Wakhan: Concomitance of the Local and International in Marginal Boundaries

ABSTRACT

Wakhan, northeast Afghanistan’s peripheral panhandle, is situated between Afghanistan’s borders with Tajikistan, China and Pakistan. Once subject of Great Game rivalry, it requires multiagency fieldwork to better understand its geopolitical vulnerabilities. Existing accounts of Wakhan are deemed inadequate and inappropriate, exceptionalising its wildness and wilderness, and drawing (in)civility distinctions that legitimise a near-divine right to dominion. Reassessing Wakhan in a boundary biography, the paper argues that by conceiving boundaries as local manifestations of international dynamics, marginal boundary regions can serve as tests for the ‘state’ of international affairs. The paper firstly assesses evolving understandings of boundaries before conceiving them as local manifestations of international dynamics. Existing narratives are then observed to render the region subaltern. Wakhan is thereafter rethought in a boundary biography revealing how marginal boundary regions are malleable instruments of statecraft. Wakhan is observed, in the assessment, to continuously reflect the changing ‘state’ of international affairs. Such reassessment rids Wakhan of its ‘wild’ otherness, transitioning it from untaken virgin land to a vulnerable periphery, forced to adapt to exogenous change. Rethought in this way, Wakhan constitutes a local site of international contestation, a demonstration that place at the margin has the potential to be concurrently local and international.

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to the staff of the Cadbury Research Library and Research Reserve, both at the University of Birmingham. Thanks also go to Bulent Gökay, John Heathershaw, Nick Megoran, Karin Dean and Bleddyn Bowen. I am indebted to the reviewers for their challenging and insightful comments. Any errors are mine alone.

Notes

1. Archival work was conducted at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, and the Research Reserve, University of Birmingham.

2. It is worth noting that of all China’s borders with its 14 land neighbours, its Afghan border is the shortest at 92.45 km (Huasheng 2016, 891).

3. Territoriality denotes the control of area in order to control resources and people (Sack 1986, 1).

4. My focus here is on the salient existing historical accounts of Wakhan. Such accounts set a precedent in the literature, ‘othering’ the region and its human and natural environments. Much can be gleaned from critical readings of the texts cited here. But this is not to deny the presence of contemporary ‘othering’. The ethnographer Marsden, having conducted valuable fieldwork, notes the prejudices that the people of Pakistan’s Chitral evinced in relation to the Wakhi, who ‘are said by Chitralis to be harmless simpletons (nacharagan) who have “nothing in their head” (kaka nikie). They are the upcountry hicks (sarhadi roye)’ (2008, 230). Indeed, ‘many people go to great lengths to deny that they are Wakhiks at all’ (2008, 239).

5. The River Oxus is commonly termed the Amu Darya.

6. See also the observation of the British Consul General in Kashgar, Sir Clarmont Percival Skrine, regarding an attempted Christmas Dinner between Yarkand and Kashgar, east of Wakhan: ‘When we came to “lay the table”, we found that our drinking water … was frozen … the hard-boiled eggs were also hard-frozen … the cold chicken emitted a ringing sound when tapped and the juicy Kucha pears had to be thawed before we could get our teeth into them’ (1926, 120). Skrine’s wife, Diana, observed in a Yarkand bazaar ‘strange wild looking men … and the eyes of people without minds’ (in 1926 106–108).

7. Afghanistan became a Great Game chessboard, upon which Britain and Russia rivalled, in 1837 after a Russian-aided Persian annexation of Herat (Goodson 2001, 31). British diplomacy, plus tribal resistance, quelled the siege (2001, 31). It was British concern for Russian southward curiosity that prompted the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–1842) (2001, 33). The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) is attributable to British invasion following British occupation of Quetta in 1876, a resultant Russian mission to Kabul, and subsequent Afghan refusal to accept a British mission (2001, 34). The Third Anglo-Afghan War, lasting one month (May-June 1919), incurred the Treaty of Rawalpindi, freeing Afghanistan to conduct its affairs, and granting full sovereignty (2001, 36). There is thus, in the Imperial and Soviet sections of this paper, a deliberate two-year overlap between the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (the start of this paper’s Soviet Era) and Afghan independence (the end of the Imperial Era).

