Great Game to 9/11

A Concise History
of Afghanistans
International
Relations
Engaging the World
Air Force
Michael R. Rouland
Aerial view of a village in Farah Province, Afghanistan. Photo (2009) by MSgt.
Tracy L. DeMarco, USAF. Department of Defense.
COVER
Great Game to 9/11
A Concise History
of Afghanistans
International Relations
Michael R. Rouland
Washington, DC
2014
The ENGAGING THE WORLD series focuses on U.S. involvement
around the globe, primarily in the post-Cold War period. It will
include peacekeeping and humanitarian missions as well as
Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedomall
missions in which the U.S. Air Force has been integrally involved.
It will also document developments within the Air Force and the
Department of Defense.
GREAT GAME TO 9/11 was initially begun as an introduction for a
larger work on U.S./coalition involvement in Afghanistan. It
provides essential information for an understanding of how this
isolated country has, over centuries, become a battleground for
world powers. Although an overview, this study draws on primary-
source material to present a detailed examination of U.S.-Afghan
relations prior to Operation Enduring Freedom.
ENGAGING THE WORLD
GREAT GAME TO 9/11
Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Razors Edge 1
ONE
Origins of the Afghan State, the Great Game, and Afghan Nationalism 5
TWO
Stasis and Modernization 15
THREE
Early Relations with the United States 27
FOUR
Afghanistans Soviet Shift and the U.S. Response 39
FIVE
The Helmand River Valley Project and the Pakistan Question 51
SIX
Socialist Afghanistan and War with the Soviet Union 63
EPILOGUE
From the Soviet Withdrawal to 9/11 79
NOTES 85
1
INTRODUCTION
The Razors Edge
In 1907, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon observed from his time in South
Asia the precarious balance on the borderlands of Afghanistan and
its impact on the world: Frontiers are indeed the razors edge on
which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life
and death to nations.
1
From the British-Russian Great Game rivalry
that started in the nineteenth century to Operation Enduring Freedom
in the twenty-first, Afghanistan, despite its remote location and often
dysfunctional government, has continued to claim the attention of the
worlds great powers.
In addition to the Europeans, for almost a century, U.S. leaders have
considered economic and strategic interests and the careful balance of
power in the South Asia region. These concerns returned to public view
in the frst decade of the twenty-frst century, but the experiences of
the past reveal patterns in Afghanistan of weak political regimes, tribal
unrest, and diplomatic intrigue.
A review of modern Afghan history raises two important questions:
how did ethnic politics shape Afghanistans national policy, and how did
Soviet and U.S. strategic interests infuence Afghanistans international
affairs? To answer these questions, a narrow focus on Afghan history after
the 1979 Soviet invasion or on U.S. links to the mujahideen is of limited
utility. A broader, albeit concise, examination of the long-term structures
of Afghan domestic politics and international diplomacy offers a fuller
understanding of this complex region.
Afghanistans path from empire to nation-state in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries established enduring conditions for ethnic confict
and resistance to modernization in the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries.
Its turbulent history has been marked by recurring patterns of political
centralization, then concessions to tribal authorities; resistance to foreign
infuence, then foreign intervention; and support for modernization,
then reaction against it. These tensions have plagued Afghanistan
throughout its history.
2
Long before the Cold War standoff between the United States and
the Soviet Union and the subsequent conficts between al-Qaeda and the
West, Afghanistan endured centuries as a frontier zone between larger
opposing empires: Persian in Western Asia; Mughal in South Asia; and
Turkic in Central Asia. Economically, the area has remained on the
margins. Even when Peshawar, Ghazni, Turquoise Mountain (Ghor), and
Kandahar emerged as metropoles during the indigenous Kushan (frst to
third centuries), Ghaznavid (tenth to twelfth centuries), Ghorid (twelfth
to thirteenth centuries), or Durrani (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries)
Empires, their income was drawn from their Persian or Indian dominions.
Afghanistan was constrained by mountainous barriers that created
particular ethnic and tribal allegiances. The foundation of the early Afghan
state rested on confederations of core groups that projected power outward
rather than establishing strong, centralized political rule from within. From the
mid-tenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, the rulers of Afghanistan
were of Turco-Mongolian origin or led a military dominated by Turco-
Mongolians. Not until the Durrani Empire did ethnic Pashtuns emerge as a
political force in Afghanistan.
2
Thus it is crucial to consider Pashtun rule
in the context of Afghanistans rich multiethnic heritage.
3
In Afghanistans
Endless War, Larry P. Goodson observed: If Afghanistan has been
marked by a history of invasion and conquest, no less has it suffered from
almost continuous internal strife among the native peoples living in its
remote mountain valleys.
4
Complicating matters, the Pashtun ethnic group itself has historically
been fractured and subjected to shifting alliances. Pashtun rivalries,
particularly between the Durrani and Ghilzai tribes, remain an important
feature of a multifaceted ethnic battlefeld. While the rivalries subsided after
the rule of Abdur Rahman Khan (r. 18801901), the socialist experiment after
1978 reignited them. Ghilzais and eastern Pashtuns played leading roles in
the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA, Hizb-e-Demokratik-
e-Khalq-e-Afghanistan), in several mujahideen groups, and in the Taliban.
Durranis returned to power with Hamid Karzai at the end of 2001.
In addition to the Pashtuns and their ongoing competition for power,
other ethnic groups have used their leverage and geographic advantages
to play key roles in Afghan history. In particular, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks,
Aimaks, Turkmen, Balochs, Nuristani, and Kuchi have made contributions
to the viability of the Afghan state. Their involvement in military, economic,
and political enterprises in Afghanistan has been important, and so has their
drive to establish an enduring Afghan nation-state, despite deeply rooted
ethnic ties and trade across its borders. Rather than continued existence as
a buffer zone created by imperious neighborsRussian, Persian, British,
3
and later PakistaniAfghanistan emerged as a confederation of tribes
with a developing national identity.
Returning to the realities on the ground, mapping and understanding
the intricacies of ethnic ties in Afghanistan remain diffcult. Intermarriage,
bilingualism, and shared local identity (manteqa), to mention but a few
factors, have consistently undermined the idea of solidarity along ethnic
lines.
5
The modern Afghan state reveals the complexities of its role as ruler
and as subject of successive frontier empires.

A Central Intelligence Agency map of ethnolinguistic groups in Afghanistan as of 1992,
based on data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Census. Library of Congress.
5
ONE
Origins of the Afghan State,
the Great Game,
and Afghan Nationalism
In the early eighteenth century, the territory that came to be known as
Afghanistan was divided between the Safavid (Persian) and Mughal
(Turco-Mongol) Empires. Ahmad Shah commanded a military unit
under the ascendant Persian ruler Nadir Shah in his campaigns against
the Mughals. When Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1747 and the Safavid
Empire collapsed, Ahmad Shah (r. 174772/73) established an independent
city-state around Kandahar. He adopted the name Dur-i-Durran, or Prince
of Pearls, and used the term Durrani to distinguish the tribes affliated
with him. According to an early-nineteenth-century British account,
Afghanistan after Ahmad Shah became an orgy of intrigue, treachery,
torture and murder . . . [an] ever-shifting kaleidoscope of betrayal.
1
Ahmad
Shah Durrani and his son Timur Shah Durrani (r. 1772/7393) expanded
their domain, conquering territories from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea
and from the Amu River (da Amu Sind) to the Indus River (Abasin). The
Durrani realm at the end of the eighteenth century included modern-day
Afghanistan and most of Pakistan, making it the second-largest Muslim
empire of its day.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, poet, warrior, and king that he was, wrote of
his nostalgia for Afghanistan during ten campaigns to expand his rule over
Kashmir, Punjab, and Sind:
Whatever countries I conquer in the world,
I would never forget your beautiful gardens.
When I remember the summits of your beautiful mountains
I forget the greatness of the Delhi throne.
2
This fondness for his Afghan homeland provided a lasting challenge
to his heirs. Unlike the rulers of other Central Asian empires who moved
their capitals to strategic and economically viable locations, Ahmad
Shah consolidated power in the Pashtun bases of Kandahar, Kabul,
and Peshawar. Thus the Durrani Empire was a coat worn inside out,
6
according to Thomas J. Barfeld.
3
Kandahar, Kabul, and Peshawar were
poor and sparsely populated compared to the rest of the Durrani Empire.
The wealthiest territories remained on frontiers in every direction.
British penetration into South Asia in the eighteenth century created
another layer of challenges for future Afghan leaders. Afghans unintentionally
aided British occupation of the Pashtun borderlands and, more critically,
allowed the rise of Sikh power in Punjab.
4
Once Durranis descendants
destroyed the Mughal Empire, they could not maintain such a vast and
diverse empire and prolong their dominance over Kabul, Kandahar,
Herat, the Hindu Kush, Peshawar, Punjab, Kashmir, Baluchistan, and
Sind. Moreover, each time the Durrani leader left his seat of power in
Kandahar, emerging plots from rival Pashtun tribes and other ethnic groups
threatened to depose him.
5
Afghan rulers slowly lost their territories to
the Sikhs and the British: Punjab (1801), Kashmir (1819), Sind (1820s),
Peshawar (1834/1879), and Baluchistan (1879), until Abdur Rahman
Khan focused his authority in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and the northern
Afghan provinces in the 1880s. As of this writing, four urban centers
remain: Kandahar in the south, Herat in the west, Balkh in the north, and
Kabul in the east. Peshawar and the North-West Frontier Province (now
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) make a ffth region, which the British gave to
Pakistan in 1947. Peshawar was historically important to Afghan rulers
as their summer capital and continues to be strategically signifcant as
the eastern gateway to the Khyber Pass, the link between Central and
South Asia.
6
Hoping to counter both internal and external threats, Afghan ruler Dost
Mohammad Khan (r. 182639, 184263) attempted to ally himself with the
British as early as the 1820s and curtailed relations with Persia and Russia.
However, the inability of the British to agree on the return of Peshawar
to Afghanistan impeded Anglo-Afghan cooperation. Sikhs maintained
de facto rule over Peshawar after 1818, and while British forces could
not quell Pashtun violence on the northwestern frontier, they preferred
a Sikh alliance with an emphasis on Punjab territories. Ultimately, Dost
Mohammad could not accept the permanent loss of Peshawar and British
intransigence, and he turned to the Russians for help in 1838.
7
At the same
time, British government agent Alexander Burnes had been negotiating
to restrain the maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Ranjit Singh, from taking
more territory as an inducement to convince Dost Mohammad not to join
a Russo-Persian alliance. The British, however, did not provide adequate
assurances to protect Afghanistan against Russia. A Russian military
mission took advantage of Dost Mohammads failure to gain concessions
from the British and offered to defend Afghan territory against Ranjit Singh.
7
The negotiations were not completed by the time British forces invaded
Afghanistan to secure geopolitical interests in South Asia, resulting in the
First Anglo-Afghan War (183942). The confict ended with an inglorious
British withdrawal, while Afghanistan abandoned its Russo-Persian
ties. This was the frst gambit in the Anglo-Russian rivalrythe Great
Gamethat would plague Afghanistan during the nineteenth century.
8

External pressures from Persia, Russia, and British India forced
Afghanistan to focus on consolidating power in the provinces between
those empires. Afghan rulers sought to strengthen their own rule while
deterring the territorial interests of their neighbors. An example of the latter
occurred when Dost Mohammad wrote to Sir J ohn Lawrence, viceroy of
India, in 1867, noting, We have men and we have rocks in plenty, but we
have nothing else.
9
In a 2011 study, J oseph J . Collins observed that in
a great political paradox, Afghan rulers were strongest within their nation
when they were supported by foreign subsidies.
10
British funding and
arms ultimately provided the cornerstone of a defensive bulwark against
Russia in Afghanistan.
Dost Mohammad was the frst Afghan ruler to consult with foreign
military advisors. During Burness visits in the 1830s, Dost Mohammad
This Punch political cartoon from November 30, 1878, shows the Great Game at its
fullest, with the Afghan amir caught between the Russian bear and the British lion.
8
sought his guidance on conscription.
11
Although he failed to recruit
Burnes, he invited a menagerie of American, French, English, Persian, and
Indian adventurers and military deserters into his retinue. J osiah Harlan,
a West Point graduate from Pennsylvania, was one of the frst and most
prominent Americans known to have maintained residency in Afghanistan.
Historian Sir John William Kaye described Harlan in 1851 as an American
adventurer, now a doctor and now a general, who was ready to take any
kind of service, with any one disposed to pay him.
12
Having previously
served Ranjit Singh, Harlan moved to Afghanistan and quickly became
involved in several revolutionary and military intrigues. Ultimately, he
became an aide de camp for Dost Mohammad and helped prepare the
Afghan infantry for the Battle of J amrud (1837) and the defense of the
Khyber Pass against Ranjit Singh.
13
After Dost Mohammad, the Afghan leader most associated with
military modernization was his grandson, Abdur Rahman Khan (r. 1880
1901). Historian Vartan Gregorian observed that Abdur Rahman relied
heavily on a military autocracy to guarantee his absolutism. Perhaps the
Iron Amirs greatest single achievement was the creation of a standing
and centralized Afghan army.
14
By the 1880s, Abdur Rahman had a standing
army of 50,000 to 60,000 men. He also positioned grain in Herat, Kandahar,
and Kabul to support expeditionary missions against recalcitrant tribes.
Barnett R. Rubin described his rule as a coercive-intensive path to state
formation.
15
While his campaign aimed to establish a modern state that
circumvented tribal rule, Abdur Rahman faced seventeen major rebellions
in a ffteen-year period.
16
Expressing a sentiment that would be repeated
several times hence, Abdur Rahman cautioned: I had to put in order all
those hundreds of petty chiefs, plunderers, robbers and cut-throats, who
were the cause of everlasting trouble in Afghanistan. This necessitated
breaking down the feudal and tribal system and substituting one grand
community under one law and one rule.
17
Anthropologist Thomas J. Barfeld noted that Abdur Rahman abolished
the decentralized governmental system in which tribes and regions maintained
a high degree of autonomy in exchange for submitting to the legal authority
of the Kabul government. When faced with numerous revolts by his
own relatives and regional groups, he waged war against his own people
until he and his government had no rivals of any type.
18
To establish his
authority throughout Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman singled out Ghilzai
Pashtuns and Hazaras during punitive campaigns in the 1880s and 1890s.
He was particularly brutal in reprisals against Hazaras, who sought to
guard their autonomy while Abdur Rahman centralized state power and
checked the infuence of local chiefs. As Abdur Rahman explained, I am
9
quite wearied of the behaviour of these people. They should take with
them their families and household property and go out of the country, and
I will populate their country with Afghans.
19
Ghilzai Pashtuns, the traditional rivals of the Durranis, also suffered
from forced migrations in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Abdur Rahman
moved thousands of Ghilzai from the south and east to north of the Hindu
Kush, depriving them of a Pashtun base in the south and creating a pro-
Pashtun population amid the Tajiks, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and Hazaras in
the central and northern parts of Afghanistan.
20
This action weakened the
ability of Ghilzai Pashtuns to coalesce and further diluted the economic
and political infuence of non-Pashtuns, whose land was often seized.
21

Ultimately, Abdur Rahman established Durrani Pashtuns as the privileged
ethnic group in Afghanistan, and a pattern of their over-representation in
the government began.
22
These actions would have signifcant strategic
and political implications for the twentieth century.
In the early 1890s, while Afghan identity remained localized and
regional, rather than national, Abdur Rahman created a centralized state
bureaucracy that placed Afghans into one consistent governmental system
Abdur Rahman Khan, the Iron Amir, ruled
Afghanistan from 1880 until his death in 1901.
During his effort to establish a modern state, his
government faced seventeen major rebellions in a
ffteen-year period.
10
of taxation, administration, and military recruitment that drew them into a
nascent Afghan state. Abdur Rahman centralized his authority by keeping
his sons in Kabul and dispatching loyal followers as provincial governors.
He created a supreme council and a general assembly (loya jirga) with
representatives from the royal family (sardars), local elites from around the
nation (khawanin mulki), and religious leaders (mullahs).
23
He also created
new provinces that undermined traditional ethnic and tribal boundaries.
Abdur Rahman did not offer much in exchange for the divestiture of
power from the regions and the supremacy of the elite in Kabul, however.
He did not invest in infrastructure, education, communication systems,
or transport networks. Afghanistans level of urbanization was higher
in the ffteenth century under the Timurids, when Herat and Balkh
were international centers of culture and commerce, Barfeld noted,
something that late-nineteenth century Kabul (with a population of only
ffty thousand) never came close to achieving.
24
Returning to the international arena and following his defeat in the
Second Anglo-Afghan War (187880), with the subsequent occupation
of his territory by the British, Abdur Rahman became well aware of the
new geopolitical realities of the Great Game.

In his memoir, he asked the
rhetorical question: How can a small power like Afghanistan, which is
like a goat between two lions, or a grain of wheat between these two strong
millstones of the grinding mill, stand in the midway of the stones without
being crushed to death?
25
His answer was to develop an isolationist
policy and reject commercial ties with his neighbors. The greatest safety
of Afghanistan lies in its natural impregnable position, Abdur Rahman
wrote, for Allah has given us every peak of the mountains for a fortress of
nature, and foreigners know that the Afghans, being born warriors, can go
on fghting for ever and ever, as long as they can hide themselves behind
the stones and do not have to face the enemy in the open feld.
26
Abdur
Rahmans observation proved to be an enduring one, as Coalition forces
in Afghanistan reported the use of these same tactics by Afghan insurgents
in the twenty-frst century.
Dost Mohammad and Abdur Rahman confronted their limited resources
and began to defne the Afghan nation as a coherent political unit in the
second half of the nineteenth century. Both leaders rearranged military
and political structures to meet the challenges of modernity with a mix of
isolationism, authoritarianism, militarism, and diplomatic skill. Yet while
they initiated reforms to manage the diverse territories that remained in
Afghanistan, they institutionalized commercial backwardness, ethnic and
regional antagonism, and political compromise, leaving the country ill-
prepared for the challenges of the twentieth century.
11
ORIGINS OF THE DURAND LINE
One of the defning events in Abdur Rahmans rule was the concession
of the Durand Line, which has persisted as an international boundary
by agreement since November 12, 1893.
27
This territorial compromise
between Britain and Afghanistan confrmed the Treaty of Gandamak,
signed on May 26, 1879, by Mohammad Yaqub Khan, son of Sher Ali Khan
and, briefy, amir of Afghanistan. Yaqub Khan ceded autonomy of foreign
relations to Britain; consented to a British mission in Kabul and deeper
commercial relations; and transferred the Khyber Pass, Kurram Valley, the
Pishin Valley, including the Bolan Pass, and Sibi in Balochistan, to British
India. He did this in exchange for an annual monetary subsidy.
According to Amin Saikal, Abdur Rahman never accepted the Durand
Line as more than a line delineating the Afghan and British responsibilities
in the Pashtun tribal areas. He contended that the line could not constitute
a permanent border between Afghanistan and British India.
28
Abdur
Rahman expressed serious reservations about the agreement with Sir Henry
Mortimer Durand, foreign secretary of British India, and other British
offcials. In a letter to the viceroy of India, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Abdur
Rahman recalled that Pashtuns in the North-West Frontier Province being
Mohammad Yaqub Khan (center) at Gandamak, a village outside of Jalalabad, during
May 1879 negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Gandamak, the document that
outlined what became the Durand Line. To his right is Maj. Pierre Louis Cavagnari,
who became British Resident in Kabul and was killed by mutinous Afghan troops in
September 1879. Photo by John Burke. British Library.
12
brave warriors and staunch Mohamedans, would make a very strong force
to fght against any power which might invade India or Afghanistan. I will
gradually make them peaceful subjects and good friends of Great Britain.
He cautioned, however, that if you should cut them out of my dominions,
they will neither be of any use to you nor to me: you will always be engaged
in fghting and troubles with them, and they will always go on plundering.
29
Although Abdur Rahman was aware of the potential consequences of
his concession, he did not have many alternatives.
30
He knew that unrest
in the frontier regions would continue to undermine British authority, but
he wanted to avoid direct confict with Britain. The British viewed the
Durand Line as an opportunity to secure high passes into India and to
curb Afghan interests in Baluchistan. Abdur Rahman, on the other hand,
understood that his rise to power and authority within Afghanistan rested
on British support and subsidies. Abdur Rahman later argued that the
British had not the sense to understand that taking and keeping under
British possession all these barren lands on the borders of Afghanistan
was a very unwise step, by which they burdened the exchequer of India
with the heavy expense of keeping an army on the spot to maintain peace
in these territories.
31
To complicate matters, Abdur Rahman extended the
practice used by rulers since Dost Mohammad of criticizing the British
in public while allying with them in private, advocating jihad against the
British while collecting their subsidies. Abdur Rahman believed, however,
that his actions slowed imperial encroachment and provided the necessary
stability for reforms in Afghanistan.
32
Responding to the Durand compromise, Abdur Rahman predicted
the sustained signifcance of Afghan unity: The frst and most important
advice that I can give to my successors and people to make Afghanistan
into a great kingdom is to impress upon their minds the value of unity;
unity, and unity alone, can make it into a great power. All the royal family,
nobility, and people must have one mind, one interest, and one opinion,
to safeguard their homes. Abdur Rahman was indeed concerned that the
Durand Line would undermine the consolidation of power he had begun
a decade earlier: In your cutting away from me these frontier tribes who
are people of my nationality and my religion, you will injure my prestige
in the eyes of my subjects, and will make me weak, and my weakness is
injurious for your Government.
33

Although the notion that Afghanistan would function as a buffer
between Russia and Britain would take hold a decade later, Abdur Rahman
understood Afghanistans importance to the stability of the region and its
strategic place in Asia. In the end, the Durand Line would have lasting
implications for the Pashtun borderlands. As a result of the exodus of
13
Afghan refugees that began during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s,
almost twice as many Pashtuns lived in Pakistan as in Afghanistan by the
end of the 1990s.
34
15
TWO
Stasis and Modernization
After Abdur Rahman Khan, Afghanistan entered into a period of sustained
stasis, or civil strife. A conventional interpretation of stasis is the
balance of equal and opposing forces that results in a kind of stability.
In his descriptions of ancient Greece, Thucydides offered a more apt
understanding of the political dissolution and violence that accompanies
such a stalemate: In times of peace, neither side had the excuse or the
willingness to call in the two great powers, but when the war was on,
alliances were easily obtained by those on both sides who, plotting a
new order of things, sought through calling in outsiders both to harm
their opponents and to acquire power for themselves. As a shifting war
between individuals and parties, Thucydides viewed stasis as a cause of
social and political disintegration.
1
When Abdur Rahman died, his eldest son, Habibullah Khan (r. 190119),
who had been groomed to rule, was prepared to succeed him. In Barnett R.
Rubins words, the peaceful succession was an event with no precedent
and so far, no sequel.
2
Habibullah was not as imperious as his father.
He eased restrictions on the tribal elites, reducing their conscription
requirements and allowing them more control over local affairs. Habibullah
still understood the value of a well-armed, modern standing army, but he
viewed economic development as a subsidiary function of military needs.
3
Seeking allies in his fathers former rivals, Habibullah invited back
many Afghan exiles, including Peshawar and Naqshbandi (Suf) elites.
Mahmud Beg Tarzi, an intellectual infuenced by the nationalist and
modernist Young Turk movement, was the most infuential to return.
He founded Afghanistans frst newspaper, Siraj al-Akbar Afghaniyah
(The Lamp of the News of Afghanistan), which was pan-Islamist and anti-
imperialist in orientation. Tarzi believed that the newspaper was one of
the most essential tools of modern civilization.
4
It became a forum for
realistic views of Afghanistans situation. As historian Vartan Gregorian
explained, Tarzi singled out the disunity of the Afghans and their anarchic
concept of freedom and law as other factors that had contributed to the
16
backwardness of the country. The disunity was such, he declared, that it
had calamitously set city against city, village against village, street against
street, tribe against tribe, brother against brother. Gregorian continued:
In Tarzis view, one important result of this disunity was that the
majority of Afghans had developed a negative concept of freedom,
equating freedom with the absence of restraint or governmental
authority. He saw lawlessness as historically regressive and as
alien to the spirit and elevated ethics of Islam. True freedom, he
wrote, lay in adherence to a positive concept of law, a concept
in which law is seen as a cohesive and constructive social force
contributing to the development of religion, national genius, and
civilization.
5
Using his position, Tarzi sought to root out the causes of social and political
disintegration and to address Afghanistans backwardness.
Infuenced by Tarzi, Habibullah pursued the soft power of Afghan
nationalism and international recognition of the Afghan nation. In 1901,
soon after his succession, he sent envoys to Great Britain, Russia, France,
Germany, J apan, China, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Persia, and the
United States. He followed Abdur Rahmans model of neutrality, using
Afghanistans natural boundaries to his advantage while impeding Russian
and British trade concessions.
6
During this period of internal stability, Habibullah oversaw the
development of schools, the construction of the frst hospital and
hydroelectric plant, and the appearance of wealth in the cities. This latter
development marked the beginning of the great social divide between
the cities and the countryside. Habibullah also identifed the importance
of a well-funded, centrally managed, modernized army. In 1904, he
founded the Royal Military College (Madrasse-e Harbi-e Sirajieh) for
the Durrani Pashtun elite.
7
Alongside his military reforms, Habibullah invited foreigners to assist
and lead several infrastructure development projects. An American, A. C.
J ewett, formerly an engineer with the General Electric Company, moved
to Afghanistan in 1911 when he was hired by a British company to build
an electric generating plant for Habibullahs summer palace at J abal Saraj
in Parwan Province, north of Kabul. By his nieces account, J ewett soon
discovered what later generations of aid providers didthat it is not easy
to help Afghans. J ewetts original two-year tour stretched out to seven
years while he struggled with physical diffculties, bureaucratic delays,
and cultural obstacles.
8
17
Habibullahs measured reforms encountered the harsh realities of
foreign affairs with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Alarmed by
the rising power of Germany, Russian and British leaders sought to end
their confict in Central Asia and to reaffrm Russias 1873 vow not to
invade Afghanistan. According to the 1907 Convention, the British would
exercise their infuence in Afghanistan only in a pacifc sense, while
the Russians, on their part, declared that they recognize[d] Afghanistan
as outside the sphere of Russian infuence.
9
Thus the European powers
agreed to consult with each other on all matters pertaining to Afghanistan,
and they stipulated that Afghanistan would remain neutral. Afghan leaders
were incensed when their input was ignored and they had no place in
negotiations between Russia and Britain regarding interests in Afghanistan.
The Kabul elite developed a severe distrust of both Russia and Britain and
rejected, as a threat to national integrity, their requests to expand trade.
10
When the Ottoman caliphate called for a global jihad against the British
and their allies during World War I, Afghanistan sided with the Young
Turks. Many in Afghanistan were driven to arms with a feeling of intense
resentment of British imperialism. In 1915, a Turkish-German mission
arrived in Kabul to prepare an invasion of India, but Habibullah gave only
Habibullah Khan (left), Abdur Rahmans eldest son, ruled Afghanistan from 1901
until he was assassinated in 1919. His third son, Amanullah Khan (right), consolidated
power after his fathers death. Amanullah instituted a series of unprecedented
reforms, but his reforming zeal was not supported by political acumen, and he was
overthrown in 1929. He lived in exile in Italy and Switzerland, dying in 1960.
18
tentative backing to the plans while practicing a policy of neutrality. Before
the Treaty of Versailles was signed, however, Afghanistan had a new ruler.
11
In February 1919, unknown assailants assassinated Habibullah while he
was on a hunting expedition. Habibullahs third son, Amanullah (r. 191929),
who was then in charge of the army and treasury in Kabul, seized power.
He eliminated dissent and gained the loyalty of his chief rival and uncle,
Nasrullah Khan, who was supported by the ulema (legal scholars) and
Pashtuns along the Indian border. When Amanullah declared independence
at the beginning of his reign on February 28, 1919, he set in motion events
that led to the Third Anglo-Afghan War. This confict lasted from May 3 to
August 8, 1919, and consisted of a series of border skirmishes.
12

To prevent an escalation of the confict, the British Royal Air Force
bombed targets in J alalabad and Kabul in an early example of air superiority.
Using a Handley Page V/1500 heavy bomber developed during World War
I, the British dropped one and a half tons of bombs on J alalabad in a single
day and targeted several military installations, an armaments factory, the
royal palace, and Abdur Rahmans tomb in Kabul. Combined with the
disarray of the Afghan army and the lack of popular support in Pashtun
areas of British India, the British aerial offensive forced Amanullah to
make a quick concession for peace.
13
The war ended with the Treaty of Rawalpindi, signed on August 8, 1919,
which guaranteed sovereignty to Afghanistan. The agreement confrmed
Amanullahs diplomatic independence and freed Afghanistan from British
interference in its foreign affairs for the frst time since the 1870s.
14
As
the price for this independence, Amanullah agreed to uphold the Durand
Line, although he continued to support Pashtun disobedience and revolts in
British India.
15
For its part, the British Indian government was well aware
of the need for pragmatism with Afghanistan. As Lord Chelmsford, viceroy
of India, stated in a report to London in October 1919:
We have to deal with an Afghan nation, impregnated with the world-
spirit of self-determination and national freedom, inordinately self-
confdent in its new-found emancipation from autocracy and in its
supposed escape from all menace from Russia, impatient of any
restraint on its absolute independence. To expect the Afghanistan
of today willingly to accept a Treaty re-embodying our old control
over her foreign policy is a manifest impossibility. If we were to
impose it at the point of the sword, to what end? The Treaty
would have to be torn to shreds the moment the point of the
sword was withdrawn.
16
19
Afghanistan initiated offcial foreign relations with Turkey, Persia (Iran),
Germany, France, Italy, and, most signifcantly, the newly formed Soviet
Union, which was the frst state to recognize Amanullahs government in
March 1919.
17
Vladimir I. Lenin decreed Amanullah the leader of the
only independent Muslim state in the world, believing that Afghanistan
held great importance as a potential model for Asia. Leon Trotsky, then
peoples commissar for military and naval affairs, wrote that the road to
Paris and London lies through the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab, and
Bengal, declaring that imperialism alone preserved the capitalist system.
Soviet support for Amanullah in 1919 cemented the relationship through
the 1920s. As Afghans endeavored to strengthen their independence, the
Soviets consolidated power in Central Asia, and anti-British sentiment rose
in the region.
18
The Soviet-Afghan Treaty of Friendship, signed on September 13, 1920,
and ratifed on February 28, 1921, was the new Soviet governments
frst international accord. Both parties agreed to refrain from entering
agreements with third parties against the interests of the other. As part of
the treaty, the Soviets promised to return territory from the Panjdeh oasis
seized in 1885, but ultimately they returned little land. The Soviets also
offered limited aid to build a radio station in Kabul and a telegraph line
from Kabul to Kandahar and to Serhetabat (Kushka), Turkmenistan.
19
During the 1920s, Afghanistan and Persia were strategically important
to the Soviets as a defensive bulwark against the British and as a potential
font of anti-British nationalism along the Indian frontier. The Afghan-
Soviet relationship, however, was soon tested by competing interests in
Central Asia: the Soviets were actively propagating their revolutionary
ideology in the region, while Amanullah sought to build a confederation of
Islamic states there. The Basmachi Revolt in Soviet Central Asia became
a focal point in this rivalry. The basmachi, an Uzbek term for bandits,
were armed militias led by kurbashi, or local chiefs, and infamed by
widespread famine, political uncertainty, and the nationalization of cotton
and food production. They were loosely organized groups that became
a popular counterrevolutionary and anti-Soviet movement, based in
Bukhara, Khiva, and the Fergana Valley.
20
By December 1921, basmachi forces numbered 20,000 and identifed
themselves as mujahideen (holy warriors). The Soviets sent Enver Pasha, a
former Young Turk, to quell the revolt, but he joined it instead. Amanullah
also decided to support the basmachi and sent his best troops with Gen.
Mohammad Nadir Khan, the future king, to fght alongside them in
Muslim solidarity. In J uly 1922, Nadir Khan declared to the Soviets that
if the hostile activity of the Bolsheviks against Bukhara does not cease,
20
the Government of Afghanistan will be forced to annex Bukhara. This is
the only way to assist a Muslim state in the center of Asia to stand up
against Bolshevik intrigues.
21
Enver Pasha led the capture of Dushanbe
as the rebellion peaked in 1922, but he could never unify the movement
or generate international support. Ultimately, Amanullahs concern over
Soviet expansion in Central Asia was less than his fear of civil war
caused by British intrigue and Pashtun tribes in the southern and eastern
provinces. Amanullah fnally agreed in November 1922 to Soviet demands
that he withdraw Afghan troops, and he continued a careful balancing act
to appease British, Soviet, and pan-Islamic interests.
22
While Afghan-Soviet relations deteriorated during the revolt, Fedor
Raskolnikov, a Red Navy offcer, civil war hero, and architect of the
Soviet Republic of Gilan, arrived in Kabul in July 1921 as the frst all-
Soviet Ambassador to Afghanistan. He supported increasing aid to check
British infuence and to promote his countrys anti-imperialist credentials.
An important cornerstone of the Afghan-Soviet relationship in the 1920s
was the creation of the Royal Afghan Air Force. After the success of
British air power during the Third Anglo-Afghan War, Amanullah sought
to build air capabilities for his own national army. The Soviet air force
arranged for aircraft and weapons to be sent from Italy and few the frst
fve aircraft to Kabul in 1924. Later, the Afghan government acquired
three J unkers from Germany and two British aircraft. By the end of the
1920s, the Royal Afghan Air Force had twenty-fve pilots: three Afghan,
four German, and eighteen Russian.
23
When the Khost Rebellion, initiated by Mangal and Ghilzai Pashtuns
resisting Amanullahs domestic reforms, broke out in March 1924, the
Soviets sent technicians and pilots to help Amanullah subdue the rebels.
The Soviets also donated Polikarpov R1s, Soviet copies of Airco DH
9As, on the condition that Russians would fy them. From a psychological
point of view, Gregorian argued, the Amirs use of airplanes piloted by
Russians and Germans against the rebels was at the least ill-advised. The
intrusion of infdels into an internal feud was not only regarded as a sign
of weakness but considered irreligious as well.
24
Despite the political
ramifcations, the use of foreign planes and pilots against the rebels had
a positive effect on the growth of Afghan air power. French journalist
Maurice Pernot observed at the time that at the end of October 1924,
Russian pilots crossed the Amu Darya, few over the mountains through
the gap at the Bamyan River, and brought their planes up to Kabul. The
impression was considerable. Soon after, twenty-fve young Afghans
departed to Russia in order to learn the craft of aviation. With profound
foresight, Pernot wrote in 1927 that Afghan aviation henceforth would
21
depend on Russian matriel and personnel. British sources agreed that the
Afghan air force was essentially a Russian service. By 1928, the Soviets
had established an air link with Central Asia and the frst fights between
Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat.
25
While the birth of Afghan air power was a small but impressive
accomplishment, Amanullahs social reforms proved an important milestone
in Afghan history. His efforts to modernize Afghanistan exceeded those
of his predecessors, Abdur Rahman and Habibullah. Amanullah embraced
European advances in education, improved conditions for women, and
supported the press. Beginning in the early 1920s, he introduced new
taxes, universal conscription, an expansion of the educational system, and
changes to family law, including family affairs and marriage customs, as
part of a systematic reconstruction of Afghan society.
26
Amanullah directly
challenged local traditions and ways of life, prompting rebellions that
began in the southeastern city of Khost in 1924.
27
After the early uprisings subsided, Amanullah and his wife, Soraya,
who was the daughter of Mahmud Tarzi, set out on a grand tour in late
1927 that included visits to India, Egypt, Italy, France, Germany, Britain,
Darul Aman Palace, The Abode of Peace or the Abode of Aman[ullah], was built
on the outskirts of Kabul in the 1920s. It is also known as the Kings Palace, as the
Afghans built a separate residence for Queen Soraya on a nearby hill (see p. 68). Darul
Aman housed the Defense Ministry in the 1970s and 1980s. It was restored after fres
in 1969 and 1978 but severely damaged during the civil wars of the 1990s. Proposals
have circulated to rehabilitate the structure for use by the Afghan parliament. Photo
(2009) by Sgt. Teddy Wade, USA. Department of Defense.
22
the Soviet Union, Turkey, and Iran. Amanullah received honorary degrees
from Oxford and Berlin Universities, the Collar of the Annunziata from
King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, and the Order of the Golden Spur from
Pope Pius XI. As he embarked on his travels, Amanullah launched a
campaign to end Afghanistans isolationism and foreign dependency and
to transform its political and economic institutions.
28

In a series of major initiatives from 1927 to 1929, Amanullah
presented a secular constitution based on the Turkish model; attempted
to defne the relationship between religion and the secular establishment
while both groups refused to compromise; created an independent
judiciary; invested in schools for girls and teachers from Europe and
India; expanded legal rights for women; reorganized the tax and budget
systems; established a national bank (Bank-e Milli); and set in motion a
campaign against nepotism and corruption. This was the most ambitious
improvement program in Afghan history, but it was ill-fated from the start.
Amanullahs embrace of modernization met with strong reactions from
tribal and religious leaders, the traditional power brokers in Afghanistan.
According to cultural historian Senzil Nawid, Amanullah sought to purge
the practice of Islam in Afghanistan of its folk ways, traditional taboos,
and superstitions, which he claimed were espoused by ignorant and self-
interested clergy.
29
Ultimately, his reforming zeal was not supported by
political acumen, and his social programs continued to antagonize the
tribal elites, religious leaders, and the army.
An uprising of Shinwari Pashtun tribesmen expanded to widespread
revolt in 1928, forcing Amanullah to abdicate in J anuary 1929. At the same
time, Ghulam Nabi Charkhi, Afghan ambassador to the Soviet Union,
crossed the Amu Darya with Soviet forces and briefy occupied Mazar-i
Sharif, where his brother had been governor. He found little support for
his faction, however, and the Soviets continued to support Amanullah.
30
The crisis provided an opportunity for Habibullah Kalakani, derided
by Pashtuns as Bacha Saqao or son of the water carrier, to seize
power. An ethnic Tajik army deserter and charismatic bandit in the style
of Robin Hood, he ruled Afghanistan from J anuary to October 1929. As
Shinwaris revolted in the east, Wazir tribes arrived from the southeast, and
Habibullah Kalahanis group of Tajiks and Ghilzai Pashtuns moved from
the north and occupied Kabul. Amanullah, with his attempt to regain
power having failed, fed from Kandahar to India in May. Habibullah
Kalakani reversed many of Amanullahs reforms, banning western
clothing and closing the schools for girls. He also began preparing for
battle against another rival, Nadir Khan.
31
23
BARAKZAI LEGACIES
The earliest rulers of Afghanistan were Sadozai-Popalzai Pashtuns,
including Ahmad Shah Durrani and Timur Shah. This order changed in 1826
when Dost Mohammad of the Barakzai clan emerged as the sovereign of
Afghanistan. Traditionally, the Barakzai clan served as viziers, the power
behind the Sadozai-Popalzai princes. When Dost Mohammad became ruler,
many Afghans viewed him as a usurper to the throne. He used the lesser
title of amir, rather than shah, in deference to his forebearers, a tradition
maintained until Amanullah declared himself malik in 1926.
32
After Amanullah abdicated, Mohammad Nadir Khan (r. 192933)
enlisted the support of the British and raised an army to remove Habibullah
Kalakani from power. Nadir Khan had been a renowned general and
former minister of war, but he had been exiled as the Afghan minister to
France because of disagreements with Amanullah and Tarzi over the pace
of reforms. To secure his succession, Nadir Khan allied with conservatives
and arrived in Kabul at the front of a coalition of Amanullahs relatives.
Nadir Khan also beneftted from the military leadership of his brothers,
Shah Mahmud Khan and Shah Wali Khan, who returned from exile in
France with him. Although Nadir Khan had little personal interest in ruling
Afghanistan, he acknowledged both his popularity as well as Amanullahs
lost mandate when he took the crown.
33
In 1929, because the Afghan government was weak and bankrupt and the
national army had ceased to exist, Nadir Khan made concessions to appease
local unrest. He annulled almost all of Amanullahs reforms, confrmed
Habibullah Kalakanis enforcement of Islamic law, and reintroduced gender
segregation (purdah) and the wearing of the veil (chadri). He promulgated
a new constitution in 1931 that entrenched religious values.
On the international front, Nadir Khan pursued a policy of neutrality
and sought to curb Soviet economic and political infuence in Afghanistan.
He renegotiated the neutrality pact of 1926 and concluded the Treaty of
Mutual Neutrality and Non-Aggression with the Soviet Union in J une
1931. One clause declared that each state would prevent activities within
its territory that might cause political or military injury.
34
With respect to military affairs, Nadir Khan moved away from
Amanullahs efforts to centralize control of the armed forces. He returned
the recruitment process to tribes and clans, even excepting the entire Paktia
region from mandatory military service in recognition of its support in
ousting Habibullah Kalakani. Nadir Khan also promoted the inclusion of
Hazaras, Mangals, and Mohmands in the army.
35

24
In 1933, Nadir Khan founded the Maktab-i-Ihzariah, a military
preparatory school for the sons of tribal chiefs. This was a distinct departure
from the promotion of Durrani elites by Afghan rulers since Abdur
Rahman. Nadir Khans remarks at the launch of the school underlined the
renewed importance of the army to uphold stability in Afghanistan:
An era marked by discords and civil wars has ruined and weakened
our native land, and it is only after a series of coordinated efforts
that it will be possible to reestablish its might and prosperity. I hope,
with the help of almighty God, that Afghanistan may possess a
strong and well-organized army that will constitute a beautiful rose
on the head of its friends and a thorn in the eye of its enemiesan
army that would assure peace and prosperity in our country.
36
Nadir Shah and his successor Zahir Shah (r. 193373) made a
lasting, ultimately devastating deal with religious conservatives to curtail
the changes instituted by Amanullah. Low literacy and government
withdrawal from social reforms meant that educational advances were
limited to Kabul, furthering a divide between urban and rural areas.
In small steps, Nadir Shah formed commercial ties with Britain and
Russia, introduced fnancial planning, and improved roads through the
Hindu Kush.
Nadir Shah was assassinated in Kabul by Abdul Khaliq, son of a
Hazara servant of Ghulam Nabi Charkhi, who avenged the killing of his
master by Nadir Shah.
37
With Nadirs death, his three surviving brothers
rallied around Nadirs nineteen-year-old son, Zahir Shah, who functioned
frst as a fgurehead while his unclesMohammad Hashim Khan as prime
minister, Shah Wali Khan as minister of war, and Shah Mahmud Khan
as minister of the interiorplayed major political roles in the 1930s and
1940s. In particular, Hashim Khan led Afghanistan toward neutralism
and gradualism in foreign policy and provided the foundation for bi-
taraf, literally without sides, the nonalignment strategy of the 1950s
and beyond.
38
As prime minister, Hashim Khan continued the efforts of Nadir Shah
to strengthen the army and the economy with foreign assistance. He
looked beyond his Soviet and British imperial neighbors to fnd additional
allies to counter their bipolar infuences. To this end, Hashim Khan
invited German experts and business interests to build hydroelectric and
industrial plants. He also forged ties with J apanese and Italian businesses
with little British and Soviet awareness of these activities.
39
He used the
fear of Soviet aggression to generate loans from the British and Germans
25
to buy arms and confront tribal revolt.
Despite the global economic crisis,
Afghan leaders avoided enacting heavy
taxes by extracting revenue from
foreign gosvernments in the form of
loans and foreign assistance from the
Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, and
Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, and then
the Soviet Union and the United States
after World War II.
40
In a theme for the era, and an
enduring pattern, Afghan leaders not only
balanced disparate and competing foreign
interests, they also regulated the popular
mistrust of outsiders to encourage foreign
assistance. Afghanistans experiences
with British military invasions and
political hegemony for the better part
of a century caused general distrust of
Europeans. At the same time, however,
the king and his uncles decided that
European modernization strategies could
fx Afghanistans political and economic
backwardness.
41
As geologist Ernest Fox
explained after his time there in the 1930s: Afghanistan still dislikes the
foreigner. The mountaineers natural love of independence, their strong
militant religious sentiment, and centuries of unpleasant experiences with
foreign invaders have bred this feeling. But the present Afghan leaders
realize that they can employ to advantage the technical achievements
of the West.
42
Afghanistan embraced a more globalized outlook before World War II,
becoming a member of the League of Nations on September 27, 1934. On
J uly 8, 1937, Afghanistan joined Iran, Iraq, and Turkey to sign the Eastern
Pact of Friendship and Nonaggression, also known as the Saadabad Pact,
which established the inviolability of mutual frontiers and abstention from
interference in each others internal affairs.
43
In seeking these alliances,
Afghan leaders positioned themselves as a political force in the Middle
East.
44
They also affrmed their diplomatic independence, which had been
constrained for a century by the Great Game. On November 6, 1941, as
the growing war became more widespread, the Grand Assembly released
this statement:
Mohammad Zahir Shah in the early
1930s. He became king in 1933 at
age nineteen after the assassination of
his father, Mohammad Nadir Shah.
Zahir Shah reigned for forty years,
then lived in exile in Italy after being
deposed in 1973.
26
The Afghan nation has at no time been under any obligation to a
foreign government, nor will she ever be. The nation has always
been free, and will also in the future maintain its free and independent
existence. By the help of God, the people of Afghanistan are
unanimously prepared to live a life of honor by defending their
rights with all their material and spiritual forces, even to the point
of shedding the last drop of blood.
45
While Afghanistan did not endure the same wartime fate as Iran, which
was occupied by Soviet and British troops, it did face rampant infation,
abandoned development projects, and reduced foreign trade, which resulted
in major economic upheaval.
46
The experience demonstrated to the young
ruling elites the vital necessity of economic reform and modernization.
When Hashim Khan resigned as prime minister in May 1946, his brother,
Shah Mahmud Khan, embarked on an ambitious new modernization plan
that would have long-term implications for Afghanistan.
A new challenge also arose in the diplomatic sphere when Afghanistan
could no longer play equal sides against each other. There were many among
the Afghan elites with German sympathies, but the Afghan government had
recognized the consequences of Irans friendship with Germany and instead
chose to remain neutral during the war.
47
Afghanistans experience during
World War II would soon make the United States a key yet elusive ally.
27
THREE
Early Relations with
the United States
When Amanullah Khan began his foreign policy initiatives in the 1920s,
he included an effort to open relations with the United States. The U.S.
Department of State, however, delayed the discussion of diplomatic
recognition. U.S. offcials viewed Afghanistan as part of Great Britains
sphere of interest, and they were skeptical of Afghanistans acceptance
of Soviet aid.
1
Despite these reservations, relations between the United States and
Afghanistan remained cordial. In J uly 1921, Secretary of State Charles
Evans Hughes wrote to President Warren G. Harding, There is a Mission
here from Afghanistan apparently with full powers and desirous of having
American participation in the development of that country.
2
Harding
met the mission, led by Gen. Wali Khan, on J uly 26, 1921, at the White
House. A few days later, he wrote to Amanullah, It is my wish that the
relations between the United States and Afghanistan may always be of a
friendly character, and I shall be happy to cooperate with Your Majesty
to this end.
3
Relations, however, never progressed beyond epistolary
pleasantries during the Harding administration.
In 1925, the Afghan government submitted a draft treaty of friendship
to renew the discussion of diplomatic relations with the United States.
4
In
response, Wallace S. Murray, chief of the State Department division for near
eastern affairs, argued that Afghanistan for centuries has been a cockpit of
Anglo-Russian struggle over the control of the principle gateway to India,
the Khyber Pass, and there is no reason to believe that this struggle will
cease now that Russia is controlled by the Bolsheviks. No foreign lives in
the country can be protected and no foreign interests guaranteed.
5
Afghanistans inability to safeguard foreigners and its prohibition of
missionaries meant that U.S. visitors were limited to adventure travelers.
Two such men, Theodore Roosevelt J r. and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of
Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the Afghanistan route was very diffcult,
and the natives uncertain, to put it mildly. We did not wish to be collected
ourselves before we had a chance to collect any animals.
6
28
Despite U.S. apprehension, Afghan desire for formal diplomatic
relations never waned. Mohammad Zahir Shah framed a letter to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1934 with the opening remarks, My Dear
and Most Honoured Friend: In view of the friendship and goodwill, which,
since the extraordinary embassy of Afghanistan of 1921, are established
between the two great States of Afghanistan and the United States of
America. Zahir Shah informed Roosevelt that his father had died and that
he had ascended the throne. He continued, We are pleased to notify the
desire of the Afghan Government to strengthen the political and economic
relations, which he had and has still now with the High Government of the
United States.
7
Several factors combined to delay U.S. recognition in the 1920s and
early 1930s. In 1934, Acting Secretary of State William Phillips wrote to
Roosevelt:
Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. during their 192526
expedition in South Asia. They observed that the Afghanistan
route was very diffcult, and the natives uncertain, to put it
mildly. Library of Congress.
29
Our failure to recognize the Government of Nadir Shah was
due largely to the fact that this Government was never formally
notifed of the abdication of Amanullah and the accession of
Nadir Shah; moreover, we have been naturally conservative on
the subject of establishing relations with Afghanistan owing to the
primitive condition of the country, the lack of capitulatory or other
guarantees for the safety of foreigners, and the absence of any
important American interests.
8
Thus informed, Roosevelt offered a polite reply without intending to
change the status quo: I cordially reciprocate the sentiments which you
express and, in extending recognition to Your Majestys Government, take
this opportunity of assuring you of my hope that friendly relations will
always exist between the United States and Afghanistan.
9
Mohammad Zahir Shahs April 1934 letter to Franklin
D. Roosevelt, in the original Dari. Zahir Shah expressed
Afghanistans desire to strengthen the policial and economic
relations with the United States. National Archives.
30
Roosevelt initiated a deliberate process to establish U.S. relations
with Afghanistan that culminated in the Provisional Agreement
regarding Friendship, Diplomatic and Consular Representation between
the United States and Afghanistan, which was signed in Paris on March
26, 1936.
10
The slow progress toward recognition refected the economic
isolationism and noninterventionist foreign policy of the United States
in the 1930s. But a few U.S. commercial interests began to recognize
Afghanistan as a potential market. In one such case, U.S. offcials
supported the frst Afghan military purchases from the United States,
beginning in February 1935 when the Caterpillar Tractor Company sold
ffty tractors to the Afghan army.
11
A signifcant expansion of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan took place
when the Afghan government offered oil concessions to a U.S. consortium
that included Seaboard Oil Company, Texas Oil Company (later known
as Texaco), Case, Pomeroy & Company, and Fisher Brothers. The Afghan
government granted this group access to oil deposits throughout Afghanistan,
with an option for mineral deposits, on November 20, 1936.
12
The agreement
called for additional measures and certain infrastructure investment to be
completed within the frst year after signature. The oil exploration was not
fruitful, however, for a number of reasons. Murray, the State Departments
chief of division for near eastern affairs, recounted that despite three years of
negotiation, which obtained extensive oil concessions in both Afghanistan
and Iran, the Seaboard Oil Company suddenly and unexpectedly withdrew
from both agreements.
13
Afghan offcials did not understand why the
United States gave up so quickly, after only one year, despite growing
concerns over the global oil market and increasing security concerns in
the late 1930s.
