Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Then came the news about the soap-making machinery he had gotten in Germany, the soap factory he was planning to build in Kabul. His enemies in the hills of Afghanistan knew what that was all about. He was planning to make soap out of Muslim corpses. In fact, rumors said, he was planning to kill old people and boil them down and use the tallow to make soap—and then he intended to sell the soap to Hindus and Europeans. (New versions of this urban legend continue to crop up still.)

  Amanullah’s final European stop was Moscow. The Soviet government faced a dilemma. They felt the pressure not to be outdone by capitalist countries in their display of hospitality, but how could a dictatorship of the proletariat put pomp and circumstance into hosting a king? Fortunately, there was an escape clause. Lenin himself had hailed Amanullah as a brother when he launched his reforms and had called him one of Asia’s progressive leaders, so perhaps it would not violate the correct line to fuss over him a little. Amanullah was taken in hand by lesser officials in the Soviet foreign ministry; when they drove the royals from one public function to another, thousands of Soviet citizens lined the streets to cheer. Here, as in Germany, the banquets could not be quite as glamorous as those in Paris, but the Russians did discuss trade deals and military aid with Amanullah. On the other side of the continent, British officials gnashed their teeth.

  It was then that Nadir Khan, living in semiexile in France, sought out the British consul in Nice just to remind the British government he still existed, still had friends in Afghanistan, and wanted to be helpful in any way he could—and by the way, had he mentioned how he appreciated all that the British had done for Afghanistan?

  AMANULLAH CAME BACK TO AFGHANISTAN THROUGH IRAN. FEW MEN had ever been so full of themselves as he was by then. He drove himself across the border with his queen sitting next to him. Soraya was veiled again, but just barely. The first city the royal couple passed through was Herat. There, Amanullah gathered the eminent men of the city and told them about his great trip with childlike excitement. He assured them that Herat would someday be like Paris, but first the old stuff had to be cleared away. He derided the religious shrine called Gazurgah, burial place of eleventh-century Sufi poet Khwadja Abdullah Ansary, a place of sanctuary so sacred that people who sought refuge there were safe from harm so long as they stayed on the grounds: no king, no warlord, and no government had ever dared drag people from that place. Amanullah called that stuff a bunch of superstitious nonsense. He vowed to level the shrine, sweep away the rubble, and have something useful built in its place, a hospital perhaps. 4 (Or a soap factory?)

  Already, however, he was sinking into gloom. Europe had been so wondrous, and his own country seemed so hopelessly backward to him now. By the time he reached Kandahar, he was angry. The whole city turned out to greet a man they considered their native son, but he lashed them with a savage lecture, telling them they oppressed their women, they were lazy and ignorant, and they would never improve their prospects unless they buckled down, worked hard, and changed their way of life—that is, stopped acting like Afghans and started acting like Europeans.

  The project of transforming Afghan society took on a manic urgency. The royal couple was evidently living in a dream. They hosted a ball, for example, at which the guests were expected to dress like courtiers in the court of Louis XVI. Amanullah had built some public parks and declared them no-burqa zones. One day, when he encountered a woman in a burqa there, he made her remove it, and he set fire to it. She had to go home exposed.5

  That fall, Amanullah let it be known that he was done compromising with his people. The laws listed in his Nizamnama would go into effect and would be implemented full force. Beards were outlawed. Native dress? Anyone caught wearing a turban in Kabul would be fined. Schools? Compulsory! For girls as well as boys! And the schools would be coeducational. What’s more, over a hundred men would be sent to Europe to study at universities, and there would be no religious test, only academic qualification. Ten girls would go abroad as well—only to Turkey and only to study midwifery, but that was merely the beginning. The king invited the leading women of his city to a special audience and told them that if any man tried to take a second wife, he hoped the first wife would shoot him. Amanullah said he would supply the weapon himself.

