by Tamim Ansary
But Abdu’Rahman could do no bursting out. Global powers confined him within his borders. And since he couldn’t conquer widely, he set his cap to conquering deeply, turning his ferocity inward, upon Afghanistan itself. He tried to transform this universe of tiny independent feudal parts and autonomous village republics into a single nation-state.
The man who carried out this project was among the toughest figures ever to stride across the Afghan stage. Even as a boy, he was a scary fellow, this grandson of Dost Mohammed’s. His own father had governed Balkh, a major province in northern Afghanistan. In his childhood, therefore, the boy who would be king luxuriated in a provincial version of the royal court. In that province, his family held absolute power and he enjoyed every privilege.
One day, at the age of twelve or thirteen, he wanted to see if his small-caliber gun was powerful enough to kill a man, so he shot his servant. The man died, the teenager laughed. The murder was so flagrant his father had no choice but to punish the boy by putting him in prison. But any fellow who can kill a man just to see if his gun works is going to prove useful to someone: his father released him from prison after a year and, by the time he was seventeen, made him one of his major commanders. Later his father rebelled against Sher Ali but lost the contest. When he went into exile north of the Amu River, Abdu’Rahman went into exile with him. The onetime prince and future king lived in poverty for a few years, making a living as best he could buying and selling ancient artifacts and archeological arcana he found floating about in the markets—a warrior scraping by as an antiquities dealer. He lived on a quarter of the money he made and saved the rest for a rainy day—the day he would storm Afghanistan.1
In 1893, thirteen years after taking over from the British, this Iron Amir would meet with a British delegation from India to formalize the agreements hammered out so hastily at the start of his reign. The British nominated General Frederick Roberts to head up their delegation, but Abdu’Rahman curtly told them to send someone else: Roberts personified the second British invasion of Afghanistan and was too hated by Afghans for any Afghan king, even an “iron amir,” to make a deal with. So the British replaced him with Mortimer Durand, foreign minister to the Raj.2
Abdu’Rahman came to the meeting with no advisors, no tribal leaders, and no representatives of his people. He sat down with Durand, one on one. The British diplomat proposed a southern border for Afghanistan, and Abdu’Rahman accepted it. The agreement the two men made at that meeting continues to cause trouble to this day, because Durand drew an arbitrary line on the map, which ran right through lands traditionally occupied by the Pushtoons, a line that corresponded to no geographical feature on the ground. When you’re there, you can’t tell where it is unless someone tells you. Villages on both sides of this so-called Durand Line are inhabited by members of the same tribes. People on one side of the line have cousins on the other side, and vice versa. How did Durand decide where to draw this line? By calculating how far forward into Afghan territory the British could push without getting pushed back. The Durand Line marks the line of scrimmage at a particular moment. As such, it is sure to be a place of enduring conflict. It froze into place Afghan resentment about losing Peshawar, turning that problem into a permanent political fact.
The Durand Line
In order to achieve his ultimate goal, however, Abdu’Rahman needed a definite territory within which to reign supreme, so he accepted the Durand Line. Anything to keep the rest of the world out. Once the border was finalized, the amir basically closed it. After that, few Afghans were permitted to travel abroad and few visitors were allowed inside. The amir’s government controlled even what artifacts, items, and information came in. To sever his country even more effectively from the outside world, he decreed that no railroads be built within its borders. By isolating Afghanistan, he cut it off from modern advances but secured a free hand to carry out his plan.
Before he could launch his grand scheme, he had a few things to take care of. First on the agenda was Ayub, the hero of Maiwand. This guy was too popular with the Afghan people! He would have to be eliminated. Abdu’Rahman took to the field and defeated him decisively. One down.
Another cousin raised his head. Ishaq wasn’t a military hero like Ayub, but he governed a large province in the north and governed it well, dispensing justice with compassion, which made him popular. He too would have to go. Abdu’Rahman took to the field, and Ishaq, never much of a military man, fled the country. Two down. Next?
