Veil of Empire: Racialized Control and Abandonment in the U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan

• In Event: The US Empire in the Present

Abstract

How does an imperial power incorporate racialized subjects as instrumental to its occupation and then abandon them without accountability when they are no longer of value? This article argues that racialization is the active mechanism underwriting both occupation and exit in the context of the U.S. war in Afghanistan—that the two are not binary opposites but are governed by the same racializing logics. In U.S. military theatres, national categories come to function as racial markers, organizing governance, spatial life, and subjectivity. Being Afghan itself becomes a racialized category within the imperial field. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul (2018–2020), ninety-three in-depth interviews, and analysis of internal private security documents, the article traces racialization through four moments: sorting, through which foreign security firms classified Afghan life into risk categories justifying exclusion; separating and surveilling, through which those classifications were materialized into the built environment of the occupied city; internalizing, through which middle-class Afghans absorbed and reproduced imperial hierarchies in their own self-understandings; and abandoning, through which the occupied were rendered disposable at the moment of U.S. withdrawal. The article makes four contributions. It demonstrates that occupation and withdrawal are governed by the same racializing logics, building on frameworks that look at just occupation/control as governed by it. It reveals how material imperial infrastructures generate internalized hierarchies among colonized populations. It shows that the U.S. empire-state transforms national identity itself—not only religious identity—into a racial category, revealing forms of Muslim racialization invisible in metropole-centered studies. Finally, it offers a methodological demonstration of multiscalar racialization, showing how racial formation is co-produced across discursive, bureaucratic, material, and intimate domains within a single analytical frame.

Author

• Syeda Quratulain Masood, Hamline University