If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white, Remember it's ruin to run from a fight: So take open order, lie down, and sit tight, And wait for supports like a soldier. Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . . When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, So-oldier ~of~ the Queen! Excerpt from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Young British Soldier” (1895) Of much less renown than his "The Jungle Book" and other children’s stories, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Young British Soldier” brings to bear the preoccupations of foreign intervention—past and present—in Afghanistan. However, rather than focus on romantic imaginings of Afghanistan and Afghans as able to repel numerous attempts at intervention and colonization by Western military forces, I will investigate it as a heterogeneous space of fertility and death, one in which certain deaths (and lives) matter and are “countable” for particular purposes – be they to declare progress in the War on Terror, to justify humanitarian aid, etc. Moreover, I will explore 19th century British travelogues and military accounts of officials stationed in Afghanistan. Whereas great tomes have been written on accounts by European Orientalists who set their sights upon the Arab Middle East, scant attention, if any, has been offered to the treatment of Afghanistan in nineteenth century Orientalist texts and the persistence of such characterizations over the centuries of Afghanistan as a site of foreign quagmire. In addition, I seek to excavate the persistence of the genre of Afghanistan travelogues to contemporary ones that continue to brand the country as a site to be traversed or passed through, one that is inherently unfriendly to foreign conquest, as resilient, and as a “place in between.” In this manner, I hope to explore broader questions for anthropology, as a discipline, and ethnography as method. Given the interrupted trajectory of the ethnographic study of Afghanistan from the anthropological research of the 1960s and 1970s (Olszewska, Anthropology of the Middle East, Spring 2012), how, then, does one pursue a renewed anthropology of post-2001 Afghanistan?