Tibet. The Russians took advantage of this more relaxed state of affairs to improve their knowledge of the country. General Andrei Snesarev, a professor at the Academy of the General Staff, spent much of his life studying and travelling in Central Asia, and ruminating on the significance of Afghanistan in the wider geopolitics of the area. He concluded that Afghanistan was a military nightmare for a foreign invader, that it could not justify the resources needed to dominate it, but that it was indeed, as some of his British predecessors had believed, the gateway to India. His book about the geographical, ethnic, cultural, and military aspects of Afghanistan was published in 1921. It rapidly faded from the public consciousness after he was arrested in 1930, sentenced to be shot, released, and then died at home in 1937. But it was republished after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and Snesarev has since become something of a cult figure among Russians interested in the country.
As soon as the British relinquished their control of Afghan foreign policy, Amanullah signed a Treaty of Friendship with the infant Soviet Union in 1921, under which the Russians agreed to give Afghanistan financial support, to build a telegraph line between Moscow and Kabul, and to supply military specialists, weapons, and aircraft. A Non-Aggression Treaty followed in 1926. In 1928 the first regular air route was opened between Moscow and Kabul, and Soviet consulates were set up in Herat and Mazar-i Sharif.
By the 1930s the Soviet Union was Afghanistan’s most important commercial and political partner. There were occasional irritations. Fugitives from the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics regularly sought refuge in Afghanistan, followed by detachments of the Red Army in hot pursuit. In the spring of 1929 the Russians invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to restore Amanullah Khan to his tottering throne. Stalin sent about a thousand men, disguised in Afghan uniform and commanded by the former Soviet military attache in Kabul, General Vitali Primakov (1897–1937), who was himself disguised as a Turkish officer. The Russians captured Mazar-i Sharif, Balkh and other places after heavy fighting. But they rapidly lost the sympathy of the local people and Stalin recalled the force when he heard that Amanullah had fled into exile. In 1937 Primakov was shot, yet another victim of Stalin’s purges. But on the whole Russia’s relations with Afghanistan flourished well enough.
In the years immediately before the Second World War, the Germans tried with some success to increase their influence in Afghanistan through economic assistance and military training—the Presidential Guard was still wearing German helmets at the time of the Soviet invasion. During the war itself, Zahir Shah steered a skilful path between the British and the Russians, who found themselves cooperating with one another to frustrate German intrigues. In 1943 Zahir Shah expelled German agents operating in Afghanistan who had been identified by the intelligence agencies of the two wartime allies.23
Zahir Shah and his prime minister, Daud, were equally skilful at playing off East and West against one another as the Cold War developed. In 1953 John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, came up with the idea of a ‘Northern Tier’ of Muslim states in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, which would act as a barrier to Soviet Communism. He tried but failed to get Afghanistan to join the Baghdad Pact when it was set up in 1955. President Eisenhower visited Kabul in 1959. The Americans constructed the concrete highway which linked Herat to Kabul via Kandahar, and promoted a number of educational and economic schemes, including a major irrigation project in Helmand province. The Americans’ interest in Afghanistan waned in the 1960s as they were increasingly distracted by their growing involvement in Vietnam.
Even so, the Americans did not give up. The Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (1923–), visited Kabul in 1974 and 1976, and with the rapid decline of British influence after 1945, it was fear of American rather than British meddling that became endemic in Soviet thinking about Afghanistan. Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1970), the First Party Secretary of the Soviet Union, visited Kabul in 1955 and concluded that the Americans were doing all they could to draw Afghanistan into the American camp, because they intended to set up military bases there.24 Such beliefs played a part in the Soviet government’s decision to intervene in Afghanistan in 1979.
After Khrushchev’s visit the Soviets announced a $100 million development loan,25 and thereafter continued to provide loans, grants, training, and technical and military assistance. They also developed their links with the small but fractious Afghan Communist Party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The PDPA quickly split into two viciously rival factions: Parcham (Banner), which had its main support in the cities, and Khalq (People), which drew its main support from the countryside. Throughout the 1970s the Russians devoted much energy to trying to dissuade these two factions from destroying one another. They were to have little success and the feud was to poison Afghan politics for the next twenty years.
