Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  3 Mohan Lal, Hindu interpreter for the British, reported this information but didn’t mention the woman’s name. His report was quoted by M. Saeed, Women in Afghan History, http://www.scribd.com/doc/30234527/Women-in-Afghan-History, 13.

  4 Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 384. Fraser-Tytler, Afghanistan, 114.

  5 Sale, Journal, 6–20.

  6 Dupree, Afghanistan, 382–383, quoting John William Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, Third Edition (London, 1874), 2:130.

  7 Stewart, Crimson Snow, 102–103

  8 Fraser-Tytler, Afghanistan, 114

  9 I found this diary on the Internet, but unfortunately it has vanished now. I am, however, amused to see that the phrase “frighteningly willing” made its way into the Afghan Chamber of Commerce’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan war here: http://www.afghanchamber.com/history/englishinvation.htm. They must have seen the same diary as I.

  10 David Loyn, In Afghanistan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 35–46.

  11 Macintyre, Man Who Would Be King, 259–260.

  12 Dupree, Afghanistan, 386.

  13 Ibid., 389.

  14 John William Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 368–370.

  15 Ibid., 376.

  16 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 6: THE SECOND COMING OF DOST MOHAMMED

  1 Ghobar, Afghanistan Dar Maseer-i-Tareekh, vol. 1, 573.

  2 Ibid., 587–588.

  3 Ibid., 573.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Habibi, Tarikh-i-Mukhtasar-i Afghanistan, 290.

  7 Ghobar, Afghanistan dar Maseeri Tarikh, vol. 1, 547.

  8 Ibid., 583.

  9 Ibid., 588.

  CHAPTER 7: EIGHT OR TEN GOOD YEARS

  1 Abdul Hakim Tabibi, The Politicial Struggles of Syed Jamaluddin al-Afghani (Kabul: Muassisa Intasharat Baihaqi, 1977). Also see Jamil Ahmad, “Jamaluddin Afghani,” http://www.renaissance.com.pk/julletf94.html. For the Iranian-origins argument, see Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

  2 Saeed, Women in Afghan History, 15.

  3 Ghobar, Afghanistan Dar Maseer-i-Tareekh, vol. 1, 594–595.

  4 Habibi, Tarikh-i-Mukhtasar-i Afghanistan, 291–293.

  5 Ghobar, Afghanistan Dar Maseer-i-Tareekh, vol. 1, 595–596.

  6 Ibid., 594. Sherpoor is within the city limits of today’s Kabul.

  CHAPTER 8: INTERRUPTED AGAIN

  1 Niall Fergusson, Colossus, The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 15.

  2 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 151.

  3 Maud Diver, Kabul to Kandahar (London: Peter Davies, 1935), 21.

  4 Ibid., 29.

  5 Ibid., 48.

  6 Ibid., 54.

  7 Ibid., 55.

  8 Ibid., 58.

  9 Ibid., 61.

  10 Ibid., 94.

  11 Ibid., 98.

  12 Ibid., 100.

  CHAPTER 9: A TIME OF BLOOD AND IRON

  1 Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan, 3–6.

  2 Habibi, Tarikh-i-Mukhtasar-i Afghanistan.

  3 Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan, 48.

  4 Ibid., 13.

  5 Ibid., 16; also mentioned in Saeed, Women in Afghan History, 17. The story of female bodyguards comes from a conversation with Bob Darr/Abdul Hayy, author of Spy of the Heart.

  6 Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan, 98–100.

  7 Ibid., 105.

  8 Ibid., 103–105.

  9 Ibid., 40.

  10 Ibid., 35.

  11 Ibid., 38–39.

  12 Ibid., xxiii.

  CHAPTER 10: STARTING FRESH

  1 Ghobar, Afghanistan in the Course of History, vol. 2, 19–23.

  2 Rameen Moshref, “The Life and Times of Amir Habibullah,” Afghanistan Online, http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/detail/dhabib.html. See also Dupree, Afghanistan, 408–409.

  3 Khalili, Yawd-dasht hai Ustad Kahlili [Memoirs of Master Khalili] (As told to his daughter Marie) (Herndon, VA: Marie and Mohammed Afzal Nassiri, 2010), 25–27.

