This is the subject of our interview with Timothy Nunan, the author of Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan, an account of development and humanitarianism in Afghanistan, which is based on Afghan, Soviet, Western, and NGO sources and archives. A lecturer in the Department of Global History at the Free University of Berlin, Nunan talks to us about how Afghan leaders and intellectuals negotiated the Cold War geopolitics of development, why NGO-centric humanitarianism replaced Soviet-led developmentalism, and the writers and scholars we should follow to get a more nuanced picture of Afghan society and state.
The swift collapse of Ashraf Ghani's government in Kabul following the withdrawal of United States' armed forces has renewed critical debates about nation building, development and international intervention on these fronts. Particularly notable has been the militarised, corrupt, and, ultimately, tenuous nature of the US-supported regime of aid and governance in post-2001 Afghanistan. What has often been missing from this conversation, however, is a wider view of development in 20th-century Afghanistan, and the role of international actors in this historical trajectory.
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Himal Southasian: With the fall of Kabul and now Afghanistan under Taliban's control, notions about the country being a 'graveyard of empires' are popular once again. This is a framework you've been critical of, and you have instead argued that Afghanistan was a "graveyard of the Third World nation-state" and a site for contested visions of 'Third World sovereignty'. Could you explain what you mean by that and how that might impact our understanding of Afghanistan today?