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Global Political Economy of Oil Understanding Capitalism Foundations in the Political Economy

Ideas and Ideology Love, Hate and Sexual Desire Under Colonialism Junior Year Honors Seminar: Cultural Encounters, 1999-2000

Afghanistan and the Origins of Global Fury:

A Third World Perspective

310-20221-01

Spring 2007
TR 10:50-12:05, Hill 58
Office phone: 274-3028
Naeem@ithaca.edu

Naeem Inayatullah
Muller 325
Office Hours: Tuesday 1:15-2:30; Thursday 1:15-2:30, and by appointment

“I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even thought he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indian of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to the these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade of race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

- Winston Churchill, 1937

1. Motivation

The rage “Third World” people feel and express is likely to bewilder many of us. In part, this may be due to a lack of knowledge about how such rage emerges from the living legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Because it is unlikely that our education focused on the First world role in the creation and maintenance of the Third World, most of us don’t discern how a colonial legacy creates and sustains structures of global inequality. Without this familiarity our understanding of recent events, such as the attacks of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the occupation of Iraq may remain shallow, easily manipulated, fruitlessly confusing, and, most important, inaccessible to public deliberation. The fog of war produces a fog of thought. Nevertheless, for those who seek it, an historical, ethnological, psychodynamic, and political-economic analysis of First/Third World relations may serve to re-orient their perceptions and sensitivities. Such a re-orientation can be profoundly practical; from it we can glean the fuller motivations of foreign others, retrieve our deeper relationship with them, and develop an appropriate appreciation of our role as national and global citizens.

This course does not seek to sort and evaluate judgments on recent world events. Rather, it is motivated by a prior question: Is it possible to uncover an overlap between, on the one side, a set of beliefs cultivated under the aegis of a super-power and, on the other side, beliefs forged through resistance to such power? More simply, under what conditions (social, pedagogical, motivational) can First and Third worlders communicate without violence but nevertheless with openness, sincerity, integrity, and passion. My public speaking experiences after 9/11 produced poor discussions and left in me doubts about whether such communication can occur. And yet, it seems clear that much depends on our willingness to keep trying.

While this may sound like a course designed for those who thrive in history, politics, economics, and sociology, it is nevertheless the case that those who intend to specialize, for example, in math, natural science, music, drama and computer science, must still project themselves as living in a world where global fury seems rampant. Indeed, perhaps it is these later students who may have had the least opportunity to engage in deliberate public discourse and might most welcome an opportunity to unknot their intuitions.

The above basically replicates the first three paragraphs of the course I offered in Fall 2003 and Spring 2004 titled “The Origins of Global Fury.” The current course differs from that one in the following ways: First, following a decade long gradual shift in my own orientation, I want to test the idea that perhaps the best way to understand general, abstract, global patterns of social life is to observe them operating through a particular time and space. Pull a particular thread on a tapestry and you begin to sense how that thread is connected to other threads and to the overall fabric of the universe. The particular thread, in our case, is something we call “Afghanistan.” I will say more about the problems of studying a particular case below. Second, outside of a few articles, I have changed the readings. Third, the fact that the initial design of this course follows 15 months in which I was able to concentrate on reading and writing gives it a wider and deeper scope. Because of this scope, we cannot hope to complete all the readings in our two-volume reader. The length of the reader does, however, provide two opportunities: the range of topics, authors, and material allows me greater scope to uncover your potential interest in these matters; and it gives you a chance to pursue these topics in the years to come.

A few words on trying to study Afghanistan perhaps seem appropriate. I have taught courses that touch on Bosnia, Cuba, Haiti, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil and the region of South Asia. For me, the central pedagogical puzzle of these courses remains the same, namely, how to uncover healthy motivations for studying others elsewhere. Beyond intellectual tourism, what reason can we find for studying these peoples and their places? For the U.S. student, the unintended consequence of 9/11 and recent U.S. foreign policy is that the motivation to study others has become more urgent; intellectual tourism, now mixes with righteous anger, befuddled anxiety, and charitable condescension as companion motives. However, I am unsure whether these new motives get us any closer to the ethics of studying others.

