Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  After proving the ignorance of the mullahs, the amir declared that mullahs must be licensed. No unlicensed mullah could get a salary, and anyone caught carrying out the functions of a mullah without a license could be punished. In his compassion for his people, however, and out of his reverence for God’s will, the amir set up religious schools where people could learn what they needed to pass the test. Those who studied at religious seminaries in the capital, which were built and watched over by the amir and his high officials, didn’t have to take the test. Their diploma alone got them a license. Diplomas from selected prestigious Islamic universities outside Afghanistan were also accepted as proof of religious competence.

  The same methods used to bring the mullahs under government control were used successfully to rope in the higher religious judges and jurisconsults—the qazis and muftis. The amir named one judge the supreme judge and included him in his cabinet as a minister of religious affairs, empowered to rule on the rulings of all other judges. The amir also appointed a commission to sort through the schools of Islamic jurisprudence and pick one and one alone for Afghanistan. Sunni Muslims recognize four schools of jurisprudence, four versions of the Shari’a, as equally orthodox. Though similar in principle, they have myriad differences in detail. The commission chose the Hanafi School of Law as the official legal system for Afghanistan. Rulings derived from this version of the Shari’a superseded rulings based on any other schools.

  Some clerics resisted the amir’s attempt to control them. Those clerics were exiled, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. The whole time this was going on, the amir continued to proclaim himself the Defender of the Faith and the most Muslim of Muslims, which allowed him to argue that recalcitrant mullahs were resisting him out of ambition and pride, not out of religious principle.

  The amir’s system depended on countless government employees, all of whom drew salaries: his army, his state mullahs, his spies, the kalantars and kotwals, the provincial governors and officials, the district governors and subgovernors, not to mention the mirzas in the capital—Abdu’Rah-man needed more revenue than any previous king had squeezed out of this country. He commenced to tax everything: Afghans now had to pay land taxes, animal taxes, and tree taxes; they had planting taxes and harvesting taxes, income taxes and business taxes, trade taxes and travel taxes. In any commercial transaction, the sellers owed something to the state, and so did the buyers. If you got married—look out: you owed a marriage tax. If you died—well, that too was taxed: your survivors had to pay. He ended up gleaning four times as much revenue in taxes as Amir Sher Ali had gotten in his last years.

  The king’s insatiable need for revenue made his enormous apparatus of kalantars, kotwals, village enforcers, and spies indispensable. He needed them to make sure everyone was paying the taxes they “owed.” And the amir couldn’t take the chance that his kotwals would collude with the locals to defraud him, so he built a network of spies to spy on his spies. The various levels of spies found plenty to report, because no matter how hard the king beat down his people, the people kept rising up: they were Afghans.

  The spies were only one branch of the amir’s dreaded Ministry of Interior. His interior minister Mir Sultan specialized in night arrests. Any unexpected knock on the door after dark made people tremble. No one knew who might be arrested next or who had been arrested already or why they had been arrested or what happened to them. Many people just vanished, disappearances that were called nam-girak: “the name taking.”

  Finally, Mir Sultan had sown so much terror that even the highest court officials including the heir apparent wanted him stopped. And the amir agreed. Mir Sultan had been a valuable instrument, but now he had more value as a scapegoat. One day this architect of terror was called to court to defend himself. The amir told his council of advisors, “This man has killed about 60,000 people and I tell all of you assembled here, I sentenced 15 or 20 of them at most. The rest he killed on his own authority and for his own reasons. Tell me, brothers: what should be done with such a man?”10

  The advisors knew the answer to that one. Mir Sultan was publicly hanged, and the amir took credit for saving his people from a monster. Everyone was glad to see the last of said monster, but most knew who the real king of terror was. The amir made it pretty obvious with his prisons. He had a dungeon below each of his palaces, and near the heart of Kabul he built Dehmazang prison, capable of holding nine thousand prisoners. The prisons kept proliferating until at one point (according to some reports) the amir had seventy thousand people incarcerated in Kabul—equal to a third of the city’s population.11 Political dissidents, corrupt officials, tax cheats, liars, merchants suspected of dishonesty—old, young, men, women, highborn, and lowborn—no one was exempt.

