by Sarah Chayes
Isfahan was (and is) a fairyland of brick tracery and celestial blue faience. Shah Abbas built a many-arched bridge, gardens, and public buildings that personified decorum. He expanded its bazaars, building an entire new quarter south of the river for thousands of Christian Armenians he brought in from northwest Persia. The presence of these industrious folk was conscious policy.6
For the Safavis relied not just on land taxes and tribute from subject peoples for their wealth. They also deliberately emphasized commerce and industry. They tried to establish a royal monopoly over silk and oblige foreign merchants to buy it at fixed prices. They erected workshops to produce carpets and illuminated manuscripts for export. And they invested heavily in the infrastructure, comfort, and safety of their nation’s roads. A chain of caravansaries blossomed along the major overland routes, where watchmen were posted and villages subjected to collective punishment if merchants were robbed. The idea was to promote the flourishing trade in luxury goods with India—which passed predominantly by way of Kandahar.7
For on the other side of the city, to the east and south, lay that second great empire. In India, a certain Babur, descended from the Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane, fathered the Moghul dynasty. Babur was a brilliant military tactician who mastered the use of muskets and light artillery in the dawning gunpowder age. He was a cultivated man of letters who wrote an unparalleled personal memoir. He was an epicurean who never ceased longing for the delights of the fragrant orchards and snow-fed rivulets of Kabul and his native Ferghana beyond it.
Driven from Central Asia by the latest warlike Turkic tribe, the Uzbeks, Babur abandoned the richer prizes of Samarqand and Herat for Kabul, then captured Kandahar from a rival in 1507 on his way to Delhi.8
Babur’s grandson Akbar structured and centralized the Moghul empire. In some ways it resembled Safavi Persia. The Indian Moghuls made Islam—if of a syncretic variety—the state religion of India. They were of Central Asian Turkic blood and, like their counterparts in Isfahan, expressed themselves in a dialect of Turkish. And yet, like the Safavis, they were beguiled by Persian culture and adopted it, patronizing it richly.
And so the two great empires—sprung from a twined rootstock, communicating in the same religious and cultural idiom—faced off across an age-old continental divide. They were bound together by their shared history and their continual artistic, intellectual, and economic exchanges. And yet the rivalry between the two houses, often violent, ran just as deep as their similarities.
Kandahar, on its road, was caught in the middle. While the rest of what would become Afghanistan enjoyed peace for almost two hundred years under the Persians or the Indians, Kandahar was the place where one empire kept encroaching on the other. The city changed hands no less than nine times in a single century. Twice at least during the lifetime of a normal resident, Kandahar was “entered by force.”
One reduction of the city, by Emperor Babur in 1507, is immortalized in the monarch’s remarkably forthright autobiography, translated by my own college Arabic teacher. Babur’s troops had made the march from Qalat (now a two-hour drive up the Kabul road) and, famished, were foraging for food. The defenders charged out from behind the city walls, and Babur was forced to fight at half strength, he reckons. His left wing ends up splashing around in a great irrigation canal, like the one that runs by Akrem’s house, “exchanging sword-blows right in the water.”9 Babur’s men eventually rout the enemy and, after a parlay, the city gates are opened. It was Kandahar after all, and from a glance at its dull walls, Babur could not have dreamed of what he would find inside.
Lucky Babur.
“Never had so much silver coin been seen in those countries,” he writes. “In fact, nobody had heard of anyone who had seen so much.”10 After the battle, the future emperor went off to do some sightseeing, and returned to find his camp transformed. “What had happened to the place I knew? There were beautiful fine horses, strings and strings of camels and mules with fine textile trappings, brocade and velvet tents and canopies.”11
Babur’s conquest of Kandahar was the first of many that century. Even the most authoritative historians throw up their hands at the effort to get the battles straight.
Why such an obsession, I wonder. Why this city? Nowhere else along the lengthy frontier separating the two empires was there such contention. It is as though Kandahar became a symbolic spot where the two giants acted out a virile display of reciprocal challenge. As though neither could quite bear to let the other kingdom simply be, inside recognized boundaries, but had to make a show of encroaching on its rival’s land. Was the choice of Kandahar as the stage for these theatrics haphazard? Or was there something about the city that warranted such a heavy military investment?
