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality’13 is dependent upon a refusal to flatten out the asymmetries in the lived experience of both those who are ‘doing’ the representing and those being represented. Social difference is messy, uneven and ambivalent, and multiple configurations of race, class and gender are employed in representations of the Afghan male. Rather than invoking ‘intersectionality’ through a focus on identity, this concluding chapter argues for a dissolution of the categories with which we make sense of the ‘Other’ and for a rethinking of the positionalities and subjectivities of those on either side of this Great Divide. The Taliban as Warlords The Taliban, a political Islamist movement that effectively ruled Afghanistan from September 1996 to December 2001, took centre stage in the global news arena and made headlines worldwide as the evil regime sheltering Al Qaeda in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001. Nevertheless, in spite of its perceived complicity in the 9/11 attacks, surprisingly little was written about its political origins, structures and leadership; the overwhelming bulk of commentary focused on its fundamentalist and puritanical ideology and its support for Osama bin Laden. Mullah Mohammed Omar remained an inscrutable one-eyed leader in the minds (and words) of most commentators, another indication of desultory imperial engagement with Afghanistan. The years since, however, have been witness to a concerted effort to buck the trend, with broadsheets, tabloids and websites all weighing in on the origins and ideologies of the Taliban and its (former) leader. A news article published in the British daily the Sun in October 2012, entitled ‘Taliban Warlord Omar in Crack-Up’, is one such pioneering example. In attempting to psychoanalyse

12 13

The colour of skin is less important here than the subject’s positionality. A light-skinned Afghan man could be metaphorically ‘saved’ by Oprah Winfrey. Kobena Mercer, quoted in McClintock, Imperial Leather, 62; emphasis in original.

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the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar – who incidentally died shortly after the piece was published – the article proclaims: ‘[h]is family has a history of mental disorder. His uncle had to be shackled to stop him going naked in the street’.14 What is particularly noteworthy is not merely the construal of Omar as mentally unstable – a point we shall revisit later in the chapter – but also the very label used to describe him: that of the ‘warlord’. Keith Stanski has explored in detail the stereotypes associated with ‘warlords’ and the effect produced by the discourse of ‘warlordism’, in particular the ways in which the concept has been used to justify an imperial order and regular intervention in the Global South.15 Even if we were to pardon the colonial genealogy of ‘warlord’ as a label, it is difficult to overlook the misapplication of the word in this context. Indeed, the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s was predicated on the removal and overthrow of tribal chieftains and military commanders with individual autonomy or ‘warlords’, as they are better known in the popular lexicon. These local strongmen were anathema to the Taliban; the Taliban’s campaign against the rape of young girls and boys in the Kandahar region16 – its traditional stronghold – was directed towards Mujahideen bandits and regional strongmen, the ‘warlords’ funded by the CIA and Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence.17 If this term is now stretched to include the Taliban, as a catch-all for ‘anybody (usually male) we dislike in Afghanistan’, the label is divested of all explanatory capacity. The ideological and material differences between the local militia commanders and the Talibs – students of Islam – are significant. The Taliban as a movement garnered popular support through its steadfast opposition to its predecessors – groups of loosely affiliated Mujahideen ‘warriors’. In the wake of the civil war, following Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the Taliban consolidated its position vis-à-vis the Mujahideen as the latter began to splinter into factions and in-fighting rose among these factions.18 Each faction had a designated leader, commonly referred to in the Anglophone world as a ‘warlord’. The fighting that broke out between these factions culminated in ‘widespread looting and rapine. Strife between the warlords and a war-weary population

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Simon Hughes, ‘Taliban Warlord Omar in Crack-Up’, Sun, 23 October 2012, www.thesun.co .uk/sol/homepage/news/4605783/Taliban-warlord-Mullah-Omar-one-of-most-wanted-after-911has-a-mental-breakdown.html (last accessed 12 January 2020). While the Sun is not significant as a target for sophisticated political critique, given its reputation for media sensationalism, it nevertheless is indicative of a broader popular trend that is almost wilfully slovenly when it comes to representing key political actors in Afghanistan. Keith Stanski, ‘“So These Folks Are Aggressive”: An Orientalist Reading of Afghan Warlords’, Security Dialogue 40, no. 1 (2009), 73–94. 17 Fluri, ‘The Beautiful “Other”’. Coll, Ghost Wars. Shahid Afsar, Chris Samples and Thomas Wood, The Taliban: An Organizational Analysis (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, Department of National Security Affairs, 2008).

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led to an environment that allowed the Taliban’s radical ideas to take hold.’19 Ahmed Rashid delineates the differences between the Mujahideen and the Taliban, claiming that the Mujahideen were ‘traditionalists’ and the Taliban ‘Islamicists’.20 Likewise, Antonio Giustozzi unpacks the different subject positions of the ‘warlords’ and the ‘Taliban’.21 This distinction may appear rudimentary and essentialising, but it does serve to underscore the widespread acknowledgement of the distinction between these two groups. To lump them together under the derogatory umbrella of ‘warlords’ is both unhistorical and ill-considered. Indeed, the differences between the Taliban and Afghan ‘warlords’, if we do temporarily adhere to this problematic categorisation, are tangible and deepseated. The Taliban is composed almost entirely of Sunni Muslims, with little to no formal education. The core of the Taliban emerged from Pashtun refugee camps, the majority of which were in the FATA and the North-Western Frontier Province in Pakistan or on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Taliban until 2001 was a relatively homogeneous group with a tight hierarchical structure. The ‘warlords’ on the other hand are geographically unevenly distributed according to region and do not have a leader or commander to which they report. They are ethnically diverse,22 with Abdul Rashid Dostum arguably the best known among them. Dostum is an Uzbek ‘warlord’ who was instrumental in ousting the Taliban from power in 2001, backed by US Special Forces.23 In 2014 he became the first vice president of Afghanistan, but this has not prevented the Centre for Strategy and International Studies (CSIS), a leading think tank based in Washington DC, from calling him ‘a thug’.24 Even more striking are the Taliban’s and the warlords’ radically different positionalities. The Taliban originally consisted of religious students in Deobandi and Wahabi madrasas in Pakistan. In 1994 the founding commanders of 19 20 21 22

23 24

Ibid. See also Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan's Untold Story (Lahore: Jang Publishers, 1992), 159. Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia; Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords. Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002–2007 (London: St Martin’s Press, 2009). Around 1992 the armed Mujahideen factions formed new coalitions, which were based to a large extent on region and ethnicity: Tajiks in the north, Hazaras in the centre and Pashtuns in the east and south formed competing factions in the 1992–6 civil war; see European Asylum Support Office, Afghanistan: Taliban Strategies – Recruitment, EASO Country of Origin Information Report (European Union: European Asylum Support Office, 2012), 16. Aryn Baker, ‘The Warlords of Afghanistan’, Time, 12 February 2009; Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords. Centre for Strategy and International Studies, The Civil Half of the Afghan War, https://csis-prod .s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/171206_Afghanistan_The_Other_Half_of_the_War .pdf?4u.LqUDATXL3zmRLMYmDTMaXl.7qBr2s (last accessed 17 March 2019).

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the Taliban movement were primarily ‘mullahs’ (Muslim men learned in Islamic theology and sacred law) who led groups of religious students. During the Taliban regime, the most important official functions at all levels were given to mullahs, from ministers to teachers. From 2002 onwards, almost all of the commanders and leaders had a background of religious education. Clerical and religious networks started playing an increasingly important role in the revival of the Taliban after 2001.25 The Taliban now fills its ranks with the poorest, least-educated members of society. Its recruitment base is largely made up of orphans, the dislocated and the disenfranchised. Often the most disillusioned and vulnerable young men in need of shelter and money are attracted to the Taliban.26 Although the Taliban’s initial ranks were made up of recruits found almost exclusively in Pakistani refugee camps and madrasas,27 the movement has been increasingly successful in luring a relatively large segment of both the urban and the rural poor. Its Pashtun identity is emphasised now more than ever, in the wake of ‘Pashtun suspicions and mistrust of the government’ which were exacerbated ‘by the Afghan Transitional Authority’s inability to protect Pashtuns from the wave of human rights abuses perpetrated by insurgents and warlords since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan’.28 The ‘warlords’, in contrast to the emasculated youth targeted by the Taliban, are fully immersed in the Afghan political system, wielding power and influence even in areas that they were originally excluded from or less active in.29 Arguably, these ‘warlords’, although often derided as hooligans running ‘Kabulstan’, are given almost carte blanche to commit crimes that the Taliban is routinely condemned for.30 As Kim Barker notes

25 26

27

28 29

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EASO, Afghanistan: Taliban Strategies – Recruitment, 24. This is not to say that the Taliban recruits are only fighting for money. Once enlisted, these men become politicised and indoctrinated, and start aligning themselves closely with the goals of the organisation. For more on this, see Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Dorronsoro, in his 27 October 2009 article entitled ‘Who Are the Taliban ?’, published in the Huffington Post, also makes a case for the distinction between ‘part-time’ and ‘full-time’ members of the Taliban, the former of which see joining the Taliban as a lucrative venture while the latter are more fully committed to the cause. EASO, Afghanistan: Taliban Strategies – Recruitment; for Ahmed Rashid, the Taliban’s ‘uncompromising attitude’ was shaped by ‘the nature of their recruiting base’. The recruits, according to him, were ‘the orphans, the rootless, the lumpen proletariat from the war and the refugee camps’ of Afghanistan. Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords, 111. Afsar, Samples and Wood, The Taliban, 63. I am using ‘emasculated’ as a synonym for ‘weak’ in this instance, although I am aware that poverty and lack of education can in certain circumstances and contexts suggest particular forms of ‘manliness’. This includes the Northern Alliance, which has been brazenly promoted in spite of its terrible civil rights records and violence against women. See John L. Cook, Afghanistan: The Perfect Failure (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2012). For ‘Kabulstan’ see the CSIS report The Civil Half of the Afghan War.

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in The Taliban Shuffle, ‘The pro-government warlords . . . seemed to operate with impunity. The Americans had backed them in driving out the Taliban in late 2001, handing them money power, and legitimacy. None had been accountable for war crimes. Most were more powerful than the President.’31 The very reason why these ‘warlords’ are granted this immunity in Afghanistan is that they have been, and remain, firmly anti-Taliban. The Taliban movement, therefore, is recognised at least in Western historiographies as coalescing in Kandahar in resistance to the ‘warlords’ who emerged from the Mujahideen. This long-standing distinction illustrates the irony of now portraying and referring to Mullah Omar as a warlord. The lack of media attention devoted to Afghanistan between 1992 and 2001 is one of the reasons for this rather arbitrary use of the label.32 ‘Warlord’ was one of several categories from the 1990s that were repurposed after the US-led invasion in an attempt to make sense of a once imminently familiar – but now relatively unknown – place.33 As Afghanistan appeared on the ‘map’ again, it became necessary to apply some familiar terms, to comprehend the workings of a mysterious and ‘unruly’ people.34 The term ‘warlord’ provided such a crutch, an ideological trope, which made comparisons across countries and peoples easier. The use of the word to describe Taliban leaders reveals the politics of imperial knowledge when it comes to Afghanistan: on the surface, it is a rather straightforward case of rendering the Other legible and knowable, by imposing upon it labels that only ‘make sense’ to those who study and represent it. But hastily applied and not fully institutionalised, the trope has done more damage than good, even from a sense-making Orientalist perspective. In this case, the ‘warlord’ functions as a metonym but is unable to fulfil its own basic purposes of description and categorising, leading to confusion rather than legibility. Moreover, the politics of disavowal rears its head again, denying any complicity in creating the subjects being described.

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Kim Barker, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Random House, 2011), 32. There are plenty of histories that corroborate the relative unfamiliarity in Western circles about Afghanistan and its political landscape during the time: see, for instance, Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, and Cullather, ‘Damming Afghanistan’. The genealogy of the term is complicated as it was coined to describe the chaos at the end of the Qing dynasty in China from 1916 to 1928, but was introduced into the popular political lexicon in the wake of the collapse of the Somalian central government in 1991. See Stanski, ‘“So These Folks Are Aggressive”’. Another testament to the politically expedient rise and fall of imperial interests in Afghanistan.

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Mentally Unstable Taliban In analogous fashion, a news report that appeared in 2012 on MSN entitled ‘Taliban Warlord Turns Himself In to Claim $100 Bounty’35 is typical not only in its misleading conflation of ‘Taliban’ and ‘warlord’ but also, as mentioned previously, in the other trope it uses to describe Mohammad Ashan, that is, as mentally weak, or, in the author’s own words, as ‘the dumbest criminal ever’. According to a US official: ‘[t]his guy is the Taliban equivalent of the “Home Alone” burglars’.36 In the infantalising of Ashan and highlighting of what amounts to the inferiority of his cerebral capacities, we have the image of an enfeebled and psychologically defeated Taliban. However, the image of mental atrophy is used in contradictory ways. While the mental ‘retardation’ of Ashan makes him ludicrous, the same trope is used to portray Mullah Omar as unstable and hence all the more dangerous as an enemy. The Taliban leader has long been depicted as one of the most mysterious and elusive enemies of the West – a move that both encapsulates the deep colonial anxiety about the Other it confronts and remains faithful to the particularly vague and adumbrated image of Afghanistan itself. For all intents and purposes, Mullah Omar was said to have operated behind a shroud of secrecy, and indeed, there are no verifiable sources dedicated to addressing his early life and upbringing. The contrast between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, so often summarily tied together, could not be greater when it comes to matters of publicity.37 Anglophone knowledge-producing entities including think tanks and government agencies have focused most of their energies on studying Al Qaeda (until the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Daesh, became the bigger threat), but have perfunctorily linked the Taliban to Al Qaeda as a sort of appendage.38 Shortly before his death and immediately afterwards, however, efforts were made to rid Omar of this air of uncertainty, and these were

35

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‘Taliban Warlord Turns Himself In to Claim $100 Bounty’, MSN, 6 May 2012, http://now.msn .com/taliban-warlord-turns-himself-in-to-claim-dollar100-bounty (last accessed 23 September 2019); the US official calls him an ‘imbecile’. Ibid. Not least in the public speeches given by the Bush administration. See also Peter Brooks, ‘Closing Gitmo – A Dangerous Decision: Are Al Qaeda and Taliban Coming to a Prison Near You?’, Heritage Foundation, 30 March 2009, www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2009/ 03/closing-gitmo-a-dangerous-decision-are-al-qaeda-and-taliban-coming-to-a-prison-near-you (last accessed 20 February 2020). See Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban–Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Incidentally, this parallels knowledge production about Afghanistan as a whole, for instance in the ways in which it is often appended as a special case to wider comparative courses on the Middle East or South or Central Asia.

