Problems in Establishing Legitimacy in Afghanistan

Afghanistan has been called a “highway of conquest,” the pivot of Central Asia that led armies to India and Iran, to the rich lands of the Transoxiana and the borders of China. Since the beginning of recorded history, its territory has fallen victim to waves of conquerors and been part of much larger empires. Indeed, while each ethnic group in the country can claim some periods of glorious history, none can make an absolute indigenous claim to the region: their histories all begin with the displacement or incorporation of some preceding group already occupying the land. Yet in more recent times Afghanistan has become famous as the graveyard of imperial ambitions, having rebuffed the British twice in the nineteenth century and forced the Soviet Union to withdraw in defeat in the twentieth. How is it that a territory that was historically overrun by every major power in pre-modern times became so indigestible in the last 150 years? And why has the United States, in at least its initial foray into Afghanistan, not provoked the high level of opposition that is habitually assumed to await the arrival of any foreign troops there? The answer lies in the changing relationship between war and political legitimacy, a change that grew out of reformulation of the conception of society and government itself. It is this change in the conception of legitimacy that has made the restoration of internal national order in Afghanistan so difficult.