  The most savage of the amir’s wars were fought not against other Pushtoon tribes but against other ethnic groups within his borders. The Hazaras—a Persian-speaking Shi’a people of Mongolian descent living in central Afghanistan—had been quite autonomous under previous kings. Their autonomy ended in the Iron Amir’s reign. Abdu’Rahman Khan deployed an army of a hundred thousand men in Hazarajat, counting both his own troops and the tribal levies he mustered. The entire Hazara population might not have been much more than 340,000.12 The Hazaras resisted fiercely, and the war was especially bloody, but, when it was over, Hazara power had been broken. The amir legalized slavery briefly, but only for Hazaras. They could be bought and sold in markets, and it even became customary for aristocratic men to give Hazara children to others of their class, just as a way of saying thank you, please accept this token of my appreciation.

  Abdu’Rahman’s last major campaign took him to the remote valleys northeast of Kabul, which had long been called Kafiristan, “Land of the Infidels,” because the people there practiced an animist religion involving elaborate graves decorated with images carved of wood. The five valleys and the numerous side canyons of Kafiristan were so narrow and rugged that no one had been able to conquer this area since Alexander the Great. Amir Abdu’Rahman conquered it in six months and renamed it Nuristan, “The Land of Light.” With that conquest he absorbed the last bit of territory within his borders into his administration, and soon he laced it too with kotwals and government mullahs, like all the rest of his territory.

  Ahmad Shah Baba, at his height, had been a superchieftain. Amir Abdu’Rahman Khan was not content to be a tribal chieftain of any size. He set out to change who the king was in Afghan society, which required changing Afghan society itself. By the time he was done, Afghanistan had a central government with a far-flung bureaucracy that could make its power felt in every part of the country and could push its way into the lives of all.

  But Abdu’Rahman did not succeed in replacing what was there with something new. He may have wanted to create a single, entire, homogenous, new society, but he ended up creating a second Afghanistan laid over the first. The universe of mullahs, maliks, village republics, tribes, and tribal feudalism with all its khans and feudal princes (sardars) remained the deepest subsoil of the country. Another organism atop that subsoil now began sending shoots down into it: the government and its appendages, centered in Kabul with nerves extending into the cities, and its agents and administrators all over the land, a new social system enmeshed and in competition with the old systems.

  This is not to say that each particular person was wholly part of one society or the other. Many people who worked for the central government had relatives in the countryside. Some people born into the universe of feudal village republics made their way to the towns and into the bureaucracy. The duality of Afghan society was uneasily recapitulated in private lives.

  In the end the fact remained: Abdu’Rahman’s agents could not get down into the heart of the villages. They could not get inside the walls of the family compounds or into the hidden worlds of clan and family privacy, the realm that constitutes the bulk of Afghan life. The Iron Amir set the parameters of a struggle in Afghanistan, between forward-looking change led by a central gover
nment and an urban elite, and backward-looking stasis vested in the villages and traditional leaders of the country, a struggle that would have profound consequences not just for Afghanistan itself but for attempts by foreign powers to intervene in the affairs of the country over the next century.

  10

  Starting Fresh

  AMIR ABDU’RAHMAN DIED IN 1901, LEAVING A NATION STUNNED TO quietude like a landscape flattened by a hurricane. His son Habibullah succeeded peacefully to the throne, and oh what a happy king was he! His father had done all the dirty work, and Habibullah was left with nothing to do but enjoy being king.

