In the early twenty-first century, we tend to think of Afghanistan as a place cursed by eternal warfare, an endlessly bleeding wound in the global body politic. What we tend to overlook is that this view is a recent invention, one conditioned by the country’s recent past. In the 1970s, before war broke out, the image of Afghanistan was starkly different—more Bali or Bhutan than geopolitical trouble spot. These were the years of the “Hippie Trail,” when self-designated “world travelers” piled into used Volkswagen vans and embarked on a path of self-discovery that led from Istanbul to Katmandu.
Afghanistan was not the end of the road, but it was certainly one of the high points. “Herat [on the border with Iran] was the first real destination on the hippie trail,” one traveler recalls. “The paranoia of oppressive control in Turkey and Iran was left behind for a wilder but welcoming state of anarchy.”1 Afghans seemed to love foreigners. You could always find someone who was willing to take time off for a friendly chat—or for a shared sampling of the fine local hashish. Everyone seemed to be smoking it. And the prices were hard to beat. Yes, of course, this was the result of local impoverishment. But surely the best thing you could do to remedy that was to spend your own money.
In Kabul you could stay at Sigi’s Hotel, a landmark on the trail. Since the dollar or the D-mark went such a long way in 1970s Afghanistan, you could easily linger for weeks, getting high, feasting on cheap kebab, or venturing out to the fantastic archaeological sites that dotted the city and its environs. (True hippies especially enjoyed communing with the giant Buddhas carved out of a hillside in Bamiyan, a day’s drive away from the capital.) Then, when the time was ready, you could continue the journey all the way to Nepal, the El Dorado for recreational drug users. Still, trail adventurers later recalled their sojourns in Afghanistan—easygoing, soporific Afghanistan—with particular fondness.
But they weren’t the only ones. The Westerners who actually lived in Afghanistan in the 1970s, on their tours of duty with the Peace Corps or European-sponsored development projects, loved the place for its laid-back exoticism. If you needed a bit of modern luxury, all you had to do was pop over to one of the foreigners’ clubs, which offered all the amenities, or pay a visit to the Hotel Intercontinental for a dip in its fine pool. And crime was minimal. An American high school student whose father was doing a stint at the University of Kabul thought nothing of riding alone on the bus to Peshawar, across the border in Pakistan, for the weekend.2
Such views were not entirely illusory. As the 1970s dawned, Afghanistan was unquestionably poor and backward, but it seemed to be making remarkable progress in its efforts to embrace modern life. In the 1971 edition of her guidebook to Kabul, the American author Nancy Hatch Dupree bemoaned the difficulties of tracking the attractions of a city in which “change is rampant.” But she was determined to document the many charms that remained—like the Khyber Restaurant on the first floor of the Finance Ministry in Pashtunistan Square: “It is a popular meeting place in Kabul, especially during the summer when sidewalk tables set under gay umbrellas beckon weary sightseers. The Ariana Cinema next to the restaurant shows foreign pictures in many different languages.” There were magnificent museums and countless historical sites—all of them catering to the influx of foreign tourists: “Rounding the curve on Mohammad Jan Khan Wat, one notes many modern stores and small hotels which have sprung up in the last few years to attract the ever-increasing number of visitors to Kabul.” There was also the Nejat School for Boys, which “will soon shift to ultra-modern quarters currently nearing completion on the road to the airport, across from the area hotel.” (More and more of Kabul’s schools, as she noted, were going coed.) Dupree also pointed out the Kabul Zoo, which received some of its animals from its sister institution in the West German city of Cologne. There were the bazaars where you could purchase yarn or lentils or the garlands of paper flowers that were used to decorate cars during weddings and the shops where you could buy lapis lazuli or dried fruits or karakul skins, “for which Afghanistan is justly famous.”
One of the most conspicuous features of Afghanistan’s tentative modernization was the prominent role of outside sponsors. On the outskirts of Kabul, Dupree noted the construction of the Mikrorayon, “a series of high-rise apartments being constructed with assistance from the Soviet Union.”3 For years Afghanistan had been playing both sides in the Cold War. As part of their strategic rivalry in Asia, both the Soviets and the Americans were willing to contribute significant amounts of aid in return for Kabul’s friendship. The trick with “nonalignment,” as this policy was known, was keeping one’s balance.
