Review article Reimagining

AVINASH PALIWAL

Taming the imperial imagination: colonial knowledge, international relations, and the Anglo- encounter, 1808–1878. By Martin J. Bayly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 352pp. £53.00. isbn 978 1 10711 805 8. Available as e-book. Humanitarian invasion: global development in Afghanistan. By Timothy Nunan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 332pp. £26.80. isbn 978 1 10711 207 0. Available as e-book. The defiant border: the Afghan– borderlands in the era of decol- onization, 1936–65. By Elisabeth Leake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 256pp. £67.00. isbn 978 1 10712 602 2. Available as e-book.

‘World powers jostle in Afghanistan’s new “Great Game”’ announced the BBC in January 2017.1 Russia, after shocking the West in the and Ukraine, had begun engaging with its enemy in Afghanistan, the . Moscow asserted that the so-called Wilayat Khorasan, an Afghan and Pakistani chapter of the Islamic in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was a bigger evil than the Afghan Taliban. The latter’s ambitions, Moscow argues, are territorially limited. Such engagement ensured that the US, on the back foot under the embattled presidency of Donald Trump, could gradually be sidelined in a country that Moscow considered its strategic backyard. The Chinese, for their part, were facilitating dialogue within the failing Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG)—formed of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United States and —whereas was materially supporting the Taliban in an attempt to compete with Pakistan for influence over the insurgent movement. continued to support the government regardless of its shape, form and sustainability. The ‘new Great Game’, according to the BBC article, meant that while every regional and global actor wanted a stable Afghanistan, offered the right optics, and undertook diplomatic initiatives, the situation continued to worsen as no one could reach an agreement on the terms of its stability.

1 Dawood Azami, ‘World powers jostle in Afghanistan’s new “Great Game”’, BBC News, 12 Jan. 2017, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-38582323. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 22 March 2017.)

International Affairs 93: 3 (2017) 701–707; doi: 10.1093/ia/iix093 © The Author(s) 2017. Published by on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Avinash Paliwal Then, if one is to go by outcomes, as one must, the legendary ‘Great Game’—a term glorified by Rudyard Kipling inKim —has been a highly inaccurate metaphor. No power, or constellation of regional or extra-regional powers, has been able to command Afghanistan’s commons or stabilize the country. Be it the various Anglo-Afghan wars, the Soviet intervention in 1979–87, Pakistan’s ‘quasi- intervention’ during the 1990s in support of the Taliban regime, or the post-9/11 US-led NATO intervention, Afghanistan has proved to be too difficult a case— not just for foreigners, but also for themselves. The Kabul government, for instance, lost 19 out of 400 districts to the Afghan Taliban in the first weeks of 2017, with the extent of its control diminishing from over 70 per cent to 65.6 per cent of Afghanistan’s territory.2 The 8,400 American troops meant to train, assist and advise the Afghan forces and conduct limited counterterrorism operations have seen much more fighting than desired. The majority of the Afghan army remains dysfunctional and compromised (with regular so-called ‘green-on-blue’ attacks carried out by Afghan soldiers against coalition forces), and Afghan Special Forces take responsibility for most kinetic actions to counter the Taliban—and consequently suffer from acute exhaustion. Effectively, the war of ‘necessity’, as former US President once called it, is being lost—again.3 The financial cost of failure is US$23 billion per year to the US exchequer, whereas the total reconstruction assistance offered to Afghanistan since 2001 stands at US$115 billion—much more than the post-Second World War Marshall Plan.4 In blood, more than 152,000 people lost their lives from 2001 to 2016— soldiers, insurgents and civilians combined.5 Policy-makers often ask, as they are wont to do: how can peace be restored in Afghanistan? There are many opera- tional responses. One study advocates ‘focused engagement’ by the US that aims to (a) ‘stabilize the battlefield by improving U.S.–Afghan strategic alignment, enforcing conditionality for political and security sector reform, and supporting an enduring commitment’, (b) ‘promote Afghan sovereignty and reduce destabi- lising regional competition by obtaining and supporting Afghan commitment to regional neutrality, penalising states that enable the Taliban and other militant groups, and rewarding peaceful outcomes’, and (c) ‘advance a peace process to bring the war to a successful conclusion that protects U.S. interests’.6 Another advocates an ‘insurgent based’ approach to reconciliation (by the West, not the Afghan government), citing internal fissures within the Afghan Taliban as suffi-

