Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Kakar knows the material extremely well. He looks through 19th-century Afghanistan in a very professional way. It is a very detailed history, which helps you understand that Afghanistan’s interaction with the international community is not recent. There is a tendency to think – Oh, the Afghans, they’ve never really dealt with foreigners. In fact successful Afghan rulers specialised in dealing with foreigners by getting them to fund their states and equip their militaries.
Your next choice is A Political And Diplomatic History of Afghanistan, 1863-1901 by M Hassan Kakar.
Hassan Kakar was one of the first professionally trained historians in Afghanistan. He got his degree from SOAS in London in the late 1960s and was also one of the first to give equal weight to both British and Afghan sources. I have followed his work for close to 40 years. It is a synthesis that manages to show how both internal and external dynamics have shaped the course of Afghan history. What you discover is that Afghan rulers play two types of games. They had to be effective rulers internally to convince the Afghans that they could keep foreign powers out of the country. At the same time they had to be highly sophisticated in terms of dealing with the outside world – the British Raj and the Tsarist Empire – convincing them that supporting an independent Afghanistan was in their own interests.
Kakar knows the material extremely well. He looks through 19th-century Afghanistan in a very professional way. It is a very detailed history which helps you understand that Afghanistan’s interaction with the international community is not recent. There is a tendency to think – Oh, the Afghans have never really dealt with foreigners. In fact successful Afghan rulers specialised in dealing with foreigners by getting them to fund their states and equip their militaries.
This is very much the time of the Great Game.
It is that classic time of the Great Game and it is an excellent study from both perspectives of how that works. Kakar understand the British imperial attitudes in history but he also understands and explicates the problems of Afghan rulers.
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Thomas Barfield is professor of anthropology at Boston University. He is director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilization and president of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies. His latest book, Afghanistan, traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world.