The violent events which were now to convulse Afghanistan’s domestic politics presented the Russians with great opportunities and even greater headaches.
Daud had been waiting in the wings since Zahir Shah had sacked him in 1963. In July 1973, while Zahir was on holiday in Italy, Daud deposed him in a bloodless coup, supported by leading members of the PDPA and a group of Communist officers whose names will crop again in this story: Kadyr, Watanjar, and Gulabzoi. Those of Zahir’s relatives who were still in Kabul—one of the princesses was halfway through her wedding—were bundled unceremoniously out of the country. The Soviet Union recognised the new regime two days later. Despite their connections with the Communists, the Russians claim, reasonably convincingly, that they had no part in Daud’s coup.
Zahir Shah’s constitution prohibited members of the royal family from holding a government ministry. So Daud abolished the monarchy and declared himself President and Prime Minister. He denounced the previous decade as a period of ‘false democracy’ and promised ‘revolutionary reforms’. His new government contained members of the PDPA.
More forceful than Zahir, Daud ruled with a rod of iron. The freedom of the parties and the students was curtailed. A former prime minister died mysteriously in prison. There were hundreds of arrests and five political executions, the first in more than forty years. In 1977 Daud pushed through a new constitution which turned Afghanistan into a presidential one-party state, in which only his own party, the National Revolutionary Party, was allowed to operate.
Soon Daud’s spies started to tell him that the Muslim youth organisations and extreme factions among the Communists were plotting his overthrow. He began to move against both. Moscow did its best to get the Communists to support Daud, and warned Daud against pushing his repressions too far. Neither the Communists nor Daud took much notice.
In the summer of 1975 Hekmatyar and other Afghan Muslim leaders, backed by the Pakistani prime minister, Zulfikar Bhutto, launched a series of risings, which were easily suppressed by the government. The leaders were executed, imprisoned, or fled to Pakistan, where they were taken under the wing of the Pakistani Intelligence Service. Many of the survivors—Rabbani, Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Masud—had studied together at Kabul University. They later played a major role in the struggle against the Russians. This did not stop them manoeuvring and occasionally fighting viciously against one another, a conflict which broke out with such violence after the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989 that it practically destroyed the country and persuaded the war-weary people that anything—in this case the Taliban, the radical young Islamic fundamentalists who emerged in the early 1990s— would be preferable to a peculiarly murderous civil war.
Daud’s main aims were to build up the internal power of the state at home and its international position abroad. The instrument of both was the army, which he took great pains to strengthen. The Americans refused to help him, so he reinforced the previous practice of seeking arms and training from the Russians. Thousands of Afghan officers and military specialists studied in establishments scattered across some seventy Soviet cities.
But Daud was well aware that a small country should try not to rely too heavily on any one source of outside assistance: he is reputed to have said that his aim was to light his American cigarette with a Russian match.26 He strengthened his relations with the Shah of Iran, who offered him $2 billion on easy terms. The Saudis said they would help him only if he reduced his links with the Soviet Union. He increased his surveillance on the leftist parties, closed several of their publishing houses, purged leftist officials from the government, and released from prison some of the conservative politicians who had languished there since the coup of 1973. Outbreaks of armed opposition from the right, not always distinguishable from banditry, nevertheless occurred in several provinces.
Meanwhile the Soviets continued to increase their support for Daud. Afghan-Soviet trade trebled. There were many more high-level exchanges between Kabul and Moscow. Nikita Khrushchev visited Afghanistan again in 1960, his successor Leonid Brezhnev (1906–82) in 1964. The Treaty of Neutrality and Non-Aggression was renewed for another ten years.
In April 1977 Daud visited Moscow, where he signed a twelve-year agreement for the development of
