Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  The document pointedly failed to specify who had done all this “believing” and “representing.” Actually, the proclamation goes on to suggest, just the opposite turned out to be true! The old king wasn’t hostile, the replacement king wasn’t popular. Therefore, in line with its enduring policies, the British government undertook to restore Dost Mohammed to his throne. After all, the proclamation concludes:

  To force a sovereign upon a reluctant people would be as inconsistent with the policies as it is with the principles of the British Government. . . . The Governor General will willingly recognize any government approved by the Afghans themselves.16

  6

  The Second Coming of Dost Mohammed

  DOST MOHAMMED THE GREAT RETURNED TO KABUL IN TRIUMPH. HE had outwitted the British by outwaiting them. While he bided his time in captivity, his loyal Afghan subjects had hammered the British, and now this proud and undefeated people welcomed their sovereign back with songs and flowers—at least, that’s the story I imbibed when I was in school in Afghanistan.

  There are some problems with this narrative, however. First of all, before he came back to Afghanistan, Dost Mohammed met with the British governor general and signed exactly the same deal that Shah Shuja had signed much earlier and the same one Dost Mohammed had been eager to sign before the war. He promised never to permit an emissary from Russia or Persia to come to his capital and never to deal with any foreign nation except Britain. If anyone outside his country had a complaint to lodge or a request to make of the king of Afghanistan, he would be referred to Calcutta.1

  Dost Mohammed also agreed to relinquish his claim to three of the five major cities of Afghanistan: he would have Kabul as his capital and rule only the territories directly north of this city as far as the Amu River (which put Mazar-i-Sharif inside his domains) and south of Kabul beyond the city of Jalalabad but not as far as Peshawar. Kandahar and Herat would remain autonomous provinces ruled by rival members of his clan. Peshawar would remain in Sikh hands. Dost Mohammed no doubt gnashed his teeth, but he signed off on Britain’s demands.

  Why? Because in exchange for these concessions, the British agreed to let “the Dost” rule his truncated territory without any interference. They would not station any envoys in Kabul: they would trust the Afghan king. Most important of all, they agreed to pay Dost Mohammed an annual subsidy. In short, you can’t exactly say the British lost the war. They came out of it with everything they had demanded going in, and they got what they really wanted: a buffer state to block Russian expansion. What’s more, they left Afghanistan divided into three parts likely to stay busy fighting one another instead of marching south to threaten India. Plus, they kept Peshawar out of Afghan hands, which was important because Peshawar was in the plains east of the Khyber Pass, an excellent base for marching into India.

  The British disaster had initially left Kabul in the hands of a coalition of chiefs dominated by Dost Mohammed’s son, the military hero Wazir Akbar Khan, now the idol of the Afghan masses. At the close of the war, a coterie of tribal chieftains had urged Wazir Akbar Khan to accept the crown. No other man was fit to rule, they said. Akbar turned them down. He was a dutiful son, not a usurper; deposing his own father would be unthinkable. It was true that sons had deposed their fathers sometimes in history, but it wasn’t going to happen here in Afghanistan, not to this gigantic father.

  The Afghan historian Ghobar suggests that the Afghans lost an opportunity here.2 The British were in disarray; Ranjit Singh was getting old; the people of his kingdom were gravitating toward an alliance with their Afghan kin in order to stay out of British clutches. A true Afghan nationalist could have built a powerful state and annexed the lost provinces along the Indus River from Kashmir to Sind. Had he done so, a big chunk of “Pakistan” would now be part of Afghanistan. Certainly, the tough-minded revolutionaries who had beaten the British wanted to call the nation to this task. But the insurgents put their faith in their leaders, and their leaders looked to Wazir Akbar Khan, and Wazir Akbar Khan deferred to his father.

