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    The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History: From Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
    The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History: From Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
    The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History: From Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
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    The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History: From Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

    By Thomas J. Barfield

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    When it invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the United States sought to do something previous foreign powers had never attempted: to create an Afghani state where none existed. More than a decade on, the new regime in Kabul remains plagued by illegitimacy and ineffectiveness. What happened? As Thomas Barfield shows, the history of previous efforts to build governments in Afghanistan does much to explain the difficulties besetting this newest experiment.


    Princeton Shorts are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in ebook format. Providing unmatched insight into important contemporary issues or timeless passages from classic works of the past, Princeton Shorts enable you to be an instant expert in a world where information is everywhere but quality is at a premium.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMay 6, 2012
    ISBN9781400843145
    The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History: From Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

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    • 4/5
      Well-written and with meaningful insights, although text can be somewhat repetitive, or at least organised symphonically.
    • 4/5
      Reading this fascinating book is like registering for a survey course in the History of Afghanistan. However, this is a double-edged sword in that returning to read it is not necessarily a pleasure but almost the equivalent of fulfilling a classroom assignment. Once you're immersed in it, the book takes over, but the text is dense and academic and a tad dry, although leavened occasionally with a nice throw-away line. Barfield is a professor of anthropology, and his expertise lends a dimension to history; one learns, for example, of the key interactions between the nation's most important ethnic groups and how this interplay effected the actions of the State. It is quite amazing how ignorant the George W. Bush administration was of the country's culture; as usual, they got it wrong consistently and without fail. The impact of Al Qaeda is viewed against the background of a country which considered itself the leading exponent of Islam; the number of foreign Al Qaeda warriors was not appreciated by the population. The rural vs. urban nature of Afghanistan often translated into reactionary vs. radical (in the context of Afghan history). Rural Afghanistan remains one of the most underdeveloped regions in the world. And often, it was Afghan monarchs who refused to modernize, preferring the status quo which allowed them to rule without insurrection. When modernizers were dominant in Kabul, the state was often plunged into civil war or insurgencies. Also: there is a general, widespread love of country, which in times of foreign intervention translates into nation-wide resistance. However, this is not yet nationalism because the term "nation-state" does not apply to the entity of Afghanistan. There is little sense, for example, of how Afghanistan fits into a global picture--or even a regional one. There is merely the sense of nationhood.
    • 4/5
      Great piece ti close to Afghan modern history, is OK to start.
    • 4/5
      Ever since The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Three Cups of Tea, I’ve found Afghanistan to be a strangely compelling region. In those books, there was a different sense of the humanity of the people compared to what is seen on the nightly news, and it was difficult to align the two in my mind. Mention Afghanistan to someone and all they usually come up with is the notorious Taliban or the crumbling ruins that appear on the news. How accurate is that image? When I first received Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, I hoped to find that answer and at the same time, that the book wouldn’t be too dry or heavy on political rhetoric. I was pleased to find that it’s an incredibly readable history book that makes the subject understandable and reveals the complicated lives of the people of Afghanistan. The author manages to compile the history without a political agenda or motive.First off is recognizing that culturally, Afghanistan is made up of both tribal and nontribal ethnic groups. These groups mean everything to the people, and unlike some cultures, “tribal and ethnic groups take primacy over the individual.” In other words, “individuals support decisions made by their group even when such support has negative consequences for themselves.” This is a somewhat unique trait, and contributes to the devotion many have for their leaders. They also have an intense oral history that is repeated through the ages that also creates a sense of cohesiveness between past and present. These people live in a land crisscrossed by history, from Genghis Khan to Alexander the Great (see the photo of his castle above right). It was conflict between tribal regions, a civil war, that made the ordinary Afghan people eager to have the US come in to intervene with the Taliban, as “a drowning person is not too picky about who throws him a line….Afghanistan had either been ignored or abused by the outside world as it descended into chaos.” The Taliban, known for their desire to spread extremely conservative Islam, had riddled the nation with violence towards women and other religions. They’ve managed to alienate even those countries that were providing needed humanitarian aid. They do not have the support of the ‘ordinary’ citizen, as at times the Taliban members have numbered below 150 members. A good portion of the book deals with how and why the Taliban gained such power. Another portion discusses the occupation by Britain and Soviet Russia prior to more recent actions with the US.The historical details are interesting, but it was the smaller things that were more revealing. For example, why is it that on the news you usually see only children or old people? Their hardscrabble lives, tending outdoors to agriculture and focused on manual labor, shows up on their faces and they appear prematurely aged. Are the devastated streets of broken concrete typical? Actually no, as the majority of citizens live in small villages far from urban areas such as Kabul. Is it just a land of dust and opium poppies? No again, as stone fruit, grapes, nuts, citrus fruits, melons, and rice are grown in different parts of the country, depending on what areas are irrigated. The famous mountainous region, known to have been a hiding place for bin Laden, is in the center of Afghanistan. Its steepness creates dynamic changes in climate in just a few hours of travel, and creates a diverse variety of crops.The current situation in Afghanistan is covered in the sixth chapter, where Barfield addresses the complicated social concerns that continually plague the country. The resurgence of the Taliban and their religious ideology reverses social progress, while modern policies want to focus on reducing the religious power of clerics. Additional goals include establishing rights for women, tolerance of non-Muslim faiths, implementing educational policies, and modernizing archaic laws to better represent the desires of the majority.

