Rethinking Regions in a Time of War: Afghanistan and the “Middle East”
When the US-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28, 2026, the news media was quick to bill it as a “War in the Middle East.” Afghanistan was mentioned in political circles only as yesterday’s war: For detractors, it was a cautionary tale against regime change, for supporters, a juxtaposition that this intervention would be waged differently. In this discourse, Afghanistan is not part of the war, but peripheral to it, as it is to the region of the Middle East.
This has long been the story of Afghanistan as told from the west. The first references to the “Middle East” in colonial archives, at the turn of the twentieth century, placed Afghanistan at the edge of the region, as a buffer to India. During the Cold War, it was suspended between South Asia and Soviet Central Asia. During the years of the US-led war on terror, it was reconstituted through new strategic geographies such as “Af-Pak.” These designations are not neutral. Not only do they shape academic funding and area studies, but they also determine how English-language media—and policymakers in the US—engage with this space.
When it comes to the current war, there has been little attention to Iran’s long and fluid border with Afghanistan—nearly 1,000 kilometers—or to their integrated histories, as if the effects of the “War in the Middle East” stop at Iran’s eastern edge. Yet for Afghans, the war is felt materially. Iran hosts millions of Afghan migrants, many of whom live precariously and have faced accelerated deportations since the outbreak of violence. As strikes have hit Iranian infrastructure, including the port of Chabahar—one of Afghanistan’s primary maritime routes—thousands of Afghans have crossed the border each day. Afghanistan’s access to global trade, already fragile, is further constrained as both Chabahar and Bandar Abbas face disruption.
The media has also spared little attention for the parallel war between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which began just days earlier. Rooted in the unresolved afterlives of the US-led War on Terror and longer colonial divisions, this conflict escalated sharply in the early days of March with aerial attacks on military and civilian infrastructure across Afghanistan. For states and peoples across South and Central Asia, these two wars have unfolded simultaneously, with compounding effects. The consequences are already visible in the disruption of regional connectivity: key corridors are threatened, infrastructure projects are stalling, and already fragile political relationships are under strain. If they appear separate, it is because of the divisions imposed upon regions.
A century ago, in the early 1900s, Afghan reformers approached the region differently. Connecting through print networks and the circulation of activists across India, Uzbekistan, China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt, they imagined themselves as “Asians”—an identity that was explicitly articulated against British colonial constructions of the world. These imaginaries emerged from dense material connections of texts, people, and political projects in which Afghanistan was positioned not as peripheral but central to a broader regional vision.
My Mapping Connections project looks at this history, its effects and its limits, in part as a way to challenge the stubborn frames that elide connection, interdependence, and the fact that regions are constructed not only from the top down but from the bottom up. Rather than treating Afghanistan as an outlier, it asks what becomes visible when we take seriously its position within overlapping regional worlds, and the ways actors on the ground imagined and inhabited those connections at a moment when, during World War I, the concept of “Asia” was used to imagine alliances and futures beyond imperial rule. In the years that followed, those imaginaries fractured and reassembled through communist solidarities moving north through Central Asia.
For Afghan migrants crossing the border from Iran today or Tajiks moving along the same overland routes as trade and evacuation corridors tighten, the “War in the Middle East” is not elsewhere. It is lived in crossings, deportations and in the breakdown of movement across regions. The connections being disrupted today are not identical to those my project traces in an earlier moment, but they point to a longer history in which such links were lived and imagined as the basis for political and regional belonging.