by Tamim Ansary
In that period just after World War II, optimism permeated Kabul and urban Afghanistan in general. Great changes lay ahead: what changes, no one knew, but the hated British had lost their entire empire, and the world’s two mightiest powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, had formed an alliance to vanquish Hitler. With two such powers working together, an age of world peace and prosperity would surely now begin, and Afghanistan might be part of it all.
To suit these happy times, the Family decided to change its stripes. Prime Minister Hashim, a grim figure, stepped down and his kinder, gentler brother Shah Mahmoud took the helm. The substitution of one brother for another took place without a ripple of trouble. This was not a coup nor even a regime change; it was a public relations move: the Family decided to show the nation a different face.
The new prime minister lifted restrictions on free speech, released a host of political prisoners, and sponsored elections for a new parliament—and not just as a rubber stamp. The Family would still appoint members of the Upper House but there would also be a lower house whose members would be chosen by the people in authentic, fair, free elections. That was the theory anyway.
The new parliament met for the first time in 1949. Some of its members were bearded, be-turbaned conservatives, but forty or fifty of them belonged to a burgeoning class of Western-oriented modernists. Some of these were liberal intellectuals who took the royal family at its word about Parliament having real powers and responsibilities. They summoned members of the cabinet before the Lower House to explain the budget. They posed challenging questions on sensitive topics such as corruption and nepotism. The cabinet ministers were all relatives or associates of the king himself and did not appreciate disrespectful questions from hoi polloi upstarts.
Meanwhile, liberal intellectuals were launching private publications in which they spoke freely. The Family got nervous. When it said “freedom of speech,” it meant people should feel free to praise the Family in whatever way they wanted. Besides, in these new publications, the Family saw the seeds of dangerous political parties and hints of worrisome political ambitions.
Meanwhile, by 1953, the Helmand Valley project was running into trouble. Every job was taking too long and costing too much. Every piece of equipment needed for the project had to be brought in from abroad. Getting the equipment to the work sites proved difficult because no roads existed to those places, so roads had to be built before the project could proceed, and where would that money come from? The original $10 million was nearly spent with little to show for it. And the American experts were having trouble coordinating with the Afghan administrators: they were arguing over areas of jurisdiction. The disorder in the Helmand Valley seemed to mirror the growing political anarchy in the capital. Finally, the Family decided to make another 180-degree turn. Kinder-gentler had not worked; tough-and-disciplined might be the way to go after all. Shah Mahmoud’s Afghan spring turned out to have been false.
The new approach required another change of faces. This time, the Family made a generational change as well. The fathers and uncles had run their course; it was time to give the sons a chance. The younger generation of the Family featured one obvious candidate for power—the king himself. Zahir was no longer a boy but a man. Unfortunately, he could not do what the Family needed done. For nearly twenty years, he had served as his country’s emblematic gracious gentleman. If Zahir Shah were suddenly to become a strongman, cracking down on critics and putting dissidents in prison, who would be the gracious gentleman? No, the king had to keep doing his job: appreciating fine music, commissioning art, going hunting—all of which probably suited his temperament better in any case. The baton, or perhaps I should say the club, did not therefore pass to him but to his first cousins Sardar Daoud and Sardar Na’eem.
These two brothers had been educated in France. Their uncle Hashim Khan had started grooming them for power the moment they had come home. Na’eem had been processed through a series of diplomatic and economic posts, Daoud through a series of military and political appointments. Now, like a wrestling tag team, they split the job of running the country.
Na’eem was a lanky man with a long face and an aquiline nose. He looked good in Western clothes and sounded good discussing fine food, classical music, and the great poetry of East and West. Beneath his conversational gifts lived a tough and clever politician. His elegance and diplomatic cunning equipped him to deal with the great powers of the outside world that were always looming over Afghanistan, leaning into its space. He became the country’s foreign minister.
Daoud was a stocky man with thick lips, heavy eyebrows and a bald, bullet-shaped head. Later in life, he affected tinted glasses, which completed his resemblance to Telly Savalas. He looked like an enforcer, and he was one. As minister of interior he dealt with the world inside Afghanistan, a tougher job than dealing with the whole rest of the planet. Also, as minister of defense, he commanded the military. Also, as prime minister, he ran the whole show.
The king was still there too, wafting above both brothers, waving graciously to the crowds from the backseat of his Rolls Royce convertible.
The new men at the top, the two brothers, brought the first era of good feelings to an end. They disbanded the liberal Parliament of 1949. The national assemblymen who had dared to call the king’s relatives in for questioning lost their jobs. The private publications that had sprouted under the previous prime minister were shut down. The liberal intellectuals who had called too stridently for secular reforms went to prison. Kabul University professor Mohammed Ghobar, whose book Afghanistan in the Course of History gave an unvarnished account of the country’s past and painted a harsh picture of the ruling clan, did hard time in a tiny town in the southwestern desert, under guard by a local lord related to the royals: the Afghan version of exile to Siberia.6 Some people simply disappeared, which raised the specter of Abdu’Rahman’s darkest days.
