Teaching the Article
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When Woodrow Wilson observed that "the American purpose mirrors the future of the world," he was neither the first nor the last president to celebrate the United States’ special relationship with modernity.1 Ideologies of progress are interwoven with the national narrative so tightly that it can be difficult for students to separate them. But the attempt can be worthwhile, because in the history of the United States—as in Afghanistan’s history—disputes over rights, property, and identity often emerged from competing visions of the future.
Afghanistan is at the end of a long list of frontiers chosen by Americans for pacification and development, so rather than expanding on the themes in the essay, I'd like to lead students toward questions about what modernization means and has meant during the half century in which it has been an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Asked for definitions, many students will understand "modern" to refer to things of our own time and "modernization" to mean the renewal or improvement of old ways to meet current standards. Some may distinguish the modern from the ancient or traditional. The term "development," whether applied to real estate or photography, refers to the unfolding of a predetermined process.
The semantics of progress thus produces oppositions—between the new and the old, growth and conservation, science and nature—that can lead to spirited but ultimately dissatisfying classroom discussions. Supporters and opponents may make similar assumptions about the inevitability and linearity of change. Within this debate are questions that can’t be resolved: How do certain ideas, machines, or fashions come to be valued as symbols of newness and movement, while others are linked to the past. Who gets to decide what progress looks like?
Here are several exercises—adaptable to other periods and places—that can be used to open discussion on those and related questions. Exercise 1 allows students to envision becoming modern as a process of ordering and controlling the environment. That is only one way of defining modernity, of course, but it allows students to ask who gains and who loses in this process and to recognize appeals to "progress" as a way of mobilizing, justifying, and concealing power.
When a government or an international organization imagines the environment it controls, more likely than not it uses a map. The perspective of a map, high above the earth with political boundaries clearly visible, is a characteristically bureaucratic and modern perspective. It rationalizes the landscape, reducing a complicated, messy terrain to a simplified schematic. Exercise 2 asks students to compare the ways Afghanistan has been simplified over the past century. The information included (and excluded) reveals what knowledge outsiders (strategists, economists, travelers, scientists) believed was important about the Afghans and their land.
Finally, Exercise 3 contains American, British, and Afghan documents describing the goals and motives of efforts to translate Afghanistan into the ordered, abstract landscape of a modern state. In each case, development was a means to something else—stability, tax revenue, an answer to terrorism—a way of deferring present problems into an imagined future. Walt W. Rostow and Max F. Millikan’s 1954 assertion that development would ensure that societies that "menace ours will not evolve" finds an ironic echo in a New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's 2001 hope that development would "prevent future Osama bin Ladens from arising."
This sort of unargued argument fills the public discourse on the economy, urban growth, and foreign aid and naturally filters into our understanding of the past. These exercises may help students to question assumptions behind modernization and to recognize it as an idea with a history.
- Nick Cullather
1 Woodrow Wilson, speech in St. Paul, Sept. 9, 1919, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, et al. (69 vols., Princeton, 1966–1997), 63, 142.