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The North-West Frontier of British India, a semi-independent mountainous borderland, was the site of continuous Pukhtun armed struggle against colonial intrusion throughout the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth. Persistent tribal armed attacks and major rebellions were followed by 'butcher and bolt' or 'burn and scuttle' British military expeditions, including one of the biggest Victorian small wars–the Tirah Campaign of 1897/98. Two features are particularly distinctive about the Pukhtun insurgencies: 1) The fierce and consistent nature of Pukhtun opposition to the encroaching British military state; 2) The insurgents' success in warding off annexation and inflicting decisive military defeat time and time again propelled the colonial state into an ongoing reflexive about its failure to 'pacify' the region and control the tribes. Focusing on Afridi insurgency in the nineteenth century, this article examines some themes that draw attention to causes, grievances, and toward the insurgent actors. While our fleeting glimpses into insurgents motives and actions come largely from colonial accounts of counter-insurgency operations, by drawing on my extensive archival and field research in the North-West Frontier, including Afridi oral testimonies, this paper focuses its lens on the Pukhtun perspective of the North-West Frontier 'small wars'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan is the country in the world with the most SALW (small arms and light weapons). Contrary to what is usually assumed, the proliferation of modern firearms in the country did not start in the 1980s, but at the end of the 19th century, when Pashtun tribes acquired modern rifles and ammunition through a variety of means, mostly through smuggling. The paper investigates the illegal arms trade from the Gulf to the north-western Indian Frontier, an area of crucial importance for British imperial strategists and the Government of India, at a time of great power rivalry and a relative decline of Britain's global influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1879, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80), General (later Lord) Frederick Roberts found himself in occupation of the defeated sovereign state of Afghanistan. Initially he claimed his authority stemmed from the Afghan amir and that he was acting on his behalf to suppress rebels, but the abdication of the Afghan ruler amid a popular insurgency and pressure from his political masters meant that Roberts had to establish his own military authority and implement martial law. This article examines the liberties and restrictions of occupation forces during protracted insurgencies, the difficulties in making the transfer of military command to political authority, and the tensions between commanders, political advisers, and civilian authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Afghanistan has been a center of a struggle between major powers since the 19th century. In 2001, the fight against terrorism had sparked a new power struggle among local, regional, and international Afghanistan actors. Various state and non-state players with conflicting perspectives and conflicting approaches are trying to pursue their strategic, political, and economic goals in Afghanistan. Due to similar security threats, complex economic interdependence, and economic liberalism, different scenarios may emerge in Afghanistan, leading to the potential collaboration of major global and regional powers in Afghanistan. This partnership can be expanded for several logics and reasons, among which security comes first. The peace treaty concluded between the United States and the Taliban on February 29, 2020. The continuing peace process via intra-Afghan peace talks with regional states has fortified hopes for peace in Afghanistan through cooperative measures among major regional and international powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of British geographical work in Central Asia (Persia and Afghanistan) in a period when Britain was concerned about a region which lay between Europe and Enlightenment on the one hand, and her Indian colonies, the uncertainties of Asia and the imperial designs of France and Russia on the other. The paper explores the connections between geography, diplomacy and colonial knowledge and demonstrates how the mapping and geographical study of Central Asia was a central feature of British colonial ambitions and of Enlightenment conceptual reasoning, in illuminating the ways in which 'ancient' and 'modern' geography was at work in this politically core yet geographically 'marginal' space, the paper highlights the complexities intrinsic to the making of geography and of empire in a region until now neglected in modern historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the early 2000s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan revived interest among security studies scholars in counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare. Yet most studies of COIN in mainstream security studies have not explored the role of race, despite the fact that the principles of COIN warfare were developed during the colonial period when racialized visions dominated world politics. We argue that mainstream security scholars tend to overlook race for two interconnected reasons: first, they treat race as an emotional and interpersonal phenomenon, and second, they assume that racial hostility will manifest in intense and indiscriminate violence. We argue instead that race should be understood as a particular kind of social ontology, one that places human communities into socially reductionist hierarchies based on assumed bio-cultural traits. We then examine how different kinds of racial ontologies were used in the colonial period to develop different kinds of COIN doctrines, whether punitive or paternalistic in character. We demonstrate how these different racialized COIN frameworks informed state practices on the battlefield through a comparative illustration of two COIN campaigns: Britain on the "North-West frontier" of India in the late nineteenth century and the United States along the "Af-Pak border" in the early twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and ten-year war that followed were the result of long, historical interest in the country by Russia that dates back to the 19th century combined with the Soviet Union's desire to protect and promote friendly communist regimes. The war failed to achieve the Soviet Union's goals, and even contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but even today the Russian Federation maintains an active interest in Afghanistan for many of the same reasons that its predecessor did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at dealing with the dawn of Pashto studies, from the first mention of this language, in the 16th century, till the first scientific treatises on Pashto grammar, literature and lexicology by Bernhard Dorn, published between 1840 and 1847. The questions this article tries to answer is: how was the documentation of Pashto collected? By whom? For which purpose? The aim of the following overview of all western authors who dealt with Pashto in the initial epoch is also to show how general knowledge increased more and more quickly with the military involvement in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article is built on the premise that both the British Empire in the 19th century (during its rivalry with Russia, known as the Great Game) and the United States in the 20th century treated Afghanistan as a means to an end in their quest to fulfil their strategic interests, without much concern for the country's people, history and traditions, which ultimately contributed to their failure: Britain was forced to accept Afghanistan's independence in 1919 at the end of the third Anglo-Afghan war, while the US withdrew its troops in August 2021, putting an end to what proved to be an unwinnable war. The article's main body examines the British and American presence in Afghanistan through the lens of a historical comparison meant to highlight the similarities and differences in their approaches, while the conclusion contains a few lessons the US should learn from Afghanistan that might, ideally, inform its future interventionist strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Lewis lived at the crossroads between remembrance and forgetfulness. He was at once spy, fáquír, pioneering archaeologist, and British deserter under a death-sentence. Escaping across India in 1827, he cast aside his former name and became Charles Masson. This article traces his subsequent journey into Afghanistan, into the blank spaces of the map, in search of the lost cities of Alexander the Great. Searching for antiquity, erasing his own past, his excavations led to the discovery of Alexandria of the Caucasus, on the plains of Bagram. His pursuit of the ancient world is extraordinary: mendacious, full of longing, groundbreaking, hovering between fact and fiction as artfully as himself. This article is likewise a dialogue between the desire to remember and the desire to forget — and it argues that in narratives of classical reception, remembrance should not take the stage unchallenged; that which has been erased, and that which has been forgotten may be equally essential, when seeking to understand relationships with the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article comprises a reply to those who seek to use the British historical experience in Afghanistan in order to draw parallels with current operations in that country. It argues that, while the conceptual and physical response to the issue of Afghanistan on the part of Empire policy-makers during the period 1839-1919 was characterised by periods of indecision and mistaken assumptions, their grasp of strategic principles allowed the formulation of a series of Afghan policies that would serve to protect and indeed enhance British interests in the region for over a century and which stand in stark contrast to the seemingly incoherent Afghan strategy articulated by the current British government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]