Part 3
By Farid Afghan
Amir Abdur Rahman Khan and the Making of a Buffer State
When the British saw that Afghanistan had become a kind of quicksand for them, sinking them deeper with every passing day, they decided to look for a middle path. Around this same time, amid the deteriorating British military position in Kabul and the great leadership vacuum that had opened up, another important figure in Afghan history stepped forward. He was Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, grandson of Amir Dost Muhammad Khan and son of Afzal Khan, who for roughly ten years had been living in exile in Russia.
He hadn’t left the country by choice. He’d been exiled in 1863, after his grandfather’s death, as a result of the family war over the throne of Kabul. In that bloody family war he’d suffered a severe defeat at the hands of his uncle, Amir Sher Ali Khan, and after that, in 1870, fled to Samarkand in Central Asia to save his own life. Samarkand at the time was part of the Russian empire, and there he lived on a salary from the Russian government.
When the flames of the Second Anglo-Afghan War were lit, and after Amir Sher Ali Khan’s death when his son Yaqub Khan was removed from power by the British and exiled to India, Abdur Rahman Khan, sitting in Russia, understood that this was the best chance he would ever get to reclaim the throne his forefathers had lost.
Without invitation or summons from anyone, relying only on his own courage and political judgment, he obtained Russian permission and crossed the border with a handful of loyal companions, making his way to Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan. Afghan tribes and ghazis, who had for a long time been searching for a strong and courageous commander, gave Abdur Rahman Khan a warm welcome and began rallying under his flag.
Meanwhile, the British army under siege in Kabul had grown so exhausted by Afghan guerrilla operations that it was simply looking for a way to pull itself out with some dignity intact. When the British government saw that a great force of Afghan tribes now stood behind Abdur Rahman Khan, and that confronting him would mean sinking into another long, pointless war, they offered to recognize him as the new Amir of Kabul.
Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, with considerable shrewdness, accepted this on a temporary condition: foreign affairs would remain with Britain for now, so that the British army could first withdraw peacefully from Kabul and he could be given the chance to unify the country’s internal affairs with an iron fist and consolidate his own government. In this way, it wasn’t really the British who chose him as king. It was the needs of the moment and the British Raj’s own predicament that put Amir Abdur Rahman Khan on the throne of Kabul.
Amir Abdur Rahman Khan therefore built a harsh, highly centralized government. He crushed internal uprisings with an iron fist and brought the scattered Afghan tribes under the umbrella of a single central law. During this same period, Russia and Britain jointly decided that fixing Afghanistan’s final borders was necessary to prevent a direct war between the two great empires.
For this strategic calculation, British and Russian commissions worked together to settle Afghanistan’s northern and western borders, and a long, narrow mountain strip in northeastern Afghanistan, the Wakhan Corridor, was forced onto the map of Afghanistan, so that the borders of British India and Tsarist Russia would not meet directly. This was how, under Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, the map of Afghanistan as a “buffer state” began to take shape.
The Durand Line: An Irreparable Loss to Afghan Geography
But the greatest and most painful event of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan’s rule came in 1893, leaving deep wounds on Afghan geography and history that remain to this day. The government of British India wanted to extend its borders right up against the territory of the Afghan tribes and establish a permanent and secure boundary. For this purpose, the foreign secretary of British India, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, came to Kabul and held long talks with the Afghan amir.
Under British military pressure, the threat of economic sanctions, and fear of losing his annual subsidy, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan was forced to sign a treaty on November 12, 1893, known in history as the Durand Line Agreement. Under this treaty, a roughly 2,640-kilometer imaginary border was drawn, dividing the homeland of the Pashtun tribes into two. With the drawing of this line, Peshawar, the Kurram Valley, Waziristan, Swat, Bajaur, Chitral, Chaman, and vast stretches of Balochistan fell outside the map of Afghanistan and became part of British India. This was a geographic loss for the Afghan state that remains unrecovered to this day, and this line is still one of the most contentious and sensitive issues in regional politics.
Amir Habibullah Khan’s Era and the First World War
After Amir Abdur Rahman Khan’s death in 1901, his son Amir Habibullah Khan took the throne. He continued his father’s policies and maintained close relations with the British. During his reign the world was changing fast, technologically and politically. Cars, telephones, and modern printing presses appeared in Kabul for the first time. During this same period an awareness of modern education slowly began to stir among Afghans, with scholars like Mahmud Tarzi playing an important role through his newspaper, Siraj al-Akhbar. This newspaper sparked a new thirst for freedom and independence among Afghan youth.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Amir Habibullah Khan faced a great test. On one side, the Ottoman Empire had declared war on Britain, and the Muslim Caliph had issued a fatwa of jihad against the British. Afghan tribes and Kabul’s elders wanted to use this opportunity to attack British India and reclaim the territories Afghanistan had lost.
A joint German-Ottoman delegation, the Hentig-Niedermayer Expedition, even arrived in Kabul to try to win the amir over to their side. But Amir Habibullah Khan understood that Afghanistan, financially and militarily, could not carry the burden of another world war. Through patience and caution he kept Afghanistan neutral throughout the entire war, though this policy stirred deep anger against him among the Afghan tribes and even within his own family.
The Rise of Amanullah Khan and His Resolve for Freedom
The First World War ended in 1918 with a British and Allied victory, but the British Empire paid for that victory with its own economic and military exhaustion. Meanwhile, inside Afghanistan, Amir Habibullah Khan’s policy of neutrality had strengthened his opponents. In February 1919, while hunting in a region of Laghman province, Amir Habibullah Khan was asleep in his tent when unknown persons shot him dead.
After the amir’s assassination a brief political crisis gripped Kabul, but his third son, Amanullah Khan, who was at the time governor of Kabul and enjoyed wide popularity among the army and the people, immediately seized control of the government and declared himself king. King Amanullah Khan was, unlike his father and grandfather, a revolutionary leader. He believed the Afghan nation had shown enormous patience throughout the First World War by remaining neutral toward the British, and that the time had now come for Britain to repay Afghanistan with its full and complete freedom.
As soon as he took the throne he wrote a letter to the British viceroy, stating in clear terms that Afghanistan would no longer accept any condition from British India and stood on the map of the world as a fully free and independent country. The wheel of history was now ready to turn, and the moment to break the chains of forty years of servitude was drawing near.
