Abstract
Gyan Prakash, in the introduction to his edited book After Colonialism, expounds a vision to ‘pry open the reading of colonialism from the prison-house of historicism’. The issue at stake is simply to know whether or not former colonies have become free from domination but also the puzzling question as to how the history of colonialism and colonialism’s disciplining of history can be deconstructed from the monopolisation of categories/binaries and ideas it produced—civilised and uncivilised; tribe and nation; coloniser and colonised (Prakash, 1995, p. 5). The need to acknowledge the coloniality of history was put forth in the mid-1990s, a time of a heightened-yet-tense sense of Western supremacy, unilateralism and much hyped Fukuyama’s The End of History. Not long after 9/11, Afghanistan was besieged by an international military alliance under the military operation ‘Enduring Freedom’. Since 9/11, Afghanistan has been turned into an laboratory for a twenty-first century intervention and its application of power. The operation transmogrified into an enduring occupation for two decades. It has made the critical re-evaluation of historical knowledge only more urgent than it had already been. Now, as the USA has retrenched from Afghanistan, it is leaving behind a geopolitical mess to be shouldered by regional neighbours such as India and Pakistan. India unlike Pakistan is the only non-Western power that has for over two decades employed soft power approach stemming entirely from humanitarian concerns and moral exceptionalism, investing in roads, hospitals, schools, dams and so on. India has been a major vital actor in Afghanistan post-9/11 and enjoys the goodwill of its people. India’s constructive role is well recognised and acknowledged by the international community.
Nivi Manchanda, in her magnum opus book, Imagining Afghanistan, excavates two simple but intriguing questions: How is Afghanistan thought about in a way such that it is possible to invade and bomb it? And what are the sources of authority that sanction the discourses that make that act of invasion permissible and possible in the first place? Manchanda digs deeper into the imperialism of colonial knowledge cultivation that has over a period of time presented Afghanistan to the world as a potential ally, dangerous enemy, gendered space, mysterious locale and as a nemesis of modernity. In this innovative examination, Nivi Manchanda unveils, uncovers and critically anatomises Anglophone practices of knowledge production and representational strategies and cogently argues that Afghanistan holds a distinctive place in the imperial imagination: over-determined and under-theorised, due to a particular history of imperial intervention in the region. Emphasising on representations of gender, state and tribes, Manchanda leaves no stone unturned to re-historicise and demythologise the study of Afghanistan through a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing and exhibits how the development of pervasive tropes in the Western conception of Afghanistan have enabled Western intervention, invasion and bombing in the region from the nineteenth century to the present. The book spans the history of modern Afghanistan from the early nineteenth century, when the country was becoming a part of the consciousness of British empire builders, to the present. Manchanda’s book is a prison-break (in Prakash’s sense) that refuses colonialism’s categories and ideas from a wrongful captivity in history in order for them to find their intimate place in the community of Western knowledge on Afghanistan. Reading this book between the lines, one would realise that this magnum opus book of Nivi Manchanda is a product of what academics increasingly called as ‘co-production’. It emerges out of an industry renowned for its practices of appropriation, expropriation, silencing and discrediting and as such it is implicated in those invariably racialised, gendered and classed processes of knowledge production (p. ix).
The book comprises of five chapters, an introduction and the concluding part. Imagining Afghanistan is more than an inventory (the first step for a critical confrontation of historical processes and their traces in ourselves) described in Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks. At its crux, Imagining Afghanistan engages with the ‘hegemonic discourse and its totalizing ambitions’ about histories of the Afghan state and its peoples (p. 5). To begin with, the author argues that Afghanistan represents ‘an intrinsically violent place’ in the general imagination and perception of the transatlantic Anglosphere (p. 3). This brings forth the argument in full circle; it reaffirms Afghanistan’s place in a geopolitical hierarchy whose structure enables and sanctions intervention. Since violence is inherent in the Western knowledge and the widespread rationalisation in its operationalisation and application on Afghan bodies, the significance of this critique cannot be underestimated (Savic, 2020). The book is an example of a detailed portrait of the fears and fantasies driving twenty-first century colonialism. At the heart of anxiety is the Afghan body, terror in potentia. Controlling, monitoring, securitising and informalising it are apparatuses of governance and development running on fantasies. The internationally funded structural violence that is so built into, and borne out of, the geopolitical containment of Afghan bodies underscores the significance of confronting and challenging the colonial past in our post-colonial present.
Revisionist historians such as Hanafi, Benjamin Hopkins and Nile Green, who are presently working on Afghanistan, are diligently committed to reveal the effects of colonialism on Afghanistan’s polity, education, culture and so on. They have also emphasised the entropy and disavowal that have been the characteristic features of British and American engagement with Afghanistan. Meanwhile the totalising control of historical knowledge production and scholarship has contributed to the reification of Afghanistan as a violent place, enemy territory and failed state, turning a bizarre Afghanistan into a tangible object of superior Western intervention (p. 25). As such, Imagining Afghanistan is a decolonising intervention as well as an exercise in auto-decolonisation, urging knowledge practitioners in the social sciences and humanities to ‘unlearn the colonizing impulses of knowledge production in the Western academy’. Chapter 2 looks into the historical trajectory of ‘Afghanistan’ as a ‘spatial formation’, exploring its multiple surreal tropes as a ‘frontier’, ‘buffer’, ‘failed state’ and even non-state or a wild un-governable void. A related concept that of ‘state racism’ is used to anatomise the neologism ‘Af-pak’, amplified by the Obama administration. State racist ‘Af-pak’ is a much-calculated galvanisation of a popular geographical prejudice, which relentlessly perpetuates the production of Afghanistan as a space of exception in an effort to (re)make the region through continued military and epistemic violence (p. 68) which can have far-reaching and deep-seated ramifications today. The author cogently argues that the expression ‘Af-pak’ is derogatory neologism because inhabitants on both sides of the border consider the coinage insulting. The politics of naming here is inexorably linked to both politics of shaming and naming. Lumping people together as ‘enemy’ or ‘terrorist’ populations for the purpose of war. It’s what Achille Mbembe (2019) calls ‘necropolitics’ (extension of biopower to control people’s lives) and finds it most deathly and surreptitious manifestation as a tactic applied on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border.