You might think: “The ethics of studying others? What does that mean? Do we need such an ethic? Why can’t we study others because we simply want to, because we think it is a good thing for each of us to do, or because doing so makes the world a better place?” Such a stance, perpetrated by educational institutions and especially Honors colleges, assumes that knowing and studying – especially others – is an innocent apolitical act. But what if how we have studied others is part of the living legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Consider, for example, how many Afghan anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and ethnomusicologists the University of Kabul has sent to study U.S. culture and political economy? It sounds like a facetious question, doesn’t it? But beyond its attempted humor is a dark insinuation: the study of others, the patterns of knowledge acquisition, and the institutions of learning present only the façade of liberation; secretly knowledge serves power. Our study turns theoretical mastery into actual mastery. Perhaps this hypothesis is no so secret after all since we are familiar with the aphorism that “knowledge is power.”

It may be that how and why we have studied others is part of Third world rage and fury. From a critical perspective, knowledge, knowing, and knowers have long served as power-full tools of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist domination. If so -- and this is a large “if” – even before we begin we are presented with an ethical paradox: can we study others without replicating relations of domination? I don’t know; mush depends, again, on our willingness to try. Regardless, as we read and write we can be mindful of how and why we study “Afghanistan.”

2. Readings and Viewings:

• Books and a map available at the Campus Book Store:

Map: Afghanistan: Land in Crisis, [double sided map], National Geographic, 2001.

Chayes, Sarah, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, Penguin, 2006.
Davis, Mike, Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, Verso. 2002.
Prashad, Vijay, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New Press, 2007.
Scheuer,Michael Imperial Hubris: Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror, Potomic, 2005.
Svetlana Aleksievich Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, Norton, 1992.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past, Beacon Press,1997.

• Course Reader:

Volume 1:

Collective Trauma, Collective Denial, Collective Pathology:
Ali, Tariq, “For the person sitting in the darkness somewhere in the United States,” in Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity, Verso, 2003, pp. xiii-xxxii.
Barkawi, Tarak, “On the Pedagogy of Small Wars,” International Affairs, 80, 1, 2004, pp. 19-37.
Biswas, Shampa, “Patriotism and the U.S. Peace Movement: The Limits of Nationalist Resistance to Global Imperialism,” in Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, Interrogating Imperialism, (Palgrave, 2006), pp. 63-99.
Churchill, Ward, “The Ghosts of 9-1-1: Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens,” in On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality, AK Press, 2003, pp. 5-37.
[Also recommended are the following of Churchill’s books:
A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present, City Lights, 1997;
Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization, City Lights, 2002;and
Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Angloamerican Law, City Lights, 2003.] [See also, Williams, Robert Jr. The American Indian in western legal thought: the discourses of conquest, Oxford, 1990.]
Hage, Ghassan, “Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm: Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia,” Public Culture, 15, 1, pp.65-89.
Lichtman, Richard, “The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology,” Counterpunch, July 10/12, 2004, [10 pages]: http://counterpunch.org/lichtman07102004.html
Muppidi, Himadeep, “Shame and Rage: International Relations and the World School of Colonialism, in Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, Interrogating Imperialism, (Palgrave, 2006), pp. 51-61.
Rose, Jacqueline, “Apathy and Accountability,” in On Not Being Able to Sleep, Princeton, 2003, pp. 217-37.
Rose, Jacqueline, “In our Present-Day White Christian Culture, London Review of Books, 8 July, 2004, pp. 14-17.

In Support of the Pax Americana:
Boot, Max, Savage Wars of Peace, Basic, 2002.
Chapter 15, “In Defense of Pax Americana,” pp. 336-352.
Cohen, Elliot, “World War IV,” Wall Street Journal, Nov 20, 2001, pg. A.18.
Cooper, Robert, “The Post-Modern State,” in Mark Leonard, Re-Ordering the World, 2002, pp. 11-20.
Ferguson, Niall, “America as Empire, Now and in the Future,” [17 July 2003]
http://www.inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Vol2Issue29/Vol2Issue29Ferguson.html
Ignatieff, Michael, “The Challenge of American Imperial Power,” Naval War College Review, Spring 2003, 56, 2, pp.53-63.
Kagan, Robert, “Power and Weakness, Policy Review, June/July 2002; 113, pp. 3-28. [skim pp. 15-21]
Kaplan, Robert D., “Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003, pp. 66-83.
Kipling, Rudyard, “The White Man’s Burden,” 1899.

