Afghanistan Under Siege

The Afghan Body and the Postcolonial Border

Bojan Savic

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780755637553
• eBook ISBN: 9781788317948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In this book, based on field work undertaken in Afghanistan itself and through engagement with postcolonial theory, Bojan Savic critiques western intervention in Afghanistan by showing how its casting of Afghan natives as "dangerous" has created a power network which fractures the country – in echoes of 19th and 20th century colonial powers in the region. Savic also offers an analysis of how and by what means global security priorities have affected Afghan lives.

Part I

Questions, Who Is Addressing Them and How

1

Introduction: The Abnormal of the Afghan War on Terror

The Troublesome Herati Subject

My first visit to Afghanistan was in December 2014. Truth be told, it did not take long before I realized that years of preparation for fieldwork had not done enough to dispel my subliminal notions of Afghan modernity as ‘different’ and ‘not quite familiar’. As I walked around Kabul’s international airport looking for Zabiullah – my guide, interpreter and key informant in the city – I realized that the little I knew about him was comically inadequate. ‘Tall, in his mid-twenties, usually wearing very modern clothes’ is the person I was looking for. Alas, nearly every young man I saw around the airport looked just like that. The male Afghan body presented itself to me in the manner most bodies do – as unremarkable and everyday. It took us about an hour until we finally found each other based on the photos and verbal descriptions that we had been given. At any rate, the conversation unfolded easily and I was soon sharing with Zabiullah my first experiences of Kabul. I remember being both unsettled and entertained by a brief interaction I had had with an American security contractor at the airport arrival hall. I jokingly told Zabiullah that she had warned me against leaving my ‘secure compound’ while in town. He responded by bemoaning the separation of ‘Westerners’ from ‘real Kabul’, and added: ‘This idea of escape is false. Afghans make their compounds possible. There would be no compounds without us.’

Ordinary Afghans have been thrust into security and economic relations that privilege foreign development professionals and security personnel. Yet, while deprived of safe compounds, Afghans are indispensable to the operation of the US/NATO governance apparatus as farmers, police officers, private security recruits, construction workers, trash collectors, pharmacists, language interpreters, etc. They appropriate exclusion into fodder for endurance. Throughout my fieldwork, numerous interviewees iterated these power relations as reminiscent of Afghanistan’s colonial experience during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book critiques the post-2001 US, NATO, and UN-led governance of Afghanistan by going beyond the recurring debates on its failures and errors (Bizhan 2018, Fairweather 2014, Coburn and Larson 2014, Johnson and Leslie 2004). Instead, it scrutinizes the strategies and social effects of Afghan reconstruction against the backdrop of pervasive imaginations of Afghan populations as risky and threatening. How and by what means have global security priorities affected Afghan lives? This book argues that global governance targets the Afghan body as a space of power, a risky landscape to be monitored and governed. This targeting works through combinations of security and development interventions that betray the postcolonial logic of governance: one that reproduces hierarchies in the social utility of humans along racial, class, cultural and other lines. Few regions in Afghanistan have experienced the diversity of post-conflict reconstruction and security programmes like Herat, the country’s westernmost province of around 1.9 million residents. On average, Herat has been the sixth largest recipient of foreign aid among Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces (Afghan Ministry of Finance 2012, Afghan Ministry of Finance 2011) and a historical ‘trading’ and ‘economic hub’ in Central Asia (Leslie 2015). Based on original fieldwork carried out in Kabul and Herat (in December 2014 through January 2015 and May through June 2016), this monograph studies Herati encounters with postcolonial security. I embed Herat in the ‘postcolony’ – a space of entangled temporalities, discontinuities, and inertias mired in the legacies of exploitative colonial power (Young 2015, 135–148, Mbembe 2001). To paraphrase Joshua Lund’s discussion of race, postcolony is the ‘racialization of space’ and the ‘naturalization of segregation’ (Lund 2012, 75) on trans-social and trans-corporeal (‘global’) scales.

