Teaching the Article
Exercise 3: Documents
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Description:
Planners invested their dreams for the future in the dams and airports they built. Examine the following documents as you read the article and identify the agendas and hopes attached to development. Locate differences between British, American, and Afghan understandings of the meaning and purpose of progress.
In each of these documents, observers speak of their hopes for a modernizing Afghanistan. Discussion could focus on points of consistency—such as the persistent belief that development will bring peace and security—and then turn to points of difference, over time and between groups.
Example:
Rostow and Millikan spoke in 1954 of creating conditions in which "societies which . . . menace ours will not evolve." Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2001 of "prevent[ing] future Osama bin Ladens." Compare these visions of global social control separated by nearly a half century. What assumptions are they based on? Why do policy makers continue to rest such hopes on economic improvement?
How did the global ambitions of development boil down to specific plans for Afghanistan? Compare Guilford Jameson’s 1958 plan with Mohammed Daoud’s 1959 vision. Both spoke of development as a way to make Afghanistan free, but how do their understandings of freedom differ?
Example:
Plans that are reasonable in the abstract often make less sense after completion. Take the construction of an airport at Kandahar. Strickland (1933) and Jameson (1958) suggest a number of ways that an airport might help Afghanistan, but Gillett, who visited the finished Kandahar International Airport in 1963, watched "sand drift into the empty buildings and coat all the magnificent, unused equipment." What made the original plans plausible? What had changed by 1963 that might account for Gillett’s very different view?
Documents Used in this Exercise:
C. F. Strickland, "The Economic Development of Afghanistan," Contemporary Review (London), 143 (June 1933), 714–22.
House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Mutual Security Act of 1958, 85 Cong., 2 sess., 1958, p. 1707.
Louis Dupree, "An Informal Talk with Prime Minister Da[o]ud," American Universities Field Staff Reports, South Asia Series, 3 (1959), 17–20.
Max F. Millikan and Walt W. Rostow, "Notes on Foreign Economic Policy," May 21, 1954, in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York, 1988), 39–55.
M. C. Gillett to Earl of Home, April 2, 1963, in Afghanistan Strategic Intelligence: British Records, 1919–1970, ed. A. L. P. Burdett, vol. IV, 1948–1970 (Chippenham, Wilts, 2002), 781–93.
Nicholas D. Kristof, "Give the Afghans a Hand," New York Times, Dec. 13, 2001, p. A31.
Richard Sokolsky and Joseph McMillan, "Foreign Aid in Our Own Defense," New York Times, Feb. 2, 2002, p. A27.