The path led upward from Shohada-i-Saliheen, the cemetery of the pious martyrs. Children milled about, laughing. It was a crisp Kabul morning. In the cold winter air, the city’s garbage had lost its odour; the breeze was sweetened by burning sandalis—coal-fired braziers around which families huddled at night. In the alleyway ahead, a single man tripped lightly along with a bundle.
We passed Bala Hissar, Kabul’s storied fifth-century citadel, located south of central Kabul. Here, Babur styled himself padshah, or emperor, for the first time in 1504; his son Humayun was born inside. The building remains in use, now serving as a headquarters for Afghan military intelligence.
Continuing along our route, we passed men with henna-hued fighting dogs and climbed onto a pebble-strewn crest of rubble overlooking the city’s main burial ground. Among the most famous occupants is Tamim, a companion of the Prophet Mohammed, who was reputedly killed here in 644. He is flanked by the son of Abdullah Ansari, the revered saint of Herat, whose grandsons Abdus Samad and Abdus Salaam are Kabul’s patrons. Legendary singer Ahmad Zahir, Kabul’s heartthrob in the 1970s, is also buried here. It is as if all of Afghan history has been compressed into a stony hillside. The surrounding neighbourhood, Arsheqan wa Arefan, named for a shrine dedicated to lovers and poets, is a carpet of fern and olive hues.
As we climbed, the air became clearer, and we could see the dirty pillow of smoke hovering over the city below. Our ascent continued over mud-plastered masonry, a wall built by the nomadic Hephthalites fifteen centuries ago. One of Kabul’s early kings, Zamburak Shah, was famously bricked into this structure: legend has it that the beautiful slave girl to whom he yielded his throne for a day had tricked him.
After passing sluggishly over a series of ruined watchtowers, we reached the top of the mountain known as Sher Darwaza, the Lion’s Gate. Babur’s Garden lay below, and west Kabul spread out across our field of vision—from the Charasiab district, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s headquarters during the civil war of the early 1990s, when life was nearly choked out of the city, to Asmayi, or TV hill, standing above the sprawling campus of Kabul University.
As we progressed on our tour, the rising sun set Kabul’s few glass buildings ablaze with orange fingers of light. The call of the muezzin competed with riotous horns on buses ferrying clerks to offices. To the northwest lay the town of Paghman, once a district of royal gardens, and a road bending west toward Kandahar. To the east lay the roads to Jalalabad and Lataband. An ominous sight was the panopticon of Pol-i-Charkhi, a prison and Communist-era mass-burial site where an estimated 27,000 political prisoners had been executed. Monuments to Afghanistan’s suffering were never far from our route.
Nor were monuments to its glories. This valley once had been thick with poets, seers, sages and, especially, merchants. Kabul’s strength, in times of prosperity, has been its caravans—travellers who set out across this ring of mountains for the emporia of India, the bazaars of Persia, the warehouses of Cathay. Kabul’s commerce was the backdrop for Kipling’s Kim (and, of more local appeal, Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali classic Kabuliwala). Its lifeblood was the Grand Trunk Road, India’s backbone, stretching eastward from the Lahore Gate in Kabul’s Old City. Routes extended west too, to the Middle East and Africa. “In the bazaars, Egypt’s caravans pass by,” poet Sa’ib Tabrizi sang of Kabul in the time of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.
It was Amir Abdurrahman, Afghanistan’s ruler during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, who created modern Kabul. Despairing of the city’s desolate, ancient fortress, Bala Hissar, which had been destroyed during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the Iron Amir began construction of the Arg presidential palace, using foreign architects. Eid Gah Mosque and its parade grounds were his grandest commission. He also built an armaments factory, a summer pavilion north of the city, a palace in Babur’s Garden and the city’s first prison. Kabul’s most famous high school, Habibia, was named for his son, Amir Habibullah, who would succeed his father. By 1901, the year of Amir Abdurrahman’s death, Kabul had a population of 150,000.