Justified by ritualized invocations of September 11 and alarming migration statistics, postcolonial governance targets dangerous populations everywhere. Brown, dispossessed, physically isolated from the neighbouring nations and the wider world, and poorly protected, Afghan bodies are easy targets that reflect the pain of Muslims violated worldwide. Postcolonial security heightens Afghan vulnerabilities by murdering them, constraining their ‘free’ movement, or incentivizing only acceptable work and religious practices. While cultivating ‘normal’ conducts, power represses the abnormal of Afghan terror wars: those eccentrically religious, poor, desperate, and ominous to ‘global stability’. Moreover, postcolonial governance utilizes security and development interventions to surveil the constricted Afghan body and develop lessons about its behaviour purportedly reflective of global ‘extremism’. Throughout, governance apparatuses re-test hypotheses about what ‘works’ in ‘combatting terror’. Yet, this book also tells stories of how power generates its own resistances. It is a narrative of Heratis who counter-exploit postcolonial interventions to maximize their own life chances in ways deemed corrupt or dangerous by the governance apparatus.

Media reporting, punditry, politicians, military brass and dominant International Relations, Development and Security Studies scholarship portray Afghanistan and Afghans as risky for the ‘world’ in terms of security, migration, opium production, public health, organized crime, etc. They casually depict Afghans as a financial and human drain on global governance institutions: as a space of sparse success or outright failure of reconstruction, development and state-building efforts. A 2013 public poll found that eight in ten Americans had an unfavourable opinion of Afghanistan, making it the sixth least popular country in the world among US respondents (Newport and Himelfarb 2013). These representations seem uninterested in the everyday experience of insecurity, loss of life and welfare, systemic surveillance, neglect, and marginalization of ordinary Afghans subjected to the priorities and instruments of regional and global ‘stability’. This book addresses this representational gap by drawing attention to a fuller experience of life in Herat as one of Afghanistan’s more prosperous cities, a mere 125 km from the Afghan-Iranian border. I invite the reader to think of perilous bodies as lives in peril. Furthermore, in contrast to simplifications of Afghan resistances as the violent, cannibalistic and anti-civilizational Taliban or Daesh insurgencies, this book highlights nonviolent everyd ay rejections and evasions of the US, EU and NATO-funded security apparatus and governance more broadly.

The critiques and stories presented here aim to achieve several purposes. My primary goal is to counter journalistic, policy and scholarly caricatures of Afghans as violent, religiously fanatic, tribal and expendable, and instead draw attention to Afghan lives as vulnerable to oppression by enmeshed ‘external’ (‘Western’ and ‘Oriental’) and ‘domestic’ actors. In articulating Herati vulnerabilities, this book underscores the unequal life chances and experiences of security stemming from class, racial, ethnic, gender and other divides typically invisible to the white, male, middle-class expert and analyst. I hope that this monograph will help intensify discussions on the impact of global security on Afghan lives and well-being by injecting vocabularies of social justice and global race-class inequalities into the conversations on governance, security and reconstruction.

Dominant scholarship on Afghan security and state-building is trapped in success/failure debates and metrics shaped by international donors (Felbab-Brown 2013, Jones 2008). Instead, this book analyses how Afghan governance subjects the lives it claims to empower and, paradoxically, empowers them in ways it does not intend to. Furthermore, in departing from the literature on Empire (Hopkins 2018, Chomsky 2012, Mann 2003, Hahn and Heiss 2001), this book argues that security governance in Afghanistan serves to protect an evasive norm of ‘global stability’ more so than the US or her NATO allies. Likewise, I argue that postcolonial power subjects the racial, cultural, and gendered ‘abnormal’, regardless of whether ‘Western’ or ‘liberal’ actors are involved. Iranian, Emirati, Russian, and other non-Western ‘core’ actors treat the Afghan body as the global ‘periphery’: the abnormal that is only conditionally useful and otherwise dangerous. Finally, this book uniquely argues that winning Afghan ‘hearts and minds’ is compatible with ignoring them as the ‘collateral damage’ of counterterrorism: both strategies objectify Afghan bodies as resources in the war on terror. To both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, Afghan populations are means deployable in defence of global security.

The rest of this chapter situates Herati bodily geographies within broader global security. Thereafter, I position this monograph in the field of critiques of security and development in Afghanistan, and reflect on the reward and difficulty of researching the quotidian practices of Herati life in the context of postcolonial security. Finally, I outline how the remainder of the book will proceed.

