Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  In 2002 Kabul had been a city of about 350,000, crammed with cars but equipped (as far as I could tell) with only two traffic lights. It made for a clamorous chaos that no one seemed to notice. In 2012, Kabul had become a metropolis of many millions. How many? The Associated Press said three, many people in Kabul said five, and a few estimated ten, but no one really knew or knows. And yet, as I say, much remained unchanged. This metropolis of millions still seemed to have only two traffic lights. Traffic jams were endemic, and still no one seemed to care. They just conducted business on their cell phones while they waited. “If I weren’t here, I’d be somewhere else,” one guy shrugged, adding, “God is great.”

  The countryside retained something of that old, underlying calm. A hundred miles from Kabul, in a seemingly uninhabited valley, we stopped to change a tire, and we’d scarcely loosened the nuts before a grizzled local from a village we couldn’t even see came moseying by to invite us home for tea. In the city, that deep sense of unhurried calm had given way to a frenzied hubbub ignited by the money and technology screaming down upon Afghanistan—yet this was just another aspect of the Afghan character rising to the surface, for paradoxically enough this has always also been a society of freewheeling deal makers, networking relentlessly as they scope out angles to play in a jungle gym of personal relationships. As it was in the days of Ahmad Shah Baba, so it still is today.

  Ten years ago, people in Kabul seemed to regard traffic regulations as quaint foreign imports unsuited to this climate. They still do. People joke that driving in Kabul is like playing buzkashi. Cars are constantly bursting out of their lanes, even into supposedly one-way streets to drive against the prevailing flow because their drivers have spotted openings. You might suppose that here there are no rules.

  You would be wrong. If there really were no rules, one would see thousands of car accidents. What I saw were thousands of near misses: not one collision. The rules may not be obvious to foreigners, but they exist and Afghans understand them. And the same is undoubtedly true of the country’s social and political life.

  The rules may be hard to discern in part because there isn’t just one set. Afghanistan probably had a consistent culture when it first began coalescing as a nation-state in the eighteenth century, and, although it was evolving, it was doing so within a coherent framework.

  Then the country experienced a series of incursions emanating out of Europe, which gave rise to a maelstrom of conflicting currents. Within the country, the multitudes whose cohesion derived only from traditional tribal and Islamic values expected their rulers to honor and defend those values with their lives and to otherwise leave them alone. Afghan rulers could not simply comply, however, for looking outward they always saw two or more well-equipped Western goliaths facing off against each other, with hapless Afghanistan situated between them on their line of scrimmage. Each goliath was intent on moving into this space to keep the other goliath from moving into it. Each expected to succeed with Afghans because it presumed it would bring cultural and material improvements to the country. Each was happy to deal with Afghan leaders so long as they operated on cultural ground familiar to Europeans.

  Trying to negotiate between the local and global forces, between the inner and outer worlds, put Afghan rulers in a double bind. Anyone who wanted to rule this country had to secure the sponsorship of the strongest foreigners impinging on the country at that moment; yet no Afghan could rule this country for long without the allegiance of the country’s deepest traditional forces. To the dominant outside power, therefore, every would-be ruler had to portray himself as a partner. At the same time, to his country’s internal forces, he had to portray himself as a tough guy standing up to foreign bullies. The kings who best succeeded in this balancing act did so by covertly pursuing “modernization” while overtly proclaiming themselves champions of conservative social and religious values.

  The same thing is happening again now. Afghans see the Karzai government signing one agreement after another with the Americans, and they shake their heads in disbelief. Americans see Karzai approving ever more reactionary social laws and issuing outlandish threats to join the Taliban, and they wonder if the president of Afghanistan has lost his mind. Actually, anyone in Karzai’s role would exhibit similar schizophrenia. His seemingly erratic actions don’t necessarily reflect personal instability but the surreal contradictions of his position in the bigger picture.