Terry Anderson a vociferous critic of American foreign policy derides the Bush administration for caricaturing and lampooning the image of Afghans, equating them with ‘disease’. It’s quite surprising that the military-led operation in Afghanistan was changed from ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ to ‘Operation Freedom Sentinel’ in 2015. The word ‘sentinel’ is an indicator of the presence of disease. He further reveals how cartoons and political satires in the Anglosphere regularly echo the sentiment designed to suppress and oppress people to belittle and tarnish their image by invoking tropes like ‘graveyard of empires’ (festering, pathological and infested with cancerous growth). However, this trope pithily weaves together the skeins of geographical determinism, ahistoricism and racialised rendition of Afghan people.
In Chapter 3, the author provides the cutting-edge analysis of the ‘tribalisation’ of Afghanistan and how Afghanistan has been reduced to tribal assemblages of chauvinistic men with proclivity for terrorism and commodification and subjection of women. The author cogently argues that the Western conception of ‘tribe’ is highly unethical. They portray tribe as anachronistic hordes of people seemingly resistant to centralised governance. Although in common parlance, the term ‘tribe’ is loosely used to suggest affiliation with one’s community. But tribe in Afghanistan is constructed as a security problem, a political threat and as something that needs engaging with (p. 109). And hence tribe became the irrefutable marker of Afghan society, polity and culture. This ‘weaponisation of knowledge’ is crucial for an understanding of how information and knowledge has been utilised to control, influence and depict certain people as ‘alien others’. Chapter 4 is a nuanced critique of Western feminist writings, which has led to the reduction and tarnishing of ‘Muslim culture’ by superimposing the neat image of a medieval land of barbaric men and tyrannised women over the weird history of region (p. 175). The author has analysed the myriad ways in which Afghan women have been depicted and represented in the Anglo-American West. The author has examined and assessed an array of articles and commentaries in leading British and American newspapers, films, music and other popular conduits of knowledge dissemination. Afghan women are widely portrayed and perceived as victims of gross injustice, living in hyper-masculine society. There is now an acknowledged need for the transformation of Afghan society—through education—a change in mindset and the subsequent ‘de-Islamisation’ of women. Books, articles, photographs, paintings, travelogues and personal memoirs that attest to Afghanistan’s savagery and underdevelopment infer and speak volumes that Western intervention is the only ray of hope to civilise and modernise Afghanistan, especially its women. The author makes a very incisive argument about how the Western media moguls manufacture helplessness and piety of Afghan women and their fetishistic obsession with ‘burqa’ or veil. Denying agency and voice to women, the portrayal of Afghan woman is filtered through an almost didactic politics of affect. The global insistence that Afghan woman need to be saved from Afghan hyper-masculinity, be educated and taught cultural values through peicemeal social indoctrination that is, by exposing them to neo-liberal Western homogenising culture (Coke, jeans, McDonald’s, Western music and movies), the only embodiments of emancipation for Afghan women. And the Taliban are depicted as one of the most pathetic and elusive enemies of the West (p. 188).
Imagining Afghanistan provides a brilliant conceptual luminosity and is deeply researched, finely articulated and thought-provoking ‘inventory’. It’s a challenge to the cultivation of colonial knowledge that buttresses imperialism and neo-colonialism. This book has scholarly as well as political relevance. This book has unveiled and critically explored the hierarchised, gendered and radicalised assumptions on which our knowledge hinges. The liminal presence and amorphous status of Afghanistan—unfortunately undergirded by lamentable epistemic practices as it is—open up interesting avenues for further exploration and future research. Moreover, it provides a springboard from which to breakdown the egoistic project of colonial knowledge. The very crux of this unputdownable book is that it traces the circuits of imperial knowledge production about Afghanistan in an attempt to re-historicise and demystify the dominant narratives about the Afghan state and its people in order to have a better foreseeable future. In addition, the book envisages an important message to all knowledge practitioners: We cannot undo or escape the past, but we are obliged to transmogrify the way we think about knowledge systems. At this critical juncture, Imagining Afghanistan is also about the stories ‘we’ tell about ourselves and about academia’s role in an age of heightened ‘culture wars’ and ‘post truth’. It’s very unfortunate that Afghanistan continues to be imagined and engaged by the Western academia and policy worlds in a very pessimistic way. However, there is a pressing ethical urge to interrogate history, and engage more with deconstructing the obfuscating banal colonial history that produces epistemological acts of imperial violence.