But we were young and were eager to see the light of sunrise illuminate the great Buddhas. After innumerable moments of terror in the dark, we reached the town of Bamiyan, just as a very early tea-stall was opening up. Re-energised with parathas, fried eggs and steaming mugs of thick, sweet tea, we drove out to the Buddhas as the first line of pearl appeared on the horizon. We were in for an extraordinary experience. As the sun came slowly up at a slant from behind the sheer, red sandstone cliffs, the two overpoweringly large statues seemed to kindle alight with a golden glow of their own. This is what we had driven through the darkness to see, and it overwhelmed us with awe.
We felt, in the words of Rumi (the road to his birthplace of Balkh headed north from this valley):
“Now is the time to unite the soul and the world.
Now is the time to see the sunlight dancing as one with the shadows.”
Later that day, we saw something of the town and this is the point I was coming to. In Bamiyan, we seemed to be in a quite different country to Kabul or Kandahar. Instead of chappals, men wore boots; caps with earflaps were more common than turbans; the languages spoken in the marketplace were softer in sound, with more sibilants and fewer glottals or hard consonants. Clearly, as we had driven through the high Hindu Kush during the night, we had exited from the Subcontinent and entered Central Asia.
[quote]"Every mullah and chief of every tribe and village considers himself an independent ruler"[/quote]
It was vividly brought home to us that there are two quite distinct natural regions within Afghanistan, divided from one another by the great mountains of the Hindu Kush (“Indian Killer”) range and its spurs. The Northern Plain, east of Iran and south of the Central Asian republics, is continuous with the Central Asian steppes. The Southern Plateau, mostly bordering Pakistan, is a semi-arid region of high plateaus, linked from the days of ancient Gandhara down to the end of the Moghul Empire with the history of what is now Pakistan.
The two regions of Afghanistan are ethnically differentiable, the south being predominantly Pashtun and the north having a Tajik majority; numerous smaller ethnic entities also exist in each region, such as the Hazara in Bamiyan. The city of Kabul sits at a strategic location a little south of the passes that penetrate the Hindu Kush. Bamiyan, today sadly bereft of its magnificent Buddhas, lies across the mountains to the west.
Contrary to popular belief, Afghanistan has not exclusively been some kind of wild frontier territory. It was a centre for the creative, artistic splendours of ancient Gandhara and of the more recent Persian, Ghaznavid, Ghaurid, Timurid and Moghul empires. It has gifted the Muslim world such outstanding intellectual figures as Jalaluddin Rumi, Firdowsi and Jamaluddin Afghani, among many others.
Also contrary to the myths, Afghanistan was continually divided or conquered by first one empire, then the other, until the rise of Ahmed Shah Abdali, whose descendants are known as Durranis. Ahmed Shah was elected as King in 1747, by a Loya Jirga at Kandahar.
Afghanistan was, and remains, ethnically multiple and socially atomised into sub-ethnic tribal groups. Amir Abdur Rahman, who mounted the throne of Kabul in 1880, writes of his countrymen, “Every mullah and chief of every tribe and village considers himself an independent ruler...The tyranny and cruelty of these men were unbearable. One of their jokes was to cut off...heads and put them on red hot sheets of iron to see them jump about...So you can easily understand what a desperate struggle I had with these people...(It) took me fifteen long years and very harsh measures before they finally submitted to my rule.”
Thus, the Durrani monarch at Kabul presided as liege lord over quasi-independent local chieftains. Attempts at greater political integration in the 1920s by King Amanullah Shah were resisted by the mullahs and the local chieftains. The call for Jihad raised by Mullah Shor Bazar, materially and militarily supported by the British Raj, resulted in the overthrow of the king by the bandit Habibullah (aka Bacha Sako) in 1929.
The restoration of the previous status quo under King Nadir Shah and his later successor Zahir Shah kept matters calm right down to 1973. But a coup by Zahir Shah’s ambitious cousin Sardar Daoud ended the Durrani monarchy. The subsequent Communist-led coup of 1978 also sought to “modernise” the country by reining in the local chieftains. This triggered off a major resistance movement within Afghanistan that brought in the US-Saudi-Pakistani-Mujahideen armed intervention, the Soviet counter-invasion, and the commencement of the thirty-five-year-long conflict that still continues.
Coming to today, the pseudo-democratic regime headed by Hamid Karzai has successfully managed to conduct another presidential election. The fact remains that this post-Bonn regime, which started with all the advantages that the collapse of the Taliban, the massive US military clout and unstinting international support could bring it, soon found that it wielded no authority beyond the city of Kabul and very little within. The same is likely to be true for Karzai’s successor.
Today, the king is no more the ruler; the very raison d’être of the Afghanistan state is gone. In place of the former backward-but-stable condition, there is anarchy, despite the illusion of control at Kabul. The country is a kind of political black hole, distorting those within and sucking in those outside. Afghanistan is likely to collapse into mutually warring components — some governed by the Taliban and their proxies, some by the Tajiks or Uzbeks, and others by local warlords and by factions and gangs that we have not heard of yet. The question is: Will Pakistan also plunge into the entropic chaos of this developing Central Asian black hole?
Pakistan has already been ruinously harmed by the multi-dimensional backlash of our earlier interventions in Afghanistan. The best policy now would be to leave Afghanistan to its own destiny. Seal the border, physically fencing it if need be, and studiously avoid the possibly fatal mistake of once again involving Pakistan in Afghanistan’s affairs.
“Good fences,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, “Make good neighbours.”