Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  It wasn’t enough, however, because by this time the Western powers had permeated deeply into the educational system of Afghanistan. French, German, and American teachers were developing curricula for Kabul high schools, and Afghan students were learning their languages. There was no Russian language high school, no one was studying Russian, and very few Russian-language publications could be found in Afghanistan. Meanwhile Kabul University was forming partnerships with American schools such as Columbia and the Universities of Wyoming, Colorado, and Indiana. Professors from these and other schools were coming to Afghanistan to teach. An ever-growing stream of Afghan students was going to America to study agricultural technology, engineering, medicine, public administration, and other fields. Education is culture, and culture is ideology. The Soviets were spending more money than the Americans and yet were losing Afghan hearts and minds.

  In 1955, therefore, Nikita Khrushchev, winner of the post-Stalin succession struggle, visited Kabul. The government rolled out the red carpet for him, and spectators lined the streets to gawk. A few Afghans associated with the conservative religious establishment glowered at this welcome for a man who took pride in being an atheist. A young activist named Subghatullah Mujaddedi tried to organize demonstrations against Khrushchev, but he was tossed into prison and kept there until the Soviet premier was safely out of town. Subghatullah was related to those Hazrats of Shor Bazaar, the revered religious brothers who had helped topple Amanullah. Subghatullah would play a profound role in Afghan politics later, but in 1955 the authorities regarded him as little more than a naïve nuisance. While he was cooling his heels in prison, Khrushchev was in the palace signing an agreement with Daoud to provide an unprecedented $100 million for infrastructure projects.

  The United States countered by brokering a deal to build the country a national airline, Ariana, which would be partly owned by Pan Am. Daoud then asked America for military aid as well, but here the dynamics of the Cold War conflicted with those of the Afghan story. Afghanistan and Pakistan were hostile neighbors for reasons that went all the way back to the days of Dost Mohammed, but America and Pakistan were close allies for reasons that went deep into the strategic considerations of the Cold War: by connecting CENTO and SEATO, Pakistan formed a vital link in the containment fence. So the United States said no to Daoud on weapons, because giving military aid to Afghanistan would have ruffled feathers in Pakistan and damaged that alliance.

  The Soviets seized upon the opening. They put together a military aid package that provided Daoud with tanks, MiGs, jet bombers, helicopters, and enough small arms to equip an army of one hundred thousand men. They also built for him a large military airbase at Bagram, just north of Kabul, plus two other airbases in the north of the country.

  The United States did what it could to counter these Soviet moves. Not only did they fund improvements in Kabul’s airport, but they started building a brand-new international airport at Kandahar, projected to be one of the biggest in the world. American development experts hoped it would emerge as a refueling station for long-distance cargo planes, which would make Afghanistan a prosperous hub for international commerce, a role this area had enjoyed in older centuries, when cities such as Balkh served as nexuses for overland caravans. The airport had runways equipped to handle airplanes much bigger than any that existed at the time (but perfect for the big American military aircraft that use that airport today).

  The Soviet Union answered by dispatching swarms of geologists and engineers into the country to prospect for oil and natural gas. They found significant deposits of gas in the north and built pipelines to transport it to power stations serving northern Afghan cities, to fuel factories the Soviets had helped Afghans build up there, and to carry the gas into Soviet central Asia. The Soviets also installed more than six hundred miles of telephone and telegraph lines.

  They were so alarmingly generous to Afghanistan that in 1959 Eisenhower felt it worth his while to visit Kabul, another huge event for Afghans, although many were a little taken aback to see Eisenhower shaking hands with the Afghan businessman Abdul Majid Zabuli as if a mere multimillionaire ranked just as high as distant relatives of members of the royal family. Eisenhower’s visit produced more millions of dollars’ worth of American grants and loans to Afghanistan and launched another major infrastructure project, a paved road from Kabul to Kandahar, complete with all the bridges needed to traverse the numerous streams and rivers along the way.

