Nivi Manchanda. Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge.

Abstract

After hundreds of drone strikes and twenty-years of nation-building projects, Afghanistan remains a puzzle for the vast majority of Americans and their allies in the “war on terror.” How could all those resources—the best intentions of civilian officials, think-tank experts, military counterinsurgents, and NGO activists, along with much high-tech battlefield equipment—result in nothing but another Taliban takeover of the country? In Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge, a work much indebted to postcolonial studies, Nivi Manchanda provides a succinct and well-researched answer to this question. She argues that the Euro-American West has suffered from an incapacity to move beyond a well-worn set of contradictory descriptions and simplistic stereotypes, which for well over a century have served as an immobile bedrock for interventions into and policy related to Afghanistan. Anyone who wants to understand what went wrong in Afghanistan and why will find no better starting point than this careful historical study.