Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  The earlier conquests made Afghanistan what it is. This book tackles the puzzle of the last two centuries, during which time Afghans have fought five wars (depending on how you count) with great Western powers attempting to dominate their country. In these centuries, the story of Afghanistan and the story of the foreign interventions have interwoven like two strands of a single narrative, each strand driven by its own dynamics but each affecting the other. The global story explains why Afghanistan keeps getting invaded; the Afghan story helps illuminate why the interventions keep foundering.

  Here, I offer the story from the inside looking out, the story of a country that began to form around the same time as the United States but is still struggling to coalesce, because of constant outside interruptions and its own internal demons, and this story begins with a man named Ahmad Shah.

  PART I: AFGHANISTAN BECOMES A COUNTRY

  1

  Founding Father

  AROUND THE TIME GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS COMING OF AGE IN North America, a tribal warrior named Ahmad Khan was cobbling together an empire in central and south Asia. Afghans would later call this man Ahmad Shah Baba, which means “King Ahmad the Father,” because in retrospect they saw him as the founder of their country.

  By all accounts Ahmad Shah was a dashing figure: a big man with a broad, fair face and the romantic, almond-shaped eyes typical of his people. At the age of sixteen, he caught the notice of the king of Persia, a savage warlord named Nadir Afshar, who briefly reconstituted the Persian Empire, storming as far as India and plundering it of such treasures as the priceless Peacock Throne. Ahmad became the conqueror’s trusted aide, commanding an elite corps of four thousand horsemen: quite a prestigious job for a teenager.

  Then one night in 1747, Nadir Afshar was assassinated by his own generals. They killed him in the camp where he and his army had stopped for the night. Chaos broke out, of course, with the generals fighting to seize command, and the common troops commencing to loot. The king had been traveling with his harem, and, in that context, women were loot. Legend has it that Ahmad Khan was guarding the harem that night, and, when a mob of rowdies drunk on plunder approached the women’s area, he backed them down single-handedly, saving the women from the mob. Then he called his cavalry together and rode hard for home.

  That’s the story I heard in school, and it sounds apocryphal, but historical evidence does confirm one feat Ahmad pulled off that night. The murdered king had an immense treasure with him, and, when Ahmad made good his escape, he got away with that whole hoard of gold, and gems, including one of the biggest diamonds in the world, the famous Koh-i-Noor, or “mountain of light.” (I saw it in the Tower of London, where it is now displayed as one of the crown jewels of the British royal family.)

  Meanwhile, Ahmad’s people, the Pushtoons, were in an uproar. The Pushtoons acknowledged no overall king but were a multitude of tribes who ordinarily spent most of their time and energy fighting one another. Now, with the neo-Persian empire collapsing, they knew they had better unite behind one man at least temporarily to cope with the chaos that was coming. They called a grand assembly of the tribes, a loya jirga, a tradition in Pushtoon culture. All the most eminent men of all the most important tribes were there. Many respected scholars, judges, and clerics flocked to Kandahar as well to help pick a chieftain. Some writers claim that the other important ethnic groups of the area were also represented—leading Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and others. Ahmad attended the jirga but didn’t say much because he was only twenty-five years old and, in the culture of this area, the young must defer to their elders.

  For nine days, the elders confabulated, but no man among them would stand down and accept another as his king. Finally, an old dervish, one of those mystical wanderers renowned for religious devotion, stepped into the circle, pointed to young Ahmad, and said “There is your leader. Can’t you see? No other has his majesty and nobility! It’s that man.” Ahmad modestly demurred that he was not worthy, whereupon the dervish took a makeshift crown woven out of wheat sheaves and placed it on Ahmad’s head, and, lo, the moment all those grizzled warriors saw the crown on Ahmad’s head, they saw his charisma, and in his very modesty they recognized heroic power.

  At least, so the story goes.