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embodied in the media coverage dealing with his mental health.39 In a telling attempt to ‘make sense’ of Omar and his motives, a Newsweek article proclaimed that, ‘[f]or what it’s worth, past associates say there’s a history of mental instability in Omar’s family. One of his half-brothers was said to need psychiatric medication for an undisclosed ailment. And relatives found it necessary to keep Omar’s uncle Noor Mohammed shackled in the years before the old man finally died in 2007.’40 The article that appeared in the Sun and which I quoted earlier also attempts to psychoanalyse Omar and to provide an account of his ‘faulty upbringing’. The readers are made aware that ‘[h]is family has a history of mental disorder. His uncle had to be shackled to stop him going naked in the street’. Similar stories about Omar’s ‘mad uncle’ Noor Mohammed have been circulated widely by the Anglophone press,41 providing some solace to those who think ‘the West’ has not done enough to ‘understand’ the Taliban, as well as ammunition for those who are convinced of the latter’s deep-seated ‘perversity’ and ‘twisted nature’. The focus on the psychology of these subjects, moreover, can be attributed to a change in the intellectual and discursive milieu, one that mirrors the exercise of new forms of disciplinary power and biopower in an attempt to better ‘know’ and ‘understand’ the Other. This heralds a worrying trend, and the notion of mental frailty has, in fact, stealthily crept into national security agendas in multiple ways.42 In a sense, a deepening and widening of imperial strategies of knowledge production and social control is reflected in these discussions and representations, where the Afghan ‘psyche’ becomes a site

39

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This has coincided with the Taliban’s own ramping-up of its media campaign. In the late 2000s, it became far more willing to speak to journalists and has worked on building a coherent narrative about their origins and objectives. See Gilles Dorronsoro, ‘The Taliban’s Winning Strategy in Afghanistan’, report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 29 June 2009, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/taliban_winning_strategy.pdf (last accessed 12 January 2020). Sam Seibert, ‘Afghanistan: Has Taliban Leader Mullah Omar Lost His Mind?’, Newsweek, 15 October 2012, /www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/14/afghanistan-has-talibanleader-mullah-omar-lost-his-mind.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). These have appeared in the Statesman (2012), The Times (2013) and the LA Times (2013) among others. One prominent example is the UK’s ‘Prevent’ programme, set up after the 2005 London bombings, as part of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. The objective is to preempt radicalisation by providing a ‘counter-narrative’ to Muslims in Britain to the narrative of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Using ‘psychoanalysis’ the programme (and specifically its ‘Channel’ strain) identifies individuals and elements most vulnerable to extremism, and assesses would-be jihadi sympathisers. Muslims are singled out by default as a ‘suspect community’. The Foucauldian resonances are striking again, not least because the research for the ‘Prevent’ programme was based on research conducted on prison inmates. See Charlotte Heath-Kelly, ‘Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the “Radicalisation” Discourse and the UK PREVENT Strategy’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 15, no. 3 (2013), 394–415.

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of intervention and a target of excoriation, alongside the Afghan ‘character’.43 But it also occludes the damage done by the invasion to the well-being of Afghan citizens through violence, drones and the constant threat of warfare. This occlusion reinforces the diverse and expanding constellation of Orientalist practices, as the depiction of the Taliban as psychologically damaged and mentally unstable segues into their portrayal as repressed and sexually deviant terrorists. The Taliban as Sexually Deviant In her trenchant appraisal of today’s war machine and the politics of knowledge that sustains it in the age of ‘securitisation’ and the global ‘War on Terror’, Jasbir Puar argues that the depictions of masculinity most widely disseminated in the post-9/11 world are terrorist masculinities: ‘failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and the body – homosexuality, incest, paedophilia, madness and disease’.44 While representations of Al Qaeda as pathologically perverse have permeated the Western mainstream, the Taliban, because of its historically low international profile, has escaped that level of media frenzy.45 The attention it does get, however, is almost always mired in Orientalist fantasies of Eastern men as pathologically disturbed sodomisers. The slogan ‘high jack this fags’ scrawled on a bomb attached to the wing of an attack plane bound for Afghanistan by a USS Enterprise naval officer,46 if not necessarily archetypal, is certainly an edifying example of our image of the Taliban as perverse and not quite ‘normal’.

43

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46

An unclassified report found in the US National Security Archive refers to Afghan culture as ‘toxic medieval mentality’: Jeffrey Bordin, ‘A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility: A Red Team Study of Mutual Perceptions of Afghan National Security Force Personnel and U.S. Soldiers in Understanding and Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed FratricideMurders’, 12 May 2011, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB370/docs/Document% 2011.pdf (last accessed 12 January 2020); it is explored in detail in the following pages. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xiii. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, posters appeared in Manhattan bearing an image of Osama bin Laden with the words: ‘The Empire Strikes Back . . . So you like skyscrapers, huh bitch’. Or there is the famous South Park episode where Bin Laden is depicted as having a small penis. For other instances of caricatures of Al Qaeda as a band of homosexuals, see Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. Patricia Owens, ‘Torture, Sex and Military Orientalism’, Third World Quarterly 31, no. 7 (2007), 1042; it is important to recognise the fact that ‘fag’ is now used as a pejorative label that encompasses more than sexuality, while continuing to rely on an entrenched bias against homosexuals for much of its force; see also Jasbir K. Puar and Amit Rai, ‘Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots’, Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002), 117–48.

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This perversity of the Taliban has been largely attributed to the members’ madrasa upbringing – an all-male environment – and their concomitant attitude towards women. Echoing the anthropologist Lionel Tiger’s concerns that ‘it is in the crucible of all-male intensity that the bonds of terrorist commitment and self-denial are formed’,47 Ahmed Rashid claims that the members of the Taliban had been brought up in a ‘totally male society’, in the ‘madrassa milieu’, where ‘control over women and their virtual exclusion was a powerful symbol of manhood and a reaffirmation of the students’ commitment to Jihad’. Indeed ‘[d]enying a role for women gave the Taliban a kind of false legitimacy rooted in the political beliefs and ideologies’.48 Tiger, focusing on Al Qaeda, offers the conventional and overstated male-bonding thesis as an explanation for its members’ failed masculinity and sexual perversity: The terrorism of Bin Laden harnesses the chaos of young men, uniting the energies of political ardor and sex in a turbulent fuel. The structure of al-Qaeda – an all-male enterprise, of course – appears to involve small groups of relatively young men who maintain strong bonds with each other, bonds whose intensity is dramatized and heightened by the secrecy demanded by their missions and the danger of their projects.49

In this imaginary, a lethal mix of male homosociality, the segregation of male and female populations and Islamic ideology carves out a space for terrorism and illicit sex. Both Al Qaeda and the Taliban are used as examples of this dangerous concoction. Heterosexism serves a dual purpose in the discourse of terrorist masculinities: on the one hand, it forms the basis for the idea that one reason why the Taliban must be opposed is its lack of tolerance for sexual and gender diversity while, on the other hand, deep-seated anxieties about homosociality and same-sex desire structure other elements of the stigmatising discourse surrounding the Taliban.50 In an article entitled ‘Homoeroticism among Kabul’s Warriors’, Michael T. Luongo discusses his visit to Afghanistan, epitomising the Western media’s problematic reporting on Afghan, especially Pashtun male sexuality, albeit from a sympathetic perspective. In his words: ‘Afghan men have lived through hardship, killed for their country to free it from the Taliban, and treat guns like fashion accessories, but strict Islamic rule means they’ve probably never seen a woman naked. Homosexual behavior might simply be a replacement for

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Quoted in Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 56. Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, 111. Lionel Tiger, ‘Osama Bin Laden’s Man Trouble’, Slate Magazine, 28 September 2001. See Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’,The British Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2008), 1–23. Butler explores how this sort of paradoxical reasoning is integral to the way the ‘West’ wages modern war by ‘framing’ certain populations as existential threats in an often contradictory manner.

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physical intimacy they can not get otherwise in their lives – a workaround.’51 In classic Orientalist vein, Afghan men are constructed as fundamentally different and repressed, with Islam and Kalashnikovs providing the unchanging ‘keywords’ to the equally constant Afghan ‘psyche’. This repression allegedly manifests itself in surprisingly licentious ways. Sensationalist reportage on paedophilia among so-called terrorist populations has become commonplace after 9/11, and Pashtun Afghans have been painted, on more than one occasion, as ‘queer’ sodomisers.52 Queer here is indexed by a sexual Otherness, always already linked to notions of what Halberstam labels ‘failure’:53 sexually fluid, neither adhering to a single fixed identity nor anchored in a socially sanctioned (Western) morality. The collection of photographs that Thomas Dworzak recovered in 2001 from dusty photographic studios in Kandahar cast the Taliban in a hitherto unfamiliar light: showing members dressed in colourful clothes, reading books and often with kohl applied to their eyes, these photographs scrambled the then dominant image of the Taliban as austere and Spartan religious fundamentalists.54 Dworzak’s explicit aim in his work was to portray the Talibs as ‘human’ and perhaps even ‘normal’ in their complexity, not the one-dimensional monstrous figures they were conventionally depicted as. However, as Faisal Devji notes in his introduction to Poetry of the Taliban, ‘these images are seen and described as “foreign” or “other”’.55 That the photographs have largely been interpreted as evidence of a pathological Pashtun tendency towards ‘queerness’ is testament to the pervasiveness of Orientalism, where every instance of difference, alterity and divergence is subsumed in the dominant narrative of ‘Otherness’, even when it is presented in contradistinction to the deftly crafted narrative that preceded it. But, as the discussion below shows, it also attests to the failure of taxonomisation and

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Michael T. Luongo, ‘Gay Afghanistan: Homoeroticism among Kabul’s Warriors’, GlobalGayz. com, 1 January 2009, www.globalgayz.com/asia/afghanistan/gay-afghanistan-homoeroticismamong-kabul-s-warriors/ (last accessed 25 April 2019). For more reporting on Afghanistan, see for instance Stephanie Skier, ‘Western Lenses: On Male Same-Sex Relationality in Pashtun Afghanistan’, Queer Journal, 2004, http://archive.today/www.queer-journal.com (last accessed 20 September 2019). Luis Chibbaro, ‘New Afghan Rulers Better for Gays’, Washington Blade, 21 December 2001. Jack (Judith) Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Through their reading of popular culture, especially animated film, Halberstam imaginatively reclaims the concept of ‘failure’ and in so doing provides an account of ‘the queer’ not as a singularity but ‘as part of an assemblage of resistant technologies that include collectivity, imagination, and a kind of situationist commitment to surprise’ (29). The documents analysed use ‘queer’ in its original derogatory sense, preserving its association with ‘depraved’ and ‘degenerate’ sexual acts. Thomas Dworzak, Taliban (London: Trolley, 2003). Faisal Devji, ‘Preface’, in Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, eds., Poetry of the Taliban (London: Hurst, 2012), 30.

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the ambivalence of the stereotype, in the Pashtun’s construction as, at once, too feminine and as hypermasculine. The Talib is then transformed to become at once ‘too macho’ and repulsively effeminate. As a Pashtun, he belongs to the ‘martial races’56 – a designation invented by the British in the nineteenth century – and is proclaimed to be inherently ‘warrior-like’. These qualities once used to extol the virtues of Afghans as a doughty, ‘noble’ ‘fighting-people’57 are now used to denounce them as products of a culture of nasty fighting, as lacking tact, diplomacy and cultural finesse. Indeed, the changing nexus of power/knowledge in the construction of Afghanistan as a (fledgling) discursive regime can be seen at play here: we see the culturally sanctioned ‘hegemonic masculinity’ of the twentieth-century Pashtuns morph into the widely reviled, failed masculinity of the Taliban in the twenty-first century.58 Pashtun Sexuality The question of identity is a complex one, and when it comes to sexual identity, the norm has been to think in terms of a hetero/homo binary, although these identity categories belong to a specific place and period of history. The fixing of types into ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ is a modern Western phenomenon, where same-sex desire has come to be scripted as what Najmabadi calls ‘homosexual as species’.59 In contemporary Western thought, homosexuality is constructed as a distinct minority identity, one that is homologous to a racial or ethnic minority.60 Moreover, homosexuality has also until recently been constructed as a secret, as the secret, in the immortal words of Eve Sedgwick, a phenomenon that is culturally and historically situated.61 As a result, observers in places where homosexuality (or same-sex romantic and/or sexual liaisons) is not a taboo are often left mystified. In the words of Brian James Baer, ‘Western journalists relentlessly projected onto Kandahar the two great secrets of contemporary American society: closeted homosexuality and child abuse. Viewing homosexuality as something that’s kept secret, Western journalists 56 57 58 59 60

61

Rajit K. Mazumder, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 99, 105. Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul. The term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ has been popularised by the gender theorist Raewyn Connell, although I am not explicitly referencing her framework. Asfaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 19. See Susan R. McCarn and Ruth E. Fassinger, ‘Revisioning Sexual Minority Identity Formation: A New Model of Lesbian Identity and Its Implications for Counseling and Research’, The Counseling Psychologist 24, no. 3 (1996), 508–34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

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found the patterns of silence and disclosure in Afghanistan to be rather baffling.’62 This section of the chapter explores the difficulties faced by those reporting the sexual conduct and practices of the Pashtun people, and the ambivalence and tensions that are the inevitable result of the violent imposition of contradictory Orientalising narratives. One strand of thought prevalent in Anglo-American reporting is what can be called the ‘deprivation’ hypothesis: women are a ‘rare commodity’ in Afghanistan, so men out of desperation turn to other men to satisfy their sexual urges. For instance, an LA Times article declares: ‘restrictions on relations with women lead to greater prevalence of liaisons between men’.63 A psychiatry professor is the source of this knowledge. He explains: ‘it would be wrong to call Afghan men homosexual, since their decision to have sex with men is not a reflection of what Westerners call gender identity’. Instead, he compares these males to prison inmates. They have sex with men primarily because they find themselves in a situation where men are more available as sex partners than are women. ‘It is something they do’, he notes, ‘not something they are’. Indeed, it has even been claimed that there are very few ‘authentic gay men’ in Afghanistan.64 Although Pashtun men are not authentically ‘homosexual’, they are, so this story goes, ‘culturally’ paedophiles. A Daily Telegraph headline insists on this point rather forcefully: ‘Paedophilia Culturally Accepted in South Afghanistan’.65 The sentiments are then echoed by the Examiner, which cites US soldiers and Reuters journalists as saying that paedophilia is a ‘way of life’ in Afghanistan.66 The New York Times contends that paedophilia is the ‘curse’ of ‘male-dominated Pashtun culture’,67 while Tim Reid of The Times writes of the ‘Pashtun obsession with sodomy’, ‘the Taliban’s disdain for women’ and ‘the bizarre penchant of many for eyeliner’.68 In this environment of degeneracy and deviance, the construal of Pashtun men as not quite homosexual but still engaging sexually with other men (or boys) is a profoundly political act. 62

63

64 65 66

67 68

Brian James Baer, ‘Closely Watched Pashtuns – A Critique of Western Journalists’ Reporting Bias about “Gay Kandahar”’, Pukaar 57 (2007), 2, www.thefreelibrary.com/Kandahar%3A +Closely+Watched+Pashtuns.+(Essay).-a098247487 (last accessed 17 January 2020). Maura Reynolds, ‘Kandahar’s Lightly Veiled Homosexual Habits’, LA Times, 3 April 2002, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-03-mn-35991-story.html (last accessed 12 January 2020). Luongo, ‘Gay Afghanistan’. Ben Farmer, ‘Paedophilia Culturally Accepted in South Afghanistan’, Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2011. ‘Afghan Pedophilia a Way of Life Say US Soldiers’, Examiner, www.examiner.com/article/ afghan-pedophilia-a-way-of-life-say-u-s-soldiers-and-journalists (last accessed 20 February 2020). Craig Smith, ‘Shh, It’s an Open Secret: Warlords and Pedophilia’, New York Times, 21 February 2002. Tim Reid, ‘Kandahar Comes Out of the Closet’, The Times, 1 December 2002.

