bilateral Soviet–Afghan economic and trade relations. But his meeting with Brezhnev ended in a row. Brezhnev told him to stop leaning towards the West and said he should expel the numerous Western advisers in Afghanistan. Daud stormed out, saying that he was the President of an independent country and would part with his foreign advisers only when he himself decided they were no longer necessary.
He now began to look for ways out of his dependence on the Soviet Union. The US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, met Daud in Vienna in October 1977 and invited him to visit the United States. The Americans began to increase their credits and grants to Afghanistan. In January 1978 the US Embassy in Kabul reported that the relationship with Afghanistan was excellent. Daud had accepted Vance’s invitation. Finance for the US military training programme had been doubled to offset—at least in part—Soviet assistance to the Soviet armed forces. And the Afghan government was cooperating, so the embassy said, in the struggle against narcotics.
This rising trend was reversed by the Communist coup of 1978, which brought to power a government determined to turn Afghanistan into a modern socialist state in a matter of years using the techniques perfected by Stalin in Russia and Pol Pot in Cambodia.
By the 1970s Afghanistan had many of the rudiments of a modern state. It was reasonably secure, and you could travel and picnic and see the sights with comparatively little risk. Foreigners who lived in Kabul in the last days before the Communists took over—diplomats, scholars, businessmen, engineers, teachers, aid workers, hippies—later looked back on that time as a golden age. So did many of the very thin crust of the Afghan middle class who lived in Kabul and some of the big cities.
In the 1970s much of old Kabul still stood, a rabbit warren of streets, bazaars, and mosques, still dominated by the great fortress of Bala Hissar, a place, the Emperor Babur said more than four hundred years earlier, with ‘the most pleasing climate in the world… within a day’s ride it is possible to reach a place where the snow never falls. But within two hours one can go where the snows never melt.’27
In the centre of the city was the imposing Arg, the fortified palace build by Abdur Rahman, the scene of one violent turn in Afghan politics after another. Amanullah, Abdur Rahman’s grandson, commissioned European architects to build him a monumental new capital, a vast palace, the Dar-ul Aman, on the south-western edge of the city; and a summer resort in Paghman, a village in the nearby hills, complete with Swiss chalets, a theatre, an Arc de Triomphe, a golf course, and a racecourse for elephants. Across the road from the Dar-ul Aman palace stood the Kabul museum, which was opened in 1924 and contained one of the richest collections of Central Asia art and artefacts in the world: flint tools forty thousand years old from Badakhshan, a massive gold hoard from Bagram, glass from Alexandria, Graeco-Roman statuary, ivory panels from India, Islamic and pre-Islamic artefacts from Afghanistan itself, one of the largest coin collections in the world, and more than two thousand rare books. A grandiose British Embassy, built in the 1920s as a symbol of British power, lay on the northern edge of the city. An equally large Soviet Embassy lay in the south-west on the road to the Dar-ul Aman.
‘Kabul’, said a guidebook sponsored by the Afghan Tourist Bureau, ‘is a fast-growing city where tall modern buildings nuzzle against bustling bazaars and wide avenues fill with brilliant flowing turbans, gayly [
Those were the days when Kabul was on the Hippie Trail and thousands of romantic, adventurous, and often improvident young people poured along the road from Iran through Herat and Kabul to India, driving battered vehicles which regularly broke down and had to be repaired by ingenious local mechanics, seeking enlightenment, drugs, and sex, living on nothing and sometimes dying on the way.
But behind that fragile facade lay the real Afghanistan, a land of devout and simple Muslims, where disputes between individuals, or families, or clans and tribes, were still settled in the old violent way, where women were still subject to the absolute authority of their menfolk, where the writ of the government in Kabul barely ran, and where the idea of national rather than family or local loyalty was barely formed.
Andrew Abram travelled to Kabul in 1975 and described what he saw: ‘Plane loads of young American and European tourists with their carefully shampooed waist length hair, wearing “ethnic” Afghan costume (which I haven’t yet seen any Afghans wearing), custom made Afghan boots, sequinned waistcoats, and custom made leather money pouches on each custom made leather belt. All looking pretty much identical and wandering around Chicken Street [the tourist shopping bazaar] looking for expensive souvenirs to show Mom and Pop at the country club before they jet off to their next sanitised travel experience. In the evening they return to their hippie style hotels to eat Western food from an extensive Western, misspelled, menu and smoke Hashish supplied by the smiling management… What a wasted opportunity to see how another culture lives. If they were to take a walk past the miles of export carpet shops and camel burger stalls they would reach the old city on the banks of the Kabul River and see part of the real Afghanistan. The old part of the city, which extends half way up the sides of the surrounding hills, is just like Herat, bazaars and filth, teeming with people. Shops selling anything and everything, factories making shoes and buckets from old car tyres, stalls with real, and good, Afghan food at low prices.’29
The hippies departed with the arrival of the Soviets in 1979. But apart from the influx of foreign soldiers and some incidental damage during the fighting, life in Kabul continued comparatively unchanged in many ways. ‘Even at that time,’ one woman wrote, ‘we still went to school. Women worked as professors and doctors and in government. We went for picnics and parties, wore jeans and short skirts and I thought I would go to university like my mother and work for my living.’30 Jonathan Steele, a British journalist who was there at the time, later wrote, ‘In 1981, Kabul’s two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.’31
A few months after the Russians left, one journalist reported that Kabul, ‘although still a city at war, had almost a festive air. It was June, the wedding month, flowers and blossoms perfuming the air, the Kabul River swollen with molten snows, and I had sat in the sunshine licking ice-creams in the University cafe with lively young women in high heels, some with dyed blonde hair, one even wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “I’m not with this idiot” tightly pulled across her large breasts. At the apartment of a bureaucrat I had met, I had danced at a party where a well-known singer called Wajiha had strummed at her guitar in between puffs of her cigarette. The only real signs of war, apart from the large number of men—and women—in uniform and the drone of planes, had been the dawn queues at the bakers as people waited for the daily rations of five pieces of
But by then paradise was already doomed. Kabul was reduced to ruins by the civil war which broke out after the Russian departure and the old life was swept away by the arrival of the Taliban, which brought the civil war to an end. The palaces and the hotels were destroyed, the museum looted, music, dancing, and women’s education all brought to nothing.
– TWO –
The Tragedy Begins
On 27 April 1978 President Daud was bloodily overthrown by the Afghan Communists, the innocuous- sounding People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The victors called it the ‘April Revolution’, the beginning of a
