Images of Afghanistan

Abstract

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 has prompted a large number of scholars and journalists to embark on the analysis of Afghan affairs. Even before the invasion, much valuable material was available in Western languages to the interested reader. The internal politics of Afghanistan had been studied by Louis Dupree, Vartan Gregorian, Hasan Kakar, Leon B. Poullada, and Richard S. Newell; Maxwell J. Fry and Gilbert Etienne had analysed the Afghan economy; and Afghanistan's international relations had been examined in detail by Ludwig W. Adamec. Indeed, a recent bibliography of works on Afghanistan has listed no fewer than 1,611 items dealing with Afghan history and politics. None the less, had it not been for the Soviet invasion, the study of Afghanistan would surely have remained the province of a few cognoscenti. In the wake of the invasion, however, a large body of literature on Afghanistan has been published, containing works varying in quality from the outstanding to the atrocious. An appraisal of the relative merits of some of the more widely cited studies therefore seems to be in order.