Developing Powers: Modernization, Economic Development, and Governance in Cold War Afghanistan Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy in History 94,621 Words Timothy Alexander Nunan Corpus Christi College University of Oxford Hilary Term 2013 ABSTRACT In the last decade, scholars have recognized economic development and modernization as crucial themes in the history of the twentieth century and the ‘global Cold War.’ Yet while historians have written lucid histories of the role of the social sciences in American foreign policy in the Third World, far less is known on the Soviet Union’s ideological and material support during the same period for countries like Egypt, India, Ethiopia, Angola, or – most prominently – Afghanistan. This dissertation argues that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is best understood as the final and most costly of a series developmental interventions staged in that country during the latter half of the twentieth century by Afghans, Soviets, Americans, Germans and others. Cold War-era Afghanistan is best understood as a laboratory for ideas about the nation-state and the idea of a ‘national economy.’ One can best understand Afghanistan during that period less through a common but ahistorical ‘graveyard of empires’ narrative, and more in terms of the history of the social sciences, the state system in South and Central Asia, and the ideological changes in ideas about the state and the economy in 20th century economic thought. Four chapters explore this theme, looking at the history of the Soviet social sciences, developmental interventions in Afghanistan prior to 1978, a case study of Soviet advisors in eastern Afghanistan, and Soviet interventions to protect Afghan women. Making use of new materials from Soviet, German, and American archives, and dozens of interviews with former Soviet advisors, this dissertation makes a new and meaningful contribution to the historical literature on the Soviet Union, Central Asia, and international history. EXPANDED ABSTRACT During the Cold War, Afghanistan became an unprecedented laboratory for different visions of how states and economies were supposed to work. By the end of the global American-Soviet conflict, however, Afghanistan lay in shambles, was among the poorest countries in the world, and stood on the brink of civil war. How, then, did a country subjected to four decades of social science interventions come to epitomize the term ‘failed state’? This dissertation answers that question by using Afghanistan as a lens through which to examine the intellectual history of development during the Cold War, focusing on the Soviet Union, the largest developmental actor in Afghanistan even prior to its occupation of the country in 1979. Using Soviet, German, American, and British sources, this dissertation examines how ‘developing powers’ sought, and failed, to turn Afghanistan into a territorial state and economy. Specifically, this dissertation argues that the history of Afghanistan during the Cold War is best understood in terms of the history of the idea of the territorial state and the ‘national economy’, and the unsuitability of these motivating images for an Afghan state. In spite of the enormous effort applied to this project by social scientists, advisors, and activists from a number of intellectual traditions, none could change the basic fact that Afghanistan’s institutional history, its economic history, or the post-1947 state system in South Asia made the country ill-suited to fulfill the vision of the territorial state that ‘developing powers’ shared in spite of their ideological differences. Implicitly, then, the dissertation argues for a different methodological focus on the history of the Cold War – one focused less on diplomacy, military conflict, or ideology, and more on how Soviets, Americans, Germans, and others sought to temper change in the Third World by changing the fiscal and administrative character of Third World states with the ‘developing powers’ that social science offered: hence the double meaning of this dissertation’s title. This dissertation explores these themes in an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction conducts a review of the pertinent historical literatures to which this work makes a new contribution. One is the literature on modernization and development, which focuses on the American experience of development in the Third World. This dissertation borrows liberally from that literature in its conception and execution, but it also takes a new step in focusing on Soviet development in the Third World. Another historical literature concerns the intellectual history of the Soviet Union. This dissertation draws heavily on the theoretical contributions of anthropologists and literary critics like Alekseĭ Yurchak, Anna Fishzon, and Andreĭ Shcherbernok, but it also breaks new ground in treating the Soviet social sciences and area studies complex as legitimate objects of intellectual history, and by placing those topics in a global comparative context. Finally, the dissertation engages with the historical literature on Afghanistan, a body of work which remains plagued by the ‘graveyard of empires’ framework: the idea that Afghanistan is inherently predisposed to destroying invaders in wars of attrition. I argue that this framework is intellectually bankrupt, less because it is factually incorrect, and more because it ascribes a ‘genetic’ coherence to the history of Afghanistan that obscures the ‘epigenetic’ (i.e. contextual) reasons why Afghanistan descended into brutal wars of attrition at certain times, but not at others. The country’s twentieth century history demonstrates this best: during that time, the Royal Government of Afghanistan invited countries like Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States into Afghanistan to restructure its state and economy, not to smash those empires. Even the PDPA regime and Soviet leadership understood themselves to be building an Afghan state and economy rather than embarking on a mission to eviscerate the country (even if one led to the other). The real question, then, is why Afghanistan’s ‘developmental moment’ descended into chaos so swiftly and violently, and why the subsequent Soviet developmental intervention failed, too. The dissertation does so by re- framing Afghanistan within the history of the social sciences and development. Chapter One, ‘Soviet Development Thought, the ‘Central Asian Consensus’, and Soviet Afganovedenie, c. 1917 – 1989’, begins this story with an intellectual history of the Soviet social sciences, with a special focus on Soviet Afghan Studies (Afganovedenie in Russian). Unlike their American or West German counterparts, Soviet social scientists faced the intellectual challenge of reconciling the unprecedented changes in the Third World with canonical theories of Marxism-Leninism. With the exception of China and North Korea, however, these changes in the outside world did not obviously correspond with Marx’s schema of societies how transitioned from feudalism to capitalism to socialism. As a new generation of scholars learned foreign languages and gained firsthand experience of the Third World, Soviet debates over political and economic change threw doubt on the central Soviet claim to represent a universal model for economic development. If, in the 1930s, former Tsarist Central Asian colonies had represented revolutionary models for India, Afghanistan, or Iran, by the 1970s they had become mere convention sites for Third World élites whose commitment to socialism seemed doubtful. Later attempts to redefine the Third World in terms of ‘countries of socialist orientation’ helped to clarify policy frameworks, but this new strategic vision hamstrung Moscow into sponsoring the Left in countries like Angola and Ethiopia. The Soviet commitment to a poorly-defined internationalist mission with each intervention, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan. Infighting and personal politics within the Soviet apparatus for the study of what academics called the Srednyĭ Vostok (‘Middle East’), including Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan), also contributed to the intellectual incoherency. In theory, the Soviet Union had structural advantages over the United States in building the intellectual capital necessary to understand the mix of ethnicities and economies that constituted ‘Afghanistan.’ The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union boasted a decades-long history of scholarly, political, and military engagement with Kabul, and millions of Soviet Central Asians spoke either Persian, Uzbek, or Turkmen – all languages spoken in northern Afghanistan – as their native tongues. But the nation-building project of Tajik identity which Soviet Orientalists had championed in the 1920s backfired. Soviet scholars like Igor’ Reĭsner, convinced of the superiority of ‘settled’ Persianate culture to ‘tribal’ Pashtun culture, and élite Soviet Tajiks like Bobojon Ghafurov dominated the Soviet Oriental Studies academy and reinforced anti-Pashtun chauvinism that hindered the development of expertise on Pashtun culture, much less the Pashto language. Subsequent leaders in Soviet Oriental Studies like Iuriĭ Gankovskiĭ harbored pro-Pakistani biases and hindered the advance of the few scholars in Moscow did have a deep knowledge of Pashtun tribal politics. If this lack of cultivation of expertise did not directly affect the decision to invade it contributed to Soviet