  When it came to roads, however, America was already playing catchup. The Soviets were building an even more crucial and ambitious highway from Kabul to the country’s northern border, which included the two-mile-long Salang Tunnel through the mountains at their highest point, gouged through solid rock at an elevation of 11,100 feet, the highest tunnel in the world. This was a road so stoutly overbuilt it could support the weight of tanks—in fact of tanks bigger than any that Afghanistan possessed (but perfect for the tanks the Soviets would send down that highway twenty years later). In fact, from the midfifties to the late sixties, dueling Soviet and American aid packages constructed over twelve hundred miles of superb paved roads through some of the planet’s most difficult terrain, completing in the end a great circle of highways connecting all of Afghanistan’s major cities.4 Daoud and Na’eem must have loved the Cold War!

  16

  Development, No Brakes

  AS ALL THIS INFRASTRUCTURE WAS GOING IN, THE FAMILY WAS PUSHING ahead on the social and cultural fronts as well. The toughest challenge they faced was emancipating Afghan women and opening avenues for them to claim an equal share in the life of their society. This was the rock upon which Amanullah had foundered. This was the issue on which Nadir had made the most drastic concessions.

  This, however, was an issue that Daoud confronted head-on and finessed masterfully. He began by testing the water with small moves. Around 1957, Radio Kabul began broadcasting music featuring women singers and employed women to read the news occasionally. The government did not disapprove, which could be taken as approval. Or not, if backtracking was required. But no riots resulted, so apparently the conservatives felt women could be heard, as long as they weren’t seen. Later that year, Daoud let a delegation of Afghan women travel to the Asian Women’s Conference in Ceylon. Then in 1958, forty girls, wearing chad’ris, were allowed to work alongside men at a government pottery factory, after the government had secured letters of consent from their parents. No bloodshed broke out.

  Then came the thunderclap. In August 1959, on the second day of the festival of Jeshyn, the royal family appeared in their usual box to observe the usual military parade—but with one unusual difference. The women were not wearing chad’ris. They were sitting there with bare naked faces. Anyone in the crowd could look up and see the features of Queen Humaira and Princess Bilqis. Anyone could see Prime Minister Daoud’s wife Zamina Begum. To get an inkling of how shocking this was to Afghans, imagine the First Lady attending the president’s State of the Union speech topless. The Family had issued no announcement about this impending move nor passed any law. They simply did it.

  The religious establishment responded at once. A group of the country’s most powerful conservative clerics signed a letter to Prime Minister Daoud expressing shock and warning the ruler of the country to get back behind the lines laid down by the Shari’a. Daoud wrote back to say he was most anxious to follow the Shari’a to the letter. He just couldn’t find the passage in the Qur’an or in any of the Prophet’s sayings that mandated the chad’ri. No doubt this reflected his lack of theological sophistication. He begged the scholars to come to the capital and show him the relevant passages. And they came. They brought their books. They pored through them, fulminating and fuming. In the end they could not offer any indisputable scriptural support for the veiling practices traditional to Afghan society.

  Thereupon Daoud declared that the women of the royal family would no longer wear chad’ris. No one else had to follow suit. The Family was not trying to tell any other Afghan ma
n how the women in his family should dress. Every family could do what they felt was right. But the royal family was going to follow the letter of the Islamic law as the religious scholars had explained it: no chad’ri.

  A number of courageous commoners soon followed suit. One was Kobra Noorzai, who went about her work as an inspector of girls schools without a veil. Another was Massouma Esmatey-Wardak, principal of the Zarghuna school for girls. Lacking the protection of royal power and prestige, these women really took their lives in their hands, but it was their assertion of an Afghan woman’s right to a place in the public realm that made the royal family’s policy real.

  Everyone braced for riots. None broke out. On this issue, the Family had gambled and won. And although the government was careful to assert that it was not forcing anyone to do anything, government officials felt pressure to set an example by allowing their women to go out in public unveiled. Later that year, girls started attending the government high school in Lashkargah (the first of them being my sister Rebecca). Coeducation had come to Afghanistan! What’s more, the girls came to school without chad’ris, although they did wear a somber uniform, a black dress with long sleeves, black stockings, and white headscarf. In 1978, TV news coverage of Iran’s Islamic Revolution showed Iranian women activists dressed in this type of outfit. My American friends saw that image and clucked at the oppression Khomeini’s revolution was imposing on Iranian women. I could not help remembering how, in Afghanistan, less than twenty years earlier, women who dressed that way in public were making a shocking revolutionary gesture of feminist emancipation.