But the triumvirate of Daoud, Na’eem, and Zahir Shah wanted more than power; they wanted to change things. They were men of the world who had seen how people lived beyond the borders of Afghanistan. Absolute power was great, but power over what? Over anonymous peasants, feudal lords, nomadic herders, and religious “scholars,” some of whom could barely read? They ruled a nation that could hardly produce a pin much less an automobile. They wanted to rule a rich and developed country.
Though ruthlessly authoritarian, the top man Daoud was a genuine modernist as well. In the fifties and sixties, the “developing world” was full of such strongman-modernists. Shah Reza Pahlevi of Iran and Egypt’s Gemal Abdul Nasser were just two of many examples. In his youth, Daoud was even associated with a Young Turks–style group of activists called Wikh-i-Zalmayan, “Awakened Youth,” which embraced a hodgepodge of modernist-nationalist ideas along the lines of: development is good, education is necessary, obsolete customs should be abandoned, women should be liberated, foreign influence should be resisted, Afghanistan must be for Afghans, hurray for native industries, and so on. Now that he had command, Daoud intended to push the development part of this program to the max.7
Financing the development was a problem, however. How could a population of herders and subsistence farmers supply the necessary money? They couldn’t. The answer to this problem lay outside the country’s borders, in the struggle gathering force around Afghanistan—for this region was becoming a key arena of the Cold War, the global power struggle that dominated the late twentieth century.
15
Nonaligned Nation
THE COLD WAR BEGAN BEFORE THE HOT WAR ENDED. IN THE LATE stages of World War II, as the Allies realized they were almost certainly going to win, they began jockeying for postwar position. Roosevelt and Stalin met in Tehran and then at Yalta to hammer out a framework for the postwar era, but it was already too late to forestall what was coming. American and British forces were pushing into Germany from the west, Stalin’s forces from the east. By the time the armies met in Berlin, Stalin had all of Eastern Europe under his thu
mb. He set up a string of satellite states stretching from Bulgaria to the Baltic Sea, raising fears in the West that Stalin might do what Hitler had attempted: conquer the world. Western fears intensified in 1949 when Communist insurgents took over China, for at that time Mao Tse-tung was widely considered an obedient factotum of the Kremlin. Yet the United States and its allies could not go to war to stop the Soviets because both sides had nuclear bombs and would soon have thermonuclear weapons, which were capable of ending human life on earth.
Harry Truman, America’s first postwar president, formulated a response to the sudden expansion of Communist power, the policy called containment. The United States and its allies would quarantine Soviet influence by surrounding it with a chain of nations hostile to Communism and friendly to the Western European allies. To this end, US diplomats cobbled together a number of military alliances. In the west, there was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In the east, there was the (weaker) Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). And between the two, there were the Baghdad Pact nations, soon renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which included Turkey and Iraq as members. The brand-new nation of Pakistan joined both CENTO and SEATO, which made it a crucial link in the chain. With Pakistan closing the gap, SEATO, CENTO, NATO, and east Asian allies of the United States such as Japan formed an almost continuous fence around the Communist bloc.1
Not every country belonged to one of the two blocs, however. India emerged from British rule as an independent nation led by the Congress Party, which displayed unsettling independence. India’s president Jawaharlal Nehru raised the idea of nonaligned nations forming a third bloc, a notion that developed into a movement. The leaders of such nonaligned countries as India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia perceived that neutrality gave them leverage with both the Communist and non-Communist sides. Afghanistan embraced nonalignment with a passion.
The Cold War had some hot spots, to be sure. In Korea, Vietnam, and other parts of the “Third World” violent struggles between Communist and anti-Communist forces served as proxy wars between the Soviets and the Americans.2 But the Cold War also featured a “peaceful” struggle for influence in various “nonaligned” countries, where each side tried to crowd the other out of the picture. These nonaligned countries became arenas for covert spy craft, propaganda wars, influence peddling, and—dueling aid packages.
Nowhere did this competition rage more intensely than in Afghanistan. Here was a nonaligned chip situated precisely at the line of scrimmage. There were three ways Afghanistan might go. It might tip into the Soviet camp; it might be coaxed all the way into the “Free World” camp; or it might remain neutral. Which of the three would happen? The answer mattered for the same age-old reasons: location, location, and location. Afghanistan neighbored Pakistan, and Pakistan linked CENTO and SEATO. If the Soviets took Afghanistan, they might use it as a platform for taking Pakistan. If they took Pakistan, they would have punched a hole in the containment fence. The United States could not, therefore, let Afghanistan “turn Communist.”
Strategically, the United States was in the same position as nineteenth-century Britain: it needed to control Afghanistan in order to deny the big power in the north a platform from which to attack India (or at least the part of India that was now called Pakistan). When Daoud and Na’eem gazed out at the great wide world, what they saw in this Cold War competition was opportunity.
American influence in Afghanistan was inextricably tied to the success of the Helmand Valley project, because this was the most ambitious, costly, and visible development project ever undertaken in Afghanistan. If it failed, America looked bad. As it happened, the credibility of the central government in Kabul was also bound up in this project. Here in the Helmand Valley, then, Afghan and American interests converged. The dynamics of the Afghan story dovetailed with those of the Cold War drama.