  The concatenation of forces pervading and surrounding Afghanistan has given rise to competing visions for the nation’s identity. Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it’s intervening in “a country,” but it’s actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is. Every foreign intervention founders therefore on the same rock. Routinely, the foreign power puts a proxy on the throne and tries to govern the country through him. But the very authority given to this proxy, because it comes from foreigners, weakens his authority among the traditional forces of old Afghanistan. The foreign power essentially tries to swing the pot by grasping its handle, but the pot shatters, and the foreign power is left holding only a handle. The British had their Shah Shuja and then their Yaqub Khan. The Soviets had their Taraki and then their Babrak Karmal. Shah Shuja, Yaqub Khan, Taraki, Karmal—they’re all the same guy, just with different names. And now, America and NATO have Hamid Karzai.

  Foreign interventions in Afghanistan don’t just undermine the designated proxy but the authority of Kabul within Afghanistan. The erosion of central authority releases the country’s propensity to fragment, and so in the end the foreign power finds itself facing a burgeoning chaos that saps its resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were. The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed. The great powers have a stake in making Afghanistan more governable, but the only people who can achieve this happy result are Afghans—because it depends on the resolution of contradictions within Afghan culture. Once the foreign power withdraws in disgust from a country it has helped render ungovernable, some new permutation of the Afghan urban (or rural) ruling classes comes back to power, its prestige renewed by the role it has (supposedly) played in driving out foreigners. The pendulum then swings back from fragmentation toward centralization, as a reinvigorated government sets to work trying to compress and shape this hodgepodge of peoples into a coherent state.

  Every Afghan government must renew this project; no Afghan government can simply let go and watch the society come apart, because the foreigners are out there always. If it isn’t the United States, it will be China. If not China, Iran. If not Iran, then India or Russia or some combination of Arab powers or of those central Asian republics—Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. . . .

  As soon as new rulers secure credibility among Afghans, they do two things: one, they move toward a cautious accommodation with some chosen outside force while publicly asserting nonalignment in world politics; and two, they start trying to push Afghan customs and values into alignment with those of the world at large. If they do it artfully, they survive for a while; if they do it clumsily they go down.

  This will happen again, whether elections bring another DC-approved modernist to the presidency or “the Taliban” overwhelm the cities and take power again. It will happen because, confoundingly enough, the constant threat of Great Power interventions make the centralizing power in Kabul outward-looking and oriented toward membership in the modern world. If “the Taliban” succeed in taking over, you can be sure they will develop this same outward-looking orientation and attraction to some version of modernity very shortly.

  The world’s great powers have a choice. They can take turns trying to conquer Afghanistan, or they can act together as neutral referees to promote Afghan reconciliation. Ironically, the interests of all outside powers are best served by a reconciliation that enables Afghans to form a sovereign country—sov
ereign culturally as well as politically. I say “ironically” because, as soon as Afghanistan achieves that sovereignty, it will adopt a foreign policy of dogged neutrality, which will serve no other country’s interests fully. This might lead any given country to decide that conquering Afghanistan is the better option after all, but that option is never really on the table. The actual choices are (1) neutral-Afghanistan-serving-nobody’s-interest-fully or (2) awful-quagmire-Afghanistan-sucking-down-yet-another-hapless-great-power.

  The real question for the United States, then, is not how America can forge true democracy in Afghanistan or end corruption in Afghanistan or change the status of Afghan women: those questions are for Afghans to settle, and Afghans will settle them if left to their own devices. The real question for the United States is how to liberate Afghanistan from the United States—and all other outside powers. The conference that can best accomplish this is one that brings to the table not just NATO and Afghanistan but all countries with a potential interest in this territory—which is a lot of countries. And what this conference must hammer out is an agreement among all nations to accord Afghanistan the status of a central Asian Switzerland.

