In the twentieth century Afghanistan’s rulers set themselves a third and equally difficult task: to modernise their country—its army, its communications, its economy, its governmental apparatus, its educational system. Most have tried to do something about the subordinate status of women. But reform has always come up, and often been shattered, against the conservatism of the people and their religious and traditional local rulers. Reform in Afghanistan has been a matter of two steps forward and one—sometimes two or even three—steps back.
The fourth task of any Afghan ruler, and the precondition for tackling the first three, has been to remain alive. Afghanistan’s rulers have succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, often for very short periods. Between 1842 and 1995 seven of them fell victim at an accelerating pace to family feud, palace coup, mob violence, or outside intervention. Between 1878 and 2001 four more were forced into exile. Others prudently abdicated while the going was good.
Ahmad Shah Abdali was a Pushtun who was elected king in 1747 by a loya jirga (consultative assembly) at Kandahar. In a flamboyant and symbolic gesture, he is said to have shown himself to the people dressed in the Cloak of the Prophet, which was reverently kept in its own mosque in the city. The state of Afghanistan, within roughly its present border, takes its beginning from that event.
By the time Ahmad Shah died in 1772, he had reconciled the turbulent Pushtun tribes, subdued most of present-day Afghanistan, extended his empire to Delhi and into Persia, and earned the name of Father of his People. Under his successors, however, many of these achievements were undone. The Pushtun tribes resumed their quarrels and the empire crumbled. In 1775 Ahmad Shah’s son moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, where it remained. His grandson Shah Shujah (1785–1842), signed Afghanistan’s first treaty with a foreign power in 1809, when he and the British agreed to support one another in the event of aggression by the Persians or the French. Shah Shujah was deposed a few weeks later. He fled to India, was brought back to Kabul in the baggage train of a British army during the First Anglo-Afghan War, and was murdered when the British cut their losses and left.
Dost Mohamed, who first came to power in 1823, was deposed by the British in favour of Shah Shujah, but returned to power after the British departed, and successfully ruled the country for the next nineteen years. For most of this time he was on good terms with the British. But after his death in 1863, the country collapsed back into civil war.
A battle lost in that war left Abdur Rahman Khan without an army and without funds. He was forced to seek exile under the protection of the Russians in Tashkent, where he remained for eleven years. He emerged as ruler of Afghanistan in 1880 in the wake of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Grim, sardonic, barely literate but highly intelligent, he was determined to fit his country for survival in the modern world. His brutal methods of government earned him the name of ‘The Iron Amir’. His power, like that of many of his successors, was fortified by a ruthless and omnipresent secret police. His methods worked. He set up the rudiments of a modern state bureaucracy, modernised and financed his army with the help of the British, and struck a skilful balance between them and the Russians.
Abdur Rahman’s successors attempted to push Afghanistan further along the path of modernisation. His son Habibullah (1872–1919) was assassinated in 1919 and succeeded by Amanullah (1892–1960), who took advantage of British weakness at the end of the Great War to invade India. The British bombed Kabul and Jalalabad and drove the invaders back. Neither side had much stomach for the war, and it fizzled out after a month. The British ceased both their subsidies and their control of Afghan foreign policy. Amanullah promptly opened a fruitful relationship with the new Bolshevik government in Moscow—the first foreign government to do so.
He then embarked on an ambitious programme of reform in imitation of the secularising reforms of Atatürk in Turkey. He established a Council of Ministers, promulgated a constitution, decreed a series of administrative, economic and social reforms, and unveiled his queen. His plans for the emancipation of women, a minimum age for marriage, and compulsory education for all angered religious conservatives and provoked a brief rebellion. Tribesmen burned down the royal palace in Jalalabad and marched on Kabul. In 1929 Amanullah fled into exile in Italy.
Nadir Shah (1883–1933), a distant cousin of Amanullah, seized the throne, reimposed order, but allowed his troops to sack Kabul because he had no money to pay them. He built the first road from Kabul over the Salang Pass to the north and continued a cautious programme of reform until he was assassinated in 1933.