  It was a daring move but done with the least possible fanfare. When all was said and done, the Family had taken only the slightest step toward liberating women from gender-based disempowerment. They did not outlaw the chad’ri. They imposed no law barring men from lording it over women. They did not forbid men to marry four wives or extort big sums of money in exchange for marrying their preteen daughters to rich old men. They did not link the chad’ri initiative to any broader program. Had they done so, they might have lit a brushfire.

  But against the millimeter of a step they did take, only a brief backlash broke out. A Kandahar street gang called the Barefoot Boys (Paylucha) concocted a plot to murder all unveiled women and all foreign workers in the region—of whom there were quite a few, this being the heart of the US-supported Helmand Valley Project. Daoud got wind of the plot, put tanks on the streets, and crushed the uprising before sundown. No further protests broke out, probably because Afghan society was ready for this amount of change. The idea of mullahs and street gangsters conspiring to commit mass murder in reaction to this iota of social evolution earned public disapproval. Daoud had thus maneuvered the conservatives into blowing their own credibility on the women’s issue.

  And even though the steps the Family took were so slight, they opened a door through which came more change. In the next five years, the status of Afghan women went through five centuries of evolution. Girls began attending the university. The graduates began working as teachers, nurses, and even doctors. Women started working in government offices, factories, and private commercial establishments. Ariana Airlines routinely employed women as flight attendants. Radio Kabul regularly exposed Afghan men to women’s voices, singing or reading “the news.” As transistor radios proliferated, people in towns and cities all over Afghanistan became accustomed to hearing the voices of women to whom they were not related, an unfamiliar experience for Afghan men.

  Kabul acquired some half-dozen movie theaters by 1963, three of which showed American and European films. The rest showed Indian films, the genre that has come to be known as Bollywood. And even though Bollywood films are notoriously chaste—no one kisses—they still showed women’s faces, women singing, women wearing costumes tight enough to reveal the shapes of their bodies, women dancing in these “tight” outfits. Movie theaters opened in other big cities as well.

  Thus did the Family exploit Cold War competition among the global powers not only to fund economic and technological development in Afghanistan but also to push for progressive social change in its wake. All this change created a challenge for the Family, however, a challenge inherent to absolute monarchies undergoing modernization. Dynastic rulers with absolute power prefer to fill all key positions with members of their own families for security reasons, but modernization produces a huge industrial and bureaucratic apparatus that needs innumerable well-educated people to keep it going, an apparatus so huge that eventually no single family can staff all its key positions. So the dynasty has to go outside its circle of relatives and recruit the most talented of its other subjects to handle some jobs.

  The need for educated experts cycled an ever-growing number of Afghans through European and American universities and back into Afghan society. The Family tried to put them in charge of carrying out development work while keeping political power out of their hands, but it was hopeless. Managers, technicians, bureaucrats, and administrators have de facto power, whether or not it is legally enfranchised. Afghan teachers, technicians, and financial experts accumulated until they far outnumbered the royal family and its associated tribal aristocracy. They burgeoned into a whole new class, a technocracy powerful enough to challenge the dynasty.

  The Family feared the technocrats but also needed them, because the country couldn’t go on forever as one family against all other Afghans, a few thousand against millions. Avenues had to be created to allow broader—not universal, perhaps, but broader—political participation. A selected group of nonroyal Afghans would have to acquire a stake in developing the country. Members of the technocracy were the obvious candidates to form this extended elite.