Next, the whole Mangal tribe revolted. Abdu’Rahman crushed them. Then the Ghilzai tribes revolted. Abdu’Rahman crushed them. In fact, Abdu’Rahman fought forty tribal wars during his reign and won them all. Mere victory wasn’t enough for him, though. To make sure his vanquished subjects never rebuilt their power, he launched a policy that the Assyrians had pursued three millennia earlier and that Stalin would try a few decades later. He moved whole populations around the country to separate them from natural allies and plop them down among people whom they didn’t trust and who didn’t trust them. Entire tribes of Pushtoons were sent from south to north; thousands of families were forced to move from the northern steppes to areas south of Kabul. This autocratic program did have a salutary side effect: it shuffled the separate peoples of Afghanistan together, encouraging their integration into a single polity.
For most kings, fighting and winning forty wars in twenty-one years would pretty much define the reign; how much time would there be to get anything else done? For Amir Abdu’Rahman, the tribal wars were the tip of the iceberg. Even as he was subduing the Pushtoon tribes, the amir was massively reorganizing his country. In the past, Afghanistan had been divided into provinces and districts that more or less matched up to tribal areas. Territory inhabited mostly by one tribe would be one district, for example, and an adjacent territory inhabited mostly by another tribe would be another. The administrative structure of the country reflected the social patchwork. The governor of a district and the main tribal chief of that district would be one and the same. It was easy and it made sense.
Abdu’Rahman went exactly the other way. Not only did he increase the number of provinces and subdivide them into many more districts, he deliberately drew the district lines to cut across tribal territories. A given district governor would thus have families from several different tribes under his jurisdiction, and a tribe that inhabited a single contiguous territory would be divided among two or more districts. Thus, the matrix of governors and subgovernors could not conflate into the matrix of tribes and subtribes. Any particular person answered to the authority of his tribal elders but also to the authority of his district officials. These were two separate, unrelated systems.
The amir then did everything he could to empower his own appointees, whose authority came from the capital, over local tribal chieftains, whose authority came from the grass roots. After all, no matter how much power his governors garnered, he could still fire or reassign them. He could not do this with the khans and other tribal elders.
Then again, there was always a chance that an official appointed to some provincial office would build an independent power base, especially if the amir didn’t keep a close watch on him. And how many officials could one amir watch closely? Well, quite a few, actually, if he had an effective spy network, so the amir built an intelligence service second to none, and this became a permanent feature of Afghan politics, continuing to the present day.
Thanks to his spies, the amir was able to disgrace and demote his governors whenever he deemed it necessary. He also regularly ruined his court officials, reducing them to nobodies. Typically, he would call a targeted official to court, claiming that someone had accused him of corruption. The official had to bring his books along and prove publicly, right then and there, that he had not misused the king’s funds or done anything wrong. No one was ever able to produce books so clean that some discrepancy could not be found. As soon as a missing number, arithmetical error, or other glitch was discovered, the official was dismi
ssed, his property confiscated, and his reputation ruined. He was lucky if he kept his freedom. In fact, not infrequently, the disgraced official was lucky if he kept his life. This happened so routinely that once, when the amir named an old friend of his to a prestigious office, the man heaped his possessions onto a cart and had them hauled to the palace.
“What’s the meaning of this?” the amir frowned
“Your excellency,” said the fellow, “I know that once you appoint a man to a high position, his destiny is to lose everything he owns within a few years. I’m trying to save time by turning over my property now.”3 As a token of their friendship, the amir did not have the man killed.
The amir kept a large establishment of bureaucrats at his court, many of whom started out as ghulam bachas, “slave boys,” although the word slave here has the special meaning it acquired in Muslim societies over the course of centuries. These were boys taken from their families in their infancy and raised and educated at court under the guidance of the amir. They were molded into a privileged class of skilled officeholders who ran the country but had no support network of their own, only the amir’s approval. In Afghanistan, the most favored of these were called amir-zadas, “the amir’s children.” Later the title was abbreviated to mirza.