2 Shereena Qazi and Yarno Ritzen, ‘Afghanistan: who controls what’, , 24 January 2017, http://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2016/08/afghanistan-controls-160823083528213.html. 3 Elizabeth Williamson and Peter Spiegel, ‘Obama says Afghan war “of necessity”’, , 17 Aug. 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125054391631638123. 4 Christopher Kolenda, ‘Focused engagement: a realistic way forward in Afghanistan’, The Hill, 13 Feb. 2017, http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/319290-focused-engagement-a-realistic-way-forward- in-afghanistan. 5 Adam Taylor, ‘149,000 people have died in war in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, report says’, Washington Post, 3 June 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/06/03/149000-people-have- died-in-war-in-afghanistan-and-pakistan-since-2001-report-says/?utm_term=.974f9433d23e; and ‘Afghan civilian casualties at record high in 2016: UN’, Al Jazeera, 6 Feb. 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/02/ afghan-civilian-casualties-2016-170206062807210.html. 6 Kolenda, ‘Focused engagement’. 702

International Affairs 93: 3, 2017 Reimagining Afghanistan cient to start mounting a dialogue.7 Riddled with contradictions, neither of these studies promises success, and both point to toxic regional and a klepto- cratic Afghan government as major problems. Whether or not these policies will (or can) be implemented is secondary. What is of import is the persistence of tropes such as the ‘Great Game’ and how a narra- tive coined for the benefit of the on took a life of its own. The motiva- tions behind interventions are related not necessarily to Afghanistan, but to the interests, insecurities and ideas of the intervening power instead—which even the corrective policy measures on offer reflect. Attempts to assess Afghanistan on its own merit and define its structural problems—eduring poverty, social cleav- ages, resistance to existing governance structures, evolving state–society relations and the problems of organizing formerly colonized spaces into arbitrary nation- states—are lost in the din of finding quick fixes to an equally complicated war. A new set of books delves deep into history and International Relations (IR) to seek answers to these ‘wicked problems’ in and around Afghanistan. Martin J. Bayly’s Taming the imperial imagination offers a cultural history of Anglo-Afghan diplomatic relations between 1808 and 1878 and shows how British perceptions of Afghanistan ‘provided the understandings that guided them to policy decisions’. Bayly, in a single volume, demolishes powerful self-fulfilling myths. Speaking to multiple audiences with interests across the historical and thematic spectrum, this book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand why Afghanistan looks the way it does in 2017, and more importantly, why many view it the way they do. The first part of the book highlights how deeply political the process of knowledge creation truly is. Afghanistan came to be viewed by military epistemic communities as a ‘buffer zone’ to be strategically dominated in order to ensure a dual system of defence against Russian aggression—unlike the ‘jewel in the crown’ that India was to the British . Its people, mostly poor and largely divided along tribal lines, were construed as restless, restive and unruly militants. In great measure and to considerable effect, these images of Afghans were conscientiously created by a clutch of soldier-scholars who took risks to travel to Afghanistan in order to explore the region’s polity, society, economy and topography. These ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’ included officers like Mount- stuart Elphinstone, Alexander Burnes and Charles Masson, all of whose works have been pivotal in shaping the imperial outlook on Afghanistan. Drawing on the observations of earlier European explorers of the region, their works laid the foundation of powerful and persistent constructs about the country. That there could be parallel narratives of and compelling logics to the behaviour of Afghan communities rooted in local cultures and history became irrelevant. In the second section of the book, Bayly goes on to show how colonial knowl- edge was processed in order to make it policy-relevant. This relied on codifying a vast amount of knowledge into ‘digestible abstract forms’. Complex issues were simplified in order to rationalize colonial policy and practice in Afghanistan. This

7 Theo Farrell and Michael Semple, ‘Ready for peace? The Afghan Taliban after a decade of war’, RUSI Briefing Paper, 31 Jan. 2017, https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/rusi-briefing-afghanistan-310117.pdf. 703

