Afghanistan’s Era of Peace and Stability
In his latest policy paper for CNAS, Andrew Exum makes a claim I’ve heard increasingly frequently from COIN fans, namely:
An Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors is not the ahistorical fantasy some critics would like the public to believe. Until the Marxist coup of 1978, Afghanistan was at peace for half a century – an anomaly among Asian states in the 20th century. Returning Afghanistan to a similar state of peace should remain a goal of the United States and the rest of the international community.
This is to some extent a matter of interpretation, but here’s a bit of an Afghan history timeline:
1929 – Amanullah flees after civil unrest over his reforms.
1933 – Zahir Shah becomes king and Afghanistan remains a monarchy for next four decades.
1953 – General Mohammed Daud becomes prime minister. Turns to Soviet Union for economic and military assistance. Introduces a number of social reforms, such as abolition of purdah (practice of secluding women from public view).
1963 – Mohammed Daud forced to resign as prime minister.
1964 – Constitutional monarchy introduced – but leads to political polarisation and power struggles.
1973 – Mohammed Daud seizes power in a coup and declares a republic. Tries to play off USSR against Western powers. His style alienates left-wing factions who join forces against him.
During the period of peace, in other words, one kind was driven from power by civil unrest, Mohammed Daud served as de facto dictator two separate times, the country shifted from Non-Aligned to Soviet-Aligned and then back again. What’s more, the ‘73 Daud coup didn’t come out of nowhere:
Between 1969 and 1973, instability ruled Afghan politics. The parliament was lethargic and deadlocked. Public dissatisfaction over the unstable government prompted growing political polarization as both the left and the right began to attract more members. Still personally popular, the king nevertheless came under increasing criticism for not supporting his own prime ministers.
Obviously, pre-1978 Afghanistan was considerably more stable than Afghanistan has been for the past 30 years. But that’s a low bar, and it seems to me that there was considerable turmoil throughout the entire post-WWII era.
24 Responses to “Afghanistan’s Era of Peace and Stability”
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October 21st, 2009 at 11:13 am
I think we made a bad decision in 2002- instead of jerking around with that fool Karzai, we should have brought back the monarchy. Zahir Shah was still alive at the time and well-regarded by Afghans (most importantly, well regarded by the Pashtun, who are the most intransigently anti-U.S. ethnic group).
I’m no fan of monarchy on general principles, but it appears to be the form of government best suited to Afghanistan. Moreover, it’s the only form of government that can argue successfully against the Taliban on its own intellectual grounds of scripture and tradition. It would seem to me that monarchy has much deeper roots in Islamic tradition then Taliban-type clerical nihilism.
October 21st, 2009 at 11:43 am
Note that even in the peaceful period, several leaders were ousted for trying to pass reforms. So even when the country is at relative peace, it still seems to favor the sorts of repressive laws and traditions that the US public is at best, uncomfortable with.
October 21st, 2009 at 11:57 am
It might also be interesting to consider whether what was
nominally happening in the central government in Kabul had
much influence over conditions in other parts of the country.
My vague impression is that Afghanistan has always been a
place with big ethnic and cultural divisions, and such a
primitive economy and difficult geography that the various
regions are effectively controlled by local forces and local
leaders. Thinking about it as if it’s a unified modern
state like France is not helpful: it’s much more like a
medieval state where both economic power (the imposition of
taxes) and military power were held by local feudal leaders,
and the central government exercised limited power only to
the extent that it could maintain the support of enough of
the regional chiefs (and part of that bargain would be
“I’ll support you and long as you don’t mess with my
control of my region”).