  A cynic might note that Ahmad possessed some other assets too. He still had thousands of mounted warriors loyal to him personally, and he still had the dead king’s treasure. But the apocryphal story expresses interesting aspects of Pushtoon culture. It legitimizes Ahmad Shah’s ascent by spotlighting the endorsement he got from a wise old religious figure, the vote he received from tribal elders, and the fact that he demonstrated that most kingly of all traits: self-effacement. Those three factors turned plain young Ahmad into Ahmad Shah, king of all the Pushtoons and their local allies and subordinates.1

  WHO ARE THE PUSHTOONS? THEY ARE A PEOPLE WHO INHABIT A contiguous area from the Hindu Kush mountains to the flanks of the Indus River. Today, they number about forty million: a little more than the population of California, a little less than that of Spain. Pushtoons speak Pushto, a language related to Persian (although the two are as mutually unintelligible as, say, Portuguese and Italian) and they share a distinct culture. The Pushtoons may or may not be the original inhabitants of this area—their own legends trace their line to one of the lost tribes of Israel—but they have lived here for at least two or three thousand years, so this is certainly their homeland.

  The Pushtoons have always been organized—or, should one say, disorganized?—into numerous tribes, subtribes, clans, and extended families. Each tribe and subtribe traces its ancestry back to some great forefather. Most therefore have a name that ends in -zai, which means “children of.” (It’s like the prefix Mac- found in the names of Scottish clans.) Ahmad Shah belonged to the Sadozai clan, which means he and his relatives were descended from a man named Sado. About Sado little is known except that he didn’t die childless. Another powerful clan was called the Barakzais, their name showing that they were all descended from Barak. No one now knows much about him either, except that he and Sado were brothers. Clusters of clans made up tribes, and tribes were loosely associated as great confederations. The Sadozais and Barakzais, for example, were two of many clan/tribes that belonged to the Abdali confederation, which means that they all descend from some much more remote ancestor named Abdal.

  The Abdalis in turn had an archrival in the Ghilzais, another great confederation, also made up of numerous tribes and subtribes. Both the Abdalis and the Ghilzais lived in the city of Kandahar and spread south from there; the Ghilzais more to the east, the Abdalis to the west. The Ghilzais had been the dominant Pushtoons for centuries, much to the resentment of the Abdalis. In the fifteenth century, they had ruled northern India as “the Sultans of Delhi.” In the 1730s, they had briefly ruled Iran. In 1747, the year of the landmark loya jirga, the Ghilzais were still the dominant confederation, but the balance of power was about to shift because of Ahmad Shah.

  Although he wowed the elders with his modesty, Ahmad Shah began his reign by awarding himself a grandiose nickname: Durri-i-Durran—“the Pearl of Pearls.” As his fame and stature grew, everyone even vaguely related to him sought to advertise the connection by calling themselves Durranis, which in English might be rendered as “the Pearly Ones.” Finally all the Abdali Pushtoons were calling themselves the Durranis, and the very word Abdali passed right out of history.

  That all came later. When he was first elected, Ahmad Shah wasn’t really a king. He was the superchieftain of a ramshackle collection of tribes that had come together in the face of a common danger. Everybody assumed the alliance would be temporary. “It’s me against my brothers, it’s me and my brothers against our cousins, it’s we and our cousins against the invader”—so goes an old Pushtoon saying. Right now, the Pushtoons had to brace themselves for possible Persian armies from the west and Turkish armies from the north. It was safe to suppose that as soon as the tension waned the confederacy would dissolve again into separate t
ribes, the tribes into clans, and the clans into the extended families that are the basic unit of Pushtoon culture.

  This was the core challenge for Ahmad Shah: he headed up a population comprised ultimately of extended families, each of which saw itself as sovereign. Indeed, within each family every individual man saw himself as sovereign. It’s true that tradition assigned to each person a role, a rank, a level: men stood higher than women, old stood higher than young, the son of a great man stood higher than the son of an obscure man . . .

  Beyond these norms, however, hierarchy among men was not determined by the offices they held or the powers attached to those offices but by the qualities each individual brought to his personal interactions. If some people acquired leaderly stature, it was only because others deferred to their decisions. They earned this deference by the expertise with which they played the game of family/clan politics. In this game, deeds counted for something but not for everything. Inherited prestige counted for something but not for everything. Eloquence, gracious behavior, allies, marriage connections—all counted for something, but none was definitive. The authority of one man over another was always fluid and open to challenge; it could always be squandered by social errors, careless insults, clumsy etiquette, or graceless moments.

