[MUSIC] Welcome back. This week we will look at the conflict in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and in order to understand it properly, we also have to look at the origin of these states, and therefore we have to look at India and Bangladesh. It might strike you as a little bit of a detour to look at all this very large geographical and historical space in order to look at a conflict that you might only be interested in, but as I hope you will understand soon, is that we will not be able to understand the origins and the driving forces of the conflict that currently rages in Afghanistan, and has by now affected Pakistan as well, if we do not understand the ideological and historical background to the creation of both of these states as modern states. The first thing that I would like to draw to your attention, and that's something that we have discussed now repeatedly, also with respect to several of the other states that we talked about, and that's the seemingly paradoxical combination of very, very old cultures. Here we see the Blue Mosque in Herat, which is fairly old. It's, as you can see, is not very different from many of the mosques that exist in Iran. Therefore, reflecting also the cultural space to which the city of Iraqi belonged for several centuries. And I could now show you many of the other artifacts of Greek history, of ancient Buddhist history, of Chinese history, all of these that are present in this region. So we are talking about very, very old cultures. At the same time, very vibrant tribal cultures that have remained fairly unchanged for very, very long time. And that we can juxtapose with very young, underdeveloped state structures. And that is a paradox, because you have a proud national cultural tradition, and the somewhat underdeveloped, immature institutional modern arrangement. In that picture you see, again, the art of the Blue Mosque in Herat, and election posters that I photographed in the city of Kandahar, and that show you the somewhat perplexed approach to this modern phenomenon of an election. You have, here, a picture of Zahir Shah, then a picture of his predecessor as king, I think it's Habibullah Khan but I'm not sure. Then you have Hamid Karzai next to the local governor of Kandahar. And on top of it, another local warlord that was up for election. So what you see, what this indicates, and that's what I would like you to draw your attention to is the simultaneity of old cultures, modern phenomena, and the somewhat incomplete reception of modern institutions, in this case elections. And that's something we will come back to, and we have already encountered when we talked, for example, about the Gulf States. And we will encounter those in some of the other places we will visit. Now the other thing that we will need to understand in order to look at the Afghan conflict, and put it into context, is we need to go back a little bit in time, and look at the British Empire, as it existed in the Indian subcontinent. Here is a contemporary map of the time. As you can see here, it's a vast empire that the British accumulated in India, ranging from Afghanistan all the way to Burma. And, as you can see on the next map, It's an area that is divided religiously. It's composed of many different principalities, different local structures that the British keep in place, and primarily it's not a religiously or ethnically homogenous place. So you see here the green areas are predominantly Muslim, the red areas are predominantly Hindu, and you see here also another concentration of Muslims, and then you have the Buddhists in Burma. Then as you see on the next map, this shows the concentration of Hindus in the British Empire. So the dark red ones, this is a contemporary map from 1909, the dark red ones show concentration of over 80 percent being Hindu, and we have the mirror image of that map. As you see the next one, this shows the concentration of Muslim populations. So the dark green ones are over 75%, as you see here, in the Pakistani areas. And here the areas that later on become Bangladesh. But, and that's the important thing, the populations are mixed, they are not rigidly, territorially divided. You have now, the independence movement that is growing in India, now becomes divided between the Hindu and the Muslim league. Here you have a picture of the Muslim League, in the last years before independence, and in the middle you see the key figure of the Muslim League in British India. It's Muhammad Ali-Jinnah, who strongly advocates for the creation of a separate Muslim State, after independence. So, based on the so called two nation theory that Hindus and Muslims are so different that they cannot live together in one national state. So this is the agitation and we are now simplifying and summarizing a very complex history, but ultimately we see the creation when British India achieves independence, the creation of two separate states. The union of India, which is predominantly Hindu, and the creation of the state of Pakistan, which is predominantly Muslim. If you see on the next map, the problem arises here, because we are not dealing with ethnically homogenous groups. Pakistan is created out of achievement of independence; you have a civil war, large population exchanges, violent exchanges and the division of two ancient Indian States. You have the State of Punjab, which is roughly around here, and then on the other side in Eastern Pakistan, you have the State of Bengal that are separated, and in each case the Muslim populations are Moving into these now predominantly Muslim states, and vice versa, the Hindus are moving into the union of India. The problem we see now is that Pakistan is created as two non-contiguous physical entities. You have East Pakistan, that is, the modern state of Bangladesh. We will come to that history later when it separates from Pakistan in 71. And then you have West Pakistan that is the Pakistan that we know today as the state of Pakistan. And if we concentrate on this one now, you will see that Pakistan itself is not ethnically homogeneous and it's not linguistically homogeneous. It's composed of a broad patchwork of different ethnicities that have in common Muslim religion but little else. And if you see the next slide, the