October 21st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Um, I don’t see the word “stability” in the quoted passage, and that makes a lot of difference with the interpretation of facts. There was a growing gap over that 50-year period between the increasingly sophisticated, foreign-educated urban population and the rural Afghans still living according to traditional tribal customs. The resulting tension was a big factor in the political instability but it did not lead to significant non-peace until we Americans under Jimmy Carter began our Cold War meddling into internal Afghan affairs. *That’s* why the Afghan government requested Soviet invasion; *that’s* why the Pakistanis began their own interventions; *that’s* what led Afghanistan toward a 30-year period of almost uninterrupted war. To claim that there’s really not much different between the current debacle and the pre-Marxist government is using a completely irrelevant yardstick to judge a country where the central government has *never* had direct control over the population as a whole.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:23 pm
*That’s* why the Afghan government requested Soviet invasion
I think the late Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin would consider this interpretation more than a bit of a stretch.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Correction: he was president when the Soviets killed him.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:29 pm
So in other words, Afghanistan is generally stable when there is not a hostile occupying power rallying its citizens to engage in guerilla warfare to remove it. Makes sense. But it does raise the question, “What is it exactly that 60,000 American troops are supposed to be doing there?”
October 21st, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I think MY is constructing an ideal of stability that even France didn’t reach during this period. I’d say Afghanistan was plenty stable during that period, based on the chronology provided.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I take MY’s point – Afghanistan was never “stable” by American standards – but it was as or more stable than plenty of Western countries (Greece, maybe Italy, basically all of Latin America). Meanwhile, his quote describing the ‘69-’73 period sounds like a pretty good description of America right now, doesn’t it?
October 21st, 2009 at 12:45 pm
The real howler is this part: “An Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors…” Yeah, its neighbors like Pakistan, with which it almost went to war in the early 1960s over the Durand Line?
We just don’t have any idea what we’re dealing with here.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:55 pm
I think the late Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin would consider this interpretation more than a bit of a stretch.
I think the late President Taraki (the guy Amin assassinated) would have agreed with me.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:04 pm
You still had nearly four decades of stability in Afghanistan after 1933 under the King, which is nothing to sneeze at when you consider that the government emerged from a tribal coalition taking the boundaries defined by the British for security reasons.
Bringing back Zahir Shah would have been a step in the right direction, assuming he wanted to come back. At the very least, he would have been a symbol of better times, one that many of the older tribal leaders would have remembered.
Of course, I think the bigger problem was the US getting involved with Afghanistan at all. The place had a pro-Soviet alignment since 1953, and it’s not as if the Soviets were rushing to use Afghanistan as a launching pad to invade Pakistan. Had we simply stayed out, the Soviet intervention would have been brutal, but the pro-Soviet government probably would have ultimately crushed any resistance (people tend to forget that a massive international effort involving the US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia to the tune of billions of dollars was involved in funding the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan). While that might not have prevented the Pakistanis from the system they ultimately set up with the Taliban (who, contrary to popular perception, were not the same as the mujahideen, but tended to be students and the like trained in Islamist madrassas funding by the Saudis and assisted by the ISI), it would have slowed them down.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:05 pm
More fractured history from Matt.
To start with, there never was a King of Afghanistan. This was just a person named by the British as King so they could sign “treaties” and “contracts” with him. You can see this pretty plainly from the fact that a “constitutional monarchy” wasn’t established until the US and the UK got tired of the Prime Minister playing patsy with the Russians.
So the “king” who was “driven from power” by civil unrest turns out to be a fraud replaced by a real Afghan government, and the ‘dictator” turns out to be a Prime Minister doing things the US didn’t like.
Shades of Hugo Chavez.
And, surprise surprise, the fake “constitutional monarchy” set up in 1964 leads to polarization. That usually happens when you impose a fake government on people, and leads to the next step, where Daud returns to power.
“Fortunately”, by then we had meddled enough to derail Afghanistan’s development, and encouraged the feudal structures enough to set Afghanistan on the downward path to today.
Yup, we’re real nation-builders, that’s for sure.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Carter hatched that particular ugly chicken, but it was under the Reagan Administration that it grew to full force in terms of an anti-Soviet effort.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Re: I think the late Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin would consider this interpretation more than a bit of a stretch.
Hafizullah Amin was a bloody butcher who seemed to be inspired by Mengistu in Ethiopia, Kim-Il-Sung in North Korea, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. So I’m not certain just why we should take his interpretation into account. Taraki was a much less brutal fellow then Amin.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:50 pm
When I lived in Kabul in 2002, most Kabulis pined for Najibullah or the King.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Matt,
Again, you have no clue regarding Afghan history. From 1933 to 1973, there were certainly POLITICAL conflicts in Afghanistan, along with political turmoil. However, this rarely turned into violent conflict. Considering the fragile location of the country, smack in between Iran, USSR, China, and Pakistan, the King and other Afghan leaders did an incredible job of maintaining relative neutrality, while still getting aid from both the West and the USSR.
