In Afghanistan after 2001, along with the statebuilding endeavour, many attempts were made to uncover the truth about why Afghanistan is what it is represented to be. In this chapter,

I argue that myths about Afghanistan were at work which served to shape and construct political realities and supply interpretations of politics. By what I call under-complex analogy, the sustainability of mythical explanations was made productive for under­standing Afghanistan.

F.P. Kühn (È)

Institute for International Politics, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

e-mail: florian.p.kuehn@hsu-hh.de

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 147

B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in

International Politics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53752-2_8 politics, society, state, and interpersonal relations, as a secular belief-structure guiding action. Political actors view their actions as re-action to acts shap­ing their world which emanate from outside forces beyond their control. As such, myth works to structure reason in the face of (quasi-)natural forces beyond oneself. Myth rests on a ‘particular interpretation of a his­torical experience or policy [...] that is invoked in the present to justify certain policies’ (Buffet and Heuser 1998, ix).

Understanding Afghanistan, especially from a western scholar’s but also from a policy perspective, implies working with and around these myths. The chapter sections following the conceptual part present selected myths ranging from talk of Afghanistan as a ‘graveyard of empires’, portraying Afghans as ‘fierce fighters’, terrorists using Afghanistan as ‘safe haven’, and Afghans’ ‘democratic fondness’, which represent epistemic approaches to the image of Afghanistan as constructed in the international discourse. Beyond narratives, these myths’ practical impact implied their selection for the purpose of illustrating the concept of myth: they guide western thinking towards Afghanistan, and in demonstrating how they structure Western policy, their power can be revealed. This, in turn, allows drawing conclusions about their functions for the construction of subject, interac­tion, and the epistemology of politics about Afghanistan.