The answer seems to lie, naturally, with Kandahar’s road. “In the 17th century,” writes Rudiger Klein, in his study of the caravan trade under the Safavis, “the way via Qandahar and Tabas to Isfahan had become the main overland axis between India and Iran.”12 Contemporary accounts describe a city bursting beyond its walls, as suburbs sprang up to cater to the booming traffic, with merchants renting out donkeys and camels, selling food stuffs, cordage, and burlap, mending gear, renting lodgings, helping organize traders into caravans. So active was this route that the European maritime companies that were aggressively moving into the Indian Ocean trade—the Portuguese, then the Dutch and British East India Companies—were hard pressed to compete. In the first half of the century, extrapolating from Klein’s figures, some forty thousand camels passed through Kandahar each year,13 carrying choice indigo, silks and broad-cloths, pepper, spices, and sugar by the ton. No wonder the empires on either side coveted the city. It was the strategic valve on the pipeline linking them.
Ironically, the frequent battles for Kandahar undermined the very source of the city’s allure: trade. An invasion of Kandahar meant the whole imperial court at Delhi or Isfahan would take to the field, dislocating the end markets for luxury goods. When war was on, demand for finery tended to be off. Then there were the commercial blockades, the requisitioning of goods and services in the countryside around Kandahar that were otherwise available to merchants, not to mention the sheer uncertainty and danger of passage anywhere nearby.
From the middle of the 1600s, when the Indian Moghuls finally gave up on capturing Kandahar, the city lived for a time in relative peace under the Safavis. Then it brought the dynasty down.
Now we’re getting warm. History is pregnant now with the coming Afghanistan.
By the end of the seventeenth century, demographic forces were pushing on both India and Iran. Turkic peoples were riding in from Central Asia, as they had done with devastating regularity since prehistory. And for the first time, a people called the Afghans was expanding outwards—and downwards—from the wall they were perched on, the great barrier of mountains that rose up between the empires. In earlier histories, in Babur’s memoirs, for example, these Afghans are mentioned as a small tribe inhabiting just the highlands of what is now Afghanistan. Now, not a century later, they are everywhere, spreading south and east into India, to Kandahar and the fertile Helmand valley.14
These Afghans were divided into two rival branches, the Abdalis and the Ghiljais. This is still the major split within the Pashtun ethnic group. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Abdalis (with Ahmad Shah’s forebears) left Kandahar, moving northwestward to Herat. Their rivals the Ghiljais occupied the city they left behind. This population exchange may even have been a Persian attempt to use ethnic cleansing to weaken the Afghans. In any case, disgruntlement at the displacement went deep.
The Afghans were not held in check for long. While the Abdali branch was busy making Herat an independent principality, a Ghiljai chief murdered the Persian governor in Kandahar, throwing off Persian rule there too. That chief’s mausoleum just outside town is almost as popular as Ahmad Shah’s. In 1722, the mad son of this Ghiljai chief brought down the whole Safavi Empire. Afghan fighters bent on loot poured into beautiful Isfa
han.
What followed was a dance of vultures on the Safavi corpse. The Ghiljais were outclassed, and a certain Nadir Shah emerged the victor.
Nadir Shah immediately turned to reconquering Persian lands from the upstart Afghans. The Abdalis in Herat were especially hard to reduce because they kept retracting their surrender and making him renew his siege.15 In a move uncharacteristic of the age, Nadir Shah did not slaughter the Abdalis once he had finally vanquished them. He rehabilitated them, incorporating many into his army.16
These Abdali Pashtuns were accomplished fighters, and they served Nadir Shah well. As his victories piled up, with their attendant distributions of booty, more and more came to join the adventure. Legend says that the chief of Akrem’s Alokozai tribe was especially favored, and earned the promise that if the rival Ghiljai branch was driven out of Kandahar, the Abdalis could move back to their ancestral home. That promise must have served as a powerful incentive.17 In 1738, Kandahar, the Ghiljai redoubt, fell to Nadir Shah and his Abdali mercenaries.18
Nadir Shah kept his word and gave the city to the Abdalis, divvying up the lands around among the tribes.19 The chief of the Alokozais was made governor, and his tribesmen were assigned a choice prize: well-watered Arghandab, where Mullah Naqib’s mud-walled fort stands today.
