Blood Washing Blood

Afghanistan's Hundred-Year War

Phil Halton

• Editorial: Dundurn Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781459746664
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

A clear-eyed view of the conflict in Afghanistan and its century-deep roots. The war in Afghanistan has consumed vast amounts of blood and treasure, causing the Western powers to seek an exit without achieving victory. Seemingly never-ending, the conflict has become synonymous with a number of issues — global jihad, rampant tribalism, and the narcotics trade — but even though they are cited as the causes of the conflict, they are in fact symptoms. Rather than beginning after 9/11 or with the Soviet "invasion" in 1979, the current conflict in Afghanistan began with the social reforms imposed by Amanullah Amir in 1919. Western powers have failed to recognize that legitimate grievances are driving the local population to turn to insurgency in Afghanistan. The issues they are willing to fight for have deep roots, forming a hundred-year-long social conflict over questions of secularism, modernity, and centralized power. The first step toward achieving a "solution" to the Afghanistan "problem" is to have a clear-eyed view of what is really driving it.

CHAPTER 1 1919

AFGHANISTAN’S HUNDRED-YEAR conflict began on the 20th of February, 1919.

Afghanistan’s ruler, Habibullah Amir, was a keen outdoorsman, and liked to hunt wild duck and other marsh fowl, as well as the country’s ibex and mountain sheep. He had travelled to the mountainous province of Laghman, just east of Kabul, with his harem in tow, on a hunting expedition. On the morning of February 20, he was shot in the temple with a pistol while asleep in his tent. Although many of the seeds of the coming conflict were planted years or even decades before then, his death led to a struggle within Afghan society that continues to this day.

Habibullah had ruled Afghanistan since succeeding his father, Abdur Rahman (known as the “Iron Amir”), who had died peacefully in 1901. A hesitant modernizer, like his father he was an enthusiastic autocrat. Over decades of rule he had made no effort to change the system of power that put him in absolute control at its centre. His efforts at modernization were largely for his own prestige or benefit.

Impressed by British might and wealth during a visit to Imperial India, on his return in 1903 Habibullah set up Afghanistan’s first secular school, which he modestly named Habibiya College after himself. The school taught a modified Anglo-Indian curriculum and was led by foreign professors. In part to mollify Afghanistan’s religious leaders, who were alarmed by a secular school run by foreigners, he also founded three madrassas with a purely religious curriculum that became the preparatory schools for Habibiya. In 1909 he also opened a military school, where Turkish instructors taught drill and military science to prospective officers.

Outside the sphere of education, Habibullah built Afghanistan’s first power station, a hydroelectric dam at Jabal-us Seraj in Parwan that supplied electricity exclusively to his palace and various government buildings. He built no other power stations that might have served the general population, perhaps because of the difficulty in building the first one: the major parts were carried to the site by elephant, taking two and a half months to arrive from Jalalabad.

Habibullah’s father had instituted a system of cruel punishments in hope of stamping out crime within the kingdom. Criminals were stoned, impaled on stakes, or caged at the scene of their crimes until they starved to death. Others were thrown down the “black well,” where they were left to die. Merchants who were caught cheating their customers had their ears removed and displayed above their shops. Habibullah modernized this system, replacing the punishment of mutilation with imprisonment, although the practices of stoning and execution remained unchanged.

The Iron Amir had fought and won four civil wars and defeated over one hundred rebellions during his 21-year reign, becoming progressively crueller over the years. Afghanistan had been a relatively cohesive state with a Pashtun ruler since Ahmed Shah Durrani was declared Afghanistan’s amir by his fellow Pashtuns in 1747. Although descended from two generations of Afghan rulers, the Iron Amir was placed on the throne by the British in 1880, at the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The resulting stain on his legitimacy meant that his throne was secure only as long as he defended it by force. He was quoted as saying that he “ruled with an iron hand because he ruled an iron people.” This was a lesson that his successors perhaps did not learn.

Habibullah had designated his brother Nasrullah as his successor, over his own three sons. Nasrullah, who commanded the Afghan Army and presided over the State Council, and Habibullah’s eldest son Inayatullah were both present in the hunting camp when he was killed. In accordance with the late ruler’s wishes, Nasrullah declared himself the amir. Inayatullah, who as the eldest son also had a claim to the throne, immediately gave Nasrullah his support. Just as Habibullah had become amir without conflict after his father’s death, it seemed at first that succession would again be without bloodshed.

