The United States is currently engaged in an effort to elevate Afghanistan to the status of exemplary moderate Islamic state. What exactly are the prospects for accomplishing this mission based on Afghanistan’s history and culture?
The first thing to realize when broaching this question is that Afghanistan is not a nation, and barely a country. Historically, Afghanistan served as a corridor for the rampaging armies of the East moving west, of the West headed east, and of central Asia moving north or south. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane) are only the most famous of foreign rulers who used this geopolitical thoroughfare to fulfill their imperial ambitions. For all recorded history, Afghanistan has either been occupied by a foreign power in full or in part, or subsisted through some interim in which foreign powers were repositioning themselves for another move.
It’s for this reason that historians and those who accept the moniker “Afghan” place such great emphasis on the formation of the “Durrani Empire” in 1747. At this point, one of the region’s tribal leaders was elected King of Afghanistan by an assembly of notables. Even at this point, however, it would be an exaggeration to say that Afghanistan existed as anything other than a primitive feudal amalgam.
I liken the situation in Afghanistan to France in the Dark Ages. In 987, Hugh Capet was selected by the various lords of France as king. He was elevated to the nominal role of king precisely because it served the interests of the lords, who didn’t want centralized rule. Capet’s own land holdings around Paris were insignificant compared to those of the Duke of Normandy or Duke of Aquitaine. As king he would have no real power. Ahmad Shah Durrani, chosen in 1747 as “king” of Afghanistan was in a similar position, except one could argue that Afghanistan in 1747 was quite far behind France of 987. The region had not even coalesced into permanent feudal holdings under major “dukes” or “counts”. The relationships to which Afghans adhered (and many still do adhere) were tribal, like those of the Germanic tribes out of which the Frankish kingdom first came together as Rome fell.
Unlike France, however, Afghanistan never managed to experience the dynastic stability out of which a centralized monarchy could arise. Although Ahmad Shah was succeeded by his son, as Robert II succeeded Hugh Capet in France, the Durrani dynasty never experienced that long string of successes that gave the Capetian dynasty its storied place in French history. Even as the Durrani Empire was in the process of crystallizing, external events swamped its progress.
In 1798, Napoleon demonstrated his intention to move on India by conquering Egypt. Then France allied with Russia in a move that might yield an overland expedition to the nascent British Empire in Asia. Because of this threat the British began to keep a close eye on developments in central Asia, and the “Great Game” was initiated. Woe be to the Afghans, who had no idea their little corner of world was viewed as a pawn in a continental chess match between world powers.
The Shah of Afghanistan and his Suitors in the “Great Game”
They would learn quickly enough, as the British–who judged Afghanistan to be an unworthy state–initiated the Anglo-Afghan Wars in order to achieve regime change in India’s backward neighbor. First in 1839, and then again in 1878, British armies invaded to try to transform Afghanistan into a useful buffer state.
When the region proved too backward to use, but not backward enough to dismiss entirely, the British decided to strike a deal with the Russians, whose empire by 1875 had reached the Amu Darya (the river which now forms part of Afghanistan’s northern boundary. The two empires drew Afghanistan’s borders themselves, including the hated Durand Line which now bisects key Afghan tribes, imposing Pakistani citizenship on some and Afghan rule on others. (A strange result of this imperial boundary tracing exercise is that Afghanistan shares a border with China, and anyone who crosses that line headed East loses both freedom and 3.5 hours of their lives!)
Afghanistan’s present borders were largely imposed upon it by Russia and Britain.
Strangely, Afghanistan got off pretty easy when it came to the World Wars. In 1907, with the Anglo-Russian Entente, the Great Game came to an end. Its two contestants agreed to work together against a common threat instead. Then, as the World Wars consumed the West’s attention, Afghanistan slipped under the radar. It was so backward that nobody really bothered.
Things changed however in 1947, when Pakistan was formed and the Cold War turned the region into a battleground once again. The partitioning of the region by Britain was given permanence when the United States chose to view Pakistan as a key ally of the “Northern Tier” to contain Communism. It armed that country while largely ignoring Afghanistan.
The Soviets, not surprisingly, saw Afghanistan as ripe for the picking. Gradually, as the country moved from having one school in 1904, to two, three, four by WWII, “Western” ideas–including Marxism–began to percolate through the educated elite. With Soviet help, a Communist party staged a coup in 1978 and the primitive Islamic region was catapulted into the era of “scientific socialism.” Not surprisingly, the dissonance between old and new was too great, and the Soviet were forced to move in to prop up the Communist regime, lest it fail for all the world to see. From 1979-1989, the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan.
As Communism collapsed, a power vacuum was created, into which all the pent up Islamic tribal energies of the various peoples of Afghanistan were sucked. The country fell into Civil War, and gradually fell under the control of the Taliban.
From this point onward, the story is familiar to most Americans. The Taliban regime that hosted Osama Bin Laden was displaced by Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 after the 9-11 attacks. And US forces have been there ever since.
What is the relevance of this background to the present? Afghanistan has never become a true state, and it has constantly lived in subordinacy to outside powers. As a result of its history as a “highway of conquest,” as one historian put it, and its recent subordination to Britain and the Soviet Union, Afghanistan really only exhibits one cultural constant: a desire for independence. You often hear people say that the Afghans are “freedom lovers.” This is a misrepresentation. The people who live in Afghanistan are “self-determination lovers”–and with good reason! But these are not the same thing.
Left to their own devices, the Afghans would make war on each other long into the foreseeable future. Their loyalties remain to the tribe, above all, and to Islam. They would not embrace political freedom and create republican institutions; they would seek to dominate each other on the basis of traditional ideas about tribal and religious life. If threatened by outside interference, they would come together, but revert to internecine feuding as soon as the threat receded. They simply don’t know how to live any differently.
Can this be changed by an extended US presence? It’s possible, but not likely. Certainly, the timescale of the requisite cultural change is much longer than anyone in the Bush administration would care to fathom. First, Afghan tribalism is alive and well, and there are simply too many parts of the country that the US-supported government does not control. Second, Afghanistan is not being injected with a sufficiently deep Western outlook. Afghanistan’s so-called universities don’t teach humanities like history and philosophy. They teach computers, engineering, medicine–and Islamic Law. The intellectual framework needed to sustain free institutions is thus not being erected. The minute the US ceases to prop up the country, the weight of Afghanistan’s history and culture will cause the whole apparatus to collapse.
To learn more about the story of Afghanistan, try my lecture on the History of Afghanistan as part of the Islamist Entanglement. For the most accessible reading on the subject, I recommend the Greenwood History of Afghanistan by Meredith Runion. It’s not as thorough as Martin Ewans’s Short History of Afghanistan, which is also useful, but it’s a better introduction.