This article explores the deep history of Afghanistan that shapes the perceptions of the country. Through an overview of Afghanistan’s history between the 1963 and 1973 years the author asserts that common beliefs about Afghanistan’s history are refuted by careful consideration of the realities of long years of peace and stability. Afghans often refer to the period between 1963 and 1973 as their country’s ―Golden Age.‖ At the beginning of that decade, Afghanistan’s monarch, Zahir Shah, worked with Afghan intellectuals and technocrats, many of whom had received graduate degrees from American institutions of higher education, to present a progressive constitution to his fellow citizens. This document, approved by a national assembly, initiated the process of transforming Afghanistan’s government to a democratic, constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. Afghans, though often inconsistent and troubled, embraced the ensuing transformation. They welcomed modernization and opportunity.
Afghans often refer to the period between 1963 and 1973 as their country’s ―Golden Age.‖ At the beginning of that decade, Afghanistan’s monarch, Zahir Shah, worked with Afghan intellectuals and technocrats, many of whom had received graduate degrees from American institutions of higher education, to present a progressive constitution to his fellow citizens (1).
This document, approved by a national assembly, initiated the process of transforming Afghanistan’s government to a democratic, constitutional, par-liamentary monarchy. Afghans, though often inconsistent and troubled, embraced the ensuing transformation. They welcomed modernization and opportunity. They contrasted their country to their neighbors – Pakistan under military rule, Iran under the repressive police state of the Shah, and the totalitarian regimes of the Communist Soviet Union and China.
No fields of opium poppies were under cultivation anywhere. Food was plentiful in the bazaars. Afghans and foreigners could travel between cities and provinces for work, recreation, or vacation without restriction or security concerns. In population centers, growing numbers of elementary and secondary school students were female. (2) The colleges of education and humanities at Kabul University had more young women than men in their classrooms, with increasing numbers joining the colleges of medicine and engineering. More than 50 percent of the teachers and government employees in Kabul were educated women; few urban women wore the enveloping, full-body chaadiri, preferring scarves or no head covering at all. In Kabul, Afghan women young and old could move about to shop, visit, and go to work and school without obligatory male escorts; mothers and their children played together in the city’s parks without concern for safety (1).
To be sure, such progress was mostly in population centers; rural Afghanistan, as in all developing societies, would lag behind. Yet, even in agrarian and tribal-based provinces and districts, the Afghan central government had offices and staff to provide security, public works, and social and judicial services, as well as education for young girls and boys (3).
Afghanistan counted itself as one of the neutral, nonaligned nations. The East and West competed to assist Afghanistan as part of the Cold War. Foreign Service professionals from both blocs often sat in meetings together to plan development strategies. It was an exciting chapter in Afghanistan’s his-tory, an ideal time and place to serve as an American Peace Corps volunteer or Foreign Service officer.
The US was a partner with the Afghan government in their development process. President John F. Kennedy hosted Zahir Shah and his wife in the White House in 1963, the year before the king ushered in the transformation of his country’s civil society. Afghans took great pride and pleasure in inviting Americans into their homes, to their weddings and family parties, providing the hospitality for which they were so well-known (4).
Projects funded by international bilateral and multilateral foreign assistance organizations, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), provided training and employment for tens of thousands of Afghans in the construction of roads and bridges, irrigation, power dams and grids, and airports in Kabul and Qandahar (3).
The Soviet Union constructed the Kabul Airport, and the US constructed the airport in Qandahar. The road between Kabul and Qandahar was constructed under a USAID project, the road onward from Qandahar to Herat by a Soviet-funded project. The Soviet Union was the lead donor in agricultural development schemes north of Kabul, the US in the southern provinces of Qandahar and Helmand. The combined international agricultural development projects succeeded in making Afghanistan nearly self-sufficient in grain production and animal husbandry and an exporter of pomegranates, melons, grapes, raisins, apples, pistachios, almonds, and walnuts (5).
American PCVs served as teachers, vaccinators, auditors, and rural development workers throughout urban and rural Afghanistan. Female volunteers could ride alone on their bikes to bazaars or work with little concern for their security. Every school wanted Peace Corps English teachers; students demonstrated before the Ministry of Education, demanding these young men and women be assigned to their schools.
