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November 18 - November 23, 2018
“It’s me against my brothers, it’s me and my brothers against our cousins, it’s we and our cousins against the invader”—so goes an old Pushtoon saying.
their authority. Ahmad Shah gained his power from the network of personal followers he built up over time, loyal strongmen bound to him by reciprocal obligations that could never be quantified or reduced to quid pro quo, for the dynamics of leadership were those of a family, not of a marketplace. This is worth noting because the nature of leadership in Afghan culture has bedeviled every wave of foreigners that has tried to govern Afghanistan through proxy Afghan “leaders,” mistakenly assuming that attaching a formal “office” to a given individual makes that man a leader.
The council was a standing body but didn’t meet regularly—only when some issue came up. The jirga couldn’t arrive at a decision by a simple vote. It had to stay in session until the group arrived at a consensus. This was a way to disarm future conflicts, because a decision by simple vote would likely leave a majority triumphant and a minority smoldering. Any such resentment was bound to flare again later in some seemingly unrelated context.
“Better a strong dog in the yard than a strong king in the capital,” says an Afghan proverb.8
It is with Dost Mohammed, then, that the Afghan story really begins.
Russia had virtually no middle class. It was a nation in which a handful of aristocrats ruled over millions of serfs and didn’t even speak the same language as their subjects.
Dost Mohammed himself tipped the scales. When he heard nothing back from the British, he met with Vitkevich again. Well, that did it! Auckland decided to go with what he called the Forward Policy. Instead of just sitting back and waiting to see what happened, he would move into Afghanistan and make things happen. He issued the Simla Manifesto, a public statement announcing that “every consideration of policy and justice” led the governor general to “espousing the cause of Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk” and aiding “the restoration of the Shah to the throne of his ancestors . . . [by which] it may
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the obedience of his people. On September 2nd of that year, 1879, Cavagnari wrote to the government of India to say, “All is well with the Kabul embassy.”8 It was an eerie echo of the letter Macnaghten had written to a friend in India thirty-eight years earlier to declare that all is quiet in Afghanistan “from Dan to Beersheba.” Just months after writing those words, Macnaghten was dead; Cavagnari was dead one day after writing this letter.
marched quickly to Kabul, led by the wiry Irishman Frederick Roberts, a man of resolute chin, huge whiskers, and stern eyes. Roberts was a no-nonsense military martinet who demanded absolute discipline from his men and demanded no less of himself, for which reason he commanded the passionate loyalty of his troops, who knew him affectionately as “Bobs.”
One such commander, Mohammed Jan, roamed the land with twenty thousand men.12 Villagers fed him and funneled information to him so he could attack the British whenever he had the advantage and slip away into the hills when he didn’t.
That summer, however, one of Sher Ali’s sons, a man named Ayub, erupted out of Herat with eight thousand soldiers. On July 27, 1880, he met the British at Maiwand, a plain just west of Kandahar, and eviscerated their army of twenty thousand. In Britain, Maiwand became a synonym for Afghan savagery. In the West more generally, it is known as the battle in which the fictional Dr. Watson was wounded, just before he started rooming with a detective named Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street.
In Afghanistan, as you might expect, the battle of Maiwand became a thrilling symbol of national pride, famous for an apocryphal anecdote: in the heat of the bloodshed, the story goes, as the Afghan line was starting to give way, a seventeen-year-old woman named Malalai grabbed the bloodied banner of her people, raised it high, and shamed the men into rallying. Malalai was killed, but the charge she sparked succeeded, and Malalai became Afghanistan’s iconic heroine, its Joan of Arc. Later, the first girl’s school in Afghanistan was named after her.
Fighting the British made Afghans aware that they did in fact all have something in common: they were all not-British.
By 1879, Afghanistan had definite borders and a single capital, the city of Kabul. No longer would Kandahar, Herat, or Mazar-i-Sharif serve as city-state seats of power for rivals to the Afghan throne.
One day, at the age of twelve or thirteen, he wanted to see if his small-caliber gun was powerful enough to kill a man, so he shot his servant. The man died, the teenager laughed. The murder was so flagrant his father had no choice but to punish the boy by putting him in prison. But any fellow who can kill a man just to see if his gun works is going to prove useful to someone: his father released him from prison after a year and, by the time he was seventeen, made him one of his major commanders. Later his father rebelled against Sher Ali but lost the contest. When he went into exile north of
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1893, thirteen years after taking over from the British, this Iron Amir would meet with a British delegation from India to formalize the agreements hammered out so hastily at the start of his reign. The British nominated General Frederick Roberts to head up their delegation, but Abdu’Rahman curtly told them to send someone else: Roberts personified the second British invasion of Afghanistan and was too hated by Afghans for any Afghan king, even an “iron amir,” to make a deal with. So the British replaced him with Mortimer Durand, foreign minister to the Raj.
men made at that meeting continues to cause trouble to this day, because Durand drew an arbitrary line on the map, which ran right through lands traditionally occupied by the Pushtoons, a line that corresponded to no geographical feature on the ground. When
To make sure his vanquished subjects never rebuilt their power, he launched a policy that the Assyrians had pursued three millennia earlier and that Stalin would try a few decades later. He moved whole populations around the country to separate them from natural allies and plop them down among people whom they didn’t trust and who didn’t trust them. Entire tribes of Pushtoons were sent from south to north; thousands of families were forced to move from the northern steppes to areas south of Kabul. This autocratic program did have a salutary side effect: it shuffled the separate peoples of
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By aligning himself with the extreme social conservatives, Abdu’Rahman positioned himself to the right of the classes he intended to attack and defeat—the elders and the mullahs.
Sometimes, men convicted of really heinous crimes, such as plotting against the king, were strapped to the mouths of cannons, which were then fired, blowing their bodies to pieces. (This mode of punishment was pioneered by the British to punish mutineers in India.) Although this was actually a mercifully quick way to go, the image created deep psychological dread. Most dreaded of all, however, was the punishment known as Siah Chah—“Black Well.” I’ll leave the details of that one to the readers’ imagination.
The king’s insatiable need for revenue made his enormous apparatus of kalantars, kotwals, village enforcers, and spies indispensable. He needed them to make sure everyone was paying the taxes they “owed.”
so he built a network of spies to spy on his spies.
Many people just vanished, disappearances that were called nam-girak: “the name taking.”
He had a dungeon below each of his palaces, and near the heart of Kabul he built Dehmazang prison, capable of holding nine thousand prisoners.
Iron Amir had solidified Afghanistan as a buffer state that could keep both Russia and Britain at bay. And
Tarzi was a different kind of romantic. He rhapsodized about telegraph lines and vaccines and streets paved with asphalt.5
Asma Restya launched Afghanistan’s first women’s newspaper, which she edited and circulated privately among the urban elite.6
Amanullah’s code banned torture, even by the government; forbade forced entry into any private home, even by the government; and gave every citizen the right to bring charges of corruption against any government official—and those who didn’t get redress for their complaints at lower levels could take their petition right on up to the king. His code banned slavery too. So far, so good.
The code went on to outlaw underage marriage. Girls were forbidden to marry until they were eighteen, men till they were twenty-two. Then there was the bride price: in Afghanistan men who wanted to marry a girl customarily paid that girl’s family a sum of money negotiated by the men of the two families. Afghan modernists felt this amounted to fathers selling their daughters for profit. Amanullah’s code did not forbid the bride price but set an upper limit on it of twenty-nine rupees. Brides had been going for 10,000 rupees.1
Kobra Noorzai, who became the first Afghan woman to achieve cabinet rank when she was appointed minister of health in 1965.
