Colonial Amnesia and Imperialism in Afghanistan
Western tendencies to either forget Afghanistan or to lament the state of affairs is ahistorical and based on systematic colonial amnesia.
Afghans walking by a new hotel being built in Kabul amidst ruins of buildings destroyed in the war - Feb. 8, 2006. Image: John Moore via Getty Images
In the West, politicians, human rights activists and lawyers, migration experts, and to a large extent the general public, is currently and perhaps rightly, fixated on the war in Ukraine. Russian imperialism is being called just that and Ukrainian refugees are being welcomed in mainland Europe, in the UK and in the US with open arms. Meanwhile, another one of Russia’s neighbours, itself a recipient of Russia’s brutal regime of intervention in the 1980s, is also mired in crisis, one that is expressly not of its own making. 50 per cent of this landlocked country is on the brink of starvation, children are severely malnourished and dying of pneumonia, and the economy is “crumbling”. The country is, of course, Afghanistan. Just as the UK rightfully announces a “Homes for Ukraine” scheme which promises to house tens of thousands of Ukrainians, it also implements a draconian policy of deporting ‘migrants’ arriving from Calais to Rwanda, a policy that is likely to target people escaping Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria - states that have, to various degrees, been ravaged by the vagaries of Western imperialism.
Afghanistan in the Imperial Imaginary
It was barely a year ago when the world watched aghast at the “desperate scenes” emerging out of Kabul airport of people clinging on to airplanes in a doomed attempt to flee the country at the prospect of an imminent and total takeover by the Taliban., after a botched US and UK withdrawal announced at the very last minute. For twenty years we were told that the West, led by the US and NATO, was there to protect the people of Afghanistan, especially the women and to ward off the evil, misogynistic Taliban. Now, the West was handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban on a platter.
Women and children made to crouch outside the gate of Kabul airport on Aug. 25, 2021 in the hope that they would be allowed into the British military-controlled entrance of the airport in order to leave Afghanistan. Image: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times
Although this sudden and ill-thought retreat by Western forces appears bewildering at first glance, a longue durée approach to Afghan history, and more specifically historical intervention in Afghanistan, suggests that periods of heightened Western engagement have almost always been followed by disengagement and indifference.
The holy grail of Western historiography sees Afghanistan’s chequered past as essentially one of fits and starts. A schematic 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’ or certainly diminished in the mid twentieth century for military and strategic purposes. Although there were a few important ‘humanitarian’ and ‘modernisation projects’ in the two decades after the Second World War, global attention was focused elsewhere. The Soviet invasion of 1978 put Afghanistan 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.
A volunteer carrying an injured person at the Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul where hundreds gather to try and catch a flight out of the country as the Taliban take over - Aug 2021. Image: Wakil Kohsar/AFP via New York Times
“many of those studying and writing about Afghanistan today have inadvertently reproduced the obfuscation and confusion that has existed in British colonial era documents...”
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 the emergence of deep ethnographic research and a nuanced and reflective corpus of knowledge about the country. Given this relative vacuum, many of those studying and writing about Afghanistan today have inadvertently reproduced the obfuscation and confusion that has existed in British colonial era documents and the colonial archive more generally.
Afghanistan was never fully colonised and was often considered to be on the margins of empire, a frontier space, a “buffer zone” between two meaningful entities (Russia and India) and a pawn in the Great Game of imperial rivalry in Central Asia. Although this history is rightly contested and based on the perspective of the coloniser rather than the lived experience of Afghans themselves, it does help contextualise the material, physical and epistemic violence meted out so haphazardly to Afghans. Owing to this liminal status, what I have elsewhere called ‘quasi-coloniality’, Afghanistan has always been marginal to the politics of empire, even when it has been the subject of brutal intervention and political, social and economic restructuring. For instance, the Northwest Frontier, the border between Afghanistan and colonial India (now Pakistan) was for decades subject to what the British euphemistically called ‘indirect rule’ which in practice meant heavy-handed engagement and violent intervention when they saw fit, and disengagement when the ‘chaos’ was deemed insurmountable.
