Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Now his long quest had ended, and he had won: his triangle of a country had one continuous border enclosing the whole territory of modern-day Afghanistan, and he was king of every person in that territory, from the meanest peasant to the grandest khan. Except for the loss of Peshawar, he could die a happy man. And die is what he did. Immediately after taking Herat, Dost Mohammed fell ill, and six weeks later at the age of seventy, “the Great Amir” was lowered into his grave.

  7

  Eight or Ten Good Years

  UNLIKE MOST OF HIS PREDECESSORS, DOST MOHAMMED GROOMED A successor. Well before his death, he named his third son, Sher Ali, as his heir and brought the young man with him to the siege of Herat. Sher Ali was at his father’s bedside when the great man died. The troops acclaimed this son as the new amir, and, after fighting his many brothers for nine years—even losing his throne for a moment during that period—he secured his power at last and established a degree of stability, whereupon he resumed his father’s project: the attempt to forge a coherent nation impervious to outside powers and ruled by a single government.

  In 1863, when Sher Ali first came to the throne, a striking figure worked at his court, a mercurial, mysterious man named Jamaluddin-i-Afghan. It is difficult to say what exactly Jamaluddin was. A teacher? An orator? A political philosopher? A reformist? A revolutionary? He did teach, he did give speeches, he did elaborate political theories, and, in the course of his career, he certainly inspired revolutionary movements all over the Muslim world; but he wrote no books to speak of, created no systematic philosophy, founded no schools, and built no political party. His goals seemed to shift as he moved. In feudal Afghanistan, he sought a strong central government. In Iran and Turkey, which had strong central governments, he urged people to topple their rulers. In Egypt and India, which were under European control, he promoted nationalism. In North Africa, which Europeans had divided into arbitrary national units with senseless borders, he preached pan-Islamic unity superseding nationalism, and he did the same in central Asian Turkestan, which the Russians had divided into separate states.

  Jamaluddin’s family had lands around Asadabad, a town in the rugged mountains northeast of Kabul. They were distantly related to the royals, but some dispute forced them into exile in Iran for a while.1 There they settled in a town that was also called Asadabad. As a result, some Iranians now believe this fellow called himself Jamaluddin-i-Afghan to disguise the fact that he was really Iranian and that he presented himself as a Sunni Muslim to disguise the fact that he was really Shi’a. Whatever the truth might be, he certainly started his career in Kabul, at the court of Dost Mohammed, tutoring the princes, one of whom was Sher Ali.

  Shortly after Sher Ali succeeded to the throne, Jamaluddin sat down with the new king, so recently his student, and gave him a step-by-step written program for the modernization of Afghanistan, a detailed plan for developing Afghanistan into a world power. Then, without explanation, Jamaluddin said goodbye, left Afghanistan and spent the rest of his life restlessly roaming the Islamic world, rousing the rabble and afflicting the comfortable. He never returned, but long after his death his body was shipped back to Kabul for burial on the campus of Kabul University.

  Sher Ali couldn’t follow Jamaluddin’s directives until he had defeated his brothers, which took him until 1868, but, as soon as he had secured stability, he launched the program. It planted the seed of a second Afghanistan that took shape and grew like a separate organism inside the original one.

  First on the agenda: establish a postal system for the country, with a central office in Kabul and branch offices in the major provincial towns and cities. Theoretically, any Afghan could now write to any Afghan, provided both lived near a big town and provided one could write and the other could read. The letter might take months to reach its target, but Sher Ali’s post office was nonetheless a first step toward weaving the country’s disparate threads into a single fabric.

  Next, the new king made some crucial adjustments to the tax laws that improved the climate for private enterprise. The new laws enabled entrepreneurs to invest money in commercial and protoindustrial ventures, which allowed a few men to gain wealth and power from business acumen rather than from land ownership, which was a first step toward moving past feudalism.