8. A year later, Younghusband and Grombtchevsky met again in Yarkand. Younghusband notes that it ‘was a great pleasure…to meet him again, and to hear from him an account of his wanderings since we had parted near the borders of Hunza’ (1904, 257).

9. This was formally termed the Agreement between the Governments of Great Britain and Russia with regard to the Spheres of Influence of the Two Countries in the Region of the Pamirs.

10. Attention focuses here on the Afghanistan–Tajikistan border. The paper accepts that Chinese border fortification is also significant. Kreutzmann notes that as recently as the 1980s, the so-called ‘System’, a Sino-Soviet ‘demilitarized zone which includes a 30km wide border strip with metal fences on both sides’ (2003, 221), quarantined Wakhan’s communities from their Chinese counterparts. Shahrani notes that Chinese border closure, following the 1947 revolution, trapped numerous Afghans inside Chinese territory for years (2002, 193). Malik locates Chinese border closure in 1949 at the Wakhjir Pass (2014, 309).

11. Note that by 1925, two-thirds of the Soviet military were located in Tajikistan’s southern plains bordering Afghanistan (Kassymbekova 2011, 353–354).

12. See Megoran’s observation that ‘in January 1924 the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party decided to re-examine the proposal for a division of Turkestan on national lines, a proposal approved by the Politburo that established a special commission for national territorial delimitation … [which] proposed that a Tajik autonomous region be formed within the Uzbek SSR [and in 1929 granted] full union republic status as the Tajik SSR’ (2010, 38).

13. Note Kassymbekova’s finding that by resettling and privileging Tajiks in southern Tajikistan, Soviet leaders ‘hoped at once to secure allies in the border region and, at the same time, to showcase them to Persian-speaking neighbours in Afghanistan in order to attract them to the Soviet regime’ (2011, 352).

14. Marsden’s ethnography in Chitral, Pakistan, identified Chitrali perceptions of backwardness (pasmandhagi) in Wakhan as opposed to progress in Tajikistan: ‘villagers in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Oblast enjoyed electricity and metaled roads that had been built by the Soviet government’ (2008, 232). Duncan, a sometime doctor in Wakhan, noted that agriculture ‘is entirely unmechanised, and it takes over a month to harvest, thresh and winnow the wheat crop, a task which would take two hours with a combine harvester’ (2009, 253). His survey observed ‘2 percent literacy among women in Wakhan, 14 percent among men’ (2009, 256). He found one ‘community whose flocks were dwindling,…who have a 50 percent child mortality rate, and a very large number of women dying in childbirth’ (2009, 260).

15. Recall Shaw’s observation that ‘With OGPU agents…presenting different messages to different populations, the Soviet state attempted to advance the notion that life within the Soviet borders was better than life beyond, all the while managing the basic fact that life on the border was among the most un-Soviet in the whole union’ (2011, 332; emphasis added).

16. Kassam is not alone in discussing drugs trafficking. Shahrani notes that after the Tajik civil war, Wakhan became an ‘important transit route for opium trade between Afghanistan and Central Asian republics, especially to…Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan’ (2002, 266). Rowe cites Afghans struggling to cross the Amu Darya into Tajikistan ‘because of transnational drug organizations that use Tajikistan as one of the main transit routes for Afghan opium’ (2010, 66; emphasis added). Huasheng observes that ‘Afghanistan…has become one of the largest sources of narcotics trafficked to China’ (2016, 899). Even a Pakistani government employee confirmed Wakhan was ‘a transit route for opium trafficking between Afghanistan and Central Asian republics’ (Malik 2011, 60).