Timothy Nunan. Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan.

Abstract

The last sentence of the jacket copy’s descriptive paragraph for Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan sets very high expectations: “Humanitarian Invasion signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of international history.” The hubris of foretelling the place of one’s oeuvre in the future of an academic discipline notwithstanding, this is an elegantly written book that provides a history of, or perhaps a story about, American, European, and Soviet transnational and international aid in Afghanistan. If Humanitarian Invasion has a driving argument or overarching purpose, its author struggles to define it. The closest Timothy Nunan gets to defining the thesis of the book is to characterize it as “a history of international development and humanitarianism in Afghanistan” (15). As a history of ideas in communities of practice on two sides of the Cold War divide, the book does not disappoint. It weaves the intellectual histories of both European and Soviet aid-program strategists (ironically both rooted in leftist ideologies) with their implementation of aid programs in Afghanistan. Nunan carefully traces the influence of worldviews and understandings of Afghanistan on how aid programs were conceived and implemented, and on how they fared on the ground. Also interestingly, he describes the effect of failures and perceived successes on the development of thought among the Soviet and West European development and humanitarian workers. Empirics make it into the book (inter alia, chaps. 2 and 5) through several case studies of Cold War development efforts in Afghanistan by Americans, West Germans, and (mostly) Soviets.