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It lets us, as Western observers, bemoan the ‘state of affairs’ in Afghanistan, while allowing us to hope for a brighter future after intervention. In this liberal humanitarian narrative, by ‘saving Afghan women’ from Afghan men, we are therefore, also, saving Afghan men from themselves. However, it appears on occasion as though the prime concern with regard to both homosexuality (or its purported lack thereof ) and paedophilia is the palpable discomfort experienced by the foreign troops stationed in Afghanistan. This theme of the noticeable vexation of our troops ‘over there’ is now a prominent one in Anglophone media coverage of the intervention. For instance, in spite of its tongue-in-cheek tone, an article published in the Scotsman published by 2002 gets to the heart of the matter: ‘[i]n Bagram British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat – being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers’. The reactions of the marines, even if not entirely serious, are telling. An Arbraoth marine, James Fletcher, exclaims: ‘[t]hey were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda [sic]. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village.’ In the words of Corporal Paul Richard, the experience was ‘hell’. ‘Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing make-up coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises.’ The inevitable pop-psychologising follows. The author Chris Stephen offers: ‘The Afghan hill tribes live in some of the most isolated communities in the country.’ And one of his interlocutors, a marine called Vaz Pickles, adds: ‘I think a lot of the problem is that they don’t have the women around a lot . . . We only saw about two women in the whole six days. It was all very disconcerting.’ In spite of its jocose tone, the grammars of difference – a deep-seated homophobia and racism – can be clearly seen in operation.69 Ben Farmer of the Daily Telegraph is more measured: ‘Western soldiers often report unease at the attentions of their Afghan comrades, who are affectionate with each other and sometimes wear make-up. British troops have also talked of their disgust at police or militias keeping young boys as hangers on.’70 But even where Western news reportage avoids obvious sensationalism, the concern ultimately is the same. The San Francisco Chronicle makes the point patently clear: ‘Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy.’71 The choice of words is instructive: it is Western forces that ‘had a problem’. Indeed, according to 69 70 71

Chris Stephen, ‘Startled Marines Find Afghan Men All Made Up to See Them’, Scotsman, 24 May 2002. Farmer, ‘Paedophilia Culturally Accepted in South Afghanistan’. Joel Brinkley, ‘Afghanistan’s Dirty Little Secret’, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 August 2010.

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the article, ‘all of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, “Pashtun Sexuality”, startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked – and repulsed.’72 The San Francisco Chronicle goes on to argue that it was because they were laden with suspicions about the perverse sexual tendencies and inclinations of the Pashtun people that the US military decided to conduct an academic inquisition into the ways of these Afghan people. The result was the ‘Pashtun Sexuality’ report conducted by the US army.73 Ostensibly conducted to help American soldiers fight better and be more culturally sensitive, the report essentially turned out to be an exercise in sensitising Western fighters to the devious ways of the Other. The report, which claims to draw on ethnographic studies and anthropological expertise, argues: Military cultural awareness training for Afghanistan often emphasizes that the effeminate characteristics of male Pashtun interaction are to be considered ‘normal’ and no indicator of a prevalence of homosexuality. This training is intended to prevent servicemembers from reacting with typically western shock or aversion to such displays. However, slightly more in-depth research points to the presence of a culturallydependent homosexuality appearing to affect a far greater population base then [sic] some researchers would argue is attributable to natural inclination.74

The overriding concern, then, is as much the perceptible discomfort experienced by the Western observer as it is the problem of ‘homosexuality’ or even ‘paedophilia’ in southern Afghanistan. It is telling that Montgomery McFate, one of the original architects of the HTS, has admitted that HTS teams taught US soldiers to dismiss child abuse as merely a ‘cultural practice’.75 The source of the discomfort here, though, in line with the report on Pashtun sexuality, is that homosexuality in southern Afghanistan (i) is ‘culturally-dependent’ and (ii) affects a greater number of people than is deemed ‘natural’. Since the report makes a case for ‘Pashtun sexuality’ as neither ‘natural’ nor ‘normal’, but as culturally sanctioned debauchery (no less than ‘an essential social force underlying Pashtun culture’76), it becomes easy to label Afghan homosexual interactions as ‘inauthentic’. 72 73

74 75 76

Ibid. AnnaMaria Cardinalli, ‘Pashtun Sexuality’, HTT AF-6 Research Updates and Findings (2009), https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:znKX3soYgusJ:www.imagesoflife-online.co.uk/ HTTAF6.doc+&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiSZIeBiz7AsASvZJTIH23FgQ5B6laC MaNWwgIOnSlyRet97PILB5a5P8CngE6SDZGAQSWIjhVM1GYm7JEFohnc_sYQtTJWtzV W7GRakTBgfHVne38yiRnmFvFGWE0XMgQZXiBG&sig=AHIEtbQkkHkrBIEaY8ZXLYad p3aJPdRnRg (last accessed 17 March 2019). Ibid.; emphases added. Interview with HTS’s senior social science advisor Montgomery McFate, https://dianerehm .org/shows/2007-10-10/anthropologists-and-war (last accessed 18 March 2019). Cardinalli, ‘Pashtun Sexuality’.

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The reasoning is that ‘statistically’ gay men are supposed to be a minority and that given the high incidence of homosexuality in Afghanistan, there is something ‘deviant’ and ‘unnatural’ about this. Indeed, numerous commentaries point out that homosexuality is something ‘they do’ and not something ‘they are’, as if to place ‘their acts’ in the realm of the physical, siphoned off and distinct from ‘our identity’ and the realm of the metaphysical. Inasmuch as gay men are not a minority in Afghanistan, they are not really homosexual, but are merely deprived – of female intimacy. Similarly, paedophilia is a cultural ‘norm’ in Afghanistan because of the lack of ‘freely available’ women. In accordance with this rationalisation, most same-sex relationships have been reduced to a ‘Pashtun obsession with sodomy’. Not only does this play into a strange identity politics, whereby we decide what they are and how this makes them different from us,77 but it also often functions in accordance with a reductive causation according to which effeminacy is equated with homosexuality. This distinction between homosexual act and homosexual identity is far from straightforward, and the act vs identity debate has become increasingly heated in some circles of queer theory. Although he sets up the distinction between act and identity in a slightly different manner, the allure of Joseph Massad’s argument in Desiring Arabs is unmistakable in this context. If we are, as it appears above, referring solely to sexual acts rather than self-affirming identities, then it is correct to critique the use of labels such as ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ as both remiss and incongruous. It can be convincingly argued that even long-term sexual intimacy outside an established cultural framework for gay relationships need not necessarily be thought of as ‘gay’ in the Anglo-American sense. Massad makes precisely this point in his biting philippic against the ‘Gay International’, which on his account is the latest iteration of a colonial onslaught in the Middle Eastern world, all the more insidious as it seeks to transform ‘practitioners of same-sex contact into subjects who identify as “homosexual” and “gay”’.78 ‘Benignly’ ethnocentric at best and explicitly violent in its universalising teleological narrative and deliberate erasure of alternate subjectivities at worst, this ‘Gay International’ – an assortment of Western human rights organisations, feminist and gay rights activists and liberal NGOs – has a messianic assimilationist drive that seeks to (re)make as ‘Western subjects’ all members of the human race. My contention, however, is that Massad, in his zealous, but not wholly unfounded, preoccupation with the imposition of categories, reifies the notion

77

78

Although this is as true of those critics of Orientalism who argue that Western categories of thought cannot be applied to people in other parts of the world, as my discussion of Joseph Massad below shows. The same position is also voiced by some of the Afghan men interviewed in the newspaper articles cited above. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 162.

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of ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ himself, disqualifying the experience of those in the Arab world who identify with those terms. In holding up a singular image of the Middle Eastern man as often partaking in same-sex desire but never love, Massad ironically mirrors the ‘Gay International’ by setting the definitional and experiential parameters of legitimate male sexual encounters. If, for the ‘Gay International’, the repressive regimes of the Middle East have denied their citizens the right to express their homosexuality, for Massad all rhetoric surrounding a gay liberatory discourse in the Middle East is always already a symptom of Western imperialism. Massad is therefore guilty of circumscribing the ways of being and thinking for the very people he seeks to defend. Not only does his argument that stable homosexual identity is a sole preserve of the West run the risk of promoting a romanticised vision of the Orient where sexuality is ever fluid and constantly at play, but it also falls into the reductive logic of what Sadiq Jalal al-Azm has labelled ‘Orientalism in reverse’.79 Orientalism in reverse metes out the same epistemic violence to the ‘Occident’ that Said accuses the Orientalists of committing, that of positing the ‘Occident’, or some aspect of ‘it’, as an unvarying fixity. By essentialising ‘Western homosexual identity’ as one that all men sexually attracted to other men in the non-Arab world instinctually attribute to themselves, Massad is certainly guilty of this on more than one occasion. He is essentially making a problematic move that divides ‘gay’ men into two camps worldwide: those in the East, who are denied all access to the category of ‘homosexual’, and those in the West, who are disallowed to think outside of it. It is a difficult line to tread, because as is reported: ‘[h]ugging doesn’t mean sex locals tell us’, and neither does wearing kohl or colourful sandals.80 The tension in Western reporting about Afghanistan surfaces yet again when reporters grapple with the openness with which men enter into relationships with other men.81 On the one hand, given the ease with which male-male relationships are discussed in Kandahar, one may be forgiven for thinking that 79 80

81

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, Khamsin 8, no. 5 (1981), 26, www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article20360 (last accessed 20 February 2020). Moreover, male affection and intimacy can just as easily be constructed as symptomatic of conflict-ridden environments as of salacious cultural traditions. For instance, in a different context it has been credibly proposed that ‘[i]n Peru too, male veterans recounted experiences of transformation: Male tenderness . . . which is there, or at least I have experienced it with people, with whom we joined together in the early phases and also served time in prison. I believe that there develops a very, very strong feeling, which is beyond gender . . . being a militant and living in the underground makes you tough, but at the same time allows new forms of tenderness, a tenderness, which you would not express in a normal situation . . . there was a lot of affection between men . . . But it was not a gay thing. Not at all. It was masculine affection of support and of strength.’ See Luisa Maria Dietrich Ortega, ‘Looking beyond Militarized Masculinities: Guerrilla Gender Regimes in Latin America’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 14, no. 4 (2012), 489–507. This may be a tension that is reflective of the tension ‘on the ground’, as it were.

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Kandahar is exceptionally tolerant, while on the other hand the language used by the reporters hint that these relationships are not consensual and that even if they are, there is always an undertone of coercion. Indeed, while Tim Reid notes that there seems to be no ‘shame’ or ‘furtiveness’ about their conduct, and others are baffled by the forwardness with which marines are being propositioned, he also says that these young boys are ‘marked for life’. The contradiction and paradoxes are rife; Reid’s piece is titled ‘Kandahar Comes Out of the Closet’, although Michael Griffin, investigative journalist and freelance writer, avers: ‘in Pashtun society, man-woman love was the one that dared not speak its name: boy courtesans conducted their affairs openly’.82 These contradictions are embedded in the larger ecologies of ‘Western’ interactions with ‘Eastern’ males, and their perceived divergences. We see these prevailing tendencies captured in a report titled ‘A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility’ which analyses the mutual perceptions of US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan as part of ISAF and those of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. The author, Dr Jeffrey Bordin, a ‘Red Team Political and Military Behavioral Scientist’, has compiled a vast resource of interviews conducted through fifty-nine focus groups at nineteen locations in order to offer recommendations on how to avoid future clashes between ‘friendly’ Afghan forces and US soldiers, a rising trend according to the report.83 The gripes of the US soldiers vary greatly, from complaints about a ‘lazy ass culture’, practices of ‘child and sex slavery’ and the ‘virtual slavery of women’ to Afghans’ ‘disgusting smells’ and ‘their half retarded behaviour’. What emerge most strikingly are the various ways in which legitimate concerns from the Afghans about ‘racist soldiers’, ‘the setting up of roadblocks’ and the US soldiers’ cavalier attitude towards sick and dying civilians are dismissed as largely petty ‘complaints’. So, whereas the report documents both Afghan and American grievances, the recommendations mostly centre on how US soldiers can be better equipped to handle a ‘toxic’ culture. In fact, even when the same complaint is articulated by both sides – as it is with the treatment of dogs, where Afghans say the US forces shoot dogs indiscriminately, whereas US forces complain about Afghans’ disregard for dogs and their mistreatment of strays – the Afghans’ response is reduced to one that is culturally programmed to view dogs as ‘vermin’ (recall Entezar) except in the case of their own dogs, which they treat like property, and they become upset if US soldiers destroy their possessions. Conversely, US soldiers’ rails against Afghans – ‘They [the ANA] are always on their cell phones during patrols. They are worse than teenage girls’ and ‘they spend so much time with 82 83

Michael Griffin, Reaping the whirlwind: Afghanistan, al Qa’ida and the Holy War (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 55. Bordin, ‘A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility’.

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each other in bed’ – are used as the basis for recommending that ‘Afghans need human relations training . . . to better deal with US soldiers who’ve put their lives in danger to improve their country’,84 whereas the US forces would benefit from ‘cultural programmes’ to cope with the Afghans’ deviant ways. But even this cultural training should not be overstated, because these ‘failings’ are an outcome of the ‘the human factor realities of the Afghan populace and culture, including a largely illiterate army and police force’. The conclusion submits: ‘Dealing with such organizational cultures and operational working conditions and limitations cause great stress and exasperation for ISAF troops. Unless fundamental changes are made to ISAF's ability to institute reform on profoundly dysfunctional Afghan governmental systems and key leaders, then any efforts in developing a legitimate, functional and trustworthy Afghan army and police force will continue to be futile.’ With regard to cultural training for Americans it cautions: However, this is not a call for appeasement to a highly toxic culture (such as the U.S. Army's 'encouragement' that its female soldiers wear a hijab instead of their Kevlar thus placating Afghan perceptions of women's lower social status as well as putting them at additional unnecessary risk). All too often, ISAF political and military officials as well as the international media have prostrated themselves before the altars of multiculturalism, moral relativity and political correctness and have excused inexcusable behaviors on the part of the Afghans . . . Such ethically challenged apologist perspectives hinder any movement towards advancing the Afghan culture beyond its toxic medieval mentality or curbing a violent and unquestioning ideology. Rather, this is a recommendation not to add fuel to the fire of cultural incompatibility by unnecessarily offending Afghans with various abrasive policies or coarse behaviors that most any people would find offensive.85

While some of the concerns voiced by US soldiers are no doubt vindicable, this trend of dismissal and denigration is systemic and permeates most observations of male-to-male relations in Afghanistan. Baer argues that ‘in their reporting Western journalists insisted on reducing relationships that are often long-term emotional bonds to a crude sexual bargain. The New York Times’s Craig Smith, for example, translated the term haliq, which crudely means ‘beautiful boy’, as ‘a boy for sex’.86 In another instance, faced with estimates from her informants that ‘between 18% and 45% of men [in Kandahar] engage in homosexual sex’, Maura Reynolds observed prosaically that this is ‘significantly higher than the 3% to 7% of American men who, according to studies, identify themselves as homosexual’. Indeed this ‘excess’ homosexuality makes Afghans suspect and much more likely to be called queer ‘paedophiles’ and ‘sodomisers’ as opposed to gay men or homosexuals. It is telling that the term ‘bisexual’ is not once used to describe these men, who often have wives 84

Ibid., 52.

85

Ibid., 53–4.

86

Baer, ‘Closely Watched Pashtuns’.

