The Guns of August: Afghanistan 2021: Framing Nivi Manchanda's Imagining Afghanistan

Antoinette Burton
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Rahman:

It is a kind of strange magic you believe in, with these maps… you are a complicated man. I respect that in you. But I beg you not to try to force the world into a shape it cannot take… Afghanistan.

Durand:

If that's a dream, let's dream it together… as he holds out the map… There it is. A thing few men have been given. A moment that comes once in five hundred years, a thousand years. To birth a country. To call a nation into being at the very center of the world. In the end this isn't about London or Delhi or Moscow and their endless scraps and intrigues. It's about the reach of a man's imagination and how wide is his soul… and the monopoly of the opium trade, too… sign and have this new thing spring from the brow of History… with your name forever on it…

Rahman:

The Rahman Line? Or the Durand?

Durand:

No more cat and mouse, Rahman. Action, Deed. Prose.

from Ron Hutchinson, Durand's Line²

When I began drafting my introduction to this Book Forum on Nivi Manchanda's Imagining Afghanistan in July of 2021, the Biden White House had just announced that the US was officially finished in Afghanistan, the site of America's longest foreign war. The above-the-fold front page story of the Sunday New York Times on 4 July led with a montage of objects entitled "What Was Left Behind" at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. A box of Pop Tarts; a gas mask; a medal; a used tourniquet; a "friendship plaque"; discarded combat boots; a mortar site box—the likes of which have turned up for sale in local shops. "Salvaged relics," the headline calls them; they are juxtaposed, in all their particularity, with the literally countless weapons left behind in the story that follows.³ To read the coverage of the official beginning of the end of US military presence in Afghanistan in the Anglo-American press was to witness half-hearted attempts to convert the unheroic failures of the last two decades into some kind of usable history. Torn from their bloody imperialist contexts and shorn of the material histories that produced them, the objects "left behind" focus our attention on the military-consumer-market nexus of the war, with hardly a glancing look at the human cost of doing geopolitical business through military conflict.

Into this present context drops Manchanda's important study, with its pointed subtitle, "The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge." Students of both imperial history and post/colonial studies may wonder at this methodological choice. Surely, we know only too well that knowledge is power, that orientalist discourses materialize this power, and that discursive regimes enable—indeed, help to ensure—violence and erasure in imperial contexts. And yet Manchanda is committed to this research design because she is after two unanswered questions: "how is Afghanistan thought about in a way such that 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?" Her study might be described as a relentless pursuit of the conditions under which Afghanistan has been staged as a graveyard of empires which has pricked the hubris of successive generations of would-be conquerors—that staging itself the pretext for both defying and making history.

The reviews which follow track the advantages and disadvantages of Manchanda's commitment to provincializing colonial knowledge and to the possibilities of decolonizing Afghanistan's history that it entails. For Kate Imy, a historian of war and empire in the context of the British Indian army, this approach appeals for the ways that it complicates what counts as cultural representation and especially for its attention to women and gender in the making of the global-imperial imagination of Afghanistan. Elisabeth Leake, a professor of international history, agrees, suggesting that Imagining Afghanistan...