  In October, Amanullah gathered some six hundred notables of the city and delivered a monumental lecture that stretched over five days. He set up a gallery so that Soraya and a selected array of women could attend the lecture as well. The climactic moment came when he told the notables that religion did not require any veil at all for women: none! As he made that declaration, Queen Soraya stood up in the gallery and dramatically ripped off her own light veil—whereupon a number of other women took their courage in both hands and removed their shrouds as well.6

  13

  Things Fall Apart

  MEANWHILE, THERE WAS NEW TROUBLE NORTH OF KABUL. IN A DISTRICT called Kohistan (Mountain Land), a colorful Tajik bandit was making a name for himself. People called him Bachey Saqao, or “the Water Carrier’s Son.” A water carrier was the humblest of street vendors, a peddler who sold water out of a goatskin bag (Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din was a saqao.) The bandit from Mountain Land was indeed a mountain of a man, famed and feared for his strength. Once, in Peshawar, a big iron safe was stolen from a house, and the police immediately suspected Saqao, because who else could carry away something so heavy?

  Saqao was not a common thug but a swashbuckling trickster. Many Zorro-like stories circulated about his foiling of the police. Once, the cops had him cornered in a house, but he set fire to it and escaped in the smoky confusion.1 Many saw him as a Robin Hood figure, because he robbed the rich—moneylenders, merchants, and especially government officials working for the Mohammedzai aristocracy—and distributed the money to poor villagers in his home district (including himself ).2

  He worked solo at first but soon accumulated a band, and his band grew into a small army. His popular appeal and his powerful little force transformed him from a highwayman to a political menace, especially since he declared himself staunchly loyal to the Muslim clerics of the land, who were fighting the infidel in Kabul.

  After he sacked a government convoy and made off with a sizable sum, Amanullah had to take him seriously enough to open negotiations with him. The bandit was flattered that the king would negotiate with him and even more flattered when Amanullah offered to make him a general. He was ready to sign on the dotted line (except that he couldn’t read or write).

  Meanwhile a seemingly more serious problem had erupted. The powerful Shinwari tribe south of Kabul had set siege to the city of Jalalabad in the late months of 1928, cutting it off from the outside world. They took control of the roads leading in and out of the city, halting shipments of goods between Kabul and Peshawar. Here was the anti-Amanullah uprising that had been brewing for so long. The king decided to respond quickly and with overwhelming force, so he sent virtually all his troops south to battle the Shinwari.

  Then he made a grievous mistake. He telephoned the provincial official in charge of negotiating with Bachey Saqao, and the two men had a good laugh about the ignorant highwayman who thought the king of Afghanistan was actually going to make him a general. What a fool! Little did the king and his official know the joke was on them: they were talking on a party line, and the “ignorant bandit” had friends in the telephone office who were letting him listen in on another line. When the phone call ended, the bandit called his troops together and announced that they were going to Kabul.3

  Ordinarily, a gang of several hundred bandits could not have taken the biggest city in Afghanistan. The very idea was ridiculous. At this moment, however, the city happened to be unprotected because Amanullah could not recall his army: the telephone and telegraph lines had all been cut.

  The road into Kabul went past the military college. Most of the students and teachers had fled, but eighteen cadets (including my then-teenaged uncle Muzafaruddin) stayed behind and, by running from window to window fi
ring guns, fooled Saqao into thinking there was an army stationed in the college, ready to ambush him. The ruse didn’t work for long, but it made the bandit and his army pause, gaining Amanullah enough time to get his pregnant wife, his pregnant sister, his children, and members of his close family on a plane to the temporary safety of Kandahar.

  By then Saqao had renewed his assault on Kabul. Amanullah put a bounty on his head, but when he woke up the next morning, he found the city plastered with posters announcing Saqao’s offer of an even larger bounty for the king’s head: a menacing sign that the Son of the Water Carrier had a following, even in the city.

  Just then, an ultimatum arrived from the rebels in the south. They made all the usual demands of the social conservatives—purdah must be restored, government interference in marriage must stop, taxes must be lowered, the Shari’a must be reinstated as the only law of the land, and so on—but they also included some devastating new demands, aimed at the king personally: if Amanullah wanted to keep his crown, he would have to divorce Soraya, put his father-in-law in prison, and banish the Tarzi family from Afghanistan.