Abdu’Rahman had a legion of mirzas. He put them in his cabinet and gave them command of his armies. Not only did he allow them to enjoy lives of luxury and grace but he insisted on it, for they represented his grandeur and, therefore, everywhere they went, they must be seen in the finest garments, riding the most magnificent horses. The trouble was, young men steeped in so much privilege tended to get big ideas. The amir was always on the lookout for plots that his pampered mirzas might be concocting. His favorite wife Halima, nicknamed Bobo Gul, once asked him why he didn’t just kill the ones he didn’t trust.
“It wouldn’t be practical,” he replied. “I don’t trust any of them.”4 Halima was not only the Iron Amir’s favorite wife but something of a co-ruler, a formidable personality in her own right. People said the whole world was afraid of Abdu’Rahman, but he was afraid only of Bobo Gul. Like her husband a direct descendant of Dost Mohammed, she went on diplomatic missions for the amir, negotiating with tribal chieftains and rival commanders. Her maids were trained in the use of guns, and she had her own cavalry of bodyguards, the core of which were women warriors.5
Like his uncle Sher Ali, Amir Abdu’Rahman decided the nation needed a professional army. Tribal levies were fine for fighting foreign invaders, but a king needed troops loyal only to him in order to fight . . . well, his own people. Within three years of taking power, the Iron Amir had built an army of forty-three thousand paid troops. By 1887, he had grown this to sixty thousand. By 1890 he had over a hundred thousand men in arms, including infantry, cavalry, and artillerymen. Every regiment had its own mullah who contributed to the war effort by preaching that if the troops fled the field of battle, calamity would befall the Muslim community, and they would face eternity in hell.6
Guns had been a hobby of Abdu’Rahman in his youth (surprise surprise). Once he became amir, guns became his passion. A French engineer once tried to impress him with a telescope. He pointed the device at the skies and said, “Look, your highness. Through this instrument, you can see the moon.”
“What good is the moon to me?” the amir growled. “Make that thing shoot bullets and I might be interested.”7
The amir armed his troops with guns supplied by the British, but he also built armament factories in and around Kabul. At the height of his reign, Afghanistan was producing on average as many guns as any European power, enough to put at least one rifle in the hands of every adult male in the country.8 But the king had no intention of putting guns in the hands of anyone except his own troops.
Even though Abdu’Rahman fought virtually all his wars with his own Muslim subjects, he proclaimed himself the world’s leading Defender of the Faith. Previous Afghan kings had traced their authority to the will of their people. Ahmad Shah, for example, based his legitimacy on the elders’ vote at that famous loya jirga. Abdu’Rahman, by contrast, derived his authority from God, like those seventeenth-century European kings who asserted a “divine right to rule.” By waving an Islamic banner, Abdu’Rahman could accuse rebels against his rule of defying God.
To bolster his religious claims, Abdu’Rahman enforced the most rigid orthodox laws and the most conservative of social strictures. He had muhtasibs, “morality police,” who operated out of mosques. They forced women to keep their faces veiled in public, made sure men prayed at the appointed times, and flogged anyone they caught eating during Ramadhan. Under instructions from the top, they even punished people for using foul language in public. By aligning himself with the extreme social conservatives, Abdu’Rahman positioned himself to the right of the classes he intended to attack and defeat—the elders and the mullahs.
This was his most audacious campaign—going head-to-head with the whole traditional leadership of his country in an effort to substitute his authority for theirs. When I say “elders” I’m talking about all those local chieftains, maliks, khans, and paterfamilias, all those men with a reputation among their own, all those guys who had built prestige among their fellows by proving themselves in action over time, all those myriad local leaders whose authority derived from the people they lived among and dealt with directly. This class was all the harder to break or control because the elders had only local affiliations. They belonged to no larger structure. They could not be defeated by defeating their leaders. Each and every one of them had to be defeated separately. This was not a case of going to war with a legal entity or a political entity or even with a legal or political system: this was making war on the culture itself. Conquering the tribes was nothing compared to subduing the country’s traditional leadership. To the extent that he succeeded, this was Abdu’Rahman’s most astonishing achievement.
