Empire and Dependence in Afghan History
The long history of imperial intervention in Afghanistan — from the British to NATO — is responsible for the country’s suffering.
Afghan peace delegation led by Mahmud Tarzi, Minister of Foreign Affairs, heading to Rawalpindi where they signed the Anglo-Afghan Treaty of 1919 that brought the Third Anglo-Afghan war to an end. Image: Afghanistan Analysts Network
In 1920, dozens of Afghan and British delegates, including the Afghan minister of commerce and Mahmud Tarzi, the foreign minister and father-in-law of the King, converged in the Indian hill station of Mussoorie, in present-day Uttarakhand. These delegates met to negotiate the Anglo-Afghan relationship in the wake of the Third Anglo-Afghan War, which had ended with an armistice in August 1919. Although the Mussoorie Conference ended without a treaty, it was a momentous occasion for the Afghan political elite. It represented their first opportunity to negotiate Afghanistan’s relationship with the British Empire as an independent state, not subject to British control of their foreign affairs.
To the degree that the Mussoorie Conference has been analysed by scholars, it has been seen as representative of British and Afghan diplomatic relations in the context of a newly “independent” Afghanistan. However, I argue that it indicates continued economic dependence and “quasi-coloniality,” the term often used to describe Afghanistan’s relationship with the British Empire. The debates at the conference—and subsequent negotiations in Kabul the next year—suggest that Afghanistan was forced into a position of dependence on the British Empire even after its leadership formally regained control over its foreign affairs in 1919.
“in the post-1921 period Afghanistan was continually subject to forms of economic and political subordination to the British Empire.”
The Anglo-Afghan Treaty of Kabul in 1921—an outcome of the conference and the subsequent negotiations—is usually characterized as establishing Afghanistan as “officially free and independent in its internal and external affairs.” But in reality, in the post-1921 period Afghanistan was continually subject to forms of economic and political subordination to the British Empire. Over forty years of formal quasi-coloniality, from 1880 to 1919, had left Afghanistan’s economy deeply intertwined with and dependent on the British Empire, and especially British India.
Imperial Withdrawals and Quasi-colonial Legacies
In the context of a post-US/NATO-occupation Afghanistan and the resurgence of Taliban authority, it is valuable to consider previous moments during which foreign imperial powers withdrew, politically or militarily, from Afghanistan. Whether we consider the withdrawal of British forces after the Anglo-Afghan Wars, the end of British authority over Afghan foreign policy after 1919, or the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, it is apparent that moments of imperial withdrawal repeatedly spurred either economic collapse or retrenched imperial dependence.
To be clear, this analysis is not a call for continued imperial intervention in Afghanistan, nor is it an apology for the Taliban regime. Rather, it is a reminder of imperial culpability in the aftermath of occupation and imperial control. As the world watches—and does little to mitigate—emerging crises of hunger and starvation in post-US/NATO occupation Afghanistan, it is a reminder of the ways that empires have repeatedly created conditions of dependence and subsequent state and economic collapse in Afghanistan.
To that end, this article argues that although “quasi-coloniality” is a useful frame for understanding Afghanistan’s political position within the British Empire, it sometimes obscures the fundamentally colonial economic practices that have bound Afghanistan to empires over the last two hundred years. I build, therefore, on Nivi Manchanda’s understanding of quasi-coloniality, in which Afghan history “has been marked by the presence of empire, which mutated into an absence and back again, as if by demand.” A reconsideration of the Mussoorie Conference, Treaty of Kabul, and Anglo-Afghan relations in the wake of 1919 suggests a continuity of extractive colonial economic relations. As Manchanda has shown, empires have repeatedly attempted to assert “distance or disavowal” from Afghanistan after periods of intense political or military intervention. But even in these moments, Afghans have been subject to an economy dictated and defined by imperial policy.
Border crossing into Afghan territory at the Khyber pass guarded by British troops during the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Image: Foreign Policy
Colonial Appropriation and Economic Dependence in Afghanistan
As Aditya Mukherjee has argued in the case of India, “at the heart of colonialism lay surplus capital appropriation from the colony to the metropolis.” Afghanistan is often treated as exempt from this relationship by virtue of its 1880-1919 “quasi-coloniality” and post-1919 “independence,” as well as the persistent imperial narrative that it offered little in the way of resources. But as Mukherjee notes, this “appropriation” was not rooted only in the fact that colonies were suppliers of raw materials and consumers of finished goods from the metropolis, but also in the transfer of labour, commodities and knowledge.
