Alternative Resistances in Narratives of America’s Afghan War

The American occupation of Afghanistan, articulated through the rubric of the “War on Terror” and operationalised via an ambitious liberal statebuilding regime, was persistently resisted and ultimately collapsed under the weight of that resistance. Initially compelled to renegotiate its modalities of rule through hybridisation of the statebuilding project and the “Afghanisation” of the war effort, the United States and its allies eventually withdrew, conceding what was widely perceived as a strategic and symbolic defeat. Contrary to mainstream representations that reduce Afghan dissent to the organised, ideologically driven Taliban insurgency, this paper argues that resistance to American and Western imperial power assumed far more variegated and diffuse forms. Drawing on James C. Scott’s notion of infrapolitics (Scott 1990), I foreground everyday acts of refusal and subversion that “dare not speak in their own name”, precisely because overt defiance risks punitive retaliation within colonial or quasi colonial orders. Resistance also operated discursively and culturally through forms of “talking back” (hooks 1989), returning the colonial gaze, hybridising imposed institutional architectures, and gradually reclaiming discursive sites of authority in ways that unsettled and destabilised imperial power (Bhabha 1994; Said 1978). Both history and discourse structured these resistances. Elites and non elites alike, sometimes consciously and sometimes tacitly, participated in dissenting practices, often in ways that render any rigid bifurcation between “elite” and “popular” politics analytically untenable. Resistance emerged not only on battlefields but within bureaucracies, translation practices, development programmes, military partnerships, and everyday “contact zones” (Pratt 1991) of asymmetrical power. To excavate testimony of such alternative forms of resistance, this paper reads a curated selection of memoirs and life writing by Americans deployed to Afghanistan during the occupation period. These include American Spartan by Ann Scott Tyson, The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman, The Prodigal Para: An Afghan War Diary by Andy Tyson, and Outlaw Platoon by Sean Parnell and John R. Bruning. Where resistance is explicit, moments of refusal, doubt, critique, or disillusionment, it is examined as such. Elsewhere, the paper reads against the grain, attending to narrative gaps, tonal dissonances, cross cultural misrecognitions, and unintentional disclosures. Through such interpretive labour, these texts become archives of subversive politics and subterranean subjectivities that reveal the fragility of imperial authority within asymmetrical contact zones. Keywords: Afghanistan; War on Terror; statebuilding, infrapolitics; everyday resistance, memoir