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and themselves admit that they like both men and women. As Reynolds’s local contact, Daud, himself tells her: ‘I like men but I like girls better.’87 In sum, the (Western) assumption that homosexuality is a ‘minority identity’ and intimately tethered to secrecy is challenged in the Afghan context. The openness and lack of embarrassment surrounding same-sex relationships in Afghanistan are what confound most Western observers. Yet again, it is the desire to make sense of, to make legible, these foreign practices that leads to a series of stereotypes and contradictions. That Afghan men may have polymorphous sexual desires or engage in polyamorous relationships is a possibility that lies beyond the purview of the Western reporter. The messy complexities of a repressive society with its members participating in fluid sexual relationships are too great to comprehend: they are written off as unnatural aberrations in a culture characterised by ‘gynophobia’. The substantial dossier on male–male relationships in Afghanistan is interesting in that it is testament to the myriad ways in which Western reporting has tried to comprehend the idea of homosexuality in a land infamous for its restrictive moral code. Constructing it alternatively as culturally sanctioned paedophilia, ‘homosexuality’ resulting from a ‘lack of options’ and a perverse understanding of intimacy, these articles provide as much insight into ‘our’ prejudices as they do about ‘their’ customs. On the other hand, the ‘evil’ of homosexuality as a racialised discourse has been adopted even by those selfconsciously engaged in the decolonisation of knowledge production.88 By unequivocally denouncing homosexuality as an alien imposition in the Middle East by the ‘Gay International’, Joseph Massad partakes of the same racialising discourse, albeit in a drama where the victim and the perpetrator seem to have exchanged roles. Another wonted assumption that emerges in these reports is the connection between sexist Afghan or Islamic culture and male intimacy. In October 2001 The Times published an article titled ‘Repressed Homosexuality?’ which made explicit this purported link between misogyny and ‘homosexuality’ in Afghanistan by submitting that ‘Taleban misogyny went so far beyond what is normally intended by the word that it qualified as a kind of “gynaeophobia” [sic] so broad that a glimpse of stockinged foot or varnished nail was taken as a seductive invitation to personal damnation’. Indeed, the article argued, ‘[i]n Kandahar, the custom of seclusion had given rise to a rich tradition of homosexual passion, celebrated in poetry, dance and the practice of male prostitution. Heterosexual romance, by contrast, was freighted with the fear

87 88

Reynolds, ‘Kandahar’s Lightly Veiled Homosexual Habits’. This is an erasure that also often figures in discussions of Western homosexuality. See also Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.

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of broken honour, the threat of vendetta and, ultimately, death by stoning.’ It went on to explain: The taleb grew to maturity on the gruel of orthodoxy, estranged from the mitigating influence of women, family and village. This made early recruits to the movement disciplined and biddable. If their gynaeophobia [sic] appeared as the product of a repressed homosexuality on the march, Taleban cohorts also conjured up echoes of a medieval children’s crusade, with its associated elements of self-flagellation and an innocent trust in the immanence of paradise.89

In the zeal to ascribe multiple different vices to the Taliban, the overall picture that emerges is both vague and confused: the Talibs are at once women-hating repressed homosexuals by compulsion and ardent gay lovers who emerged out of a rich tradition of same-sex eroticism and passion. If the articles quoted above are ambivalent towards (ambiguous and contradictory) Pashtun sexuality, the one by Jamie Glazov which appeared in Frontpage Magazine on 4 October 2001 is certainly not. It is worth analysing it in some detail, however, because it confronts head-on the assumptions latent in many, if not most, of the aforementioned pieces. Using the provocative title ‘The Sexual Rage behind Islamic Terror’, Glazov cautions his readers about ‘Arab’ sexual deviancy. The argument can be directly applied to Afghan or Pashtun sexuality. In no uncertain terms, Glazov posits: Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior. But, interestingly enough, there is no word for ‘homosexual’ in their culture in the modern Western sense. That is because having sex with boys, or with effeminate men, is seen as a social norm. Males serve as available substitutes for unavailable women. The male who does the penetrating, meanwhile, is not emasculated any more than if he had sex with a wife. The male who is penetrated is emasculated. The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.90

In some senses this argument is startlingly reminiscent of both Massad’s thesis, examined earlier, and Foucault’s work on Ancient Greece.91 It can also be viewed as a direct challenge to hegemonic Western understandings of masculinity: we have here a model of masculinity that we are told is both prevalent and culturally desirable. It also confounds accepted definitions and understandings of homosexuality: ‘[i]n this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hypermasculinity. It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do.’92

89 90 91

Griffin, Reaping the whirlwind. Jamie Glazov, ‘The Sexual Rage behind Islamic Terror’, Frontpage Magazine, 4 October 2001; emphasis added. 92 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2. Glazov, ‘The Sexual Rage’.

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Not only do men here ‘do’ homosexuality without yet being homosexual, but this act seems to be a culturally endorsed male prerogative. Homosexuality stops functioning as a minority identity, and indeed it becomes delinked from any identity except one that is conditioned by cultural diktat. This has the interesting effect of absolving those critical of Afghan ‘homosex’ of homophobia. The conclusions drawn by Glazov are enlightening: ‘As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination.’93 What ‘they’ partake in, then, is essentially bestial power-play, whereas ‘we’ engage in meaningful sex built on love and understanding. The author is particularly concerned about the penetrated boys, a concern that is echoed in most commentaries on the issue. They are ‘victimized’ and ‘forced into invisibility’ because ‘[e]ven though the society does not see their sexual exploitation as being humiliating, the psychological and emotional scars that result from their subordination, powerlessness and humiliation is a given. Traumatized by the violation of their dignity and manliness, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back.’ Ultimately, however, in spite of the many cultural allowances, male–male sex is perceived as an affront to masculinity. The problem is aggravated because ‘trying to recover from sexual abuse, and to recapture one’s own shattered masculinity, is quite an ordeal in a culture where women are hated and love is interpreted as hegemonic control’. Glazov deftly makes some rather suspect leaps of logic: because women are hated, men have sex with boys; they therefore are incapable of loving, and their masculinity is under attack. This is primarily a ‘cultural problem’, not least because: In all of these circumstances, the idea of love is removed from men's understanding of sexuality. Like the essence of Arab masculinity, it is reduced to hurting others by violence. A gigantic fissure develops between men and women, where no harmony, affection or equality is allowed to exist. In relationships between men, meanwhile, affection, solidarity and empathy are left out of the picture. They threaten the hypermasculine order.94

Notwithstanding the hyperbole, this article illustrates the logic of securitisation at work. Not only is difference dangerous, but equally the danger is difference, presented here in the form of a perverse and pathological challenge to our notions of love and relationships firmly grounded in a heteronormative – albeit homonationalist – framework.

93

94

Ibid. Incidentally, Dunne was referring to ‘medieval Islamic societies’ and did not use the word ‘violent’ once to describe male-to-male sexual activity. See Bruce Dunne, ‘Power and Sexuality in the Middle East’, Middle East Report (Spring 1998), 8–10. Glazov, ‘The Sexual Rage’; emphasis added.

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The evidence for the allegedly coercive relationships that older men have with younger males is often scant and incidental. Much is made of the sartorial choices of Pashtun men, as though this is automatically indicative of their sexual preferences, which in turn is ‘naturally’ linked to moral depravity.95 The examples drawn on are rather instructive. An opinion piece published in the New Yorker in 2002, for instance, has argued: Pashtun men, Kandaharis in particular, are very conscious of their personal appearance. Many of them line their eyes with black kohl and color their toenails, and sometimes their fingernails, with henna. Some also dye their hair. It is quite common to see otherwise sober-seeming older men with long beards that are a flaming, almost punklike orange color. Burly, bearded men who carry weapons also wear chaplis, colorful high-heeled sandals. I noticed that to be really chic in Kandahar you wear your chaplis a size or so too small, which means that you mince and wobble as you walk.96

The logic is simplistic: if they do not behave like ‘us’, if they are different in their appearances, choice of clothing, colour of beard, etc., then they must be suspect. Once again, the familiar binaries of sensuality/rationalism, Islamism/ Secularism and East/West are used as crutches in the face of our own incompetence and inability to confront difference on a level playing field. The result, as ever, is the naturalisation and perpetuation of those very binaries that prevent a more nuanced understanding of ‘Eastern’ events, phenomena and subjectivities (in all their multiplicity) in the first place. To return to Glazov: ‘It is excruciating to imagine the sexual confusion, humiliation, and repression that evolve in the mindsets of males in this culture. But it is no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign “enemy”, whose masculinity must be violated at all costs – as theirs once was.’ And the analogy is clear: the attacks against America are the result of pent-up frustration. Those men who have been denied the natural love of a woman attack the bastion of ‘normal’ relationships with a rage that springs from their cultural and sexual perversity, and must be met with like punishment. ‘Violating the masculinity of the enemy necessitates the dishing out of severe violence against him. In the 2001 terrorist strikes, therefore, violence against Americans served as a much-needed release of the terrorists’ bottled-up sexual rage. Moreover, it served as a desperate and pathological testament of the re-masculinization of their emasculated selves.’97 Only by striking at the beacon of sexual prowess can these men hope to win their masculinity back. This lexicon of masculinity, violation, penetration and emasculation serves to underscore not only the nature of the enemy but also the stakes of 95 96 97

The discussion on Karzai below expands on this. Jon Lee Anderson, ‘After the Revolution’, New Yorker, 28 January 2002. Glazov, ‘The Sexual Rage’.

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the war. But it is more than just the gender(ed) identity of the USA as superior masculinity that is being challenged. America is battling a threat to its principles, to its ontological security and to its cherished moral code characterised by freedom, choice and (heteronormative) family values. It is under attack from those who have been coerced into a life of sodomy and hatred. The threat ultimately is bio-political. And the response also has to be bio-political: not only has power made life its referent, but also life must be remade in our image of the ‘normal’ and the ‘good’.98 As the report on ‘cultural incompatibility’ put it, Afghans must be trained in human relations, must be made ‘normal’. The possibility of alternative, non-normative ways of being must not be entertained. The conclusions drawn have repercussions far beyond Kandahar or even Afghanistan. The trope of a racialised, sexually perverse Muslim male has been instrumental in justifying intervention in the ‘Third World’ and continues to be powerfully mobilised in policy and academic circles in the West. As Paul Amar has compellingly argued, ‘these public-discourse versions of masculinity studies and everyday etiologies of racialized Middle Eastern maleness operate as some of the primary public tools for analyzing political change and social conflict in the region’.99 Indeed, the same sets of vernacular theories also prop up intelligence services and terrorology industries whose wildly inaccurate studies of Islamism and of politics in general in the Middle East are often built upon pseudo-anthropological or psychological-behavioralist accounts of atavistic, misogynist, and hypersexual masculinities. These institutionalized methods of masculinity studies have shaped geopolitics and generated support for war, occupation, and repression in the region for decades.100

The fetishised figure of the Muslim man functions as the perfect counterpart to the tyrannised veiled woman of Chapter 4 – both subjects in need of (Western or liberal) remaking. Although much lip service has been paid to the need to bolster ‘moderate’ Muslim voices, Saba Mahmood’s point that the essential project of liberalism (or, more accurately, liberal interventionism) ‘lies not so much in tolerating difference and diversity but in remaking certain kinds of religious subjectivities (even if this requires the use of violence) so as to render them compliant with liberal political rule’101 is worth repeating. In her pioneering Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick spells out a contradiction that resounds emphatically in attempts to paint a portrait of Pashtun sexuality. In her words it is

98 99 100

‘Out there’: i.e. in Afghanistan. Paul Amar, ‘Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of “Men in Crisis”, Industries of Gender Revolution’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 3 (2011), 39. 101 Ibid., 38–9. Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, 328.

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the contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance or a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (which I refer to as a minoritizing view) and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view).102

What is a contradiction against a Western backdrop becomes particularly acute in a society that does not subscribe to the ‘minoritizing view’ but has it imposed upon it by sense-making Western interlocutors. This is the problem with more general metaphors of the closet when these are unthinkingly imported into the Afghan context, as seen in the commentaries analysed above. In the final analysis, we have a rather confused motley crew of perversions, discontents, sexual depravities and repressions. The familiar self/other binaries are supplemented by a still relatively unfamiliar one: of ‘identity’ vs ‘behaviour/act’. ‘We’ have identity and ‘they’ have behaviour – a profoundly empowering and disempowering manoeuvre respectively. Only those in and of the West can lay claim to that privileged construct of individual (sexual) identity. Furthermore, in spite of the varied responses to and different reasons put forth for male–male relationships in Afghanistan by their Western observers, a few rigid underlying themes emerge. The most prominent is the role played by Islam. Islam functions as a powerful mobilising trope even when the reference to it is only tangential. The article titled ‘Gay Old Time in ShariaLand’ is one example. Here too, the result is paradoxical: images of Oriental excess complement and are simultaneously undermined by theories of ‘Islamic repression’.103 The other potent trope is that of the closet, which is linked to the mostly unchallenged assumption that homosexuality is analogous to a minority identity. The breadth of allegedly homosexual activity in Kandahar (sometimes ‘detected’ by incidental ‘evidence’ such as kohl-lined eyes) discomposes the most sympathetic of observers, and the metaphor of the closet is manifestly misapplied. And finally, much of the reporting can also be read as signalling a latent desire: what we find suspicious is often what we are most afraid of being allured by. The article about the marines being propositioned by Afghans that appeared in the Scotsman certainly hints at this. The excuse of ‘gay panic’ used by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan when faced with charges of violence and torture is also an example of this same intermingling of fear and desire. The suspicious element, the objet petit a in Lacanian terms, is also inherently 102 103

Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1–2. ‘Gay Old Time in Sharia Land’, Page Six, 7 July 2007, https://pagesix.com/2007/07/07/gayold-time-in-sharia-land/ (last accessed 12 January 2020). The term ‘repressive hypothesis’ was coined by Michel Foucault and used for the (Victorian) West. In this instance, I am merely referring to the argument that Islam is inherently repressive, which has become common currency in the Western world broadly defined.

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desirable: we are both scared and in awe of it. Perhaps the Afghan male – sodomiser and paedophile, reeking of Oriental lasciviousness – serves the same purpose in the Western imaginary.104 The practices of knowledgecultivation about the Afghan man, however, become all the more curious and follow a quite different trajectory when it comes to representations of Hamid Karzai. Hamid Karzai If Mullah Omar largely shied away from, and escaped, media attention, the opposite can be said for Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan. Karzai took office formally on 7 December 2004, but had been a leading political figure since the removal of the Taliban regime in 2001. Although a Pashtun, Karzai originally stood for everything the Taliban was not, at least in the eyes of his Anglophone observers: modern, cosmopolitan, urbane and Westernised. Initially feted as Afghanistan’s Nelson Mandela, Karzai witnessed a dramatic fall from grace. At the beginning of his tenure he was hailed as Afghanistan’s saviour, but nearing the end of it he was inveighed against by all quarters and excoriated as a cowardly, corrupt and incapable leader. In the words of the New York Times: ‘A charming, urbane tribal leader who favors flowing capes, Mr. Karzai was a White House favorite during most of the Bush administration. Since then, his relationship with the United States has become increasingly hostile as the two countries have lurched from one crisis to another.’105 The US administration is not the only government that has expressed its disappointment with the Afghan president. Portrayals of him closer to the end of his tenure painted a picture of a man deeply embattled and often ineffective. Although as late as 2006 the New York Times could claim that ‘[o]ur backing of an enlightened government in Kabul should put us in a far stronger position than the Soviets in the fight to win back the hinterland’,106 by 2009 the mood had changed considerably, and it was announced by the same newspaper that the ‘Leader of Afghanistan Finds Himself Hero No More’.107 This impression persisted, and Karzai continued to be depicted as ‘irrational’, with the ‘rift’ between him and the USA adjudged to be

104

105 106 107

Here we see the multiple and changing sites of repression and desire. As we saw in the previous chapter, the burqa also functions as object petit a, intimating the elasticity of the discourse. ‘Hamid Karzai’, New York Times archive, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/ people/k/hamid_karzai/index.html?inline=nyt-per (last accessed 20 February 2020). Robert Kaplan, ‘The Taliban’s Silent Partner’, New York Times, 20 July 2006. Dexter Filkins, ‘Leader of Afghanistan Finds Himself Hero No More’, New York Times, 7 February 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/world/asia/08karzai.html (last accessed 20 February 2020).

