The enthusiasm for revolution and reform that swept over much of the world following World War I found its echo in Afghanistan. Amanullah (1892-1960; r. 1919-29) won the country its independence from British control and launched 10 years of political and economic reforms, until a violent traditionalist reaction forced him to abdicate in 1929.
The third son of emir Habibullah, Amanullah was stationed in Kabul at the time of the assassination, where he was in charge of the treasury and the army. Using both resources, he overcame a challenge from Nasrullah within a few days and was crowned on February 27. Unlike many previous successors, he had a clear idea of his goals from the start—to build an independent, modernizing state in the manner of his fellow Muslim reformer Kemal Ataturk of Turkey (joined as a model a few years later by Reza Shah Pahlavi of Persia).
Amanullah’s first priority was to fulfill his father’s goal of complete independence, which he proclaimed to a durbar, or assembly, in Kabul. When Viceroy Chelmsford replied ambiguously to his letter declaring independence, the emir called for a jihad and sent troops to the border, catching the British by surprise. The army took the village of Torkham near the Khyber Pass on May 3, and army commander Nadir Khan overran several British posts in the central sector. The British also moved forces toward the frontier, and the Third Anglo-Afghan War, or the Afghan War of Independence, ensued, preceded by an uprising among a few of the border tribes.
At the time, India was racked by anti-British violence, proindependence sentiment, famine, and influenza. The Indian army had been decimated by the fighting in Europe, and what British units remained in India were demoralized and in the process of demobilization. Russia, absorbed in civil war, posed no immediate threat to his rear, and Amanullah seemed to hold all the cards. He may have had dreams of recovering all the Pashtun territories and perhaps areas beyond that in Muslim India. However, his army’s performance was spotty, and British officials and commanders in the region used all their political and military skills to forestall a general uprising on the frontier; they also launched a small counterattack between Quetta and Kandahar and sent a few airplanes to bomb Kabul and Jalalabad.
When the hoped-for Indian uprising failed to materialize, Amanullah expressed his desire for a peaceful settlement, which suited the exhausted British (some troops had refused to move to the front). The viceroy agreed to a cease-fire on June 3, 1919, and in July, he sent a negotiating team to Rawalpindi, which signed an armistice agreement that reaffirmed the Durand Line and eliminated British subsidies to the emir. Amanuallah was credited with victory, at home and abroad, when
King Amanullah Khan (fourth from right), seen here in European dress with his cabinet, strove to bring Afghanistan into the 20th century with a multitude of reforms. Resistance to these eventually led to his abdication and exile in 1929. (Courtesy Library of Congress)
The British attached a letter to the agreement stating that his country was “officially free and independent in its internal and external affairs.” A final treaty, providing for the exchange of ambassadors, was not signed until November 1921; by then the emir and his foreign minister, Tarzi, had long been pursuing an independent foreign policy.
Mutual suspicion and dislike between Amanullah and the British continued throughout his reign, as did outbursts of British-tribal violence on the Indian side of the border, sometimes encouraged and financed by the Afghans. In return for such misdeeds, in British eyes, as harboring Indian nationalists in Kabul, the British restricted the free flow of goods into Afghanistan. Perhaps the greatest cause for British concern in the 1920s, however, was the Soviet Russian presence in Afghanistan.
At the very start of his regime, Amanullah had turned to Russia, for decades the obvious counterweight against the British. In the wake of the czarist breakdown, the Afghans had made some efforts to recover Panjdeh and Merv, territories earlier seized by the czar. Soviet leader
Vladimir Lenin, overwhelmed with civil war and diplomatic isolation, sent an envoy to Kabul in September 1919 to resolve this dispute and offer support against the British. In exchange, he wanted help in suppressing Muslim resistance in the old czarist colonies of Central Asia, whom he had no intentions of freeing, despite earlier promises. Lenin hoped at least to win some legitimacy by being recognized by a nationalist Muslim ruler. Worrying the British, who favored his opponents in the Russian civil war, was an added bonus.
The emir sent his own envoys to St. Petersburg in October, led by Tajik general Muhammad Wali Khan, and formal ties were set up. In reward, Lenin sent 13 airplanes with pilots and a number of technical assistants, which formed the basis of a new air force. The two countries signed the Treaty of Friendship in May 1921, in which the Soviets promised cash, technology, and military equipment. Soviet technicians laid several trunk telephone lines in the 1920s.
Amanullah eventually grew leery of Soviet intentions, in light of the brutal suppression of Islam and traditional culture in the Muslim Soviet areas. The autonomous khanates of Khiva and Bukhara were abolished in 1924, and Muslim resistance fighters were crushed (though some continued to fight into the 1930s). Afghan forces withdrew from Panjdeh and Merv without a fight. The only help the emir could safely provide to his fellow Muslims to the north was to allow some volunteer fighters to cross into Soviet territory and to accept hundreds of thousands of Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik, and Kirghiz tribesmen fleeing the other way, thereby greatly increasing the non-Pashtun proportion of his country’s population (as well as its exports of qaraqul pelts and hand-woven rugs). Once Soviet rule was firmly established down to the border, a nonaggression treaty was signed between the two countries in 1926, and air service was established between Kabul and Tashkent. Russian consuls were stationed in Mazar-e Sharif and Herat, with their British counterparts covering Kandahar and Jalalabad.
In 1921, Muhammad Wali Khan led an Afghan mission to Europe and Turkey and set up relations with several countries; treaties were quickly signed with Turkey, France, and Italy providing training for Afghan military personnel. Tarzi, as the first ambassador to France, developed cultural relations between the two countries; a French-language high school (Lycee Istiqlal) was set up in Kabul, and scholarships provided for university study in France. Tarzi also signed a landmark 30-year protocol for joint archaeological work, renewed in 1952. French archaeologists played a major role in the 20th-century effort to shed light on Afghanistan’s rich historical heritage. In addition,
Tarzi managed to purchase French arms and ammunition for the army and then enlist French diplomatic support when the British tried to keep the arms from leaving the port of Bombay.
World History
