Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Pushtoonistan

  Daoud could not let go of the Pushtoonistan idea but could not make headway on it either. Finally, in 1960, he made the dumbest move of his career. He decided to put pressure on Pakistan by closing the border between the two countries from the Afghan side. As soon as he did this, trade stalled. Nomads bunched up on both sides of a border they could no longer cross. Daoud’s Folly emptied the shelves of Afghan bazaars. Around the world observers scratched their heads. Why would a landlocked country close its only access to a port? How was this “putting pressure on Pakistan”? It was like saying, “Give me what I want or I’ll hold my breath till I turn blue and die.” In Pakistan, the authorities smiled and waited. An alarmed United States removed 150 of its technical advisors from Afghanistan and urged Daoud to quit being such a child.

  Daoud wouldn’t budge. Dictators with unlimited powers seem to have a hard time saying “I’m sorry.” Instead, Daoud looked to the Soviet Union to bail him out. The Soviets obliged. Before the border closure, trucks had been moving a thousand tons of Afghan grapes to Karachi every day. Now the Soviet Union airlifted a few hundred tons north each day. Rumor has it they didn’t even want the grapes. They grew their own and couldn’t afford to let the imported fruit compete with theirs, so they threw the Afghan grapes into the Aral Sea.2 The main thing was to build Afghan dependency. In short, Daoud’s Folly looked like it would tip Afghanistan into the Soviet camp, and there wasn’t a damned thing the United States could do about it.

  The Family did not have to stand for it, though. Nonalignment was the policy, and, if Daoud made nonalignment difficult, it was Daoud that would have to go, not the policy. So it was that in 1963 a really stupendous event occurred. King Zahir Shah asked Daoud to step down. He thanked his dear cousin for all his patriotic services and wished him a happy retirement but announced that he, the king himself, was going to take over at last.

  17

  The Democracy Era

  EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS TRANSITION WAS REMARKABLE. FIRST OF ALL, Daoud stepped down voluntarily. What strongman relinquishes power voluntarily at a time when he controls the army, the police, the intelligence service, and the spy system that spies on the intelligence service? I can’t think of another example. When I was growing up in Afghanistan, I can tell you that Daoud visited my nightmares: I assure you, this was a scary man. Looking back, though, I have to say, he had a greatness about him too. He proved it by the way he managed the unveiling of women, and he showed it again when he left office peacefully instead of resisting and plunging his country into bloodshed, although his main motive may have been to spare not his country but his family. Undoubtedly, there was family politicking, backroom deals, and unpublicized pressures that led to his resignation, but, just as certainly, with the instruments at his command, Daoud had a choice and he chose to step down.

  Next came an even more remarkable event. The king decided to weaken himself and his family. He ordered a new constitution written that would limit his powers and give more control to his people. When has anything like that ever happened?d

  At first, everyone was dreadfully suspicious, of course. People said this was just a replay of Shah Mahmoud’s false Afghan spring. Censorship would be lifted and elections held to smoke out potential rebels. Once new leaders had shown themselves, their heads would be cut off and things would go back to the way they were.

  People were wrong. The king meant what he said. Not only did he ask Daoud to resign, he asked his whole cabinet to resign. He appointed a leading member of the technocracy as prime minister, and, with the king’s approval, he established a new cabinet, not one member of which belonged to the royal family and of whom two were not even Pushtoons. The times they were indeed a-changing.

  Prominent political prisoners saw their cell doors open. Members of the Charkhi family, men and women who had grown up in prison, came walking out onto public streets, blinking at daylight they had thought they would never see again. The historian Ghobar returned from ten years of domestic exile and took up his old job at Kabul University.

  With the king’s approval, the new prime minister and his cabinet appointed a committee of learned men to write a new constitution—a real one this time. The seven members of the committee included my eccentric uncle Najmuddin, a dentist who never practiced his profession. An advisory board that consulted with the committee included a handful of activist women such as Massouma Esmatey-Wardak, Kobra Noorzai, and Shafiqa Ziaie, who was later appointed a cabinet minister without portfolio—that is, she participated in cabinet meetings and government decision making without having a specific department to run. It took the committee a little over a year to come up with a draft and several months to get it ratified, but the final document rocked Afghanistan.

  The new constitution established a real parliament and declared that its members would be chosen in real elections and its duties would consist of real legislation.

  It circumscribed the power of the king explicitly, transforming him into a ceremonial monarch like Queen Elizabeth.

  And then there was the most astonishing plank of them all—Article 24.

  Article 24 stated that no member of the royal family and no close blood relative of the king could hold any position of cabinet rank or above nor serve as a member of Parliament nor serve as a justice of the Supreme Court nor belong to any political party.

  Wow!

  Even as I write this, I am flabbergasted. When has something like this ever happened? Don’t cite the United States of America: the king was across an ocean when the American colonies were developing into small democracies, and they still had to fight an eight-year war to pry his clutches loose from their lives. The French Revolution does not count either. Yes, France went from extreme absolutism to extreme democracy in a flash, but it took a bloody revolution and a reign of terror to get it done. In Afghanistan, the change happened overnight, instigated by the newly disempowered elite.