And for a long time, it worked just fine. Afghanistan dispatched students to the United States on Fulbright scholarships for business degrees; others headed off to the USSR to study the technical professions. Foreign aid poured in. The Americans helped build dams and schools, West Germans trained the police force, and the Russians laid out natural gas pipelines and power plants. Development money also helped the Afghans to jump-start locally run businesses, like textile factories. And some of the funds were also used to build up the institutions of government. Every year, it seemed, Kabul erected yet another ministry building in the brutalist concrete style that was supposed to signify enlightened modernity. Each month brought a new announcement about some new agreement on technical assistance or foreign investment. The country was moving ahead. Peace reigned. The last serious uprising against the government had taken place in 1929.4
What the foreigners tended to overlook, however, was the extent to which their own presence reflected the weakness of the Afghan state, which remained critically dependent on aid from outsiders and had little motive for change as long as the money from its patrons kept flowing in. Both the Americans and the Soviets were happy to buy influence in the strategically important country. From 1956 to 1973, foreign grants and loans made up 80 percent of the country’s spending on investment and development. Afghanistan was also heavily dependent on the export of agricultural products and natural resources, including, eventually, natural gas, most of which went to the USSR, which had also supplied virtually all of the engineering know-how and facilities for the nascent industry. One of Afghanistan’s biggest export hits consisted of the skins of those karakul sheep mentioned by Dupree, which were prized by hatmakers around the world. Still, taken together, these weren’t exactly the ingredients of a robust modern economy. In the early 1960s, indeed, 80 percent of all taxes came from exports. By the 1970s, taxes from domestic sources, mainly on land and livestock, accounted for less than 2 percent of government revenues. A survey of fifty developing countries from this period showed that only one—Nepal—had a poorer record than Afghanistan’s when it came to collecting taxes from the citizenry.5
Afghanistan in the 1970s thus offered a textbook example of what the economists like to call a “rentier state”—one that lives by exploiting the advantages of good fortune (natural resources or favorable strategic position) rather than capitalizing on the talents and skills of its people. There were deep-seated historical reasons for this. Afghan rulers had long governed according to a somewhat minimalist philosophy, dictated, to some extent, by the country’s bewildering ethnic diversity and its fantastically rugged terrain. Roads were few and far between. The high mountains and deep valleys fragmented the population, exacerbating differences of language and custom. When the Soviets finally completed the Salang Tunnel in 1964, the world’s highest traffic tunnel at the time, they supplied the missing link to a road that connected the northern and southern halves of the country for the first time in its history. The Americans, meanwhile, had already built the first east-west highway, from Kabul to Kandahar. This new infrastructure transformed Afghanistan’s economy and dramatically simplified the government’s ability to communicate with the interior.
Even so, the average Afghan’s dealings with Kabul remained shallow and infrequent. The primary function of the local administration was less to provide people with public services, few of which were available in the countryside to begin with, than to prevent them from organizing opposition. Most people correspondingly regarded officials as a remote and somewhat unnecessary presence, better avoided than engaged. American anthropologist Thomas Barfield, who conducted field research in Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, noted that, for most Afghans in the countryside, “government” meant not a concept but a place, namely, the local government compound. “On passing out its front gate, and particularly after leaving the road that led to it, ‘government’ ended,” he wrote.6 (And this, in turn, helps to explain why literacy rates in the country were so shockingly low. In the 1970s, only 10 percent of the population could read or write—and only 2 percent of women.)7
The real power in most communities came from traditional leaders, usually tribal notables or landowners. The local khan might provide jobs, adjudicate disputes, or allocate resources (especially water, that scarce but vital commodity for this overwhelmingly rural population), and his authority rippled through the intricate networks of kinship that structured most of society. The leader’s followers judged his legitimacy in part according to his success at distributing wealth. In the old days, that might have meant the booty from battle, but in the 1960s and 1970s, this often translated into access to a cushy government job or a place in the university in Kabul. Afghanistan is often described rather loosely as a “tribal society,” but the reality is more complex, given the fantastic ethnic and social diversity of the place. The word Afghans use for the defining characteristic of their society is qawm, which can refer not only to networks of blood relationships but also to linguistic, religious, and geographical traits that shape the group to which an individual belongs.8 A Turkic-speaking Uzbek might define himself above all by the dialect that he speaks, a Persian-speaking Tajik by the district that he hails from, a Pashtun by his tribal affiliation.