Prior U.S. Involvement in Afghanistan:
Truman, Harry, “Truman’s Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1949, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.html
Cullather, Nick, “Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State,” The Journal of American History, Sep 2002, 89, 2, pp. 512-37.
U. S. Covert Activity in Afghanistan:
Ali, Tariq, “Afghanistan: Between hammer and anvil,” in Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity, Verso, 2003, pp. 203-216.
Coll, Steve, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to the September 10, 2001, Penguin, 2004:
-“Lenin Taught Us,” chapter 2, pp. 38-52. [Afghanistan’s Cold War context]
-“The Terrorists Will Own the World,” chapter 7, pp. 125-46. [*The Great Blurring]
-“Serious Risks,” chapter 10, pp. 189-204. [*Overlaps: Hekmetyar and Masood]
Cooley, John, “Introduction,” and chapter 1: “”Carter and Brezhnev in the Valley of Decision,” in Unholy Wars, Pluto, 2000, pp. 1-8; 9-28.
Gates, Robert, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, Simon and Schuster, 1996, pp. 15-23, 143-49, 249-52, 319-21, 348-50. [total = 19 pages].
Yousaf, Mohammad and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan the Bear Trap, Casement, 1992:

“Introduction,” pp. 1-7;
“The Role of the CIA,” chapter 5 of, pp. 78-96;
“The Pipeline,” pp. 96-112;
“Postscript,” pp. 233-35.
U.S. Overseas Bases:
Johnson, Chalmers, “America’s Empire of Bases,” January 15, 2004. [5 pages] http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm
Magdoff, Harry, et al. “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,” Monthly Review, 53, 10, 2002, [12 pages]: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm

USSR and Afghanistan
Dobrynin, Anatoly, “Afghanistan,” in his In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962-1986), Random House, 1995. Chapter IV: pp. 434-54.
Garthhoff, Raymond, “Afghanistan: Soviet Intervention and the American Reach, 1978-80,” chapter 26 in his, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Brookings, 1985, pp. 887-965

Modern Colonial Empires
Debray, Regis, “The Indispensable Nation,” Harper’s January 2004, pp. 15-21.
Hanke, Lewis, “The ‘Requerimiento’ and Its Interpreters,” Revista de Historia de Amaerica, 1, 1, 1938, pp. 25-34.
Meyer, Karl E. “Forty Years in the Sand: What happened last time freedom marched on Iraq,” Harper’s, June 2005, pp. 69. [8 pages] [For further reading his Meyer’s The Dust of Empire: The race for mastery in the Asian heartland, Century Foundation, 2004.]
Misra, Maria, “Heart of Smugness,” The Guardian, Tuesday July 23, 2002, (2 pages).

Volume 2:

Afghan Women and their Deployment
Ahmed, Leila, “The Women of Islam,” Transition, 83, v9n3, 2000, pp. 78-96.
Armstrong, Lisa and Vijay Prashad, “Bandung Women: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Necessary Risks of Solidarity,” in Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, Interrogating Imperialism, (Palgrave, 2006), pp. 15- 49.
Dupree, Louis, “The Burqa Comes Off,” American University Field Staff Report, LD 2 – 1959, pp. 1-4.
Dupree, Nancy Hatch
“Behind the Veil in Afghanistan,” Asia, 1, 2, July/August 1978, pp.10-15.
“Revolutionary Rhetoric and Afghan Women,” in M. Nazir Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Perspectives, Institute of International Studies, Research Series No. 57, University of California, 1984, pp. 306-340.
“Victoriana comes to the Haremserai in Afghanistan, Bauen und Wohen am Hindukush, 1988, pp. 111-49.
“Women as Symbols: Trends and Reactions,” Writers Union of Afghanistan (WUFA), 5, 2, 1990, pp. 30-41.
“A Socio-Cultural Dimension: Afghan women refugees in Pakistan,” in Ewan W. Anderson and Nancy Hatch Dupree’s Cultural Basis of Afghan Nationalism, Pinter, 1990, pp. 121-33.
“Afghan Women Under the Taliban,” in William Maley’s Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, New York University Press, 1998, pp. 145-66.
Pratt, Minnie Bruce, “Women’s Liberation and the ‘Endless War,’” manuscript, August, 2004, pp. 1-20.