  He was a man of lusty enjoyments. He liked food, and so he grew stout in office. He liked sports, especially riding and hunting, and so he didn’t grow medically obese. He liked women, so he took all the wives allowed to him under religious law and then went on to accumulate concubines and more concubines, building a harem that might have seemed normal to Shah Shuja a hundred years ago but that, in these more modern times, struck even his closest courtiers as distasteful. And it wasn’t just that he acquired concubines. He had an eye for all women, including other men’s wives. He designated Wednesdays as Lady’s Night at his court and instructed all his officials to bring their wives and daughters to his entertainments. Once, an official refused. He said he was at his monarch’s service without reservation, but his wife was not. The king slapped him silly.1

  Habibullah could punish anyone he wanted, for any reason or no reason. That’s what it means to be an absolute monarch. But he didn’t want big things, like his father. Abdu’Rahman had wanted to reshape the nation and bend the course of history to his will, so he eviscerated whole villages, whole tribes, whole ethnic groups, whole sections of the country to attain his desires. Habibullah just wanted toys and pleasures, and he grabbed what he wanted, like a big, spoiled, petulant boy, so overprivileged he couldn’t even see his own sense of entitlement. He might slap a man who annoyed him, but he didn’t go out of his way to hurt anyone. Why bother? It was so much nicer to sit down to a fine dinner and then go visit the harem.

  For the rest of Afghanistan, Habibullah’s reign was a time of rest, recovery, and revival. Terrible though his father’s twenty-one years had been, his reign had wrought productive changes in the nation. The Iron Amir had solidified Afghanistan as a buffer state that could keep both Russia and Britain at bay. And thanks to those twenty-one years of horror, the country could at least be governed now: the king wasn’t standing on quicksand. A strong king might have used these assets to accomplish a great deal, had he been so inclined.

  Habibullah wasn’t really so inclined. He lacked ambition. And yet, despite this deficit, he did oversee a few accomplishments on his watch in an offhand sort of way. In 1904, his government established the country’s first secular secondary school, which was named Habibia after the amir. Afghanistan had plenty of madrassas—religious seminaries—but here at Habibia boys studied mathematics, geography, English, and Urdu. Eventually drawing, history, Turkish, and various sciences were added to the curriculum. Out of Habibia School came trickling a new class in Afghanistan, an educated elite equipped to develop and administer a modern country. Amir Sher Ali had commissioned twelve experts to advise him. Afghanistan was now producing lots of experts who might advise a king, should he want advice.

  This amir also acquired from the outside world whatever devices caught his fancy. On a visit to India, he saw a telephone, a relatively new invention, so he brought a few to Afghanistan. In 1908 he had lines strung from Kabul to several larger towns. He also established telegraph links among the country’s major cities. In 1910, the royal government started building a hydroelectric power station near Kabul. Soon the elite of the capital enjoyed electric lighting for at least part of each evening. Amir Habibullah also bought a car, and a few of his privileged friends and relatives followed suit.2 Then the amir improved a few roads around Kabul so that he and his buddies would have something to drive on and somewhere to go.

  Most of the credit for these developments must go to a financial wizard whom the amir employed, a man named Mohammed Hussein. This fellow was unconnected to the royal clan but was learned in the mysteries of bookkeeping and business math. The amir made the man his mustaufi—his head accountant and exchequer. He developed into the king’s boon companion and the second most powerful man in the land.3

  Mustaufi Hussein made it his business to normalize the conquests the king had inherited from his father by bureaucratizing the management of these lands and absorbing the conquered people efficiently into a rational tax system. Accordingly, early in his tenure, Mustaufi Hussein toured Hazarajat, the homeland of the Hazara ethnic group, whom the Iron Amir had crushed so terribly. The Mustaufi went there to calculate what the region could yield in taxes. I know something of this journey because he took along his personal physician, my grandfather Einuddin. During that journey, Einuddin cured a village chieftain somewhere. The chieftain expressed his gratitude by giving my grandfather a Hazara girl—for, although the door had been closed on further enslavement, those already owned could still be bought, sold, traded, or given away. That girl ended up as my grandfather’s fourth wife and bore him five sons, one of whom was my father.