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unbridgeable, until his successor Ashraf Ghani replaced him in September 2014.108 Shortly afterwards, Abdullah Abdullah, Ghani’s principal rival in the presidential race, was designated as part of a ‘unity’ government. Karzai, as the head of the Afghan state, has also fallen prey to allegations of paedophilia, owing, unsurprisingly, to his Pashtun background. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle, mentioned above, declares: ‘this pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's most important tribe. For centuries, the nation's leaders have been Pashtun.’ The article obliquely implicates Karzai: ‘President Hamid Karzai is Pashtun, from a village near Kandahar, and he has six brothers. So the natural question arises: Has anyone in the Karzai family been bacha baz?’109 It conjectures: ‘[t]wo Afghans with close connections to the Karzai family told me they know that at least one family member and perhaps two were bacha baz. Afraid of retribution, both declined to be identified and would not be more specific for publication.’ As for Karzai himself, the reporter claims that ‘an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior “was rampant” among “soldiers and guys on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time.”’110 But apart from the relatively rare attempts to embed Hamid Karzai in his purportedly paedophilic Pashtun culture, Karzai has been subject to a very different type of scrutiny and treatment from that meted out to the Taliban. There are two things worth mentioning at the outset. The first is that Karzai’s vacillating position in Western newspaper articles and other reports is paradigmatic of the inherent fluidity and instability of representations generally and of Afghanistan in particular. As is hopefully evident by now, discourse in general, and Afghanistan as discursive regime in particular, is neither static nor composed of a chorus of unanimous opinions, representations and actions. The discourse on Karzai provides a neat illustration of the messy reality of discursive practices, of which Orientalism (as praxis) is rightly considered a prime example. The second, intimately connected with the first, is that categories of masculinities (such as wartime or hegemonic), while helpful in teasing out traits that are common to people at certain times and spaces, do not fully capture the identities and performances that masculinities (like femininities) present. To try to sketch a definitive Pashtun 108

109

110

Jawad Sukhanyar and Rod Nordland, ‘In Prison Release, Signs of Karzai’s Rift with U.S.’, New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/world/asia/afghanistan-releases-prisonersover-us-objections.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). Bacha bazi now connotes pederasty, but it originally denoted sexual practices between an older and a younger man. On the pressure to typologise sexuality in Islamic countries see Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches. Brinkley, ‘Afghanistan’s Dirty Little Secret’.

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masculinity, let alone an Afghan one, is a task that is from the outset selfdefeating – a fact that the inconstancy of Western portrayals of Hamid Karzai helps to illustrate. In the initial stages of Karzai’s tryst with Anglophone commentary, he seemed to inhabit a different space from the Taliban, a space ordinarily unavailable to Afghan men. However, even in the so-called ‘honeymoon period’, Karzai allegedly exhibited traits that were ultimately not so different from those associated with the Taliban. Karzai was alternately portrayed as signally weak and cunningly powerful. This bears a strong resemblance to the constructions of the Taliban, which oscillated between presenting the group as crushingly effective and entirely impotent. Not only does this betoken the argument about the lack of serious engagement with Afghanistan, but these representations, characteristically contradictory as they are, are also indicative of a deep suspicion of ‘Orientals’ as innately mercurial and unreliable. The initial ecstatic lionisation of Eastern leaders, followed by a lifetime of obloquy when they fail to live up the expectations of their Western counterparts, is a familiar trope in world politics, and it bespeaks the compulsion to designate the Other as inherently different and/or problematic. The underlying tensions between representations of ‘early’ and ‘late’ Karzai are made explicit by Jason Burke in his article ‘Hard Man in a Hard Country’, published by the Guardian in 2008.111 Karzai, we are told, is ‘a man as prickly, proud, independent and difficult to control as his homeland’. For Burke, it is not merely the perception of Karzai that has changed: it is rather our understandings of Afghanistan. It is worth quoting him at some length here: In the heady aftermath of the 2001 war, everything seemed possible and Karzai, with his hawk nose, multicoloured Uzbek cape and astrakhan hat, was, like his country, handsome, brave, rugged, exotic and romantically wreathed in gunsmoke. Convincing both at home and abroad, effective enough to be useful, malleable enough not to be a threat, he was the perfect friend in a far-flung land.112

Like those of the women, Karzai’s sartorial accoutrements deserve special mention. But more importantly, seven years on, Karzai, ‘like his country’, had become ‘a problem’. ‘Tricky, conservative, proud, prickly, his views, like those of his countrymen, are not always those of his Western interlocutors. He does not do what he is told. In short, he is a bit too Afghan.’113 Few commentators have summed up the troubled relationship between Karzai and his Western opposite numbers (most notably, but not solely, Obama) better. Karzai’s fatal flaw, it would seem, is that he is after all (a bit too) Afghan.

111 112

Jason Burke, ‘Hard Man in a Hard Country’, Guardian, 20 July 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2008/jul/20/afghanistan (last accessed 20 February 2020). 113 Ibid. Ibid.

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This constant linking of Karzai with his country is another instance of a heavyhanded effort to simultaneously turn him into a symbol for the entire country and personify Afghanistan as ‘prickly’, ‘tricky’ and ‘conservative’. The article is tellingly focused on Karzai’s insufficient ‘Westernisation’: ‘[d]espite his apparent Westernisation, the President is . . . a devout man. He never touches alcohol – abroad or in private – and prays five times a day. His piety is allied to a social conservatism that sees his wife, a literate medical doctor, kept out of sight.’114 Karzai’s ability to traverse seamlessly from East to West and converse in both languages, as it were, was hailed as a gift, a much-needed facility to broker peace both within and without Afghanistan. It quickly became a curse: his position became untenable and his loyalties questionable. Indeed, Burke’s analysis sits uneasily with a commentary published a few years earlier: Born in Kandahar and educated in India, Karzai is the scion of a noble Pashtun clan. He glides easily between the traditional and the modern worlds. He relishes sparring with tribal visitors, who come grumbling about their local rivals or demanding special attention. It's like the court of a traditional Afghan chieftain. Everyone has his say, but Karzai, with humor but firmness, imposes his will.115

In these analyses Karzai comes across as a highly mutable personality, and even when his versatility is complimented there is more often than not a whiff of the ‘craven Oriental’ in the journalistic accounts he features in. Karzai here functions as a synecdoche for Afghanistan: like his country, he cannot be fully taxonomised116. He dwells in the interstices, liminal, changing, engaged with only partially. Nevertheless, since the change in the tenor of perceptions of Hamid Karzai has been so monumental, it is worth spending some time analysing this change in more depth. In 2006 US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice asserted: I don’t know anyone who is more admired and respected in the international community than President Karzai for his strength, for his wisdom and courage . . . I am with foreign ministers and with heads of state all over the world. I sit in the councils of NATO. I sit with the EU. I sit with people all over the world.117

And then a mere three years later it was announced that ‘Washington is fed up with Karzai’s duplicity and fecklessness. Despite the fact that he came to power on the back of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, Karzai used the 114 115 116 117

Ibid. Burke deduces this from the fact that ‘Mrs Karzai was not much in evidence’ on the day the visited. Tim McGirk, ‘Lonely at the Top’ Time, 4 March 2002, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,1001918,00.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). This is merely an observation and by no means an adjuration for greater taxonomy. ‘Remarks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai after Their Meeting’, Secretary Condoleezza Rice, Kabul, Afghanistan, 28 June 2006, US Department of State Archive: http://2001-2009 .state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/68396.htm (last accessed 20 February 2020).

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latest poll as a chance to portray himself as the one Afghan willing to stand up and criticize the way U.S.-led coalition forces have inflicted civilian casualties while chasing the Taliban.’118 At first glance, it appears that Karzai’s fall from grace was due to his increasing inefficacy, his inability to make decisions and take action. However, on closer inspection the concerns seem to be to do with his effectiveness and not the lack of it. The problem arose because his effectiveness in implementing policy or blocking reform was often in opposition to, rather than in the service of, his Western allies. Karzai increasingly channelled his energies and powers in a way that met opprobrium. In later accounts he is portrayed most often as ‘obdurate’ and not as ‘weak’. His weakness when evoked usually stems from a failure to put into action the demands of the West and the ‘international community’. A headline from the Guardian proclaimed: ‘Hamid Karzai Shows Stubborn Streak amid the Appeasement.’ According to the author of the article, a ‘snub to UK and praise for the election commission show Karzai remains a man who does not like to be pushed around’.119 Time magazine went from eulogising Karzai as ‘[u]rbane, well educated and hailing from an aristocratic Pashtun family’ and as ‘Washington’s best – and perhaps only – chance to win over the southern tribes’, in November 2001,120 to arguing that ‘Washington’s strategy is missing one key component: a legitimate Afghan President deemed worth defending’ nine years later.121 It is because ‘diplomats aren’t holding their breath that Karzai will stick to the coalition script in the future’ that he is now held as an ‘increasingly problematic ally’ in Washington’s eyes.122 In the aftermath of the election crisis of 2009, we are told that ‘[d]espite the obstacles, many international sponsors including the Americans say privately that they want to see Karzai face a runoff . . . A second round, they argue, might clip Karzai’s wings and make him more responsive to Western demands.’123

118

119

120 121

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Tim McGirk, ‘Can the US Still Work with Afghanistan’s Karzai?’, Time, 8 September 2009, www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1920954,00.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). Jon Boone, ‘Hamid Karzai Shows Stubborn Streak amid the Appeasement’, Guardian, 19 November 2009, www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/19/hamid-karzai-inaugurationspeech-analysis (last accessed 20 February 2020). Tim McGirk, ‘Taliban Spies: In the Crosshairs’, Time, 12 November 2001, www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001167,00.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). Tim McGirk, ‘Why Karzai May Be Obama’s Best Bet in Afghanistan’, 25 September 2009, Time, www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1926057,00.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). Jason Motlagh, ‘Karzai: Increasingly Problematic Ally in Afghanistan’, Time, 17 November 2010, www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2031713,00.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). Tim McGirk, ‘Gun Prices Soar as Afghanistan’s Postelection Crisis Continues’, Time, 10 September 2009, www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1921633,00.html (last accessed 20 February 2020).

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The choice of words is instructive: Karzai’s wings must be clipped (his powers must be curtailed, or he must be rendered impotent) lest he take off or otherwise engage in activities that his Western allies deem unsavoury. Admittedly, much of this shift in attitude towards Karzai can be attributed to the political climate at the time: a change in administration in the USA, and a concomitant reworking of the mandate under Obama. Nonetheless, the political grammar of retreat from Afghanistan has continued to draw upon a pre-existing conceptual vocabulary, one that constructs Karzai as possessing a certain ‘type’ of masculinity: slippery and effeminate. Once considered attractive, Karzai’s protean political persona was soon rendered deeply unpalatable. Disapprobation and Discipline: Hamid Karzai as the ‘Bad Child’ Karzai tried his utmost to chart a trajectory for Afghanistan that would be politically independent and not reliant on the wishes of outsiders,124 whether donors, benefactors or allies. His government made overtures to Iran, which for its part has built roads and provided funds for electricity in west Afghanistan;125 it became increasingly outspoken about civilian deaths caused by NATO bombing and drone strikes, and accused the USA of secretly resuming talks with the Taliban. Karzai’s government firmly rejected the notion that it is a ‘puppet regime’ and made a point of telling the coalition so. Karzai’s Western allies were clearly displeased about this ‘posturing’, and in spite of resorting to the familiar carrot-and-stick mechanism to rein in unruly leaders in their ‘protectorates’, the outcome was not to their liking. The shifting tropes through which Karzai has been framed resemble very closely Mrinalini Sinha’s argument about strategies of colonial rule in South Asia. The empire sought to fashion Indian men who would be ‘Western’ in outlook and could be relied upon to uphold British values. These men initially received plaudits as necessary for the future of India, but when they started to undermine colonial rule and strive for independence they began to be discredited as inauthentic and dangerous, and especially as ‘effeminate’.126 This tracks Karzai’s journey fairly closely. Along with his ‘effeminacy’, the stock trope of having a child that has gone off the rails has also been 124

125

126

Whether his policies have been prudent or politically astute is debatable. My intention over the next few pages is not to defend Karzai’s actions as the Afghan head of state, but merely to interrogate the space he occupies in the dominant Western imaginary. Jon Leyne, ‘Cash and Keeping Friendly Relations in Afghanistan’, BBC, 25 October 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11621525 (last accessed 20 February 2020). Interestingly, the BBC has called Karzai’s amicability with Iran a ‘headache’. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); I owe this insight and recommendation to an anonymous reviewer. Readers may recall this desire to mould Indian masculinity in the British image from Macaulay’s minute on education recounter in chapter 1.

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deployed extensively in the case of Karzai, and a host of articles using the rhetoric of ‘misbehaviour’ have surfaced. Karzai has been given a ‘dressing down’ and is deserving of ‘a slap’, according to the Independent;127 he has been ‘rebuked’ by the US envoy, in the words of the New York Times;128 and we are made aware of the ‘urgency’ with which Karzai must be ‘curbed’ by another news source.129 Karzai, in a nutshell, is a wayward child who must be monitored, surveilled, controlled and ‘set right’. And while NATO is to ‘scold’ Karzai for his intractability,130 this treatment brings Karzai firmly into the fold of unruly leaders in the developing world, rather than setting him apart as exceptional. NATO and its members have occupied the place of ‘teachers’ to their Third World pupils on more than one occasion.131 One of the reasons for Karzai’s bad press is simply that he has not matured into the specific kind of ‘adult’ his Western allies hoped he would become. ‘The west’s own man’, then, once brimming with promise, who had ‘wowed the international community’ with his ‘impeccable English’ and his pro-Western outlook, thus ‘fell out favour’.132 The charges against him are diverse, and the reasons for the relationship souring are legion. For instance, the Guardian noted in 2009: ‘it is on the issue of civilian casualties that Karzai’s relationship with his Western backers hit rock bottom. In September he had a furious row with the normally supportive Bush administration after he accused US forces of massacring more than 90 civilians, including women and children, in Azizabad.’133 Condoleeza Rice’s panegyrics of 2006 turned in to a ‘verbal lashing’ delivered to the Afghan president in 2009 in which she warned him that if he continued to criticise the

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

David Usborne, ‘US Gives Karzai a Rare Dressing Down over “Occupation” Rhetoric’, Independent, 20 June 2011, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/us-gives-karzai-a-raredressing-down-over-occupation-rhetoric-2299948.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). Ray Rivera and Ginger Thompson, ‘U.S. Ambassador Responds to Karzai’s Criticisms’, New York Times, 20 June 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/asia/20afghanistan.html (last accessed 12 January 2020). Ben Arnoldy, ‘US Ambassador to Afghanistan’s Criticism Adds Urgency to Curb Karzai’, Christian Science Monitor, 12 November 2009, www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Cen tral/2009/1112/p06s17-wosc.html?nav=367495-csm_article-bottomRelated (last accessed 20 February 2020). Susan Sachs, ‘Nato to Scold Karzai Press Petraeus in Search for Afghan Wars Endgame’, Globe and Mail, 17 November 2012, /www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/nato-to-scoldkarzai-press-petraeus-in-search-for-afghan-wars-endgame/article1314490/ (last accessed 20 February 2020). Suzette R. Grillot, Rebecca J. Cruise and Valerie J. D'Erman, ‘Developing Ssecurity Ccommunity in the Western Balkans: The Role of the EU and NATO’, International Politics 47, no. 1 (2010), 62–90. Jon Boone, ‘Hamid Karzai: Too Nice, Too Weak – How the West’s Own Man Fell Out of Favour’, Guardian, 23 March 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/hamid-karzaiafghanistan (last accessed 20 February 2020). Ibid.