Young Ahmad the Abdali joined his tribesmen in the fighting force of this successful new shah. It befitted his heritage as scion of the rulers of Herat, as well as his station as younger son. For nine years, he helped command the troops that Nadir Shah took south, on a tear through Moghul India. The pillage and massacres don’t bear retelling.20 Through them, Ahmad Shah could not have missed two salient points: the land was rich, and it was easy to harvest.
Most accounts tell of Nadir Shah growing erratic, suspicious, and despotic as he gorged on war and its fruits. One chronicle describes in nauseating detail the kind of punishment he meted out: cutting off people’s noses and ears in his paranoia, putting out their eyes, making a tower of their severed heads.21 Nadir Shah had his own son blinded, and feared that the chief nobles of his clan were plotting to assassinate him. They probably were.22 He was about to arrest them, according to some stories, when they moved faster and struck off his head as he lay in bed.23 Another version has those nobles growing jealous because of the favors Nadir Shah was bestowing on the Abdalis, including young Ahmad.24
So. At last I have circled back to the very moment of Afghanistan’s founding, the legend that has the same resonance here that the battle of Concord Bridge has at home, or the storming of the Bastille in France. But suddenly, there are no more footnotes in Hamid Karzai’s schoolbooks. It is infuriating. I have no idea where the authors are getting their tales. My journalist’s training—my historian’s training, for that matter—is enjoining me to find some corroboration. I have to dig up a primary source.
So on a trip to Kabul, I decide to visit the public library. I wasn’t even sure Kabul had such a thing, given what the city has been through. But there it stands, set back across a weedy vacant lot not far from the U.S. embassy. The history section is on the top floor, where a librarian courteously leads me. He is a short, gray-haired man, surprised and pleased by my interest. He cannot suggest a specific book, but points me at the relevant region of the rarely visited shelves.
I am impressed with the collection. All six volumes of the Cambridge History of Iran are there, and several of the authorities cited in Karzai’s books. I trail my fingers along the spines, turning my head sideways every now and then to read a title.
Then I find it: Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi (The History of Ahmad Shah). The volume I excitedly pull down and start leafing through is a glossy-paged facsimile of an eighteenth-century manuscript, written, I find in the brief English introduction, by Ahmad Shah Abdali’s own court historian. The book was published in Moscow. That makes sense, after a second. The Soviets were always rather utilitarian about their scholarship, and Afghanistan was clearly on their strategic radar. I check the date. 1974. How interesting. Almost six years before their invasion, the Soviets were already investing in this kind of research.
It takes some begging to get the librarian to let me carry this book out of the building. It is against the rules. But I have to make a copy. I leave him my U.S. passport as collateral. An insane risk.
The book is written in Persian, naturally, which I don’t speak. And the Russian critical apparatus is just as unintelligible to me. I inform one of my employees that he is going to be helping me on this. And every single day for the next two weeks, I drag him through the translation. It is interesting to watch. An educated man with loudly opinionated views about his country’s history, very conversant with the 1970s and 1980s period, he is at sea with this story, key though it is to the Afghan national identity. And he keeps whining about the difficult eighteenth-century Persian.
The book is everything I was hoping for. Ahmad Shah’s historian, who may have heard a firsthand account, describes the assassination of the Persian ruler Nadir Shah in riveting detail.
It happened, he writes, when “the velvet of darkness” had settled on the shah’s camp. One of the conspirators penetrates the sanctum of the royal sleeping tent. A guard, an African, rears up before him. The white globes of his eyes, piercing his inky face, pierce the night. “Who are you!” he snarls. “Where did you find the courage to place the edge of your foot inside the Shah’s tent at this time of night? I think you are sick of life!”
The assassin laughs and strikes a heavy blow on the chamberlain’s shoulder, and strides past. Nadir Shah has heard the noise; he’s awake, he’s grasping a torch to see by. “Ungrateful!” he shouts at the conspirator, his erstwhile friend, “What do you want?”
