Afghanistan

Political Frailty and External Interference

Nabi Misdaq

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415702058
• eBook ISBN: 9781135990169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Afghan society is analyzed from a fresh standpoint in this book which discusses the country's two and a half centuries of socio-political disquiet and outside interference. The author explores the continuous struggle between the central government and the cornerstone of the present state, the tribes. In its examination of the interchange between the centre and the periphery, the book presents a compelling review of Afghan history, the role of Islam and the contemporary theories of state, Islam, nationalism, ethnicity, and tribalism.

In addition, Misdaq considers Afghanistan's dynamism and long established custom of dealing with foreign invaders. Covering the Soviet occupation, ethnic conflicts and the US invasion, the book examines Afghan resilience and the capacity to raise an army of fighting men. Written by a well-respected authority on the region, the book highlights past mistakes which should not be repeated and recommends the way forward for this troubled nation.

Part I
A state in the making

1 Formation of the Afghan state: 1747–72

Introduction

For millennia the area called Afghanistan has been the crossroads of invading empires, a network of trade routes and a centre or meeting place for cultures. The great civilisations of the Asian continent, in particular the Indian and Chinese, were inter-linked by various trade routes crossing through Afghanistan. An art historian of the region summarises in the following words: ‘No land, in ancient times, was more thoroughly traversed in every direction. Doubtless no other was so well situated geographically to act as a link between east and west’ (Auboyer 1968: 9). Perhaps because of this, Afghanistan has gained the title, ‘cross-road of Asia’ (Gregorian 1969: 21–4). This area nearly always has been a battleground of different invading armies, sometimes ruled by one, at other times by others, and yet most of the time disputed between them.¹ This violent and continuous change is part of the turbulent history of the Pash-tuns or Afghans. An anthropologist of law writes:

For at least a millennium, the Pashto-speaking people have preserved their independence and flourished through a tribal political organisation in their own homeland straddling the present Afghanistan- Pakistan international border. The tribal organisation of the people – more commonly called Afghans to the west, Pathan in the east, and Pushtuns/Pakhtuns on both sides of this border – today provides them not merely with a distinct cultural or ethnic identity, but especially for those in the central homeland nearest the border, with a form of polity alternative to that of the state.

(Hager 1983: 83)

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the area known as Afghanistan was divided three ways between the Shabanid Uzbek empire in the north, the Safavid Persian empire in the west and the Moghul Indian empire in the east, with some cities like Kabul, Kandahar and Ghazni often disputed between them.

This chapter first presents the historical background of how the state was formed. I write about the Roshani religious revivalist movement as an example of an early nationalist movement battling with the Moghuls. Another empire that stood in the way of Afghan national unity was the Persian Safavid. Hence the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were a period of struggle against the Moghuls in the east and the Persians in the west with the aim of safeguarding their identity and attempting to set up an indigenous Pashtun/Afghan state, like the earlier Afghan states of Lodies, Suries and Ghories – the Delhi Sultanate. These struggles were spearheaded not by Uzbeks in the north against the remnants of the Sha-banids or Tajik in the west against the Safavid, but by the various tribes of the Pashtun within the Roshanid movement in the east; Ghilzai and Abdali (Durrani) as two of the largest confederacies of tribes in the west. A tribal confederacy in the Pashtun sense means an ethnic identity that cannot be divided politically even along tribal lines.² Of the two, the Ghilzai dominant nomadic mode of life has been responsible for their spread all over the country, although a large proportion of them remain to this day in Kandahar and southeast and southwest Afghanistan.³

Struggle against the Moghuls: the Roshani movement

Afghans have been active in the Indian subcontinent, as traders, merchants and rulers for a long time (Gommans 1995: 4–5). Afghans from eastern Pashtun tribes had established ruling dynasties in India such as the Lodies (1451–1526) and Suries (1539–55) (Rahim 1961). These Delhi Sultanates preceded Zahir ud-Din Mohammad Babur, the founder of the Moghul Empire.⁴ Other Pashtuns, locally known as Rohillas, for nearly a hundred years from the turn of the eighteenth century established their principalities in the foothills of the Himalayas, Rohilkand, Kaisur and Far-rukhabad. These and the Delhi Sultanate were early Pashtun states and provided ample experience to establish a native state later on in Afghanistan itself. The above dynasties, though established on Indian soil, considered themselves culturally and linguistically Pashtuns/Afghans.

