Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

General Willoughby Cotton had led British troops into Kabul, but, in early 1841, he had finished his term and returned to India, and a new man had taken his place. William Elphinstone hadn’t asked for the job and didn’t really want it. He had done some fine soldiering during the Napoleonic Wars—twenty-five years ago. Now he had gout, his shoulders hurt, and he was slow, but he accepted his commission like a good soldier.

In Afghan society, there is no courteous way for a young man to lead a young woman to a corner of a room during a reception and engage her in genteel conversation, sometimes touching her shoulder or perhaps her arm to emphasize a point—with her father and brothers looking on.

Akbar wasn’t the leader Macnaghten needed. The leader he needed did not exist, not at that moment. In ousting Dost Mohammed, the British had uncapped the chaos that the great amir had brought to heel.

The fire consumed much of Kabul, killed an unknown number of people, and left many more homeless. Then the British flag over Bala Hissar palace was lowered, and on the 11th of October, 1842, the British began their final withdrawal from Afghanistan, taking with them the remnants of the royal family they had installed: the sons and relatives of Shah Shuja, including the brother he had blinded, the onetime king Shah Zeman.

To force a sovereign upon a reluctant people would be as inconsistent with the policies as it is with the principles of the British Government. . . . The Governor General will willingly recognize any government approved by the Afghans themselves.16

Why? Because in exchange for these concessions, the British agreed to let “the Dost” rule his truncated territory without any interference. They would not station any envoys in Kabul: they would trust the Afghan king. Most important of all, they agreed to pay Dost Mohammed an annual subsidy. In short, you can’t exactly say the British lost the war. They came out of it with everything they had demanded going in, and they got what they really wanted: a buffer state to block Russian expansion. What’s more, they left Afghanistan divided into three parts likely to stay busy fighting one another instead of marching south to threaten India. Plus, they kept Peshawar out of Afghan hands, which was important because Peshawar was in the plains east of the Khyber Pass, an excellent base for marching into India.

Dost Mohammed was undoubtedly a big personality. He fought well enough when he had to, but he didn’t specialize in war. He specialized in political craft—in this realm he was a brilliant, cold-blooded realist.

A British “diplomatic” mission made its way to Kabul, headed by an envoy named Neville Chamberlain. Yes, he was an ancestor of that later Neville Chamberlain who, as prime minister of Great Britain in the 1930s, signed the infamous Munich Pact with Hitler.

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.

It wasn’t that the Afghans were unbeatable. The British were beating them regularly. It was rather that beating them didn’t stop them from continuing to fight.

Britain could win battles but could not gain ground in a war that had turned into a money pit, swallowing up British India’s resources, with no end in sight.

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.

The battle of Maiwand may have been a decisive victory for the Afghans, but in military terms it was only one part of a larger engagement, which the Afghans decisively lost.

It’s hard to say, therefore, who won this war. Both sides got something; both paid dearly for what they got. In any case, the consolidation of Afghanistan into a country, the story the British had so rudely interrupted, could now resume.

The British diplomat proposed a southern border for Afghanistan, and Abdu’Rahman accepted it. The agreement the two 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.

Villages on both sides of this so-called Durand Line are inhabited by members of the same tribes. People on one side of the line have cousins on the other side, and vice versa. How did Durand decide where to draw this line? By calculating how far forward into Afghan territory the British could push without getting pushed back. The Durand Line marks the line of scrimmage at a particular moment. As such, it is sure to be a place of enduring conflict. It froze into place Afghan resentment about losing Peshawar, turning that problem into a permanent political fact.

By isolating Afghanistan, he cut it off from modern advances but secured a free hand to carry out his plan.

Amanullah’s mentor Tarzi, an ardent nationalist, had passed on the virus to his student. Even if the new king had not sincerely longed for his country’s independence, he might have used this issue to cement his position. Whatever his motive, in 1919, as soon as he had power, Amanullah declared total independence from Britain.

They were begging for terms. In London, officials discussed what terms to impose on them. Some favored taking direct control of the country, but the Paris Peace Conference had just ended, and Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points were still hovering over the Western world. Talk of “self-determination” and the rights of “small nationalities” filled the air. Taking over Afghanistan would not look cool. If it were done, it would have to be done in a “veiled” manner.5 Such were the thoughts the British brought to Rawalpindi.

Grant thought he had finessed something, whereas actually he had given away the store. All previous British treaties had been with an individual amir, not with an enduring state. As soon as one king died, all promises were moot. This treaty was with a country, no matter who ruled it—and it used the phrase “independent government.”

The laughing stopped when Amanullah announced Afghan independence at a major mosque in Kabul with the British envoy on one side of him and the Russian representative on the other—a Bolshevik. The British realized he might be serious about this new toy of his. The final treaty between the two countries was not signed until November 21, 1921, but by then Amanullah had signed trade protocols and friendship treaties with various states including Japan, France, Italy, and Turkey.

He was the most democratic of absolute monarchs, and if that’s an oxymoron, so be it.

And then there was purdah—the requirement that women be veiled from men outside their own family. Afghanistan observed the strictest purdah in the world. Afghan women who went out in public had to wear a bag-like garment called a chad’ri or burqa over their bodies, which covered them from head to toe, leaving only a tiny patch of mesh for them to look through. Amanullah’s code said no law could require the burqa. Women could wear one if they wanted, but no one could force them to wear one, not even their husbands. This was truly radical stuff.

But there is one final suspicious circumstance, which has kept the conspiracy theories alive. T. E. Lawrence was in Peshawar at this time under the assumed name of T. E. Shaw. This was the famous British intelligence agent known as Lawrence of Arabia, who engineered the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I. His business in Peshawar might well have been unconnected to the troubles in Afghanistan, but what his business was in Peshawar remains unknown.

The United States and its allies would quarantine Soviet influence by surrounding it with a chain of nations hostile to Communism and friendly to the Western European allies. To this end, US diplomats cobbled together a number of military alliances. In the west, there was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In the east, there was the (weaker) Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). And between the two, there were the Baghdad Pact nations, soon renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which included Turkey and Iraq as members. The brand-new nation of Pakistan joined both CENTO and SEATO, which made it a crucial link in the chain. With Pakistan closing the gap, SEATO, CENTO, NATO, and east Asian allies of the United States such as Japan formed an almost continuous fence around the Communist bloc.

No, the United States could not afford to abandon Pakistan, not on this issue nor any other. American diplomats therefore tried to convince Daoud to accept the Durand Line.

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.

Culturally, then, Western Europe and America were winning Afghanistan hands down.

But on the political and diplomatic fronts, the American and European bloc was losing ground.

The old Afghanistan, which Abdu’Rahman had tried to crush, the one that had toppled Amanullah, was still out there, and most Afghans still belonged to it; but it was more disconnected than ever from the urban Afghanistan that the Kabul government and its technocracy inhabited and administered.

On April 27, 1978, Daoud, his whole family, and his two thousand bodyguards went to their graves, and the House of Dost Mohammed came to an end.

In Soviet circles, some were saying it might be best to take direct action, just as the Soviet Union had done in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

In the early eighties, Massoud cobbled together a supervisory council to coordinate the actions of 130 separate guerilla commanders, but, being a Tajik and given the growing ethnic tensions of this period, Massoud could not build much strength among the majority Pushtoons.

In the Middle East, America had lost its stoutest ally, the Shah of Iran. To make matters worse, a bunch of student-age Iranian activists had seized the American Embassy and taken fifty-two US diplomats hostage—an unprecedented humiliation for a great power like the United States.

Iranian Revolution and the Iran hostage crisis

He said the United States would regard any Soviet interference in the Persian Gulf as a threat to America’s vital interests and act accordingly. In other words, he conceded Afghanistan and moved the goalposts to the Persian Gulf.

