Losing Afghanistan

Reviewed by: Losing Afghanistan: An Obituary for the Intervention by Noah Coburn Alessandro Monsutti Noah Coburn, Losing Afghanistan: An Obituary for the Intervention. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 264 pp. After his studies of local politics in the community of potters of the town of Istalif, North of Kabul, and the internationally sponsored elections in Afghanistan (Coburn 2011, Coburn and Larson 2014), in Losing Afghanistan, Noah Coburn offers a new, insightful book on the post-2001 international intervention. He asks how and why the billions of dollars that flowed into Afghanistan have not lead to more development and security. The manuscript keeps away from the strategic and military aspects of the Afghan situation as well as the usual policy-oriented and journalistic tropes, such as the struggle between tradition and modernity, the socially and politically backward insurgency, the unruly tribal groups, the government's corruption...Rather the author proposes a grounded depiction of a period during which the presence of foreign troops, international and nongovernmental organizations is shaping everyday life. To grasp the way people have experienced the intervention, he follows an effective narrative strategy already adopted by David Edwards (1996, 2002). He builds a broad analysis of historical developments and social transformations through detailing the lives of a few individuals who have been directly involved in the reconstruction effort; an American engineer who launched with three Afghan partners a windmills company after having worked for a faith-based NGO; the US Ambassador to Afghanistan between 2005 and 2007, whose father had already been Ambassador in the country between the late 1960s and early 1970s; a Navy SEAL Captain; and a young Afghan businessman. Their stories and testimonies intertwine and form the core and frame of the book. Even if the choice of these central characters could have been explained a bit further (for [End Page 869] instance, it could have been appropriate to include a humanitarian or development worker, be he or she Afghan or non-Afghan), Coburn convincingly shows that any anthropological understanding of the international intervention in Afghanistan needs to describe the specific subculture of the foreign military, humanitarian workers, consultants, or journalists who flocked into the country in the aftermath of the Taliban regime's fall. Through, but also beyond, the unique features of those four stories, Coburn draws a lively picture of the intervention. Most empirical material has been collected around Bagram Airbase, in the Shomali Plain, North of Kabul, a region the author knows well from his previous research. Page after page, the reader discovers the everyday struggles of the main protagonists and a few others. In the first part, the author explains the intellectual genealogy of the book and the scaling up of his approach (Chapters 1 and 2). What lessons can be learned from the trajectories of people who have been involved at their own different levels into the post-2001 intervention? Losing Afghanistan gives "a more nuanced history of the intervention in Afghanistan, a history that looks at how individual lives were shaped socially and economically by the vast resources that flooded the country" (12). Coburn offers a spirited and at times savorily ironic gaze on the expatriate community (Chapter 3). It is presented as a tribe with its own language and social code, an increasingly inward-looking little world, which appears almost as a counterpoint to Louis Dupree's (1973) description of the peasant-tribal Afghan society before the 1978 Communist coup. Some aspects of the international presence are successively depicted: the art of writing grants with their stereotypical language, the topography of humanitarian compounds, the blossoming of poppy palaces in Kabul. The book keeps its focus on Bagram and goes back to the past, and looking at the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan (Chapter 4) to contextualize the euphoria and optimism that prevailed right after the US-led intervention in late 2001 (Chapter 5). The main focus, however, is on the period following the surge announced in late 2009 by President Obama. We witness the hopes and growing disillusionment of the protagonists (Chapter 6). The author describes how more intense economic activities around Bagram Airbase had little benefit for the life of most people but induced shifting forms

Afghan · Intervention (counseling) · Narrative · Obituary · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Peacebuilding and International Security · Philosophy · Political Conflict and Governance · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East