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USA, ‘we will no longer co-operate with you’.134 By 2014 the concern was Karzai’s release of ‘65 men with long beards’, prison inmates released from Bagram prison against the wishes of the USA which the latter has pronounced. ‘infuriating’.135 We were told that ‘Karzai’s isolationism worries both Afghans and the West: the insecurity has left Mr. Karzai alternately lashing out in anger and searching for new allies, turning to Iran and elements within the Taliban. Both are antagonistic to American interests.’136 His shifting loyalties and his desire to create a broader support base within and outside Afghanistan also became a cause for concern. ‘He is trying to create new networks, new allies and contacts both inside the country and outside the country in case there’s a premature withdrawal, so a lot of this is more of a survival gesture’, wrote Ahmed Jalali, Afghanistan’s former interior minister, in 2010.137 One commentary claimed rather cautiously in 2009 that ‘[i]t is too early to say that Afghanistan has been a failure, but not too early to say that is has not been a success. The government of Hamid Karzai is corrupt, muddled, and weak.’138 In 2010 the caution was thrown to the wind, and Time announced that the Karzai regime was ‘mired in political chaos’ and ‘hardly competent at the best of times’.139 And even before this, in February 2009 an editorial in the Guardian titled ‘Lost Leader’ stated that ‘[t]he Obama administration seems to have already made up its mind that Mr Karzai is part of the problem and must go’.140 ‘Karzai had been talked round by ultimatums from world leaders including Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, Gordon Brown and Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary general.’ The senior diplomatic source reporting to the Guardian said that they had ‘made it clear’ to Karzai that ‘if he did not back down’, he would ‘no longer be a partner of the west’.141 The pressure on Karzai was unceasing towards the end of his presidency: ‘Western critics have accused Mr Karzai of weak leadership, cutting deals with warlords, tolerating drug smugglers and ignoring rampant corruption that has fed the insurgency.

134 136

137 138 139 140 141

135 Ibid. Sukhanyar and Norland, ‘In Prison Release’. Alissa J. Rubin, ‘Karzai’s Isolation Worries Afghans and the West’, New York Times, 6 August 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/asia/08afghan.html?_r=2& (last accessed 20 February 2020). Ibid. ‘Shrinking Ambitions’, Guardian, 16 February 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2009/feb/16/afghanistan-hamid-karzai (last accessed 20 February 2020). Tony Karon, ‘Can Karzai Persuade Taliban Fighters to Stand Down?’, Time, 22 June 2010, www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1955925,00.html (last accessed 20 February 2020). ‘Lost Leader’, Guardian, 27 February 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/27/ afghanistan-karzai-president (last accessed 20 February 2020). John Boone, ‘Afghan Election Panel Orders Runoff Vote for 7 November’, Guardian, 20 October 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/20/hamid-karzai-afghan-election?INTCMP=SRCH (last accessed 20 February 2020).

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The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the Obama administration . . . has been contentious.’ In all of this critical reportage, the representation of Karzai as ‘childish’, ‘immature’ or irresponsibly stubborn is subterranean but never far from the surface. Karzai has been depicted as a spoilt petulant child, prone to whining and complaining to such an extent that he himself acknowledged this representational tendency and sought to deal with it in the context of his own strategies of self-presentation: ‘I was a lovely man when I was keeping quiet. I'm a nasty man, a no-good leader when I began to speak.’142 Children should speak only when spoken to. In his attempts to chart and defend an independent course for Afghanistan, Karzai has found the tropes of infancy and maturity inescapable. Once we analyse Karzai’s actual actions and statements, another rationale for the typical Western view of Karzai’s presidency begins to come into view. During a nationally televised speech on 10 March 2013 about a hidden Taliban–US partnership, Karzai, referring to blasts in Kabul and Khost provinces for which the Taliban claimed responsibility, said that the bombings ‘were not to show [Taliban] prowess to the United States. They were in the service of the United States. They were in the service of the rhetoric of “2014”. It was meant to scare us, [to show] if they [foreign forces] are not here, “we will not leave you alone”.’ Karzai’s speech came hours before his meeting with Chuck Hagel, the US secretary of defence. He went on to accuse both the USA and the Taliban of doublespeak. In his words: ‘the US says “the Taliban are not our enemies, we are not fighting the Taliban”, yet, every day, in the name of the Taliban they are harassing our people’.143 With oratory like this, it is no surprise that the Afghan president was no longer darling of the West. Even if we exercise some caution in reading Karzai’s own commentary on the ‘spoilt child’ topos, the problem remains that the concern stems not from Karzai being too weak; it is rather that he believes himself to be too strong. In September 2014 Karzai was replaced by Ashraf Ghani after a long and uncompromising election season. Although Karzai’s stepping down defied Western expectations, his replacement has been largely overlooked by most commentators, in keeping with the pattern of waning and waxing interest in Afghanistan. There was, however, a constitutional change, a nominal but remarkable one. It was proposed that a power-sharing agreement be instituted whereby chief political office was occupied in two moieties: the president, Ashraf Ghani, and his opposition leader, Abdullah Abdullah. In effect Abdullah acted as Afghanistan’s ‘prime minister’ but the official nomenclature 142 143

Boone, ‘Hamid Karzai: Too Nice, Too Weak’. ‘Karzai Accuses US and Taliban of Doublespeak’, Al Jazeera, 11 March 2013, www.aljazeera .com/news/asia/2013/03/2013310105646824403.html (last accessed 12 January 2020.

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conferred on him was ‘Chief Executive Officer’ or ‘CEO’ of Afghanistan at the behest of the Obama administration. This unconventional naming – evocative of large businesses and multinational companies run for profit – coincided with the intensification of US military operations in Afghanistan in 2015. In another noteworthy manoeuvre, in June 2017 Erik Prince, the founder of the private mercenary firm Blackwater (later renamed, as if to dispel any doubts about the mutual shoring-up of scholarly pursuits and military praxis, Academie), wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Afghanistan should be governed by ‘an American viceroy who would lead all U.S. government and coalition efforts – including command, budget, policy, promotion, and contracting – and report directly to the president’. He claimed that the USA should deploy an ‘East India Company’ approach to Afghanistan which would ‘reduce rampant fraud by focusing spending on initiatives that further the central strategy, rather than handing cash to every outstretched hand from a U.S. system bereft of institutional memory’.144 Blackwater’s human rights record is so dismal, bordering on the criminal, that even entertaining such an idea may seem ludicrous to the uninitiated. But Prince’s closeness to President Trump suggests that this proposition may not in fact be off the table. As Jeremy Scahill reports, in January 2017 Prince advised Trump’s ‘team on matters related to intelligence and defense’ and even offered suggestions ‘on candidates for the Defense and State departments’. In April the Washington Post reported that Prince, presenting himself as ‘an unofficial envoy for Trump’, met in January with ‘a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow’ and then-PresidentElect Trump. Prince also donated $250,000 to the Trump campaign after the 2016 Republican National Convention, according to the Washington Post.145 In 2019 Erik Prince’s $5 billion campaign to fund an army of mercenaries makes privatised warfare in Afghanistan not far off the horizon.146 144

145

146

Erik Prince, ‘The MacArthur Model for Afghanistan’, Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2017, www.wsj.com/articles/the-macarthur-model-for-afghanistan-1496269058 (last accessed 12 January 2020); Jake Johnson, ‘“Literal Colonialism”: Blackwater Founder Calls for “American Viceroy” to “Rule Afghanistan”’, Common Dreams, 2 June 2017, www.commondreams.org/ news/2017/06/02/literal-colonialism-blackwater-founder-calls-american-viceroy-rule-afghanistan? (last accessed 20 February 2018). Adam Entous, Greg Miller, Kevin Sieff and Karen DeYoung, ‘Blackwater Founder Held Secret Seychelles Meeting to Establish Trump–Putin Back Channel’, Washington Post, 3 April 2017. See Karen De Young, Shane Harris and Dan Lamothe, ‘Erik Prince, in Kabul, Pushes Privatization of the Afghan War’, Washington Post, 4 October 2019, www.washingtonpost .com/world/national-security/erik-prince-in-kabul-pushes-privatization-of-the-afghan-war/2018/ 10/04/72a76d36-c7e5-11e8-b1ed-1d2d65b86d0c_story.html?utm_term=.7c8436e9a464 (last accessed 12 January 2020), and Erik Prince talking to Al Jazeera about his future plans in an episode of head to head on 8 March 2019, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOB4VukpBI&t=65s (last accessed 18 March 2019)

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Anil Kalhan, chair of the New York City Bar Association's International Human Rights Committee, reminds us that Prince’s invocation entails a ‘literal colonialism’ vis-à-vis Afghanistan.147 Perhaps Afghanistan’s ‘quasi colonialism’ contains within it a perceived fear – that the West has not done enough. Perhaps the next and final stage in this saga of war profiteering and plunder will be, quite fittingly, an East India Style Company, one that lives up to its name by more subjugation and destruction of South and Central Asia. It may not come to that, but the possibility – a distinct one at that – re-entrenches Afghanistan’s image as a failed state, one which can be ‘rescued’ by newfangled mercenaries and old-school viceroys. Conclusion Hamid Karzai was often portrayed by the Anglo-American media as a weak, ineffective and embattled leader. However, what has emerged instead is a portrait of Karzai as a hugely complex president whose greatest shortcoming was his hyper-agency in the eyes of his Western interlocutors. This, rather than his ineffectiveness (as ruler of one of the world’s poorest countries, one condemned to the dangers, dislocations and deprivations of war), is what provoked the ire of many of his Western critics. Karzai put his foot down when he saw fit,148 became gradually more vocal about civilian deaths and what he viewed as NATO’s heavy-handedness (much to the chagrin and censure of his international allies) and finally did not mince his words in expressing his desire for an independent Afghanistan. Much of this drive for independence, notwithstanding his appalling record of corruption,149 was seen as ungratefulness, as a provocative attempt to bite the hand that fed it. In comparing representations of the Taliban with those of Hamid Karzai, what emerge are two different ‘sorts’ of masculinities, neither of which fits into the label attributed to it. The Western media founder on the question of the average Pashtun male’s fondness for men. On the one hand, this has been attributed to the lack of ‘available women’, while on the other hand, it is often associated with culturally conditioned dandyism. Similarly, the question of ‘gayness’ and its acceptance has most commentators floundering. Male affection is either dismissed as a cultural curiosity – here the de-contextualised analogy of the closet recurs again and again – or reactively conceived as a culturally sanctioned version of homosexuality. In trying to box the Taliban under the label of 147 148 149

Johnson, ‘Literal Colonialism’. Without letting Karzai completely off the hook, whether he has been ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is not something I wish to debate here. But this is hardly unique to Afghanistan, since most poor countries have an appalling level of corruption: see the Corruption Perception Index 2016, www.transparency.org/cpi2012/results (last accessed 23 September 2019).

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‘terrorist’ or ‘perverse’ masculinity to make sense of ‘its’ ways, more often than not we find ourselves unable to come to grips with the varied manifestations of this masculinity – resulting in antinomies, contradictions and the perpetuation of confusion. In fact, Karzai (viewed through the eyes of his English-speaking discussants) meets a comparable fate: he is at once the epitome of Eastern weakness and failure and the paradigm of Oriental stealth and cunning. He has either too little agency or too much – the usual vocabulary of ‘deficiency’ and ‘surplus’ find their match in Karzai – and he manages to embody both at the same time. It is also worth noting that the representations of Hamid Karzai changed dramatically over time (and in a relatively short period of time), whereas representations of the Taliban have remained relatively stable. This is ironic, because as a force the Taliban has undergone immense upheaval, possibly even a complete overhaul,150 whereas Karzai has remained much the same person.151 This can be attributed, in large part, to the ways in which knowledge is constructed and the context within which that knowledge is embedded. Efforts to articulate a singular form of masculinity are innately liable to failure because of the contradictory, inconsistent and multifarious nature of masculinity as a performative identity, where performativity is understood in Butlerian terms as ’that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’.152 Once again we are reminded that ‘masculinity (indeed, all gender) is always incomplete, but in a constant dialectic – shifting in different fields, and established temporarily and evasively’.153 However, although the discourse on Karzai mutated significantly over the course of his presidency, it remained true to the wider Orientalist discourse that construes a certain type of inhabitant of the East as unruly and unpredictable. If the Taliban fits the all-too-familiar trope of the monstrous and barbarous, Karzai takes his place in the ranks of the mysterious and untrustworthy – a different Orientalist trope, but one no less entrenched and no less laden with assumptions and misgivings. Moreover, there have also always been underlying similarities. Not only did Karzai metamorphose from almost ‘Western’ to ‘much too Afghan’; he too was portrayed frequently as a fashionable male, his attire remarked upon by most commentators. It is perhaps no stretch to say that Karzai is not unlike the other 150

151 152 153

The structure and organisation of the Taliban have changed so drastically that the appellation ‘Neo’ has applied to its original name. See Rashid, The Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords. This is, of course, an assumption that cannot be verified in any absolute sense. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2. Paul Kirby and Masha Henry, ‘Rethinking Masculinity and Practices of Violence in Conflict Settings’, International Journal of Feminist Politics 14, no. 4 (2012), 447.

