Robert Rakove

Stanford University

Thursday, February 11, 2016  |  12:15pm  |  Eastwoods Room, Union Building

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As Lyndon Johnson unveiled his Great Society program, another transformative political project unfolded on the other side of the world. The kingdom of Afghanistan, at the end of a two-year standoff with its neighbor Pakistan, embarked upon a historic constitutional project. The enthusiastic U.S. Ambassador John Milton Steeves compared the constitutional program to the emergence of Meiji Japan and Kemalist Turkey. Yet, even as successive  administrations underwrote modernization programs elsewhere in the world, U.S. policy remained curiously detached from Kabul’s great experiment. This paper will offer an overview of the U.S.-Afghan relationship within the political currents of the 1960s and early 1970s, noting the tragic dimensions of the failure of the Afghan constitutional experiment.

Dr. Robert Rakove is a historian who studies U.S. foreign relations, focusing particularly on the Cold War era. He is a lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in International Relations, and has previously taught at Colgate University and Old Dominion University.  His first book, “Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World,” was published by Cambridge University press in 2012. He is presently at work on a study of the U.S.-Afghan relationship and the Cold War in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion. He received his doctorate in History in 2008 from the University of Virginia, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, and the Hoover Institution.