If anything could be said to unite them all, it is religion. Virtually all Afghans are Muslims, most of them Sunnis. (The most prominent exception are the Hazaras, an ethnic group, descended from the Mongols, who happen to be Shiites.) Even in the 1960s and ’70s, observers often remarked upon the simple piety of the people in Afghanistan. All activity stopped whenever the call to prayer sounded from the local mosque. References to God and the Prophet punctuated everyday speech. Public figures were expected to invoke the supremacy of the Almighty at every turn.
Yet this did not mean that religion and politics seamlessly overlapped. Throughout their history, Afghans had known rule by kings, not religious leaders. Village mullahs, who performed a variety of religious services in exchange for fees, were often regarded as corrupt or buffoonish, the butt of jokes rather than figures of respect.9 There were, of course, some religious figures who enjoyed privileged status—Islamic scholars, perhaps, or pirs, Sufi spiritual leaders. But none of these individuals had any clearly defined institutional power over the others. The diffuse quality of Afghan Islam was also a product of practices that many other Sunni Muslims would have regarded as heterodox—such as the veneration of saints, whose graves, beflagged and decorated, were treated as holy places. In Iran, the Shiite religious elite presided over a clearly defined hierarchy, which greatly increased the power of the clerics. In Afghanistan, there were no central religious institutions to speak of. Islam was flat, localized, and fragmented.
Yet the mystical bent of Afghan Islam did not mean that it was passive. On many occasions in the past, the Sufi brotherhoods had provided surprisingly resilient networks for armed resistance to unjust rulers or foreign invaders. But by the 1970s, Islamic institutions seemed to have lost most of their power to offer coherent opposition to the increasingly powerful central state.
King Zahir Shah, on the throne since 1933, saw little reason to put this to the test. He had little cause to challenge the religious establishment; in 1959, for example, veiling was declared to be voluntary within the city limits of Kabul—a concession to the modern world that excited little response from religious authorities.10 But this relaxed status quo changed dramatically in 1973, when he was overthrown by his cousin, an intensely ambitious ex-general and former prime minister named Mohammed Daoud Khan. Daoud made his move while the king was receiving medical treatment in Italy. The coup went off without a hitch; no blood was spilled. Daoud declared a republic with himself at the helm. His program had two main planks. First, like so many other Third World leaders at the time, he was eager to lift his country onto the bandwagon of twentieth-century modernization. His second signature cause was “Pashtunistan,” code for unifying the millions of Afghan ethnic Pashtuns with the millions who lived on the other side of the border in neighboring Pakistan. The Pakistani government, which understandably rejected such talk, broke off relations.
Both of these factors—Daoud’s desire to speed up industrialization and his estrangement from one of his country’s most important trading partners—motivated him to edge closer to Moscow. This was also a way to boost his domestic standing with the modernists, since the Soviets had many sympathizers in Afghanistan by now. Their political home was the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the indigenous Communist Party, formed in 1965. It was an unruly organization, with most of its members falling into two mutually hostile factions, the moderate Parcham (“Banner”) and the radical Khalq (“the Masses”). The two groups essentially went their separate ways two years after the party was formed (though the split was never made public).
Still, the PDPA remained a force to be reckoned with. Daoud, a firm believer in state control over the economy, had great respect for the Soviet Union’s achievements, and he did what he could to bring PDPA leaders into the fold. Parchamis had even helped him pull off his coup. Once it was over, Daoud asked their leader, Babrak Karmal, to join the new government, but Karmal declined. Under the king, he had made a career out of giving rousing speeches in the Afghan parliament, assailing the forces of feudalism and backwardness. Now Daoud had closed parliament down, and Karmal and his comrades reasoned that it was better for them to remain on the outside, offering tactical support to Daoud whenever that made sense. But there was no reason to tie their cart too closely to his. Daoud himself had demonstrated how easy it was to topple a government. Surely, they reasoned, their own chance to follow suit could not be far off.