“Afghanistan’s infrastructure, several of its state ministries, and its major educational projects, all became dependent on British funding”
In the case of Afghanistan, colonial dependence was inculcated through the reorientation of Afghan trade, labour, and regional mobilities to benefit the security aims of Britain and British control over India. Afghanistan’s infrastructure, several of its state ministries, and its major educational projects, all became dependent on British funding, and increasingly, on advisors from India. Simultaneously, because of Britain’s hold on Afghan foreign policy, the country struggled to develop significant trade partners outside of the Empire, relying heavily on trade across the Indo-Afghan border.
British officials portrayed this relationship as one of magnanimity, citing the provisioning of Afghanistan with technical experts and educational models. But the empire appropriated Afghanistan labour, along with crucial trade passages and their accompanying tax revenues, and created for itself a dependent trading partner. Afghan dependence benefited the British Empire both economically and politically.
Indeed, when Britain withdrew its control over Afghan foreign policy in 1919, it risked little in terms of imperial security, despite its representatives' protestations to the contrary. The British delegates maintained during the Mussoorie conference that their greatest concern was that “any other Power [might] use Afghanistan as a corridor for the transmission of agitators... to India.” They likewise argued that the context of the recent war—in which Afghan forces had crossed the Durand Line in the hopes of retaking territory and forcing the British hand on the question of independence—meant that they had to treat Afghanistan as a legitimate threat to British India’s security.
The Limitations of Independence at the Mussoorie Conference
But the reality, as suggested by the records of the conference, was that even as an independent state, the Afghan court had limited leverage against British interests. Despite the Amir’s attempts to negotiate trade agreements with the newly founded Soviet Union, Afghanistan remained tied to the British imperial economy. Although a proposal at the Mussoorie conference to reinstate a British “subsidy” of 18 lakh rupees for the Afghan King, Amanullah Khan, was not ultimately part of the Kabul Treaty of 1921—which was far more limited in scope than the British initially hoped—the proposal reflected a general continuity of colonial practices.
“The subsidization of Afghan rulers had been a key component of British policy since the first Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42)”
The subsidization of Afghan rulers had been a key component of British policy since the first Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42), and grew exponentially since the second (1878-80). In post-1919 Afghanistan, the subsidy was transformed, from a direct payment to the Amir to interest free loans alongside “gifts” of items like factory machinery and technical materials and expertise for the development of telegraph and railway networks. Whether financial or in the form of goods, these subsidies meant that many state functions continued to rely on Britain, making it difficult for Afghan leaders to press their interests against the empire.
Indeed, it was through imperial “generosity”—funds for state capacity building, technologies, and systems of education—that Britain sought to maintain both political authority and an extractive colonial economic influence over Afghanistan in the wake of 1919. At Mussoorie, in exchange for preferential customs and taxation agreements, the British suggested that Amanullah Khan would receive items such as “160 miles of steel telegraph cables,” “ten large new motor lorries,” and “specially prepared paper for the printing of Afghan currency notes.” This exchange was never formally agreed upon in the final treaty, but British policy towards Afghanistan remained rooted in the promise of “gifts” in exchange for political concessions.
King Amanullah takes the guard of honour alongside King George V during his visit to the United Kingdom in 1928. Image: The Guardian
Technology and education were especially central to this British performance of imperial “generosity,” which coded Afghanistan as intrinsically “backwards” and in need of the support of a more “advanced” power. At Mussoorie, the British promised that in exchange for a “peaceful” and “friendly” Afghanistan,” they would provide for “a modern number of Afghan youths” to be educated in Europe. Likewise, they promised technical advice and financial assistance in the creation of railways, factories, and new irrigation systems in Afghanistan. But these “gifts” remained predicated on preferential trade and diplomatic assurances, rendering the Afghan state reliant on a colonial, and often extractive, relationship.
Quasi-coloniality and Economic Extraction
A second important way in which a quasi-colonial relationship between Afghanistan and the British Empire persisted after 1919 was in extractive economic relationships between the two states that contributed to the accumulation of wealth in Britain. Among the most important of these was Afghanistan’s position in Britain’s economy of war and weaponry. As Priya Satia has shown, Britain’s war economy, and particularly the manufacture of weapons, was central to its economic development and the industrial revolution.