With the precedents of Afghan rule in the subcontinent, the eastern Pashtuns, headed by a spiritual leader, Bayazid Ansari (1525–85?) started a supra-tribal uprising, called the Roshani, the illuminated or the enlightened movement, from amongst the tribes of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).⁵ Bayazid who became known as Pir Roshan, the apostle of light, aimed at creating ethnic and sectarian solidarity and therefore cast his net much wider than the localised tribe and ethnic groups. The Roshanid movement was in essence an emancipatory movement wrapped up in Pashto garb (Gommans 1995: 110). Pir Roshan through his preaching united the hill tribes and also the Shi’ah and Isma’iliah factions with the majority Sunni. He also sent da’wa or missionaries to places as far away as Balkh and Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan, Bokhara and Khiwa in Central Asia and Delhi in India. Bayazid, and his sons and grandsons after him, worked to strengthen tribal solidarity through religious fervour to achieve autonomy and statehood. His descendants and followers on more than one occasion declared their independence from the Moghuls, minting their own money and calling on other Pashtuns to rise. Gregorian researching into the former Soviet Union’s scholars’ work on the Roshanids concludes that ‘Soviet scholars see in the Roshani movement the first manifestation and the foundation of an Afghan national struggle for independence’ (Gregorian 1969: 421, n49).

The local Yosufzai land-owning khans who were losing control over their tribes came to regard the Roshani movement as a threat. Therefore, with the aid of Moghul money and influence they stood behind a local religious and literary figure, Akhund Derwaza, as a challenge to Pir Roshan. Derwaza criticised Pir Roshan’s heterodoxy, calling him Pir-e-Tarik, the apostle of darkness, and thus tried to convert his followers back to orthodox Islam. However, amongst the poor peasants, ethnic minorities and acephalous Pashtun, Pir Roshan’s movement had spread with great vigour since its introduction in the early 1540s. The main reason for its success was the hefty tax system of the Moghuls, coupled with their policy of divide and rule over the tribes. Also the Moghul emperor Akbar, assuming a semi-papal position by placing himself above criticism, became the focus of religious discontent and this was another issue against which Muslim orthodoxy took exception. Thus according to Mount Stewart Elphinstone in 1630, when Bayazid’s great-grandson, Abdul Qadir, launched an attack on the Moghul troops in Peshawar, fighting men from the tribes of the Afridi, Orakzais, Bangash, Mohmands, Yosufzai, Mohammadzai, Gigiani, Tarklauris, Baluchis, Turis and Zazis, numbering over 40,000, all took part (Elphin-stone 1969: 209–11). However, despite such a united stand, the lack of a central command, tribal jealousy, and the unclear allocation of functions in this attack led to their major downfall against the Moghuls (Caroe 1965: 228–9). But this dynamic Pashtun movement continued to harass the Moghuls throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite the Moghuls’ grant of land and donation of money to local khans, in the hope of inflaming inter-tribal warfare so that they could continue to reach their outposts in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.

Another Pashtun figure of this time was the celebrated poet, writer and tribal leader, Khushal Khan Khattak (1613–89) of the Khattak tribe.

Khushal Khan, as a literary man, knew more than most about Afghan/ Pashtun history and politics. Afghan writers see his life-long struggles against the Moghuls as a wakeup call to national consciousness that could be described in today’s political vocabulary as ardent ‘nationalism’. The epitaph on his tomb bears a poem that is known to all Pashtuns:

I bound on the sword for the pride of Afghan
I am Khoshal Khattak, the proud man of this age

Elphinstone writing in 1814 saw his poems as ‘intended to animate his countrymen to the defence of their independence, and to persuade them to concord and combination, as the only means of success’ (1969: 192–3). Despite the Moghuls’ grant of land to his great-grandfather in return for policing the road, he rose against the Moghul rulers and through his poetry and oratory became a formidable foe. ‘In 1664 . . . at the age of fifty-one [Khoshal] was dispatched in chains and under escort to Delhi . . . to spend over two years in prison’ (Caroe 1965: 233). Those Pashtun leaders whose loyalty was bought by Moghul money disgusted him. In one of his many Pashto poems, he expressed his revulsion in this way:

What worthless creatures Pashtun are

Without a scrap of sense

They act like every dog and cur

Haunting the butchers yard

Their sovereignty they have renounced

Preferring Moghul gold

They seem to have but one desire

To seek for Moghul titles

(Mackenzie 1965: 147)

The Yosufzai tribe, who had settled in the fertile valley of Swat, is mocked in one poem for not joining him against the Moghuls:

I alone am concerned for my nation’s honour
The Yosufzai are at ease, tilling their fields

However, after the middle of the seventeenth century, as a result of resistance from within some of the tribal leadership and the sophistication of the Moghul administration, it proved too difficult for the Roshani movement to overthrow Moghul rulers. Some Roshani leaders, true to Khushal Khan’s above observations, ended up becoming Moghul Mansabdar officers, and others were appointed as Jagir land revenue collectors (Gommans 1995: 111). But the movement continued to flourish even within India, so much so that the Bangash Pashtun tribes, who were followers of the Roshani, established their own principality to the south of Rohilkand in Farrukhabad.⁶ Towards the end of the seventeenth century the Roshani seem to have lost much of their rallying and fighting power. However, the movement continued to retain much of its spiritual vigour as a recruiting network for Afghans in the subcontinent.

This religious movement has similarities to the Taleban movement who recruited from madrassas, seminary schools, and operate across the tribal and ethnic divide. Taleban leaders, unlike the Roshanis Pirs saints, were ulama religious scholars, graduates from the madrassas and did not claim pir saint/holy men ranks as did the Roshanid leadership, including the son and grandsons of Bayazid. Pirs and other hereditary functionaries did not play any significant role amongst the Taleban. The Roshanis also compromised with Shi’ah and Isma’iliah. Taleban told me ‘we can not deviate from mainstream Sunni orthodoxy’.

It is clear then that Pashtuns in the east since the sixteenth century used both the sword and Islam to achieve statehood. Though they were unsuccessful at dislodging the Moghul Empire their desire for an independent Afghan state was not weakened. Eventually it was the Ghilzai and Durrani in western Afghanistan, who in the eighteenth century succeeded in setting up their independent states. Some historians have called the Roshani movement a millenarian movement in the guise of Islam, while others see it as ‘pure and naked nationalism’. Their saying, ‘Pashtun seeks freedom, not slavery’ is indicative of their nationalistic sentiments.

Pashtuns were familiar with the Persian and Indian methods of governing. They also had the examples of their own Lodies, Suries, Rohilah and the Afghan Turkik Ghaznawids, whose governments they helped establish and served as their own administrations.⁷ So when Ahmad Shah came to power in the middle of the eighteenth century and went to conquer India, he found all these eastern Pashtuns ready and willing to help him avert ‘the Hindu threat’ and to achieve greatness for his own Durrani state.

Initial attempt in forming the state: the Ghilzai uprising, the Kandahar state

The struggle against Persian rule was started in Kandahar in 1709 by an important sub-tribe of the Ghilzai – the Hotak, led by Amir Khan, known as Mir Wais. Mir Wais was the kalanter, representative or spokesman of the Pashtuns in Kandahar. The Persian governor, a Georgian, re-named Shah Nawaz Khan, known to Afghans as Gorgin, bent on eliminating Pashtun resistance to the Safavid rule, massacred and committed atrocities against the Durranis in Kandahar (Appendix 4). Mir Wais spoke against these atrocities and wrote to the Persian Court about what the governor was doing. When Gorgin heard about it, he was taken prisoner and sent in shackles to the Persian capital. Mir Wais was well spoken and by the standard of the time a wealthy man. He soon worked out his strategy of bribing the Safavid officials and before long gained the confidence of the Persian king (Al-Afghani 1938: 18–19). Mir Wais then requested to go on a pilgrimage to Makkah and was given permission to do so. There he met the Imam of Makkah and the ulema of the Hijaz, informing them of the cruelties of the Shi’ah Persians in Kandahar. The Makkan ulema gave him a letter, saying that Afghans as Sunni were under no obligation to live under Shi’ah rule and also that, if a Muslim king acts contrary to the Islamic teachings, the subjects are not obliged to obey him (ibid.: 18). Keeping his meeting with the Arabian religious leaders a secret and having already won the Persian court over to his views, on his return to Persia, he was allowed to go to Kandahar. In Kandahar he succeeded in convincing the governor that he was a changed man and ‘thus lulled Gorgin into a sense of false security’ (Ganda Singh 1959: 7). Gorgin once again restored him to his former position as kalanter of the city of Kanda-har. Meanwhile Mir Wais called a secret Loya Jirga, a grand tribal meeting, of all regional Pashtun and some non-Pashtuns. At that meeting, after the jirga heard Mir Wais and had seen the letter of support from the Makkan ulema, they decided to get rid of the Persians once and for all.⁸ The Baluch and the Kakar tribes volunteered their refusal to make further tax payments and so it was decided that once the bulk of Gorgin 23,000 forces were despatched after these rebellious tribes, Mir Wais and his insurgents would then take on Gorgin himself.

