Afghanistan

02 Jan 2024 13:35

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Everything mentioned under Central Asia, only even more so; religious history; the city of Ghazni, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, the Ghaznavid dynstay; Balkh; the "Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex".

Afghanistan is one of the Old Countries for me; more specifically my paternal grandfather is a Momand Pashtun from Shalez, in the neighborhood of Ghazni, and my father was raised in Kabul. It has never been a very easy or prosperous country, but these last two decades it has become no very rough approximation to Hell, with a third of the population dead, maimed or driven out of the country; this was known as "the great game." I now have some slight hope for it, but not much.

See also: Indian History; the Soviet Union, 1917--1991

Recommended, on modern Afghanistan:
• In the early '60s my grandfather worked for the ministry of planning and put together a photo-book called Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways. It was a propaganda piece through and through, but quite sincere, and the pictures are good.
• Afghanistan Online
• Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit [Modern studies on the political economy of Afghanistan, conducted from Afghanistan]
• Center for Afghanistan Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha [Has one of the largest collections of Afghan documents in the world, and is apparently the only source of English-language instructional materials for Dari, the Afghan version of Persian]
• Tamim Ansary, Games without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan
• Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
• Louis Dupree was an American anthropologist who studied Afghanistan quite thoroughly. I'm in two minds about my grandfather's claim that he was studying it for the CIA. On the one hand, such things are far from unknown, and my grandfather was minister of the interior, so he was in a position to know. On the other hand, he thinks almost everyone works for the CIA. In any case, Dupree's book, Afghanistan, is very good, an encyclopedia of a now-vanished society.
• Feminist Majority Foundation, Afghan Women's Crafts [All proceeds to benefit refugees in Pakistan]
• M. Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1978--1982 [Review: Incipit Tragoedia]
• Gilles Keppel, Jihad: The Trail of Militant Islam [Good on international manuevering in the war against the Soviets, the origin and rise of the Taliban, and the role of foreign adventurers who fought against the Soviets in exporting "salafists-jihadist" violence elsewhere. Not so good on what Afghans actually did or felt, but that's not his main subject.]
• Doris Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words [Travels with the mujaheddin and among the refugees, and her utter inability to interest anyone outside in the suffering of the country; 1987.]
• Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia [Authors' website, with reviews]
• William T. Vollman, An Afghanistan Picture-Show

Recommended, on ancient history:
• Dupree's book has several good chapters on the history and archaeology, going back to the beginning of the Neolithic
• Frank L. Holt
  • Alexander the Great and Bactria: The Formation of a Greek Frontier in Central Asia
  • Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria
• W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India

To read, general:
• Warwick Ball, Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan
• V. V. Barthold, An Historical Geography of Iran ["the Iranian world in its larger sense, comprising part of what is now Soviet Central Asia and Afghanistan as well as Iran proper"]
• Robert D. Crews, Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation
• Fletcher, Afghanistan, Highway of Conquest
• Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan's Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban
• Sana Haroon, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland
• Jonathan L. Lee, Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present [i.e. to 2018]
• Angelo Rasanayagam, Afghanistan: A Modern History
• Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival
• Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban
• Shaista Wahab and Barry Youngerman, A Brief History of Afghanistan

To read, ancient history:
• Gandharan Art in Context
• Pia Brancaccio and Kurt Behrendt (eds.), Gandharan Buddhism: Archaeology, Art, Texts
• Berenice Geoffroy-Schneiter, Gandhara: The Memory of Afghanistan
• F. T. Hiebert, Origins of the Bronze Age Oasis Civilization of Central Asia
• Frank L. Holt, Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan
• Vladimir I. Ionesov, The Struggle Between Life and Death in Proto-Bactrian Culture: Ritual and Conflict
• G. Ligabue and S. Salvatori (eds.), Bactria: An Ancient Oasis Civilization from the Sands of Afghanistan
• John Marshall, The Buddhist Art of the Gandhara School
• Rachel Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia
• Llewelyn Morgan, The Buddhas of Bamiyan
• H. G. Rawlinson, Bactria: The History of a Forgotten Empire
• Richard Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara
• Nicholas Sims-Williams (ed.), Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan
• Lolita Nehru, Origins of the Gandharan Style
• Marian Wenzel, Echoes of Alexander the Great: Silk Route Portraits from Gandhara
• Wladimir Zwalf, Gandharan Sculpture in the British Museum