  Afghanistan was now relatively peaceful and safe (unless you were standing close enough to the amir for him to sock you in a petulant moment). As a consequence, people who had fled the country in Abdu’Rahman’s time came filtering back. Among them was a man soon known as the amir’s chief counselor, or musahib, and his five sons, the brothers Musahibban. The eldest of these brothers and the leader of the pack was a grim, trim stick figure with gold-rimmed spectacles named Nadir. All five sons had grown up in British India and had been educated there in the British system. All five were well schooled in courtly graces. All five were tough, quiet fellows who hung together and operated as a unit under Nadir’s steely direction. They were related to the amir, but only distantly. The two lines had branched apart in the generation before Dost Mohammed the Great. Now that they were back in Afghanistan, they wormed their way into the king’s confidence. Nadir became commander in chief of the amir’s armies, while his brothers secured important provincial posts. Their sister Ulya Janab helped secure their position at court by marrying Habibullah. This accomplished woman dressed in European clothes, wrote poetry, and spoke several languages fluently. She was translating from Urdu into Dari a biography of Prophet Mohammed’s second successor Omar when she died. It was finished after her death, and her brother published it in 1932.

  Another man who came back was Mahmoud Tarzi, the most incendiary of the returning exiles. Tarzi’s family had settled in the Ottoman Empire when they left Afghanistan, and, growing up in Turkey, Tarzi had imbibed the heady, revolutionary brew stirred up by the Young Turks, who were not so much a movement as a whole array of movements that shared one theme in common: enough of the stagnant Muslim past! Let us embrace the future, the new! Not all of the Young Turks were young, and those who started out young were still calling themselves Young Turks when they grew old. “Young” did not denote their age but their attitude.

  Tarzi brought Young-Turk effervescence to Afghanistan, and he too became a fixture at court. His great hero and defining influence was the radical Muslim modernist Jamaluddin-i-Afghan, who had tutored the sons of Dost Mohammed and had written up a modernization program for Amir Sher Ali. Like his hero, Tarzi believed that he could transform the nation by molding the mind of its monarch. Like Jamaluddin, therefore, he entered Afghan history as a teacher: he tutored Amir Habibullah’s sons, hoping one of them would end up on the throne. What he taught the kids was much more than reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. He filled their heads with information about the world beyond the borders of Afghanistan and with visionary dreams about the future.

  As a boon companion of the king’s, Tarzi was close to his exchequer Mustaufi Hussein as well. Hussein’s son Khalillulah, who became Afghanistan’s foremost modern poet, studied with Tarzi as a child. Seven decades l
ater, thinking back to those days, he remembered how he was playing around in Tarzi’s study one day when he came across several books his teacher had translated from French into Dari. Khalilullah started reading the first one and kept reading until he had inhaled all four. The books were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island, and A Voyage to the Sky, novels by Jules Verne.4

  Tarzi was not just a translator but a writer. Tarzi is actually a pen name that became a family name. It means “stylist,” for this was a literary family, going back to the days of Dost Mohammed. Tarzi was an accomplished poet, but he didn’t write the old-fashioned stuff that Rumi and Jami and Hafez and Ansary and other Afghan poets had written. He did use classical forms and follow classical rules of prosody, but his lines were not loaded with images of love and wine nor of moths incinerating themselves in candles as metaphors for mystical immersion in God. Tarzi was a different kind of romantic. He rhapsodized about telegraph lines and vaccines and streets paved with asphalt.5

  He started the most celebrated newspaper in Afghan history Seraj-ul-Akhbar , “Lamplight of the News,” in which he published news about the world as well as essays about breakthroughs in science and cultural innovations—about radio waves and weather prediction, the germ theory of disease, the French Revolution and its ideas, constitutions and political philosophies, new discoveries in psychology—the pot brimmed, it overflowed! Soon thereafter, his wife Asma Restya launched Afghanistan’s first women’s newspaper, which she edited and circulated privately among the urban elite.6