As soon as Daoud took charge of the country, he created a new agency called the Helmand Valley Authority (HVA) to take the project across the finish line. (It was modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA.) The original $10 million had run out, but the United States now pumped in twice that amount in new funding. Daoud put together a management team headed by my father’s buddy Dr. Abdul Kayeum, one of the five Habibia high school graduates who were sent to study in America in 1938. My father came aboard as Kayeum’s deputy, and several dozen other Western-educated Afghans were appointed to the remaining posts.
On the American side, the Helmand Valley became a project of the International Cooperation Agency, soon renamed the Agency for International Development or AID, American’s main instrument for using development aid to promote Cold War goals. American engineers, geologists, soil scientists, and the like came to southwestern Afghanistan to work with Afghan administrators. The president of HVA was elevated to the rank of a cabinet minister. The nerve center of the Helmand Valley Authority, the little government-built town of Lashkargah came to be known (by Afghans) as “Little America.” Surrounded though it was by the most conservative traditional forces in the country, the most deeply entrenched of the Durrani and Ghilzai Pushtoon tribes, Lashkargah featured houses without surrounding walls—very un-Afghan. It had a swimming pool, a clubhouse, a modern hospital, and a government school, where selected children from villages throughout the region were brought to get educated in secular subjects (although religion remained in the curriculum as well).
The core of the project consisted of two huge dams, one on the Helmand and one on its chief tributary, the Arghandab River. Downstream from these dams a network of canals was extended into the desert, equipped with locks and mechanized sluices and other technical marvels. These canals carried irrigation water not to existing fields (of which there were few) but to new government-run “experimental” farms, where Afghan tribesmen learned to use tractors and chemical fertilizers to grow novel crops with seeds imported from America.
At strategic spots in this canal network, government-built model towns popped up like mushrooms, towns such as Nadi Ali and Marjah, featuring neat blocks of bungalows with thick walls and domed roofs to keep in the cool—very necessary in this blistering climate. The houses had modern plumbing and electricity, each one had a small garden, and between the houses ran well-graded gravel roads.
Nomads who migrated through this land seasonally were stopped by government officials and convinced to settle in the model towns and to take up farming. Each family was given a plot of irrigated land within one or two days walk of their house.
And that was not all. The two massive American-built dams were retrofitted with hydroelectric plants, capable of generating enough electricity to serve the whole southwestern quarter of the country, including the big city of Kandahar.
The 1,740-foot-long Arghandab dam was situated fairly close to Kandahar, but the other dam, the one on the Helmand itself, was built far upstream in the mountains, at a place called Kajakai. When first completed, it was one of the most massive earth dams in the world. A thirty-two-mile reservoir formed behind it.3 A few miles downstream from the dam, on a steep slope high above the river, MKA built a cute village to house its engineers and technicians. The sturdy little houses were made of stone and concrete, far more durable than anything the locals had, and the whole town looked like a charming resort village in Italy. Each of the hundred or so houses had one or two bedrooms and a kitchen equipped with modern appliances and a spare bit of Western-style furniture—beds, couches, chairs, tables, and such.
Once the dam was built, all the experts went home, and no one lived at Kajakai except an Italian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Corriega. He was an engineer, left behind to look after the hydroelectric facilities. Since this normally entailed nothing more than going down to the dam once a day and checking the gauges, he had plenty of spare time to putter about the village doing arts and crafts projects. He was a superb metalworker, so he fitted every house in Kajakai with filigrees of wrought iron railing and other enhancements. Every street ended up with decorative lampposts,
all of them different. Mr. Corriega painstakingly collected tons of pebbles of different colors, sorted them by shape and size, and used them to pave the sidewalks and walkways with floral and geometric patterns rendered in green, red, black, white, and others colors of stone. When he ran out of ways to beautify his village, he built a scale model of a luxury ocean liner, accurate down to the quarter-inch deck chairs and the portholes through which one could see tiny beds and miniature armoires.
No one ever saw this eccentric masterpiece except for the few Afghan HVA officials who made the five- or six-hour journey from Lashkargah once a year with their families to spend the three-day holiday of Eid at Kajakai. The other 362 days, the Corriegas lived in a ghost town.
And what of the Afghan villagers who lived in the vicinity? What did they think about the three-hundred-foot-high wall of stones and dirt suddenly blocking their river? As far as I can tell, nobody ever asked them.
AMERICAN AID TO AFGHANISTAN DISMAYED THE SOVIETS, ESPECIALLY because the Soviets had gotten in first. In 1950, they had signed a barter agreement to trade oil and gas for Afghan cotton and wool. Two years later Stalin’s government inked a deal to provide Afghanistan with cement. They hoped and assumed that with these aid packages they had bought Afghanistan.
Faithless Afghanistan would not stay bought. In 1953, just as Stalin died, Afghanistan changed hands too: Daoud stepped up, and right after that fresh US aid poured in for the Helmand Valley project. No way were the Soviets going to take that lying down. Even amid the disarray that followed Stalin’s death, the Soviets pressed new largesse upon Afghan ruler Sardar Daoud. They agreed to build a gigantic bakery (called Silo) in Kabul and to fund a big expansion of textile factories in the north.c