“I am the Angel of Death,” the assassin answers. “I have come for your soul. Speak no more; your appointed time is done. Put out your neck for cutting.” And he brings his sword crashing down on the shah’s helmet, cutting into his skull bone. Nadir Shah falls to the ground, stunned but not dead. The killer plops down on his chest and hacks his head off.25
At dawn on June 20, 1747, the shah’s bloody torso is discovered. All the accounts speak of stark pandemonium in Nadir Shah’s camp after the murder. Then the scene in Karzai’s books skips to Ahmad the Abdali and several thousand horsemen breaking from the camp at a gallop and heading for Kandahar.
It is perfectly possible—though no historian suggests it—that the young Afghan cavalry captain knew about the caravan of treasure making its way at that very moment toward Nadir Shah.26 Its load of coin and goods would have made a cogent argument for the Abdalis to abandon the royal camp and its strongboxes to the squabbling nobles. Otherwise, given the Abdalis’ description as the cream of Nadir Shah’s forces, it does not make sense that they would just give up their share of the loot.27
But leave they did. The account of their trip to Kandahar in the facsimile manuscript indicates the kind of chaos that was reigning in those days of the dissolution of empires. That route that had made Kandahar’s fame, once studded with caravansaries and dependable wells for the benefit of long-distance traders, innocent of robbers or freelance tollbooth operators, had been the pride of the Safavi nation builders. But Ahmad Shah’s troop keeps encountering bands of thugs perched in forts above the road, poised to rob travelers.28 Just like the twentieth-century gunmen who mercilessly harried truck drivers during the “mujahideen nights.”
The scene of Afghanistan’s founding myth unfolds at a shrine just outside Kandahar.29 I heard this famous tale when I first arrived in the city: the story of the jirga, or council meeting among the elders of all the Afghan tribes, called to settle the matter of their leadership. You can practically smell young Ahmad taking his seat, the sweat of the road barely scraped off his skin, his horsemen spread out in the surrounding fields.
Now those fields are a haunted landscape of ruined kishmish khanahs. Fortlike buildings of mud brick, their walls are scored with rows of window slits, like the ones for protecting medieval castles. Here they pie
rce the thick baked mud to allow air inside to dry grapes into raisins. Most of the arched roofs are blown off, and the low-slung domes that capped end rooms are shattered. Anti-Soviet mujahideen used to camp out in these structures, and the Communists shelled them. The fields around are dried out; just the earthen walls where the grapevines once spread their tendrils testify to a forgotten abundance.
According to the story, the jirga at the holy precinct lasted for days, for none of the chiefs would give up his own claim to lead. Young Ahmad the cavalry captain is depicted as a proper Afghan youth, sitting silent in the presence of his elders.30 A holy man was there, a darwish, a kind of half-coherent itinerant hermit who decks himself with amulets and utters prayers as he begs his way from here to there. Nowadays, one of these men stakes out a spot on the seamed concrete road by the turn-off to Khakrez. He is so hilarious as he calls down God’s munificence on my head that I never fail to stop and give him money. The eighteenth-century darwish is said to have ended the argument at that founding jirga. Drifting off from the fringes of the group, the story goes, he broke a sprig of wheat from an adjacent field, then pushed through the circle of elders to young Ahmad Shah and slid the green blade among the folds of his turban, “crowning” him.31
Thus was the Afghan nation born.
Ahmad Shah was a member of the Popalzai tribe, like President Hamid Karzai. Reading the accounts of this story, I notice that his prime competitor for power was Hajji Jamal Khan, the chief of Governor Gul Agha Shirzai’s Barakzais.
Well, that explains a lot.
Here then lay the roots of the rivalry played out at that tense meeting at the governor’s palace 250 years later—a rivalry in which I will soon be caught up.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, as he called himself after that day, was a consummate politician. His first recorded deed after gaining leadership of the Abdalis, or Durranis as they are now known, was to parcel out positions in a Persian-style bureaucratic government to the chiefs of the various tribes, finding something for everyone.32 His reign lasted twenty-five years. He expanded his new kingdom of Afghanistan northwest as far as Mashad in Iran, and southeast beyond the Indus River. He raided the Moghul lands nine times. Throughout, he consulted regularly with his jirga of tribal elders.