Afghanistan : Decade of democracy
Afghanistan : “ The ball is in the
Taliban’s Court
Foreign Policy : April 27, 2021
While U.S.
troops and NATO allies prepare for their withdrawal, many older Afghans are
invoking a brief shining moment—call it their “Camelot” moment—when Afghanistan
almost became a modern democracy on its own, without any help or interference
from the United States or other major powers.
It was a
period of 10 years that began in 1963 when then-King Mohammed Zahir Shah
launched a democratic project, drawing up a radical new constitution that
granted his people freedom of thought, expression, and assembly while limiting
the powers of his royal family. For the first time in Afghanistan’s history,
elections would select members of the modernized parliament, and the country’s
political sphere began to change significantly. The “decade of democracy” ended
in 1973 when Mohammed Daoud Khan, the king’s cousin, staged a peaceful coup and
became the new republic’s first president.
“Today, we
know that our aim is going back to this era. But it will take years to do
that,” said Masoud Qani, who fled some years after the coup and now lives in
Germany.
In the
1960s, Kabul was quite different. Women, wearing either Western skirts,
headscarves, or burqas depending on their personal inclination, walked next to
one another. The same goes for students, male and female, who imitated the
style of U.S. or Indian cinema icons or pop stars. There was no sign of fear,
apprehension, or anxiety. There was no threat of explosions, truck bombs,
suicide attacks, or being robbed at gunpoint.
“We, the
whole school or neighborhood, became sad about small quarrels. Today, grief and
bloodshed is everywhere,” said one former Kabul resident who asked not to be
identified.
Some
determined Afghans tried to improve their country’s trajectory during that
brief era. Aspiring writers, political activists, and intellectuals formed
debate circles, regularly meeting one another to discuss their homeland’s
future: that of a relatively young nation-state deeply attached to its
traditions and customs, sandwiched between superpowers and the seemingly
opposed thrusts of modernization and conservatism. At the same time, the
country’s leadership—in particular, the king himself—walked freely among his
subjects, often alone and without a security detail—something unimaginable now
when even minor dignitaries and their children can’t venture out without their
pick-up convoys and Kalashnikovs.
And during
that short golden age, it was a suited and clean-shaven man who served as a
standard bearer of the country’s deeply rooted cultural traditions and
religious sanctities. Fluent in both Dari and Pashto as well as in English and
Arabic, former Prime Minister Mohammed Musa Shafiq sported a Clark Gable
mustache and had thick hair. He hailed not from the upper classes of Kabul,
which frequently rubbed shoulders with the likes of the king, but from the
deprived and remotely situated Kama district in eastern Nangarhar province.
Shafiq rose
high, not just relative to his disadvantaged origins. Born in 1932, he made his
way, slowly but steadily, from a small provincial village to Cairo, New York,
and the king’s palace in Kabul. Shafiq had a comprehensive knowledge of who his
people were, particularly the rural- and conservative-minded. He was the son of
Mawlawi Mohammed Ibrahim Kamavi, a known religious scholar and tribal leader.
Like most Afghans of the age, Shafiq traveled to Kabul to continue his higher
education, earning a law degree at the highly revered Al-Azhar University: the
foremost institution of Sunni Islamic learning in the world. After Shafiq
returned, he became a clerk at the Supreme Court in Kabul and, ultimately, one of
the main architects of the country’s new constitution and a strong supporter of
reforms aimed at increasing the participation of the traditionally ignored
lower classes in government. Meanwhile, ruling elites too noticed that men like
Shafiq could serve their country in many different ways. Thus, he was called by
the Afghan Foreign Ministry to start a career as a diplomat. Within a few
years, Shafiq became Shah’s foreign secretary and in December 1972, he was
appointed prime minister. As someone who had witnessed the East and West
firsthand, he tried to adopt a pragmatic approach.
Rooted in
his religious convictions, he pushed for changes within the context of Afghan
values. He resolved through diplomatic means disputes over water rights with
Iran, widened the scope of political participation with different members of
society while also pushing forth an increasingly religious ethos in his
government. It was during his time in office that the adhan, the
Muslim call for prayer, usually blared out of the country’s thousands of
mosques, was aired for the first time on the national radio.
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For an
all-too brief period, Shafiq was seen as the bright face of Afghanistan’s new generation,
which would finally bring Afghanistan into the modern age, balancing the
undoubted need for modernization with the need to preserve Afghanistan’s deeply
embedded cultural and traditional fabric.
However,
Shafiq was not the only one busy with his career.
Like Shafiq,
former Afghan President Hafizullah Amin hailed from a rural Pashtun family in
Paghman, a few miles to the west of Kabul. Situated higher up in the mountains,
Paghman’s higher altitude meant cooler weather and immaculate scenery, which
earned it the status as a local resort for the royal family and urban elites.
The region was mainly inhabited by Pashtun landlords and peasants, among them
Amin’s family. Thus, Amin grew up with the inequality between urban elites and
peasant Afghans glaring him in the face—a reality that would play an important
role in Amin’s political trajectory.