  And what was true within a family was also true among families, and what was true among families was also true among clans and whole tribes. The same patterns reappeared at every level. Ultimately they all went back to personal interactions and how those interwove with the intricate dynamics of family politics, invisible to outsiders. When many tribes formed a common front against some threat, leadership had to be negotiated constantly, because even superchieftains like Ahmad Shah couldn’t order about their near-peers: if they did, they might lose face, which could erode their authority.

  Ahmad Shah gained his power from the network of personal followers he built up over time, loyal strongmen bound to him by reciprocal obligations that could never be quantified or reduced to quid pro quo, for the dynamics of leadership were those of a family, not of a marketplace. This is worth noting because the nature of leadership in Afghan culture has bedeviled every wave of foreigners that has tried to govern Afghanistan through proxy Afghan “leaders,” mistakenly assuming that attaching a formal “office” to a given individual makes that man a leader.

  In order to keep his people united and himself at the head of them all, Ahmad Shah had to wage war. His predecessor had sacked India, so he would sack it too. This was good politics, for Indians were mostly Hindus and their worship involved idols. Ahmad Shah’s people, by contrast, were Muslims who believed that anyone who destroyed idols stood higher in God’s favor. The more idols Ahmad Shah destroyed, the more prestige he gained among his own.

  Sacking India was good business too, for the idols he broke were crusted with gems and located in temples that contained gold plate and other valuables: so his campaigns gave him a revenue stream, which enabled him to dispense favors to an ever-wider network of followers who were then bound to him by the debts they owed. Waging constant war kept enlarging this emperor’s territory, but it also helped him consolidate the territory he already possessed.

  Ahmad Shah must have been ferocious in battle, but his people didn’t admire him for his military prowess alone. As a Pushtoon, he also had to perform great feats of hospitality, throw splendid feasts, lavish charity on the less fortunate, and demonstrate munificence. Even as he exerted mastery of every situation, he had to stroke the egos of the men he dealt with, for only by giving the appearance of modesty could he grow colossal. Pushtoon culture also values eloquence, and here again Ahmad Shah excelled. His martial poetry is still savored by Pushtoons (although it must be admitted that his work does not survive translation very well).2

  In short, though his enemies feared him, his own people saw him as wise, diplomatic, and fair. Far from behaving despotically, he set up a council of nine advisors to help him rule. Each was the chief of a major Pushtoon tribe, and all civil decisions had to go through the council. By flattering the dignity of other Pushtoon chiefs, he kept them loyal.

  Much has been said about Pushtoonwali, the code of the Pushtoons, which demands that men take care of guests even to the point of sacrificing their own wealth and lives if need be, that they avenge injury to their own kin with an equal injury dealt to the injuring clan, that they defend to the death the “honor” (that is, the inviolate sexual purity) of the women in their family, that they stop fighting an enemy the moment the enemy surrenders—and so on and so on and so on . . .

  But although the Pushtoons may honor this code in the extreme, similar values flavor the folkways of other groups throughout Afghanistan. Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and others all tend to revere generosity and treat guests as privileged celebrities. All tend to feel that a man’s self-respect rests on the unsullied sexual modesty of the women in his family, especially the unmarried young ones. Whatever influence Ahmad Shah built up among Pushtoons, he cast a similar spell for his other subjects too. Non-Pushtoons may have had some cultural differences from Pushtoons, but they got along well enough under this Pushtoon lord, in part because Ahmad Shah pretty much let everyone run their own affairs. He did tax people, but that’s what kings do. He did draft people of every ethnic group into his armies, but that was not so much an imposition as a way of sharing the spoils of war.

  Ahmad Shah’s empire ended up stretching from eastern Iran to the Indus River. Many earlier conquerors had flung up essentially the same empire. In the eleventh century the Ghaznavid sultan Mahmoud had sacked some of the very same temples as Ahmad Shah Baba. In the sixteenth century, the founder of the Moghul Empire fought a key battle at Panipat, where Ahmad Shah Baba routed the Hindu Marathas two centuries later.

