Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

FIVE TIMES IN THE LAST TWO CENTURIES, SOME GREAT POWER HAS TRIED to invade, occupy, conquer, or otherwise take control of Afghanistan.

And if the foreign interventions tend to follow the same course, it’s partly because they keep interrupting the same story, a story that never quite gets resolved before the next intervention disrupts the progress made.

Even Buddhists conquered this territory, which is why the unique art style known as Greco-Buddhist originated and flourished only here.

Afghanistan is not really impossible to conquer. It’s just that all the successful conquerors are now called “Afghans.”

When many tribes formed a common front against some threat, leadership had to be negotiated constantly, because even superchieftains like Ahmad Shah couldn’t order about their near-peers: if they did, they might lose face, which could erode their authority.

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.

This is why, in Ahmad Shah’s lifetime, the area that was called Ariana in ancient times and Khurasan in medieval times came to be known as Afghanistan.

WHAT AHMAD SHAH BABA CREATED WAS NOT A COUNTRY IN THE MODERN sense. Today, “country” means at minimum a definite territory enclosed by a continuous border, within which one government makes and enforces all the rules for public life and issues a currency that all the inhabitants use for their transactions.

No matter who called himself king of this region, these five cities were usually part of his empire, an enduring nexus. Four are still part of Afghanistan, but the fifth, Peshawar, lies outside the country’s borders, which has been a burr under the saddle throughout Afghan history and continues to generate trouble today.

The bigger the city, the higher its walls and the more numerous its gates. Mighty Kabul, for example, had five gates facing five different directions. Through one came the road from Kandahar, through another the road from Peshawar, through another the road from Mazar-i-Sharif, and so on.

Mazar-i-Sharif means sacred shrine,

Rural Afghanistan was in many ways the real Afghanistan, and the social fabric of this universe of villages is a key to this story because it still exists and its tenacity continues to affect the politics of the country.

Locally, the most important patriarchal lords were known as khans. They were the feudal barons of Afghan society, their status hereditary. Every village usually had a malik, as well, a formal “headman.” Maliks were elected (sort of), but the chances were pretty good that the chosen malik’s father had been a malik too or was at least recognized as a khan.

Formal decisions were made by a council of the most important men of a village in a protracted discussion called a jirga. (In Dari-speaking villages, it might be called a shura.)

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.

Traditionally, anyone could speak up during the meeting, but, once a jirga made a decision, everyone was bound by it.

for every marriage was fundamentally a tribal-business transaction between families, not the culminating moment of a romance between individuals.

In this universe of village-republics, there were lords and there were lieges, and everyone did what was expected of them and demanded what tradition entitled them to.

Though largely autonomous, villages were not completely isolated.

For the average villager, a wise king might be better than a stupid one, and a kind king better than a cruel one, but a change of dynasty produced little reverberation on the ground level. “Better a strong dog in the yard than a strong king in the capital,” says an Afghan proverb.8

The first English trading post had been planted on the Indian coast in 1613 not by the government of England but by the East India Trading Company, a private English corporation looking to enrich its shareholders.

The British didn’t realize they were conquering India itself as they battled the French, because they weren’t out to rule India. Their interests remained strictly commercial. The British government had no officials on this soil. The British presence on the subcontinent was still limited to the East India Company, which was technically a private venture, even though it had the full endorsement of the British government and served as an agent of British interests. The company was just striving to maximize its market share, which happened to coincide with the interests of the British state.

The operation was called the battle of Plassey, but it hardly merits the term “battle.” It was more like an administrative procedure. This was not the moment when the British took control of Bengal but the moment when everyone, including the British, realized they already controlled Bengal. No one could pinpoint exactly when the conquest took place, but, from then on, the East India Company did as it pleased in Bengal and anywhere else in India that caught its fancy.

But that would be getting ahead of the story. Delhi was nearly a thousand miles from Calcutta, and Ahmad Shah’s home city of Kandahar was another five hundred miles farther west. There was no intersection between the British and the Afghans, no reason yet for the two to clash.

Eventually, London decided that India was too important, fragile, and vast to be administered by a private company, especially because that company mismanaged Bengal pretty badly. In 1773—just as their North American colonies were beginning to break away—Great Britain sent a governor general to oversee India. The East India Company continued to operate on the subcontinent as a formidable power, but formal British rule of India had now begun. The colonial government was later called the Raj, and although its governor was appointed by the Parliament in London and his decisions were subject to Parliament’s approval, he was pretty much sovereign in India, with his own cabinet and foreign policy.

Afghanistan, at that moment, was an empire stretching from the heart of modern-day Iran to the Indian Ocean and included modern-day Kashmir in the northeast. As a power in the Muslim world, it was second only to the Ottomans.

In 1826, Dost Mohammed declared himself amir, and thus began the reign of his clan the Mohammedzais. Though not directly descended from Ahmad Shah, they were closely related to his clan and belonged to his larger tribal group, the Durranis: they too were Pearly Ones.

But Dost Mohammed had lost Peshawar as well and with it all the fertile lands flanking the Indus River. Those lands had been seized by a formidable warrior-king named Ranjit Singh, who was not even a Muslim but a Sikh. Peshawar and its environs were inhabited by Muslim Pushtoons, and Peshawar was also the traditional winter capital of Afghan kings. The ruling clan of Afghanistan, being Pushtoons, found the loss of this city particularly galling. Dost Mohammed’s determination to get Peshawar back launched a conflict that was never resolved and that continues to generate trouble to this very day.

