Historians generally assume that “modernity” jump-started in Afghanistan in 1919 with the crowning of Ghazi Amanullah Khan as emir and later as king in 1926. Succeeding his father, Habibullah Khan, who had been assassinated while on a hunting trip, Amanullah launched a campaign similar to Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran to create a “European” style modernity with the moderated trappings of Islam. All three Islamic countries were being reborn after the disaster of World War I, even though only Ottoman Turkey had been directly involved. In 1919 Afghanistan was one of the least “modern” countries in the region, long buffeted by foreign invasions from its neighbors but never fully controlled by an outside power.
When history repeats itself, it does so with a vengeance. In 1842 Great Britain suffered one of its major defeats when in a retreat from Kabul some 16,000 British troops and civilians were annihilated. In 1989, after losing more than 15,000 troops, the Soviet Union pulled out of its decade-long attempt to make Afghanistan a Marxist ally. Today NATO, led by the United States, is ending its attempt to democratize the Afghans against terrorism after two decades and a loss of over 2,300 American servicemen and another thousand from NATO member troops.
The case of Amanullah is well worth revisiting. The flamboyant American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who made his claim to fame by glorifying Lawrence of Arabia, was able to cross the Khyber Pass in a Buick at the invitation of Emir Amanullah. He describes his visit in Beyond Khyber Pass (1925). Well aware of the dangerous and uncharted territory he was entering, he quoted lines from the British Raj poet Rudyard Kipling:
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
Driving up to Jalalabad and Kabul in his motocar, a sight to behold at the time, Thomas paints a time-machine Orientalist picture of a land filled with brigands and fanatics, sprinkled with an occasional positive note. On women in this Islamic realm, he writes:
But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is what Thomas shows of the typical Afghan woman:
Like his adoration of Lawrence during World War I, Amanullah becomes a local icon resurrecting a backward society into a Westernized future. Thomas writes:
One of those “good things in life” was tennis, which Amanullah loved, just as he did the new American silent cinema. And just as he loved his wife Soraya, who threw off the veil (which Amanullah considered not essential to Islam) and wore stylish Western clothing of the time.
In 1929, after a decade that benefited elites, the masses of Afghanistan had little to show. It seems that Amanullah though that all the country needed was modern dress. He even convened a loya jirga of tribal leaders who were forced to dress in suits. After a rebellion, not unlike the Taliban started in the early 1990s, Amanullah abdicated and spent the rest of his life in luxury in Europe, dying in Italy in 1960.
Thomas was hopeful about a new nation of Afghans, but was aware that it would not be easy.
In an assessment of the fall of Amanullah, the writer Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah in 1932 summed up what doomed the king:
The blame game for the messy withdrawal of American troops and the host of Afghan supporters is now in full swing. If two decades of outside support was not enough to transform Afghanistan into what the neocon architects dreamed of for it and Iraq, it is hard to see what staying any longer would have accomplished. The swift takeover by the raggle-tag Taliban apparently took the Pentagon intelligence by surprise, but it also shows that little would be accomplished by maintaining any military presence. Whether Biden made the right decision or not (and history, rather than partisan congressional committees, will be the best judge), it is obvious that the majority of Afghans have chosen the Taliban rather than the puppet government paved with good intentions but as corrupt as all the previous ones.
It is too early to tell how the Taliban will govern. As an opposition they were demonized, but taking on the responsibility of running a country with a population of some 38 million divided into numerous ethnic and tribal enclaves will be a full-time job. Spending the winters in neighboring Pakistan is over with. The “buck”, as they say, now stops with a group that has a dubious record with the potential for continuing human rights abuses. Either the Taliban will be reborn with a slight nod to moderation, not as much as Amanullah of course, or will themselves fail so miserably to bring peace and economic prosperity, that they too will be toppled.
As Thomas noted almost a century ago:
“The swaggering Afghan has good reason to swagger. The independence of his wild mountainous country, placed squarely between two jealous rivals, the Bear to the north and the Lion to the south, has remained intact… Yet the freedom-loving mountaineers —hiding in ravine and cave- later waged incessant guerilla warfare on all who passed their way.”
Afghanistan redux.
