Locating Afghan History

Extract

Afghanistan's 20th century has long been seen through an analytical dichotomy. One concentration of historical scholarship has sought to explain the fraught progress of Afghan nation-building in the 1910s and 1920s. A second has sought to explain the unraveling of the Afghan nation after 1979. Weighted toward the decades at either end of the century, this dichotomized field has been problematic in both chronological (and thereby processual) and methodological terms. On the level of chronology, the missing long mid-section (indeed, half) of the century between the framing coups of 1929 and 1979 has made it difficult to convincingly join together the two bodies of scholarship. Not only has the missing middle further cemented the division of scholarly labor but it also has made it more difficult to connect the history of the last quarter of the century to that of the first quarter (except as a story of parallels), rendering them discrete narratives of development, one ending and the other beginning with a coup. The problems are deeper than this, though, extending from questions of chronology and process to matters of method. For if in its focus on nationalism and nation-building the first-quarter scholarship is framed within the neat boundaries of national spaces and actors, then in its focus on the unraveling of the nation and its peoples through the consequences of Soviet intervention, the last-quarter scholarship elevates nonnational actors as the key agents of historical process.