Hamid Karzai – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Book Review: Afghanistan Post–2014—Misreading Afghanistan’s Crypto-coloniality

Review of: Afghanistan Post-2014: Power Configurations and Evolving Tragectories. Edited by Rajen Harshe’ and Dhananjay Tripathi. (New Delhi: Routledge), 2016, pp. xix+248. The colonial and postcolonial writings about of Afghanistan are marked by the absence of a systematic and critical awareness about the country as an offspring and dependency of Western colonialism. The ethnographic, historic […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Pamphleteer Anthropology and the Production of Knowledge about Afghanistan

The military occupation of Afghanistan by the United States and its partners has spawned floods of popular and academic writings and visual effects about the culture, history and politics of the country. A leading contributor to these stores of information about Afghanistan is Thomas Jefferson Barfield, currently professor of anthropology at Boston University and president […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Encircling Empire: Report #7, 16-21 October 2010

EE: Report #7, 16—21 October 2010 Encircling Empire Reports is a selection of essays, blog posts, and news reports covering a given time period. They are intended to be useful for those interested in: ● contemporary and critical political anthropology ● public anthropology ● imperialism and imperial decline ● militarism/militarization ● the political economy of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

General Stanley McTerror: The Shocking Admissions the Media Treated as Unremarkable

THE PROBLEM: Google Search for: “Are you asking about Vice President Biden” = 3,890 results Google Search for: “You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight” = 154 results ONE EXAMPLE: Vanity Fair, in a supposedly savvy media analysis that pinpoints what it thinks were McChrystal’s biggest mistakes, names the most tasteless, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

This Fraud Is On You: The 2009 Afghan Elections and the U.N. Cover Up

We spent over $300 million to perpetrate a fraudulent election in Afghanistan, with the record of fraud actively covered up by the U.N. mission in Afghanistan. See: Excerpts – Galbraith’s Letter to U.N. Secretary General – NYTimes.com Extracts: In July, I came to the realization that the greatest risk to the Afghan elections was from […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Public Propaganda, The Human Terrain System, and Staged Democracy in Afghanistan

Some interesting reports have surfaced over the past three weeks concerning initiatives with links to the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), along with reports about control exercised over U.S. journalists, both of which come under the rubric of public propaganda (what proponents call “public diplomacy” and others call “strategic communications”). Gary Langer of ABC […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Demonstration Elections

The concept of “demonstration election” is a useful one for describing the elections staged by the U.S. occupation regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a much longer history of practice in Latin America and the Caribbean. The concept came into usage with the publication in 1984 of Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

NATO and Afghanistan’s Shia Marriage Law: The Collapse of a Master Narrative

“The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights” (Mohammad Asif Mohseni, senior Afghan cleric and legislator, 11 April 2009) “I hope that we have elevated in the hearts and minds of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

On the conduct of military “contractors” in Afghanistan: In the words of Paula Loyd (1.7)

Since Paula Loyd (36 years old) was set on fire by an Afghan Taliban man, Abdul Salam, on November 4, 2008, there has been a considerable outpouring of messages of grief and condolences for Loyd online, in the United States particularly. Another member of the U.S. Army Human Terrain Team to which Loyd belonged, a […]