  If Ahmad Shah stood out from the other conquerors, it was mainly because he united the Pushtoon tribes more than anyone ever had. He mended the fault line between Barakzais and Sadozais. He reconciled the Durrani Pushtoons and the Ghilzai Pushtoons. He also created a fragile association among Pushtoons and other ethnic groups within his realm, governing a dozen ethnicities under one great umbrella. Farsi-speaking Tajiks, Shi’a Hazaras, Turkish-speaking Uzbeks and Turcomans of the north, and Farsibans whose roots ran west into what is now Iran, all thought of themselves as loyal subjects of this single great emperor. And, in his multifarious armies, the beginnings of a common national consciousness began to form. The many ethnic groups serving shoulder to shoulder in Ahmad Shah Baba’s armies built up among themselves the beginnings of a national spirit, a sense of Afghaniyat, or “Afghan-ness.”3 This is why, in Ahmad Shah’s lifetime, the area that was called Ariana in ancient times and Khurasan in medieval times came to be known as Afghanistan.

  Ahmad Shah’s Empire

  2

  Ahmad Shah’s Afghanistan

  WHAT AHMAD SHAH BABA CREATED WAS NOT A COUNTRY IN THE MODERN sense. Today, “country” means at minimum a definite territory enclosed by a continuous border, within which one government makes and enforces all the rules for public life and issues a currency that all the inhabitants use for their transactions. In that sense, a country could not have existed in Ahmad Shah’s time and place, for no man could have exerted much control at a distance. The geography was too daunting, the inhabitants too diverse, and the technology of communication and transportation too primitive. Ahmad Shah’s empire was instead a loose affair characterized less by borders than by centers, a network of garrisons and cities laced through a mostly rural landscape.

  Borders were more zones than lines. Each city and town had a strongman who dominated the surrounding countryside, but this strongman’s power waned as one moved away from his seat, like the force field around a magnet. Kabul, for example, was one great power center and Kandahar another, but between those cities stretched a great deal of territory in which neither city’s strongman mattered much.

  In these locales, someone weaker but closer made the rules: he might be the lord of the nearest town or, if there was no t
own, the headman of the nearest village or, in a place even more remote, a big landowner with a fort of his own and a few hundred relatives and retainers living with him. In this sort of state, the emperor’s power consisted of his ability to tax and draft and his personal relationships with a network of local lords. Any place fitting this description was part of his empire. Accordingly, the most important power centers were governed by men loyal to the emperor, often his close relatives—his brothers, uncles, or sons.

  Of the big cities, three defined Afghanistan: Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul. Two others were important as well: Peshawar in the south and Mazar-i-Sharif in the north. No matter who called himself king of this region, these five cities were usually part of his empire, an enduring nexus. Four are still part of Afghanistan, but the fifth, Peshawar, lies outside the country’s borders, which has been a burr under the saddle throughout Afghan history and continues to generate trouble today.

  In Ahmad Shah’s era, each city had a high surrounding wall and one or more gates, much like the cities of medieval Europe. The bigger the city, the higher its walls and the more numerous its gates. Mighty Kabul, for example, had five gates facing five different directions. Through one came the road from Kandahar, through another the road from Peshawar, through another the road from Mazar-i-Sharif, and so on. Inside the walls, these roads became boulevards that converged on some definitive complex at the city’s heart. In Kabul, all the big boulevards led to a vast covered market called the Grand Bazaar, a labyrinth of shops and stalls vending produce, handicrafts, and manufactured products from surrounding civilizations. The Grand Bazaar was situated along the Kabul River, which ran through a notch between two sets of mountains. Citizens’ houses covered the slopes north of the Grand Bazaar. On the other side of the river, a royal palace known as Bala Hissar perched atop a promontory, a fortress with thick walls of sunbaked brick and immense towers dotted by small windows. The neighborhoods on this side of the river were known as Shor Bazaar or “Hubbub Market”—for it was, to locals and even to many travelers, the liveliest urban center ever seen.