But in the capital there was intrigue. Habibullah’s third son, Amanullah, was the governor of Kabul Province. He claimed that he should ascend to the throne by right of being the eldest son of Habibullah’s first wife, Ulya Hazrat. Succession was muddied by the fact that Habibullah had children from the four wives allowed to him under Islam, as well as 10 other women who occupied a lesser position in court. Ulya Hazrat was Pashtun, from the Loynab sub-tribe of the Barakzai, the same tribal confederacy as the amir himself, while Inyatullah’s mother was not. Though Nasrullah commanded the Afghan Army, it was based in Kabul and he had no means to quickly give it orders. Amanullah had control of the treasury, and the ear of a number of the amir’s advisers. Counselled by his mother, Amanullah called the senior officers of the army together, along with the members of the Council of Notables. These were the largely hereditary elite who formed the amir’s court, from the foremost families within the capital.

Amanullah, only 27 years old, was well known as a reform-minded and energetic member of the royal family. There were several factions at court, all with different ideas of how Afghanistan should be run, though none were so broad-minded as to consider any system other than autocracy. Habibullah himself had been staunchly pro-British, and saw even small attempts at modernization purely as a means to increase his own wealth and prestige. He was content with the political arrangement made by his father, whereby Afghanistan was permitted to have diplomatic relations only with the British Empire. This relationship was managed through the Viceroy of India. In exchange, the British paid Habibullah a large stipend, allowed him to purchase vast quantities of arms and ammunition at cost, and promised to come to his aid should he be attacked.

Nasrullah was seen as leading a conservative, pro-British faction within the court that largely agreed with the direction taken by Habibullah. Nasrullah was also closely allied with the religious leaders of the country, who were Sufi clerics drawn from two major families — the Gailani and Mojaddedi. Although Afghanistan is now associated with religious extremism in the minds of many, Sufism is a moderate, mystical strain within Islam that emphasizes personal and direct contact with God rather than strict regulation of outward behaviour. Sufism was so widespread in Afghanistan that it was known as the “land of the saints” for the number of its Sufi shrines. Although Nasrullah agreed with Habibullah’s acceptance of his status as a client king installed by the British, it did not sit well with everyone in the amir’s court.

Amanullah was a member of an opposing nationalist, pro-Turkish faction, although he was not its leader. That role was filled by his father-in-law, Mahmud Tarzi, whose daughter Soraya he had married in 1914. Tarzi’s family had been exiled by the Iron Amir, and he had grown up outside of Afghanistan. His family first fled to India and then to Turkey, before settling in Damascus, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Tarzi eventually became a well-educated Ottoman bureaucrat, and was exposed to the modern political and philosophical ideas of the age. He travelled to Iraq, went on pilgrimage to Mecca, and visited Paris, engaging with intellectuals of all stripes wherever he went. In Istanbul he became a student of Jamal al din Afghani, a noted Islamic thinker and political activist. When his family, along with many other exiles, was invited to return to Afghanistan by Habibullah, he brought with him the experience gained from living for 20 years in a relatively modern Islamic state.

Tarzi’s view of modernization was combined with pan-Islamic political ideas in a potent combination that appealed to both the conservative clergy and hot-headed youth. He preached a return to greatness for Islamic civilization, including in the realms of science and mathematics, under the political structure of a caliphate. His anti-colonial and anti-British views were the hardest to square with those of Habibullah, though he was careful not to provoke the amir directly. From 1911 to 1918 he was the editor of Seraj al Akbar-e Afganiya, Afghanistan’s first newspaper, which he used to state his views. It was influential in court circles and among the capital’s elite, though in a country with an approximately 2 percent literacy rate its reach was limited.

In addition to the connection with his father-in-law, Amanullah also had a connection to a more radical group of thinkers, who gave themselves an almost farcical name: the Jamiat-e Sirri-ye Melli (National Secret Party). They desired a drastic change in Afghan politics, specifically the introduction of a constitution and a truly representative national assembly that would limit the powers of the amir. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as “Constitutionalists.” Ironically led by the Indo-British principal of Habibiya College installed by Habibullah, the group was organized in a cellular structure and drew from three main elements of society: Habibiya graduates, educated members of the court, and the educated Indo-British community.

In 1909 an alleged Jamiat-e Sirri-ye Melli plot against Habibullah’s life was discovered by his secret police and brutally suppressed. About four dozen people were arrested and seven were executed, though Amanullah’s connection to the organization does not seem to have been publicly revealed.

The struggle between Amanullah and Nasrullah was short-lived. Amanullah quickly gained the support of the assembled notables and military officers in Kabul, and sent word to Nasrullah, then in Jalalabad, of his own claim to the throne. After a week, while the succession hung in the balance, Nasrullah and Inayatullah came to Kabul and submitted to Amanullah.

