International Society for Iranian Studies

The Afghans by Willem Vogelsang

Review by: M. Jamil Hanifi
Iranian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 124-125
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of International Society for Iranian Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4311799 .
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124 Reviews

possessed the meansto do so. The Russiandefeatin the CrimeanWar(1854-56)

usheredin a new era for those inhabitingthe region.
Chaptersix, "BlackSea 1860-1990," is devoted to the age of nationalism,the
rise of nation-states,intensificationof forcedmigrations,ethniccleansing,and the
majorpolitical and economic developmentsof the late twentieth century.It was
in the middleof the nineteenthcentury,following the CrimeanWar,arguesKing,
that the Sea stopped being an "Asian"territory(p. 189); now it had become a
valuableprize in the contests between the Europeanpowers.
The last chapter,"Facingthe Water"(pp. 239-247), dealswith the post-Soviet
era and the challengesfacing the inhabitantsof the region. The most obvious of
the challengesare the endemic poverty, weak political states, and followed, but
not that distantly,by the threatsagainst the ecosystem. On the last issue, King
sees some progress and believes that there has been a halt in the process of
oxygen-depletion,over-fishing,and industrialpollution.
While readerswill definitelynot mistakethis book with that of Ascherson,who
exhibitsa uniquestyle and a personalattachmentto the region, and notwithstand-
ing the minor issues pointed out above, Prof. King should be congratulatedfor
providing us with a valuablework on this magnificentSea.

SiamakAdhami
LagunaNiguel, CA

The Afgbans, Willem Vogelsang, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002, ISBN

2001000332, x + 382 pp.

In recent years Afghanistan has received much international attention and print
not because of innovative scholarly activity or interest in addressing the serious
gaps in the depth and breadth of our knowledge about its cultural and social com-
plexities, but because, once again, the country has been destabilized by two
powerful and expansive political and economic adversaries. This time,
however, one of the contesting powers, the United States, has no historical terri-
torial grounding in the neighborhood. And in this recycling of earlier patterns,
the country's soft state structure imposed by a European colonial power more
than a century ago easily disintegrated. The prospects for the restoration of the
Afghan state seem to be at the mercy of global capitalism and American
neocolonialism. These two forces, while hastily imposing a crude political
model convenient only for neocolonial capital, have initiated the process for
turning Afghanistan into a privatized backwater of American style capitalism
highlighted by a pool of cheap human labor.
Under the American occupation of Afghanistan, thousands of international aid
workers and entrepreneurs have converged on the country as facilitators of global
capital and the American neocolonial project. The demand by these facilitators
and the international media for summary overviews about the country have

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 Reviews125

produced dozens of new publications. The book under review is one such work
published a few months after September 11, 2001-in the early months of the
American occupation.
Willem Vogelsang specializes in the ancient history of Iran, and his specialty
explains the devotion of more than one half of the book to the pre-history and
early history of the Iranian Plateau of which Afghanistan is the eastern flank.
Chapter one contains a brief geographical outline of Afghanistan. In chapter
two, the author offers a brief sketch of the ethnic composition of the country
with Paxtuns given most of the space. The book is trapped in the erroneous
assumption in Western scholarship about the numerical and political predomi-
nance of Paxtuns in the country. Although other ethnic groups are noted in
passing, their important contributions to the political economy, culture and
history of Afghanistan are overlooked or not understood. And this is the unstated
logic for the misleading title of the book in which the author apparently does not
appreciate or understand the ethnographic complexity and the contested nature of
the label "Afghan" which is the term of reference by non-Paxtuns to Paxtuns.
Paxtuns, unless Persianized, do not identify themselves as "Afghans." This ethno-
graphic reality, combined with the fact that the word "Afghan" is constructed out
of Persian linguistic elements, obviate an explicit contradiction between the title
of the book and the author's basic assumption about Paxtun domination in
Afghanistan.
Chapters three through fourteen outline the pre-1747 history and archaeol-
ogy of the Iranian Plateau. Expertly written, these chapters are the strength of
the book. However, they do not clearly locate the roots and construction of
the Afghan polity and state in their proper historical and cultural contexts.
Chapters fifteen through seventeen contain the standard regurgitation of the
emergence and fall of the Afghan monarchy with the misleading fixation on
the Paxtunness of this monarchy and the prominence of Paxtuns in Afghani-
stan. Chapters eighteen through twenty offer yet another set of stylized
accounts of the post-monarchy transition of the 1970s, the overthrow of
Muhammadzai rule in 1978, the Soviet-supported rule of the People's Demo-
cratic Party of Afghanistan (1978-1992), and the subsequent chaos caused by
the American-sponsored mujahidinterrorists and the Taleban regime spawned
by the latter.
A distinct and useful feature of this book is its thirty-page comprehensive
bibliography that includes many European publications seldom cited in this
genre of books dealing with Afghanistan.

M. Jamil Hanifi
Independent Scholar

The Martyrs of Karbaliw Sbh'i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran,

Kamran Scot Aghaie, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,

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