  4 Ibid., 37–38.

  5 Senzil Nawid, “Political Advocacy in Early Twentieth Century Afghan Persian Poetry,” Afghanistan Studies Journal 3 (1992): 5–15.

  6 Saeed, Afghan Women in History, 19.

  7 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 11.

  8 Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan, 1900–1923: A Diplomatic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 95.

  9 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 20–21.

  10 Ibid., 20.

  11 Khalili, Yawd-dasht hai Ustad Kahlili, 28–31.

  12 Ibid., 32.

  13 Ibid., 36.

  14 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 11: KING OF THE RADICALS

  1 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 23.

  2 Ibid., 37.

  3 Ibid., 43.

  4 Ibid., 61.

  5 Ibid., 73.

  6 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 12: KING’S LAW VERSUS GOD’S LAW

  1 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 188.

  2 Sana Haroon, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 117–119.

  3 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 346.

  4 Khalili, Yawd-dasht hai Ustad Kahlili, 55–59.

  5 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 378.

  6 Ibid., 377–379, 403–405.

  CHAPTER 13: THINGS FALL APART

  1 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 416–417. Also see Saqao’s “own” accounts of his exploits in his supposed autobiography: Habibullah Kalakani, My Life from Brigand to King (London: Octagon Press, 1990), 54–59, 66–68, 71–82.

  2 For a discussion of Saqao’s image, see Ludwig Adamec, “The Two Faces of Habibullah Kalakani,” Afghanistan Studies Journal 2 (1990–1991): 85–90.

  3 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 425–426, 435–437. Saqao’s autobiography gives an amusingly different account of this episode. Kalakani, Brigand to King, 115–116, 118–120.

  4 Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 480. These stories were still being told when I was growing up in Kabul twenty-five years later. The poet Khalili’s memoir gives a far more admiring picture of Bacha (59–60, 71–82), as does his biography of Amir Habibullah Kalakani.

  5 Khalili, Yawd-dasht hai Ustad Kahlili, 71–73. Rhea Talley Stewart, Fire in Afghanistan, 438.

  6 Kalakani, Brigand to King, 158–180.

  7 M. H. Anwar, Memories of Afghanistan (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004), 127–129.

  CHAPTER 14: AFTER THE STORM

  1 Anwar, Memories of Afghanistan, 131–132.

  2 Ghobar, Afghanistan in the Course of History, vol. 2, 96–97.

  3 Khaled Siddiq Charkhi recounts the destruction of the Charkhi elders and the subsequent fate of surviving family members in From My Memories: Memoirs of Political Imprisonment from Childhood in Afghanistan (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010). See 1–37.

  4 Ghobar, Afghanistan in the Course of History, vol. 2, 68.

  5 Anwar, Memories of Afghanistan, 200–201, 212–215, 228, 225–226, 262–277.

  6 Ghobar, Afghanistan in the Course of History, vol. 2, 151–161.

  7 Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2004), 114–115.

  CHAPTER 15: NONALIGNED NATION

  1 Dupree, Afghanistan, 510.

  2 When Mao Tse-tung invented the term “Third World,” he meant to label the Soviet Union and the United States together the “first world,” the developed second-tier powers such as France and Germany the “second world,” and all the undeveloped countries, including China, the third world. In common usage, First World came to mean the Capitalist West, Second World the Soviet-led Communist countries, and Third Wor
ld everybody else. The exact meaning of the terms has remained ambiguous.

  3 Dimensions from Dupree, Afghanistan, 483.

  4 Ibid., 513–522.

  CHAPTER 16: DEVELOPMENT, NO BRAKES

  1 I remember hearing these speeches without understanding them when I was a little boy growing up in Kabul.

  2 Dupree, Afghanistan, 546–548.

  CHAPTER 17: THE DEMOCRACY ERA

  1 Dupree, Afghanistan 549.

  2 From private conversations with Nasser Hosseini, former ambassador to France, Mazar Ansary, and others.

  3 Dupree, Afghanistan, 501.

  CHAPTER 18: RISE OF THE LEFT

  1 Raja Anwar, The Tragedy of Afghanistan: A First-Hand Account (London: Verso, 1988), 45.

  2 Bashir Sakhawerz, author of the novel The Snake Charmer, described these events to me in July 2011; so did Ghulam Ebadi, author of an unpublished memoir, “In Quest of Khalil,” which I was editing when he unexpectedly passed away.

