one of the greatest cultural storehouses of all Asia’.2
The people of Afghanistan are divided by race into Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other lesser ethnic groupings. Each of these is subdivided into clans defined often by the accidents of geography, as so often in mountainous regions. And each clan is further divided into often mutually hostile families. All are ruled by an ethic of fierce pride, martial valour, honour, and hospitality, mediated by the institution of the blood feud. At all levels, from the local to the central, politics and loyalties are defined by conflicts and deals between these groups, and even between individual families. There is thus little sense of a national entity on which to build a functioning unitary state.
Most Afghans are Sunni Muslims. The Pushtuns make up two-fifths of the population and their language, Pushtu, is one of the two official languages of the country. Most of them live in the southern part of the country, and in neighbouring Pakistan on the other side of the ‘Durand Line’, the artificial frontier drawn by the British at the end of the nineteenth century. But substantial numbers live in the north, where they were settled at the end of the nineteenth century to reinforce Kabul’s control over the non-Pushtun inhabitants. The Pushtuns used to consider themselves, and were considered by outsiders, to be the true Afghans. Some still do, which is not well taken by the rest.
The next largest groupings—the Tajiks (27 per cent), who live in the north and west, and the Uzbeks (9 per cent), who live in the north—are related to the peoples across the border in what used to be Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many Tajiks and Uzbeks fled into Afghanistan when the Bolsheviks were imposing their regime in Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. The Tajiks speak Dari, the Afghan form of Persian, the second official language.
The Hazaras (9 per cent) live in the central mountains and are said to be descended from the Mongols. They are Shias, and the rest of the country despises them as infidels. They are often found in menial positions and they have often been persecuted. But when occasion calls, they too are effective warriors.
Afghanistan’s modern history was shaped by three remarkable rulers: Ahmad Shah Abdali (
The second task has been to preserve the independence of the state from the depredations of outside powers. Afghan foreign policy has usually combined a precarious neutrality with a willingness to distance itself from one predatory rival in return for a guarantee of security and a large bribe from the other. This policy has often failed, and Afghanistan has often been successfully invaded. But invaders have always found it even harder than its own native rulers to manage the country. Sooner or later they have preferred to cut their losses and pull out, and that has always been Afghanistan’s ultimate defence.
In the twentieth century Afghanistan’s rulers set themselves a third and equally difficult task: to modernise their country—its army, its communications, its economy, its governmental apparatus, its educational system. Most have tried to do something about the subordinate status of women. But reform has always come up, and often been shattered, against the conservatism of the people and their religious and traditional local rulers. Reform in Afghanistan has been a matter of two steps forward and one—sometimes two or even three—steps back.
The fourth task of any Afghan ruler, and the precondition for tackling the first three, has been to remain alive. Afghanistan’s rulers have succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, often for very short periods. Between 1842 and 1995 seven of them fell victim at an accelerating pace to family feud, palace coup, mob violence, or outside intervention. Between 1878 and 2001 four more were forced into exile. Others prudently abdicated while the going was good.
Ahmad Shah Abdali was a Pushtun who was elected king in 1747 by a
By the time Ahmad Shah died in 1772, he had reconciled the turbulent Pushtun tribes, subdued most of present-day Afghanistan, extended his empire to Delhi and into Persia, and earned the name of Father of his People. Under his successors, however, many of these achievements were undone. The Pushtun tribes resumed their quarrels and the empire crumbled. In 1775 Ahmad Shah’s son moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, where it remained. His grandson Shah Shujah (1785–1842), signed Afghanistan’s first treaty with a foreign power in 1809, when he and the British agreed to support one another in the event of aggression by the Persians or the French. Shah Shujah was deposed a few weeks later. He fled to India, was brought back to Kabul in the baggage train of a British army during the First Anglo-Afghan War, and was murdered when the British cut their losses and left.
Dost Mohamed, who first came to power in 1823, was deposed by the British in favour of Shah Shujah, but returned to power after the British departed, and successfully ruled the country for the next nineteen years. For most of this time he was on good terms with the British. But after his death in 1863, the country collapsed back into civil war.
A battle lost in that war left Abdur Rahman Khan without an army and without funds. He was forced to seek exile under the protection of the Russians in Tashkent, where he remained for eleven years. He emerged as ruler of Afghanistan in 1880 in the wake of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Grim, sardonic, barely literate but highly intelligent, he was determined to fit his country for survival in the modern world. His brutal methods of government earned him the name of ‘The Iron Amir’. His power, like that of many of his successors, was fortified by a ruthless and omnipresent secret police. His methods worked. He set up the rudiments of a modern state bureaucracy, modernised and financed his army with the help of the British, and struck a skilful balance between them and the Russians.
Abdur Rahman’s successors attempted to push Afghanistan further along the path of modernisation. His son Habibullah (1872–1919) was assassinated in 1919 and succeeded by Amanullah (1892–1960), who took advantage of British weakness at the end of the Great War to invade India. The British bombed Kabul and Jalalabad and drove the invaders back. Neither side had much stomach for the war, and it fizzled out after a month. The British ceased both their subsidies and their control of Afghan foreign policy. Amanullah promptly opened a fruitful relationship with the new Bolshevik government in Moscow—the first foreign government to do so.
He then embarked on an ambitious programme of reform in imitation of the secularising reforms of Ataturk in Turkey. He established a Council of Ministers, promulgated a constitution, decreed a series of administrative, economic and social reforms, and unveiled his queen. His plans for the emancipation of women, a minimum age for marriage, and compulsory education for all angered religious conservatives and provoked a brief rebellion. Tribesmen burned down the royal palace in Jalalabad and marched on Kabul. In 1929 Amanullah fled into exile in Italy.
Nadir Shah (1883–1933), a distant cousin of Amanullah, seized the throne, reimposed order, but allowed his troops to sack Kabul because he had no money to pay them. He built the first road from Kabul over the Salang Pass to the north and continued a cautious programme of reform until he was assassinated in 1933.
His son Zahir Shah (1914–2007) reigned from 1933 to 1973. This was the longest period of stability in Afghanistan’s recent history, and people now look back on it as a golden age. Reform continued. A parliament was elected in 1949, and a more independent press began to attack the ruling oligarchy and the conservative religious leaders.
In 1953 Zahir Shah appointed his cousin Daud (1909–78) as prime minister. Daud was a political conservative but an economic and social reformer. For the next ten years he exercised a commanding influence on the King. He built factories, irrigation systems, aerodromes and roads with assistance from the USSR, the USA, and the German Federal Republic. He modernised the Afghan army with Soviet weapons, equipment, and training.
In 1963 Zahir Shah got rid of Daud to appease conservatives infuriated by his flirtations with the left and the
