Review Article Reimagining Afghanistan
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Review article Reimagining Afghanistan AVINASH PALIWAL Taming the imperial imagination: colonial knowledge, international relations, and the Anglo-Afghan 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 Cold War 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–Pakistan 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 Middle East and Ukraine, had begun engaging with its enemy in Afghanistan, the Taliban. Moscow asserted that the so-called Wilayat Khorasan, an Afghan and Pakistani chapter of the Islamic State 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 China—whereas Iran was materially supporting the Taliban in an attempt to compete with Pakistan for influence over the insurgent movement. India continued to support the Kabul 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 Oxford University Press 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 Afghans 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 Barack Obama 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’, Al Jazeera, 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”’, The Wall Street Journal, 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 geopolitics 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 British Raj 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 Empire. 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