Even the coup of 1973 was far more bloodless than anything that came after 1978, which were at least 2 orders of magnitude more bloody in terms of violent deaths, torture, forced exiles, etc.
As a result, I don’t know where you come up with this “low bar”, because for a developing country with a sub $1,000 per capita GDP in a very geographically compromising spot, that is a pretty “high bar”. This is especially true when you consider what happened after 1978, a series of absolute disasters with tremendous human toll paid by Afghans.
Sometimes, you sound like a complete idiot.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:21 pm
My pardons for going a bit over the top, but Christopher’s (#4) claim re: US involvement in Afghan affairs is utter horseshit.
If you wanna whine about US meddling, go whine about Iran. Even there, the reason the likes of the current senior clerics are alive today is (IMO) because the Shah – a dying man with perhaps just a wee-bit *too* much Swiss schooling – just didn’t have the will to go Nadir Shah on the revolutionaries.
Afghanistan was a backwater, and Carter could have cared less. Despite the machinations in Kabul, as a practical matter for travelers, Afghanistan was like eastern Turkey: crappy youth hostels, bandits waiting for those straying from the main highways, and nobody in their right mind traveled after dark.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Returning Afghanistan to a similar state of peace should remain a goal of the United States and the rest of the international community.
But why! That whole paper was on the how and what can happen, with a little pre 9/11 boogey man throw in. Look, I’m all for ending civil unrest, but when the reason there is unrest is because we’re occupying the country, I think we need to truly evaluate why were are there.
October 21st, 2009 at 4:55 pm
@18 Dude of course it’s a simplification but this is a blog comments thread. But there’s not a whole lot of doubt that the Americans considered Afghanistan a trap for the Russian bear, and that they believed at the time that they were springing it.
October 21st, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Adrock Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Returning Afghanistan to a similar state of peace should remain a goal of the United States and the rest of the international community.
But why! That whole paper was on the how and what can happen, with a little pre 9/11 boogey man throw in. Look, I’m all for ending civil unrest, but when the reason there is unrest is because we’re occupying the country, I think we need to truly evaluate why were are there.
=============================================================
Think again. The reason for the unrest is that the largest ethnic group in the country, the Pashtun, isn’t running the central government as it was prior to the civil war they lost to the Northern Alliance (a coalition of the other ethnic groups that we backed) in 2001. What we have now is a Northern Alliance government with a Pashtun figurehead – Karzai.
If every NATO soldier left the country tomorrow there would be plenty of “unrest” with the Pashtun fighting for control with the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, etc
October 21st, 2009 at 6:27 pm
What is “anomaly” intended to mean here? It can mean anything from “unique” to “deviation from established rule or trend”. If the latter, that is true for the entire world outside North America, not just Asia. If the former, it is obviously untrue. The phrase feels non-specific enough that it can mean whatever the reader wants it to mean.
Regardless, just because a country had a period of peace and prosperity in the past, it is unclear why that creates a moral obligation on the United States (the inclusion of “and the rest of the world” seems like an afterthought) to restore it to that former state.
October 21st, 2009 at 8:20 pm
The history is interesting, but unless their is a democracy in Afghanistan’s past that we can study, the history of the country’s governance can teach us next to nothing.
We, foolishly or not, set the parameters. We are bringing democracy to Afghanistan. And yes, I have noted the irony.
October 21st, 2009 at 8:43 pm
How do we set up a sloppy democracy in Afghanistan, Matt, a democracy that can survive and allow us to declare victory and extricate a majority of our force strength?
This seems to me a question that should be considered on a constant basis by blogger/thinkers, but isn’t. For me, it has been the only question that matters -at all- since approx 8:57 on the morning of 9/11, 2001. Here we are, 8 years later. Strange.