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Pashtuns who ‘have a strong streak for dandyism’.154 As the product of Pashtun culture and tradition, he was too colourful in his dress and ultimately rather effeminate, and not as unlike his ethnic peers as he originally appeared. Finally, although the ‘murderous effectiveness’ of the Taliban, in spite of its ‘medieval’ technologies and ideologies, has been made only too clear by Western soldiers and commentators alike, Karzai was often popularly perceived as a weak and ineffective leader.155 Nevertheless, the perception is misguided, and both the Taliban and Karzai seem to possess a degree of power and effectiveness that is in fact highly unpalatable to the West. Representations of Hamid Karzai and the Taliban, therefore, have more in common than initially appears: Orientalised and purportedly perversely empowered, they both serve as figureheads of a masculinity that is ‘queer’, feminised and unsavoury. This final chapter has argued that our understanding of the Pashtun male is mediated by an Orientalist, specifically homonationalist, framework in which accusations of ‘deviance’ and ‘queerness’ take centre stage as organising principles in making sense of the Other. The treatment of the Afghan male in mainstream Anglophone discourse provides a compelling counterpart to the narrative of the victimised Afghan woman, and together they are crucial in constructing Afghanistan as an object of intervention. However, the discourse of Afghan masculinity is rife with contradictions, with the inherent ambiguity and flux in its system of representations signalling the impossibility of achieving a stable Orientalist understanding of the Afghan man and Pashtun sexuality, especially given the lack of sustained academic engagement with the country, stemming in no small part from its quasi-colonial past and its manipulable imperial present. The contradictions, in point of fact, extend beyond the representations of Afghan sexuality. They also emerge in the ways in which the accusation of deviance functions in Western discourse. On the one hand there exists a suspicion of ‘queerness’ in and of itself, a homophobic suspicion that insulates itself from such challenges by locating queerness in particular narratives of deviance and of naturalness which serve to Orientalise and confer distance. But this suspicion coexists with a smug celebration of the stability of liberal Western discourses on sexual difference. Much of the affective dimension involved in highlighting alleged Islamic sexual deviance, in its multiple forms and sites, seems to be located in the identification of hypocrisy – a certain pleasure, a jouissance, in noting the instability of the austere Islamic and 154

155

Maura Reynolds, ‘Kandahar’s Homosexual Tendencies’, Moscow Times, 4 April 2002, www .themoscowtimes.com/archive/kandahars-homosexual-tendencies (last accessed 12 January 2020). Admittedly instances such as Karzai being called the most fashionable man in the world by Tom Ford, which has been fervently repeated in many commentaries, are different from those in which the Taliban have been portrayed as sexual perverts. McGirk, ‘Taliban Spies’.

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terroristic identity which, while on the surface it presents itself as a traditional and moral challenge to liberal hegemony, always fails on closer inspection and, in the face of strict moral codes, collapses into deviance. Thus the supercilious morality of the strict Islamists is purportedly revealed as fiction. In this narrative, the deviance of the Islamic subject is not noteworthy and enjoyable because deviance is wrong per se, but because it is in this very deviance that we can read the fiction of the Islamic project. Our superior liberal politics can accommodate deviance and morality without contradicting itself, whereas theirs is a politics of false promise, patent hypocrisy and a repressed pathological tendency for queerness. The logics of distancing and differencing construe Afghanistan as a perversely gendered locale. The ‘truth’ surfaces in the following comment: The pathological loathing of women by the Taliban didn't spring from nowhere, nor has it evaporated overnight. This is an apartheid society, a bifurcated human race where one half has been systematically excised: mothers, wives, daughters are only empty vessels, the regrettable and disgusting physical function through which men must deign to be born. Men are everything to one another here and their warm and public emotion can be a touching sight. They hug, kiss, embrace, weep together, delighting in each other's company, laughing and probably making love quite a lot too. (Battles between warlords have been fought recently over beautiful boys, often involving kidnap and male rape.)156

It is through the perpetuation of powerful ironies such as these that Afghanistan is (re)constituted as a slippery, liminal and ambivalent Other, and indeed that the general tenor of homonationalism as a project of modernity establishes and perpetuates itself.

156

Polly Toynbee, ‘Was the War on Afghanistan Worth It?’, Guardian, 12 November 2002.

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Coda

Colonialism was distinguished by its power of representation . . . whose effects extended themselves at every level. It was distinguished not just by representation’s extent, however, but by the very technique. The order and certainty of colonialism was the order of the exhibition, the certainty of representation itself. —Timothy Mitchell, 19881

The aim is to assign to representing a more modest, less imperial, place in a theory of knowledge, not to exorcise by decree what is obviously an important human capacity. —Johannes Fabian, 19902

Just in time for the new school year in 2014, a publisher based in St Louis publisher re-released a series of colouring books for children across the USA. ‘Really Big Coloring Books’ has updated its version of We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids Book of Freedom in order to reflect the current political climate and ‘the new terrorist threats the world is facing’.3 This second edition includes the Boston Marathon bombing, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the release of the Taliban bombers, in contrast to the first volume, which centred on Al Qaeda as the preferred object of line art for schoolchildren. The company, which mainly prints books on fairy tales and superheroes, released its first ‘terrorist-themed’ text We Shall Never Forget in 2011, followed by another graphic colouring text, The True Faces of Evil – Terror, in 2012. The company also released ‘terrorist trading cards’ for children. Both books are now accompanied by a featured supplement, The Terror Update on Global Jihad. The Terror Update showcases a rather vivid picture of a public crucifixion by ISIS, to which the caption reads: ‘This is what ISIS 1 3

2 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 171. Fabian, ‘Presence and Representation’, 756, Husna Haq, ‘Terrorist-Themed Coloring Books for Kids: Instructive or Inflammatory?’, Christian Science Monitor, 3 September 2014, www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2014/ 0903/Terrorist-themed-coloring-books-for-kids-instructive-or-inflammatory?utm_source=Sail thru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Books&utm_campaign=20140904_Newsletter%3A Books_Sailthru&cmpid=ema%3Anws%3ABooks%2520Weekly%2520%2809-04-2014%29 (last accessed 7 September 2017).

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Figure C.1 Really Big Coloring Books: Talibani 5. Really Big Coloring Books

wants to bring to America and its people. What are you going to do when they come for you?’4 It also features pictures of the ‘Talibani 5’, the five Taliban detainees who were released in exchange for Sgt Bergdahl. ‘Obama administration broke the law by freeing 5 Taliban terrorists’, the page reads, and follows promptly with this pithy injunction: ‘[b]ack to the battlefield’ (see Figure C.1).5 The original 9/11 books had as their focal point a picture of a Navy Seal pointing a gun at Osama Bin Laden, the latter depicted cowering behind a veiled woman. The message next to the image was this: ‘[c]hildren, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.’ Really Big Coloring Books has provided copies of its terrorism series to all fifty states and to the White House. The founder of the company, Weyne Bell, declared in a video statement: ‘[our books] tell the truth, they tell it often, and they tell the children . . . these are books that actually explain what’s going on today . . . We’re trying to educate the country on these animals, these brutal people, these terrible humans on the planet called ISIS, these terrorists.’ In an interview with the Daily Beast, Bell upheld that the books were instructional and taught ‘positive values’ and that they were ‘important for people in the US. They don’t understand, they don’t have pictorials to show children . . . It’s a delicate topic, and . . . it needs to be explained in black-and-white. This is 4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

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Coda

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happening overseas, not here. But it could happen here . . . So that’s why we’re making them.’6 This book opened with an anecdote that captured the ways in which knowledge was produced about Afghanistan: about how it is generated and marketed in the USA, and re-packaged to construct Afghanistan as an inexorably war-prone nation, marked by its failure and always already imprinted by a difference. While the incident regarding the publishing and dissemination of numeracy books for Afghan schoolchildren can be thought of as an act or a series of acts of wilful forgetting and selective omissions, the publishing of colouring books in the USA, for consumption at home, which demonises and invalidates an entire people by teaching children about the evils of ‘their’ culture, may be thought of as an act of premeditated remembrance and calculated commemoration. The Afghan textbooks are deployed as ‘instruments of amnesia’ and the American ones as ‘mnemonic devices’. This second example – and the politics of memory that undergirds both – cohere with the themes outlined in the introduction: the representation of Afghanistan and its citizens as intrinsically violent; the logics of difference, disavowal and distancing; and the cursory nature of imperial engagement with Afghanistan’s history, politics and society. ** Fast forward three years. On 22 August 2017 President Trump declared a renewed US interest in the war in (or on) Afghanistan, generating both incredulity and applause.7 The kudos came from many quarters – including officials from the Afghan government;8 the British defence secretary, Sir Michael Fallon; and Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general – and highlighted the importance of continued American involvement in Afghanistan. The bafflement was also par for the course, given that this ‘recommitment’ to Afghanistan represented a volte-face for Trump that few could see coming and was at least partly responsible for Steve Bannon’s exit from the White House. Trump himself expressed this about-turn in his position as borne out of the responsibility to be flexible in his capacity as the president of the USA. 6

7 8

Asawin Suebsaeng, ‘You Can Buy These Anti-ISIS Coloring Books (Featuring a Crucifixion) for Your Kids’, Daily Beast, 29 August 2014, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/29/youcan-buy-these-anti-isis-coloring-books-featuring-a-crucifixion-for-your-kids.html (last accessed 8 September 2019). In keeping with our story of the cadences of imperial interest in Afghanistan, in 2019 President Trump intimated that he could have the country ‘wiped off the face of the earth’. Sune Engel Rasmussen and Michael Safi, ‘Trump's Afghan Shift Praised in Kabul but Leaves Pakistan Wary’, Guardian, 22 August 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/22/donaldtrump-kabul-praises-fight-to-win-afghanistan-strategy (last accessed 16 January 2020).

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This complete (and uncharacteristic) change of heart, however, was not merely a response to pressure – popular or elite – for a continuation of Obama’s policies in the ‘graveyard of empires’. In fact, more characteristically, Trump has categorically ruled out any desire to ‘nation-build again’ in Afghanistan, maintaining that his sole objective is to ‘kill terrorists’ and ‘win the war’ at any cost. What then precipitated this about-turn in the (notoriously stubborn) president’s policy towards Afghan? The answer lies (at least in part) in a photograph that Trump was shown by his national security adviser H. R. McMaster. According to the Washington Post, McMaster ‘presented Trump with a black-and-white snapshot from 1972 of Afghan women in miniskirts walking through Kabul, to show him that Western norms had existed there before and could return’.9 This photograph struck a chord, and Trump vowed to ‘obliterate’ and ‘crush’ the men who had made it impossible for women to wear short skirts in Afghanistan. For a man whose most infamous moments include the injunction to ‘grab women by their pussies’ and the reference to a female reporter as incapable of proper journalism because she was ‘bleeding from everywhere’ this might seem to represent an unfathomable sedulousness to the feminist cause. Why has the man who is notorious for the active derailment of women’s rights – as his recent reinstatement of the ‘global gag rule’,10 which endangers the lives and health of the world’s poorest women, demonstrates – become the champion of female empowerment in Afghanistan? He has not. Donald Trump and his photograph of Afghan women in miniskirts represent the acme of the ‘study’ of Afghanistan. A photograph picked up without context, an elision of history, a flippant nod to ‘saving’ women, a hasty decision to (re-)intervene. Trump’s policies towards Afghanistan may be inchoate, even contradictory, but they are entirely consistent with his worldview. In August 2017 Trump reversed a decision to grant conditional resettlement to an Afghan woman – currently a refugee in India – who had been shot by her husband and was living under constant threat to her life. Her plans were shattered, and a forbidding future beckoned, all under the flimsy pretext that it was ‘a matter of discretion 9

10

Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, ‘“It’s a hard problem”: Inside Trump’s Decision to Send More Troops to Afghanistan’, Washington Post, 21 August 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ its-a-hard-problem-inside-trumps-decision-to-send-more-troops-to-afghanistan/2017/08/21/14d cb126-868b-11e7-a94f-3139abce39f5_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpdecision838pm-winner-new:homepage/story&utm_term=.7a2bbd4c27fd (last accessed 16 January 2020). On the global gag rule (also referred to as the ‘Mexico City Policy’) and the devastating impact it is likely to have on women around the world by denying them access to care for HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and reproductive health and family planning medication and services, as well as laying them bare to the risk of unsafe abortion, see Ann M. Starrs, ‘The Trump Global Gag Rule: An Attack on US Family Planning and Global Health Aid’, Lancet 389, no. 10068 (2017), 485–6.

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for security-related reasons’.11 Trump’s actions are perfectly explicable in a racialised world order where ‘migrants’ are the enemy (and Muslims a special kind of enemy) and where white supremacy is no longer a fringe ideology, confined to powerless far-right groups. Indeed, memes and photographs of Afghan women in the 1970s wearing skirts and dresses alongside alarmist captions that draw attention to ‘Muslim barbarity’ have become standard fare on ‘alt-right’ websites. While the self-congratulatory racism and the blatant Islamophobia that accompany pictures of blue burqas in Afghanistan are exceptional, the shrillness diverts our attention from the nub of the problem: that intervention in and engagement with Afghanistan are structured around the enduring logics of a selective engagement with history (Theirs and Ours), a disavowal of our own complicity in this history (a handful of Afghan women wore shorts skirts and dresses before American aid to Afghan Mujahideen ensured Soviet-style governance, and all that it entailed, was extirpated), and a grammar of difference laced with hypocrisy (We are better than Them). As the president of the USA strips all the funding that the State Department receives to promote women’s rights around the world,12 this cant about rescuing the female population of Afghanistan becomes ever more fanciful. It also becomes more dangerous, less accountable and increasingly non-exceptional. Our task, as academics, activists and those invested in a more just global order, is to stop living under the illusion that we can be non-partisan bystanders. We are both implicated and capable – good starting points to initiate change. ** In this final section, I review my main arguments and point to future research questions that this project has triggered and educed. Through the power of articulation and enunciation, across time and in different genres, Afghanistan has been (re)presented to the world, alternately and often concurrently, as potential ally, as dangerous enemy, as gendered space, as an exotic or mysterious locale and as the nemesis of modernity. I have foregrounded representations and significant tropes – as strategies of categorisation, typification and reification – to show why these representations surface in the forms they do, the resonances they have and the worlds they conjure.13 This is an enquiry that 11

12

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Sune Engel Rasmussen, ‘“I can have you killed”: Afghan Woman Fears Husband after US Denies Asylum’, Guardian, 9 August 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/09/afghani stan-woman-husband-us-asylum-claim (last accessed 16 January 2020). Jon Sharman, ‘Donald Trump to Strip All Funding from State Department Team Promoting Women’s Rights around the World’, Independent, 25 April 2017, www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-budget-2018-state-department-cut-office-globalwomens-issues-oxfam-ivanka-a7701631.html (last accessed 16 January 2020). The chapters cover the main and most significant tropes, but the very nature of a project like this precludes exhaustive coverage. I am aware that there are other representations that I could have

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has located practices of representation, and the asymmetries and stratifications they engender in their wake, in a rich theoretical tradition, to further augment the growing challenge to colonising and monopolising tendencies of ‘social science’ and political thought. The chapters individually and cumulatively have also shown that the ideological work that tropes do, through the conferring of subjectivities and reification of difference, is key to our understanding of East–West political and cultural relations. Against the charge that a focus on representations and tropes estranges Orientalist discourse from its material circumstances and welds it to a thin textuality, I have asserted the (wellrehearsed) argument that the discursive construction of subjectivities through the practice of representation has both political and material consequences. My discussion of ‘tribes’ and ‘Af-Pak’, to take just two examples, has shown that discourse, far from being otiose, is productive of a host of relations and foments problematic ‘actionable’ policies as justifiable and necessary. Imagining Afghanistan has sought to make a contribution on two levels. At the level of theory and the philosophy of knowledge, I have shown how thinking about and representing the Other are inexorably political acts, always already embedded in a nexus of power/knowledge. This nexus attempts to make sense of the Other by adopting a grid of intelligibility that places it in the zone of the familiar and the knowable. However, as I have demonstrated, while this practice of rendering the Other legible is inherently fraught and ambiguous, the problem is compounded in the case of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the age-old desire to classify and taxonomise that which is not clearly understood – in this case the social, cultural and political world of the Other – was never fully acted upon. If, as Said writes, the ‘element preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into types’,14 and, as Scott likewise upholds, ‘[a]ll empires, as culturalpolitical enterprises, are necessarily exercises in classification’,15 in Afghanistan even these exercises and impulses were partial and provisory. Not fully accepted into the fold of the British Empire, but sporadically subject to invasive imperial intervention, Afghanistan is best viewed as a semiinstitutionalised, quasi-colonial discursive regime. This is the second contribution – at a more ‘grounded’ level: the level of interrogating, through an instantiation, the byzantine practices of imperial knowledge production – that my project has endeavoured to make. At its core, the project was envisioned as being an intellectual and political intervention that would re-historicise and de-mythologise the study of Afghanistan. To this end, it has traced circuits of English-language

14

dealt with, but I have worked towards attaining a ‘deep’ and ‘thick’ rather than a ‘full’ analysis of all representational, linguistic and epistemic practices with reference to Afghanistan. 15 Said, Orientalism, 119. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 123.

