How similar can we compare Afghanistan to post-colonisation Burma?

[u/kevirtual]

The lack of a proper handover process was evident in many post-colonisation Southeast Asian states including Indonesia, Burma, and Vietnam.

Burma being a more significant example because we know that shortly after decolonisation, it was difficult to establish proper governance due to the myriad of smaller ethnic groups around the country and the prevalent factionalism in the central government. These characteristics seem similar to the lack of unity between the different ethnic groups in Afghanistan and also the poor administration within the Taliban government itself.

Are we allowed to draw such a comparison between both states?

[u/SlipperyWetDogNose]

No, because Myanmar is faced with ethnic separatists, whereas Afghanistan is pre-occupied with who rules.

Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras aren’t asking for partition, they want a piece of the pie preferably with their group getting special privileges.

[u/ferrel_hadley]

Afghanistan was an empire that lost out and was squeezed between three competing forces. The Durrani empire had stretches to Delhi in modern India in the late 1700s but it was squeezed from the east by the Sikh Empire (then the British Raj), from the west by the Persians\Iranian and from the north by the Russians\Soviets. They were never colonised and only suffered an invasion and occupation to turn them into a vassal of the British Raj. This is normal through out history. For large blocks of the world you either are the empire or the vassal.

It had a reasonable trajectory in the 50s and 60s with a climbing urbanised society that was modernising. But obviously, like most of the world, a rural population with low literacy.

There problems really started when Marxist factions in the army began making bids for power in the 70s. This ended with the Soviet invasion that shattered the society, especially its urban educated. It also brought the growing trend of militant Islamism into the country in a big way.

The shattered country was governed by warlords as the Soviets left.

A group of youths, heavily inducted into violent Jihadism and with Pakistani support took over the government and most peoples awareness of the countries history kind of start at this point. The Taliban of the late 90s.

I see no parallels with that and Myanmar. It has a totally different history, a totally different type of history. It was directly colonised and left with the centralised British imperial institutions that its near neighbours, such as Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh have.

Iran (and at a real real stretch Turkey) are the closest analogues. Muslim countries that retain most of their autonomy through the era of high imperialism, regions with long long histories of being part of the shifting tides of empires.

[u/jmlsasgzhiwala → u/ferrel_hadley]

They lacked colonial institutions, but the squeeze as you put it definitely has help shape the conflicts. In all honesty both Iraq and Afghanistan would probably have been better off if they had been balkanized along ethnic and sectarian states. Iraq's stability has gotten a lot better but it essentially has faced 3 Civil Wars if not more in the last 30 years: The 1991 uprising, the civil war that was fought when the U.S occupied Iraq, and the ISIS war The current stability now comes from having the army gaining a huge amount of direct combat experience through the anti ISIS war and the thousands upon thousands of people in armed militias. And that came out of the cost of so many lives, and cities such as Mosul, Ramadi, Tikrit and others were largely leveled and the rebuilding process staggers onward.

Afghanistan having so many ethnic groups and divisions along sectarian lines has been a continuous source of fuel for conflict over the last 40 years. It would have made more sense if Russia had in the 1800s had also annexed the Uzbet and Tajik areas of Afghanistan, but of course that would have pitted them against the Iranians and British Raj at the time, and the hodgepodge mess of a country eventually became the unchanging buffer between the Russians and the British, and later the Soviets.