conclusionstrategic interest took precedence over any negative impact it might have
on ordinary Afghans, meant that the Viceroy did little more than write an
occasional mild rebuke.
The Soviet intervention of 1979–89 was arguably the only attempt by
a European power to transform the state and governance in Afghanistan.
This too in part was backward-looking, for like Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman,
whose role model was Tsar Peter the Great, the Soviet Union attempted to
impose its vision by brute force. Yet instead of creating a united Socialist
and secular state, the intervention sparked a civil war, which is still raging,
and dragged Afghanistan back into a neo-Great Game. In response, the usa
assumed the mantle of the former imperial power and, drawing heavily on
the nineteenth-century policies of the Great Game, revived paranoia about
a Russian invasion of the Indus. The outcome was that the Soviet Union
ended up with a hostile, Islamic state on its southern frontier, backed by
the regional powers allied to the usa and nato.
As for the mujahidin government that emerged after the fall of the
Communist regime, their idea of government and the state was even more
backward-looking, rooted as it was, and still is, in an idealized Islamic
theocracy conceived more than a thousand years ago. Pakistan, too, failed
to impose its proxies, the Taliban, on the country. Mullah ‘Omar’s decision
to provide a safe haven for bin Laden ended in the fall of the Taliban and
the de facto restoration of the Durrani monarchy in the form of a Popalzai
president. Subsequently, successive Afghan administrations revived the
Pushtunistan dispute by formally rejecting the Durand Line. Furthermore,
by arming radical anti-European Islamist groups, Pakistan’s Inter-Service
Intelligence agency opened the door for militant jihadists to gain a foot-
hold in the region, which created an Islamist insurgency that now aims to
topple Pakistan’s ruling elites.
The u.s. support for the mujahidin in the 1980s and ’90s indirectly
contributed to American military intervention in 2001 and regime change.
Like all previous European military interventions, u.s. involvement was
fuelled by internal political pressures and self-interest, in particular the
need to avenge al-Qa‘ida’s attacks on American soil and appease outraged
American citizens, especially Republican voters. When it came to address-
ing the structural problems that had given rise to the instability and civil war
in Afghanistan or the underlying causes of anti-American Arab terrorism,
such considerations were near the bottom of America’s Afghanistan agenda.
Like the British colonial administration before them, the Bush, Obama and
Trump presidencies distanced themselves from anything more than token
nation building and instead pursued the chimera of a military solution.