In retrospect, it’s hard to see why the Soviet Union struck such fear and awe into the hearts of people around the globe in 1980. America might have been wobbling a bit, but the Soviet Empire was in its actual death throes. The government had degenerated into a rust-caked bureaucracy that even its own functionaries despised.

Worst of all, the empire had no animating ideal to compensate for the drab grind of daily life. Communism had fulfilled this function once upon a time, but Communism had lost credibility even in the Communist world, where it now lacked the power to inspire even Communists.

Afghanistan served Reagan especially well because it had become a cause célèbre among old-guard anti-Communists on the Right, one of Reagan’s key constituencies. Political activists on the Right, who knew little about Islamism (or Islam for that matter), lauded the Afghan Mujahideen as glamorous freedom fighters, seeing them only as anti-Communists.

To gain advantage in the Cold War, he did not hesitate to use nuclear brinkmanship.

He threatened to build a defensive shield that would render Soviet nuclear missiles irrelevant. His Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly known as the “Star Wars” defense) jolted nuclear policy experts, for it violated the core formula of Mutual Assured Destruction upon which the Cold War stalemate (and global stability) was based: neither side could afford to use nuclear weapons because it would result in the destruction of both. If the United States achieved immunity from Soviet nuclear attack, the United States could attack the Soviet Union with impunity. If the Soviets saw this outcome as imminent, they might launch a pre-emptive strike. Reagan flashed his avuncular grin and reckoned he’d take that risk.

As always, all this Cold War pushing and posturing had implications for Afghanistan. In 1985, the Soviet Union finally got a dynamic younger man at the helm, but Mikhail Gorbachev had inherited a sinking ship. Reagan’s initiatives had forced the Soviets to risk spending themselves to death. Gorbachev knew he would have to scale back the military and shrink his country’s foreign commitments, or the country was doomed.

One was perestroika, which gave the market a role in the Soviet economy. Another was glasnost, which allowed Soviet citizens some limited freedom of expression. The West applauded Gorbachev as a heroic reformer.

Reagan reaped the rewards in domestic acclaim, but Gorbachev won some applause as a peacemaker too (except among right-wing evangelical Christians who saw the birthmark on his forehead as a sign that he was the Antichrist).

Gorbachev thought the invasion had been a mistake, and he wanted to get the Afghan albatross off the Soviet neck; but, instead of ordering an immediate and unilateral withdrawal, he told his generals to win the war as quickly as possible by any means necessary. Like Richard Nixon, who had sought “peace with honor”4 in Vietnam, Gorbachev wanted to get out of Afghanistan with at least the appearance of a victory: he couldn’t afford to look weak going into the sensitive nuclear negotiations he had set in motion.

The destruction of Afghanistan did not come at the hands of a mighty superpower at the arrogant height of its power: Afghanistan was destroyed by a dying dragon flailing its spiked tail in its final agony.

In Congress, Senator Gordon Humphrey, Congressman Don Ritter, and others lobbied for the Afghan cause.

Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, who chaired the House Appropriations Committee, embraced the Afghan cause and, together with allies in Congress and the CIA, managed to triple the (secret) US funding for the Mujahideen. What’s more, he convinced the Saudis to match whatever the United States contributed. By 1987, the Mujahideen were receiving a billion dollars a year from the United States—almost all of it coming through the ISI pipeline, of course—and that much again from the Saudis.

They figured out exactly what type of weapon the Afghan resistance needed: something the guerillas could hand-carry into the hills and use to shoot down helicopters.

On September 25, 1986, Hezb-i-Islam commander Abdul Ghaffar (Engineer Abdul Ghaffar, he called himself) fired the first of the Stingers at a Soviet helicopter landing at the Jalalabad airport.

The CIA provided the Mujahideen with more than five hundred Stingers, and perhaps as many as twenty-five hundred. (British and Chinese versions of this weapon soon began reaching the Mujahideen as well.)5