By Munazza Ebtikar (11 August 2021)
As a group of friends from Afghanistan, Iran, Northern Cyprus, and Egypt, the usual discussions we have in Oxford common rooms are on our languages, traditions and heritage, or the political developments and conflicts taking place in our home countries. We discuss our research, fieldwork, and homes in Kabul, Tehran, Famagusta, and Cairo, among walls adorned with portraits of well-known colonial officers of the British Empire, bound to the history of the University. We discuss and reflect on the paradox of doing research in the “field” which we also consider our home. Although most of us have been studying here for years, our sense of unbelonging remain, especially as the institution has deep-rooted historic ties to a painful colonial past which partakes in the knowledge production of our home countries.
The university itself is a privileged site of knowledge production. It has a long-standing reputation for generating and disseminating knowledge that has played a fundamental role in shaping the world in which we live. Some disciplines were formed to study perceived foreign and far-away geographies that involved training students for the Empires’ colonial endeavors. Many of these students became elite colonial officers and administrators. Knowledge production came with an imaginary that sought to make these geographies legible for colonial and imperial ambitions, premised not necessarily on understanding the metropole, rather the “other”. By taking Western Europe as its model, and generally guised as “neutral” and “scientific”, knowledge was produced and reproduced from a particular viewpoint.
The knowledge that we have of Afghanistan, and much of the Global South, is catered to an Anglo-American public and grounded firmly in previous imperialist epistemologies. The ethical and intellectual grounds for power, control, and domination are premised on outdated ethnographies, maps, understanding of languages and customs, ethnicities, and so on. This biased and erroneous form of knowledge production theorizes and philosophizes peoples and societies, which at times may seem almost unrecognizable to its inhabitants, to become universal objective truths. These ‘truths’ becomes what Nivi Manchanda calls “the only way of knowing” and remain integral to the current knowledge production of these presumed foreign geographies. As students and researchers, we have to be wary of reproducing colonial hierarchies and critical of grand narratives that so often create the dominant discourse about the communities we study and engage with.
Yet, much of the research on Afghanistan in the Anglophone world continue to not be accountable to the people of the country. Since 2001, alongside military and civilian personnel, Afghanistan became saturated with newfound international experts from near and far as the so-called ‘War on Terror’ – a moniker coined by the Bush administration – rapidly propelled. Publications and policy briefs produced by these experts of Afghanistan saw the country from an imperial lens and made military objectives their main priorities. Most of this research was adopted for practice and produced quick policy prescriptions. At times, pre-conceived understandings of the country and people were authorized through research and even forced to align with the conceptions of the changing policies of the United States and Western European countries. As such, these experts came to dominate the political space in Afghanistan and their research served elite economic and political interests.
Meanwhile, the people who are written into these bodies of literature have little to no access to them. Knowledge is produced by, and for, individuals within exclusive spaces, many of whom serve as gatekeepers and regulators. Local histories and knowledge production have been given little value, and few experts of Afghan heritage are ever consulted. As Ghumkhor and Daulatzai discuss, by rarely engaging with Afghans as intellectual interlocutors, knowledge is based on speaking of others, “never with others”. Knowledge rooted in Afghanistan’s history and politics becomes unnecessary because Afghans are not, as Benjamin Hopkins reflects, “drivers of the present”. Bringing forth complexities and creating new vocabularies and ways of understanding alongside the people of Afghanistan is now more urgent than ever before.
As I am writing, the people of Afghanistan are dying. While political violence has been normalized in Afghan society since the Soviet invasion in 1979, the country’s current experience of abhorrent and escalated violence at the hands of the Taliban has left many Afghans questioning the remaking of their country in the name of instilling ‘peace’. As the United States seeks to withdraw on September 11 of this year, they, along with a few glorified Afghan elites, have rebranded the Taliban from a terror group to a legitimate political group with shared grievances. To change public perceptions about the Taliban, several research institutes in Washington began to highlight how the group has transformed. Taliban spokesmen were given prominent podiums in American news outlets like the New York Times and CNN and sensationalist op-eds like the ‘Afghanistan Papers’, modeled after the Pentagon papers of the United States’ war in Vietnam, were published. The Taliban, a terror group which relies on violence as a means to a political end, are engaged in fighting, and killing Afghan civilians under the purview of foreign military personnel, and international humanitarian organizations, whose presence and activities in Afghanistan has been justified by humanistic claims.
Today, amid an atmosphere of immense fear and uncertainty, Afghan civilians are forced to arm themselves against a US imposed and Pakistani-backed terror group. With limited options for peace and security, some feel forced into exile. For those who remain, their future is uncertain. As the Taliban continue to make advances across the country, Afghans have been subjected to a new social order with violence, fear, and repression as its foundation. The prolonged nature of US intervention, and the detriments of what they are leaving behind, has placed civilians in a position of dependency, degradation, and humiliation. The people of Afghanistan have been forced to accept decisions made on their behalf while their existence continues to be a provocation to their domestic, regional, and international enemies who choose violence and exterminatory policies as politics. This violence of the present and future is predicated on the past. Since 1979, there has been an inconceivable multigenerational loss of Afghan lives amid long imperial, regional, and local wars.
How, then, can the people of Afghanistan formulate, conceptualize, and create an alternative future for themselves on their own terms in the midst of violence and overlapping wars and conflict? A future unconstrained by what they are obliged to accept and imagined about them by others, to one that enables them to imagine and create a new social order with peace and liberation – in its robust sense – as its foundation. How can we critically engage with the colonizing impulses of knowledge production and create the vocabulary within which we can better understand Afghanistan so that we can recognize, and act on, the perennial struggle of the Afghan people?
Image: Topographic Soviet Map of Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan. Maps such as this were used by the US Department of State in the early 2000s. Source: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
(Munazza Ebtikar is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Oriental Studies & Anthropology, St. John’s College, University of Oxford. She tweets at @mebtikar)