  Previous kings had ruled without any official cabinet, employing their kinfolks and close relatives as their functionaries. Sher Ali put together a formal government with a cabinet that included a prime minister, a treasurer, a head clerk, and ministers for such concerns as foreign affairs, internal affairs, and war. The cabinet was selected in the harem, where Sher Ali’s wife Mirmon Ayesha presided over the process.2 This king also created a commission of twelve learned men to study issues confronting the government and the country and give him disinterested advice. It was the faint beginnings of what would develop into a whole class in Afghan society, later dubbed the technocracy.

  Sher Ali convened a standing jirga that was an incipient parliament, though its function was purely advisory. It consisted of two thousand representatives from all parts of the country, who met for the first time in 1865. The first question the king put to them had to do with a brother who was raising rebellion. What should he do about this brother? he asked. “Crush him,” the parliament cried out, and with their imprimatur Sher Ali marched on Kandahar, called his brother out to battle, and defeated him.3

  Sher Ali’s career suggests he had some mettle in him, but you wouldn’t know it from his pictures. Photography had just been invented, so this is the first Afghan king of whom we have photos. They show a solemn, curious man with a full beard, pursed lips, a curved nose, and eyes steeped in a combination of rumination and speculation. He looks sort of melancholy. On his head he wears a tall karakul cap that resembles an upside-down beehive but looks rather more stylish than it sounds.

  He cuts a figure that would not have looked out of place in some crowded little clock-making shop in Eastern Europe. Had he not been king of Afghanistan, he probably would have been tinkering with machines and puttering about with odd devices somewhere. Indeed, in the ten years of peace he managed to eke out, he imported various tools and machines from the outside world and tinkered with them in his palace. One such device was a lithographic press, which he installed at his palace of Bala Hissar. He used it to publish the country’s first newspaper, a sixteen-page tabloid called the Sun, as well as pamphlets on subjects he found interesting, especially military matters, some of which he turned into manuals for distribution to his army officers.4

  Sher Ali built up a national professional army of fifty-six thousand soldiers.5 He got it into his head that soldiers should look like the ones in pictures of Western wars. No longer would he tolerate draftees going into battle wearing their own clothes. No more baggy trousers and turbans! The king designed and issued uniforms to his soldiers so that they would all look alike and would all look like the troops of European nations. So the king ensconced in the capital now had an army that looked different from the tribal warriors who had served the kings of the past. The tribal warriors still existed, though, since these were not professional soldiers but simply tribesmen who picked up arms when arms were necessary—the country now had two different sets of warriors, one the government’s, one the people’s (or perhaps, simply, the people).

  Quite a few Afghans had gone to India to serve in the British armies. Sher Ali lured some of them back to drill his troops and teach them how to march in rows and pivot on command and present arms and all the other pretty martial maneuvers armies practice when they’re not fighting. Sher Ali built the first armaments factories in Kabul so that someday he would be able to arm his own troops without aid from foreign nations. The next time some great power decided to treat this sovereign country as its own back yard (thought Sher Ali) Afghanistan would be ready.

  The king ordered that his troops be domiciled not in the cities, rubbing elbows with everyday citizens (with whom they sometimes clashed), but in separate garrisons. In fact, Sher A
li started building a whole new military city called Sherpoor, north of Kabul, a project that employed six thousand laborers, a thousand carpenters, and numerous skilled artisans for five years.6 But the city was never completed, because in the late 1870s the British and Russians began making trouble again, trouble that brought this brief chapter of the Afghan story to a close.

  8

  Interrupted Again

  BY 1878, CONTENTIONS AMONG THE GREAT POWERS OF EUROPE HAD entered a new phase. Prussia’s kaiser Wilhelm I had an “iron chancellor,” Otto Von Bismarck, who welded the many German-speaking fragments of central Europe into a single state. The new nation-state of Germany altered the enduring competition among Britain, France, and Russia. Bismarck proclaimed that the great issues of the day could not be settled by speeches but only by “blood and iron.” France was his immediate target, and, when one looks at the French president of that time, Louis-Napoleon III, with his moustache waxed to sharp peaks extending past either side of his face, it’s hard to avoid seeing a pompous blowhard who wouldn’t last long once speechifying gave way to blood and iron.

