What inspired you to pursue this fascinating study of Afghanistan? I first went to Afghanistan in the 1970s and did ethnographic fieldwork with nomads in the the northeastern part of the country. At that time, Afghanistan was at peace and stable, despite having a weak government in Kabul. I was able to see for myself how people could maintain political order without much in the way of government institutions. After 1978, Afghanistan entered a period of protracted warfare that included the Soviet invasion in 1979 and their withdrawal in 1989. The decade long civil war that followed, including the rise of the Taliban, drew little attention in the outside world, but this changed dramatically after the United States invaded Afghanistan following the 9-11 attacks. But in spite of all the new attention paid to the country, it was clear to me after revisting the county that few policy makers or even academics had much familiarity with the dynamics of Afghanistan's political history. The book was an attempt to make the dynamics of Afghan politics clearer. Why is Afghanistan known as “the graveyard of empires”? Afghanistan developed the reputation as “the graveyard of empires” by twice forcing the British to withdraw from the country in the 19th century and then successfully repeating that feat by forcing the Soviets out in the 20th. While the Afghans won a few occasional battles, they were no match militarily for the British or the Soviets. What they did was to make the cost of occupation higher than invading powers were willing to pay, forcing governments in London and Moscow to change their policies. Paradoxically, Afghanistan was regularly conquered and ruled by outsiders before the 19th century, but rulers in those periods had much more limited aims and made relatively few demands on local populations. Do you agree with President Obama that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity”? Afghanistan is certainly much more a war of necessity than Iraq, but at a policy level the necessity is removing the threat posed mostly by non-Afghans. That is, Afghanistan is the theater of operations, but al Qaeda and related groups that constitute the basic threat to the US are now located mostly in Pakistan. The difficulty for the US and its coalition allies is that they would surely return to Afghanistan if international troops departed and it is only from Afghanistan that they can be confronted in Pakistan. If Pakistan withdrew its covert support of the Taliban and made a more serious effort to confront it and al Qaeda, the US presence in Afghanistan would not be necessary at its current level. Are you optimistic about the future of Afghanistan? Afghanistan is not an easy place to be optimistic about because so many policy errors have been made since 2001. If a quarter of the effort now being made had been done in 2003, there might be no insurgency in Afghanistan today, and the country would be on the road to stability. But despite the county's problems, Afghans who have experienced almost thirty years of warfare are keen to see violence come to and end so that they and their children can live ordinary lives. Although it is one of the poorest countries in the world today, Afghanistan is in fact rich in mineral resources and a key link in the region's transit trade.* To the extent that these are developed, Afghanistan's neighbors will have a stronger interest in facilitating stability there in a way that would secure a long lasting peace. Have you ever visited Saudi Arabia? I have never visited Saudi Arabia, although my first book ”The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan,” was published in Arabic translation by King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh.
