Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Other cities had different flavors. At the heart of Kandahar, one found a thick cluster of mosques ringed by garrisons. This ancient capital of Pushtoon culture was always a conservative religious city and the capital of its major tribes.

  At the heart of Herat, by contrast, one found schools and shrines, for this had long been an important capital of art, literature, and learning. It was the birthplace of Behzad, the greatest painter of Persian miniatures, and the home of vaunted Sufi poets such as Jami and Ansary.a

  Major Cities of Afghanistan

  Mazar-i-Sharif means sacred shrine, and indeed the core of this city was and is an immense mausoleum embellished and expanded generation after generation no matter who ruled the country, a tomb believed by locals to be the actual burial place of Khalifa Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s fourth successor and the most revered figure to Islam’s Shi’a sect. Here, also, the region’s most spectacular New Year’s Day celebration takes place, a festival featuring rituals and ceremonies dating back to Zoroastrian times.1

  Over the centuries, men who called themselves kings ruled by virtue of controlling at least a plurality of these strongholds. Most of the people they ruled, however, did not live in cities of any kind. The bulk of them lived in the countryside. Rural Afghanistan was in many ways the real Afghanistan, and the social fabric of this universe of villages is a key to this story because it still exists and its tenacity continues to affect the politics of the country.

  AFGHAN HISTORIAN MOHAMMED ALI CLAIMS THE AFGHAN VILLAGE-REPUBLIC attained its classic form around the same era as the Italian Renaissance. 2 Thousands of these villages dotted the hills and plains of this region, each of them a more or less autonomous political and economic unit. They sprang up throughout the mountains, in the steep valleys, along the hundreds of rivers and streams running down from snowy peaks. In general, every Afghan village had at its heart a stronghold or qala—a large compound with cob walls. Many but not all qalas had stout earthen towers rising from their four corners.

  The people of any village were all related in some way or another because virtually all marriages took place within this village world, and yet the villagers typically regarded themselves as belonging to a number of different clans and kept track of their lineages in order to maintain a sense of separation. This allowed a social hierarchy to obtain among the clans. The most privileged families lived in the qala, along with their poor relations and servants. Others lived in compounds clustered around the qala. Fields and farmlands surrounded the cluster of compounds, extending as much as a day’s walk away or more. On the slopes above the fields, the villagers grazed their numerous sheep and their less numerous goats.3

  Some kept cattle, but not too many, for cattle took too much tending. Rarely butchered for meat, cattle were kept within the compounds for milk. Taking the sheep out to graze was a man’s job, tending the cattle a woman’s. Most farmers had buffalos as well to do the heavy work of pulling plows. People walked where they had to go, or, if they had to go far, they rode donkeys. Donkeys hauled loads as well: timber, mounds of grain, sacks of bricks—nothing was too bulky or heavy to load onto a donkey. Mules were not unknown but not common. In the mountains, few had horses: average folks could not afford them, and donkeys were far more practical. Horse country lay mainly in those rolling, grassy plains of the north.

  Ali uses the term village-republic for these little social units because they had no formal ruler. The patriarchs of the clans were the leaders of the village. Some clans had higher status, and their patriarchs and leading men had more authority. But their authority was more like that of a father in a family than like that of a prince in a state—which illuminates what Ahmad Shah really was: the patriarch of all the patriarchs. That’s why he was called Ahmad Shah Baba—Father Ahmad Shah.

  Locally, the most important patriarchal lords were known as khans. They were the feudal barons of Afghan society, their status hereditary. Every village usually had a malik, as well, a formal “headman.” Maliks were elected (sort of), but the chances were pretty good that the chosen malik’s father had been a malik too or was at least recognized as a khan. If a crisis faced the community, the leading khan assisted the malik in deciding what should be done. The leading khan and the malik might very well be the same person, but they might not be.