General
Baudrillard, Jean “L’Esprit du Terrorism,” Harper’s, February 2002, pp. 13-18.
Mitchell, Timothy, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order,” Social Text, 20, 4, Winter 2002, pp. 1-18.
Roy, Olivier, Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War, Darwin, 1995.

“Introduction,” pp. 11-15
Chapter 1: “Islam and Society in Afghanistan: An Overview,” pp. 19-25.
Chapter 2: “From Fundamentalism to Islamism,” pp. 29-40.
Chapter 6: “Jihad as an Ethical Model,” pp. xxx-xxx [Missing from reader]
Weaver, Mary Anne, and “Children of the Jihad,” in her A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, pp. 169-215.
Weaver, Mary Anne, “This was Pakistan” chapter 2 in her Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, pp. 45-85.
Weaver, Mary Anne, “Déjà vu,” chapter 6 in her Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, pp. 214-48.

Afghan Deaths
Peaceful Tomorrows [Full Name: September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows], “Afghan Portraits of Grief: The Civilian/Innocent Victims of U.S. Bombing in Afghanistan,” September 2002. [16 pages] http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/downloads/apogreport.pdf

• Films:

The Fog of War: eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara, Errol Morris, DVD 1177, 107 minutes, 2004.
Battle of Algiers, DVD 1041,125 minutes, 1965.
Panama Deception, video 3383, 93 minutes, 2000.
Search for Freedom, Munizae Jahangir, video 54 minutes, 2003.
Afghanistan Unveiled, Brigitte Brault & Aina Women Filming Group, video 52 minutes, 2003.
3. Design of the Course

I think of the design of a course as similar to a style of music. Most courses follow “classical (European) music” in design. That is, the audience hears music pre-determined by the score. The music may change slightly from performance to performance but this change is not usually a part of the design of classical music. In contrast, Jazz, classical Indian music, and West African drumming combine the structure of the piece, the interpretative skill of the players, and the response of the listeners to create a specific structured improvisation. Accordingly, I have designed this course to change from one experience to another according to the interaction of students, instructor, and the reading materials. Thus no two classes or experiences should be the same because the interaction of the three differs on each occasion. This design embraces the necessity of collective improvisation.

An anarchic (not to be confused with a chaotic) design has consequences for our sense of time in the course. To some the course will feel less structured and slower than what they might expect. The good news is that the course may also feel like something we create together.

4. Evaluation

I will determine your grade by evaluating the following components.

• 60% will come from two essays of 8-10 pages, due on:

10:50 AM, Thursday, February 22 and,
10:50 AM, Thursday, April 5.
Please see my “writing suggestions for essays” (section 6, page 8) on how I would like you to write these essays.

• 35% of your grade will be derived from a take-home final essay, due 9:00 AM Monday, May 7, 2007. I would like to see a comprehensive and retrospective essay. I will provide further details in class. Please see my “writing suggestions for essays” (section 6, page 8) on how I would like you to write these essays. Essay topics will synthesize reading materials, lectures, and discussions

• 5 % of your grade comes from the mapping exercise. Due: 10:50 AM, January 30. Please remind me to provide details in class.

• An “entry paper” (due: February 1st) and an “exit paper” (due Noon, Friday May 11) are required but not graded. Details will be provided in class

Note Well: If you are unclear about these expectations or feel that they do not suit your style of learning, please see me in my office. I will do everything I can to accommodate you. However, please see me by Thursday, February 8th. After this date, I will assume that you agree to the above arrangement.

Map: 1050 AM, Tuesday, January 30.
Entry paper: 1050 AM, Thursday, February 1.
First essay: 1050 AM, Thursday February 22.
Second essay: 1050 AM, Thursday, April 15.
Final essay: due 9:00 AM, Monday, May 7.
Exit paper: due by Noon on Friday, May 11.