The Revenge of Geography in Afghanistan

Fabrice Balanche is a geographer at the University of Lyon who focuses on the Middle East. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on August 19, 2021, and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.

Q: What are the geographic specificities of Afghanistan?

Fabrice Balanche: Afghanistan is a country of mountains and deep valleys, with passes connecting one region to another. It is a compartmentalized country. This obviously poses problems to all powers that want to penetrate it. It is a territory very difficult to control.

This physical fragmentation has human and social corollaries. The country includes different ethnicities living in the valleys: Pashtoons, Uzbeks, Tajiks. These ethnicities are further divided into clans and tribes that compete with each other. Even the central authority in Kabul, during the time of the monarchy, never succeeded in achieving direct control of the population.

This physical reality and the ethnic diversity are essential elements for any understanding of the country. They are furthermore linked to each other: the tribes maintain their specific identities thanks to the physical geography of the territory. One can be the master of one’s valley. Let us be precise that the field of geography has two topics: the physical question and the human and cultural specificity of a country. Western leaders did not want to see or understand these points, and this is what has led to the fiasco.

Q: Did this geographic specificity contribute to the American defeat? Was the conflict lost from the start?

Balanche: No, the war did not have to be lost. But a Western army, like the American army, faces major challenges with this kind of geography. It has all the trouble in the world to control the territory. In Iraq, by way of contrast, the country is essentially made up of great plains, so it was easier from that point of view, but the American army also collided with a culture in Iraq that it did not understand.

It is the same with Afghanistan. The Americans were not able to understand the ethnic and tribal diversity. This is the problem of Western powers that want “regime change,” including democracy promotion, women’s rights, and human rights, but all of that stands at odds with Afghan society and its conservatism, that is, with the reality of the country. The pro-Soviet leaders, Babrak Karaml and Najibullah, in their era, also wanted to modernize the country in their Communist manner, and they faced the same problems. The Western forces repeated their errors.

Q: Is geography the key to the geopolitics of Afghanistan, a country that was never colonized and that never underwent a durable occupation?

Balanche: Robert D. Kaplan is the American author of The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate (2013). He explains well that we can put people on the moon but we still have a hard time crossing the Himalayas. There are geographic realities, in addition to the cultural realities that one has to consider. One can enter Afghan society and carry out open-heart surgery, but changing mentalities takes a much longer time. The United States and Westerners in general, with their enormous financial and technological means, thought they could succeed to change Afghan society profoundly by winning hearts and minds.

One often speaks of international relations by explaining the interests of each country, the inclinations of the various powers, and of course there is a context, but that is not all. Let’s use the metaphor of a game of checkers: in geopolitical terms, the pieces in the game are different actors with different powers, but the board on which one is playing also has a specific dynamic because the squares are not uniform: that is geography. The squares are different from each other, tied to physical reliefs and local cultures.

From the vantage point of bureaucrats in offices in Paris or Washington, all that can be forgotten, but geography has a way to force itself into their memory, as one sees well in the case of Afghanistan. One could even say that Afghanistan is the archetype of the revenge of geography: a terrain difficult to control and populations that are hard to force to change. Westerners are therefore handicapped in this country.

Further factors have come into play in the past ten years, especially concerning the neighboring countries, as Russia, China, and Pakistan have grown in power: Russia through its involvement in Syria and China with its global ambitions. They have thrown oil on the fire by arming the Taliban to force the Americans to leave. All this put pressure on the American presence. Despite that, the geographic reality itself was never factored in.

In Afghanistan, no “regime change” can work like this: you can’t install a democracy just by snapping your fingers. Despite the expenditure of resources and the role of NGOs, there was no change. It may even have had a contrary effect, like I saw in Syria: the promoters of change in civil society are eventually forced out. The NGOs that advocate human rights train the activists who remain fully out of touch with the reality on the ground. They in turn cling to the illusion that their politics are succeeding because everyone, from the local personnel to the executives of the NGO, has an interest in seeing their budgets replenished to support their work and for local activists to obtain a visa to travel to Europe or North America.

The same strategy dominates Western diplomacy. Realists are ignored while those advocating illusions get promotions. So it of course makes sense that Kabul, the showcase of Western success in Afghanistan, fell within a matter of hours.