The amir’s first actions as ruler were surprising. On March 3 he sent a letter to the Viceroy of India provocatively declaring himself the ruler of a “Free and Independent” Afghanistan. The viceroy did not deign to reply, as at that time there were more pressing concerns in India. Nationalist protests and rioting broke out all across the country in March and April, and much of the military that might have been used to subdue Amanullah either was still returning from the First World War in Europe or was dispersed for internal security duties. On April, 11, 1919, British troops attempting to break up a large crowd of protesters opened fire and killed an estimated 375 people in what became known as the Amritsar Massacre, creating a crisis for the colonial government as nationalist sentiment rose sharply across the country.

In mid-April the same group of notables and military leaders whom Amanullah had petitioned for support to become amir were convened again in a darbar, or royal court, to investigate Habibullah’s murder. They quickly came to the conclusion that the murder was committed by an army colonel as part of a wider plot that also implicated Amanullah’s uncle Nasrullah. The colonel was executed, and Nasrullah was imprisoned for life, dying in custody not long afterward. Other alleged conspirators were rounded up and imprisoned. Inyatullah pledged allegiance to his brother and publicly renounced his own claim to the throne. At the same time, Amanullah released all the Constitutionalists who had been imprisoned by his father.

When Amanullah realized that the British would not reply to his letter, and sensing the limited British appetite for war after four years of bloodshed in France, he took action: he decided to attack British India. On May 3 Afghan soldiers supported by tribal levies paid in plunder attacked and occupied Bagh, a village in the Khyber Pass on the Indian side of the border. They also seized the springs at Tangi, which controlled the water supply to the trading settlement of Landi Kotal. A bustling trade crossed through the Khyber Pass: cutting the route through the pass and threatening Landi Kotal choked off this trade.

A small British force was dispatched on May 9, quickly bogging down outside of Bagh, where it dug in and looked to the Royal Air Force for support. Aircraft dispersed Afghan forces concentrated nearby, causing many tribesmen to take the weapons and equipment they had been given and return home. Tribal enthusiasm for attacking the British was motivated less by patriotism or anti-colonial feelings than by the desire for personal profit. A stronger British attack on May 11 captured the Afghan artillery and caused the remaining men to retreat, harried from the air as they went.

After this attack, Amanullah called for a loya jirga, which roughly translates as a “grand assembly,” only the third in Afghanistan’s history. The jirga as a local institution is central to the Pashtunwali or “way of the Pashtun,” a customary way of life whose tenets include hospitality, forgiveness, revenge, personal bravery, loyalty, honour, egalitarianism, and faith. The Pashtun tribes by tradition are egalitarian and collaborative, and their main means of dispute resolution and decision-making is the jirga. In its ideal form, no one person oversees the conduct of the jirga, and all adult members of a community are entitled to speak at it as equals. Despite this ideal, it is not uncommon for powerful or respected individuals to exert influence over the members of the jirga to obtain a decision in their favour. A jirga can be called by any member of the community, and it sits until a consensus is reached. Both customary and shari’a law will be used to reach an agreement, though in practice most Pashtuns do not differentiate between the two.

Amanullah called for a jirga of Pashtun representatives from every province of the country, as well as senior members of the clergy and his court, to discuss the war with the British. This seemed to demonstrate his willingness to consult and collaborate with his people, and was well received. He sought support for the declaration of a jihad, a word that can mean many things but in this case is best translated as holy war. Ignoring the fact that his forces had attacked British India in the first place, Amanullah swore that he would not only defeat the British incursion through the Khyber Pass, but he would capture the distant city of Karachi and absorb it into his kingdom. He received enthusiastic approval from the assembled group, and so from the minbar (similar to a pulpit) of the Eid Gah mosque in Kabul, he declared jihad. Amanullah’s popularity was on the rise.

There was a further degree of duplicity to Amanullah’s actions, as at the same time he was putting out feelers to the British asking for a ceasefire. He must have known that the Afghan Army was hopelessly outclassed by the British Indian Army, and it was only a matter of time before sufficient force would be rallied against him to carry the war all the way to Kabul.

The Afghan Army at this time numbered about fifty thousand conscripts in a mix of infantry and cavalry units. With no headquarters above the battalion level, operations larger than a thousand men had no effective means of being organized, though senior officers would try to do so without any staff or procedures to support them. The army had been provided with Krupp 75mm artillery pieces and modern rifles by Germany, in vain hopes of securing Afghan co-operation against the British during the world war that had just ended. But while the artillery pieces themselves were modern, all but a few were either drawn by oxen or carried by elephant. Conscripts who finished their two years of service returned to their villages to form a kind of reserve that also encompassed all the untrained tribesmen who could be raised in an emergency with the promise of weapons and plunder. All camels in the country were also required to be registered for potential conscription, which was reputed to be more effective than the system for conscripting soldiers. All things considered, the Afghan Army was much better suited to putting down rebellious tribes within the country than fighting a modern war.