The 1700s capped a period of unprecedented European expansion, made possible by their mastery of the seas. Over the course of just a few centuries, the English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and others sailed to the furthest shores of the five oceans, planting colonies and trading posts.

In 1789, one of history’s greatest social revolutions erupted in France. The French overthrew their monarchy and landed aristocracy.

The French Revolution

The conservative forces of Europe united to crush the new order, but the revolutionaries beat back the monarchists, and out of the turmoil marched a new kind of conqueror, a petty-journalist-turned-soldier, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon did not, however, manage to win a single significant battle against Great Britain, and his grand attempt to conquer Russia ended in disaster. Finally, beaten decisively at Waterloo, he was exiled to a lonesome little island to die.

This whole dramatic episode—the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—altered global politics. Britain emerged as the most powerful nation on the planet, a power derived largely from its navy: no one could beat the British at sea, and the Napoleonic Wars confirmed that sea power was now one key to global dominance.

Britain was the first nation to build railroads and the first to harness steam power for mass production. To be sure, it needed an abundant supply of raw materials to feed its factories, but, even though it was a little island, Britain had a commanding advantage.

Industrial Revolution

With its unbeatable navy, its advanced technology, and the resources of India at its disposal, Britain had power no other country could match.

It was Russia that had dealt Napoleon his real deathblow, for Napoleon lost his entire army in a catastrophic march to Moscow.

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.

It did have an ocean to its north, but that ocean was the Arctic, which was frozen most of the year. Russia had ports on the Black Sea, but the Black Sea itself was surrounded by land except for the choke point of the Dardanelles strait. In this new age of naval power, a country needed better access to the world’s oceans to compete globally.

Russia had one way out of its predicament. If it could expand east far enough and then move south through Afghanistan, it could gain access to ports on the Arabian Sea. From there it would have unlimited access to the Indian Ocean. Now there was a goal worth fighting for. Only Afghanistan stood in the way.

For Britain, the issue wasn’t just a port or two; the very source of British power and wealth seemed at stake. India must be defended! Russian expansion must therefore be blocked! At all costs, Russia must not be allowed to take Afghanistan! And so these two global powers began struggling for dominance in central Asia. Rudyard Kipling, in his novel Kim, famously called the contest “the Great Game,” but it was a frivolous name for a drama that would turn so dark and so bloody.

Shah Shuja comes across as a whiner and a fop. He greets Burnes wearing a pink gauze tunic and a velvet cap from which hang emeralds and tassels. A fat, sour man, he complains to Burnes about his many misfortunes. When he lost his throne, he fled to the court of the Sikh king Ranjit Singh, lord of Peshawar, seeking refuge. He was hoping to pay for that refuge with the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which he had stolen from the treasury before taking flight. But Ranjit Singh simply took his diamond and put him in a dungeon.

Burnes went on to publish a book about his great adventures, which became a best seller in London and made him the toast of the town.

Locate books by Alexander Burnes

They also called him the Iskandar of the East. Iskandar was the Persian pronunciation of Alexander, the great Greek conqueror. British accounts marveled that Burnes had made his way to remote regions so few had seen.

Those cities of the north—Balkh, Bukhara, Samarqand, Tashkent, and others—were entrepôts on the old Silk Road, which had long been the busiest highway of human commerce in the world, a network of roads and routes that connected China to Europe and both to India. People who lived in or around these cities traveled to India routinely on trading expeditions; and, of course, because people here were all Muslims, not a few had gone as far west as Mecca.

Soliciting Russian help, however, was a little like asking a dragon for help building a bonfire. The czar’s forces might offer too much help, as it were. Then again, asking the British for help posed similar risks. A third possibility existed: to play one power against the other, using each to keep the other out of Afghan territory. But, in that case, who would help Amir Dost Mohammed Khan recover Peshawar? How would he reconstruct the whole of Ahmad Shah’s empire?

Then one day, in 1837, Dost Mohammed received good news: Lord Auckland was sending a trade mission to Kabul headed up by none other than—Alexander Burnes! The king welcomed the delegation and lavished upon his guests the sumptuous hospitality that Afghans consider their highest claim to fame. Officially, Burnes was here to (again) explore commercial opportunities on behalf of the East India Company.

A strong alliance with a friendly Dost Mohammed might have been one good way to block Russian expansion, but Macnaghten and Lord Auckland didn’t trust “the Dost,” as they called him. The Dost was too strong to be trusted. Strength gives a man ideas. During those fine banquets at the Afghan court and the quiet conversations afterward, Burnes avoided all discussion of Peshawar, military aid, treaty alliances, and closer ties. Dost Mohammed began to realize that Burnes was going to return to India without having made him a single promise.

The Simla Manifesto made a claim that would become grindingly familiar over the next 170 years: the British were not out to conquer Afghans but to see “the independence and integrity of Afghanistan established.” Once this job was done, the British would withdraw.

🙄 yea right

THE BRITISH HAD PROMISED TO WITHDRAW THEIR TROOPS AS SOON AS Shah Shuja got his throne back, but they decided to postpone the withdrawal.

Afghanistan had been almost laughably easy to conquer, but the British didn’t rely on force alone to keep the country in hand.