  And this father no sooner had his throne back, than he moved swiftly to eliminate every leading figure in the rebellion against the British. Amin of Logar, a relentless opponent of foreign intervention, the man who had offered Wazir Akbar Khan the crown, was imprisoned below the fortress-palace of Bala Hissar and lived the last fifteen years of his life in that dungeon.3

  Mohammed Shah Ghilzai, who had so intimidated the British, they simply called him The Enemy, was a sovereign lord with his own fortress-mansion in Kabul. One day, Dost Mohammed’s men swooped down on him and carried him and his whole family away to a remote region in the mountains southeast of Kabul, where they lived in isolated domestic exile.

  Another of the Afghans’ most feared war chiefs, Sultan Ahmad, was banished to Kandahar. After a few years Kandahar didn’t seem far enough, and so, with the agreement of his Kandahar cousins, the amir ordered this dangerous fellow to keep moving, move on west. Sultan Ahmad ended up in Iran. The Dost had not seen the last of him, but that story comes later.

  For now, one by one, everyone who had risen to prominence during the First Anglo-Afghan War was stripped of lands, banned from office, banished to a foreign land, imprisoned, or executed. The amir may have given up Kandahar, Herat, and Peshawar, but, in the truncated territory he could call his own, he brooked no rivals.

  Dost Mohammed was undoubtedly a big personality. He fought well enough when he had to, but he didn’t specialize in war. He specialized in political craft—in this realm he was a brilliant, cold-blooded realist. He slipped out of Kabul just ahead of the British invasion not because he was a coward but because he was a canny survivor: he figured his best play right then was to stay alive and wait for an opening. When the opening came (after the war) he accepted a reduced country not because he was satisfied with a smaller realm but because he still saw biding his time and watching for openings as his best way forward.

  In the meantime, how was he to govern the domains that were his by treaty? The Dost was still a tribal chieftain, not a national ruler in the modern sense. He never had a parliament, or a real cabinet, or any administrators to speak of. On a day-to-day basis, his government was largely in the hands of a single assistant called the shah aghassi, who was a cross between a valet and a prime minister. (In European monarchies, a similar figure was known as the lord chamberlain.)4

  Then again, the Dost didn’t need much of a bureaucracy because his government didn’t do much governing. That is, it didn’t “provide services” or perform most of the duties we commonly associate with government today.

  There was no government police force, for example; villages and tribes provided their own security. Education too had nothing to do with the government; it was provided by the mullahs, the lowest level of Islamic clerics. The government had nothing to do with training or appointing mullahs. They emerged out of the population at large, spontaneously, you might say. In most cases, boys who wanted to be mullahs attached themselves to existing mullahs, learned to read from those mullahs, learned about Islam from them, and hung around the mosque helping their mullah/ imam do anything that needed to be done, at first perhaps performing only menial chores—sweeping floors, refilling water cisterns, and so on; but gradually, as they gained the imam’s approval, working their way up to more responsible duties until, eventually, a day came when someone needed a mullah, and the older one wasn’t available, so they went to his apprentice and from then on people increasingly saw the apprentice as a mullah too; and so he was one.

  There was no secular court system except for the personal judgments of the king and his officers. The jirgas settled most local conflicts, and they were formed locally by the people involved. Individuals who had some dispute that didn’t involve the community paid a small, negotiated fee to a mullah to hear their case. Beyond the village level, the law was dispensed by higher clerics who made their rulings on the basis of the Shari’a, the Islamic code of jurisprudence. These judges needed no government
ratification. They emerged from the population at large by a process that the clerical establishment, an autonomous social force, managed and controlled.

  The king did provide protection against outside forces such as marauding bands from the lawless central Asian steppes or armies out of Persia. He did provide some security by stamping out highwaymen, keeping the roads open, and quelling rebellions that might flare into open wars. The government did enforce honest weights and measures in the markets, and it enforced some laws in the cities, and the king’s army was the final force in any really big dispute.

  But the army mainly kept the king’s authority fresh so that he could collect taxes, most of which he spent to pay said armies and to support a royal lifestyle. That lifestyle did involve some major construction projects such as bridge building and road repair to facilitate military maneuvering and the refurbishing of important shrines and construction of new mosques to increase the king’s fame. Public works such as these provided some employment, but the majority of Afghans needed no John Kennedy to tell them they should ask not what their king could do for them but rather what they could do for their king.