To augment the army, Amanullah hoped to raise tribal levies from Pashtuns living inside India, separated from their brethren by the hated artificial border known as the “Durand Line.” Agreed to in principle in 1893 by Sir Mortimer Durand, a British member of the Indian Civil Service, and the Iron Amir, it took a joint survey team until 1896 to complete the actual mapping of the boundary line. Stretching 2,200 kilometres through the heart of the traditional lands of the Pashtun, it remains contentious even today. Many Pashtuns, rejecting the authority of either state, simply ignored the border and crossed back and forth freely. At the same time, it was not unknown for tribes to seek assistance from either state against the other when it suited them. Meant to simplify relations between British India and Afghanistan, and to curb Russian ambitions by demonstrating British restraint, the border has complicated relations between the states on either side and their Pashtun subjects. As recently as 2017 former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a political moderate (also a Ghilzai Pashtun), was quoted in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn that Afghanistan would never recognize the Durand Line. This refusal has dogged relations between Afghanistan and its neighbour, whether British India or Pakistan, ever since the line was first drawn.

Although Amanullah hoped to exploit and perhaps increase the unrest in India, his sudden attack had the opposite effect. As much as there was discontent with colonial rule, there was greater fear among the population of hordes of wild Afghan tribesmen looting their homes. This meant that public opinion in the country was quickly galvanized against the invaders.

The British Indian Army formed the ad hoc Trans-Indus Force to repel the Afghans, which grew in size to over 340,000 men with modern artillery, motor transport, and support from the Royal Air Force. The Afghan forces were defeated on all fronts. Most humiliatingly, the Royal Air Force bombed the cities of Jalalabad and Kabul, and the Afghans had no means to respond.

The only Afghan success in this Third Afghan War was a minor one, General Mohammed Nadir Khan’s temporary capture of the fortress of Thal. Nadir Khan was a distant cousin of Amanullah whose family had been exiled to British India by the Iron Amir and permitted to return under Habibullah, who married his sister. Despite growing up outside of Afghanistan, Nadir Khan had good relations with the eastern Pashtun tribes, particularly the Mehsud and Wazir tribes, whom he led against the British.

The British were concerned that to subdue the Afghans militarily would be both costly and risky. Failure might damage British prestige in such a way that it might encourage a nationalist uprising across India. And so limited military action continued to keep the Afghan Army off balance and prevent an invasion of India, while a negotiated settlement was sought.

With both parties seeking peace, agreement to a ceasefire was quickly reached, although it was largely ignored by Amanullah’s tribal levies, who continued raiding, and the Royal Air Force, which did not put a stop to its bombing. Negotiations began in earnest on July 26, and the Treaty of Rawalpindi was signed on August 8, 1919.

Although Amanullah had seen little military success, he again took to the Eid Gah mosque to declare victory. The terms of the treaty were favourable to Afghanistan, so much so that the viceroy came under heavy criticism from England for being too light handed. The right of Afghan rulers to manage their own foreign policy, bargained away by Abdur Rahman, was restored. The only gains made by the British were that they would no longer pay the Afghan amir a subsidy, and would no longer allow him to buy arms at favourable prices through India. Britain, distracted by internal issues in India and perhaps exhausted by the First World War, had lost control of what had been seen as a vital corner of the Empire’s frontier.

This was a stunning achievement for Amanullah, who only six months into his reign could declare himself the liberator of Afghanistan.

CHAPTER 2 EARLY REFORMS

AMANULLAH’S VICTORY OVER the British added to his popularity and allowed him to portray himself in subtly different ways to the many parts of his diverse kingdom — as a successful military leader to the tribes of the east, as a pious warrior to the clergy, and as a reformer and modernizer to the Kabul elite. Not only was he seen as successful and dynamic, but uniquely among his dynasty he seemed to be interested in his subjects; it was rumoured that, like the storied ruler Harun al-Rashid, he wandered his capital at night in disguise, observing and questioning common people. Even during daylight he would stop to speak with commoners at length, and unlike his predecessors, he travelled without a heavy bodyguard. He saw himself as a “revolutionary king” without internal enemies.

Rhetoric aside, there was a revolutionary aspect to his plans. Political power in Afgha...