  Formal decisions were made by a council of the most important men of a village in a protracted discussion called a jirga. (In Dari-speaking villages, it might be called a shura.) The council was a standing body but didn’t meet regularly—only when some issue came up. The jirga couldn’t arrive at a decision by a simple vote. It had to stay in session until the group arrived at a consensus. This was a way to disarm future conflicts, because a decision by simple vote would likely leave a majority triumphant and a minority smoldering. Any such resentment was bound to flare again later in some seemingly unrelated context. Best to come out of a jirga with a consensus. Traditionally, anyone could speak up during the meeting, but, once a jirga made a decision, everyone was bound by it.

  The malik was elected by the jirga, but his authority was not clearly separable from the informal authority he derived from prestige, social status, and family eminence. In “electing” a malik, the jirga was usually just acknowledging the stature of a fellow known by all to be the most eminent. Villages could operate by these informal, tacit rules because they were so small: everybody knew everybody. The malik did have some formal duties. He was responsible for dealing with the outside power, whomever that might be: the strongman of the nearest town, the king in the capital, the emperor, if there was one. If the king knew about a village, he collected taxes from it in the form of commodities. The malik was in charge of gathering what was due and delivering it to the king’s agent.4

  In any village, there were a few titled roles in addition to malik. Every village had at least one mullah, and perhaps more. A mullah was the basic, all-purpose Muslim cleric. He wasn’t a “holy man.” Mullahs had wives and children, they might own land, they went to war—they were no holier than thou or anyone else in the village. They just knew how to read, and they had read the Qur’an front to back. They supposedly knew at least the rudiments of the religious law. They oversaw the various rites of the life cycle insofar as these concerned religion. For example, when a child was born, the mullah was called in to whisper words from the Qur’an into the baby’s ear, thus inducting him or her into the community of faith. When someone died, the mullah was the fellow who recited the necessary prayers to accompany the lowering of the body into the grave. Later, he’d be the one to organize the communal reading of the Qur’an that honored the deceased. And when two people got married, the mullah presided over the ceremony that joined the couple in matrimony and also over the all-important meeting of family elders to sign the contract—for every marriage was fundamentally a tribal-business transaction between families, not the culminating moment of a romance between individuals.

  At the times of prayer, especially in the early morning and at sunset, the mullah might well be the fellow who climbed into the minaret (if the town had one) or onto some tall rooftop (if it didn’t); from there he loudly chanted the Arabic verses that let people know that the time for prayer had come. In a larger village, the mullah might have a muezzin to perform this duty, an assistant with a particularly melodic, booming voice.

  And every village did have some sort of mosque, some building that functioned as a gathering place for Friday prayers, for daily sunset prayers, for ceremonial gatherings on religious holidays, and for jirgas, a building that also served as shelter for travelers if any came by. Taking care of the mosque might be one of a mullah’s duties, although not every mullah had a mosque of his own to look after. Those who did were known as imams, and when the people gathered for prayer the imam generally led the prayer—led it by doing just what everyone else was doing except that he stood in front of the group, facing the same way as all the others (toward Mecca) and speaking certain verses out loud while the others spoke them sile
ntly. He set the rhythm of the ceremony by chanting Allahu Akbar at the appropriate moments to let the group know when to go into its prostration or assume a sitting position or stand up or bow at the waist. In short a mullah was like a religious mechanic. He took care of the physical details of daily life in a world so permeated by religion that religion was indistinguishable from daily life. He had no special virtues otherwise.

  Indeed, there is a robust tradition of the mullah as rascal, typified by Mullah Nasruddin, a fanciful figure featured in a rich body of humorous folk anecdotes. One such anecdote, for example, relates that the mullah’s neighbor came to borrow his donkey. The mullah was reluctant. He said, “I’m sorry but my donkey died yesterday.” Just then the donkey began to bray behind the house. “What’s this? What’s this?” the neighbor said. “Mullah-sahib: your donkey isn’t dead, I can hear it braying.” The mullah was indignant. “Who are you going to believe?” he snorted. “A mullah or a donkey?”

  Another figure who roamed the village world was the dalak, a character who handled many of the less pleasant but necessary details of daily life. A dalak was not a religious figure at all, but many matters he handled were governed in some way by religion. At a young age, for example, boys had to be circumcised. A dalak did this. Dalaks pulled teeth, cut hair, and performed a variety of other personal services. Dalaks often had no homes of their own but moved around from household to household, sleeping wherever they happened to be and eating what the family fed them. The village world (and traditionally Afghan life in general) was strictly divided into a private realm (inhabited by both men and women) and a public world (inhabited exclusively by men). Dalaks moved between the two realms. They knew intimate details of every household since they dealt with matters most personal. They heard all the gossip, therefore, and they spread the gossip—they were a village version of a news service. Also, they knew which households had young men antsy to get married and which ones had girls of marriageable age, so they provided matchmaking services. This was especially useful because dalaks often served not just one but several villages in an area.5

  The dalak was the lowest end of a scale that ran through the mullah on up to more respected figures. One such was the mirab, or water arbitrator. A man had to have acquired a high reputation for wisdom and good judgment to achieve this role. Even though a mirab adjudicated only disputes concerning water, his was a powerful role, for in this desert country, land per se was not worth much. Water was the precious resource.

  At the top of the scale were hugely respected figures such as mawlawis (religious scholars). The qazi or judge was definitely a most eminent religious figure, but not every village had one. A qazi was needed only in difficult and complicated cases, often ones involving disputes between people of different villages or tribes—because disputes within a family were handled by the family, and those within a clan by the clan, and those within a village, in the case of criminal matters—a murder or a theft, for example—by the jirga. The qazi was qualified to judge complex matters because he had earned a broadly accepted reputation as a scholar and devout.

  Some matters baffled even the typical qazi—matters involving subtle religious interpretations of a legal issue. In such cases, a qazi might consult with a mufti, a religious scholar whose reputation for learning was so immense, communal consensus accorded him the authority to issue fatwas, interpretations of religious law. These were not judgments about particular disputes but rulings about the law itself. Here was legislation derived, not from any government, not from any elected body, not from any political appointee, not from any warlord or general or ruler, nor from the will of any living individual or entity, but from the Muslim scriptures and the theological works of ancient devouts. The only way to achieve the authority to issue these rulings was to mature into the role by winning the approval and respect of the existing muftis and qazis. It was inherently a conservative system, deeply so.

  Internally, these village-republics operated pretty much without money. They didn’t even use the barter system. Personal service stood in for economic exchange: everyone was someone with respect to all other persons in the village—everybody was a son or a daughter, a niece or uncle, clan chieftain or grandfather or poor relation or whatever.6 Some people had a duty to serve other people and had, in their turn, a right to be served by certain others. Children had to serve the whims of their elders. Young women had to obey the dictates of older women within their tribe of household womenfolk.

  Women had command of certain spheres upon which men did not typically intrude. They made decisions about household food supplies and children, and they handled the initial negotiations and bargaining that led to marriages. As a group, however, the masculine encircled the feminine, and the women’s corporation was contained within and ruled by the men’s corporation. In this universe of village-republics, there were lords and there were lieges, and everyone did what was expected of them and demanded what tradition entitled them to.

  Afghan villages were pretty much self-sufficient. They produced their own food, did their own carpentry, made their own shoes, and shod their own horses, if they had horses. Women did the spinning and weaving and made the garments. They cooked food and baked bread—all this was done privately, every compound in a village having its own pit oven. The women churned milk into butter and made cheese, and they dried yogurt to make the base for the coveted sour sauce called q’root, and they used techniques they knew about to preserve meats and vegetables for winter storage, and they pounded nuts and dried fruits together to make an edible leather that men could carry on long journeys. The men did the heavy work outside the home: they dug the irrigation works, they dammed and apportioned water, they plowed and harvested the fields, and they dealt with any strangers who approached the village. And of course, if there was fighting to be done (and there often was), men did the fighting.