  They also included one final curious demand: the king must expel all foreign legations from Afghan soil except Great Britain. Some Amanullah supporters have pointed to that plank ever since as evidence that Great Britain engineered the overthrow of their amir as part of the never-ending Great Game. According to this theory, the Pushtoon tribes, the Deobandi activists, the Hazrats of Shor Bazaar—all were stooges manipulated by the puppet master in London.

  Britain has denied this charge, and private correspondence among British officials of that time supports British protestations: clearly the uprising caught the British by surprise, and they had no idea how to deal with it. But there is one final suspicious circumstance, which has kept the conspiracy theories alive. T. E. Lawrence was in Peshawar at this time under the assumed name of T. E. Shaw. This was the famous British intelligence agent known as Lawrence of Arabia, who engineered the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I. His business in Peshawar might well have been unconnected to the troubles in Afghanistan, but what his business was in Peshawar remains unknown.

  In any case, the ultimatum from the tribes crushed Amanullah’s spirit. He was down to no supporters in Kabul except his private guard, and even them he couldn’t trust—and this was the man who had once said, “The nation is my bodyguard.” On that winter day of 1929, he attempted a tragic capitulation. He went out in the snow, clad not in Western clothes nor in traditional garb nor in his royal robes but in the drab gray uniform of a common foot soldier. He found a platform for ornamental plants on a city street, climbed up onto the pedestal, and gave a pathetic speech to random citizens passing by, renouncing everything he had been fighting for. He would cancel education for girls, he said. He would shut all schools except the religious schools. He would appoint mullahs to his cabinet, repeal his Nizamnama, and declare the Shari’a the law of the land. As for monogamy—he was mistaken about that one too. Polygamy was a good thing. And to prove he meant what he said, he went back to his palace and married a nineteen-year-old girl living there, his cousin Aliah.

  It did no good. Saqao kept up his attacks. In mid-January 1929, the king took flight, driving west in his Rolls Royce. He tried to make a stand at Ghazni, at Kandahar, and at Herat, but no one rallied to his banner. Finally he, his father-in-law, and Queen Soraya drove right out of the country. Tarzi went back to Turkey. Amanullah and Soraya ended up in Italy, where their friend King Victor Emmanuel gave them refuge. They left Afghanistan with no money and had no job skills—openings for “king” being few in Europe just then—so Amanullah ended up making furniture for a living, and a meager living it was. When he died in 1960, thirty-one years after losing the throne, in exile and in poverty, not a single announcement appeared in Afghanistan.

  Back in Kabul, Saqao and his peasant army swarmed into the royal palace in the heart of the city. Apocryphal stories have them gawking at the rich furnishings and appropriating chamber pots for use as soup tureens. Supposedly they ate the fruit they saw lying about and tried to spit the seeds out the windows and were surprised to see them bounce back—for they had never seen glass window panes before. Such at least were the anecdotes circulated by the sophisticates of Kabul about the peasants who had conquered them.4

  Sher Agha Mujaddedi, the religious titan behind the rebellion, was still in India. Events had taken him by surprise. His younger brother Gul Agha was on the spot and figured he could claim the crown. He met with Bachey Saqao, thanked him for his service, and as the new amir of Afghanistan promised him a fine reward.

  Saqao begged to differ. He was going to be the new amir of Afghanistan. He thanked the Hazrats for their service and promised them honorable positions in his new administration. On the day of his coronation, Kabul learned that his real name was Habibullah—the same as Amanullah’s father. To distinguish him from the first Habibullah, he was called Habibullah Kalakani, a reference to his home village of Kalakan.