Herat at the Limit: Between the Postcolonial Frontier and Security Unbound

An inquiry into the social-corporeal effects of security on Heratis should perhaps begin by situating Herat Province and Herat City historically and geopolitically, particularly vis-à-vis the logic of global security governance. This will help explain why Herat is a place and a population at the limit of competing and overlapping power relations.

Herat at the Limit: Between Afghanistan and Iran, Pashtunistan and Persia, Sunnis and Shias

Speaking to Heratis over the years, my understanding of where Herat is has shifted. Chapter 2 will expound upon territory and population as subjectivities or ‘selves’ that are neither one’s conscious choice nor simple facts of genetics and geography. Rather, they are products of broader social truths and power struggles. I have come to see Herat’s subjectivity as liminal (rather than Afghan): as ‘in-between’, ‘both’ and ‘neither’ (Bhabha 1994) in relation to dominant population-territories that have delineated it through history.

The imaginations and descriptions of Herat have varied over time, and Chapter 3 will explore some of that history. Yet, whichever descriptors are applied to the city and its wider region, the vitality of the Harirud (Herat River) and its fertile valley has been credited with breathing life into the city and the whole Province.¹ Historical and contemporary accounts (Henty 1902, Doubleday 2006, Lamb 2002) romanticize Herati life as a historical force that has willed itself upon an arid geomorphology and climate, surrounding dominions and plundering tribes of lesser sophistication. Its ‘strategic’ location, ‘not quite on the Silk Road, but close enough to profit from its trade’ (Gammell 2016, 5), has been credited with sustaining that force. Rather than seeing Herat as battling to maintain its integrity and heroically pushing back against invading empires and tribes, this book is inclined to see it as constituted by, and constitutive of the forces around it and in its midst. Herat’s geopolitics has been tied to the wider geo-cultural area of (Greater) Khorasan, a plateau co-influenced and inhabited by shifting (and often enmeshed) Persian, Turkic, Mongol, Pashtun, Hazara and other populations. The name Khorasan (‘sunrise’ in Middle Persian) most likely came about during the Sassanian Empire (probably in the AD sixth century), designating a fluctuating space east of ‘Iraq Adjami’ (Persian Iraq), and vaguely extending through the Transoxiana region (modern-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) and Hindustan. In historiography, the region was typically associated with its key cities, centres of trade, urban culture, and elite politics, including Balkh and Herat (now in Afghanistan), Mashhad and Nishapur (in modern-day northeastern Iran), Bukhara and Samarkand (in Uzbekistan), and Merv and Nisa (in Turkmenistan) (Daryaee 2012, Beckwith 2009). Presently, the toponym ‘Khorasan’ designates a northeast Iranian administrative province. Given the politics of geography, naming and historiography, positioning Herat as liminal is not a historical compromise, but a summary of the in-betweenness of Herati life and subjectivity.

My intent is not to recount histories around the Harirud dating back to the Assyrian and Achaemenid (First Persian) empires or the conquests of Alexander the Great. Instead, I point to the liminality that has shaped Herat’s modern (used here very loosely) history, which can tentatively be tied to 1717, when a confederation of Pashtun families – the Abdali Sadozai – expelled Herat’s last Persian Safavid governor from the city. Moreover, the eighteenth century marked the point of Herat’s transformation into a more Pashtun and ‘Afghan’ political space. In eighteenth-century British colonial vocabularies, Afghan meant Pashtun. Prior to 1717, Herat’s slice of Khorasan was controlled by various iterations of the Persian Empire, including the Sassanian dynasty (from the early third through the fifth century) and the Safavids (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), as well as the Tajik Kartid dynasty (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) and the Mongol Empire (through the rise of the Safavids in the sixteenth century). Speaking to the cultural, geopolitical and self-representational eclecticism over centuries, both the Kartids and the Il-Khan Mongols adopted Persian legal, juridical and administrative codes, cultural practices and imperial notions of power. As a cobweb of Tajik families, the Kartids spoke Persian, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Questions, Who Is Addressing Them and How
• Part II Why Does Postcolonial Security Care about Herat?
• Part III Power over Heratis and Resistances to It: Three Case Studies
• Part IV Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright