Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Nomads, then, were not separate from the general population. They belonged to tribes and felt tribal affiliations; they could trace their lineage to the same ancestors as some of the settled folk. They had mullahs, they acknowledged certain qazis as legal authorities, and they respected certain scholars in common with villagers. The difference was, a villager might live and die without ever having gone twenty miles from the spot where he was born. The nomads, by contrast, routinely traveled hundreds of miles in a year, deep into India going south, and beyond the Amu River going north. Borders? They hardly knew the meaning of the word. Even though they tended to be hidebound, suspicious, and deeply conservative, nomads had seen the world and could routinely speak three languages or more. For a king, governing an area in which many of the inhabitants were nomadic was like trying to serve soup with a sieve. The nomads were difficult to count, much less tax. And the hell of it was, they sometimes took umbrage with kings and lords and joined rebellions, so they could not be ignored.

  Although kings such as Ahmad Shah Baba had little presence in the lives of their subjects beyond taxing and drafting, they could interact with their people in one further way. If people felt they were owed justice and weren’t getting it from their jirga or the qazi or any other traditional source, they might petition the king, for, in addition to the traditional law, there was the king’s law. Traditional law was a blend of religious rulings and folkways mistakenly regarded as religious rules plus local customs supported by generations of consensus. The king’s law expressed the whim and wisdom of the king’s officers and factotums—and ultimately of the king himself.

  Since the king had the military power, his word superseded all other rulings. But anyone who went to the king for justice was taking a chance, for the king’s rulings were final and might be arbitrary. Also, anyone who sought the king’s justice had to gird for a long struggle getting into the system and getting heard by someone who mattered, because there was only one king, his corpus of officers was limited, and only a few people, therefore, were going to be heard. No one would even attempt to go to the king for judgment on some trivial dispute, and few would try unless they knew someone who knew someone who gave them some connection to the court. So only khans and other great men were likely to go that route. For the average villager, a wise king might be better than a stupid one, and a kind king better than a cruel one, but a change of dynasty produced little reverberation on the ground level. “Better a strong dog in the yard than a strong king in the capital,” says an Afghan proverb.8

  3

  Farangis on the Horizon

  AHMAD SHAH MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST KING OF AFGHANISTAN, BUT HE was the last of a long line of conquerors who amassed a tribal army and flung together an empire stretching from central Asia to India. He was the last because the political map was changing drastically by the time he died. New powers were moving into the region, powers no local warrior could beat in open battle. Some called them the Farangi, a corruption of “Frank,” the name of the tribes that had come out of Europe seven centuries earlier to storm Jerusalem and trigger those centuries of battle the Farangis called the Crusades. Since then, Farangi had become the generic term for Europeans. Now one group of Farangis was coming to the forefront in India.

  Local people called them the Engrayzee, a Farsi/Pushto corruption of the word “English.” The Engrayzee had been in India for more than 150 years at this point. The first English trading post had been planted on the Indian coast in 1613 not by the government of England but by the East India Trading Company, a private English corporation looking to enrich its shareholders. In 1707, England and Scotland merged to form Great Britain, after which it was no longer just the English but the British who were in India, but they were still there mainly as merchants and traders, operating humbly out of little stations that the great and powerful Moghul dynasty allowed them to construct on a shoelace of land along the coast.

  The British were just one of several European groups competing to do business in India at that time. They did some fighting, but not with the Indians: they fought each other. First, the French and English drove out the Portuguese. Then the French and British turned upon each other. In 1743, just before the Pushtoons named Ahmad Shah their king, the British began battling the French on the east coast of India. This became just one front in a global conflict that, in Europe, was called the Seven Years War and, on the North American continent, the French and Indian War. By 1763, the British had won this war and in India had won it decisively. After that, the French could live in India only “under British protection.”

  The British didn’t realize they were conquering India itself as they battled the French, because they weren’t out to rule India. Their interests remained strictly commercial. The British government had no officials on this soil. The British presence on the subcontinent was still limited to the East India Company, which was technically a private venture, even though it had the full endorsement of the British government and served as an agent of British interests. The company was just striving to maximize its market share, which happened to coincide with the interests of the British state.

  In 1756, trouble broke out between the Indians and the British at the trading post of Calcutta. The minor Moghul governor of that province, the Nawab as such governors were called, arrested a few dozen British citizens and clapped them into a small cell, which the European press soon dubbed the Black Hole of Calcutta. The room was intolerably small, and by morning many of the British prisoners were dead. When news of the outrage reached East India Company headquarters at Pondicherry, the company deputized its agent Robert Clive to march north and punish that governor. Clive went to Calcutta with a small force, casually removed the Nawab, and installed his nephew in his place. The operation was called the battle of Plassey, but it hardly merits the term “battle.” It was more like an administrative procedure. This was not the moment when the British took control of Bengal but the moment when everyone, including the British, realized they already controlled Bengal. No one could pinpoint exactly when the conquest took place, but, from then on, the East India Company did as it pleased in Bengal and anywhere else in India that caught its fancy.

  The affair of the Black Hole of Calcutta took place on the eastern coast of the subcontinent in the same year that Ahmad Shah was sacking the city of Delhi. At that moment the Afghans might have seemed even more powerful than the British. After all, the British merely replaced one nawab with another; the Afghan king replaced the Moghul emperor with a more compliant puppet. Just as the British were revealing their naked power in the east, Ahmad Shah was asserting his naked domination in the west. The bare facts suggest a showdown brewing between the British and the Afghans.

  But that would be getting ahead of the story. Delhi was nearly a thousand miles from Calcutta, and Ahmad Shah’s home city of Kandahar was another five hundred miles farther west. There was no intersection between the British and the Afghans, no reason yet for the two to clash.

  In the several years that followed the Black Hole of Calcutta affair, the British secured their hold on Bengal and began moving west. Their expansion began just as the Moghul empire was dissolving into smaller states. One by one, the British took control of these successor states. Where necessary, they took charge directly. When it was more convenient, they let an indigenous elite keep on ruling but set strict parameters for them.

  Eventually, London decided that India was too important, fragile, and vast to be administered by a private company, especially because that company mismanaged Bengal pretty badly. In 1773—just as their North American colonies were beginning to break away—Great Britain sent a governor general to oversee India. The East India Company continued to operate on the subcontinent as a formidable power, but formal British rule of India had now begun. The colonial government was later called the Raj, and although its governor was appointed by the Parliament in London and his decisions were subject to Parliament’s approval, he was pretty much sovereign in India, with his own
cabinet and foreign policy.

  Ahmad Shah died of jaw cancer in 1772. In that same year—just to put the event in perspective—American patriots in Massachusetts were planning the Boston Tea Party, an act of rebellion not just against the British government but against the East India Company, the same corporation that had such a stranglehold in India. Afghanistan, at that moment, was an empire stretching from the heart of modern-day Iran to the Indian Ocean and included modern-day Kashmir in the northeast. As a power in the Muslim world, it was second only to the Ottomans.

  But the Afghan empire was already beginning to crack. The emperor Ahmad Shah had been ailing for a few years before his death. After he died, just as British power was expanding, Afghan power shrank. The British had nothing to do with this. Their impact would come later. Ahmad Shah’s state crumbled for internal reasons. It was a dynastic empire, which is an inherently unstable form of political organization because it depends on the genius of its ruler. Ahmad Shah was a towering figure, but his sons were less remarkable, and his grandsons even less so. The sons and grandsons fell to fighting over the throne. The crown changed hands six times in three decades. Finally, the fragmentation devolved into a grisly civil war between two Pushtoon clans, which was much like England’s War of the Roses, when the Yorks and the Lancasters hammered at each other for several decades.

  Out of the English conflict came the gigantic figure of Henry VII, the first of the Tudor dynasty and in many ways the founder of England as we know it. Out of the Afghan civil wars came a giant too: a man whom Afghans still call “Dost Mohammed the Great.” The grandsons of Ahmad Shah all ended up blind, dead, or in exile. They themselves had done most of the blinding, killing, and driving into exile. In 1826, Dost Mohammed declared himself amir, and thus began the reign of his clan the Mohammedzais. Though not directly descended from Ahmad Shah, they were closely related to his clan and belonged to his larger tribal group, the Durranis: they too were Pearly Ones.

  Amir Dost Mohammed Khan was a lanky, long-bearded, black-eyed man of imposing stature. In his youth he had been something of a wastrel and a drinker, but he had matured into an austere and soft-spoken monarch who impressed everyone he met as a perfect gentleman.1 Obviously, he could not have been perfectly gentle, or he would not have come out of those civil wars victorious. When rougher manners were needed, he could no doubt sink to the occasion; but he was perfectly at home in genteel settings, the soul of sophisticated social grace.

  Dost Mohammed set out to weld a coherent nation that could be ruled from his chosen capital, the city of Kabul. This would become the fundamental project of Afghan history, a project thwarted and distorted by both outside and inside forces. It is with Dost Mohammed, then, that the Afghan story really begins.

  Within a few years, this king restored order to his territory. His countrymen could not have been more grateful. Life could now return to normal. Farmers could get back to farming, herders to herding. Women could tend their gardens and plot political marriages. Men could loll about in the bazaars and gossip with their friends. Trade could resume. Camel caravans wended their way out of the northern steppes once again, transporting wool and hides and flax oil, lapis lazuli and gorgeous carpets, horses, camels, and other livestock, over the Hindu Kush and down to the plains of India to exchange for rice, tea, spices, calico, cotton fabric, and other coveted goods.2

  Dost Mohammed had recovered the core of Ahmad Shah’s empire, yet he was not content. He was not content because he did not have the whole of the empire back. The city of Mashad was gone, but, oh well: that loss Dost Mohammed could swallow, because Mashad traditionally fell within the sphere of influence of the Persian monarch. But Dost Mohammed had lost Peshawar as well and with it all the fertile lands flanking the Indus River. Those lands had been seized by a formidable warrior-king named Ranjit Singh, who was not even a Muslim but a Sikh. Peshawar and its environs were inhabited by Muslim Pushtoons, and Peshawar was also the traditional winter capital of Afghan kings. The ruling clan of Afghanistan, being Pushtoons, found the loss of this city particularly galling. Dost Mohammed’s determination to get Peshawar back launched a conflict that was never resolved and that continues to generate trouble to this very day.

  4

  Between the Lion and the Bear

  AT THE SAME TIME AS THE CIVIL WAR THAT RAGED IN AFGHANISTAN before the rise of Dost Mohammed—roughly 1792–1826—Europe was going through massive tumult of its own. The 1700s capped a period of unprecedented European expansion, made possible by their mastery of the seas. Over the course of just a few centuries, the English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and others sailed to the furthest shores of the five oceans, planting colonies and trading posts. As their dominance increased around the globe, European nations fell to fighting one another for commercial advantages and for possession of vast territories distant from their own. During this same period, throughout western European culture, science was replacing religion as a method for understanding nature, a development that spawned technological advances such as steam engines, railroads, mechanized factories, and mass production, all of which had profound political and economic implications.

  In 1789, one of history’s greatest social revolutions erupted in France. The French overthrew their monarchy and landed aristocracy. The bourgeoisie stood revealed as the new ruling class and the potential power elite of the future. The conservative forces of Europe united to crush the new order, but the revolutionaries beat back the monarchists, and out of the turmoil marched a new kind of conqueror, a petty-journalist-turned-soldier, Napoleon Bonaparte. Not content with defending France, he took the war to France’s enemies, conquering much of Germany and eastern Europe and ringing his empire with docile client states such as Italy and Spain.

  Napoleon did not, however, manage to win a single significant battle against Great Britain, and his grand attempt to conquer Russia ended in disaster. Finally, beaten decisively at Waterloo, he was exiled to a lonesome little island to die. This whole dramatic episode—the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—altered global politics. Britain emerged as the most powerful nation on the planet, a power derived largely from its navy: no one could beat the British at sea, and the Napoleonic Wars confirmed that sea power was now one key to global dominance.

  Technology was the other key, and there too Great Britain held the lead. Britain was the first nation to build railroads and the first to harness steam power for mass production. To be sure, it needed an abundant supply of raw materials to feed its factories, but, even though it was a little island, Britain had a commanding advantage. It possessed India, probably the most valuable piece of colonial real estate in the world. With its unbeatable navy, its advanced technology, and the resources of India at its disposal, Britain had power no other country could match.

  The Napoleonic Wars also left one other country snorting with newfound ambition: Russia. It was Russia that had dealt Napoleon his real deathblow, for Napoleon lost his entire army in a catastrophic march to Moscow. Russia was in many ways the polar opposite of Britain. Instead of tiny, it was vast. Instead of technologically advanced, it was primitive. Britain had (for its time) a sizable and well-educated middle class—Adam Smith supposedly described it as “a nation of shopkeepers.”1 Russia had virtually no middle class. It was a nation in which a handful of aristocrats ruled over millions of serfs and didn’t even speak the same language as their subjects.

  Russia had long been expanding east across the Ural Mountains and into central Asia, but it did not have colonies in distant places because of another crucial difference from the island nation of Britain: Russia was essentially landlocked. It did have an ocean to its north, but that ocean was the Arctic, which was frozen most of the year. Russia had ports on the Black Sea, but the Black Sea itself was surrounded by land except for the choke point of the Dardanelles strait. In this new age of naval power, a country needed better access to the world’s oceans to compete globally.

  Russia had one way out of its predicament. If
it could expand east far enough and then move south through Afghanistan, it could gain access to ports on the Arabian Sea. From there it would have unlimited access to the Indian Ocean. Now there was a goal worth fighting for. Only Afghanistan stood in the way.

  Britain could not look kindly on a Russian expansion to the Indian Ocean, for it would bring Russia right to the borders of Britain’s precious India. For Britain, the issue wasn’t just a port or two; the very source of British power and wealth seemed at stake. India must be defended! Russian expansion must therefore be blocked! At all costs, Russia must not be allowed to take Afghanistan! And so these two global powers began struggling for dominance in central Asia. Rudyard Kipling, in his novel Kim, famously called the contest “the Great Game,” but it was a frivolous name for a drama that would turn so dark and so bloody.

  The Great Game

  IN 1831, THE EAST INDIA COMPANY DISPATCHED AN EAGER YOUNG man named Alexander Burnes to explore the upper reaches of the Indus River and thence to proceed across Afghan territory to Bukhara and the other famous central Asian cities of the old Silk Route to see what commercial opportunities might exist up there. Burnes was new to the East and raring for adventure. He kept a diary of his travels in which, with a journalist’s eye for detail, he recorded the sights and sounds of the worlds he passed through.