Amin would
eventually turn into one of Afghanistan’s bloodiest tyrants. The path from
apathy to anger to insurrection, however, was long.
Handsome and
charismatic, Amin moved into a house in Kabul. Together with his later mentor,
Nur Mohammed Taraki, and other thinkers, activists, and writers who considered
themselves left wing, socialist, and progressive, Amin founded the People’s
Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in January 1965. With the party’s
creation, the Cold War started to shape Afghanistan in a dangerous way. From
early on, the PDPA had two different wings: the Khalq (“Masses”), dominated by
rural Pashtuns and the Parcham (“Flag/Banner”), a harbor for ethnically mixed
urbanites. Today, it is known that the PDPA received Soviet funding and that
Taraki was one of Moscow’s most important assets. A new “Great Game,” similar
to the one between the British and Russians in the 19th century, had started.
Its protagonists were not treacherous princes or warlords but intellectuals,
writers, political activists, Marxist radicals, and revolutionary Islamists.
And although Washington showed little interest in the Afghan monarchy, Moscow
presented itself as a generous superpower willing to help.
The creation
of a political party was not, however, enough to change all of Afghanistan’s
society or even large parts of it—at least not right away. Specifically in
Kabul’s vibrant, political landscape, the leftists appeared to be just a small
part of the whole picture; there also were royalists, republicans, liberals,
nationalists, and both Islamist democrats and more radical elements. With the
latter, in particular, the PDPA clashed regularly.
But Amin was
the polar opposite of Shafiq. Unlike most of his PDPA comrades, Amin never
visited the Soviet Union through the scholarships that were largely embraced by
many young Afghans. These generally comprised of rural Pashtuns from
southeastern provinces—young men who made military careers and later became the
backbone of the PDPA’s Khalqi faction, which would come to be led by Amin.
Instead, and like Shafiq, the aspiring educator attended Columbia University in
New York. It was paradoxically in the United States, in the heart of
capitalism, that Amin became a radicalized leftist. After he returned to
Afghanistan, Amin used his position as a teacher to spread radical ideas among
the youth. He became a lecturer at Kabul’s Darul Muslimin, where he educated
young teachers before sending them back to their rural villages, indoctrinated
with radical Marxist ideology. Many of them would later become a crucial part
of the Afghan communist regime.
Things began
to come apart in July 1973, when Afghanistan faced a bloodless coup by the
king’s first cousin and brother-in-law, Sardar Mohammed Daoud Khan, who
declared himself president. Shafiq’s time as prime minister thus ended
abruptly. Instead, he was forced to stay under house arrest by Khan’s regime,
which was heavily supported by the Parcham wing of the PDPA leadership.
Khan had a
much more authoritarian character than Shafiq or the deposed king. He ordered,
or forced, his cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah, to stay in Italy at his holiday
resort. Khan imprisoned several political opponents, including leading Islamist
dissidents who were planning a revolt against him. Also, while the former king
and his loyalists preferred a much more neutral stance toward the world’s
leading superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, Khan found himself
aligning himself closer with Moscow, especially because of his PDPA supporters
within the military and the intelligentsia.
Khan could
not foresee this would not just lead to the fall of his country but also to his
and his family’s deaths.
Khan’s
authoritarian and suspicious personality meant his erstwhile Parchami allies
soon came under his watchful eyes. He systematically attempted to marginalize
them from power. Mass protests precipitated Khan’s imprisonment of many PDPA
leaders, including Taraki and Amin, after the assassination of Mir Akbar
Khyber, a prominent Parcham leader. The PDPA blamed Khan for his murder. On
April 27, 1978, Khan, the first and last president of the Afghan Republic, was
overthrown in a violent coup staged by the PDPA. In true Bolshevik fashion,
Khan and 18 members of his immediate family were killed by the communists in
what was called the Saur Revolution (after the month of Saur on the Persian
calendar).
Afghanistan
never recovered. Shah’s democratic experiment ended abruptly, but the policies
of his cousin and the PDPA’s bloody coup ultimately destroyed it, and
Afghanistan once again became a plaything for superpowers—in particular, the
Soviet Union. In December 1979, the Red Army entered Afghanistan to end the
PDPA’s internal disputes once and for all. Amin was killed by Soviet elite
forces and Babrak Karmal, the Parcham wing’s leader who was obedient to Moscow,
was installed as the country’s new leader. Karmal became a true puppet leader
and never acted on his own. Even the rifles of his Afghan guards were
empty.
That, in
turn, opened the door to reactionary forces like the mujahideen, supported by
the United States. Afghanistan has never recovered since. Indeed, some people
ask themselves what path the country would have taken if people like Shafiq and
others were not brutally executed or if the communist coup did not happen at
all. If Afghanistan had not been a victim of the Cold War, might it have
succeeded as a democracy on its own?
Emran Feroz is a freelance journalist,
author, and the founder of Drone Memorial, a virtual memorial for civilian
drone strike victims. Twitter: @Emran_Feroz
TAGS: AFGHANISTAN, TALIBAN
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