This collaborative atmosphere extended beyond development schemes and Cold War politics. In a production of Kiss Me Kate by the expatriate Kabul Amateur Dramatic Society, the male lead was played by the Soviet cultural attaché, the female lead by a US PCV. Members of the diplomatic missions serving in Kabul competed in tennis tournaments, golf matches, basketball leagues, and pickup games sponsored by embassies and the United Nations. I lost a tooth in a friendly, though competitive, basketball match to the elbow of the same multitalented Soviet cultural attaché. It was indeed a different time with different images (1).
It was not idyllic; Afghanistan was then as it is now: a poor, developing country. But it had not undergone decades of war and devastation. Afghans had a sense of moving forward, of hope, of being able to participate in setting their own future. Unfortunately, the years that followed the Afghan ―Golden Age‖ have been the most destructive and tragic in the nation’s history. Progress that had been achieved in developing a sense of national identity among Afghans was re-versed. This setback to the aspirations and progressive efforts of Afghans was initiated by a single, selfish act. That act would presage a downward spiral into decades of uninterrupted instability, violence, war, and suffering (6).
When King Zahir Shah and other members of the Afghan royal family moved to transform Afghanistan’s civil society in 1963, they forced out of power the strongman in what was essentially a military-dominated monarchy. That individual, the king’s first cousin and brother-in-law, Sardar (prince) Muhammad Daood (Daoud), served as prime minister between 1953 and 1963. He was the dominant figure in the royal family. The king was the face of the government but had little power other than as a member of the royal family council. Daood, never reconciled to the collective decision taken by the royal family, would take his revenge in 1973 (4).
Daood, an ambitious, stubborn, nationalistic, gruff, and secretive man, was the de facto ruler of his country during the crucial, formative years of the Cold War, when regional and global balances of power were being created and shifting. Afghans had long been concerned about the inexorable advances to their northern borders by Czarist Russia and then the Soviet Union. The geopolitical circumstances to Afghanistan’s south and east underwent dramatic changes two years after the end of World War II. Great Britain agreed to the partitioning of its South Asian ―Jewel in the Crown‖ into the newly independent, contentious nations of Pakistan and India and then left the region. Afghanistan’s immediate neighbor to the east was no longer a colonial power but an insecure, competitive Pakistan, seeking to create the national identity that still eludes it (7).
Daood was against this backdrop that the royal family effected its palace coup, removing Daood from power and setting the stage for reform and for the ensuing best ten years of Afghanistan’s history. Daood, irreconcilably angry, sat at home, not associating with his relatives for most of those years; he was rarely seen in public (8).
Conclusion
When King Zahir Shah and other members of the Afghan royal family moved to transform Afghanistan’s civil society in 1963, they forced out of power the strongman in what was essentially a military-dominated monarchy. That individual, the king’s first cousin and brother-in-law, Sardar (prince) Muhammad Daood (Daoud), served as prime minister between 1953 and 1963. He was the dominant figure in the royal family. The king was the face of the government but had little power other than as a member of the royal family council. Daood, never reconciled to the collective decision taken by the royal family, would take his revenge in 1973.
Daood, an ambitious, stubborn, nationalistic, gruff, and secretive man, was the de facto ruler of his country during the crucial, formative years of the Cold War, when regional and global balances of power were being created and shifting. Afghans had long been concerned about the inexorable advances to their northern borders by Czarist Russia and then the Soviet Union.
- Farzan Ahmed Shah, 2013Ad , Afghanistan, the rise of David to climb Massoud‟ pp30,60
- Moradi, Sahibnazar ,2011Ad , Afghanistan geography of the crisis, the publisher pp,44,96
- „Moscow-Kabul exchange: March 1979 call between Kosygin, Taraki‟, com/ColdWar,http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/20/documents/moscow/ (Accessed 18 August 2008). pp,42,137
- Tanean ,zahir , 2005Ad, Afghanistan in the twentieth pp,12,45.100
- Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, 378-380. pp,69,404 6 Ahmedi Ramazan 1988Ad Third Anglo-Afghan War Publications: Maiwand.pp,60
- Atay ,ebrahem Academician candidate 2010Ad contemporary history of Afghanistan .pp30-60
- Thomas Gouttierre 2012Ad What History Can Teach Us about Contemporary Afghanistan pp3-5