In The Colonial Present, the geographer Derek Gregory sees the influence of empire in Western escapades in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, arguing that the war on terror is a ‘violent return of the colonial past, with its split geographies of “us” and “them,” “civilization” and “barbarism,” “Good” and “Evil”’, reminding us that Britain embarked on numerous Afghan wars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to keep Tsarist Russia from its doorstep in India, and highlighting the remarks of journalists who have expressed distinctly imperial sentiments about contemporary wars.
