The Afghan Conundrum: Regional Answers?
I.P. Khosla
AFGHANISTAN’S REGIONAL DILEMMAS, SOUTH ASIA AND BEYOND by Harsh V. Pant Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2018, 180 pp., 850
January 2018, volume 42, No 1

Historians, political commentators, journalists have all, almost uniformly, depicted an objectified Afghanistan: it is played upon by external powers, not a player. A ‘great game’ has, since at least the nineteenth century, been played out by these powers, but Afghanistan itself is not supposed to have agency.

That phrase was first used by a British intelligence officer, Arthur Conolly, in 1840, in a letter to a colleague. He commended it, called it also a noble game, a grand game whose essence was that Britain, Persia and Russia would work together, cooperate to free Afghanistan from the ambitious clutches of the Emir of Bukhara. Two years later Conolly was caught by the Emir, who had his head sliced off. But the phrase lived on, popularized years later by Rudyard Kipling but now meaning the opposite, not great power cooperation but rivalry for influence in Afghanistan. Thence it developed a taken-for-granted quality, that the Afghans themselves have little say in the way that rivalry plays out. That idea needs correction.

Add to this the regional perspective. It was the great expanding empires that vied for position; the smaller regional powers find no mention and, of course, there weren’t any at that time, just tribal chiefs and warlords; but now there are several regional powers with varying interests in the future of Afghanistan, so they have to be included: the Central Asians (CARs) after the demise of the Soviet Union, Iran after the revolution, Pakistan and a rising China (not to mention the Gulf countries, like Saudi Arabia, which had a lot to do, but this book does not include those).

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