  All of Kabul walked around in a daze, waiting for the bubble to pop, waiting for Daoud to loom up suddenly swinging his ax. It didn’t happen. Daoud was living in Kabul but living the quiet life of a retired gentleman, merely observing events and discussing them privately with his friends, making no public pronouncements. The cabinet of commoners got to work. Elections took place smoothly, and four of the winners were women. A parliament convened. A few intellectuals began tentatively to publish newspapers and no one shut them down, so more publications sprang up.

  The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan opened and goods flowed again. The shelves of the bazaars filled up with products from around the world—not just regional goods but Dutch chocolates, French perfumes, pasta from Italy, corned beef from Tanganyika, and canned sardines from Norway, as well as Swiss watches, French fountain pens, German cameras, English bicycles, and American records.1

  Diplomatically, this velvet revolution of 1963 put Afghanistan back where it needed to be—right between the Communist and Capitalist blocs, sturdily nonaligned, open to flirtation from both sides, and willing to accept whatever gifts were offered.

  And plenty were offered. The Germans built an entire modern campus for Kabul University. The Soviets built a housing development of sixty apartment buildings equipped with modern plumbing, electricity, and appliances, a development complete with shaded walkways, stores, and recreational facilities. Tall buildings reared up—a bank . . . then a modern, international hotel . . . then a department store.... The big cities got fleets of modern buses, courtesy of the country’s Cold War suitors. All the streets of Kabul except the ones in Shari Kuhna (Old Town) got paved, and many of the streets got sidewalks. Donkeys and camel caravans stopped coming into the city so much; they gave way to trucks and automobiles. Enormous hydroelectric plants went up on the country’s major rivers. They lit up Kabul with a vengeance—lit up wedding palaces where clamorous galas took place every night, lit up modern, Western-style restaurants and cafés that sprouted along main thoroughfares. Bookstores and record stores opened down
town. Teahouses proliferated, and so did ice cream shops and kebab houses. On fine days, the city’s burgeoning middle class—members of that new technocracy—drove to nearby pleasure spots such as the little resort town of Paghman, or to Qargha Reservoir, which featured a large patio café overlooking the water.

  Afghanistan’s great end-of-summer celebration of independence, the festival known as Jeshyn, already the country’s single biggest public event, now grew even more splendid. Every year, the government strung lights for blocks and blocks around the fairgrounds where the main celebrations took place.

  The festival featured a game of buzkashi, the country’s national sport, a brutal equestrian contest in which teams of horseman wrestle to gain possession of a goat carcass and drag it across a goal line. Unlike the buzkashi of old, the players in these games were organized into teams representing provinces. Jeshyn also featured massive hours-long firework displays over the lake in the middle of the fairgrounds. The various government ministries sponsored open-air tea gardens where bands played music and the crowds could listen for free to famous singers such as the semiclassical crooner Sarahang or the pop star Ahmad Zahir, master of the electrified accordion, a man who made girls swoon with love songs whose lyrics were written by classic Persian poets from hundreds of years ago. And there were exhibit halls dedicated to the works of modern Afghan painters, who favored realistic landscapes with a slightly fauvist flavor.

  More importantly, Jeshyn offered up a trade expo, a venue for Cold War plumage competition. Various countries set up pavilions and displayed their goods. Afghans streamed through these buildings, peering in awe at material marvels made in the United States, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, the Soviet Union—motorcycles and radios, electric egg beaters, ice cream makers, record players, and machine-made fashion items from hats to boots . . . the list went on and on.

  In the several theaters situated on festival grounds, Afghan audiences could enjoy such acts as Duke Ellington and his band, flown in from America, or the Chinese opera from Peking, or the Moscow Circus, with its trapeze artists and its jugglers and high-wire acts. “Choose me! Choose me!” sang dazzling artists from both sides in the Cold War contest. “Choose our side, our side!”

  Money and technical aid kept pouring in to develop the road system. By the end of the 1960s, a traveler could drive from the Pakistan border through Kabul to the Soviet border in one long day, passing through the Soviet-built Salang Tunnel.

  Plenty of foreigners swelled the population of Kabul now. There were Russian and other Eastern-bloc families living rather squalidly, crowded into apartments or small houses, sometimes two or three families to a dwelling, and they could be seen shopping for local goods in the bazaars, elbow to elbow with local Afghans.

  Plenty of Americans and Western Europeans could be seen in Kabul too, although, like the British of the nineteenth century, they lived in compounds sequestered from Afghans, and they shopped in commissaries stocked with goods flown in from their own countries. By the midsixties, however, Peace Corps volunteers were flocking into the country. They lived and worked more closely with Afghans and not just in Kabul but in outlying towns, teaching, nursing, or helping out with agricultural projects. These young men and women brought little technical expertise to the field; what they brought were their American faces and their affability. This alone contributed to international understanding (and to the American cause in the Cold War contest).

