Creating a State for the Purpose of Imperial Rivalry: The Great Game and Afghanistan as ‘Graveyard of Empires’

Situating Afghanistan in the Great Game of the nineteenth century and highlighting its continuing importance for global affairs provides the pre­text for myths about Afghanistan.

Policymakers lacked actual evidence for a Russian strategic expansion into Afghanistan (Hopkins 2004). However, the claim mirrored strategic thinking, so British lust for expansion was projected onto the Russian Empire. Afghanistan as bulwark against this expansion became a mythical last post for the ‘free’, that is, the liberal-capitalist world. From the myth automatically followed strategic policy and consequently how Afghanistan was dealt with. The first Anglo-Afghan War was fought on the premise of assumed Russian support of the Persian military by strategic advisors, portrayed as an imminent Russo-Persian alliance that posed a threat to British interests which had to be countered immediately.

The second half of the nineteenth century, however, saw a change as the Russians were getting established in Central Asia, building railroads and dependent states—which proved costly to sustain. Yet instead of mili­tarily engaging directly in Afghanistan, the British had changed their atti­tude towards Afghanistan. Their southern pressure moulded Afghanistan into a nation state, which, if anything, was intended to buffer the Russian and British Empires. After the first war, the British had concluded that ‘the Durrani elite were incapable of controlling their own people. Hence any future occupation of Afghanistan as a colony, even with the cooperation of its ruling class, would likely prove a questionable venture’, which would demand ‘military commitment far out of proportion to the value of the country’ (Barfield 2010, 132). The internal composition of the Afghan ‘state’, hence, demanded treating it differently in the eyes of the attempt­ing colonisers.

Said elites, however, saw their own limited role in rejecting British influence, as they concluded that a stronger state apparatus was required to prevent their own demise by their own people (Kühn 2011, 64-67). Hence, their approach to politics towards the British, via Calcutta, focussed on securing funds not available in Afghanistan itself, in order to establish modern military forces. They also tried to establish a narrative of legiti­mate Durrani rule (excluding competing Pashtun tribes as well as Tajik, Uzbek, Kohistani, or other minorities) over the whole of Afghanistan, ‘portraying themselves to the Afghan people as the necessary preservers of the nation’s independence and Islamic religious identity against potential aggression by both the British raj and czarist Russia’ (Barfield 2010, 133). Afghan rulers, henceforth, dependent as they are to the present day on foreign funding, have played an intermediary role between the population and foreign powers.

In any case, despite historiography, the ‘graveyard of empires’ myth never deterred foreign powers from trying to use Afghan rivalries to their own advantage. British, Russian, and American involvement manipulated and transformed Afghan politics to different degrees—all left their mark on Afghan society. Vice versa, attempts to subdue Afghanistan by coop­erating with forthcoming elites mostly failed as Afghan internal rivalry destabilised political arrangements rather speedily. To be sure, in colo­nial history this claim might be made quite legitimately for most states. Indeed, the development of a state system is of European making, and capitalist globalisation championed first by the British and later by the United States affects and penetrates most societies. Conversely, defeat in battle and unfulfilled political hopes did not destroy the British Empire (Kühn 2010, 153 et seqq., 268-72), and there is reason to believe that the Soviet Union would have collapsed without the military campaign to secure the Afghan communists’ survival in power. To ascribe Afghanistan causal responsibility for any of these developments seems to be going very far.

The gloomy narrative about Afghanistan provides ample illustration for reasoning by analogy. Comparisons of the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF)’s post-2001 engagement with that of the Russians in the 1980s, or with the United States’ erratic war in Vietnam abound; the ‘graveyard of empires’ myth sells books, and authors and pundits alike set claims to expertise on such analogous reasoning (Jones 2010; Schneckener 2005). Yet the analogies are problematic, as they pick aspects of a much more complex set of factors, conveniently excluding contradictory evidence. For example, Soviet intervention was by no means an attempt at creating another Soviet republic in the Union but was born out of strategic inde­cisiveness, itself owed to the gerontocratic leadership of the Communist Party (Feifer 2009).

This underscores Blumenberg’s assertion that myths tell stories rather than explaining the origin of the world. Not being etiological, that is, not being about genetic characteristics, we have to stick with Blumenberg’s idea that we will not know the origin of myth; it is, however, all the more important to turn to their function (Segal 1999, 145). For stories com­prising a myth to be credible, they need to be isomorphic with other stories, which mutually establish a credible claim by being compatible. The ‘graveyard’ myth rests on several supporting myths, and in turn sup­ports others, which combine in providing sufficient ‘knowledge’ about Afghanistan to constitute the foundational room for such claims. For this process, whether political action tailored to the ‘realities’ described in the myth is actually deliberately (and manipulatively) misleading, or whether belief in such ‘realities’ and ‘ancient truths’ is genuine, makes no differ­ence. Rather, what is of interest is how such myths are productive and, in the concrete case, decisive in defining the interaction of members of the ‘empire’ and their mythical gravediggers.