  And so it was. Bismarck tricked the French fool into declaring war on him, thundered across the border, crushed the country with laughable ease, and took the key provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which were rich in iron ore, a key ingredient of industrialization. The acquisition of those provinces made Germany an instant contender for world power. Bismarck and his kaiser then began looking around the world to see what territories were left for a latecomer to colonize.

  The fall of France, however, gave Britain a chance to swell even stronger than before. The British Empire then covered 23 percent of the world’s land surface. Counting colonized subjects, the British government ruled about a quarter of the people on Earth.1 The island itself had only 2 percent of the world’s population but 45 percent of the world’s industry. Britain consumed five times as much energy as the United States and 155 times as much as Russia.2 Britain’s global domination dwarfed that of any previous power in history. But the rise of Germany looked like a possible challenge to Britain’s dominion.

  The rise of Germany also created fresh consternation in Russia, which was still huge, primitive, and without ready access to an ocean port, and therefore still hobbled in the global rush for colonies. Two decades earlier, Russia had lost the Crimean War. The subsequent treaty had blocked Russian expansion into the eroding Ottoman Empire and had clipped its naval power even in the Black Sea. Now Russia was fighting back. It was re-establishing its Black Sea ports, and, if it couldn’t move into the Balkans, well then, it would push its frontiers further east, the traditional direction of Russian expansion. The Ottoman Empire was going into its real death throes, and European powers were jockeying to pick up the territories breaking off of it. In the Levant, the lands bordering the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, this competition was called the Eastern Question. In central Asia, east of the Caucuses, the Great Game was on again.

  In 1865, Russian troops took the city of Tashkent. Two years later, Russia captured the famous old city of Bukhara. The next year it occupied Samarkand. In 1873, Russia forced the khan of Khiva to accept “Russian protection,” an imperialist euphemism for “nice little country you got here, what a shame if something was to happen to it.” Three years later Russia annexed the adjacent khanate of Khokand. Its power now extended to the very banks of the Amu River. Only Afghanistan stood between the Russian juggernaut and the pugnacious British in India. It was a bad place for a little country to be situated.

  When Sher Ali secured control of Afghanistan, William Gladstone’s Liberal Party was in power in Great Britain. The Liberals were a probusiness party, rather like America’s nineteenth-century Republicans. They were wary of foreign adventures that might cause turmoil, because turmoil was bad for business. When it came to colonial affairs, their attitude was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In the decades since Auckland’s Folly, an ambiguously autonomous Afghanistan had served British interests well enough. Gladstone thought it best to stick with the status quo there, and his governor general of India Lord Northbrook agreed.

  But the election of 1874 brought to power Benjamin Disraeli’s conservatives, an upper-class party that was trying to expand its appeal to the working class. Banging the drum for militaristic adventures abroad for the greater glory of empire and queen looked like a way to rally such voters. Disraeli’s government replaced Lord Northbrook with Lord Lytton, who definitely favored a “Forward Policy,” like Auckland.

  Disraeli and his group decided that a neutral buffer state between the Indus and Oxus wasn’t good enough. The independent attitude of King Sher Ali worried them. They doubted that, when push came to shove, Sher Ali would be able to keep the Russians out of his country. The czar was looking too aggressive. Better to get a firm hold of Afghanistan at once, was Disraeli’s position, before the Russians turned it into one more of their protectorates. The new chapter of the Forward Policy began, therefore, with a move designed to let Sher Ali know who was boss. Sher Ali had a favorite son named Abdullah, whom he had named his heir. He had another son Yaqub, whom he disliked, perhaps because Yaqub had organized a revolt against his father. Sher Ali had put Yaqub in prison.

  Imagine Sher Ali’s dismay when he received a missive from Lord Lytton ordering him to disinherit Abdullah and name Yaqub as his successor. Why the British preferred one son to the other, they didn’t say. Perhaps they had talked privately with Yaqub and liked the way his mind worked.