In many ways, it is still Abdurrahman’s city today. Kabul’s airport, parliament and other more modern additions have simply book-ended the city’s original core, an old metropolis teeming with trade, opposite a presidential palace drenched in power politics. City life revolves around Abdurrahman’s tomb in Zarnegar Park—adjoining the Arg, flanked by the mayor’s office and the city’s leading hotel, within sight of Timur Shah’s Durrani-era mausoleum, itself mobbed by stalls.
Kabul’s first suburb, Shahr-i-Nau, initially known as Shahabuddin Maidan to honour a Ghorid prince, was planned in 1930, extending northwest from the palace. Prime Minister Mahmud Khan punched Jade Maiwand, now Kabul’s main street, through the Old City in 1949. Karte Wali and Wazir Akbar Khan, where embassies now cluster, were added north of the Arg in the 1950s and 1960s. Kabul University moved to a new campus in 1964.
By this time, Kabul had grown to 400,000. President Mohammad Daoud Khan, the man who would definitively overthrow Afghanistan’s monarchy in 1973, approved a plan for the city that would accommodate a population as large as 800,000. Including adjoining areas, the Kabul metropolitan area now holds more than 3 million.
In 1992, Kabul became a central battleground in the war that, eventually, would bring the Taliban to power. After a first burst of fighting near the Ministry of Interior, the city was carved up between warlords. The Islamist Jamiat-i Islami faction dominated the north of the city, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami the south. Abdul Rashid Dostum’s militia controlled the airport, and all three jockeyed for power in the centre. Hezb-i Wahdat, a group founded and supported by the country’s ethnic Hazara Shiite Muslim minority, was pre-eminent in the city’s west, Mohammad Younis Khalis’s militia in the east.
All parts of the city were hit in this chaotic battle. Casualties ran into tens of thousands. Many abandoned the city, draining the population back to 1950s levels. The marks of Jangi-ye Kabul—the “Kabul wars,” as they’re now called—are still everywhere. Even since the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, Kabul’s reconstruction has been patchy. Five mayors have come and gone; apart from a few roads, no major infrastructure has been built. Most people still lack clean water and sanitation.
As for the rule of law, much depends on whom you know. When the United Front entered Kabul on the heels of the fleeing Taliban on November 14, 2001, many drew parallels with 1929, an interregnum that was quickly succeeded by a period often described as “the rule of the brothers” in reference to the power struggles involving five great-grandsons of Sultan Muhammad Khan Telai—one of whom was the father of King Zahir Shah. Like their forebears from eight decades previous, Mohammad Fahim’s forces treated Kabul as their property, taking over real estate vacated by the fleeing Taliban. Thousands of houses fell into the hands of Fahim’s commanders.
Fahim, who’d become defence minister and vice-president in Afghanistan’s new post-Taliban regime, supervised this process personally. In one case, a Defence Ministry property in Kabul’s Sherpur area, coinciding in part with old British cantonments, was seized and subdivided. With only one or two exceptions, every government member of the rank of deputy minister or above received a parcel.
It was a sign of things to come.
As described in Chapter 1, King Zahir Shah—the man deposed and exiled by Mohammad Daoud Khan in 1973—arrived back in Kabul in mid-April 2002, having accepted the title of Baba-i-Millat, Father of the Nation. Just two months later, his wife and queen consort, Princess Humaira Begum, passed away. My first meeting with him was on the day I presented credentials as ambassador; it was the first of several chats. He had the reputation for sometimes referring to the president as “his prime minister”—in mild protest at the slights he felt he received.
At one of our meetings, His Majesty Zahir Shah met me in the same Dilkusha Palace where his father, Mohammad Nadir Shah, had been murdered in 1933 at an awards ceremony for graduating high school students. Zahir Shah’s cousin Sardar Wali was at his side, confined to a wheelchair. (The two men were inseparable.) I remember that we spoke about the first coats of arms of Afghanistan’s kings, dating back to ancient, pre-Islamic days: two eagles in profile. Then the swords of the medieval Ghorid dynasty had been added. Images of mosque and flags, which grace the current coat of arms, had come later.
