Inside Afghanistan

Inside Afghanistan: Political Networks, Informal Order, and State Disruption, by Timor Sharan. London/New York: Routledge, 2023, xix+332pp. ISBN: 978-1032334943.

Reviewed by: Iftikhar Malik, Bath Spa University              

Often exotically called “the graveyard of empire”, Afghanistan’s location at a crossroads of central, southern and west Asian regions, has been undoubtedly a battleground, if not a power engine, of enduring and no less transformative developments. Its geopolitics, in recent centuries, has been as vocal as is its plural ethnic mix, presenting itself as a vanguard for Persian, Mongol and Turkic fortune seekers until the dissolution of the Mughal, Safavid and Uzbek empires in the eighteenth century and consequently emerging as an autonomous country locked between the two contemporary and fiercely competitive Eurasian empires, respectively led by the British and Russians. A landlocked country, often seen as an aggregation of tribal peasantry with a marked ethnic differentiation, shocked a U.S.-led unipolar work in 2001, when a score of Arab militants linked with Afghanistan-based Al-Qaeda, shook the former by engineering the most horrendous aerial attacks on its urban powerhouses. Washington’s wrath knew no bounds as, assisted by more than forty allies, it invaded the very people who until a decade before were its heroic associates, sublimely called the mujahideen or the holy warriors. The second ascendance of the Taliban, following their first emergence during the heady 1990s when Afghanistan was morosely stuck in unending squabbles, has been one of the most glaring examples of a retreat by an exhausted superpower, with history repeating itself following a similar withdrawal by the Soviets in 1989. The peasants-turned fighters often tutored in seminaries returned to Kabul in August 2021, reminding people of the American withdrawal from Saigon some four decades earlier.