How U.S. Intervention in Afghanistan Changed That Country. “New Afghan State Built on US Legacy of Torture and Impunity”. Stanford Historian

Among the more than a million refugees that have flooded into Europe over the past year are the Afghans, the second-largest group behind the Syrians. Yet the humanitarian crisis affecting this land-locked South Asian country, like most news regarding Afghanistan, has received little attention in the United States.
Robert Crews, an associate professor of history at Stanford, said,

“In Washington, it has become common to view Afghanistan as a country defined by a never-ending struggle among warlords, tribal chiefs, and religious fanatics. This has been particularly attractive as a way of explaining why the American intervention in that country, despite costing more than 2,300 American lives and roughly a trillion dollars, has achieved so few of its goals in over 14 years.”

Crews examines America’s role in policies that have fueled Afghanistan’s economic and cultural crises in his book, Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation. The work explores the extent to which U.S. influence has shaped Afghanistan over the past seven decades, including the American intervention against the country’s fundamentalist Taliban in 2001 in response to their presumed role in the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

“Long before 2001, Americans came to Afghanistan with the goal of remaking their lives along lines that would advance U.S. interests,” said Crews, a historian whose research and teaching interests focus on Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, Russia, Islam, and global history.

Enduring images
Crews starts from the premise that the way Americans conceptualize the country –in journalism, public-policy debates and scholarly work – remains mired in stereotypes that bear little resemblance to historical reality.

“One of the most enduring images of Afghanistan evokes a desolate, inward-looking, primitive and isolated place,” said Crews, whose recent courses at Stanford include The Global Drug Wars, The Islamic Republics and Modern Islamic Movements.

Drawing on a variety of archival and secondary sources in Afghanistan, Europe and the United States, as well as first-hand oral histories he collected personally from Afghans in half a dozen countries, Crews portrays an Afghanistan that is hardly a static and backward collection of tribes or ethnic groups, but rather a central global player in modern politics.

Among the people whose stories inform his narrative are Afghan traders in Africa, poets in Iran, scholars in Iraq, pilgrims in Jerusalem, seafarers in India, entrepreneurs in Australia, carpenters in California, students in Turkey, workers in London and a novelist in Denmark.

Crews became fascinated with Afghanistan in the late 1990s, when he lived with Afghan merchants in Uzbekistan while working on a project in Central Asia. “I was struck by their generosity, hospitality and cosmopolitan sophistication, which clashed with the American image of Afghans as being medieval peasants,” he said. - Read More at the Center for Research on Globalization‎
How U.S. Intervention in Afghanistan Changed That Country. “New Afghan State Built on US Legacy of Torture and Impunity”. Stanford Historian

Stanford historian studies how U.S. intervention in Afghanistan changed that country