  By 1967, the sixties revolution was sweeping the world, and hippies were starting to stream through Afghanistan. Typically, these new nomads began their trek in Europe, came across Iran, and then traveled through Herat, to Kandahar, to Kabul, and then on to India. The hippies liked what they found in Afghanistan. The hash was good and the people unbelievably mellow. Afghans had strict social regulations for themselves, but their standards for others were remarkably live and let live, at least in the beginning. (This had long been true: Alexander Burnes remarked on it when he traveled through the country in the 1830s.)

  What many Afghans along the hippie route saw in this new surge of tourists was economic opportunity. Men with business acumen soon realized that American and European hippies didn’t actually want to hang out in real bazaars smoking dope with real Afghans. In Afghanistan, hashish had long been legal but disreputable. Anyone could smoke it, but those who did were day laborers, off-duty truck drivers, and ruffians. Folks with (upper) class drank booze (even though—or perhaps because—it was forbidden by religion). Afghan entrepreneurs therefore scoped out the romantic dream that brought the hippies in and constructed that dream for them. They established hotels and set up clubs where Western hippies could get a controlled experience of their imagined Afghanistan.2 To make sure the experience would be pleasant, they screened out the riffraff. More respectable Afghans, however—educated Afghans, Afghans with connections—could get into these dope clubs. Of course the hippies liked Afghanistan. What was not to like? But just as the Peace Corps volunteers gave Afghanistan an image of the West, so did the hippies. This didn’t trouble Afghans much when the hippies were a trickle, but once they turned into a torrent, the image wore on Afghan sensibilities.

  By 1969, the social fabric of urban Afghanistan was undergoing rapid, drastic change, particularly in Kabul. The high schools were pouring out graduates, both girls and boys, and women were going to the university in great numbers. Because most of these women were enrolling in the Teachers College and in the College of Medicine, the number of women physicians and teachers in the country escalated dramatically.

  Boys and girls who rubbed elbows in classrooms started dating discreetly. It wasn’t that anyone asked anyone out—please! It wasn’t like that yet. Rather, boys and girls would drop hints about where they’d be and then make sure to be there and thus to see each other in a public context. As a result, boys and girls began to choose each other and then push their families into “arranging” for them to get married. These love marriages led to weddings attended by two crowds of people who were strangers to each other—the families of the bride and of the groom respectively, setting up another venue for unrelated boys and girls to meet as individuals, take a shine to each other, and arrange their own marriages.

  Meanwhile, in the big city of Kabul, women were beginning to appear in public showing not just their faces but their arms, their legs, even cleavage. Afghan girls of the elite technocratic class were beginning to cotton to Western fashions. They were wearing miniskirts and low cut blouses. Nightclubs were popping up, which served beer and wine and whiskey—and not just to foreigners. Afghans were drinking and making no bones about it. That quaint Italian engineer from Kajakai, Mr. Corriega, had moved to Kabul, and there he was bottling his own brand of wine. Culturally, then, Western Europe and America were winning Afghanistan hands down. Rock and roll, blue jeans, miniskirts—the capital had it all. But on the political and diplomatic fronts, the American and European bloc was losing ground. The Helmand Valley had turned into more of a liability than an advertisement. No one, it seems, had done adequate soil studies before the dams went in. The new irrigation drew salt to the surface, which made much of it impossible to farm: nothing would grow in it.

  Also, no one had studied the social consequences of building these dams and irrigation canals, no one had polled the villagers who would be affected, and no one had explained the project to them. Anthropologist Louis Dupree wrote that just after the Arghandab Dam was completed, he found villagers living just twenty miles from the dam who had no idea it was there.3

  Some time after the Kajakai Dam was completed, my father traveled by Land Rover over roadless terrain to isolated villages far downstream from the dam on some official HVA business or other. In one place, he said, the villagers who came out to greet him asked after the health of King Amanullah. Amanullah had been deposed more than thirty years earlier, but these villagers hadn’t heard the news yet. They too knew nothing about the Kajakai Dam upstream from them. They only knew that the river had stopped behaving i
n its usual way. Now, a great deal of extra water came down at certain times of the year. The villagers’ own ancient water-management systems could not handle these inexplicable new water patterns. Their fields flooded and their productivity dropped. They were in trouble and hungry.

  What’s more, the sudden mystifying change in the river had disrupted the intricate social traditions that had evolved around water management. Villages looked to respected figures known as mirabs, “water directors,” to organize irrigation-related work and adjudicate water disputes. The eerie changes in the river had overwhelmed the mirab in this village, and his authority had suffered. From this erosion of authority a host of subtler consequences had rippled.

  Meanwhile, the model towns were not really working. The government had settled people of different ethnic groups in many of these towns, and the different groups had not worked out ways to reconcile their customs. Conflicts had resulted, and some of the inhabitants of the new towns had gotten fed up and moved away to resume their old nomadic ways.

  In the newly irrigated areas, local folks had been moved off their farms to make room for the big experimental farm projects. Later, some of them wanted to come back, but the government would not let them. Resentments were building up.