Tell me about your first choice, the muqaddimah: an introduction to the story of ibn khaldun.
Ibn Khaldun began writing the book in 1375, so it’s certainly the oldest on my list. it is also a unique work of that period in its attempt to analyze the context of history by understanding how societies are organized and how different modes of organization can affect interactions between people.
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The book has had a really powerful influence on me, in part because I began my work studying nomads similar to those that Khaldun writes about and calls people of the desert. Although the Bedouin nomads are his main example, he explains that it is a way of life that encompasses all people who live on the margins, be it the mountains, the steppes or the deserts and asks the basic question: why are the people who come from the margins and are not particularly sophisticated manage to form so many Arab dynasties in East and North Africa?
He discusses how their way of socializing in a difficult environment gives them a group solidarity that can be a great military advantage in times of conflict and, when the opportunity is ripe, allows them to conquer more populated regions. but these opportunities are rare because sedentary civilizations, areas of high urban culture and irrigated agriculture, are generally more economically prosperous and politically powerful. the people there have weak social solidarity but strong economic integration. therefore, they maintain complex political organizations and professional militaries that can fend off these people from the fringes. but he points out that their lack of internal solidarity creates a vulnerability when incompetent ruling dynasties go bankrupt: there is no one to defend them from outside invaders. as the khaldun saw it, it was the charismatic leaders of the fringe regions who restored order and founded new dynasties; dynasties that then also decline in four generations and are themselves replaced by new outsiders. so for a person looking at afghanistan, there are some wonderfully interesting parallels that he draws.
so you definitely see echoes of what he was talking about centuries ago still happening today?
There are echoes but it is not quite similar to your Bedouin groups because Afghan history is also affected by people who come from Central Asia who have a different model of tribal organization which is more hierarchical. they are more willing to accept leadership. they have ruling clans instead of everyone believing he can be the ruler and that sets up a different political dynamic.
That’s why you find long-lived dynasties like the Ottoman Empire, which lasted 800 years, and the Mughals, which lasted more than 300 years. they obviously lasted more than four generations. So what I wanted to see is what happens in this zone of interaction, and what we find is an Afghan dynasty that lasts 230 years, which is much more like the Turks. but if you look at it internally you see that it follows an ibn khaldun cycle which is that the clans within the royal elite fight and replace each other in a cycle of four generations just as described by khaldun in his book. So we see this interesting dynamic where highly egalitarian Pashtun tribes have an easier time accepting the legitimacy of a royal clan because they could never agree on who had the right to replace it. it was finally overthrown in 1978 by the communists who were trying to overthrow the whole system. After more than two decades of war, it is interesting that the Bonn Agreement chose Karzai, whose ancestors first founded the Afghan state. The interesting thing is that Karzai comes from that group of descendants. In other words, while we thought we were creating a new democracy, we were in fact helping to restore the same kind of ruling dynastic elite that had previously ruled Afghanistan.
Your next book is about the intriguing game of buzkashi. this is g whitney azoy’s buzkashi: game and power in afghanistan.
buzkashi literally means grabbing goats. it is a very famous game played in the north of afghanistan that is a bit like polo played with a dead goat, or rather a calf because Afghans say that a goat is too fragile and the game ends too quickly. in this type of polo, a scrum of riders fight to grab the carcass and break free with it to win the round. It is a very exciting game because there are no rules, no teams and no limits. people can go in any direction, even towards the audience. the game continues until the carcass is gone or the prizes are depleted. the Afghan government adopted it as their national game with rules, limits, and teams, which most fans thought did not understand the point of the game.
and are there parallels between how the game is played and how afghanistan is governed?
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yes, there are a number of parallels that whitney azoy investigated. We worked in the same province. he came a year after me, so he focused on the organization of this game, not only how it was played on the field, but also how it was organized. people often talk about Afghan politics as a buzkashi, which means all against all. what he noticed was that it was a non-violent way of doing politics.
It was a way to find out who was powerful and who wasn’t. you look at the game and you don’t know what’s underneath. what you discover is that pilots are a bit like soccer players. they do not own the horses, but are paid to ride them. it is about the prestige of the player and the owner of the horse. horses are very important in afghanistan. just after the taliban was overthrown i went to meet the warlord from northeast afghanistan and the first thing we did was go down and admire his buzkashi horses. Taliban never liked buzkashi because they are from southern afghanistan and puritans who didn’t like games. that was to their detriment because the game allows networking.
In addition to playing for prestige, games have to be organized. that’s one of the most interesting parts of azoy’s book. he points out that this is a high-risk thing because you have to get people to come. if they don’t come or the game goes wrong it’s a shame that shows the organizers as weak and they lose power and credibility. Another problem is that your enemies are going to try to frustrate you. so the organizers will never announce the exact date until the last moment. otherwise someone might try to host another game on the same day. once you’ve done it, people will ask, how well did it go? Will people remember it and talk about it? so people’s reputations are at stake.
