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Bannú, or Our Afghan Frontier is an account of Bannu District in British India (located in present-day northwestern Pakistan). The Bannu Valley was seized by the East India Company in 1848 and the district formed in 1861. The author, Septimus Smet Thorburn, was an official in the Indian Civil Service and the settlement officer in the district. The book is in two parts. Part one, consisting of six chapters, covers the geography, history, and administrative system of Bannu, with emphasis on British rule and its interaction with local traditions, customs, and patterns of authority and land tenure and ownership. Part two, which comprises the bulk of the book, deals with customs and folklore. It includes an introductory chapter entitled "Social Life, Customs, Beliefs and Superstitions of the Peasantry," and separate chapters devoted to "Popular Stories, Ballads and Riddles" and "Pashto Proverbs Translated into English." The final chapter gives the texts of the same proverbs--406 in all--in Pushto. The stories, ballads, and riddles are brief--generally a few paragraphs--and are classed in five categories: humorous and moral, comic and jocular, fables, Marwat ballads (relating to the Pushto Marwat tribe living in Bannu), and riddles. The proverbs are grouped according to the topics to which they relate, for example, begging, boasting, bravery, and so forth, and for many of the proverbs a brief explanation is given of its meaning and application. A short appendix deals with the complicated system of land allotments in the different tappas (traditional subdivisions) of the Bannu region. The book includes a map of the Bannu District with an inset map showing its relationship to the neighboring parts of Afghanistan and the regions of Waziristan, Kashmir, and the Punjab.
The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan's northwest territories has a long and violent past. Through a collage of historical narrative and ethnographic research, Magnus Marsden and Benjamin D. Hopkins disprove the stereotypes and simplistic assessments that obscure a truer picture of the frontier, exposing the web of difficulties now facing local and international actors. This border region is anything but an isolated depot filled with radical terrorists and tribesmen. The frontier is rich with meaning, determined by centuries of movement by its inhabitants and their conceptions of those who operate outside their world. Fragments of the Afghan Frontiergives readers a deeper understanding of an evolving region that grows ever more significant as the West enhances its counterterrorist campaigns.
If you want to understand Afghanistan, writes Carter Malkasian, you need to understand what has happened on the ground, in the villages and countryside that were on the frontline. These small places are the heart of the war. Modeled on the classic Vietnam War book, War Comes to Long An, Malkasian's War Comes to Garmser promises to be a landmark account of the war in Afghanistan. The author, who spent nearly two years in Garmser, a community in war-torn Helmand province, tells the story of this one small place through the jihad, the rise and fall of Taliban regimes, and American and British surge. Based on his conversations with hundreds of Afghans, including government officials, tribal leaders, religious leaders, and over forty Taliban, and drawing on extensive primary source material, Malkasian takes readers into the world of the Afghans. Through their feuds, grievances, beliefs, and way of life, Malkasian shows how the people of Garmser have struggled for three decades through brutal wars and short-lived regimes. Beginning with the victorious but destabilizing jihad against the Soviets and the ensuing civil war, he explains how the Taliban movement formed; how, after being routed in 2001, they returned stronger than ever in 2006; and how Afghans, British, and Americans fought with them thereafter. Above all, he describes the lives of Afghans who endured and tried to build some kind of order out of war. While Americans and British came and went, Afghans carried on, year after year. Afghanistan started out as the good war, the war we fought for the right reasons. Now for many it seems a futile military endeavor, costly and unwinnable. War Comes to Garmser offers a fresh, original perspective on this war, one that will redefine how we look at Afghanistan and at modern war in general.
Edwards contends that Afghanistan's troubles derive less from foreign forces and the ideological divisions between groups than they do from the moral incoherence of Afghanistan itself.
A rare collection of tales from the remote, historically and politically significant Pakistan-Afghan border.
A provocative case that “failed states” along the periphery of today’s international system are the intended result of nineteenth-century colonial design. From the Afghan frontier with British India to the pampas of Argentina to the deserts of Arizona, nineteenth-century empires drew borders with an eye toward placing indigenous people just on the edge of the interior. They were too nomadic and communal to incorporate in the state, yet their labor was too valuable to displace entirely. Benjamin Hopkins argues that empires sought to keep the “savage” just close enough to take advantage of, with lasting ramifications for the global nation-state order. Hopkins theorizes and explores frontier governmentality, a distinctive kind of administrative rule that spread from empire to empire. Colonial powers did not just create ad hoc methods or alight independently on similar techniques of domination: they learned from each other. Although the indigenous peoples inhabiting newly conquered and demarcated spaces were subjugated in a variety of ways, Ruling the Savage Periphery isolates continuities across regimes and locates the patterns of transmission that made frontier governmentality a world-spanning phenomenon. Today, the supposedly failed states along the margins of the international system—states riven by terrorism and violence—are not dysfunctional anomalies. Rather, they work as imperial statecraft intended, harboring the outsiders whom stable states simultaneously encapsulate and exploit. “Civilization” continues to deny responsibility for border dwellers while keeping them close enough to work, buy goods across state lines, and justify national-security agendas. The present global order is thus the tragic legacy of a colonial design, sustaining frontier governmentality and its objectives for a new age.
Originally published online in 2008 by Columbia University Press.
'The most dangerous place in the world' - Barack Obama The borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan have become the arena for a global conflict with consequences that defy prediction. At the crossroads of Central Asia, gateway to India and the West, Afghanistan has tempted countless invaders in their quest for domination. Written by leading regional expert Victoria Schofield, Afghan Frontier traces the history of this region as a hotly contested battlefield for millennia. As the borderlands - now dubbed 'Af-Pak' - assume an increasingly crucial role in international politics, understanding the history and geopolitical significance of this region has never been more important. Afghan Frontier is a gripping portrait of the frontier territories, militant fighters and resilient tribesmen who shaped Afghanistan.
Debunking conventional narratives of Afghanistan as a perennial war zone and the rule of law as a secular-liberal monopoly, Faiz Ahmed presents a vibrant account of the first Muslim-majority country to gain independence, codify its own laws, and ratify a constitution after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Afghanistan Rising illustrates how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Kabul--far from being a landlocked wilderness or remote frontier--became a magnet for itinerant scholars and statesmen shuttling between Ottoman and British imperial domains. Tracing the country's longstanding but often ignored scholarly and educational ties to Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul as well as greater Delhi and Lahore, Ahmed explains how the court of Kabul attracted thinkers eager to craft a modern state within the interpretive traditions of Islamic law and ethics, or shariʿa, and international norms of legality. From Turkish lawyers and Arab officers to Pashtun clerics and Indian bureaucrats, this rich narrative focuses on encounters between divergent streams of modern Muslim thought and politics, beginning with the Sublime Porte's first mission to Afghanistan in 1877 and concluding with the collapse of Ottoman rule after World War I. By unearthing a lost history behind Afghanistan's founding national charter, Ahmed shows how debates today on Islam, governance, and the rule of law have deep roots in a beleaguered land. Based on archival research in six countries and as many languages, Afghanistan Rising rediscovers a time when Kabul stood proudly as a center of constitutional politics, Muslim cosmopolitanism, and contested visions of reform in the greater Islamicate world.