The notion of the ‘tribe’ is perhaps the most (ab)used socio-political category when it comes to contemporary political discourse on Afghanistan. Following on from the alternate construction of Afghanistan as a failed state, as a frontier and from debates about ‘Af-Pak’, Chapter 3 shows the ways in which a particular lens through which the early East India Company administrators tried to comprehend the people they encountered has become a definitive marker of Afghan society, polity and culture today. The discussion traces the genealogy of the term ‘tribe’ before moving on to an examination of the problematic knowledge practices that underpin this over-determined and misleading Afghan ‘way of life’.

The introductory chapter introduces the main questions that animate the book as a whole. It has a section on methods and a discussion of the theoretical and methodological traditions the book draws on. It elaborates on the stakes in construing Afghanistan as an ‘interve+G6nable object’. It uses an image of a textbook used in Afghanistan in the 1980s to show how knowledge about Afghanitan is produced and packaged and how it circulates around the world.

The short conclusion reflects on and recapitulates the arguments made in the thesis. It also points in the direction of future research that would be fruitful, most prominently in the form of providing the space for “contrapuntal narratives” and an imperial archive, located in, and excavated from, the colony. The Coda contains an element of auto-critique in that it also identifies what this project would have benefitted from, not least Russian language skills and easy access to Soviet sources. The book ends by impelling us to continue working towards the dismantling of the project of colonial knowledge and by so doing to continue weakening the processes of racism, sexism, violent accumulation and dispossession that it perforce engenders.

Through an analysis of some of the stock tropes (as a pawn in the Great Game, as a space of disease and pathology and as the graveyard of empires) used to describe Afghanistan, and through a close reading of one key text (Afghanistan 101), the first chapter highlights the ways in which a certain essentialised ‘idea’ of Afghanistan has become common-sense and has disguised the need for more serious engagement with the country and its people. The aim of this chapter is to foreground Afghanistan as an object of enquiry and to start questioning some of the strategies that are most commonly used to think about it.

As a counterpoint, Chapter 5 considers representations of the offending men. A certain pathologised image of the Afghan man now dominates the mainstream Anglophone imaginary. This chapter analyses representations of Pashtun males in the Western media and juxtaposes them with depictions of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai in order to underscore the tensions and contradictions inherent in the hegemonic narrative of ‘Pashtun sexuality’. This chapter and the chapter on women that precedes it are best viewed as an exercise in what Richard Tapper has called ‘media ethnography’ – the ‘observation’, as it were, of information and images circulated in Britain and America by different media. The chapter also revisits the debate about homosexuality as a ‘minority identity’, arguing that the act versus identity debate is deployed in this context to simultaneously make the Pashtun Other legible and to discredit his ‘unorthodox’ ways of being. The aim of this final chapter is to show just how ‘situated’ all knowledge necessarily is, and just how insidious practices of knowledge cultivation about the Other can be. _ftnref1+G10

If ‘tribal’ is the first word that comes to mind when talking about Afghanistan, the image of women in burqas forms its visual counterpart. The ‘plight of women’ is frequently invoked to inform the world of the backwardness and brutality of the government and people (especially the men) of Afghanistan. By examining an array of articles, commentaries and political testimonies, Chapter 4 underscores the problematic and politicised assumptions that guide ostensibly ‘neutral’ liberal discourses on saving Afghan women. Rather than making an ontological assertion about the (misread and misunderstood) character of Afghan women – not least because such a diverse group cannot be said to have a single character – this chapter focuses on discourse productivity as a process by which certain narratives sanction particular policies and validate some lifestyles and marginalise others.

Chapter 2 charts the trajectory of Afghanistan as a spatial formation, one created but not ‘occupied’, as it were, by colonial order. It argues that the seemingly innocuous production of Afghanistan as a ‘state of exception’ is in fact intimately tied to the logics of colonialism. Afghanistan conceived as a ‘failed’ state, a liminal zone on the periphery of civilisation, is a type of imperial formation, one necessary for the representation and establishment of the stability of the centre. It is an exploration of the intimate connections between power, knowledge and space. The chapter’s focus on the ‘state’ forms the first half of the conventional ‘state’ versus ‘tribe’ debate that animates most policy discussion about the country.G7