His son Zahir Shah (1914–2007) reigned from 1933 to 1973. This was the longest period of stability in Afghanistan’s recent history, and people now look back on it as a golden age. Reform continued. A parliament was elected in 1949, and a more independent press began to attack the ruling oligarchy and the conservative religious leaders.
In 1953 Zahir Shah appointed his cousin Daud (1909–78) as prime minister. Daud was a political conservative but an economic and social reformer. For the next ten years he exercised a commanding influence on the King. He built factories, irrigation systems, aerodromes and roads with assistance from the USSR, the USA, and the German Federal Republic. He modernised the Afghan army with Soviet weapons, equipment, and training.
In 1963 Zahir Shah got rid of Daud to appease conservatives infuriated by his flirtations with the left and the Soviets. But the King continued with the policy of reform. He introduced a form of constitutional monarchy with freedom of speech, allowed political parties, gave women the vote, and guaranteed primary education for girls and boys. Women were allowed to attend the university and foreign women taught there. Ariana Airlines employed unveiled women as hostesses and receptionists, there were women announcers on Kabul Radio, and a woman was sent as a delegate to the United Nations.
During all these years, the educational system was systematically developed, at least in the capital city. Habibia College, a high school modelled on an elite Muslim school in British India, was set up in Kabul in 1904. Amanullah sent many of its students to study in France and elsewhere in Europe. A School of Medicine was inaugurated in 1932, followed by faculties of Law, Science, Agriculture, Education, and Engineering, which were combined into a university in 1947. Most of the textbooks and much of the teaching were in English, French, or German. A faculty of Theology was founded in 1951 linked to the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Cairo. In 1967 the Soviet Union helped establish a Polytechnic Institute staffed largely by Russians. Under Zahir Shah’s tolerant regime student organisations were set up in Kabul and Kandahar.
Daud rapidly expanded the state school system. Between 1950 and 1978 numbers increased by ten times at primary schools, twenty-one times at secondary schools, and forty-five times at universities. But the economy was not developing fast enough to provide employment for the growing numbers of graduates. Many could find jobs only in the rapidly expanding government bureaucracy. Salaries, already miserable, lost half their real value in the 1960s and 1970s. The good news—though not for conservatives—was that about 10 per cent of this expanded bureaucracy were women.
The American scholar Louis Dupree called Kabul University ‘a perfect breeding ground for political discontent’. It was in the universities that Afghanistan’s first political movements were created. A Communist Party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, was set up in 1965 by Nur Mohamed Taraki, Babrak Karmal (1929–96), and Hafizullah Amin, all of whom were to play a major role in the run-up to the Soviet invasion. A number of students who were later to become prominent in the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet struggle also fledged their political wings there: Rabbani (1940–), Hekmatyar (1947–), Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (1946–), and Ahmad Shah Masud (1953–2001) all studied together in Kabul University. Students rioted in 1968 against conservative attempts to limit the education of women. In 1969 there were further riots, and some deaths, when high school students protested against the school management. The university was briefly closed.
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br /> Social and political dissatisfaction increased with the return of young Afghans who had been sent abroad for technical or military training. Between 1956 and 1978 nearly seven thousand Afghan students attended Soviet academic and technical institutions. An agreement with the Soviets in 1955 provided for military training in the Soviet Union: about a hundred young men went to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia every year.3
All these institutional changes, admirable as they were in principle, had little support among the Afghan people. The number of educated and reform-minded Afghans grew in Kabul and some of the other towns. But they had very little influence in the villages, which remained under the sway of tribal leaders, landlords, and mullahs. Time and again reform and the emancipation of women by liberals in the cities fell foul of the religious conservatism of the villages and the mountains. And when push came to shove, it was the views of the countryside that prevailed and derailed the best efforts of the reformers.
