Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 3 | Afghanistan at the Tipping Point page 2

The roots of modern Afghanistan begin in what Rudyard Kipling called, “The Great Game,” a clandestine and mischievous struggle for control that pitted Britain, whose Indian empire lay to the east, against the ambitions of tsarist Russia to the north. In the 19th century, the British made two ill-fated military assaults on Afghanistan in an attempt to subjugate the country before realizing that the Afghan tribal leaders and ethnic clans could be bought off far more easily than they could be militarily defeated. In May 1879, the Afghani amir Yakub Khan signed the Treaty of Gandamak to forestall further British advances.

The spirit and history of the British presence in Afghanistan is still alive in a guest house in downtown Kabul known as the Gandamack Lodge. Its proprietor, Peter Jouvenal, a former officer in a British parachute regiment turned freelance cameraman for the BBC, has lived in Afghanistan for most of the last three decades. I stayed in the guest house during part of my reporting trip.

The Gandamack Lodge prides itself on retaining the trappings of the British colonial past with a collection of 19th century Enfield rifles of the type used by Her Majesty’s regiments during the Great Game era. There is even a restaurant named for Harry Flashman, a fictional 19th century James Bond-type character who, as related in the George MacDonald Fraser series of novels, made his fame in the First Anglo-Afghan War. The whole setting at Gandamack today is done up in a tongue-in-cheek manner by Jouvenal who is, in fact, a serious photographer and cameraman who covered the frontlines of the conflicts in Afghanistan for the BBC as well as CBS and others from 1979 straight through to today.

Shortly after the fall of the Taliban, Jouvenal opened the lodge to a host of foreign correspondents and diplomats and the staff of nongovernmental-organizations. I talked with Jouvenal as he was sitting over a very British breakfast of bacon and eggs and marmalade and toast. With him was his wife, Hassina, who is Afghani, and their two young daughters, who were giggling and chasing after ducks in the garden. Jouvenal is widely considered one of the more studied Western observers in Kabul, and he believes the U.S. and its NATO allies are making many of the same errors the British Empire made before them.

“The biggest mistake we are making is going for the military option again,” said Jouvenal. “And what is on the Afghan side, and what is always on their side, is time. They will wait this out, just as they did with the British.”

In fact, Afghanistan’s patience did pay off with the British. The country established official independence from Britain in 1919 and set up its first constitution. But political assassinations and tribal revolts, as well as fighting on all levels, revealed the difficulty in trying to transform a multi-ethnic, tribally based society into a modern state. For the next half-century Afghanistan’s history would be one of struggling to modernize while trying to maintain neutrality through World War II and the early days of the Cold War.

The country was held together by the reign of King Zahir Shah from 1933 to 1973. During that time—from 1953 to 1963—the king’s brother-in-law, Daoud, came to power with the tacit support of the royal family as the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Cold War pushed Afghanistan into the arms of the Soviet Union, which offered economic and military aid. In that era, Afghanistan revealed itself to be what political scientist Barnett Rubin calls the “rentier state par excellence,” a “rentier state” being one that relies heavily on unearned income and outside investment. In the case of Afghanistan, this bounty came in the form of a steady flow of foreign aid and development projects.

The period from 1963 to 1973 was what Angelo Rasanayagam, former director of the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) in Peshawar, Pakistan and author of Afghanistan: A Modern History (I.B. Tauris & Co., 2005) called “the experiment in democracy.” During that decade, an impressive constitution was written and the traditional institutions of consensus governance such as the loya jirga, or “great council” of tribal chiefs were woven together with modern principles of democratic government. Building institutions of governance was not easy in a country with 90 percent illiteracy and a largely peasant population that was hit hard by a bitter, three-year drought. At the end of this period, Daoud reemerged and this time exiled Zahir Shah to Italy and ruled as president while increasing Afghanistan’s financial reliance upon the Soviet Union.

Things did not end well for Daoud. He was overthrown in a bloody coup by Marxists within the army who had been trained in the Soviet Union. Sharp divisions emerged within Afghanistan as the more traditional and religious structures of society declared “jihad” against the infidel Communists and their secular modernism. And the Communists themselves suffered bitter internal rivalries. Two quick political assassinations led to a country spiraling into chaos. Soviet troops invaded in December 1979 and installed a puppet government.

Suddenly, Afghanistan was at the center of an intensifying Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Then, out of the traditional, religious sectors of Afghan society, emerged the mujahadeen who would organize armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. The U.S. funneled billions of dollars in covert aid to the mujahadeen in what became a proxy war in the ideological struggle between the Soviets and America. The U.S. funding was further helped along by the Saudis, China and neighboring Pakistan. Suddenly, a century after Kipling coined the phrase, a new “Great Game” was playing out in Afghanistan, which once again found itself at the center of a power struggle for global dominance by vying empires.

“Buzkashi” As Metaphor
A shadowy network of diplomats and spooks based largely out of Peshawar, Pakistan, set up a pipeline for more than $5 billion in covert funding from the CIA to be funneled to the mujahadeen in its insurgency against the Soviets throughout the 1980s. One who is acquainted with that setup is G. Whitney Azoy, an American academic who worked for the U.S. State Department in the 1970s as a cultural affairs officer in the region and “in other roles,” as he coyly puts it. “Let’s say I was in an unofficial capacity working with the State Department on what we called ‘cross border assistance,’” said Azoy.

Beyond his diplomatic work, Azoy is also an anthropologist who has done extensive academic research on Afghan culture and history. He has written a book on Afghanistan’s macabre national sport known as buzkashi, in which horsemen fight over the carcass of a goat and try to run away with it over a goal line. For Azoy, the sport serves as metaphor for Afghan politics. But he says the metaphor extends beyond the simplistic idea of a brutal and bewildering array of horsemen pulling at a body to try to control it. To Azoy, the higher idea of Buzkashi as metaphor lies not among the horsemen but the rich owners of the horses, who support the game for their own prestige. They do not ride horses at all, but watch from the sidelines. And they, he insists, are the real players. “When his horses and riders win, the khan’s name is said to rise. And reputation is the true currency of Afghan politics,” explains Azoy.

Next page: The rising toll of civilian casualties has undercut the U.S. and NATO mission significantly. Said Afghan president Hamed Karzai, “Afghan life is not cheap, and it should not be treated as such.”

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