International Affairs 93: 3, 2017 Avinash Paliwal analytical aspect underpins the endurance of knowledge as a political concept across time and space. Advancing a peace process in Afghanistan in 2017 in order to secure US interests, and talking to the Afghan Taliban without becoming too endeared to a kleptocracy in Kabul, are contemporary examples that prove right the French saying: plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Determined more by sentimen- talism than knowledge, as the third part of this book—‘Exception’—highlights, such categorizations ignore, often deliberately, the underlying complexity of the situation. If the Afghans were ‘fanatics’, ‘intriguers’ or ‘tribal’ in the nineteenth century, today they are either ‘terrorists’ or ‘corrupt’. The first lot, appearing as the Afghan Taliban, is to be ‘contained’ by weaning the ‘good’ elements off the ‘bad’, and the second, represented by the Afghan government, needs disciplining through ‘punishments’ and ‘rewards’. Knowledge creation about and policy formulation on Afghanistan, then, is as much an exercise in learning as it is in unlearning. Timothy Nunan’s beautifully written book, Humanitarian invasion, comple- ments Bayly’s work by demonstrating how Afghanistan continued to be a space for experimentation during the Cold War and afterwards. Seen as a ‘laboratory for the future of the Third World nation-state’, competing conceptions of state- hood guided developmental assistance towards Afghanistan. Nunan shows how American, Soviet and German advisers during the 1960s understood Afghan sovereignty and worked hard to ‘rescue’ Afghanistan from itself, ‘a blank spot on the historiographical map’ between the Middle East, and . Arriving with their ideas—rooted in religion, ideology and interests—of what Afghanistan should look like, most external humanitarian actors were discon- nected from local needs and logics. A telling example of this is the Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA), an American-funded project tasked with developing a canal system. With the project becoming an obsession for those in charge, HAVA officials were determined to turn the Afghan South into the American West. Such was their commitment to the cause that they dispatched a Persian speaker to persuade villagers, who, incidentally, only understood , to let HAVA bulldoze their lands. As Nunan wittily observes, it only came as a surprise to HAVA officials ‘when locals met American bulldozers with rifles’. The reception that met Soviet petroleum development in Afghan Turkestan and the West German experience of forestry in Paktia were no different. Designed and implemented more to suit the taste and desires of the agent of development, these projects ended in utter failure. As a protagonist mentions to Nunan, the modernist ‘idea of development’ was falling freely into an abyss. This is when the Cold War became hot in 1979 as Soviet armour rolled into Afghani- stan. Meant to protect Soviet ‘gains’ in the previous years, the invasion was countered by an unlikely alliance of Pakistan-supported , western intel- ligence agencies and French and Swedish humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. Puncturing estab- lished boundaries, the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan and the counter to it were as much a clash of Cold War ideologies as a struggle between those who wanted

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International Affairs 93: 3, 2017 Reimagining Afghanistan to protect the existing system of nation-states and those left-wing radicals who prioritized human rights over state sovereignty and favoured transnational libera- tion movements. While the —and to an equal extent the Americans who bankrolled the mujahideen via Pakistan—typified the former, the Swedish and French humanitarians believed in the latter. Analysing the impact of post-colonial statehood on Third World cultures, while also liberating this history from the straitjacket of state boundaries, Nunan offers an honest and deeply illuminating global history of Afghanistan. The fact that most of these external actors and their ideas were somehow rationalized and even encouraged by Afghans highlights the interactive nature of this history. For instance, the appeal of ‘’ among the Kabul elite meant that most developmental projects came to be viewed as a way to support a nationalist vision that challenged existing territorial realities. It also showed that the political elite in Kabul, like western powers, had limited understanding of and cared little for the requirements of the people. In this respect, Nunan’s book could break the heart of anyone who is interested in Afghanistan on its own merit. It shows how failure has become a trend in the country, even when there are no good reasons for it. Like Bayly, Nunan confirms the thesis that despite decolonization, Afghanistan continued to remain a place where ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’ or ‘humanitarian entrepreneurs’ let their imaginations and aspirations run wild. If such is the history of toxic interventionism in this region, then why and how have the Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands evaded governance and state control—and still ended up becoming a fulcrum of global power play? Elisabeth Leake answers this question in The defiant border. It is often argued that Pakistan’s continuation of the system of political agents in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has been a sign of unquestioned acceptance of the political legacies of the British Raj. The ‘unruly ’ in the mountains of the border regions, so goes the logic, are too remote and violent to control and therefore it is to best leave them be and focus on the rest of Pakistan. Leake demonstrates that this is far from the truth. If anything, both imperial Britain and Pakistan tried hard to assert control over these areas, only to fail in their endeavours. The recent military operations in north-west Pakistan, codenamed Zarb-e-Azb, then, mark the continuation of the political process that Pakistan embarked on soon after independence. In the first chapter, covering the 1936–45 period, Leake details how tribal unrest—and she uses the term ‘tribal’ with the utmost caution—informed British military and political planning before and during the Second World War. Due to the 1936–7 revolts by the ‘Faqir of Ipi’ and Axis ‘intrigues’ in the region, a large garrison had to be stationed in the tribal area, despite gargantuan war efforts elsewhere. As the eastern bastion of the Middle East theatre, maintaining peace in the borderlands remained critical even after the Japanese invasion of Burma and eastern India. In the second chapter, Leake goes on to analyse the importance of these regions during the decolonization process in 1945–7. With the All India Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Indian National Congress under Jawa­harlal

