The myth that dominates discussions of Afghanistan is that of “the graveyard of empires.” Afghanistan is a tar baby, the myth goes. Imperial powers’ attempts to civilize the country are doomed to failure, and they may even contribute to the dissolution of empire itself, as the Soviet experience in Afghanistan seems to show.
Yet, the “graveyard of empires” narrative obscures as much as it illuminates. It makes Afghans bit players, rather than protagonists, to their own history. And it fails to explain why Afghanistan has been at the margins of geopolitics for much of its modern history, in particular for much of the twentieth century. The Afghans won their independence from the British in 1919, only to discover that with liberty came an end to British subsidies. New state monopolies and tariffs allowed Kabul’s rulers to gain a measure of economic self-sufficiency. Fundamentally, however, the resources inside Afghanistan’s borders could not pay for the costs of governing the space within those borders.
Thus was born the real pattern to modern Afghan history, namely that of Afghan elites appealing to foreigners to subsidize and build up the Afghan state. Afghanistan became a field onto which outsiders could project norms of statehood, development and modernity. Ottoman and Indian Muslim technocrats flocked to Afghanistan to shore up one of the Muslim world’s few independent states with constitutions, officer schools and printing presses. Like their German and Italian successors in Kabul, these foreigners sought not to conquer Afghanistan, but rather embed it in a coalition of states that could challenge the British-dominated interwar world order.
But these attempts to modernize Afghanistan rested on a fragile foundation. Attempts to tax the Afghan population or interfere in local affairs could risk revolt. Reliance on foreign aid, meanwhile, privileged deracinated Afghan elites over uncouth tribesmen. And such elites’ efforts to bolster the state’s legitimacy as a homeland of the Pashtun people provoked resistance from Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun minorities. Their irredentist stance toward majority-Pashtun lands in neighboring Pakistan also unnerved Pakistani elites.
The Cold War turbocharged this pattern of dependency. Hitherto, the United States had shown little interest in Afghanistan, not bothering to establish an embassy in Kabul until 1948. American journalists used the term “Afghanistanism” to refer to the practice of reporting on obscure problems in irrelevant countries. By the mid-1950s, however, fears of Soviet influence in the “third world” led Washington to “develop” Afghanistan along the lines of modernization theory. Modernization theory argued that “traditional” societies like Vietnam or Afghanistan could be developed in the direction of Western capitalist modernity through the right combination of reform and foreign aid. American trade and financial experts would reform the country’s byzantine tariff and taxation system. Hydrological engineers would dam Afghanistan and remake it in the image of the American West. Kabul would ban opium production.