Imperial Russia Moves South
From the eighteenth century onwards new predators began to circle round the struggling Afghan state. Once the Russians had secured their western frontiers against their European neighbours, and their eastern and southern frontiers against the nomads and the Tatars, the logic of empire—the search for security and the search for trade—led them into the forests of Siberia and into the vast and underpopulated southern steppes and deserts.4
Their expansion was not unopposed. They clashed with the Turkish and Persian empires, and soon came to see the less sophisticated states of Central Asia as a threat, an opportunity, and a barrier to any ambitions they had towards Afghanistan and the riches of India beyond.
Peter the Great’s imagination was fired by reports of gold to be found along the Amu Darya, the river which was eventually to become the boundary between Afghanistan and Russia. The local ruler, the Khan of Khiva, was said to be willing to become Peter’s vassal in exchange for Russian protection from his rebellious subjects. Peter ordered Alexander Bekovich, a captain in the Life Guards and a converted Muslim prince from the North Caucasus, to find out more. He gave Bekovich a force of over six thousand men—horse, foot, guns, and a clutch of merchants—to build fortresses along the Amu Darya, to persuade the Khan of Khiva to help find the gold, and to open the trading route to India. Bekovich reached Khiva in the summer of 1717. After an initial welcome, the Khan treacherously slaughtered him and his men, stuffed his head with straw, and sent it to the Khan of Bukhara. A few years later, in 1728, the Russians collided for the first time with the Afghans, when their troops encountered an Afghan army which had invaded Persia. The Russians prevailed.5
By the middle of the century the Russians became aware that they were facing another adversary, one whose imperial ambitions matched their own. In Peter’s day, the British in India had been mere tradesmen. But the Russians began to take them more seriously as the East India Company consolidated its position after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, annexing native Indian states by force, imposing its hegemony on nominally independent Indian rulers, and driving out its French, Dutch, and Portuguese rivals.
Over the coming decades, anxious to get revenge for their defeats in India, the French proposed to the Russians a number of ill-considered schemes for the invasion of India through Persia or Afghanistan.6 In 1791 a French adviser to Catherine the Great suggested that she send her troops to march on India via Bukhara and Khiva, ‘announcing as they advanced that they had come to restore Muslim rule under the Moguls to its former glory [and thus] foment mass uprisings against the British within India as word of their coming spread’.7 Catherine’s confidant and former lover, Potemkin, dissuaded her from pursuing this hare-brained scheme.
Another Franco-Russian scheme emerged in 1801. Even though their two countries were still technically at war, the Russian emperor Paul I proposed to Napoleon that they should mount a joint attack on India. Without waiting for an answer, Paul ordered General Orlov, the commander of the Don Cossacks, to take thirteen regiments ‘by one or all of three routes through Bukhara and Khiva to the English possessions in India which lie beyond the River Indus’. Orlov could take the riches of India as his reward. Worryingly, Paul added, ‘My maps go only as far as Khiva and the Amu Darya. Beyond that it is up to you to get information about the English possessions and the Indian peoples who are subject to them.’
Orlov set out in the depths of winter, with over twenty thousand men. In the first month his force, hungry and ill-provided, lost a fifth of its horses and an uncertain number of men. He had not even left imperial territory before he was ordered to turn back after Paul was assassinated on 11 March, strangled by his ministers with the connivance of his son and (so Russians believe) the active complicity of the British Ambassador.8
Hare-brained schemes continued to be bandied around by hotheads in St Petersburg for some decades. But sober opinion agreed with General von Bennigsen, the Baltic German aristocrat who commanded the Russian army in 1807. The British, he argued, had created a European-style military system in India funded by local taxpayers. This army, ‘formed on the same lines as our European regiments, commanded by English officers, and excellently armed, manoeuvres with the precision of our grenadiers’. In the past Asiatic cavalry armies had invaded India over its north-west frontier and conquered the subcontinent, but these had no chance against the Anglo-Indian infantry and artillery. Meanwhile no rival European army could reach the subcontinent because the British dominated the sea routes and the logistical problems of getting a European-style army across Persia or Afghanistan were insurmountable. Having himself campaigned in northern Persia, Bennigsen spoke with authority.9
But as the nineteenth century advanced, the Russians became increasingly suspicious of the predatory intentions of the British in northern India. British merchants were competing with increasing success in Central Asian markets. British agents were popping up all over Central Asia. All this, the Russians considered, was directly contrary to their own legitimate interests. So they began to prepare more systematically for a renewed move south.
