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11 - 17 July 2002 Issue No. 594 Books |
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Return to the Afghan belle époque?
Le Royaume de L'Insolence, L'Afghanistan 1504 -- 2001 (Kingdom of Insolence), Michael Barry, Paris: Flammarion, 2002. pp510
Michael Barry's Royaume de l'Insolence, part history of Afghanistan, part journalism and memoirs, was first published in 1984 before the end of the Soviet occupation of that country. It has now been re-issued with a new section covering events between 1989, when Soviet troops withdrew, to late last year, when the country, then run by an Interim Administration set up at last year's Bonn Conference, awaited a more permanent solution.
Click to view captionZaher Shah with Gamal Abdel-Nasser This solution was announced last month, following a meeting of the loya jirga, an assembly of the country's notables. The former Afghan monarch, Zaher, who reigned from 1933 to 1973 before being overthrown by his cousin Dawoud, returned to Afghanistan in April to preside over this event, it being hoped that his presence in the country would serve as a focal point for constitutional renewal. Despite reports of some hitches, notably regarding the ethnic composition of the new Afghan government, Hamid Karzai, former head of the Interim Administration, emerged from the loya jirga as the country's new president on 19 June.
Though Afghanistan, recovering from decades of civil war, has apparently settled down remarkably well under Karzai's administration, testifying perhaps to the exhaustion of the population and the desire on all sides to have peace, present arrangements are still precarious. The Bonn Agreement, which set up the Interim Administration, planned the loya jirga and arranged for British-led troops to police the country, ended on 22 May, a vote then being taken at the United Nations to extend the force's mandate for a further six months.
January's donor conference in Tokyo revealed the willingness of the international community to contribute to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, with some $10 billion being pledged in aid. However, this money is conditional on security being restored and on the new constitutional arrangements, based on foundations of inclusiveness and participation and agreed upon at the loya jirga, working in practice. Recent reports out of Afghanistan have not been entirely reassuring, with threats of Taliban and Al-Qa'eda cells regrouping to destabilise the central government and powerful warlords acting to plunge the country back into civil war.
Given this background, most readers will turn to Barry's book in the hope of finding an historical basis for renewed security in Afghanistan. In this they will not be entirely disappointed for Barry, an American who writes in French and teaches in Paris, seems optimistic that the country's future will be better than its recent past. Nevertheless, two causes for concern emerge from this tour through Afghanistan's recent and not-so-recent history, the first having to do with internal features of Afghan state and society and the second with the attitude of the regional and neighbouring powers, these being linked in a sometimes fatal embrace.
According to Barry, foreign intervention is a recurring fact of Afghan history, the country thriving only when its security is in the interests of its more powerful neighbours. One reason for this is that Afghanistan's central administration has always been weak, with government authority fading out outside the country's urban centres and being replaced by the authority of local chiefs. These chiefs, sometimes in open conflict with the central "government of the plain" but more usually content to co-operate with it, depend for their position on controlling patronage, buying or manipulating support through calculated shows of largesse.
Click to view captionZaher in full regalia, during his reign Another reason has to do with Afghanistan's geographical position, the country surviving during parts of its history only because its neighbours could not agree on how to divide it up.
As a result, Afghanistan has been happiest when the central government's position has been guaranteed by the regional balance of power, as it was from the late 19th century on first by Anglo-Russian rivalry and then by the less satisfactory conditions of the Cold War. Under these conditions, the weak Afghan state managed to thrive, even allowing the government to pursue modernisation and development programmes in the face of rural and traditionalist opposition, as it did during the Afghan "liberal age", from, roughly, the 1920s to the 1970s. Take away such conditions, and the result has been the fragmentation of the country into rival warring groups, each the client of a foreign state.
Barry devotes considerable space to Afghanistan's late 19th and early 20th century history when the foundations of the modern Afghan state were laid, central authority being consolidated thanks to the Anglo-Russian regional balance of power. The British in India, having failed in attempts at direct rule in Afghanistan and wanting a secure buffer state to halt Russian expansionism in the north, were content discretely to support the regime of Afghan ruler Abd-or-Rahman from 1880 on, while guaranteeing Afghan independence.
The country was thus controlled neither by the Russians, who had incorporated the rest of Central Asia into their empire over the course of the 19th century, nor by the British government in India, and this allowed the new ruler to "create a real capital, a real government, and the beginnings of an industrial base. The administration of modern Afghanistan was created by Abd-or-Rahman." While the "ultimate goal of Russia was the destruction of Afghanistan, which was an obstacle in its route southwards, the British had every interest in reinforcing Afghanistan as a rampart" against any such advance. Abd-or-Rahman was able to use this stand-off to consolidate his country and his personal rule, even as it was already clear in 1890 that British rule in India was doomed, as were British guarantees to Afghanistan.