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imperial knowledge production on Afghanistan, in an attempt to refigure conventional units of analysis in social science and International Relations – not least the nation-state and the Euro-centric bracketed version of history that accompanies it. Through a rigorous examination of tropes and representations, as well as an eclectic mix of theory and history, the book has demonstrated the ways in which the hegemonic narrative about Afghanistan follows logics that are both similar to and different from other (post-) colonial places. Afghanistan is alternately construed as a familiar Other – its women depicted as needing to be saved, its state decried as a failure and its male population portrayed as wild frontiersmen – and as a place of mystery and indeterminacy – its borders tenuous, its history uncertain and its future ambiguous but over-determined. Afghanistan, as a discursive regime, functions both in the broad framework assigned to the colonial Other and in registers that are under-theorised and not fully institutionalised, and is restricted to the quasi-colonial zones of exception. Thus far, I have been primarily interested in probing (and decentring) the Western, or more accurately the Anglophone, subject that has come into being through contact with its Afghan Other. Afghanistan, then, has occupied the conceptual space of an object of knowledge, even while I have critiqued the hegemonic (Anglophone) narrative around Afghanistan’s position as an object of empirical enquiry. By describing the ahistorical reifications that these representations, tropes and metaphors propagate, I have focused on the nexus of power/knowledge as it operates in and through the Western media, academy and military discourse. The reclaiming of subjective space for Afghanistan and Afghans has been beyond the remit of this present book, but I hope to have laid the grounds for the conduct of such an enquiry. Thus, while I have asked a phalanx of questions and provided some answers, I have not excavated or unearthed subjugated, local and regional knowledges, or told a story about Afghanistan that draws on local sources and is built upon ethnographic fieldwork. A contrapuntal history of the present, based on a disinterred and translated imperial archive, would be a natural next step for future research. To be sure, a seismic shift in the epistemic landscape is possible only if we work towards dislodging the ingrained assumption that ‘specialist knowledge’ about Afghanistan is the sole preserve of the (usually Western) outsider. Similarly, a more holistic ‘decolonising’ intervention requires a broadening of our understanding of the imperial imaginary, and should ideally include a study of the multiple Russian forays into Afghanistan. In order to expand the project and shed greater light on the discontinuities, ruptures and ambivalences in Afghanistan’s functioning as a particular type of imperial formative and discursive regime, a sustained examination of Russian imperial and Soviet sources would provide a particularly fecund intellectual terrain to traverse. The interlocking modalities of colonial power and knowledge are variegated, and

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extend much beyond the Anglophone world. To be fully apprised of the ‘polyvalent mobility’ of discourse,16 and to be cognisant of how discourses are employed in a project of imperial domination, necessarily entails both a deeper and a wider reading of the imperial archive. Russia’s imprint on Afghan society, history and politics has been indelible, and a comparative study would be especially fruitful, particularly in its potential to push further and add nuance to the concept of quasi-colonialism. Finally, the liminal presence and amorphous status of Afghanistan – undergirded by lamentable epistemic practices as it is – open up exciting avenues for further exploration and future research. They provide a springboard from which to dismantle the smug project of colonial knowledge and engage in a progressive decentring of its fields of force. As Agamben has argued elsewhere: ‘it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinctions, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought’.17 In the (post-)colonial imaginary and especially in the disciplinarised social sciences, former colonies continue to be judged according to the extent to which they have successfully ‘mimicked’ their colonisers’ institutions.18 As I have shown, Afghanistan’s ‘lack’ in this domain, gauged by statist metrics of power – censuses, maps, ethnographic surveys, etc. – presents an important opportunity to broaden our vistas and think beyond taken-for-granted colonial forms of knowing and disciplining. Through an analysis of Anglophone representations of Afghanistan, this book has uncovered and critically explored the hierarchised, gendered and racialised assumptions on which our knowledge hinges. The importance of another register to engage with the only country that bucked the worldwide trend of a fall in civilian casualties in 2018 is supreme.19 The need for a different politics, in the era of Brexit, Trump and a revitalisation of the far-right around

16

17 18

19

Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 36–7; cf. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘State Racism and the Education of Desires: A Colonial Reading of Foucault’, in Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes and Gary Hinkley, eds., Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 7. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188. For more on the concept of mimicry, see Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’. For Bhabha, this ‘mimicry’ is both disruptive of colonial authority and always decried as a failure of the ‘not white’. Indeed, this demand for the evidence of the production of a mimetic representation emerges as ‘one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’ (126). Karen McVeigh, ‘Afghanistan Bucks Global Trend with Sharp Rise in Civilian Casualties’, Guardian, 11 January 2019, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jan/11/afghani stan-bucks-global-trend-with-sharp-rise-in-civilian-casualties (last accessed 19 March 2019). Afghanistan was already a country ravaged by war in 2001, but between 2001 and 2016 26,270 civilians were killed and more than 29,900 have been injured, the healthcare system remains decimated, and there are currently 3 million disabled people living in Afghanistan, amounting to 10 per cent of the population. See Puar, The Right to Maim, 90.

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the world (exemplified by Modi, Erdoğan, Netanyahu and Bolsonaro, to name but a few), is also a more pressing global concern than ever before. My hope is that Imagining Afghanistan has provided us with the preliminary intellectual resources to begin working towards such a politics, one that stems not from the logics of distancing and disavowal but is instead an ethical challenge to the processes of racism, sexism, violent accumulation and dispossession that inhere in the colonising project.

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Index

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 156 Afghan Boundary Commission, 81 Afghan National Army, 9, 199 Afghan National Police, 199 Afghanistan ‘culture of’, 25, 50–2, 54, 56, 58, 61, 63–4, 173, 190, 200 frontier, 87, 94 history of, 9, 44, 56, 175 literature on, 54 politics of, 26–7, 44, 157 representations of, 14–15, 17, 20, 22, 40, 64, 139, 228 ‘tribes’, 117, 119, 122, 124–6, 134, 139 Afghanistan–Pakistan border, 13, 88–9, 96, 99–100, 136 Agamben, Giorgio, 96, 101, 178, 228 ahistoricism, 27, 39, 63 aid, 25, 50–2, 57, 225 foreign, 35 humanitarian, 11 Al Qaeda, 99, 170, 183, 188, 190, 221 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 157 Anderson, Benedict, 142 Anderson, Jon, 105, 108, 115, 131, 141 Anderson, Terry H., 37 Area Studies, 21 Arendt, Hannah, 101 Ataturk, Kemal, 149 Baluch, 63, 85, 91–2, 126–9 Bannon, Steve, 223 barbarism, 125, 135, 164 ‘bare life’, 96, 101 Barfield, Thomas, 26–8, 30, 32, 45, 52, 58, 62–3 Barthes, Roland, 143 Baudrillard, Jean, 147 Bellew, Henry Walter, 121, 123–5, 127–9, 136, 138 Berlant, Lauren, 167 Bhabha, Homi K., 8, 23–4, 43, 49, 53–4, 126, 141, 145, 180, 228

bin Laden, Osama, 48, 97, 183, 190 Blair, Tony, 70, 126 Bolshevik Revolution, 43 British Broadcasting Company (BBC), 30, 39, 44, 135, 165, 212 British India, 31, 75, 77, 81, 83–4, 86–7, 107, 118–20, 127, 132, 140–1 buffer, 41, 90–1 burqa (burka), 133, 149–59, 161–5, 177, 207 Bush, George, 70 Bush, Laura, 143, 163, 173 Butler, Judith, 14, 146, 181, 218 Caroe, Olaf, 32, 89, 108, 118, 120, 129–30, 136 cartography, 68, 91, 102, 139 caste, 75, 134 CATO Institute, 37 Central Asia, 28, 41–3, 67, 81, 90–1, 112, 121, 188, 191, 217 Chatham House, 167 CIA, 9, 35, 48, 99, 151, 184 civil disobedience, 113 Clinton, Hillary, 66, 164, 173, 214 colonialism, 11, 19, 66, 77–8, 143, 216–17, 221 quasi-colonialism, 6, 8, 14, 19, 21–2, 40, 49, 65, 67, 82, 106, 145, 168, 219, 226–8 corruption, 57, 118 counter-insurgency, 25, 46–7, 92, 137, 156, 181 Curzon, George, 80, 86–91, 101, 150 Dalrymple, William, 29–30, 45, 121 decolonisation, 7, 10, 227 drones, 190 Durrani, the, 112–13, 138, 149, 174 East India Company, 30, 109, 114, 117, 119, 216 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 11, 77, 79, 108, 114, 118, 121

249

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250

Index

Elphinstone, William, 29 empire, 27–8, 37–9, 43–4, 72, 80, 185, 224 Entezar, Ehsan, 24, 26, 49–56, 58–60, 62–3, 65, 173 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 229 Ethiopia, 30 ethnicity, 50, 53, 60, 134, 183, 185 ethnography, 53, 63, 119–20, 124, 140, 176, 179 European Asylum Support Office (EASO), 172, 176, 185

Kabul, 42, 50–1, 53, 57–8, 72, 77, 82, 87, 95, 114, 120, 126, 136, 157, 159–62, 167, 169, 176, 191–2, 207, 210, 215–16, 224 Kandahar, 77, 154, 184, 187, 192–4, 198, 200–1, 204–6, 208, 210 Karzai, Hamid, 164–5, 169, 181, 204, 207–15, 217–19 Kerry, John, 66 Khalqis, 33 Khan, Amanullah, 31, 150 Ki-moon, Ban, 214 Kipling, Rudyard, 41–2, 113

failed state, 26, 70, 73, 94, 101, 106, 217 Fallon, Michael, 223 feminism, 176–7 Western, 157, 171, 174 foreign policy, 12, 31, 96–7, 136, 147, 158, 164 Foucault, Michel, 1, 10, 13, 17–19, 26, 67, 73–4, 76, 93, 99–100, 102, 119, 178, 202, 206, 228

Lacan, Jacques, 151–2, 155 liberal interventionism, 205

Gates, Robert M., 134 geopolitics, 9, 37, 41, 205 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 45 Great Game, 24, 28, 32, 39, 41–4, 59, 67, 80, 82, 112, 121, 191 Green, Nile, 11 Hanifi, M. Jamil, 106 Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud, 7, 11, 77, 80, 105, 112, 118, 141, 175 Hegel, G. W. F, 3, 54 Holbrooke, Richard, 45, 95, 99 homonationalism, 176, 182, 220 Hopkins, Benjamin, 11 Human Rights Watch, 167 Human Terrain System (HTS), 24, 134, 196 Hume, David, 115 imperial imaginary, 21, 49, 67, 87, 149, 227 imperialism, 6, 19–20, 83, 88, 108, 113, 120, 140–1, 168, 176, 198 India, British, see British India intervention, Western, 46, 147, 160, 168 Iraq, 89, 112, 134, 140, 181, 206 ISIS, 221–2, 226 Islam, 3, 27, 33, 41, 63, 103, 134–7, 145–6, 148–50, 152, 157, 163, 174, 184, 191–2, 206 Islamism, 204–5 Islamophobia, 152, 225 jihad, 1–2, 34, 103

Mandela, Nelson, 207 Marsden, Magnus, 24, 86, 88, 90–3, 96, 98–9, 113, 131, 135 masculinity, 145, 181, 190–1, 193, 202–5, 209, 212, 218–19 Massad, Joseph, 53, 55, 63, 197–8, 201–2 Mattis, James, 180 Mbembe, Achille, 100 Miliband, David, 138 Mills, Charles, 5, 20, 64 mimicry, 44 misogyny, 61, 145, 178, 201 Mitchell, Timothy, 5–6, 10, 19, 71, 74, 178, 221 Modi, Narendra, 229 Motley, Kimberley, 166–9 Mujahideen, 34–5, 48, 184, 187 Napoleon Bonaparte, 23 nation-state, 68, 76, 90, 109, 227 native informant, 53, 58, 60, 65 NATO, 30, 41, 45, 49, 64, 70, 92, 95, 147, 165, 210, 212–13, 217 neo-colonial, 135, 149 neo-liberalism, 167 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 229 Obama, Barack, 37, 46–7, 67, 95, 97, 99, 209, 211–12, 214, 216, 222, 224 Occident, 181, 198 Omar, Mullah, 183–4, 188–9, 207 paedophilia, 190, 192, 194, 196–7, 201, 208 Pashtuns, 12–13, 60, 63, 82–4, 86, 91, 95, 105, 110, 112–14, 116–17, 122, 125–9, 131, 133–4, 136–7, 181, 185–6, 191–4, 196, 199, 202, 204–5, 207–8, 210–11, 217, 219 Pashtunwali, 27, 40, 84, 131, 139 Pathans, 32, 84–5, 89, 108, 112–13, 118, 125, 128–9

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Index

251

People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), 26 Petraeus, David, 134, 171, 213 power, colonial, 11, 17, 102, 142, 227–8 Puar, Jasbir, 45, 178, 182, 190, 228

Stanski, Keith, 184 state, colonial, 76, 78, 82, 84, 92–4, 141 State Department (US), 35, 158, 163, 225 Stewart, Rory, 66, 88 Stoltenberg, Jens, 223

queer theory, 197

‘Talibanistan’, 96 Tanner, Stephen, 23, 39, 45, 116, 133, 138 terrorism, 48, 81, 147, 189 ‘Third World’, 78, 148 Toynbee, Polly, 151 Treaty of Westphalia, 78 Trump, Donald, 57, 216, 223–4, 228 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 19

racialisation, 34, 117 racism, 5, 20, 55, 64, 67, 99–100, 195, 225, 229 Rashid, Ahmed, 41, 49, 133, 185–6, 191, 197, 218 Reagan, Ronald, 35, 131 Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA), 177 riwaj, 84 Rorty, Richard, 167 Said, Edward, 6, 10, 15 Scahill, Jeremy, 216 Sedgwick, Eve, 193 Sharia, 84, 206 social sciences, 5, 23–4, 59, 72, 134, 228 Soviet Union, 2, 26, 33, 35, 37, 41, 43, 113, 131, 138 Soviet invasion (of Afghanistan), 11, 26–7, 30, 33, 35–6, 112

UNESCO, 168 United Nations (UN), 158 USAID, 3, 139, 145, 163, 172 vaccination, 48 Wahabi Islam, 185 warlords, 160, 184–6, 214, 220 Waziristan, 48, 80, 84, 88, 110, 136 World Bank, 139, 145, 158 Yemen, 109, 112

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