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    The War for Afghanistan - Thomas J. Barfield

    The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History

    THOMAS BARFIELD

    A PRINCETON SHORTS selection from Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

    When it invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the United States sought to do something previous foreign powers had never attempted: to create an Afghani state where none existed. More than a decade on, the new regime in Kabul remains plagued by illegitimacy and ineffectiveness. What happened? As Thomas Barfield shows, history of previous efforts to build governments in Afghanistan does much to explain the difficulties besetting this newest experiment.

    PRINCETON SHORTS are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in eBook format. Providing unmatched insight into important contemporary issues or timeless passages from classic works of the past, Princeton Shorts enable you to be an instant expert in a world where information is everywhere but quality is at a premium. For more information and a complete list of books in the series, please visit http://press.princeton.edu/PrincetonShorts.

    The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History comprises chapter 5 from Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, by Thomas Barfield. Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press

    Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

    In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

    press.princeton.edu

    All Rights Reserved

    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. Afghanistan—Politics and government. 2. Afghanistan—History. 3. Afghanistan—Social conditions. 4. Islam and politics—Afghanistan— History.

    I. Title.

    DS357.5.B37 2010 958.1—dc22     2010002082

    British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

    Princeton Shorts edition, 2012

    eISBN 978-1-400-84314-5

    CONTENTS

    Afghanistan Enters the Twenty-first Century

    Notes

    About the Author

    Related Titles

    AFGHANISTAN ENTERS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

    The arrival of the United States in Afghanistan to expel the Taliban marked the fourth time in 160 years that a foreign power put troops on the ground there. But while the British in the nineteenth century invaded with plans to replace the existing regimes, and the Soviets invaded in the twentieth to preserve the one they supported, the United States invaded Afghanistan at a time when the state structure had ceased to function. It would need to create a new state to restore stability in the country. In the past this was done by supporting a client political elite in Kabul that would use foreign money and weapons to centralize power. After a quarter century of warfare, however, such a strategy was no longer as viable. There was no political elite in Kabul able to take the reins of power and get others to accept its authority. In addition, too many people had become politicized, at least to the extent of demanding a share of power in the new regime and greater control over local affairs. Yet perhaps because Afghanistan appeared so backward to outside observers, no thought was given to devising a new type of government for this changed situation. Instead, the international community hurried to restore the highly centralized government first imposed on Afghanistan by Abdur Rahman, albeit one in which the government’s legitimacy was to be based on elections rather than dynastic right. The weaknesses of this model in terms of leadership, functionality, and legitimacy became apparent soon after Hamid Karzai took power.

    To be successful, the leader of a centralized state needed to remove the existing power holders who were determined to undermine state power or make them subservient. Karzai, for all his admirable characteristics, was seen as passive, weak willed, and prone to compromise. Far from acting as a state builder, Karzai adopted a patrimonial model of the state in which its offices and resources were redistributed on a personal basis to buy the support of existing power holders or play them off against one another. Such tactics encouraged maladministration and corruption, failings that debilitated earlier Afghan governments, and these became worse as time passed. Holding loya jirgas and elections meant little if they could not ensure popular participation in government or make government respond to popular complaints. When the Afghan government proved unable to provide the level of security and economic development that the population expected, it was forced to rely ever more heavily on its international backers to maintain itself. This only highlighted Karzai’s weakness and undermined his legitimacy in Afghan eyes, particularly when these foreign efforts on his government’s behalf proved, as an American idiom has it, a day late and a dollar short. Still, it was not until the Taliban insurgency flared up in 2006 that the dangers of complacency began finally to be recognized, although little was done until the Obama administration reversed U.S. foreign policy to focus on Afghanistan in 2009. That the situation was not worse owed much to the desire of the Afghan people to see normality restored to their country—a goal that the Taliban had little hope of delivering by reintroducing war into a country that had seen too much of it. Whether new policies could bring peace and stability to Afghanistan was the question that now hung in the balance.

    Although nothing is more problematic than sorting through recent events, the consequences of which are unknown (or worse, misapprehended), it is revealing to set the establishment of the Karzai government and its development in the context of earlier similar efforts in Afghanistan. The focus in this chapter is therefore less on events per se than on how they illuminate the process of Afghan state rebuilding (in theory and practice), its leadership, and the role that the international community has played in Afghanistan. For the United States, all was new; for the Afghans, much was recycled. How this period would turn out depended on both of them. Keeping in mind the famous response reputedly made by Chinese prime minister Chou En-lai that it was too soon to tell when asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, the consequences of this interaction may become finally apparent only long after all the current actors have left the stage.

    THE UNITED STATES IN AFGHANISTAN, 2001–

    In 2001, the world community sought to restore peace and stability to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. This goal was well short of being achieved as the country approached the end of its first decade in the new century. Depending on how you looked at it, Afghanistan was either once again on the verge of chaos as a failed state or was surprisingly stable given the problems it faced. There were many positives. The presence of international forces and outside aid had ended the civil war. Millions of refugees had rapidly returned from exile in Iran and Pakistan. A political process for creating and ratifying a constitution had run smoothly, allowing the popular election of a national leader, Hamid Karzai, for the first time in Afghan history. On the other hand, the military and financial resources allocated to the country were grossly inadequate to provide security and improve one of the world’s lowest standards of living. The large sums of money pledged for reconstruction at first raised the expectations of ordinary Afghans to unreasonable levels, but as the years passed people had a right to be disappointed by how little was being accomplished at such great expense. Worse, project priorities were set by the funders, not the Afghans, so they rightly questioned the wisdom of building schools and hospitals without teachers and doctors to staff them,

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