situation is additionally complicated because the big population groups that are now located in Pakistan, they extend into the neighboring countries. You have the Baluch that are also present in Iran and have in Iran their own province. They extend in to Afghanistan. They extend, and then here you have the province of Sind that is separated, you have all this province in India. You have Punjab that I just mentioned that is separated. And you have some of the principalities where the population did not necessarily accord with the ruler. And that is one of the origins of the problem of Kashmir that we will discuss later on. We have a predominantly Muslim population but a Hindu ruler. And the Hindu ruler decides that he wants to join the union of India. And then Pakistan later agitates for its inclusion into Pakistan. That is the origin of the conflict we see, the enduring conflict over Kashmir. At this moment, all you need to remember is that Pakistan is an ethnically and linguistically divided country from the beginning. It's only held together through the common religion. So you see on the next slide, the situation is now particularly complicated with respect to the Pashto people, because as you see here this is a map that roughly shows the distribution of the Pashtuns. And they are straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there are roughly two-thirds of the Pashtuns nowadays live in Pakistan, one-third lives in Afghanistan and they cross a very porous border and a very artificial border, as we see on the next slide. It's a border that had been created when the British were still in command of British India, and it was negotiated between the ruler of Afghanistan and the viceroy of British India at the time, and it's completely arbitrary. And it strikes right through the settlement areas of the Pashtuns, and that is one of the enduring sources of conflict between these two nations, and we will come back to this in the next video. So we have an ethnically divided Pakistan, and the situation is even more complex in Afghanistan. We have here a rough overview of the different ethnicities that inhabit the territory of Afghanistan. And as you can see it's a very, very complex landscape of ethnicities and languages. And while almost all Afghans are Muslims, there is this relatively prominent Shia minority. But in Afghanistan the overall division is not between the religion, the vast majority are Sunni Muslims, but it's between different ethnicities and languages. And as we will see this week, once conflict breaks out, these ethnicities become the natural ordering system for populations that are now under stress and are fearing for their physical safety. Which then ultimately leads to the ethnic nature of the civil war in Afghanistan. That's something we will discuss. But at this point, you should just remember that Afghanistan is not a nation-state in the Western tradition. We do not have an homogeneous ethnic population. Rather the opposite. There's a vast variety of different languages and cultures there. So in this course we put a great deal of emphasis on institutions. And now with respect to the countries that we look at this week, Afghanistan, Pakistan and to some extent Bangladesh, it's important to remember that the institutions we're dealing with are twofold. They're primarily tribal institutions, inherited from tribal cultures. And there are, with respect to Pakistan and Bangladesh, British institutions inherited from the British Raj, the British colonial presence, which in itself was a mixture of old and imposed British institutions. So this institutional melange, you need to keep in mind. We see here on a contemporary stamp of the 1965 from Afghanistan which shows the Valley of Bami Yan and the Buddhas, which at that time were a primary tourist site of Afghanistan. And one of the things that drew visitors to Afghanistan, as this stamp encouraged them to do, and something that despite all the conflict is still very much present in Afghanistan and large parts of Pakistan as well, is the striking vibrancy of tribal culture and traditional culture. Here you see from roughly the same era a stamp encouraging foreign visitors to come with the promise of an authentic lifestyle that they could see. And here you see some pictures that I took relatively recently on one of my travels to Afghanistan. It shows a local game of buzkashi which the traditional Afghan form of polo that is played there. And you can see it's a very timeless atmosphere that you can see. This game probably would've looked exactly the same if it had been played 200, 300 years ago or in the periods that these stamps refer to. And we see similar games are played in Pakistan and they look very similar. So one of the things that is striking about these two countries is the, The authenticity, if you want to call it that way, or the, The survival of traditional lifestyles well into the modern era, something that's, for example, particularly strongly reflected in the way Afghans and also many Pakistanis dress. Something that, if you remember when we discussed Turkey and Iran, something that the states had actively discouraged, even forbidden. Here in Afghanistan we see people are dressed exactly the same way for the last several hundred years. So the, The vibrancy of these cultures is something that is very much valued among the populations. But it's also we remember that the populations are ethnically divided. So they like and they want to preserve their differences. So that's a strong element. And that it's an element that feeds into the contemporary conflict. On the other hand we have relatively weak state institutions. Here we see the prison regulations, in the prison of Hosni, that I photographed when I was monitoring and evaluating a project in that prison. And, you know, it does it's job but it tells you something about the approach too. Running a prison, which is very different from running a modern prison. And for those of you who have read Foucault book about Discipline and Punish, you will see this is a very different approach to it. And here, for example, it shows you the organizational chart of the Ministry of Justice. Under the Taliban Islamic Emirate and it's, it shows that there is an institutional