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

Stanford :  Drawing on archives and oral testimony, historian Robert Crews discovers an Afghanistan that hardly fits the forbidding image that has fueled the U.S. military’s disastrous intervention there.

Crews begins his book by examining the making of the Afghan nation-state within and beyond its borders as they exist today, exploring interactions between a sizeable Afghan diaspora abroad and the rulers of the kingdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

He then takes up the pivotal period of the 1930s and 1940s, in which Afghanistan became deeply embedded in global financial networks. With the onset of the Cold War, Afghanistan was awash with foreign advisers and experts eager to turn Afghan elites’ rush toward the industrial era to the advantage of one or the other superpower. Along the way, the country became a major supplier of opium and cannabis to satisfy world demand.

Crews turns his attention to the seizure of power in 1978 by an underground Afghan socialist party, which, he says, “triggered a proxy war between Moscow and Washington.” He describes the struggle between Soviet communists and Muslims that ensued, later spawning al-Qaida, the Taliban and other revolutionary groups.

“U.S. backing for the mujahedeen – the Islamist groups that mounted resistance to the leftist government and its Soviet backers in the 1980s – would have fateful consequences for Afghanistan and the world for years to come,” Crews observed.

The American intervention against the Taliban, claimed to be responsible for the 9/11 attacks, opened up yet another distinctive era in the history of Afghan globalism, he demonstrates. “Afghans became the object of an American-led humanitarian mission that was, simultaneously, a campaign to remake Afghans in the name of American security,” he noted. 

Crews calls for new approaches to Afghanistan, especially how we imagine its past and act in the present.

“One of the remaining alternatives, long-neglected by Washington, is a sustained commitment to a political settlement to Afghanistan’s civil war and its regional entanglements,” he said. “This is a challenging but not impossible proposition.” - Read More

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