Dominating the arms and ammunition trade across the British Empire, arms manufacturers in Britain enriched the metropole at the expense of the colonies. But in directly administered colonies, the British placed limitations on the purchase of arms, out of fear of rebellions and anti-colonial movements. They had no such concern in Afghanistan, which became one of the most heavily armed countries in the world in part through an importation of British weapons. While importation of arms to Afghanistan through British India was briefly halted between 1919 and 1921, the Treaty of 1921 made it explicit that such trade would and should resume.
Trade, Dependence, and the Indo-Afghan Border
The proceedings of the Mussoorie Conference likewise reflect Afghanistan’s dependence on trade across the Indo-Afghan border. One of the major contentions of the Afghan minister of commerce during the Mussoorie conference was that Afghanistan should be allowed to maintain a post office in Peshawar, an argument that was summarily rejected by the British. Peshawar had been the winter capital of the Afghan Durrani Empire from 1776 to 1823, when it was conquered by the Sikh dynasty. It became part of British India after the East India Company’s annexation of Punjab following the Anglo-Sikh wars of the 1840s. Peshawar retained cross-border cultural and economic ties long after it was made part of British India, and Afghanistan maintained a post office in there prior to 1919.
As Shah Mahmud Hanifi has shown, while the Afghan post office in Peshawar ostensibly served Afghan political interests, upon its foundation in 1881, the British openly supported its presence, even providing it office space. Their support for this unusual institution was rooted in their belief that the post office would “facilitate their communication” with the Amir and assure their access to information about political conditions in Afghanistan.
British refusal to approve a continued Afghan presence in Peshawar after 1919, at the Mussoorie Conference and in subsequent negotiations, stemmed from two stated concerns. First, in the lead-up to the third Anglo-Afghan War, the Afghan postmaster in Peshawar had sought to foment opposition to the British regime, in the hopes of cultivating local support for the Afghan cause. This project had failed; the Afghan postmaster and his supposed co-conspirators were quickly arrested, and Peshawar was placed under British Indian martial law for the duration of the conflict. But in the context of increased anti-colonial political organization across Punjab and north India, the British worried that a representative of independent Afghanistan might serve as a rallying point for anti-colonial Indians.
Second, British negotiators at the conference maintained that “it is an unheard-of thing for a civilized nation to have a post office in the territory of another civilized nation.” They admitted that “certain European nations” had sometimes maintained post offices in “Turkey, Persian, and China,” but claimed that was because the post there was unreliable. The former presence of an Afghan post office in Peshawar had been tolerable so long as Afghanistan was subject to British authority over its foreign policy, but as a fully independent state, they argued, it could not stand.
Restricted Mobilities
The debate over the post office reflects the multiple intersecting forms of colonial dependence that were central to the Afghan political and economic experience. The border between India and Afghanistan was defined by the British through the creation of the Durand Line in 1893, and Afghan efforts to renegotiate control of the passes—not to mention the status of border cities like Peshawar—were routinely rejected. The borders were central to the British Empire’s ability to monitor and tax the passage of goods and materials within a region where Afghan merchants, labourers, and migrants had historically moved flexibly.
British delegates at the conference saw Afghanistan’s loss of its right to a Peshawar post office as a punishment for the country’s challenge to British regional hegemony during the third Anglo-Afghan War, and for its assertion of independence post-1919. At the same time, these delegates continued to address Afghanistan as a subordinated power, one dependent on British Indian knowledge and trade, and on British “generosity” in providing access to funding and technology via India.
Durand line continues to separate Afghanistan from Pakistan (part of British India pre 1947) despite multiple Afghan governments challenging its legitimacy. Image: The Nation
Shifts in Dependence
The degree to which the Afghan economy remained imbricated with British imperial economic power was thrown into sharp relief less than a decade later. In January 1929, Amanullah Khan was overthrown in a civil war that briefly brought Habibullah Kalakani to power. Kalakani was a Tajik from an impoverished background and Afghanistan’s only non-Pashtun king, ruling for less than one year until October 1929. During the Civil War, British support for state institutions ceased, and Kalakani led a state threatened by resource scarcity and with minimal state functions.
Muhammad Nadir Shah, Amanullah Khan’s former minister of war, reestablished dynastic rule in late 1929. Born and raised in Dehradun, India, Nadir Shah, like rulers before him, did attempt to lessen Afghanistan’s dependence on Britain. Like his predecessors, his court attracted advisors from across Europe and the Middle East, especially from Turkey and Germany. But his court remained partially funded by British loans, and the infrastructure of the country heavily dependent on British “gifts.”