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International Affairs 93: 3, 2017 Avinash Paliwal Nehru competing for influence—exemplified by Nehru’s controversial 1946 visit to Waziristan—the frontier regions witnessed intense activism and animated political debate among various stakeholders. Though the wider processes of and politics around partition of the subcontinent are well documented, Leake success- fully gives voice to the communities in these regions whose demands for autonomy shaped these political debates and are largely unknown or underappreciated in the existing literature. Based on this analysis, the third chapter examines Pakistan’s uneasy relationship with tribal leaders, which was further complicated by Afghan- istan’s calibrations over Pashtunistan. The chapter highlights how, apart from seeking to assert its authority, Pakistan also came to view the armed tribesmen of these regions as a strategic asset in its dispute over with India—a continuing theme in Pakistan–India relations. The first war over Kashmir in 1948 proved valuable on this count. Pakistan used an unhealthy mix of armed villagers from these regions and soldiers from the to attack the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu. Though it failed in achieving its objective, that one act ensured FATA an important place in Afghan, Pakistani and Indian strategic planning. In the fourth chapter, Leake shows how the region fit in US Cold War policies, as became a base for CIA flights over the Soviet Union; and the fifth chapter discusses developments in the region during the presidency of Ayub Khan and the 1965 India–Pakistan war. Both these chapters underline the fact that despite the sociopolitical marginalization of the communities of this region, the frontier areas remained key to the strategic interests of independent Pakistan. They also throw light on the fact that despite Kabul’s best efforts in galvanizing support for an independent Pashtunistan, most tribal leaders remained unsure of such political objectives. Given the history and terrain of the region, it is hardly surprising that the US-led NATO forces were most frustrated when operating in these border areas. Whether it was the escape of Osama bin Laden into the mountains of Tora Bora, or the guerrilla warfare launched by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban against Kabul and Islamabad respectively, the borderlands remained impenetrable. American drone operations in these areas are almost a farcical repetition of imperial British air bombing campaigns to ‘pacify’ tribal revolts. The latter were carried out to ensure stability in the rest of India, the former to support state-building in post-9/11 Afghanistan. Together, Bayly’s, Nunan’s and Leake’s books form a seminal corpus of literature that challenges arguably every floating myth about Afghanistan and its adjacent region. These books lay bare the lazy analytical frames which most contemporary analyses apply to Afghanistan and the Afghans. Instead of asking foundational questions about poverty, the impact of war on society and the economy and why the country is stuck in a conflict trap without any possible egress, most efforts are invested into crafting temporary policy measures that ensure that the ‘gains’ of recent years are not lost. Even a brief look into this literature will be suffi- cient to show that this perennial need to secure temporary gains is a trap and will only prolong the conflict. Maybe ‘focused engagement’ and an ‘insurgent-based

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International Affairs 93: 3, 2017 Reimagining Afghanistan approach’ to reconciliation help stabilize the battlefield—but they will surely not end the war. The urge to make Afghanistan into something that underlying structural, social and political realities do not permit is dangerous and doomed to failure. After all, recent western attempts to rebuild the country into a western- style democracy are little different from former efforts to reshape a Third World state. The core issue that emerges from this important literature, therefore, is the need—both for outsiders and insiders—to reimagine Afghanistan.

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