  This new amir might have been a decent enough person. He was sharp, he had a robust sense of humor, and he was unpretentious. He did not use the money he had gained from banditry to separate himself from the common people or set himself up as a fancy warlord. He told the people of Kabul quite frankly that he would need their help, because he could not read or write. He appointed a few of the former elite to his cabinet. He assured the British legation they were in no danger: his quarrel had never been with them.5

  As king, however, the poor man was in over his head. He moved to cement his popularity in the simplest way he could think of: he abolished all taxes except the charity levy approved by the Shari’a. Where he came from, that’s what everyone wanted of the government: no taxes! Soon enough he realized he needed revenue from somewhere, so he tried to squeeze it out of the useless bloodsuckers who lived off the people. Where he came from, everyone knew who those were: rich merchants, moneylenders, and government officials. He left the actual revenue collection to his equally unlettered right-hand man, who invented new ways to torture, terrorize, and kill. These methods generated some revenue, but not as much as the new king had expected or needed.6

  Meanwhile the new amir promulgated his own program of social legislation, and it was the mirror image of Amanullah’s reforms. He abolished education for girls. He made the burqa/chad’ri obligatory. Women were prohibited from going out in public without a male escort, even in chad’ris. By law, men now had to sport full beards, and any man caught wearing Western clothes or a hat instead of a turban would be fined, beaten, or both.

  From January to October of 1929, the Son of the Water Carrier tried to rule Afghanistan. He met every demand in the tribal ultimatum delivered to Amanullah. He wrapped himself as tightly as he could in the mantle of religion. None of that mattered once he was king. What did matter suddenly were his ethnicity and his class. He was a Tajik, not a Pushtoon; and he was the son of a water carrier, the lowest class of coolie, not the scion of some noble line. The Pushtoon tribal powers looked at him and felt humiliated.

  The moment was ripe for Afghanistan’s own Machiavelli to make his move. Shortly after the fall of Amanullah, Nadir Khan, the eldest of the Brothers Musahibban, left Paris and headed east, arriving in Peshawar with all the fanfare of Lenin arriving in Finland Station. His brothers gathered to him there. Over the next few months, Nadir made contact with the tribal chieftains he knew from the war against the British in 1919. He evoked those memories in a way that cast himself and not Amanullah as the man who had gained independence for Afghanistan, a masterful rewriting of historical narrative. Nadir was the very man the tribes had been looking for: a strong conservative military hero who had good relations with the British and had royal blood going back to the days of Dost Mohammed Khan.

  The Musahibban brothers converged on Kabul at the head of tribal armies, rousted Saqao easily, coaxed him into negotiations, grabbed him as soon as he came close enough, and hanged him in the courtyard of the royal palace. E
nd of that story.

  Nadir then called a loya jirga like the one that had ratified Ahmad Shah. He told the elders he had come to Afghanistan not to make himself king but to save the country from ruin. Amanullah’s few supporters hoped this meant he would restore Amanullah, but Nadir did not even mention the deposed king’s name. He said he would pledge loyalty to whomever the nation chose.

  At that—spontaneously it seems—voices rang from many parts of the hall, calling on Nadir to accept the crown. Twice he blushed and refused the honor—but the third time he said he would bow to the will of the nation and with humble reluctance take on the heavy burden of being the country’s absolute lord and master.7

  So it was that at the close of 1929, just two weeks before the stock market crash in New York launched the Great Depression in the West, a new era began for Afghanistan.

  PART III: KABUL RULES

  Abdu’Rahman’s twenty-one-year reign proved to be a turning point for Afghanistan. He finalized his country’s borders, but, more importantly, he cut a deal with the British that kept outside powers at bay. With the breathing space thus gained, he set to work forging a single nation controlled entirely and directly by him, from Kabul. What he created, however, was a second Afghanistan to compete with the first. The amir’s Afghanistan was a matrix of cities, provinces, districts, governors, mayors, supervisors, bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, state-paid clerics, a huge spy system, and a national army. Beneath this web, the old Afghanistan continued to live and breathe, an organic network of peasants and feudal lords, tribal leaders and grassroots religious clerics, nomads and nomad chieftains, self-governing village republics and tribal guerilla armies.

  No sooner had these two societies grown distinct, they commenced to diverge. The urban elite of Kabul, which had dealings with the outside world, absorbed cultural elements from the West—ideas, fashions, dreams. Among them an ambition was born to open up Afghanistan to the new sciences, new technologies, and new thinking that had made the West so powerful and thereby secure for Afghans the same prosperity, wealth, comforts, and conveniences enjoyed by Western societies.