Party—who, twenty years earlier, had justified the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan using similar arguments: “It is necessary to put an end to droit du seigneur and feudalism that prevails in the land of the Khans,” he argued in an interview for French television as the Red Army entered Kabul to come to the rescue of the Saur revolution. This classic form of colonial feminism was reactivated in a speech of American first lady Laura Bush, who triumphantly announced after five weeks of intense bombings: “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (Bush 2001). She was soon followed by Cherie Blair, wife of British prime minister Tony Blair, who launched a campaign using similar arguments to support her husband’s decision to go to war, despite massive demonstrations in the streets of London. This level of attention to the plight of Afghan women was in sharp contrast to the silence that had marked the years of civil war after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989, reminding us of the opportunistic alliances imperial powers are sometimes able to forge with feminism.
Cultural Battleground
This book is an attempt to capture the nature of the “reconstruction” project in Afghanistan, using the category “woman” as an entry point into broader questions around sovereignty, state building, and democratization. Playing with the metaphor of the “carnival of (post)war”—on which I will elaborate later in this introduction—I reflect on its implications for theorizations of military-humanitarian interventions as well as for the comprehension of subjectivities forged out of these global encounters. I put “women” at the center of my analysis because of an arresting conjuncture: the fact that the international community’s interference into states’ affairs, especially in Third World countries, has historically coalesced around a state’s treatment of the “other” half of its population, namely women.
The literature documenting the consecutive wars in Afghanistan has generally focused on the transformations of ethnic, tribal, and religious allegiances from the jihad against the Russian occupying forces until the emergence of the Taliban. Its main objective has been to explore the limitations and potentials of the state, the tribe, and Islam for nation building and the formation of political ideologies (Roy 1985; Dorronsoro 2005; Barfield 2010). This literature has been particularly resourceful in identifying the various actors involved in the conflict, their source of authority and moral inspiration, as well as the transformations of Islam and interethnic relations through external interference. Tracing the life trajectories of three prominent characters from Afghanistan’s recent history, David Edwards (1996) has attempted to capture the deeper structures of the conflict. In his view, Afghanistan’s troubles have less to do with divisions between groups than with the moral incoherence of the country itself—an incoherence exacerbated by the imposition of a nation-state framework upon an unstable social fabric and a non-unified territory.1
This book builds on this important literature in its endeavor to understand nation/state building and conflict in the region, but also slightly departs from it. Indeed, the scholarship dealing with the Afghan wars has been mostly concerned with documenting formal political parties, tribal and sectarian groups, as well as broader geopolitical dynamics that have exacerbated the conflict. Its primary objective has been to trace the political, cultural, and religious roots of prominent political actors’ engagement and the modalities of their transformation through colonial and imperial encounters. Apart from a few anthropologists who have looked at the effects of wars on the everyday life of ordinary Afghans, either through the prism of religion (Marsden 2005), migration (Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont 2007; Monsutti 2005), or access to justice (De Lauri 2012a; Barfield 2008), representations that come out of this scholarship remain rooted in the Orientalist tradition, presenting Afghan “culture” as a “fact” with an essence that can be grasped. Afghans tend to be depicted as proud, heroic, and fearless fighters and Afghanistan as a chaotic and ungovernable country: “the land of the unconquerable” (Heath and Zahedi 2011), the “graveyard of empires” (Isby 2011), or “the kingdom of insolence” (Barry 2002). Analyzed from the perspective of those directly involved in the conflict, women are often absent from these descriptions, or when they are present, they are portrayed either as powerless victims (Mann 2010) or as rooted in tradition and rural life (Lindisfarne-Tapper 1991).
One of my central arguments is that the political category “woman” is largely the product of unequal interactions between institutions of transnational governance and local power entities, a category that carries specific cultural meanings and assumptions regarding the responsibilities of the state or the community toward its “second sex.” As much as I believe culture may inform structures of feeling and ways of inhabiting the world, I also want to pinpoint its primary relational, contextual, and contested nature. Indeed, the conflict in Afghanistan is not solely about warring factions competing for the control over a territory. It is also a symbolic battle in which the “woman question” acquires a specific salience and “culture” is articulated in specific gendered terms.
This book walks in the footsteps of postcolonial and subaltern scholars (L. Ahmed 1992; Yegenoglu 1998; Abu-Lughod 1986; Talpade-Mohanty 2003; Chatterjee 1993; Das 1988) by showing how “culture talks” are often enmeshed within broader power relations and reflect anxieties around national identity. It aims to contextualize both politically and historically the “woman question” in Afghanistan in order to identify the colonial continuities that persist in the current reconstruction effort. I choose to focus on urban women because their bodies, either covered or exposed, represent central sites of cultural struggles over identity and because urbanity offers a greater spectrum of possibilities and constraints. Indeed, because of the incapacity of the state to assert control outside the main urban centers, reconstruction efforts with their myriad of “women empowerment” projects have mostly focused on major cities, especially Kabul.
“Modernization” is not a new word in Afghan political culture. It refers to particular moments of the Afghan history when modernization theory exercised a powerful influence on the Afghan intelligentsia and political elite. As early as the 1920s, the presence of Afghan intellectual Mahmood Tarzi—whose family was exiled in Turkey during the reign of Abdur Rahman—in the close entourage of King Amanullah Khan (the leader of Afghanistan’s independence) was critical in initiating major reforms that would conduct Afghanistan on its long journey toward modernization (Gregorian 1967). However, unlike in Europe where modernization was the result of endogenous processes of industrialization, production, and class conflict, Afghan modernization was the result of exogenous influences exercised on the elite. As Nancy and Louis Dupree have well documented (L. Dupree 1973; N. H. Dupree 1984), for these early modernizers social engineering through women’s emancipation from the traditional Islamic way of life was pivotal in making Afghanistan catch up with more modern and developed countries. However, social reforms initiated by Amanullah Khan on his return from his trip around Europe in 1928 in a country still not united as a nation were received with great resistance in rural areas where tribal leaders felt challenged in their authority. For these segments of society “modernization” was synonymous with the corruption of the values, principles, and morals that were constitutive of Afghaniyat (Afghanness).
Despite the more careful manner with which King Zahir Shah continued the agenda of reforms initiated by Amanullah, the model chosen remained similar. Institutions, ideas, and manners that the king promoted were the reflection of his overt admiration for Europe (Cullather 2002a, 521). Kabul and, to a lesser extent, other cities became isolated islands in a society that remained predominantly rural. In the countryside, the government and Kabul inhabitants who received the greatest benefits from the reforms and the modest industrialization were seen as morally corrupt (Emadi 1991, 229).
The Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1981 was understood as the concrete evidence of the corrupt nature of the ruling class (N. H. Dupree 2001). Here, as in other countries under imperial domination, the Soviets used the argument of the necessity to civilize and modernize a tribal society to justify their military intervention. Afghanistan’s violent encounter with foreign occupiers revealed that its relationship
