Thomas Barfield - Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)

Afghanistan

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Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

A CULTURAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY

Thomas Barfield

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2010 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barfield, Thomas J. (Thomas Jefferson), 1950

Afghanistan : a cultural and political history / Thomas Barfield.

p. cm. (Princeton studies in Muslim politics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. AfghanistanPolitics and government. 2. AfghanistanHistory. 3. AfghanistanSocial conditions. 4. Islam and politicsAfghanistanHistory. I. Title.

DS357.5.B37 2010

958.1dc22 2010002082

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

C HAPTER O NE
People and Places

C HAPTER T WO
Conquering and Ruling Premodern Afghanistan

C HAPTER T HREE
Anglo-Afghan Wars and State Building in Afghanistan

C HAPTER F OUR
Afghanistan in the Twentieth Century: State and Society in Conflict

C HAPTER F IVE
Afghanistan Enters the Twenty-first Century

C HAPTER S IX
Some Conclusions

F IGURES

M APS

I first entered Afghanistan traveling overland as a young student almost forty years ago. Like many travelers, I was awed by the countrys scenery and fascinated by its people. Unlike most others I returned to learn more. That journey never ended but has often been detoured. It first encompassed years of ethnographic fieldwork among nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s. I had a unique opportunity to experience life as it is actually lived in rural Afghanistansomething that seemed so easy to come by then and is so difficult now. It was a time of peace and security, when foreigners could travel the breadth of the country alone, armed only with a bit of common sense to ensure their safety. Political changes in Kabul rarely had any serious impact outside the capital. I was in Kabul the day that Zahir Shah (r. 193373) was overthrown in 1973. The biggest change was how quickly his pictures disappeared and how soon they were replaced by those of his cousin Daud.

This calm was deceptive, however, because others seeking power in Kabul, Communists and Islamists, sought to transform the country in radically different directions. The leftists had the first go in 1978 and provoked an insurgency, which the Soviet invasion in late 1979 was designed to quell. During the ten-year Soviet occupation I observed the country from the outside, informed by occasional trips to Pakistan to work with Afghan refugees. The Russian withdrawal in 1989 proved to be a false dawn of optimism. None of the great powers was willing to provide the necessary political and economic investment to forge an agreement between the Pakistan-based mujahideen (holy warriors) parties in Peshawar and the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. The Russians wanted nothing more to do with the country, and the Americans lost all interest in it when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. This opened a ten-year civil war in which the Islamist leaders became dominate, and proved they could be every bit as ruthless and power hungry as the Communists they replaced. The nadir of this period produced the Taliban in the late 1990s.

From my safe perch in the United States I continued to follow the few reports that came out of Afghanistan, but was rarely asked about the country or its people. Critics of the university tenure system undoubtedly put me among those useless faculty who purveyed esoteric and irrelevant knowledge to the young without fear of termination. Wise policymakers had already determined that such remote places and people could be safely excluded from Americas New World Order.

On September 11, 2001, Afghanistan suddenly became relevant. Now people wanted to know why we did not have more information on the country and its people. In 2002, I returned to northern Afghanistan after a twenty-five-year absence. The nomads I had lived with had survived and even prospered. (Regardless of ideology, everyone was still in the market for the mutton that the nomads produced.) But the countrys infrastructure was destroyed and its security remained fragile. I began publishing more extensively, particularly on issues of customary law. In collaboration with other scholars, in 2003 I helped establish the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies. I was asked to give many scholarly presentations and occasionally advise policymakers. It proved difficult to explain Afghanistan and its politics to those who took an interest in it only after 2001. Not that it mattered much. Tired clichs passed as insights, and few policymakers thought of consulting any Afghans who could not speak English. There was, in any event, little appetite for real engagement in Afghanistan after 2002 because the Bush administration was preoccupied with Iraq.