Afghanistan: Realities and Misperceptions

Lack of understanding Afghanistan by foreign interventionists has often slanted their perception of the country and seriously influenced their policy judgments. In 1950s Afghanistan was a stable and a unified state, and yet America’s strategic assessment of the nation was based on biased observations.

In fact, attempts in early 1950s to include Afghanistan within the U.S. security zone in the Middle East failed partly because of the remoteness of Afghanistan in the minds of policy makers in Washington. One example was a 1953 secret study of the Chiefs of Staff which read: “Afghanistan is of little or no strategic importance to the United States. It is situated on the perimeter of the USSR. It remains nominally independent of Soviet domination, but its geographic location, coupled with the realization by Afghan leaders of Soviet capabilities presages Soviet control of the country whenever the situation so dictates.”

A quarter of century later, Afghanistan was the only country in the region that fought a bloody war against the Soviet Communism and forced the Soviet army out. It was also in Afghanistan that the United States chose to wage the longest covert war against the USSR in the region. Furthermore, less than a half century later, Afghanistan was the only country in the region from where the United States was attacked forcing the U.S. to invade Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has been forced by its recent history to persist as a unified country. The central government was traditionally weak, but the peripheries were even weaker, favoring the presence of a central authority as a power balancer and political arbitrator. Despite its ethnic diversity, the Afghan nation has shown surprising strength, resilience, and viability in the recent past, with no trace of secessionist threats. For most of the last century, relative peace coupled with foreign assistance has helped Afghanistan to establish modern state institutions and economic infrastructure, both of which facilitated national integration and expanded the writ of the central government throughout the country.

Then, during the past 60 years the political disintegration of the country was mostly caused by foreign intervention. Afghanistan is not the graveyard of empires, but a victim of their interests or ambitions. Once an elderly Afghan from Ghazni told me that he wouldn’t ask any material help from the outsiders only “if the foreigners could undo what they did to us.” First,” he said, “the rival superpowers fought their ideological war in our country and then walked away from the mess they created. Both parties helped radicalize the society to serve their own purpose. Then the Afghans had to cope with the devastating social, political, and economic legacy of the war. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, Da’ish and a bunch of other radical groups are all a byproduct of that dreadful battle of the Cold War fought in Afghanistan."