  3 Anwar, Tragedy of Afghanistan, 39–45.

  4 Mentioned by Khaled Hosseini, who heard it from his father’s associates in the government.

  CHAPTER 19: CHANGE BY DECREE

  1 Conversation with Ghaffar Lakanwall, former minister of agriculture in the Karmal government, August 16, 2005.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Kabul Times, page 1, August 9, 1979.

  4 Conversation with Idrees Ahmad Rahmani, June 17, 2011.

  5 Anwar, Tragedy of Afghanistan, 129, cites a 1978–1979 survey that claims 2.5 million Afghans—one out of every six—were nomadic or seminomadic at that time.

  6 Fred Halliday, “The War and Revolution in Afghanistan,” New Left Review, no. 119 (January–February, 1980): 31.

  7 Anwar, Tragedy of Afghanistan, 179–180.

  8 My cousin Farid, who was studying in New York at the same time as Amin, recollects Amin’s fruitless but sincere attempt to recruit him into the Afghan Communist Party.

  9 Kakar, among others, gives the twenty-five thousand figure in his book Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982. Anwar, Tragedy of Afghanistan, 156–157, gives the eight hundred number.

  10 See Anwar, Tragedy of Afghanistan, 166–173, for a detailed account of this debacle.

  11 The Russian General Staff, The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 15.

  CHAPTER 20: THE SOVIET OCCUPATION

  1 Conversation in the summer of 2002 with Malia Zulfiqar, former minister of women’s affairs in the Amin government, who resigned (and then defected) because she was required to take part in episodes like this.

  2 Russian General Staff, Soviet-Afghan War, 21–22.

  3 This detail comes from Mahtab Mujaddedi, who fought in Afghanistan as a Mujahid in the eighties.

  CHAPTER 21: THE MUJAHIDEEN

  1 Kakar, Afghanistan, 80.

  2 Ibid., 138.

  3 In a conversation with the author.

  4 Chronicled in Ghulam Ebadi’s unpublished personal essay “The Prince and the Lion.”

  5 From Abdullah Qazi, “Biography: Ahmad Shah Massoud,” Afghanistan Online , http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/asmasood.html, 2001, updated 2007.

  CHAPTER 22: COLD WAR ENDGAME

  1 In the nationwide speech delivered on July 15, 1979, Carter used the phrase “crisis of confidence,” but his advisor Patrick Caddell had used the word

  “malaise” in his memo to Carter about the address, which became known ever after as Carter’s “malaise” speech.

  2 Reagan first evoked the phrase in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 8, 1983, in Orlando, Florida.

  3 If you don’t believe me, just Google “Gorbachev, birthmark, anti-Christ.”

  4 Nixon used variations of this phrase in his campaign speeches leading to the presidential election of 1972 and explicitly in a speech on January 23, 1973, describing the Paris Peace Accords his negotiators had just signed with the North Vietnamese.

  5 Kamal Matinuddin, The Taliban Phenomenon: Afghanistan 1994–1997 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004), puts the number distributed by the CIA at twenty-three hundred, 337.

  CHAPTER 23: FROM HORROR TO CHAOS

  1 In a conversation with the author, July 2, 2002.

  2 Coll, Ghost Wars, 337, says six hundred remained in Afghan hands in 1996.

  3 Mark Urban, War in Afghanistan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 241–243.

  4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Kp21GGccE.

  CHAPTER 24: OUT OF THE CAMPS

  1 Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 17.

  2 Matinuddin, Taliban Phenomenon, 18.

  3 Ibid., 20.

  4 Ahmad Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, & Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale Note Bene, Yale University Press, 2000), 178.

  5 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762181.html.

  6 For a complete list of countries in the coalition and their troop contributions, see http://www.cryan.com/war/AlliedForces.html.

  7 Various sources, such as BBC news reports, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/iraq_events/html/desert_storm.stm.