Here’s how he went about it. He ordered that every village, every town, and every neighborhood in the cities elect one man to represent them in their dealings with the government, a figure called a kalantar. The king also fielded thousands of his own officials to deal with these local kalantars, and his local officials were called kotwals.
The kalantars’ job was not to let the king know what the people wanted. They were charged with collecting taxes, enforcing the king’s conservative social laws, and reporting any antigovernment talk they heard, any signs of subversion, any hints of suspicious activity. Whatever they discovered, they had to report to the kotwal. Essentially, the kalantars became part of the king’s spy network.
They were also made responsible for keeping records of who lived in their area, where they lived, what they owned, and who their fathers were. Every Afghan was issued a numbered identity card, a tazkira, on which this information was recorded. Travel was forbidden except by permission of the authorities. Issuing travel permits was another duty of these people’s representatives, but they had to secure approval for each permit from the local kotwal.
The kalantars were put on government salaries, which put a carrot into the system alongside the stick. Kalantars got a reward for doing their jobs well, and that was the carrot; but they if they didn’t deliver, if they failed to turn in their neighbors and inform on their kinfolk, they were stripped of their livelihood. That was the stick.
The kalantars had quotas, as did kotwals. If a kalantar didn’t turn in enough tax evaders, cheats, liars, thieves, murderers, and assorted wrongdoers, it didn’t mean his district was well behaved; it meant he was lax in his duties, and his pay was docked. If a robbery occurred and the culprit was not found, the kalantar himself had to recompense the victim.
The kotwals were on the firing line too. If someone was cheating on his taxes and the kotwal did not discover it, he faced punishment. At the very least, he might be obliged to make up the taxes out of his own pocket, but he might go to prison or worse. Dissidents caught disparaging the king had their lips sewn shut and/or their tongues
ripped out. Those caught plotting or carrying out subversion were put in iron cages hung by the wayside and left to starve in public view as a warning. The same punishment was meted out to highwaymen and other common criminals, as a result of which the amir was able to boast to an English diplomat that there was less crime in Afghanistan than in England.9 During his reign, this was probably true.
Sometimes, men convicted of really heinous crimes, such as plotting against the king, were strapped to the mouths of cannons, which were then fired, blowing their bodies to pieces. (This mode of punishment was pioneered by the British to punish mutineers in India.) Although this was actually a mercifully quick way to go, the image created deep psychological dread. Most dreaded of all, however, was the punishment known as Siah Chah—“Black Well.” I’ll leave the details of that one to the readers’ imagination.
The amir also went up against another class that was tough to break: the mullahs and other clerics. Again, the power of this class came from social consensus, habit, and tradition. The king could not subdue them by disrupting their organization—they didn’t have one. He couldn’t destroy their headquarters or their leaders. They had none. So he attacked them in another way. He put them on his payroll.
He didn’t give every self-proclaimed mullah a salary, of course—only the ones who toed the line and convinced the amir’s kotwals of their loyalty. Many mullahs accepted the money because they had no reason to oppose the king: he was not against Islam, he wasn’t pushing for any social changes offensive to Afghan culture—in fact he proclaimed himself more Muslim, more adamantly orthodox, than anyone. Many mullahs therefore came over. Why wouldn’t they?
Once they started living on government money, the king had them. He could impose conditions, and he did. He declared that mullahs had to prove they really knew their religion (quite a reasonable demand, actually). Government officials traveled all around the country administering a test devised by the amir and his top theologians. Some 90 percent of the country’s mullahs flunked. This is not such a surprise: most Afghans had their own very idiosyncratic understanding of religion, a combination of classical legislation, local folkways, customs, and traditions. And even though mullahs (supposedly) knew how to read, books were few and hard to come by.
