Herat became their key strategic concern. Controlled sometimes by the Persians, at others by the Afghans, Herat was, in the eyes of British officials, ‘the Gateway to India’, through which Alexander, Genghis Khan and the first Mogul emperor Babur had all passed on their way south. The British feared the Russians might be next. Twice the British and the Russians came close to war over the control of Herat. In 1837 the Russians supported a Persian move on the city. The siege lasted for four months and was conducted, according to a contemporary historian, ‘in a spirit of unsparing hatred and savage inhumanity’.21 It was lifted when British forces were deployed in the Persian Gulf to intimidate the Shah.
In 1885 a crisis over the remote oasis of Pandjeh, which lies on the Amu Darya river between Merv and Herat, also nearly led to a war. The Afghans maintained that Pandjeh—which was called Kushka by the Russians and is now Serhetabat in Turkestan—belonged to them. The Russians nevertheless took Pandjeh, with considerable loss of Afghan life. The British warned that any further advance towards Herat would mean war. On British advice, the Afghan defenders of Herat demolished several of the glorious buildings of the fifteenth century in order to provide a clear field of fire. In the event the Russians never attacked and the crisis fizzled out, thanks primarily to the good sense of Abdur Rahman.
Anglo-Russian rivalry in the high mountains to the east of Afghanistan continued into the 1890s, with armed skirmishes continuing there between the Russians and the Afghans as late as 1894.22 But as tensions in Europe grew with the rise of Germany, both sides decided it made more sense to curb their territorial ambitions in Asia. An Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission agreed that the frontier between Afghanistan and the Russian empire should lie along the Amu Darya. As a buffer between India and Russia the British insisted in 1891 that Abdur Rahman should accept sovereignty over the Wakhan Corridor, a thin sliver of land—in places less than ten miles wide—high up on the borders of China, Afghanistan, and the Russian empire. Both these borders were strategically important during the Soviet war.
But the boundary which carried the most burdensome implications for Afghanistan’s future international and strategic position was the Durand Line, the artificial frontier drawn in 1893 by a senior British official of the Indian government. This drove straight through the middle of the Pushtun tribal areas in the borderland between the Punjab and southern Afghanistan. Successive Afghan governments resented the loss of territories, including Peshawar, which they regarded as rightfully theirs: Afghanistan was the only country to vote against the admission of Pakistan to the United Nations when it became independent in 1947. Prime Minister, later President, Daud backed the cause of ‘Pushtunistan’, which called for the recovery of the Pushtun lands on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line. The Pakistanis retaliated by doing all they could to destabilise and control their smaller neighbour. The hostility between the two countries was to have a most negative effect on Afghanistan’s affairs into the twenty-first century.
The local people took no notice of the Durand Line except when they were compelled: they feuded, smuggled, traded, and fought indifferently on both sides of the border. The British attempted to control the border in the 1920s and the 1930s by a policy of ‘butcher and bolt’, with punitive raids against errant tribesmen, including the destruction of their villages from the air. Soviet attempts to seal the border during the war of 1979–89 were almost a total failure.
The Soviet Union Becomes Afghanistan’s Best Friend
In August 1907 Russia and Britain reached an agreement to regulate their affairs in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The Russians took advantage of this more relaxed state of affairs to improve their knowledge of the country. General Andrei Snesarev, a professor at the Academy of the General Staff, spent much of his life studying and travelling in Central Asia, and ruminating on the significance of Afghanistan in the wider geopolitics of the area. He concluded that Afghanistan was a military nightmare for a foreign invader, that it could not justify the resources needed to dominate it, but that it was indeed, as some of his British predecessors had believed, the gateway to India. His book about the geographical, ethnic, cultural, and military aspects of Afghanistan was published in 1921. It rapidly faded from the public consciousness after he was arrested in 1930, sentenced to be shot, released, and then died at home in 1937. But it was republished after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and Snesarev has since become something of a cult figure among Russians interested in the country.
As soon as the British relinquished their control of Afghan foreign policy, Amanullah signed a Treaty of Friendship with the infant Soviet Union in 1921, under which the Russians agreed to give Afghanistan financial support, to build a telegraph line between Moscow and Kabul, and to supply military specialists, weapons, and aircraft. A Non-Aggression Treaty followed in 1926. In 1928 the first regular air route was opened between Moscow and Kabul, and Soviet consulates were set up in Herat and Mazar-i Sharif.
By the 1930s the Soviet Union was Afghanistan’s most important commercial and political partner. There were occasional irritations. Fugitives from the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics regularly sought refuge in Afghanistan, followed by detachments of the Red Army in hot pursuit. In the spring of 1929 the Russians invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to restore Amanullah Khan to his tottering throne. Stalin sent about a thousand men, disguised in Afghan uniform and commanded by the former Soviet military attaché in Kabul, General Vitali Primakov (1897–1937), who was himself disguised as a Turkish officer. The Russians captured Mazar-i Sharif, Balkh and other places after heavy fighting. But they rapidly lost the sympathy of the local people and Stalin recalled the force when he heard that Amanullah had fled into exile. In 1937 Primakov was shot, yet another victim of Stalin’s purges. But on the whole Russia’s relations with Afghanistan flourished well enough.
In the years immediately before the Second World War, the Germans tried with some success to increase their influence in Afghanistan through economic assistance and military training—the Presidential Guard was still wearing German helmets at the time of the Soviet invasion. During the war itself, Zahir Shah steered a skilful path between the British and the Russians, who found themselves cooperating with one another to frustrate German intrigues. In 1943 Zahir Shah expelled German agents operating in Afghanistan who had been identified by the intelligence agencies of the two wartime allies.23
Zahir Shah and his prime minister, Daud, were equally skilful at playing off East and West against one another as the Cold War developed. In 1953 John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, came up with the idea of a ‘Northern Tier’ of Muslim states in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, which would act as a barrier to Soviet Communism. He tried but failed to get Afghanistan to join the Baghdad Pact when it was set up in 1955. President Eisenhower visited Kabul in 1959. The Americans constructed the concrete highway which linked Herat to Kabul via Kandahar, and promoted a number of educational and economic schemes, including a major irrigation project in Helmand province. The Americans’ interest in Afghanistan waned in the 1960s as they were increasingly distracted by their growing involvement in Vietnam.