This time there was no question of despatching troops without maps on the basis of rumour. The main agency for conducting relations with Russia’s neighbours in Central Asia and for collecting intelligence about them was the Frontier Commission based in Orenburg in Siberia. From 1825 to 1845 the Commission was headed by General Grigori Fedorovich Gens (1787–1845), a distinguished Orientalist and scholar. In 1834 Gens sent one of his young officers, a naturalised Frenchman called Pierre Desmaisons, disguised as a mullah, to discover what he could about the Emirate of Bukhara. The following year he sent Jan Witkiewicz (1798–1839) on a more substantial mission. Witkiewicz (known in Russian as Ivan Viktorovich Vitkevich) came from Polish Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. He had been conscripted into the army and exiled to Orenburg at the age of sixteen for participating in an anti-Tsarist underground organisation. A gifted linguist, he was noticed by his superiors, promoted, and appointed to the Frontier Commission.
Unlike Desmaisons, Witkiewicz made no attempt to pretend he was not a Russian officer and travelled in full uniform. He learned to his dismay that a British officer, Alexander Burnes (1805–41), had got to Kabul before him. But he remained there for four months, attempting to negotiate a trade agreement with the Emir Dost Mohamed, and returned to Orenburg with an Afghan emissary carrying a request from the Emir for Russian financial and diplomatic support against British interference in Afghanistan.
The Governor of Orenburg, General Perovski, welcomed the proposal, arguing to his superiors that if the British succeeded in establishing themselves in Kabul ‘it would be only a step for the British to reach Bukhara; Central Asia would be subjected to their influence, our Asian trade would be ruined, they might arm… our Asian neighbours against us, and supply them with powder, weapons and money’.10 The Russian government agreed and sent Witkiewicz back to Kabul bearing gifts, and with secret instructions to collect intelligence. He arrived in Kabul to find that Alexand
er Burnes had once again beaten him to it. But Burnes’s negotiating position was fatally undermined when the Governor General of India, Lord Auckland (1784–1849), sent an arrogant and ill-judged ultimatum to Dost Mohamed, threatening that if he allied himself with the Russians or anyone else, he would be forcibly deposed.
Not surprisingly, Dost Mohamed received Witkiewicz with every mark of favour. Witkiewicz offered a Russian alliance and a guarantee of Afghanistan’s independence and territorial integrity. But on his return to St Petersburg, the offer was repudiated by the Tsar’s government, perhaps in order not to provoke the British. Witkiewicz committed suicide, and the documents he brought back with him disappeared. The background to this bizarre turn of events has not been satisfactorily explained.11
By now British spies and agents were moving ever further northwards, penetrating deep into Central Asia, into Bukhara, Khiva, Kokand, places of particular interest to Russia for more than a hundred years. The government in St Petersburg agreed with General Perovski that the valuable trade through Central Asia could only be protected by force of arms.
In 1839, as the First Anglo-Afghan War was getting into its stride, General Petrovski was sent to bring the Khan of Khiva to heel. His force consisted of three battalions of infantry and three regiments of Cossacks, together with twenty guns and ten thousand camels. The force was well supplied and the winter season had been deliberately chosen to avoid the heat of the desert. Unfortunately the winter turned unusually savage, the temperature fell below thirty degrees centigrade, and men and camels melted away. The last remnants of the expedition got back to Orenburg in June 1840.
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