  Still, Dost Mohammed Khan needed loyal governors in every province to make sure no one rebelled against his kingship. In the first portion of his reign, the part before the British invasion, he had appointed his brothers as his governors—but they were too much on a level with him. In the second part of his reign, he turned to his sons. The Pushtoons have a proverb: Within the tribe you’d better have a big clan; within the clan you’d better have a lot of brothers; among the brothers you’d better have the most sons. I don’t know whether Dost Mohammed had the most sons, but he was surely a contender. His fourteen wives gave him fifty-six children. (Within a hundred years, more than seven thousand men could reportedly trace their descent directly back to Dost Mohammed.)5

  In his own lifetime, the fortunate Dost Mohammed had enough sons to supply all the governors he needed. He made his eldest the governor of Badakhshan, the next one governor of Balkh, another the governor of Hazarajat, and so on. Each son was responsible for defending his own portion of his father’s territory. Each son had to muster and maintain whatever military forces he needed to do that job. Each son therefore had the authority to collect taxes from the people of his province to pay his own warriors. This made each provincial governor a sort of semiautonomous duke, but Dost Mohammed knew how to rein in his sons and keep them obedient to his will. He had to bargain with the British, he had to dance a wary dance with the Russians, he had to accept limitations on his rule imposed by the great outside powers, but over his sons he could exercise absolute authority.6 Afghanistan was not so much a nation as a family business, and it was not so much ruled by the Mohammedzais as owned by them.

  The most prominent son got no province of his own, however. This was the famous, dashing, much-admired Wazir Akbar Khan. Dost Mohammed declared this son his heir and kept him close, kept him in Kabul; he was too valuable to waste on any single province. He was needed at his father’s side to advise him on matters pertaining to the entire kingdom. Besides, there was no telling when a king might need a charismatic military genius like Akbar to command a campaign for him.

  Wazir Akbar Khan did have a major campaign in mind. He wanted to conquer Peshawar and from there, perhaps, all of Sind, not to mention Kashmir—in short the youngster wanted to reconstruct Ahmad Shah’s entire empire. But the British knew what territories could be conquered from Peshawar. They wanted to keep it out of Afghan hands for precisely that reason. Dost Mohammed would not violate the agreement he had signed with the British, so he would have none of the campaign his son envisioned.

  At one point, a tribal uprising flared in a province south of Kabul, and the king dispatched Akbar to put it down. When Akbar approached the gates of the provincial capital, the rebels came out to greet him. “We’re not rebelling against you,” they said, “nor even against your father. We just want to take back Peshawar. Lead us into battle, Wazir Akbar Khan!”

  Akbar wrote to his father begging him to reconsider. The people wanted war, he told the great man. “Command me, sir.”7

  Dost Mohammed sent back a stern letter forbidding his son to attack Peshawar and ordering him back to Kabul. He had an important assignment for him up north. The obedient son returned, received his orders, and headed off. Halfway to Balkh, he fell ill, probably of malaria. The king dispatched his personal physician to his son’s sickbed, an Indian doctor who specialized in “Greek medicine.” This was a treatment system based on the theory that every illness stemmed from an imbalance among four mystical substances in the body associated with air, earth, fire, and water. The balance could be restored with purges, poultices, leeches, and herbs known only to experts, of whom this physician was one. He treated Wazir Akbar Khan with an herb that would normally have been toxic, but that in this case—well, in this case, unfortunately, it also proved toxic. The doctor expressed his sincere regret: God made the decisions in the end. And so Wazir Akbar Khan died on the road not of the illness he had contracted but from the treatment he received. He was buried in Mazar-i-Sharif and Dost Mohammed had nothing further to gain or to fear from his heroically outsized son.