  Once outside pressure abates, Afghans can begin to resolve their cultural contradictions. The path has been thorny, but that process may be under way already. For so long, this country has been wracked by the wrestling match between its rural and urban souls, but that distinction is growing fuzzier. Ten years ago, my family’s ancestral village was a hamlet well outside Kabul. No formal road ran to it. To get there, you had to know where to depart from the highway and then which direction to go, over hill and dale, on foot, on a donkey, or in a rugged vehicle. Today, my relatives are busy filing formal claims to lands they’ve always farmed because New Kabul is coming, and when it does the government will appropriate undocumented properties, after which Deh Yahya will be just another neighborhood within the capital.

  In 2012, I met a Pushtoon from rural Wardak working in Kabul as a driver. When he found out I was writing a book about Afghanistan, he begged me to tell the world about his people. “Everyone thinks we just want to fight and hurt and kill. It isn’t true! Look at me! Am I not the sweetest, most well-behaved of men?” (He was in fact one of the sweetest fellows I had met in a long time.) He went on to say, “This government paved the road to my village. Before, it took four hours to get to Kabul. Now it takes forty-five minutes. If my mother gets sick and I need to get her to a hospital in Kabul, don’t you think I’m glad the road is paved? We’re not against roads! We’re not against hospitals! We just want to live in peace, the way we’ve always lived.”

  On that same trip, I had a chance to visit Bamiyan, the valley where the giant Buddhas stood, before the Taliban blew them up. I had been there at the age of two but retained no images of the place in my head, of course, except from photographs. Yet, as we drove into the little town at the heart of the province, everything looked strangely familiar. For one thing, the bazaar of Bamiyan looked pretty much like all the small-town bazaars of my childhood and even like the one in Dehbouri, our neighborhood in Kabul. It was a narrow street flanked by room-sized stalls. Some were butcher shops, vending fresh meat hanging from hooks. Others were selling local fruits and vegetables piled high in baskets, still others miscellaneous dry goods such as matches, batteries, pencils, mascara, and toys. In the shops, storekeepers were drinking tea with their customers. On the sidewalks, street vendors were hawking motley goods and services. I saw one guy sitting on a stool with a little table in front of him and for a moment I thought he was a dalak, one of those itinerant barber/surgeons who used to cut hair on the streets in the old days.

  He wasn’t a dalak, of course. Those no longer exist. When I got close, I saw that this man had a personal solar panel the size of an attaché case standing next to his stool. It was hooked up to a 12-volt car battery. The battery was running a laptop computer. The laptop was wirelessly connected to the Internet, which this guy could access, even in central Afghanistan. He was making money downloading songs from some website in Kabul or India and selling them to passersby to load into their cell phones as apps. The singers’ voices were electronically modulated, but the songs, though modern in style, recognizably derived from the sort of music I used to hear on Kabul Radio in the fifties, which came out of the folk music of the hills, which went back to the twelfth century and before—just as surely as country music in modern America goes back through Appalachian bluegrass to English country music in Tudor times, or grunge rock goes back through Mississippi Delta blues to roots in Africa.

  Here in Afghanistan, the twenty-first century lies directly atop the twelfth, but the contradictory currents of the country’s culture and history may at last be melding into some new blend. Standing in that Bamiyan bazaar, under an enormous Buddha-shaped cavity in the cliffs, I felt suddenly that I was not surrounded by today nor by the past. It was the future rising around me, out of the swamp of Afghan history, something whose eventual shape I could not imagine. It struck me then that Afghanistan is like a laboratory. So many currents have flowed through this territory from so many places over so many centuries. The country is rife with contradictions—but then so is the planet. And if Afghanistan succeeds in blending its many strains into a cohesive cultural whole, well, then, maybe there’s hope for the planet too.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I AM GRATEFUL TO SO MANY PEOPLE FOR INFORMATION, CONVERSATIONS, and advice contributing to this book—Akbar Nowrouz, Ghafar Lakanwal, Bismillah Iqbal, Yalda Asmatey, Humaira Ghilzai, Idrees Rahmani, Anwar Rezayee, Abdul Hayy, Bashir Sakhawarz, Zahir and Shafiqa Ansary, Farid and Saman Ansary, Akhtar Jamal Ansary, Fazluddin, Najibullah Sedeqe, Wahid Omar, Zmarak Shalizi, Kasem Gardezi, and others too numerous to list. My thanks also goes to Joe Quirk for his invaluable feedback, and above all to my wife, Deborah Krant, for reading the manuscript again and again and patiently discussing it with me, acting as a second eye the likes of which no writer should be without. Thanks as well to Susan Hoffman for setting up the class at Berkeley’s Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning that helped me formulate this book, to my agent Carol Mann, and to Lisa Kaufman for her always insightful editing.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1: FOUNDING FATHER