  8 Department of Defense (http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45404) official count of Americans killed in this war is 147. CNN (http://articles.cnn.com/2003-04-17/world/ sprj.irq.casualties_1_combat-deaths-casualties-coalition-deaths? _s=PM:WORLD) set total coalition casualties at 358. For casualties on the Iraqi side, see http://www.cryan.com/war/AlliedForces.html. The accuracy of this count is open to discussion since official US Defense Department sources avoid estimating Iraqi casualties, as discussed by John Heidenrich, “The Gulf War: How Many Iraqis Died?” Foreign Policy, no. 90 (Spring 1993): 108–125.

  9 Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 2–3; also see CIA estimates of oil reserves worldwide at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2178rank.html.

  10 Matinuddin, Taliban Phenomenon, 65–66.

  11 Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 36–37.

  12 Ibid., 40.

  13 Matinuddin, Taliban Phenomenon, 49–50. According to US State Department cables, however, US intelligence believed Pakistan directly funded and armed the Taliban. See http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB227/index.htm#15#15.

  CHAPTER 25: TALIBAN VERSUS MUJAHIDEEN

  1 Matinuddin, Taliban Phenomenon, 87.

  2 For a full picture, see Abdul Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, ed. Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn (New York: Columbia University Press), 2010.

  3 Tomsen, Wars of Afghanistan, 20.

  4 Ibid., 17.

  CHAPTER 27: AMERICA ENTERS THE PICTURE

  1 Coll, Ghost Wars, 548.

  2 Ibid., 538.

  3 Ibid., 543.

  4 Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, 141–143.

  5 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/06/22/world/asia/afghanistan-war-timeline.html.

  CHAPTER 28: THE BONN PROJECT

  1 Ahmad Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 90–93.

  CHAPTER 29: KABUL SPRING

  1 This data is collected from a variety of sources including Lydia’s Poole’s report to Global Humanitarian Assistance at http://www.globalhumanitarianas-sistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/gha-Afghanistan-2011-major-resource-flows.pdf. Also see GAO report found at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05742.pdf.

  2 Interviewed in the movie Defying Silence by Stacia Teele and Ed Robbins.

  3 http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/afghanistanunveiled/film.html.

  4 http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/242.

  5 Joel Brinkley, “Pity Afghanistan’s Children,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 2011.
r />   CHAPTER 30: THE PERSISTENCE OF TROUBLE

  1 Gayle Lemmon, “Raisins Give Hope to Afghan Farmers,” New York Times, October 8, 2010.

  2 This statistic was cited by a speaker at a September 2003 fund-raising event in Marin County for Roots for Peace, an NGO dedicated to removing land mines from war-torn areas and planting grapevines in the clear soil.

  3 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html.

  4 General Accountability Office Report to Congressional Committees, July 2005, Afghanistan Reconstruction: Despite Some Progress, Deteriorating Security and Other Obstacles Continue to Threaten Achievement of U.S. Goals (Washington, DC: GAO, 2005), http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05742.pdf.

  5 Tomsen, Wars of Afghanistan, 640; and Sayid Sattar Langary, Women from Afghanistan in Diaspora (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010), xii.

  6 Lydia Poole, Afghanistan: Tracking Major Resource Flows, 2002–2010 (Wells, UK: Global Humanitarian Assistance), http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance. org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/gha-Afghanistan-201 1-major-resource-flows. pdf.

  7 Fariba Nawa, “Deconstructing the Reconstruction: A Corpwatch Investigative Report,” http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14076, 15.

  8 Afghan Amabassador Tayeb Jawad (in a speech at the University of California–Berkeley, April 2007) claimed that two-thirds of the money allocated to aid in Afghanistan was banked in America. See also Matthew Nasuti, “America’s ‘Phantom Aid’ to Afghanistan,” Atlantic Free Press, November 4, 2009, http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/12194-americas-qphantom-aidq-to-afghanistan.html.

  9 A June 2011 Majority Staff Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee estimated that posting one US civilian in Afghanistan costs half a million dollars, excluding security expenses and salary. Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2011), http://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/SPRT%20112-21.pdf, 7.