Barry quotes at length from Abd-or-Rahman's fascinating Memoirs, published in London in 1900, in which the Afghan ruler argued that his country could become an "Asian Switzerland" if the British guarantee continued and the Afghan ruler had a free hand to deal with internal threats to his rule. Such a situation of "false independence", conditional as it was on external goodwill and foreign guarantees, continued from 1919 to 1978 when centrifugal tendencies in Afghan society were kept in check by an unusually secure central state, unthreatened as yet by foreign help to ambitious local chiefs.
The dispossessed king in exile
Under the rule of Amanollah (1919--1929), Nader (1929--1933) and then Zaher (1933--1973), with successive regents ruling from 1933 to 1963, an ambitious programme of social modernisation was undertaken in the shadow of first Soviet and British neighbours and then of the Soviet Union alone. Barry compares this programme to that carried out at the same time in Turkey and in Iran, arguing that it had many of the same weaknesses as the later with few of the former's virtues.
Cut off from conditions in the countryside and from the growing urban working class, the Westernised Afghan elite adopted French as their language of choice, the young Zaher being educated at French schools and still expressing himself most happily in that language. Though the 1950s and 1960s now appear as an "Afghan belle époque", with the country gaining roads, electricity and modern educational facilities for the first time and even emerging during the 1960s as a popular tourist destination, pressure was building up on the regime as a new educated middle class demanded access to positions of power. A growing urban lower middle-class, having education but few prospects or opportunities, joined the ranks of the growing Afghan communist and Islamist movements, both of which were hostile to the regime.
This situation was not helped by what Barry terms the "curious passivity" of Zaher's character, his indifference to the sufferings of the Afghan peasantry, notably during the 1971 famine, and his habit of playing the country gentleman at his model farm rather than attending to affairs of state. As a result, Afghanistan was particularly vulnerable both to internal instability and to foreign intervention in the 1970s, the regime drawing ever closer to the Soviet Union, which finally, though as it turned out temporarily, absorbed the country in 1979.
Barry witnessed many of these developments at first hand, and his book is filled with fascinating details of Afghan history and society. His account of Afghan Islam, Sufi practices and of traditional social organisation is particularly rewarding. A frequent visitor to Afghanistan both during the "Afghan twilight" of 1973 to 1978 and then during the nightmare of 1978 to 2001, Barry has been able, as perhaps have few others, to offer a comprehensive account of what actually happened during this dark period, when Afghanistan, following an unusually intense period of foreign intervention and the collapse of the central state, was abandoned to the Taliban and Al- Qa'eda.
He emphasises, as have many others, that the leader of the Taliban, the ex-Mujahideen fighter Mullah Omar, owed his success over other local warlords to his superior foreign support, notably from Pakistan. Omar was, however, never more than the dupe of his foreign backers, Osama Bin Laden being "the real master of the Afghan state between 1996 and 2001". It is, therefore, not surprising that when the collapse of Omar's regime was inevitable in November 2001, the Afghan tribesmen "suddenly turned their rifles against the foreigners really responsible for wrecking their country, the Arab and Pakistani fighters, and not against the 'American infidels', contrary to the instructions of Bin Laden's fanatical entourage".
Last month's loya jirga, the example of Zaher's liberal 1964 Constitution behind it, will result in a stable, inclusive Afghan state only if local interests can be held in check, and that, as Abd-or-Rahman saw in 1900, can happen only if foreign intervention is also controlled within the context of meaningful regional security arrangements. In the meantime, Barry's book provides possibly the best available account of Afghan history, the author having seemingly devoted his life to the study of the country.
In his introduction to the 2002 edition, Barry recommends "post-Taliban Afghan generations" to refer to the work of Mir Gholam Mohammed Ghobar, author of Afghanistan dar masir-e tarikh (Afghanistan through its History, 1968) and a kind of "Afghan Michelet". "In order to connect up with broken memory, the post-Taliban Afghan generation should refer to this book, the schoolchildren of tomorrow's Afghanistan finding in it the heritage of the two Afghan Golden Ages, that of the Koushan emperors, both Buddhist and Hellenistic, during the 2nd Century AD, and that of the Timurid Sultans of 15th Century Herat, allowing them to discover the roots of their identity and to have hope for the future of their country."
Ghobar's book, unfortunately, is not available in English, but there is every reason to thank Michael Barry for giving us this fascinating book in French.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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