  Meanwhile, disjunctions emerged between the Afghan story and the Cold War drama. The Durand Line—that old burr!—generated much of the trouble. Ever since the days of Dost Mohammed, the Pushtoon “street” had wanted the king to go reconquer Peshawar and take back the lost provinces. Other ethnic groups didn’t care, but their feelings didn’t matter, because the king was always a Pushtoon. To appease his own ethnic base, therefore, every Afghan king since Dost Mohammed had been obliged to at least pay lip service to the dream of reuniting all Pushtoons under one big national umbrella. On the other hand, to keep his throne, every Afghan king had been forced to accept the eastern border imposed by the British, because every king had needed the money, guns, and protection of the greatest great power dominating the country at that moment.

  In 1947, a tremendous development was changing the rubrics of this story dramatically. India’s long struggle for independence had come to a head, and the British were pulling out of the subcontinent. In the course of that long struggle, a Muslim independence movement had split away from the mainstream campaign led by Gandhi’s Congress Party. This nationalist movement led by the Muslim League demanded a separate state for Muslims. The British dealt with the contention by endorsing a partition of the subcontinent into two separate states: India, a secular state with a Hindu majority; and Pakistan, an explicitly Muslim country that would provide a haven for the Muslims of the subcontinent.

  The creation of Pakistan reopened an old question: what about the Pushtoons on the eastern side of the Durand Line? Had the time come for Afghans to include their brethren within their borders and absorb their lost lands back into Afghanistan? The British acknowledged that an issue existed and held a referendum in the Pushtoon-inhabited portion of their territory, asking people to choose which state they preferred to join—Pakistan or India?

  Really? Pakistan or India?

  Yes, really. Those were the only options on the table. Most voters sighed and voted to join Muslim Pakistan. Some boycotted the referendum altogether, as their way of saying, “Neither.” A sizable number didn’t want to join any state. They wanted to form an independent country of their own, called Pushtoonistan. How would Afghanistan and Pushtoonistan be related? Would they form a federation? Would one eventually become an autonomous province of the other? . . .
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br />   No one talked about it. In 1947, the Afghan government simply found it politic to blare support for Pushtoonistan without getting into specifics. Afghanistan opposed recognition of Pakistani statehood in the United Nations until “the Pushtoonistan issue” was “resolved.” When Pakistan came into existence anyway, the Afghan government continued to support a Pushtoon secessionist movement in the new country.

  The leader of that movement, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was a singular pacifist known as the Frontier Gandhi. The Afghan government let him live in Kabul and use Radio Kabul to broadcast passionate speeches into Pakistan.1 Pakistan retaliated by setting up “Radio Free Afghanistan” in Quetta and beaming propaganda across the border, urging tribes on the Afghan side to break away and join their brethren in the east.

  Despite the nonviolent ideals of the Frontier Gandhi, these propaganda spats led to real-life skirmishes. Actual bullets were fired into actual flesh. Scattered casualties occurred. Pakistan closed the border briefly two or three times just to dramatize the leverage it had over a landlocked nation.

  As it happened, Daoud took charge in just this period. Daoud was an ardent Pushtoon nationalist. Even if he hadn’t been, he probably would have embraced this cause because Pushtoon nationalists were his base, and, even in an absolute monarchy, politicians have to cater to their base. Daoud therefore began to talk the toughest anti-Pakistan Pushtoonism ever heard.

  But it was also in this period that he asked the United States for military aid and got turned down. America needed the hundred million people of Pakistan more than it needed the twelve million of Afghanistan. US policymakers worried that this Pushtoonistan ruckus could jeopardize the very existence of their ally, the hodgepodge nation that was Pakistan. After all, the new country was already divided into two noncontiguous parts. East Pakistan would soon break away to become Bangladesh. Kashmir had been claimed by India. If Pushtoonistan formed, part of Sind might go with it, and Baluchistan might split away as well. Pakistan would be reduced to just the Punjab, and how long could that ministate survive? And even if it did survive, what good would a tiny Punjab do as the link between SEATO and CENTO or as the sole regional counterweight to left-leaning, nonaligned India? No, the United States could not afford to abandon Pakistan, not on this issue nor any other. American diplomats therefore tried to convince Daoud to accept the Durand Line.