Orientalism and Afghanistan

While the world still reels from the Taliban takeover from Kabul, a particular narrative is percolating the discourse around the takeover of and the prior American occupation in Afghanistan.

This narrative has at its heart a concern – indeed, a very valid concern – about the fate of Afghan women and children under the emerging political regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The challenges Afghan women and children will face under the Taliban remain undisputed. However, the fault in this narrative lies in the fact that it remains steeped in oriental prejudice and fails to scrutinize the plight of the Afghan population, including women, under the American occupation.

A specious concern for the ‘liberation’ of Afghan women and children underlay the initial American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In fact, while the United States was launching its invasion, the then US First Lady Laura Bush claimed publicly that the ‘war on terror’ went hand in hand with the ‘fight for the rights and dignity of women’ in Afghanistan. These sentiments, unfortunately, are based on centuries of what Edward Said termed as ‘orientalism’.

In his book ‘Orientalism’ – perhaps the most seminal work of the twentieth century – Said argued that the West viewed the East or the ‘orient’ through a highly racial, hypersexualized and myopic lens. This point of view shaped the views of the West on notions such as the hyper-sexuality and barbarity of Oriental men – a narrative that resonates strongly with the demonization of black men in the West – and with the helpless, unexplored beauty of the East which requires saving from the chivalrous white man.

This is exactly the line of thought we see emerging in conversations around Afghanistan and other places like Iraq. Indeed, the concern for Afghan women is predicated on this oriental and biased view of the realities people of the Orient live. This concern itself becomes concerning when we scrutinize how the method of liberating women – a military occupation, attacking civilian and refugee camps and imposing a capitalist economy – all derail and threaten the existence of women and children in these sites of occupation.

It is essential, therefore, that we remain aware of the contradictions inherent in the narratives around us. Many scholars such as Robert Fisk, in fact, have recounted how wars of occupation and narratives of liberation expose locals to dislocation and immense violence. The efforts of the US and other Western entities to improve living conditions through developmental schemes targeting women, moreover, have also often eroded independence, disrupted innate social fabrics and exposed people to the caprices of unemployment and a tumultuous labour market, once again highlighting how fraught this line of thinking can become.

We must not, however, let this sentiment exonerate the Taliban or downplay the challenges that lie ahead. History remains the best instructor and as the previous Taliban regime revealed, Afghanistan may move towards a more atavistic social or political structure.

Oriental viewpoints, meanwhile, are not the exclusive domain of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, orientalism was at the epicenter of the colonialism of the West as well. This orientalism not only instilled a deep savior complex within western colonizing forces, it also gave birth to a deep sense of superiority western colonizers held over their occupying forces. Hence, British colonizing forces in India had to ‘delay independence for the country because the locals were not yet prepared for democracy’. Thomas Macaulay’s notorious statement about a single shelf in an English library outweighing all of Eastern culture also stems from this oriental and colonial mentality.

The West is not the only one guilty of perpetuating orientalism. Many denizens of the orient itself promulgate and adhere to an orientalist mindset, whereby they disassociate native populations from traits they associate with the West. This has become a common refrain not only in the discourse around Afghanistan but also in the larger conversations surrounding post-colonial societies. Hence, we are subscribing to the same oriental thought process when we claim Pakistanis as a people are not ‘suitable’ for democracy, and instead, only an enlightened dictator can ‘get us in line’.

This internalized orientalism is again a phenomenon that has been extensively studied. The great thinker, Frantz Fanon, posited how colonialism and its associated forms of knowledge and power force natives to internalize a sense of inferiority towards and fear of the colonizer. For Fanon, a major pillar of decolonization remains unlearning and jettisoning this internalized orientalism, and instead reclaiming the minds of the natives through asserting cultural, political and economic equality.

As the next few days unfold and the conversation centers on political building in Afghanistan, let us remember the fallout of the invasion, and let us remain cognizant of the perils of orientalism and the stranglehold it possesses over Afghans and other decolonized nations. For it is only through the reclaiming of the mind and of thought that we can truly set aside the shackles of colonizers – both external and internal.

The writer is a civil servant and has studied at Cornell University and at the University of Oxford.