Afghanistan: Land of Valor, Land of Sorrow - Part 3
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
The Persians returned under Nadir Shah (1738 CE) but the Afghans reasserted themselves under Ahmed Shah Durrani (d 1773). Ahmed Shah expanded the Afghan domains to include all of modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, eastern Iran, and portions of north India. Durrani is celebrated as a hero of Afghan resistance. However, in the eighteenth century, the implosion of the Mogul and Safavid dynasties rapidly took over Afghanistan too and it fell into disarray and internecine warfare. Peshawar was occupied by the Sikhs and Herat by the Persians.
In the nineteenth century Afghanistan became the prize in the “great game” played between Czarist Russia and the British Empire. Russia coveted Afghanistan because it was a possible outlet to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea. The British interest was to contain Russia and advance its own economic interests.
After the Anglo-Sikh wars (1845-49) and the fall of the Sikhs in the Punjab, the British made several attempts to capture and control Afghanistan. The Afghans were triumphant in the first Anglo-Afghan war of 1839-45. However, the British returned during the second Anglo-Afghan war of 1878-80 and forced the Afghans into accepting British supervision over their foreign affairs. Meanwhile, the galactic advance of the Russian armies swallowed up Samarqand, Bukhara, and the Fargana Valley (1868-73) while the British occupied Baluchistan (1858) reducing Afghanistan to a landlocked kingdom completely dependent on external powers for access to the outside world.
The Treaty of 1878 fixed the borders between Afghanistan and Russia but did not end the rivalry between the two great powers. The British invaded Afghanistan once again and forced the Emir of Kabul to cede the areas east of the Khyber Pass. The Durand Line separated British India from Afghanistan but was not recognized by the Afghans. It became a bone of contention between the modern states of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is currently a hot spot in the ongoing American led war against the Taliban.
Afghanistan was neutral during the First World War. Despite enormous pressures from the Turks and from some of his own people, Emir Habibullah of Kabul stayed out of the war. In the later stages of the War, the Turks contemplated an attack on British India through the Turkoman regions of the Russian empire and Afghanistan. The calculation was that the predominantly Muslim populations of Southern Russia, Afghanistan and northwest India (today’s Pakistan) would rise up against the Allies and help the Turkish war effort. It was a strategic calculation which if successful would have turned the tables against the Allied powers.
The temptation to be responsive to such an overture from Turkey was enormous. Istanbul was at the time the seat of the Caliphate and the spiritual center of Sunni Islam. But the Ottomans were militarily too weak to successfully conduct such an audacious campaign. For the Afghans, the neutrality paid off and Afghanistan emerged with its prewar boundaries intact, an outcome notably different from those of Ottoman territories in the Middle East that were carved up between the British and the French.
Scanning the decades since the First World War, a few milestones that shaped the destiny of Afghanistan stand out. First, it was the ascension of King Amanullah in 1919 and his success in evicting the British. Second, the dethroning of King Amanullah in 1929. Third, it was the coupe against King Zahir Shah by his own brother in law Dawud in 1973. Fourth, it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Fifth, it was the rise of the Taliban in 1995-96. And lastly, it was the American bombardment and invasion in 2001. Each of these milestones stand out in succession, each contributing to the tragedies that have enveloped this hapless land.
Shortly after the First World War, King Habibullah was assassinated (1919) and Amanullah ascended the throne of Kabul. This marks the beginning of the modern phase of Afghan history. Amanullah organized armed resistance against the British and after a decisive military campaign forced the British to relinquish their hold on Afghan affairs.
King Amanullah was a far-sighted monarch. He desired to take Afghanistan out of the Middle Ages and into the modern age. An open admirer of Ataturk, he traveled to Istanbul to observe and learn from the Turkish experience. Ataturk had banned the wearing of the beards and the fez, forbidden women to wear the hijab, discarded the Arabic script and had adopted the Roman script for the Turkish language. Amanullah contemplated similar reforms for Afghanistan. Ataturk advised him against it saying that the experience of each country was different and what works in one culture may not work in another.
Amanullah did introduce a few reforms. He built schools, universities, roads, hospitals and encouraged intellectuals to participate in the modernization of Afghanistan. The noted journalist Mahmud Tarzi was among those who answered the call and started journalism in Kabul.
In 1929 King Amanullah was overthrown by a warlord Bacha Saqaw in a coup that many Afghans suspect was engineered by the British who would not tolerate a modernized Afghanistan next door to a colonized British India. This was a tragedy for Afghanistan from which it never recovered. It took the Afghans away from gradual, sustained reforms towards escalating chaos, alternating between extremist religion and anarchic communism.
Bacha was the son of a water carrier. Upon usurping the throne, he took the title of Habibulla Kalakani. He was an illiterate and incompetent man who surrounded himself with similarly illiterate men. He nullified the reforms instituted by Amanullah and installed a fundamentalist regime. Intellectuals were banished. His excesses were too much even for the normally conservative Afghans.
Within a short time this corrupt regime was overthrown by General Nadir Khan. His rule, however, was short lived and he was murdered in 1933. His son Zahir Shah became the king. There was no change in the tribal structure of Afghan society during Zahir Shah’s rule and he depended on his immediate family to oversee the affairs of state. (To be continued)
