Afghanistan: Six Questions for Thomas Barfield

May 21, 4:50 PM, 2010

By Scott Horton

Boston University anthropology professor Thomas Barfield is one of America’s foremost authorities on Afghanistan, a country he first visited over forty years ago as a student. He has just published Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, a panoramic study of the nation from the rise of the Mughal Empire to the current Taliban resurgence. I put six questions to Barfield about his book.

1. Blackwater’s former CEO Erik Prince recently said that America’s Taliban adversaries in Afghanistan were “barbarians” who “crawled out of a sewer” with “a 1200 A.D. mentality.” Afghans generally, but particularly the Taliban, are routinely derided as “medieval” by Western analysts. What do you make of this?

Prof. Thomas BarfieldWestern analysts label the Taliban, and rural Afghans in general, “medieval” because that is one of the few (along with “tribal”) pre-modern typologies in their limited historical repertoire. More commonly it is used as an insult for any backward way of life out of touch with our own modern world. These same “medieval” people shot Soviet helicopters from the sky using American Stinger missiles in the 1980s and are now as addicted to cell phones as anyone else on the planet. Yet the use of the term is insightful if applied to a society where religion still plays a determinative role in culture and politics, much as it did in medieval Europe when religious issues took precedence over economic ones. In Afghanistan, Islamic politics is the default option because its people assume there can no other type. Afghanistan’s fragmented state authority also resembles that of medieval Europe: leadership is personal rather than bureaucratic, and the state’s power to impose its will quite limited. Since the rise of the modern West was characterized by the emergence of centralized states and the retreat of religion as the dominant influence in society, it now takes a leap of imagination to appreciate a society in which religion continues to play a culturally dominating role and the state is only one of many contenders for legitimate political authority.

2. In your first chapters you apply analytical tools developed by the Arab philosopher ibn Khaldun to Afghanistan. Explain ibn Khaldun’s theory, how you apply it, and what it tells us about Afghanistan that is valid today.


remainder: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/