Nearly 200 billion dollars were spent to reconstruct Afghanistan and its institutions, and now we can see the results. An altogether different strategy would have been needed, with management much closer to the local realities, plus a refusal to impose our Western concepts on this type of society. From the point of view governance, it is instead necessary to promote forms of indirect governance that respect the autonomy of the different groups and ethnicities.

The reality that is not being grasped, ethnic, tribal, and clan diversity, is the primary organizational factor in society and politics. Social classes are not the mobilizing factors in Afghan politics: it is rather the ethnic group or the tribe. We see similar situations in some other countries, such as Iraq, Lebanon, etc.

Q: Why have these permanent conditions not been recognized? What lesson can be drawn from the role of geography in geopolitics and history?

Balanche: This is linked to the mentality of the political decision makers, those who decide on military interventions, and those who make the politics and carry out the management. Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan testify to the same problem: the strategies are thought out by individuals who project Western concepts and sometimes even fantasies onto these very different countries. The French decision makers are often trained at Sciences Po and never master geography and all its realities. They do not know the populations or the terrain because they never leave their offices. In addition, they do not trust people who are in the field because the conclusions of the latter run contrary to the thought of the former. This explains the fiascos in Iraq, Syria, and now in Afghanistan.

It is vital to understand how politicians make relevant decisions: it is rarely a function of information from the field. Today, the West wages War 2.0: it watches Twitter and follows the social networks, and it never gets on the ground. But the Taliban in those steep valleys aren’t just communicating on Twitter.

On the internet, Westerners encounter individuals they think are local actors. They are however present on the net because precisely they speak English and have numerous followers, which means they are an elite, disconnected from local reality. The Westerners do not know the true actors, who come from the periphery. The perfect example of this is the Committee for National Transition in Libya. There were files on everyone thought to be part of the Libyan elite (university networks), but it turns out that they were not the true actors in the revolt. The West relied on a Committee for National Transition that was actually completely disconnected, without any real power.

Geographers have to regain ground. Geography had considerable importance until the middle of the twentieth century. It was the geographer René Caillié, who was the first Westerner to explore the region of Timbuktu and to have returned, in the nineteenth century, at a time when one still trusted people who had seen distant territories with their own eyes.

Q: Why is geography not given more consideration today?

Balanche: Surely because today, with satellites and long-distance surveillance, people think they can do without people on the ground. But because we think we have sufficient technological information, we end up lacking the essential knowledge of other societies.

In France today we no longer send geographers into the field, and there is less readiness to take risks. Similarly, in overseas operations in dangerous countries, we resist risking the lives of our soldiers by putting them on patrol: we prefer to keep them on their bases. Nor do we send geographers out into the field either.

I speak from personal experience. When I was at the French Near East Institute in Syria, one was hardly able to go out into the field, officially for reasons of security. Colleagues who want to keep their position at the Institute work in venues situated close by the office, or even better, they just stay in the library. But if, despite these conditions, you decide to make full use of being in one of these overseas posts, which are quite well compensated, and seriously go out into the field—you are punished for that with sanctions.

This partially explains the French failure in Syria. Despite the well-populated French Near East Institute, where numerous researchers benefitted from comfortable salaries, Bashar al-Assad’s continuation in power appears to have been a surprise for all of this little world. Those who doubted that the authoritarian regime was about to fall preferred to stay quiet so as to avoid being pilloried. It is simply not wise to hold opinions at odds with the political decision makers, all of whom come from the same political science mold that has no interest in the geography of the terrain. Add to that the postcolonial theories and cancel culture, now in fashion in the university and research institutes, and one can understand that researchers and students are going to move even further away from the reality of the Middle East.

Q: Is there a training problem in France in this regard?

Balanche: Teaching field geography is now a “has been.” So the sort of community identity that is a reality especially in the Global South can no longer be addressed. Most students and scholars refuse to understand this reality, which complicates research and teaching. To return to Afghanistan: if a scholar were to be interested in rap groups in Kabul, getting funding would be much easier than if the topic were the roots of tribalism. This is the same problem we encounter in France itself, if one tries to work on community identity in the suburbs (banlieues).