Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Afghanistan’s strategic importance to the West declined. The dominant European empires faded or dissolved after the First World War. A militarily fatigued Europe turned inward. Britain’s global power waned in the 20th century, and Tsarist Russia was reconstituted as the Soviet Union. As a result, neither country focused on Afghanistan. By the middle of the 20th century, Britain, still the dominant, though tired, Western power in South Asia, was pessimistic about Afghanistan’s ability to govern itself. British diplomats seriously considered partitioning the state between Pakistan and Iran.
The great powers had little incentive to modernize Afghanistan, which suited Afghan leaders. National and tribal leaders were content to remain neutral in international ideological and geopolitical struggles. Afghanistan refused to enter into a formal pact with the United States in the 1950s, during Washington’s unprecedented period of alliance-building in South Asia. Instead, Afghanistan turned to the Soviet Union for military and economic aid and established a relationship based largely on barter. This barter economy did little to end Afghanistan’s isolation or promote sustained human development.
Afghan Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan, commonly known as Daoud, served from 1953 to 1963 and again in the mid- to late 1970s. He was not ideologically wedded to any political or economic theory. He was a reformer who sought to court Washington and Moscow to integrate Afghanistan into the regional economies of southern and central Asia.
Daoud gradually sought to end Afghanistan’s isolation by courting international financing for development projects. He had some success. However, foreign aid slowed in the 1970s, partly because of Afghanistan’s declining geostrategic importance to the West and the Soviet Union. Afghanistan remained neutral. A treaty of friendship between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union was promulgated in December 1978, bringing more Soviet aid and advisors to Kabul. The United States had provided aid to Afghanistan since the 1950s, but most programs ended after the April 1978 coup.
Standards of living began to rise in the 1960s and early 1970s. There was political stability and a belle époque in Afghanistan under King Mohammad Zaher Shah. He was a well-liked, tough, but not dynamic, king. In a coup, King Shah was gently deposed by his cousin, Mohammed Daoud, and Shad went into exile. He would return, if only briefly, after the Taliban were defeated in 2001.
Elements of Constitutional Law
Afghanistan was never a Jeffersonian democracy, but Afghans enjoyed many human rights, most of which the Taliban later revoked. The Afghan 1923 constitution abolished slavery and protected religions other than Islam, while still asserting that Afghanistan was an Islamic state. It offered some measures of political freedom, including the right to own private property. However, the constitution cannot be considered liberal by contemporary Western standards. It asserted the supremacy of Sharia, or Islamic law.
Of enduring consequence in the 1923 Constitution is the Loya Jirga. The Jirga, a Pashtun tradition, is a loose assembly of village elders whose judgments and decisions influence national-level policy. For centuries, it was the most important conflict-resolution mechanism with democratic traits. The 1923 Constitution gave it unprecedented status, shifting power to the local level. The Jirga would reemerge as an important component of Afghan law and policymaking in the post-Taliban era.
In 1964, Afghanistan adopted a new constitution that strengthened the role of the Shura (parliament) and established a bicameral legislature. Its references to “basic principles” of democratic rule were ambiguous, its tolerance of religions other than Hanafi-Sunni Islam was questionable, and its civil and criminal protections for women were weak. Nonetheless, elements of universal human rights were gradually adopted. This progress ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The promise of social change unsettled the deeply religious. Not all the young were drawn to the West’s promises. By the 1950s, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood had scholars at Kabul University’s Faculty of Islamic Studies. By the late 1960s, the Muslim Youth Organization of Afghanistan had become a university student organization, including Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. They became a bulwark against Western liberalism, and several would become national leaders 20 years later.
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