  Though largely autonomous, villages were not completely isolated. People of one village knew people of nearby villages, and any of the village men might sometimes go to larger local towns, their donkeys loaded high with q’root or felt or other goods they sold for cash, which they used to buy more sophisticated manufactured goods—matches, spoons, cosmetics, and the like. On these sojourns, they heard about events and affairs in the larger world. No one far away had much effect on their daily life, however. For most villagers, the governor was a story. The king was a rumor, some tough guy with a big army crashing around in the distance somewhere, his relevance to daily life near nil. If he came around, he was the boss; as soon as he left, he became a tale to tell the kids: “I saw the king once. Yes! Standing right there, he was, real as that horse!”

  Yet even villagers who didn’t travel anywhere might come into contact with the pastoral nomads who constituted some 10 percent or more of the population. They were a minority but a big minority: hundreds of thousands of people, and, because they lived on the move, they permeated the land. Farsi speakers called them kuchis: “the ones who move.” Pushtoons called them powindas. They made their way across the land in bands of a few score to a few hundred people, stopping for several days in favorable spots—or at the most several weeks—and then traveling on.7

  A small nomad camp might have ten tents and a big one up to fifty, but they were never much bigger. Any given band might have hundreds of sheep and dozens of camels, which roamed along with them and had to be herded and guarded wherever the band went and wherever it stopped. Every nomad band therefore had its own dogs, which weren’t elegant Afghan hounds but mastiff-like beasts maybe twice the size of your average Labrador, with bulky bodies and large heads and jaws like those of a pit bull. When I was growing up in Afghanistan, no one seemed to think nomad dogs were any special breed. People regarded them simply as scary mongrels; yet these dogs all looked so similar, I have to think they were de facto purebreds. The ones I saw in Kabul as a boy were feral and frightening, but the nomads’ own dogs trotted along the outside of the band as it moved, and they skulked around the edges of the
camp when it stopped, and, if you were a stranger, these dogs were one more reason not to go wandering casually into a nomad camp.

  This makes sense because nomads led an inherently perilous lifestyle. They were always in foreign territory. They were always subject to raids by other nomads or by bands of men who practiced marauding rather than herding as a way of life. In old Afghanistan, especially in the north, such marauders were legion. You might suppose that nomads would not offer a tempting target because, after all, what did people with such a spare lifestyle have to steal? The answer is herds. Food on the hoof was very valuable indeed. Also, they had women. And because marauders might make off with their women, the nomads tended to form up in the same way as covered wagon trains crossing the plains of America in pioneer days: in phalanxes with women and children in the center and men on the outside. When they stopped and set up an encampment, the same physical pattern emerged: women and children hung out in the heart of camp, surrounded by tents. Men formed up on the outside and kept watch for hostile forces. If anyone approached the encampment, the men went to them and found out who they were and what they wanted.

  Whenever a nomad band roamed close to a village, a potential for conflict arose because both groups had animals to graze, both needed pasture. The villagers could hardly be blamed for taking a proprietary view: they were here first, this was their turf, and so they were apt to resent a nomad band letting loose hundreds of sheep to swarm over their grassy slopes.

  This is not to say nomads and villagers were at war. Hardly. Some villagers were closely descended from pastoral nomads; some nomads had been sedentary villagers until some misfortune such as a drought uprooted them, whereupon they took to a lifestyle they knew well because their tribal kin or near-term ancestors practiced it—and took to it gladly, it seems, for many preferred the nomadic to the sedentary way of life. But the relationship between nomads and townsfolk, though fragile, was symbiotic, especially for nomads because, unlike typical villagers, they were not self-sufficient. Kuchi bands produced their own food, to be sure, but they had to go into towns and bargain in the bazaars for items such as utensils and metalware and the very cloth from which they sewed their tents; plus they leaned on farmers for fruits and vegetables and the flour they needed for the staple of the Afghan diet, bread. For such goods they traded milk products, dried meat, hides, embroidered cloth, beaded garments, and other light portable craft items.