This helps explain current Afghan politics. if a politician proposes something, people wait to see if he can carry it out. that’s one of the things karzai has trouble with: he promises a lot and doesn’t deliver. his credibility is undermined. People who want to know why he has so much trouble getting people to cooperate need to understand that people in Afghanistan willingly follow success and run from failure. Of course, Karzai’s enemies want him to fail, but the biggest audience (as in buzkashi) are the viewers who watch how well he gets along and then decide whether or not they should risk their own credibility by joining him. here’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation: they won’t help until you prove yourself, but you can’t succeed unless they do.
your next choice is a diplomatic and political history of afghanistan, 1863-1901 by m hassan kakar.
hassan kakar was one of the first professionally trained historians in afghanistan. He obtained his SOAS degree in London in the late 1960s and was also one of the first to give equal weight to British and Afghan sources. I have followed his work for nearly 40 years. it is a synthesis that succeeds in showing how both internal and external dynamics have shaped the course of Afghan history. what you discover is that the Afghan rulers play two kinds of games. they had to be effective rulers internally to convince Afghans that they could keep foreign powers out of the country. at the same time, they had to be very sophisticated in terms of dealing with the outside world (the British raj and the tsarist empire), convincing them that supporting an independent Afghanistan was in their own interest.
kakar knows the material very well. look through 19th century afghanistan in a very professional way. It is a very detailed history that helps to understand that Afghanistan’s interaction with the international community is not recent. there is a tendency to think – oh, Afghans have never really dealt with foreigners. in fact, successful Afghan rulers specialized in dealing with foreigners by having them finance their states and equip their armies.
This is very much the time of the big game.
It’s that classic era of the great game and it’s an excellent study from both perspectives of how it works. Kakar understands British imperial attitudes in history, but he also understands and explains the problems of the Afghan rulers.
His next book, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation-Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid, also looks at Afghanistan’s international relations, but this time in the present day.
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ahmed rashid is a well-known writer on afghanistan. his book on the Taliban rose to prominence after 9/11. what rashid achieves is to show that this is a transnational problem. you can’t understand what’s going on in afghanistan without understanding the politics of pakistan. he is able to explain to some extent the double game pakistan has always been playing in afghanistan. He wants to install and dominate a Pashtun Afghan government in Kabul.
They were staunch supporters of the Taliban, helped bring them to power, but after 9/11 they faced an American threat. The United States demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden or face destruction. Pakistan was asked to choose whether it wanted to be an American ally or an American target in the Bush administration’s new war on terror.
Hoping to salvage the situation, Pakistan pleaded with Mullah Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden, promising that the Taliban regime would not be a target if he did. but the Taliban were not as cooperative as they had hoped and refused. While Pakistan abandoned the Taliban when the Americans invaded Afghanistan, they never abandoned their covert support for the movement. therefore, pakistan showed little hesitation in pursuing al qaeda members who fled to pakistan but sheltered mullah omar and his followers in quetta, baluchistan. for that reason, the insurgency in southern afghanistan had its roots across the border in pakistan. Since Pakistan denied that he was aiding the Taliban, Ahmed Rashid was one of the few people with the connections to resolve such a cross-border conflict and the ability to navigate the complexities of Pakistani politics.
Rashid also knows the Afghan side well, Karzai in particular. so your descriptions of the political factions there are also good and you can place them in a longer term context. he gives a very good understanding of all the different issues that make it so difficult to achieve peace in afghanistan.
His latest book is The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan by Ben Macintyre.
the title is taken from kipling’s novel of the same name, in which a westerner goes somewhere like afghanistan and is made king. The idea for the story came, at least in part, from Josiah Harlan, the first American in Afghanistan. He served as a general in the pay of the Afghan Emir Dost Muhammad in the 1830s until the British invaded Afghanistan and drove him out. he was very much against the British and then they went to great lengths to discredit his writings by labeling him a liar and a braggart.
what this book shows are a couple of things. Harlan claimed he was offered the royals of central Afghanistan, which his critics said showed he was a storyteller. But Macintyre managed to return to the Harlan family home in Pennsylvania, where he found the original Persian document that made the offer and was signed by tribal leaders in the region. so it turned out he wasn’t lying. His documents also showed what a wild place the Afghan frontiers were in the early nineteenth century. The British had not yet controlled the Punjab and the Sikhs were rising up under Rangit Singh. Josiah Harlan was one of many Westerners who went to work for Indian rulers who used them to modernize their armies.
It first started with the pay of the exiled Afghan ruler Shah Shuja, who gave him money and an army to go to Afghanistan and reclaim his throne. The army falls apart, but Harlan goes alone to Afghanistan, where he meets Shuja’s rival, Dost Muhammad. he likes her better and, keeping the shuja’s money, decides to work for the Sikhs. He becomes Governor of Sind and helps the Sikhs repel an Afghan attack on Peshawar. quarreling with the sikhs, he joins dost muhammad (no hard feelings) and becomes his right-hand man. Because Harlan lives with all of these cultures and serves in the palaces of his ruler, he is a wonderful image of what he was like at the time. expatriates of all stripes (French, Irish, Scottish and Italian) worked, for high wages, to thwart British ambitions in India.
as the first american in afghanistan, he is very unusual. he crossed the hindu kush at the head of an afghan army but raised an american flag and made everyone salute it. They probably didn’t know what flag it was, but they did! of course, his American relatives must have been equally baffled. Harlan came from an old Pennsylvania Quaker family, so the military business was not in the family, and they must have wondered where all this money sent to them came from.
This is the kind of thing that, if you were a novelist, your publisher would ask you to tone down a bit, but it really happened.
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