For this purpose a party was arranged in a garden outside Kandahar for the Persian governor and his entourage. The Persian governor walked straight into the trap. Mir Wais attacked Gorgin killing him and all his bodyguards and troops. The insurgents, then put on the uniform of the Persian officers, entered their headquarters in the city and captured the remaining forces. The Baluch and the Kakar tribes also rounded the troops that were sent after them. All this happened in 1709. Mir Wais without losing any time declared the independence of Kandahar on that very day (Ferrier 1858: 28–9; Malleson 1879: 225–6). ‘Three powerful armies, one after the other, were sent against him, but Wais inflicted crushing defeat on them and made his independence secure’ (Ganda Sing 1959: 7).

The conquest of Persia: Mir Wais’ family wrangles, the Hotak downfall

Mir Wais ruled Kandahar for six years, not as a king or amir, but ‘as one amongst equals’. Instead of being called a king or amir, he wanted to be known as Masher or Spinzhiray, elder or white-beard. In adherence to tribal ways he always sat on the ground with the other elders who represented their tribes and groups. He minted his coins and came to terms with running his newly independent country.

Mir Wais’s rule in Kandahar was a transition from gaining the independence of Kandahar and its environs as a city or regional principality, to a state later established by Ahmad Shah. Kandahar under Mir Wais did not have the resources to take on the Safavids or the Moghuls and thus extend the state. So after the initial unsettling wars with the Persians, in order to keep the Afghans united behind him Mir Wais embarked on the process of the reconciliation of the tribes. Though he succeeded in patching up his Ghilzai tribal differences with the rival Abdali/Durrani, his successor son and nephew in their terborwali or cousins rivalry brought about the end of Ghilzai rule.

With the Ghilzai coming to power in Kandahar, the Abdali took control of Herat. Kabul and eastern Afghanistan were still under the Moghuls. The Persians, who lost a further 25,000 troops in their initial attacks designed to retake Kandahar, had no choice but to opt for a policy of ‘wait and see’. After Mir Wais’ death in November 1715 his brother Mir Abdul Aziz, known as Abdullah, was crowned. Abdullah, misjudging the public mood, made overtures to the Persian king, with the view of accepting some sort of Persian influence in Kan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern History
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• Part I: A State in the Making
• Part II: Sowing the Seeds of Turmoil
• Part III: Battleground of Superpowers
• Conclusion
• Epilogue America’s and Afghanistan’s 9/11
• Appendix 1: Categorising Books on Afghanistan
• Appendix 2: The Institutions of Pashtunwali
• Appendix 3: State and Islamic Jurisprudence
• Appendix 4: Struggle Against Persians in the West
• Appendix 5: Abdali Uprising, Intrigue and Deception
• Appendix 6: The Early Life of Ahmad Shah, King in Waiting
• Appendix 7: Nader Shah’S Assassination, Formation of the Afghan State
• Appendix 8: Britain’s Forward Policy and the ‘Great Game’
• Appendix 9: British and Soviet/Russian Interest in Afghanistan
• Appendix 10: The Pashtunistan Issue
• Appendix 11: The Initial Months of Communists in Power
• Appendix 12: Mujahideen Resistance Parties
• Appendix 13: Geneva Negotiations
• Appendix 14: Russian Designs on Afghanistan
• Notes
• Bibliography
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