Border crossing into Afghan territory at the Khyber pass guarded by British troops during the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Image: Foreign Policy
The Politics of Colonial Amnesia
The ebb and flow of imperial interest in Afghanistan over centuries has been mirrored by the way in which Afghanistan is represented, engaged with and thought about by Western publics, media and policy-makers. Even though scholars in and of Afghanistan have done excellent and granular research and debunked the myth that Afghanistan is inherently backwards, prone to warfare, a graveyard of empires etc, these tropes continue to plague our image of Afghanistan.
The irony is that the West (the UK and the US in particular) has been deeply implicated in the very state of affairs it decries so passionately and vehemently. The Taliban, as has been documented extensively, emerged not in a vacuum but was borne of the geopolitical machinations of the United States against the backdrop of a Cold War fought by proxy and largely animated by a desire to control the resources, territory and population of the majority world.
Likewise, the return of the Taliban, stronger than ever is not down to some innate propensity for warfare and religious fanaticism and certainly not because the people of Afghanistan love and cherish them, but simply because the occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its allies was cruel, corrupt and not benefitting the vast majority of Afghans. The Taliban capitalized on this opposition and promised security, safety and food. Although they have not, and likely will not deliver on this promise given their own track record and judging by the reports coming out of Afghanistan today, they are at the very least seen as an Afghan political organization and religious group, rather than foreign invaders. Many Afghans chose the Taliban once again, because they were running out of options.
The Taliban celebrating their return to power by displaying their flag on a helicopter making rounds over Kandahar. Image: Javed Tanveer/AFP
It is undeniable that there is a real and material danger to lives, livelihoods and lifeways under an authoritarian Taliban regime. Nonetheless the white liberal saviour imaginary on the whole only inhabits two subject positions: (i) a persistent bemoaning of the status quo in Afghanistan, sometimes with pity and at other times with disgust, and (ii) an erasure of Afghanistan from the dominant political narrative; a relegation of Afghanistan to the fringes of news coverage and policy relevance.
The first of these can be seen at play especially prominently in liberal feminist depictions of Afghan women as needing saving; identifying them as one homogenous and undifferentiated pre-political constituency, a trope that has a very long and illustrious past.
The second, is the abovementioned tendency to only dedicate time, effort and resource to Afghanistan in times of acute political crises. Both these positionalities are regrettable for a host of reasons, but they are especially shocking because they are premised on a complete denial of any complicity in creating the very ‘Afghanistan’ they have either no time or only repulsion for. This disavowal of imperialism in profoundly shaping the Afghan political present contributes to the double bind and false choice Afghan people find themselves confronting time and again: brutal outside invasion or local patriarchy and dictatorial rule.
“Afghanistan provides a difficult ethical challenge: how can we support a people without endorsing a terrible regime?”
This is emphatically not an endorsement of the often sympathetic perspective that Afghans have no agency. It is merely a recognition of the scale and structural nature of the political imbroglio they are facing. Indeed, it is also a call to re-centre Afghans who have been doggedly fighting oppression on multiple fronts. Without falling into the voyeuristic trap of empathy or worse sympathy from afar, the most urgent task remains to bolster, rather than systematically forget those very voices that have dedicated themselves to exposing and battling the twinned evils of Taliban authoritarianism and imperial interventionism. Development assistance, access to asylum, and perhaps a conversation about reparations should also be on the table. Western tendencies to colonial amnesia, or a recourse to hoary clichés about the graveyard of empires, tribal warlords, and women in blue burqas who need saving only serve to aggravate the problem.
Even for those of us, who are critical of Western intervention and are broadly part of the left, Afghanistan provides a difficult ethical challenge: how can we support a people without endorsing a terrible regime? How we navigate this dilemma will shape, at least in small part, the future available to those currently facing a tidal wave of tragedy, that is once again not what they signed up for.
Dr. Nivi Manchanda is a senior lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. She is interested in questions of colonialism and racism and is the author of Imagining Afghanistan: the History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge.