The Once and Future Afghanistan

Following the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, I found myself looking back a century at what that country once was and asking what the future Afghanistan will be.  To get a picture of what Afghanistan looked like a century ago, I opened Carpenter’s New Geographical Reader: Asia (1897, 1923) and turned to the chapter on Afghanistan.  The author has left Lhasa (Tibet), flying west, high above Afghanistan.  Carpenter’s century-old travelogue holds clues worth considering.

The author describes snow-covered peaks in the Hindu Kush Mountains four or five miles above the level of the Indian Ocean.  In the foothills, an irrigated patchwork of fruit orchards covered slopes.  Much of the country is rainless and dry.  But where streams of mountain water flow through valleys and feed the crops, villages were well populated.  When the pilot lands, he is on a level field on the outskirts of Kabul, the country’s mile-high capital. 

Carpenter explains that to land there was forbidden to foreigners. Landing required a permit from the Amir (ruler).  Any traveler caught sneaking across the border would be in danger of death. 

As to Afghanistan’s place in the continent of Asia, the reader learns it is almost as large as Texas.  Though landlocked and filled with physical extremes of climate and relief, its location is important.  Historically, it was founded as a country in 1747 and served as a buffer state in the 18th and 19th centuries separating British controlled-India from Russia.  For this reason, railroads were not encouraged.  Trade came in via horse and camel caravans guarded by soldiers.  Had railroads been built, the country would have connected Calcutta to the Caspian Sea and the rest of southern Asia with Europe.  Without them, it remained isolated.

Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat were then and remain today the three major cities.  “But who,” Carpenter asked in his 1923 text, “are the Afghans?”  Walking in Kabul, he meets people of all classes and many different tribes with rosy cheeks, light complexions, and eyes in startlingly shades of blue and green. Men wore a turban and gown over loose pants gathered at the waist, sometimes with velvet vests embroidered with gold. He also notes, “Nearly everyone in from the country carries guns or wears a sword.”

And what of the lives of Afghan women a century ago?  Then as during the reign of the Taliban two decades ago, women were hidden by a great skirt gathered in at the top and sewed on to a cap.  When put on over the head, it covered the face, except for tiny squares in a linen band across the eyes.  Most of the people were poor and oppressed, divided into classes much like those of European feudal times.

What of commerce in 1923?  Afghans raised fruit, farmed, and breed stock—camels, ponies, donkeys, and sheep with fat tails.  Apples, peaches, pears, apricots, quinces, cherries, figs, and sweet melons were abundant. With irrigation, farmers had two harvests a year—winter wheat was sown in the fall and reaped in summer, while rice, millet, and Indian corn were sown in the late spring and reaped in the fall.  Carpenter notes in his final paragraph that fine handmade carpets were exported then. 

Carpenter was traveling and writing about life in Afghanistan four years after the country had won independence from British control in 1919.  When I visited Kabul 50 years later, I wandered unescorted and without fear through the city’s covered markets filled with copper pans and ancient-looking muzzle-loading rifles.  My memories are of tall Afghan men with eyes the color of Aegean blue glass, a linkage some say to the army of Alexander that reached that remote region of Central Asia centuries earlier.  The kind French woman with whom I found lodging took me to her Afghan tailor where I bought a magnificent full-length suede coat lined with black yak fur and a pair of matching boots.   It was in the winter of 1970.   Afghanistan was experimenting with democracy, but that ended in a coup in 1973 and was fully eliminated by a 1978 Communist counter coup. 

Twenty-three years of non-stop war began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. For 10 years, Soviet troops were engaged in guerilla-style warfare with anti-Communist mujahedin rebels supported by the United States. The Soviets withdrew their disillusioned forces in 1989 and Afghanistan’s weakened communist regime finally fell in 1992.   A civil war followed between mujahedin factions, leading to the rise of the austere, hardline, Pakistani-sponsored Taliban that aimed to end the country’s civil war and anarchy.   Their seizure of Kabul and most of the country outside of the opposing Northern Alliance strongholds was achieved by 1998. Then followed three years of drought, forcing many farmers to sell their livestock, then their land, and finally that most prized possession that Carpenter wrote of in his 1923 geography text--the family’s handmade rugs.

Afghan girl photographed by Steve McCurry in a Pakistani refugee camp in 1984.

This was the reality in Afghanistan when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the world forever and brought Afghanistan into our conversations and onto America’s TV screens on a daily basis.  A month after 9/11, a U.S. Coalition and Afghan Northern Alliance military action toppled the Taliban for sheltering Osama Bin Ladin. 

Following the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, rebuilding the country’s infrastructure and its schools and orchards from ground zero was placed in the hands of a newly appointed provisional Afghan government. As winter approached, hope was in the air and plans were being voiced for Afghanistan’s future.  In this tribal land of Pashtuns (Patans), Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazaras, Kafirs, Persians, and Baluchis, a government that gives representation to all of Afghanistan’s ethnic and major political parties, possibly even the Taliban was talked about.

That year, winds of change were in the air.  Veils were lifted and beards shaved in Kabul.  There was hope that across Afghanistan’s war-weary land, gardens and orchards would someday outnumber land mines and sunlight once again would warm the faces and spirits of Afghan women.  Though the task was daunting, we allowed ourselves to imagine what might happen if peace was finally given a chance.

Five years later, an article in the LA Times (December 09, 2006) reported from Kabul that Afghanistan was entering, “a dangerous phase in which the United States and its NATO partners will need to suppress a revitalized enemy or be drawn into yet another drawn-out and costly fight with an Islamic insurgency.”

Aggravating this situation, Afghanistan’s opium trade had revived at an explosive rate and was fueling the insurgency.  Borders with Iran and Pakistan remained porous.  The insurgents included remnants of the Taliban, the very Islamist movement that ruled Afghanistan for five years and gave shelter to Osama bin Laden and other members of his Al Qaeda terrorist network. This volatile mix included competing warlords, part-time fighters, recruits from the growing ranks of the poor and unemployed, and disaffected youth often graduates of radical Wahabi-style Islamist religious seminaries.

In much of Afghanistan, the lack of security severely crippled development projects which in turn fomented a growing sense of disillusionment.  Many Afghans came to believe their daily lives had improved little since the Taliban times, and blamed the same Americans they once hailed as liberators. 

This month, the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan’s government following the announcement of the withdrawal of American forces 20 years after the events of 9/11. The world watched Afghanistan slide into chaos in a matter of 17 days. The question now is, what will Afghanistan’s future look like? And what will become of the lives of its women and children?

Editorial cartoon by John Darkow, published 8/17/2021 in the Columbia Missourian.