tradition. It's just that it's a very different form of institutional organization of arranging the affairs of the state. It's not necessarily in the Western Weberian, bureaucratic sense of state, as I've presented it in the beginning of this course. And that's, if you remember the admonition towards path dependency. That's something we need to take into account when we look at the administration today and we try to work with them and to reform them. That's something that I've been working professionally for the last ten years in administrative reform, in legal reform. And that's something that is very striking and that needs to be taken into account. The particular institutional and administrative traditions that exist. In this case, in Afghanistan, but they're also very distinct in Pakistan. And that's something that's often forgotten. Both by academic analysis, but even more so by those who are practically dealing with reform efforts in these parts of the world. So, keep in mind, for the time being, their weak institutional traditions of modern statehood that overlaps with very strong, very vibrant traditional cultures. And that's, in particular, we will come back to this in some of the next videos. The tribal Customs and the tribal law that exists very strongly and particularly among the Pashtun, the Pashtunwali. Which is much stronger than any attempt by the state to enact laws and enforce laws. So we will see how that works together. Now briefly to the thing that's probably on the mind of most of you when you think of Afghanistan. You will primarily think of the conflict that has raged there for the last 30, 40 years. And it's something that has captured the imagination not just of the Afghans themselves, but also the surrounding Muslim countries. Here, we see a commemorating stamp from Iran. That recognizes and celebrates the Afghan resistance to the Soviet presence in the country. You see another Iranian stamp from the year after. So, it's the celebration of Muslim resistance against this atheist, Godless, foreign colonial invasion, as it was presented. And that led to the Mujahideen, the Afghan resistance fighters, fighting the Soviets. But as most of you are aware, it also led to the arrival of many foreign fighters, particularly Arab fighters. Who came to support the Mujahideen in the struggle against the Soviet Union. And that's something that was heavily supported financially, logistically, and materially from Saudi Arabia, from Pakistan, and from the United States. And we will discuss it in this week. It led to a very unholy alliance between some very radical ways of approaching Islam. Leaving a very bitter legacy that we will see to this day. So the thing to remember is that it led to the defeat of the Soviet Army. Here we see a monument to the fallen Soviet Fighters in Afghanistan that I photographed in Uzbekistan. Next to it you see a Soviet helicopter gunship that used to be a monument in front of the if I remember correctly, it was the Kunduz airport. And it has been completely destroyed by the Mujahideen afterwards. So, yes, it led to the defeat of the Soviet Union, so in that sense it was probably a success, a victory for jihad, for the Mujahideen. But as we will discuss later on, it also lead to the implosition of Afghan society, a very enduring civil war in Afghanistan that we will discuss later on. But also important, it lead to these radicalized militarily trained foreign fighters. That then returned after the victory against the Soviet Union. Encouraged by that recent victory and which then inflamed existing tensions in their countries. Probably the most pernicious effect of this was of the returning fighters that went to Algeria. And then leading to the Algerian civil war between the Islamists and the secular state that claimed something between 150 to 200 thousand dead. We have the similar arrival of some of these fighters into the Bosnian conflict where they supported the Bosnian Muslims. So this is something you need to remember. The radicalization and the military training that many of these foreign fighters, not least of which is Al-Qaeda, of which you are probably aware. That they receive there the logistical, financial, and military support that they got. And then the impact they had after the conflict in Afghanistan actually was over. That's something that we will discuss. Now looking briefly at the period that comes in Afghanistan after the civil war that raged from '92 'til '96. And then you have the Taliban presence from '96 to 2001. And then in 2001 you have these foreign intervention, let's call it, in Afghanistan. And that led to a political process that now tries to bind these different factions, different tribal traditions. Different warlords into one political process. Here you see Afghan dignitaries at one of the early negotiations for the compact that then leads the political process. And here an Afghan stamp commemorating the first election of the President after their years of conflict. Which is Hamid Kharzai, and that also then leads to international presence trying to support these fledgling institutions in Afghanistan, as we see here. Particularly the attempt to build up institutions supporting the Rule of Law, the other formal parts of the state. And that's something that we will see later on did not directly run into problems because of the path dependency and the weakness of existing structures that I discussed earlier on. And that's something we will refer to Return to in the next videos. And also, there is now the legacy in Afghanistan of not only cultural distruction, as you see here, you know. It's a stamp commemorating the destruction of the Buddhas after 2001, after the new government came to power. But, you see, this is just a physically tangible legacy of radicalization. We see a much more difficult, but much more pernicious legacy of radicalization in the way social norms have changed. And have been hardened and that's something we will discuss in the next video. Not in the next video, when we look at the colonial history, and the run up to the creation of this state, so we will return to some of these issues. But in the videos afterwards we will return to this problem of the legacy of radicalization as a result of this conflict. [MUSIC]