History, after all, was on their side. Wherever the Afghan Communists looked—Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia—Moscow’s allies appeared to be surging ahead. To be sure, the appeal of Marxism-Leninism was waning in the developed world, where leftist ideology was splintering into a kaleidoscope of options: Social Democracy, Trotskyism, Eurocommunism, Maoism, the New Left, the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. But such examples held limited relevance to would-be modernizers in the Third World. To the elites in the poor countries, the key to Marxism’s attraction lay in its ability to mobilize backward societies. To them, the history of the Soviet Union showed how a relatively small bunch of zealous Communists had transformed a land of illiterate peasants into a mighty industrial power in the course of a few years. What Afghan Communists saw in the USSR was exactly what they wanted for Afghanistan: big factories, hard-topped roads and hydroelectric dams, widespread literacy, and modern military equipment. As Stalin had noted, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The adherents of material progress could not hope to make things better without destroying the forces that stood in the way: the big capitalists, the feudal landowners, the mullahs, the priests.
So the Afghan Communists welcomed the rousing talk of militant social reform and armed anti-imperialism that was so essential to the Soviet revolutionary program. A country like Afghanistan, they reasoned, could be changed only by decisiveness and force. What the United States and its liberal Western allies offered by comparison was a Band-Aid on a suppurating wound. Sometimes you had to stir people out of their torpor, smash the old order. Didn’t those Westerners understand that gradual economic reform and incremental progress toward democracy would take millennia in a place like Afghanistan? That the feudalists would never give up power willingly?
Some of the PDPA radicals knew the United States from firsthand experience. Nur Mohammed Taraki, the leader of the Khalq group, had worked for a while at the Afghanistan Embassy in Washington. Another Khalq member, Hafizullah Amin, had earned a master’s degree in education at the teachers college of Columbia University in New York. The Americans themselves delivered an additional argument for the Communist propaganda about the superiority of the Soviet model. US assistance to Afghanistan had peaked in the 1960s, as Washington tried to counter Moscow’s rising influence. But the Americans gradually decided to concentrate their efforts on other, more powerful, allies in the region, Iran and Pakistan. Afghanistan didn’t really seem like it was worth the investment.
So Soviet influence steadily grew, though the Communists were no threat to Daoud at first. The challenges to his budding dictatorship came from other quarters. An urbane, Western-educated secularist who favored women’s rights and government control of education and the courts, he had little sympathy for Islam. He managed to buy off many of the members of the Islamic religious establishment, who were used to receiving favors from the state in return for their support, but a group of young religious hotheads were still causing problems. In the late 1960s, some enthusiastic young Muslims, taking their cue from Communist practice, had decided to form their own semiclandestine political organization, which they named the “Muslim Youth Organization.” Some of them went well beyond the usual religious platitudes by agitating for the creation of an “Islamic state” in which sharia (Quranic law) would reign supreme and the government would be in the hands of people who followed the example of the Prophet. Upon taking power, Daoud had thrown some of their organizers in jail. The rest had fled to Pakistan.
Then, in 1975, they tried to organize a dilettantish coup that went awry almost as soon as it began. Few in the society at large paid attention, and Daoud suppressed it easily. The activists who fell into his hands, including several key leaders, were summarily shot, shattering the movement. The survivors returned to Pakistan, where they could expect sympathy from a Pakistani government that was eager to take revenge on Daoud for his Pashtun irredentism. But the religious establishment back at home—the village mullahs, the religious scholars, and the Sufi notables who were all tightly bound into the status quo—didn’t lift a finger in the rebels’ defense. And why should they have? The Islamists, after all, had come to their cause through the universities, not the madrassas, and thus had few ties with the ulama, the religious establishment.
By now Daoud felt himself safe enough to set his own course. In 1975, he created his own political party and declared all competitors illegal. He started purging the army and the security services of Communists. And he began to show other signs of easing away from Moscow’s suffocating embrace. He removed Soviet advisers from military units and sent them home. He put Pashtunistan on the back burner and worked to repair his relations with Pakistan. And he began promoting ties with other countries in the Muslim world, courting Egypt as well as oil-rich Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Islamic world welcomed Daoud’s initiatives. The Soviets (and their Afghan proxies) watched these shifts with growing dismay.
In the final analysis, though, Afghanistan was still a bit player. If someone had asked you, in the middle of the 1970s, to name a country that would have an impact on the world’s affairs in the decades to come, Afghanistan would have been near the bottom of the list—perhaps along with Bangladesh and Bolivia and some of the more obscure African countries. It was just too poor, too underdeveloped. Someone like Mohammed Daoud was probably its best bet: an enlightened dictator, secular, “progressive,” with a clear vision for the future. Little did he and his supporters realize that the way of life they represented would soon become extinct.