afghanistan
In this respect, the present u.s.–nato intervention is no different to
that of the early British or Soviet military occupations, though it is now the
United States of America, primarily, that provides the Money from God.
Afghanistan has reverted to its rentier-state status and remains incapable,
or unwilling, to become self-sustaining financially or militarily. Once again
the citizens of Afghanistan find themselves unwittingly entangled in events
beyond their control and condemned to what increasingly looks like an
endless civil war. Despite all the efforts of the world’s greatest military
powers and billions of dollars of military aid, Afghanistan and its govern-
ment once more teeters on the brink of collapse. Yet the international
community’s solution to the problem is more of the same: send back the
troops to fight the government’s battles, keep paying the country’s bills
and turn a blind eye to rampant corruption, military and governmental
incompetence and electoral fraud.
The historic culture of reliance on foreign subsidies, loans and military
aid meant that successive Afghan administrations have had little incentive
to reform state institutions, and created a sense of dependency and entitle-
ment. Furthermore, the subsidies indirectly supported entrenched tribal
and religious self-interest, fuelled nepotism and sustained the patronage
system and ‘old boy’ networks. The Afghan government’s solution to social
upheaval, meanwhile, remains the same as it has always been: resort to
military suppression and centralize power in the hands of the few.
To one degree or another European solutions to the ‘problem of
Afghanistan’ have been backward-looking too, and have usually ended in
failure. In the First Anglo-Afghan War Britain tried and failed to restore the
discredited Saddozai monarchy. On the back of this military catastrophe,
Dost Muhammad Khan and his son, Wazir Akbar Khan, whom Britain
had roundly condemned in the Simla Declaration, returned to power as
national heroes. The Second Anglo-Afghan War was more successful in
terms of regime change, but while the army of occupation survived by the
skin of its teeth, the intervention was a moral defeat for Britain. General
Roberts’s brutal repressions created yet more anti-British sentiment and
played a part in the development of an emerging nationalist discourse
and the creation of national icons such as Mushk-i ‘Alam, Malalai and
the Battle of Maiwand. The British decision to recognize ‘Abd al-Rahman
Khan as Amir, rather than one of Sher ‘Ali Khan’s sons, led to the peoples
of Afghanistan having to endure two decades of the most tyrannical ruler
to date. Despite many British officials privately expressing their concern
about Britain’s abnegation of its ‘Christian duty’ and moral conscience,
Britain’s Afghanistan policy, rooted as it was in the dogma that Britain’s
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(Nandana)
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