Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad

Abstract

Hanifi reviews Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad by David B. Edwards.

Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad. David B. Edwards. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 354 pp.

David B. Edwards has become known popularly as a specialist on Afghanistan. He taught English in Kabul during the 1970s but has not conducted field research inside the country. The author was "drawn to Afghanistan by exotic tales and camel caravans, turbaned tribesmen, and women in veils" (p. 10). Using information from Persian language taped biographical accounts and some English texts, he attempts to provide an understanding of the interface between Islam, state, and tribe in Afghanistan and in so doing he wishes to "uncover the origins of the jihad" (p. xix) in that country.

Before Taliban is the "sequel" to the author's 1996 work in which he alleges "moral fault lines" within Islam, state, and tribe and between these components of Afghan polity. The latter book was based on biographical narratives of three heroic, "larger-than-life," figures in Afghanistan. The counterparts in the current volume to these three figures are three "not larger-than-life" individuals.

Edwards sets out to interrogate Islam, state, and tribe in Afghanistan. But very quickly and for unexplained reasons this emphasis is reduced to Islam, rule, and honor and these are in turn downsized to the idiosyncrasies of specific individuals. Those Edwards has selected to represent Islam and tribe are members of the urban elite among whom he lived in Kabul and Peshawar. He acknowledges this narrow orientation but offers that he was "not in a position to conduct the necessary research" among ordinary Afghans-"noncombatants" and "women in particular" (p. xviii)-who made up the bulk of the population and the millions of Afghan migrants who moved to Peshawar and vicinity. Unfortunately, Edwards's study results in precisely what he justifiably critiques in the works of others when he notes that, "Western attempts to understand Afghans and Afghanistan since the onset of the war in 1978 have centered largely on stereotypes and personifications" (p. 16).

Part 1 deals with the background and political career of Nur Muhammad Taraki, the first Ghalzai president of Afghanistan after the Muhammadzai dynasty was overthrown in April 1978. The English language newspapers, Kabul Times and Kabul New Times, and a U.S. government publication (Foreign Broadcast Information Service, South Asia Review) are the author's main sources. Taraki's rule is constantly compared to one of the "successful rulers" (p. 20) of Afghanistan, Amir 'Abd al-Rahman (1880-1901), who is notorious for having been a psychopath (Lee 1991), and who used state power to execute tens of thousands of innocent Afghans with the knowledge (and tacit approval) of the British colonial government of India. This man created the original framework for current ethnic tensions and hostilities in Afghanistan. The disruption of Afghanistan's role in regional trade networks by the Amir is directly responsible for the poverty and economic isolation of the country. Unlike 'Abd al-Rahman, whom the British subsidized and supported, Taraki had to face the vehement opposition of the U.S. government as well as its inspiration, recruitment, training and management of the so-called freedom fighters or mujahidin and their assembly line Jihad. These U.S. clients caused the collapse of the Afghan center in 1992 and the Taliban are the progeny of this collapse. For Edwards to speak of the "genealogies of the Afghan Jihad" and to not explicitly acknowledge the U.S. involvement is truly astonishing. By introducing massive amounts of money and weaponry, the United States seriously exacerbated ethnic and regional tensions that were seeded by 'Abd al-Rahman a century earlier.

Edwards's reflexivity runs throughout the book. He misses no chance to ridicule Taraki. In place of ethnographic data, Edwards resorts to stereotypical portrayals of virtually all Ghalzis, especially President Taraki's Paxtun tribe: "Like most other Ghalzai [sic] tribes, the Taraki were opportunistic nomads" (p. 45). The source he cites for this portrayal does not in fact say this. Rather it states: "most of the Tarakki are settled on their lands about Nawa in Mukur and Kalat-i Ghilzai where the greater number of the nomads spend the summer with the settled section" (Robinson 1978:111). Taraki is portrayed as a "fatally misguided man" (p. 91). Perhaps the reason for Edwards's brazen antipathy is that during Taraki's rule, a U.S. anthropologist, who Edwards admired, was expelled from Afghanistan for allegedly spying for the CIA (Hanifi 2000:298).

Part 2 deals with the life story of Samiullah "Wakil" Safi. Much of Safi's life was spent away from his tribal homeland in exile in western and northern Afghanistan and in Kabul. It is through him that Edwards wants to expose his readers to the concept of "honor" among Paxtuns. However, his discussion is uninformed by the fact that virtually all tribal and nontribal groups in Afghanistan, and stretching from Spain to Pakistan, have cultural values dealing with honor and shame (sharm). Honor is generally a measure of male reputation, especially trustworthiness. Shame is, broadly, a standard with which female reputations (especially chastity) are judged and is a flipside of honor that Edwards ignores. Generally speaking, in Afghanistan as elsewhere, both men and women are able to uphold honor and incur shame and both have available to them social devices with which to exaggerate the former and deflect the latter. To Edwards, honor and tribe are symbols of backwardness, an Orientalism that colors both of his books. He portrays the dynamic complex of honor and shame as the monopoly of tribes and as inherently incompatible with the state, but in doing so he strains ethnographic logic.