To read, Islamic conquest to c. 1750
• Arezou Azad, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan: Revisiting the Fada'il-i Balkh [Favorable reviews in American Historical Review, Speculum]
• Shivan Mahendrarajah, A History of Herat: From Chingiz Khan to Tamerlane
• R. D. McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia: Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine, 1480--1889

To read, modern era but pre-1978 history:
• David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier
• Elphinstone, Kingdom of Caubul
• Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan
• Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier
• Victoria Schofield, Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia

To read, the Soviet and civil wars:
• Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys
• Anderson, The Lion's Grave
• Anthony Arnold, Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan's Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire
• Alexandre Bennigsen, "The Soviet Union and Muslim Guerrilla Wars, 1920--1981: Lessons for Afghanistan", RAND Note (N-1707/1), August 1981 PDF reprint
• Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan
• Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979--1989
• Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi (eds.), The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
• David B. Edwards, Before Taliban: Genealogy of the Afghan Jihad
• Deborah Ellis, Women of the Afghan War
• Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan
• Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (2001)
• Jan Goodwin, Caught in the Crossfire [How the editor of Ladies' Home Journal came to travel with the mujaheddin]
• Gilles Gorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present
• Thomas T. Hammond, Red Flag over Afghanistan: The Communist Coup, the Soviet Invasion, and the Consequences [1984]
• Peregrine Hodson, Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan
• Robert Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: How and Why They Fight
• Atremy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
• Vassily Klimentov, A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam [forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2024]
• Jeri Laber and Barnett R. Rubin, "A Nation Is Dying"
• Kamal Matinuddin, The Taliban Phenomenon: Afghanistan 1994--1997
• Sarah E. Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
• Ahmed Rashid, Taliban
• Barnett A. Rubin
  • The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System
  • The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State
• Major General Oleg Sarin and Colonel Lev Dvoretsky (+ ghosts), The Afghan Syndrome: The Soviet Union's Vietnam
• Abdulkader H. Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond

To read, post-2001:
• Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi, Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan
• David P. Auerswald and Stephen M. Saideman, NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone
• Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews (eds.), Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands
• Benjamin Buchholz, "Thoughts on Afghanistan's Loya Jirga: A Myth?" Asien 104 (2007): 23--33 [PDF. See here for summary and discussion.]
• Noah Coburn, Losing Afghanistan: An Obituary for the Intervention
• Sharifullah Dorani, America in Afghanistan: Foreign Policy and Decision Making From Bush to Obama to Trump
• David B. Edwards, Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan
• Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: American in Afghanistan, 2001--2014
• Kathy Gannon, I Is for Infidel, J Is For Jihad, K Is for Kalashnikov: From Holy War to Holy Terror in Afghanistan
• Ann Jones, Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan
• Nina Langslet, Subordination, Migration and Mobilization: Strategies for Coping in an Altered Security Situation [2008 anthropology thesis, applying Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty to the situation of Pashtuns in northern Afghanistan. PDF]
• Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History [goes up to 2020]
• Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan
• Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror
• Torunn Wimpelmann, The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan
• Andrew Zammit-Mangion, Michael Dewar, Visakan Kadirkamanathan, and Guido Sanguinetti, "Point process modelling of the Afghan War Diary", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 109 (2012): 12414--12419

To read, travel and ethnography:
• Beardsley, The Naked Hills: Tales of Afghanistan
• Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana [Review by Danny Yee]
• Veronica Doubleday, Three Women of Herat
• Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
• Birthe Frederiksen, Caravans and Trade in Afghanistan: The Changing Life of the Nomadic Hazarbuz [Members of the Momand tribe, which is to say, very distant relatives]
• Charlotte Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Herat
• Peter Levi, The Light Garden of the Angel King
• Sylvia Matheson, Time Off to Dig
• Asta Olesen, Afghan Craftsmen: The Cultures of Three Itinerant Communities
• Sheila Paine, Afghan Amulet
• Gorm Pedersen, Afghan Nomads in Transition: A Century of Change Among the Zala Khan Khel
• James W. Spain [Review by Danny Yee]
  • The Pathan Borderland
  • Pathans of the Latter Day
  • The Way of the Pathans
• P. K. Shalizi, Here and There in Afghanistan
• Nancy Tapper, Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society
• Willem Vogelsang, The Afghans