Limits of
Knowledge and Power in
Afghanistan
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
dire poverty, rampant illness, and omni-present
physical danger notwithstanding, Afghanistan appears like a black hole or
a Bermuda Triangle that ingests global information but yields little to
the world in return
How knowledge is accrued and applied are important
considerations for students of history. Because Afghanistan figures
relatively prominently in the current national electoral discourse it is
appropriate to address some of the issues relating to knowledge and power in
the country.
Afghanistan as a whole is largely unknown to Afghans
inside and outside the territory itself. The country is also essentially
opaque and mysterious to the swarm of international (primarily American)
military-civilian conglomerates occupying about twenty well-defined enclaves
in Afghanistan that contradictorily sustain an imported regime of
expatriates in Kabul and support local warlords in the remainder of the
country. For locals and foreigners alike there is a dearth of raw
information about Afghanistan and, perhaps more importantly, viable
frameworks for processing Afghan-centered data. At home and abroad, this
perilous collusion of ignorance allows for unconscious mystification of
Afghanistan on the one hand and political manipulation of Afghanistan on the
other.
How to account for the paucity of knowledge about
Afghanistan inside and outside the country? In terms of the
domestic/national side of this unfortunate equation, we find a weak state
that was decidedly inert and ambiguous by neither seriously attempting to
cultivate a sense of shared super-ordinate national identity nor caring to
preserve an array of ethnic, regional, and sectarian affiliations.
Residents of Kabul are especially insulated from affairs outside the city
and a key index of the Kabul-centered Afghan state’s failure to generate
senses of patriotism and citizenship is the pandemic historical illiteracy
--regarding inter-group and state-society relations in particular -- that
characterizes the population of the capital city and the country-at-large.
All communities of Afghans need to be become privy to their own and each
other’s cultural heritage and historical realities before a shared sense of
nation can take root.
We can use scholarly production to evaluate the
international community’s knowledge of Afghanistan. In the cases of Western
European and American scholarship (which I should add are quite distinct
from Russian and Soviet scholarship) two characteristics stand out. The
first is that English-language writings about Afghanistan often result from
exceedingly limited time in the country and a scarce few authors engage even
one of roughly a dozen local languages, and if so usually weakly. The
country scholarship is also notably un-integrated: few country-specific
writings reference other such writings in a serious way so as to form a
discussion or debate, and there is a prominent cognitive gap separating
local micro- from country-wide macro-specialists on Afghanistan.
Colonialism highlights and problematizes the relationship
between knowledge and power. Looking at the American colonial discourse on
Afghanistan it is difficult to reconcile President George W. Bush’s ongoing
claims of ‘victories for democracy and freedom’ in Afghanistan with
pronouncements from the commanding U.S. military official in Afghanistan,
Lieutenant General David Barno, about the ‘successful implementation’ in
early 2004 of a new ground-level strategy of varyingly sized military units
exerting “ownership” over local territories and resources under the guise of
“development and reconstruction” that once unveiled reveals the overriding
motive of capturing/killing Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and few other
individuals. So the nation-wide rhetoric in America contains the claim of
liberation that is confounded by the reality of military occupation and
purported possession in a contradiction that typifies colonial discursive
formations. The intellectual tragedy of it all is that a handful of
American academics, who traditionally relied on Afghan government
translators, taxi drivers and servants in Kabul (with limited experience or
exposure elsewhere in the country) to create anecdotal and unsustainable
caricatures of Afghan society, are now uncritically reinforcing their
already ill-founded categories, attitudes and understandings while helping
to drive and direct the American colonial venture in the country.
Historically, the Afghan state has been dependent on
external resources for survival, various peripheries have regularly and
systemically destabilized it, and its cultural productivity has been
minimal. So reinforcing an endemically tenuous political structure only
highlights the shallow pools of rule where state authorities wade through
increasingly perilous interactions with patrons, adversaries, dependants,
and each other until they are replaced and the cycle is repeated. Ignorance
should not be coronated, and without an informed, healthy, and economically
viable populace the hastily contrived and already delayed and truncated
October Presidential elections in Afghanistan are woefully premature.
With Afghanistan we are confronted with discernible
structural and practical limits as to what can be known. Power is about
control, and what is not known cannot be controlled. If knowledge is or
leads to power, at present in Afghanistan occupiers and state-authorities
alike remain fundamentally powerless and mired in fortified and alienating
oases of shared ignorance in Kabul, a few other towns, various base camps
and voting stations scattered about the country. For historians the basic
lessons are that there are in fact ways to effectively learn almost anything
but that one shouldn’t ask too much of a limited database. How and how well
Afghans and Americans know the United States are of course another set of
perspectives on the holograph of global knowledge and power very much worth
considering.
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8 August 2004
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
hanif2sm@jmu.edu
Department of History
James Madison University
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