Two chapters in part 3 use the life history of Muhammad Amin Waqad to portray the rise and fragmentation of Islamist parties in Peshawar. Again, there are questions of ethnographic integrity. In discussing the tribal assembly convened by Muhammad Nadir near the shrine of Mulla of Hadda in 1919, for example, Edwards states:

the government had decorated the meeting ground with black banners . . . that had been consecrated at the shrine of Hazrat 'Ali in Mazar-i Sharif . . . |t]hese banners were embroidered with religious motifs, such as the outline of a hand [symbolic of the five principle members of the Prophet's house], [p. 188, brackets original]

The problem is that the source he cites for this information contains nothing resembling what Edwards narrates in this quotation. Perhaps this is an oversight, but it would be quite unusual for the avowedly Sunni central government of Afghanistan to inject explicit Shi'a symbols in what is clearly a non-Shi'a setting and this requires explanation.

From the analysis and interpretation of these biographical stories Edwards concludes that the "Afghan political culture-Islam, state, and tribe" (p. 298) contains "moral contradictions" that are responsible for the country's inability to construct a "civil society" (p. 302). The book contains numerous conceptual shortcomings that cast doubt on the viability of the author's interpretations and conclusions. He confuses state, dawlat with hukumat, government (Edwards 1996: 27), and tribe is interchangeably used with Pakhtun culture, Paxtun society, tribal culture, tribal Afghans, Pakhtun ethos, and honor. A basic assumption in anthropology is that all human settings contain inconsistencies and contradictions between "ideal" culture and its "real" behavioral counterparts, between the "etic" and the "emic" levels of discourse. It may be that to a narrow western interpretive perspective, ordinary contrasts in the Afghan polity appear as "fault-lines" and "moral contradictions," but Edwards's reductionism is built around attempts at symbolic and discourse analysis carried out without proper linguistic tools or cultural competence. The book is full of instances where important local categories are misread, distorted, or garbled. A few examples will suffice: In Paxtu, sarai (with a retroflex r), not salai (p. 104) means man. Paighur means rebuke, blame, reproach, while kanza means insult; in Persian, sympathizer translates as hamdard not ham nawai, which roughly means collaborating; hamkar is a coworker or colleague not a supporter, which translates as pushtiban (p. 325 n. 43). In Paxtu the equivalent of the sword of real iron cuts (p. 33) is asila turn ghutsa kawi not turn pa asil ghutsa kawi (p. 33; Edwards 1996: 51), which awkwardly translates as sword cuts on noble(man).

If Edwards was competent in Paxtu and other nuances of local culture he would not declare in frustration that "Peshawar was a less inclusive city that incubated Pakhtun chauvinism, which is a reason why one saw relatively few non-Pakhtun refugees on the streets of Peshawar during the 1980s" (p. 233). The reality is that Afghans who migrated to Peshawar were predominantly from the Paxtu-speaking eastern and southern parts of Afghanistan. Iran absorbed most of the Persian speakers except for the Kabulis who migrated to Pakistan thinking that their prospects for moving on to the West were better in Pakistan. During my own fieldwork in the summer of 1980, Peshawar was flooded with migrants from Kabul-mostly from the elite, who did not appear as uncomfortable as Edwards would want us to believe. Like Edwards, most of this elite spoke English, the language of Pakistani bureaucracy and commerce.

Like several other anthropologists who have published works on Afghanistan, Edwards is trapped in the ambiguity and contested character of local labels for identity. He uses Pakhtun, Afghan, Afghan Pakhtun, and tribal Afghans, among others, interchangeably and with an Orientalist nonchalance that distorts the ethnic and tribal configuration of Afghanistan. Before Taliban may lead readers to believe that besides Paxtuns there are no other tribal or ethnic groups in the country, but in fact non-Paxtun tribal and nontribal groups comprise at least half of the country's population. Non-Paxtuns have played prominent roles in the "political culture" and "civil society" of Afghanistan. Like most other outside observers, Edwards is convinced that the Paxtuns dominate Afghanistan. Thus, he writes about "the Pakhtundominated Kabul government" (p. 111) and "Pakhtun hegemony" (p. 300). But an objective, historically, and ethnographically informed analysis of the Afghan state and its central machinery establishes that it is not the Paxtuns who have ruled Afghanistan, it is a consortium of Persian speakers who have dominated from the start. What was tribal and Paxtun about 'Abd al-Rahman and Muhammad Zaher and the governments over which they presided?

Despite its deficiencies, this is an informative book full of promise. Edwards writes lucidly with a creative flare for metaphor. Interspersed throughout are insights about the political economy of Afghanistan. The book provides useful excursions to the Afghan conflict of the past 25 years as played out in Peshawar. Importantly, it also draws attention to the larger question of fault lines, not simply among Afghan peoples but also within Afghan scholarship, fault lines against which Edwards struggles. The tectonics that produce the latter are driven by an obsession with stereotypical representations of Paxtuns and their supposed domination of Afghanistan.

References

REFERENCES CITED

Edwards, David B.

1996 Heroes of the Age: Moral Faultlines on the Afghan Frontier. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hanifi, M. Jamil

2000 Anthropology and Representations of Recent Migrations from Afghanistan. In Rethinking Refuge and Displacement. E. M. Gozdziak and D.J. Shandy, eds. Pp. 291-321. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.

Lee, Jonathan

1991 'Abd al-Rahman Khan and the "maraz ul-muluk." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, series 3, 1(2):209-242.

Robinson, J. A.

1978[1934] Notes on Nomad Tribes of Eastern Afghanistan. Quetta: Nisa Traders.