Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars by Alla Ivanchikova

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars by Alla Ivanchikova Hong Zeng (bio) Alla Ivanchikova. Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars. Purdue UP, 2019. Pp. 259. US$44.99. Alla Ivanchikova’s Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars examines how Afghanistan was imagined in literary and visual texts after the 9/11 attacks and subsequent United States invasion. She convincingly argues that Afghanistan after 9/11 became a testing ground for global forces that reflect the moral defects of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-centric humanitarianism, Cold War logic, America’s unwitting contribution to transnational terror, and the damage of wars on human and nonhuman environments. The book’s innovative central arguments criticize a NATO-centric view of Afghanistan, which portrays it as a primordial, isolated country, a site of suffering that justifies Western intervention. According to the author’s astute definition, such a NATO-centric position views Afghanistan through the lens of Orientalism. This book also innovatively deconstructs the prevalent Western Cold War logic of regarding Afghanistan’s problems solely as the outcome of Soviet invasion, which disregards Afghanistan’s multifaceted history, including its indigenous socialism before the Soviet invasion and the domestic strife among religious factions that had already devastated the land. Besides her shrewd criticism of NATO-centric views, Ivanchikova studies several authors’ alternatives views of Afghanistan in post-9/11 literature, including the view of Afghanistan as a site of global forces and variable history rather than a site of flattened history that accounts for only recent Taliban rule. Secondly, she re-evaluates the Soviet Union’s role in Afghanistan: despite massive casualties, the Soviets did restrain Afghanistan’s indigenous theocratic violence and bring about a degree of economic equality and women’s liberation. Thirdly, she satirizes how the American invasion and exploitation of Afghanistan was masked as humanitarian intervention. Fourthly, she points out America’s responsibility in the Taliban’s rise, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the global wars after 9/11, citing the US’ support of local religious extremist groups during the Cold War to compete with the Soviet Union for influence in Afghanistan. Chapter One, “Humanitarian Sublime and the Politics of Pity,” responds to Nivi Manchanda’s questions in Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge: “[H]ow is Afghanistan thought about in a way such that it is possible to invade and bomb it?” and “[W]hat are the sources [End Page 175] of authority that sanction the discourses that make that act of invasion permissible and possible in the first place?” (Manchanda 5). To answer these questions, Ivanchikova critiques three works—Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film Kandaha (2001), Yasmina Khadra’s novel The Swallows of Kabul (2002), and Tony Kushner’s acclaimed play Hombody/Kabul (2002)—which frame Afghanistan as a site of intense suffering and humanitarian crisis that legitimizes US-led invasion. Ivanchikova insightfully points out the cognitive fallacy of this humanitarian view, which relies on “empathy of distant suffering,” “the flattening of Afghan history,” and “the medievalization of Afghanistan” (16). Chapter Two, “Imagining the Soviet: The Faustian Bargain of Khaled Hosseini’s Kabul trilogy,” brilliantly contrasts Hosseini’s best-selling anti-Soviet novel The Kite Runner (2003) with M. E. Hirsh’s Kabul (1986) as well as with Hosseini’s subsequent novels A Thousand Splendid Suns (2006) and The Mountains Echoed (2013). Her comparison reveals the intense anti-Soviet stand of the first book that wins the author success as much as Hosseini’s inability in his later books to similarly depict Soviet invasion and Western “salvation.” Chapter Three, “Humanitarian Jihad: Unearthing the Contemporary in the Narrative of the long 1979,” examines two novels and a graphic novel: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), Soraya Khan’s City of Spies (2015), and Didier Lefèvre’s The Photographer (2009). These works depict ghost wars orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its support of jihad against the Soviets, which later led to the empowerment of Islamic extremist groups and the retrogression of women’s liberation. In particular, Lefèvre’s The Photographer uses the graphic novel genre to...