This book is concerned with seeing interpreters in war, examining the gaze that is turned on Afghan interpreters by their western employers. We are, as it were, going to look at the West as the West is looking at its Afghan interpreters. Given that few of the western interveners in Afghanistan were fluent speakers of Dari or Pashto, the version of the country and its peoples which they overwhelmingly received was trans lated to them by locally employed interpreting personnel. In the twenty year conflict, the West’s relationship with Afghan interpreters was argu ably the most direct of any which they enjoyed with the peoples of Afghanistan. Whether these relationships were incidental and transac tional, or longer lasting and personal, the figure of the Afghan interpreter became both a conduit for western impressions of Afghanistan and a key symbol of Afghanistan for the West. In this study, I am deliberately reversing the gaze, looking away from the normal object of interpreting scholarship, the interpreters, and focus ing instead on their employers. I want to explore how western interveners lived with, left behind, evacuated and gave asylum to their Afghan inter preters, and how they represented the ‘otherness’ and ‘foreignness’ of this group with whom they worked. If, as Fabian suggested, the act of repre senting the Other is inherently one of conferring distance and difference (quoted in Manchanda, 2020), the West was creating the elements of this otherness out of a relationship which, according to much interpreting scholarship, is essentially predicated on building bridges and aiding understanding. I hope that by treating the West’s assumptions about interpreters as an object of study in its own right, interpreting in war may be more clearly understood as the inevitably politicised endeavour that it is. Reading the story of the West’s imaginary of interpreters in Afghanistan is to engage, the book will argue, with western motivations for foreign invasion, the mechanics of waging kinetic and non-kinetic war, and with the immedi ate and longer term consequences of all these actions.
