St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies 81 Panel Five. Political Patterns in Afghanistan and in the Liminal Areas... populations through religious interventions. The spatial imaginaries underpinning the interventions of these two Sufi networks account for the difference in their social and political impact in this frontier. Benjamin D. Hopkins (The George Washington University, Washington, D. C., USA) Afghanistan as Beta-Test There has been a long tradition where tactics and strategies developed and deployed on the battlefield are returned home and redeployed in domestic contexts. In the United States, for instance, many of the urban counter-insurgency techniques developed by the RAND Corporation as part of theAmerican war in South Vietnam were later domesticated in American inner cities as methods of crowd control and urban policing. Since 2001, the war in Afghanistan has provided yet another opportunity for the development of techniques and technologies which have increasingly found their way into the armoury of military forces as well as the arsenal of domestic police forces throughout the Western world. The US Army’s Human Terrain System, and its next generation ‘computational counter-insurgency’, as well as the use of retinal scans to make identity databases are just some of the most important and publicly visible examples. Yet Afghanistan’s role as a kind of beta-testing ground for tactics and more broadly governance goes back much further than the most recent American intervention. The area now constituting the state of Afghanistan, along with its frontier with Pakistan, provided the British Indian state a template on which it developed forms of administration, ideas of control and practices of governances. There were replicated not only throughout the British Indian Empire, but throughout Britain’s global empire as well. Indeed, they were part and parcel of a globally ubiquitous phenomenon of governance making the late 19 th century world as European colonial empires filled in the ‘blank spaces on the map’ with legible state forms. Three elements of this 19 th century beta-testing with lasting consequence today are: 1) the mission, and intellectual legacy of Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone; 2) the system of tribal governance of Sir Robert Groves Sandeman; and 3) the legal code of the Frontier Crimes Regulation in force along British India’s northwest frontier. This paper considers each of these episodes in turn and how they continue to shape both the Western intellectual cannon and governing approach to Afghanistan and beyond.