Faiz Ahmed - Afghanistan Rising

ON MAY 17, 1929, an intrepid high school student in Los Angeles, California, sat at his desk, pulled out a sheet of paper and pencil, and began his homework. A particularly daunting class project had been weighing on his shoulders, and time to procrastinate was running out. His assignment: to find primary source material on the state of law and government in Afghanistan. At a loss with where to begin, the young Edison Ostrom was aware the British Raj had a thorny relationship with the Forbidden Kingdom, as Afghanistan had been infamously known in English novels and newspapers since Victorian times. So he decided to press his case with the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Edisons handwritten letter, still legible in faded pencil lead, was forthright in its request: Our class here in school has been studying Asia but has been unable to get any up to date material on Afghanistan, Ostrom confessed. Would you please inform me what the present form of government is. Before affixing his signature, Edison could not resist scribbling a final query at the letters close: whether London would confirm rumors that famed British superspy T. E. Lawrence was involved in covert operations against the Kabul government from the tribal zone of northwestern India, as he had been over a decade earlier against the Ottomans in Arabia.

Two months later, Edison received a response, but from a source much closer to the action than he expected: Simla, northern India, the summer capital of the British Raj. In a formal reply from the Foreign and Political Department of the government of India, veteran Raj official Sir James Glasgow Acheson first lauded the youths initiativethe enterprise displayed in which undoubtedly deserves encouragementbut regretted to inform him that there is unfortunately no generally recognized central Government in Afghanistan, which is in a state of civil war. As for the purported role of Colonel Lawrence in the Afghan tumult, Sir Acheson was resolute and dismissive: These rumours, which were partly due to anti-British propaganda and partly to sensationalism pure and simple are absolutely without any foundation of any kind.

The student from Los Angeles had received an answer, but reasonable minds could differ as to its educational value. Though not exactly inaccurate, the transoceanic letter exchange was noticeably silent on Afghanistans more positive and instructive achievements in recent years, including its independence from Britain in 1919 and the promulgation of its first constitution in 1923, among other milestones in law, governance, and diplomacy in that decade alone. Instead, one students search for reliable material on the country yielded an ahistorical portrait bereft of contextjust another day of mayhem in Afghanistan, so it would seem. In the end, perhaps a fixation on motifs of war, chaos, and regime change by the questioner and questioned here is not so remarkable. Nearly a century later, after all, when it comes to Afghanistan many a writer and reader continue to be drawn to the same themes.