In the nineteenth century, the British fought three brutal wars in Afghanistan to balance Russian influence in the region. Britain had drawn the line against Russia at the Amu Darya River, and its leaders made clear they would contest any Russian move to the south. But Britain paid a heavy price for its interest in Afghanistan. The first Anglo-Afghan War, which lasted from 1839 to 1842, ended in a humiliating British defeat. The departing British force, numbering 16,000 soldiers, was systematically reduced to one as British forces were ambushed in biting cold and knee-deep snow. William Brydon, the lone survivor, later recalled: “This was a terrible march, the fire of the enemy incessant, and numbers of officers and men, not knowing where they were going from snow-blindness, were cut up.”8
In 1878, the British invaded again, launching the second Anglo-Afghan War. Roughly 33, 500 British troops began a swift assault on three fronts, but cholera shredded the British ranks and many were felled by heat; daytime temperatures in the shade rose to over one hundred degrees. Some British commanders did not even visit their soldiers in the hospital to avoid the utter shock of what they would see.9 On July 27, 1880, Afghans loyal to Ayub Khan defeated the British army during the Battle of Maiwand. Despite a decisive victory at the Battle of Kandahar in September 1880, however, the British pulled out of the country following intense domestic opposition to the war. After the fighting ended, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Roberts remarked: “It may not be very flattering to our amour propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to reconquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.”10 His words were prophetic.
In 1917, however, the Russian civil war triggered the collapse of Nicholas II’s regime, ensuring that Russia would pose no strategic threat for the foreseeable future. British leaders began the third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 and later that year signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi, which recognized Afghan independence on August 8, 1919. British policymakers had long seen Afghanistan as a strategically important buffer state to protect British interests in India from Russian expansion. During the eighty years of hostility, the British had grappled with a growing revolt from Pashtuns in southern and eastern Afghanistan, who took power once Afghanistan became independent. Characterized by their own language (Pashto) and the practice of Pashtunwali—a legal and moral code that determines social order and responsibilities and governs such key components as honor, solidarity, hospitality, mutual support, shame, and revenge—the Pashtuns would play a major role in Afghan history in the twentieth century.
In 1919, King Amanullah Khan tried to modernize the country, but he was overthrown in 1929 by Habibullah Kalakani, a Tajik. Kalakani was ousted a few months later after Pashtuns rebelled, and members of the Pashtun Musahiban family then founded a dynasty that would rule Afghanistan for nearly five decades, from 1929 to 1978. The first of their leaders was Muhammad Nadir Shah, who had grown up in British India, served as a general in the army, and spent part of his adult years living in southern France before becoming king. But he was assassinated in 1933, and his son, Muhammad Zahir Shah, took his place at the age of nineteen. For several years Zahir Shah remained in the background while his relatives ran the government. One of the most prominent was Daoud Khan, a cousin and brother-in-law of Zahir Shah, who was educated in France and became prime minister in 1953. Daoud Khan was an advocate of Pashtun irredentism, including the creation of a greater “Pashtunistan” in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Zahir Shah eventually took control of the government in 1963 and catapulted the country into a new era of modernity and democratic freedom.
Collapse of the State
In 1967, Ronald Neumann left the University of California-Riverside with a master’s degree in political science and headed to Afghanistan, where his father, Robert Neumann, was the U.S. ambassador. The elder Neumann had been a tenured professor at the University of California when President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him to the post. “My father had a profound impact on my interest in foreign affairs,” Ronald Neumann later recalled. “Because of him, I made up my mind in the tenth grade to go into the Foreign Service.”11
It was Ronald Neumann’s first trip to Afghanistan, and the last he would take before following in his father’s footsteps as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan nearly four decades later. With his wife, Neumann traveled the country. They drove from Herat to Kabul, along part of the same route that Rory Stewart would later memorialize in his 2001 best seller The Places in Between.12 Neumann went on a hunting expedition for the famous Marco Polo sheep in Badakhshan, Afghanistan’s mountainous northeast in the heart of the Hindu Kush. After returning from his trek across the region in the late thirteenth century, the Italian explorer had described these 300-pound beasts as “wild sheep of enormous size” with horns “as much as six palms in length.”13 “It was an exotic adventure, a throwback in time,” said Neumann.14
He also drove through the Salang Tunnel, linking northern and southern Afghanistan through the Hindu Kush mountains. In 1955, the Afghan government and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to build the tunnel, which was opened in 1964. The tunnel was the highest road tunnel in the world until 1973, when the United States built the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel—just slightly higher and slightly longer—in the Rocky Mountains. For travelers at this time, the tunnel was one of the marvels of the country, if not all of Central Asia.
The country that Ronald Neumann toured in 1967 had enjoyed several decades of stability and a relatively strong government. American and European tourists poured into Kabul each year. The Afghan capital was the Central Asian hotspot for young backpackers, who flocked to the city’s coffee and carpet shops. King Zahir Shah had introduced a representative form of government, for which he received mostly high marks from the U.S. government. In a secret Eyes Only 1970 memo to President Richard Nixon after meeting with the king, Vice President Spiro Agnew described him as “a quiet, rather intense person, with great dedication to his country” who “appears to be very well versed in world affairs.”15 He was in his mid-fifties, and mostly bald, with a neatly trimmed mustache, and he often felt more comfortable donning a pressed Western suit rather than wearing traditional Afghan clothes.
The king had summoned a loya jirga (grand assembly) in 1964, one of the freest and most influential ever convened by the Afghan state. The loya jirga wrote a constitution that set up a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary. It also established a system of checks and balances based on the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. U.S. State Department reports lauded Zahir Shah’s “blueprint for democracy” and noted that he had effectively maintained stability throughout the country.16 While the central government was weak, Zahir Shah’s regime was nonetheless able to establish law and order by dividing up responsibilities. In urban areas, such as Kabul, the government provided security and services to the Afghan population. But in rural areas, tribes, subtribes, clans, and other local entities ensured order. In cases where major disputes arose in rural areas, the government’s security forces would sometimes intervene. Consequently, the formula for peace and stability involved a power-sharing arrangement between the center and the periphery.