“Afghans were surrounded by the hallmarks of foreign modernity, yet few saw any improvement in their own lives.”
Indeed, the search for other international partners ultimately gave way, under Nadir Shah’s son, Zahir Shah (r. 1933-1973), to Afghanistan’s position, in the context of the Cold War, as a centre for competing Soviet and American ideologies and practices of “development.” As Timothy Nunan has argued, these projects had limited impact on the material conditions of most Afghan citizens, though they rendered the state reliant upon foreign donors. During the Cold War, Nunan argued, “Afghans were surrounded by the hallmarks of foreign modernity, yet few saw any improvement in their own lives.”
Soviet Influence and Withdrawal
Questions of dependence and quasi-coloniality have reverberated in Afghanistan’s more recent conflicts and experiences of occupation. In 1989, after ten years of military occupation and a conflict that killed and displaced millions, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan. They left behind a political regime that could not survive against attacks from the US-, Pakistan-, Iran- and UK-funded mujahideen without continued Soviet subsidies.
The Soviet-supported Democratic Republic of Afghanistan did not fall to the mujahideen opposition immediately upon the Soviet withdrawal. This was in large part because the Soviets—and later the Russians—continued to provide substantial financial support to the government of Muhammad Najibullah, the president of Afghanistan from 1987 to 1992. In January 1992, Boris Yeltsin discontinued Russian financial support for Najibullah and his military forces. By April of that year, the mujahideen had forced Najibullah’s resignation, taken Kabul, and announced the Islamic State of Afghanistan.
The inability of the victorious mujahideen forces to build an effective government, and Afghanistan’s 1992 descent into civil war, are often understood as reflective of the lack of political cohesiveness within the mujahideen. But they also reflect the fact that Afghan state institutions had been dependent, for the previous twelve years, on Soviet (later Russian) funds and support, radically constricting any post-war state capacity.
Contemporary Reverberations
It is in this context that we should consider the degree to which the United States and NATO repeated the projects of powers that previously invaded Afghanistan. Certainly, the collapse of the Ashraf Ghani-led Islamic Republic of Afghanistan during the withdrawal of US and NATO troops in August 2021 is evocative of the collapse of the Russian-supported government nearly 30 years earlier. Even more importantly, the US repeated both British and Soviet policies that cultivated Afghan dependence and extractive colonial economic relations.
By 2020, nearly 40% of Afghanistan’s GDP and 75% of public spending consisted of international aid. In the wake of the fall of the US-supported government and military forces, much attention has been given to the dependence of the Afghan army on US support, and the fact that the US spent $88.3 billion on a force that rapidly collapsed. But what has emerged, in late 2021, as the most damning reflection of the US’s cultivation of imperial dependence is the unparalleled economic collapse, wrought by a pause in most forms of “development aid,” alongside the freezing of foreign assets and a drought. The cultivation of dependence during twenty years of war and occupation led to a government beholden to the US, but also one unable to survive its withdrawal.
Taliban fighters took over the presidential palace in Kabul after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country in August 2021. Image: DAWN
“the groups that profited most were far from Kabul, the CEOs and stockholders of weapons manufacturers, private security contractors, and oil companies.”
At the same time, US imperial intervention in Afghanistan, like former (quasi)-colonial relations, can be understood as extractive. Foreign intervention in the country has enriched arms producers and other US-based stakeholders, contributing to the growth of the global war economy in the last two decades. Analyses of corruption in Afghanistan have emphasized the degree to which politicians and warlords used the US-NATO presence to their economic benefit. But the groups that profited most were far from Kabul, the CEOs and stockholders of weapons manufacturers, private security contractors, and oil companies.
In the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, many scholars have cautioned against the fallacies of the popular “graveyard of empires” narrative, emphasizing that this narrative erases US and NATO culpability for Afghan suffering. What has repeated, in Afghanistan, is not the defeat of empires, but the efforts of imperial powers to create structures of economic dependence that bind the Afghan state and its government to foreign interests. Moreover, in the wake of imperial withdrawals, empires have repeatedly denied their own culpability in these systems of dependence, leaving Afghanistan either facing economic collapse or embedded in new systems of coloniality, despite formal independence.
Amanda Lanzillo is a Costen Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University, where she recently taught a new seminar titled “Afghanistan in World History.” She studies South Asian social histories, and is working on two major projects, the first on Muslim artisanship in north India, and the second on Afghan labour and mobility in the British Empire.