  The death of Wazir Akbar Khan didn’t cripple the amir’s administration. Dost Mohammed had enough sons left to govern all his provinces and more sons to spare. Here, the term provinces should not be taken too literally. Even the outside borders of the country were a matter of opinion; the borders within it remained ambiguous too. There were, however, a number of distinct regions. The highlands of central Afghanistan were known as Hazarajat, “the land of the Hazaras,” because they were inhabited by the recognizably Mongolian ethnic group, the Hazaras. Another region further north was called Balkh, because it had once been dominated by the oldest city in Afghanistan, the metropolis of Balkh, devastated by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. There were also Badakhshan, Maimana, Qataghan, Logar, Nangarhar, and other areas that registered as geographically distinct for one reason or another and that I will, for convenience, simply call provinces.

  In 1855, the autonomous Kandahar/Helmand region was divided among fourteen feudal lords, all of whom were one another’s brothers, cousins, and uncles. All therefore had families in the city of Kandahar itself. Each was constantly coveting the lands of another, and, whenever a dispute broke out, it sparked ruinous fighting among related families in the city. Finally the warring lords convened a jirga and decided they could not work out a peace among themselves: they needed a stronger hand. They sent a message to Amir Dost Mohammed Khan offering to accept him as their king if he would guarantee their property rights and keep the peace. In his treaty with the British, Dost Mohammed had agreed not to attack Kandahar; but this would not be an attack. He had received an invitation. Dost Mohammed accepted the petition and thus regained one of the three major cities he had given up without violating his treaty with the British.8

  In 1857, a regiment of Indian soldiers had turned their guns on their own British officers, igniting the Great Indian Mutiny, which threatened to drive the British out of India. Dost Mohammed’s advisors hectored him to go for Peshawar now. This was the moment, they said: Ranjit Singh had just died, the Sikhs were weak, and the British had their backs to the wall. Dost Mohammed refused to renege on his treaty with the British. This was the time, all right, but not for attacking Peshawar. He seemed alone among Afghans of his time in recognizing that attacking Peshawar was a waste of blood and treasure. The British could not fight the Afghans west of the Khyber, but, in the plains east of the Khyber, they had every advantage. If an Afghan king took Peshawar while the British were distracted, they would take it back as soon as they subdued the mutiny. Not attacking Peshawar was an Afghan king’s real ace in the hole, because if he didn’t attack it, he always might. Dost Mohammed used the Great Mutiny as an opportunity to secretly renegotiate his deal with the British. He agreed not to attack Peshawar, if the British would let him take Herat back by force—someday. Strapped
to a barrel, the British accepted his terms. The Dost put the agreement in his pocket and waited for “someday” to arrive.

  In 1861, Sultan Ahmad, the rebel leader Dost Mohammed had driven into exile fifteen years earlier, stormed back out of Iran and took possession of Herat. He declared himself better qualified than Dost Mohammed to be king of all the Afghans. He felt pretty sure of himself because Iran was backing him and Russia tacitly approved of his ambitions. He thought the British had already forced Dost Mohammed to relinquish Herat, and so they surely would not help him now.

  Sultan Ahmad didn’t realize the rules had changed. When Dost Mohammed led his army to Herat, the British raised no objection. In fact, they had enough power in Iran now to forbid the king of that country to “interfere with Afghanistan’s domestic affairs.” What’s more, Russian approval did not translate into guns and money. It was just idle talk, it turned out. Sultan Ahmad found himself stranded and abandoned.

  The siege began in 1862 and dragged on into the following year. The curious thing is, the combatants in this war (as in many Afghan wars) were closely related to each other. Sultan Ahmad was Dost Mohammed’s son-in-law. At the height of the siege, the woman who was the one man’s daughter and the other man’s wife passed away, and all hostilities were suspended so that both men could attend her funeral and take part in the mourning ceremonies.9 Then Dost Mohammed left the city and the siege continued.

  Finally, Sultan Ahmad died of stress and distress, and Dost Mohammed took back Herat. How triumphant he must have felt on that April day as he rode through the gates. How thrilling it must have been for him to look back on his long career: born the youngest of twenty-one sons, his prospects dim, rising to mastery during the civil wars only to lose his country to the British, followed however by his return as if from the dead, and then his slow, crafty reconstruction of his realm.