  1 Pohand Abdul Hayy Habibi, Tarikh-i-Mukhtasar-i Afghanistan [Concise History of Afghanistan] (Arlington, VA: Association of Afghan Refugees, 1989), 256–257.

  2 Mohammed Ali, Cultural History of Afghanistan (Kabul: Mohammed Ali, 1964), 217–220.

  3 Saira Shah, “‘Afghaniyat’ Is Alive and Well in Afghanistan,” Guardian, April 7, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/07/afghanistan-nation-building-alive-well.

  CHAPTER 2: AHMAD SHAH’S AFGHANISTAN

  1 Hasan Kawun Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 135–140.

  2 Ali, Cultural History of Afghanistan, 198–199.

  3 This picture of the qala comes partly from conversations with Akbar Nowruz, whose family had a qala in Logar.

  4 See the discussion of Afghan society in Hasan Kawun Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir ’Abd al-Rahman Khan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 50–66.

  5 Description of dalak drawn heavily from Akbar Nowroz’s accounts plus personal experience with dalaks of my day.

  6 Ali, Cultural History of Afghanistan, 199.

  7 Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan, 124–126.

  8 Zarb-ul Masal-ha, Afghan proverbs collected by Dr. Ja’far Taheri, 129.

  CHAPTER 3: FARANGIS ON THE HORIZON

  1 This description of Dost Mohammed comes, in part, from Alexander Burnes, Travels into Bokhara: Being the Account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary, and Persia (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835), 2:23.

  2 Mir Ghulam Mohammed Ghobar describes Afghan trade goods, in Afghanistan Dar Maseer-i-Tareekh, Juld-i Awal [Afghanistan in the Course of History, Volume 1] (Kab
ul: Government Publications Department, 1967), 573, although he claims the economy suffered under Dost Mohammed. Fraser-Tytler has a more complimentary view of his reign. W. K. Fraser-Tytler, Afghanistan: A Study of Political Developments in Central and South Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 127.

  CHAPTER 4: BETWEEN THE LION AND THE BEAR

  1 The phrase appears in The Wealth of Nations, bk. 4, chap. 7, pt. 3. Smith actually qualifies the description by describing England as “a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.” The book can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#2HCH0027.

  2 Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, 1:127.

  3 Ibid., 1:128.

  4 Ibid., 1:178.

  5 Ibid., 1:210–217.

  6 Ibid., 1:234.

  7 Ibid., 2:15–17.

  8 Quoted in Ben Macintyre, The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004), 201.

  9 Quoted in Karl Ernest Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 85.

  10 Quoted by Fraser-Tytler, Afghanistan, 110. For the full text of the manifesto, see Abdul Hakim Tabibi, Afghanistan: A Nation in Love with Freedom (Cedar Rapids, IA: Igram Press, 1985), 144–148.

  CHAPTER 5: AUCKLAND’S FOLLY

  1 See Terence Blackburn, The Extermination of a British Army: The Retreat from Kabul (New Delhi: APH, 2008), ix–x, for a detailed breakdown.

  2 Jules Stewart, Crimson Snow: Britain’s First Disaster in Afghanistan (Gloucestershire: Sutton Press, 2008), 78, refers to eight hundred wives. Lady Florentia Sale, in her A Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan (Franklin, TN: Tantallon Press, 2002; originally published in 1843), 48, refers to the king’s womenfolk, including wives, daughters, and serving maids, as numbering in the eight hundreds.