  The missive also warned the Afghan king not to look to the Russians for help because, as Lytton wrote, “we can pour an army into your country before a single Russian soldier can arrive to help you.” Sher Ali was told that, if he was friendly, the British could protect him from any czar; if he was unfriendly, the British could break him “as a reed.”3 The letter ended by telling Sher Ali an envoy was coming to talk about these matters.

  Sher Ali didn’t like the substance or the tone of these directives. He let a period of insulting silence pass, then informed the British that he preferred to name his own heir, thank you, and suggested that instead of receiving an envoy from them, he would send one to them. Any issues that needed sorting out could be discussed in Calcutta.

  When Sher Ali’s man arrived in the capital of the Raj, what transpired wasn’t a discussion. Britain delivered its terms: British agents would be stationed in Kabul. Britain would control the borders of Afghanistan. British citizens would have free reign to enter the country at will and go anywhere in it that they pleased. British citizens would be subject to British laws, not Afghan ones. British businessmen would be free to cut deals with anyone in the country without government interference. If Sher Ali would concede these few points, the British would let him name his own heir, pay him and his heir handsome subsidies, and supply Afghanistan with all the military aid and advisors the country needed to hold the Russian Bear at bay.

  When the amir read these terms, he flew into a rage. Then he sat down and dictated a letter, the gist of which was: No. Unlike his crafty father, this intemperate amir told the British he would defend Afghan sovereignty to the last man. Unfortunately, by then, Russian troops were massing along his northern border. Even as Sher Ali was telling the British they couldn’t enter his country, a Russian “diplomatic” delegation was crossing the Amu River without permission, headed for Kabul. Sher Ali sent frantic messages telling them to halt, turn back, they were not invited, they must not come to Kabul. The Russian team ignored these messages. They just kept coming. They came right into the city. They took rooms, unpacked their suitcases, and knocked on the palace door. They were here to make friends, they said.

  Tragedy took that moment to strike the amir’s household. His favorite son, his chosen heir, his beloved Abdullah, died of some sudden illness. The whole court went into mourning. The amir, a man of strong and tender feelings, took the loss especially hard. He let court business go untended for days while he holed up in his private chambers, steeping in grief. When ne
xt he was seen, his eyes were red from weeping. And it was then that another letter arrived from Lord Lytton. Sher Ali should prepare to receive a British mission in Kabul at once. Sher Ali ordered his border forces not to let the British in. When a small detachment of British diplomats and its military escort arrived at the Afghan border, the commander of the border fortress there blocked them from proceeding. “If it weren’t for the fact that I have known some of you as friends in the past,” he said, “I would shoot you right now.”4

  The British delegation turned back, deeply offended. Lord Lytton wrote an apoplectic letter to the amir of Afghanistan, demanding an apology, then waited for a response. The silence was deafening. It was then that Lytton began massing his forces. In the First Anglo-Afghan War, India had sent one army of about twenty-five thousand troops. From that disaster they took a lesson: one army was not enough. This time, they prepared three, each about as big as the single army they had sent in earlier.

  Sher Ali was in agony. The Russians had come, the British were coming, his heir was dead, and he had no one to entrust his kingdom to except Yaqub, the hateful son who had rebelled. He decided to ask the Russians to help him against the British. But he had to let Yaqub out of prison and put him in charge of the country while he went north to seek an audience with the czar—he had no choice: the British armies were already pushing into the Khyber Pass, the Bolan Pass, and the Kurram Valley. Afghan forces had blocked them at all three entry points, but for how long?

  When Sher Ali reached the Amu River, the czar’s men wouldn’t let him cross. For political reasons much bigger than Afghanistan, the czar had decided this was not the time to confront the British head-on. He ignored Sher Ali’s pleas and kept him penned up in his own country, and it was then that this tragic king just gave up. He took to his bed with a fever. The doctors urged him to eat, keep up his strength, but he would not touch food or water. His leg had been hurt during his journey, but he refused medical attention. The wound turned gangrenous, and he turned down all treatment. Within weeks, at the age of fifty-four, the amiable Sher Ali was dead.