The conversation then swung around to the current state of Afghan politics. “Je suis sûr qu’il était un patriote,” the king said, referring to US ambassador Khalilzad, who had played a crucial role in ensuring that a presidential system, not a renewed monarchy, emerged from the two loya jirgas. “Il a beaucoup fait. C’est un homme capable, mais . . .”
At this point, Sardar Wali interrupted to note the importance of state stability—the need, impressed upon everyone at Bonn, to avoid any rupture among the key participants in Afghanistan’s reconstruction. “Le roi lui-même a dit qu’il était prêt à servir son pays au titre qu’on demandait de lui,” assured Sardar Wali. “Il avait insisté que ce statut soit approuvé par le biais d’une loya jirga.”
Clearly, the king had concerns about Afghanistan’s direction. But his cousin was keeping him on message.
But the royals were still part of the political landscape. Prince Mostapha Zahir, grandson of King Zahir Shah and director general of the National Environmental Protection Agency in President Karzai’s government, took me to another palace on the outskirts of Kabul, Darulaman, the site of his birth.
Modelled on Karlsruhe in Germany and built in the 1920s by Amanullah Khan, Darulaman gave the city and its royal family a European sheen. But like many historic Kabul buildings, the castle now lies in ruins. To the north stands the aforementioned Communist gravesite, the final resting place of President Mohammad Daoud Khan following his 1978 assassination by Communists, as well as of his brother and one-time foreign minister, Mohammad Naim Khan. (Daoud’s remains had been identified on the basis of dental records kept in Vienna. More than seven years after the Taliban’s ouster, he was properly buried, with national pomp.)
The halls of Darulaman are laced with Taliban graffiti where they’d sat on the floor under its Baroque mouldings, plotting their attacks. In the days of the Russian occupation, the building also had been the headquarters for General Gromov’s 40th Army. In the foyer, under the stairs, I found a memento of circles closed: “Moscow–Kabul. 1979–2002. We have returned.” It had been written in Russian by KGB veterans of 1979 vintage who’d returned with Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Nikolai Patrushev on his 2002 visit. The Russian embassy nearby was once again the largest in Kabul—but would be surpassed again by that of the United States after Barack Obama’s surge.
We turned back from Darulaman toward downtown. During our drive, Prince Mostapha began on a familiar theme, Afghanistan’s tortured relations with its neighbour Pakistan. As prime minister, Daoud had described the Durand Line separating the two nations as “an acrobatic of cartography—arbitrarily a line was drawn, kith and kin were divided.” Mostapha and his generation understood the dangers unleashed by Daoud’s policy of seeking to unify Pashtuns by gobbling up Pakistani territory. How could you on the one hand say to Pakistan that you are my friend and on the other hand stoke the fires of an imaginary Pashtunistan?
“My grandfather [Zahir Shah] told me,” Mostapha recalled, “when he returned from Rome [in 2002], that after forty years on the throne [from 1933 to 1973], he was going to give the people three choices. Would you like me to continue—stay on as your king—or step down as your king, and have another king, elect that king—either from this family or from another? That was one choice. The other choice was a referendum: Do you want the continuation of the monarchy, or do you want the presidential system of government? Three choices: either I stay, or you elect another king, or you bring the monarchy peacefully to an end and declare a republic.”
In the end, the republic created by the man who overthrew the monarchy in 1973, Mohammad Daoud, survived—albeit in a never-ending state of polarization and conflict. No Afghan leader since Amir Habibullah, the son of Abdurrahman who ruled Afghanistan for the first two decades of the twentieth century, had succeeded in having a stable relationship with his powerful neighbour to the east. And even he could not avoid being assassinated during a hunting trip in Laghman.
Nadir Shah, his son Zahir Shah and Daoud Khan all had been blasted out of office by rivals who thought they were too soft on Britain, and later Pakistan. Each had been found wanting by the pious martyrs. Yet over half a century, they had kept a certain balance—an achievement that had so far eluded their successors in the Arg.