14
Although the venture failed, U.S. offcials began to realize
the need to formalize relations with Afghanistan. Murray had written in
J uly 1937 that I do not see how we can avoid much longer establishing a
permanent legation at the Afghan capital.
15

Afghanistans strategic location during World War II prompted the
United States to bolster diplomatic relations. When Louis G. Dreyfus J r.,
the U.S. minister to Iran, visited Kabul in J une 1941, he noted that the
Afghans have a sincere and deep-rooted desire, in the absence of a friend
or neighbor to whom they can turn, to have a disinterested third power
friend to assist and advise them, and they have always hoped that the U.S.
would be willing to fll such a role. Dreyfus believed that this is an
opportunity which should not be missed of establishing ourselves solidly
in a strategic position in Asia.
16
When the United States entered the war,
Murray expressed an interest in developing a treaty of friendship to replace
the provisional accord of March 1936, but he did not pursue that goal.
17
31
The requirements of war did result in the establishment of an American
legation in Kabul on June 6, 1942. From 1942 to 1945, the frst U.S.
envoys to Afghanistan included Cornelius Van H. Engert, Ely L. Palmer,
and Dreyfus, all experienced diplomats with extensive backgrounds
in the region. They directly confronted pro-German sentiments in the
Afghan government that could have destabilized the British Indian
frontier during the war.
In July 1942, Engert arrived as the frst U.S. minister to Afghanistan.
In 1922, Engert, then serving as the second secretary of the American
legation in Tehran, Iran, had been the frst U.S. diplomatic offcer to
visit Afghanistan. During his subsequent assignment to Washington, he
published a confdential study, A Report on Afghanistan, about his travels
there.
18
This work remained a key reference for U.S. offcials until Engert
returned during the war, twenty years later. Upon his arrival in Kabul,
he informed Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the king of Afghanistan
had for many years harbored feelings of great sympathy, confdence and
admiration for the United States.
19
On the other side of the globe, President Roosevelt welcomed the
frst Afghan diplomat accredited to the United States, Abdul Hussein
Aziz, in 1943.
20
While U.S. offcials considered the strategic implications
of Afghanistans geographic location in Asia, including a secret plan for
an alternate Lend-Lease route to the Soviet Union and China through
Afghanistan and India, Afghan leaders viewed the United States as a
potential counter to British and Soviet interests in Asia. Writing to Hull,
Engert clarifed in November 1943 that from the Afghan point of view, the
U.S. would be the ideal powerful friend to whom to cling especially as pro-
British elements are still afraid to give public expression to their feelings.
21

U.S. offcials soon perceived the complexities of Afghanistans foreign
policy challenges. On one hand, Engert optimistically told Hull that
Afghanistan is ready to exercise a stabilizing infuence in Central Asia and
on the northwest frontier of India provided only that she can be reasonably
certain that she will not be ground between the upper and nether millstones
of rival powers struggling for supremacy.
22
On the other, U.S. diplomats
were aware of Afghan leaders fear of a return to the nineteenth-century
Great Game as the Soviets emerged as a military power during the war.
It is certain that as [a] result of spectacular Russian military successes,
Afghan offcials have been trying to improve relations with [the] Soviets
and to cultivate closer offcial and social contacts, Engert observed in
February 1943. He added that there are as yet no indications of [the]
future course of Soviet policy toward Afghanistan, but Russia has long
been a most uncertain neighbor, and little trust is placed here in Soviet
32
promises and undertakings.
23
In a letter to Hull in April 1943, Engert
wrote, The Afghans are convinced that when the war is over Russia will
demand substantial territorial concessions of her neighbors and that neither
the U.S. nor Great Britain will be able to stop her.
24
The Afghans attitudes toward the Soviet Union proved no less
problematic than their relations with Great Britain and British India.
Following a meeting with the Afghan minister, Aziz, in Washington in
November 1943, Hull recounted the offcial Afghan position: The Afghan-
Indian frontier presented no problem in so long as the British remained in
India, but that the Government of Afghanistan would never permit that
the Afghan tribesmen along the present northwest frontier of India should
be subject against their will to the control of the Indians. Anticipating
challenges that would plague Afghanistan in the future, Aziz concluded,
according to Hull, that if the tribesmen in question should by any chance
prefer to remain with the Mussulmans [Muslims] of India, Afghanistan
would come to them.
25
The United States and its allies were able to keep foreign confict from
reaching Afghanistans borders during World War II, and U.S. offcials remained
interested in the countrys potential strategic value. Engert fought to send aid
to Afghanistan during the war, despite its neutral status. He also facilitated
the export of karakul wool, Afghanistans primary export commodity, to the
United States. This was an extraordinary feat during the privation of war, and it
inspired cordial relations with the Afghans over the next decade.
26
The U.S. Department of War shared little of the State Departments
interest in Afghanistan. Col. Harold R. Maddux, chief of the liaison section,
War Department General Staff, argued in J une 1944 that the War Department
is unable to foresee any military benefts that will accrue to the United
States as a result of increased effectiveness of the Afghan army.
27
Two
years earlier, Engert had sent a telegram to Hull requesting the placement of
several bomber squadrons in northwest India or northeast Persia (Iran) to
bolster his Afghan allies. Engert argued that in view of immediate urgency
of military situation I venture to make a practical suggestion to raise morale
of Afghan Government: Arrival of a few American bomber squadrons even
if only for purely temporary duty in North and Northeastern Persia would
make profound impression in Afghanistan.
28
In May 1943, Engert and the
military attach to Afghanistan had managed to present a Stearman trainer
plane to the Royal Afghan Air Force.
29
The proximity of the China-Burma-
India theater provided additional opportunities for military cooperation.
A year later, more substantial military-to-military interaction ensued.
On December 29, 1944, a C47 carrying members of the Afghanistan
military mission arrived at Hijli Air Base in northern India to visit Maj.
33
Gen. Curtis E. LeMay and XX Bomber Command as part of a tour of the
China-Burma-India theater. The mission toured two B29s at the base,
developing rapport and enjoying a halal meal together.
30
Toward the
end of the war, Lt. Gen. Mohammad Daud Khan, the kings cousin and
commander of the Kabul Army Corps who would become prime minister
in the next decade, requested military training for Afghan offcers,
envisioning a training mission in Afghanistan run by U.S. rather than
Turkish advisors. U.S. government offcials refused the request, as they
did not view Afghanistan as a military ally because it had maintained its
neutrality throughout the war.
31
Since the Soviet-Afghan Treaty of 1931 was still in force at the end
of World War II, Afghans would have abrogated their treaty by pursuing
deeper ties with the United States, as that would have constituted a third-
party alliance. Yet during a visit in November and December 1948, Abdul
Majid Zabuli, minister of national economy, requested U.S.-manufactured
weapons to maintain internal security in the face of persistent tribal revolt.
Zabuli also articulated Afghanistans potential aid to President Harry
S. Trumans containment policy in two offcial meetings. According to
meeting notes, Zabuli asserted that properly armed and convinced of U.S.
In December 1944, Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay and XX Bomber Command hosted a
visit by senior Afghan offcers at Hijli Air Base, India. The delegation included Lt.
Gen. Mohammad Daud Khan, the kings cousin, who would become prime minister
in the 1953. U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency.
34
backing, Afghanistan could manage a delaying action in the passes of the
Hindu Kush, which would be a contribution to the success of the armed
forces of the West. At a meeting three weeks later, he added that when
war came, Afghanistan would of course be overrun and occupied. But the
Russians would be unable to pacify the country. Afghanistan could and
would pursue guerrilla tactics for an indefnite period.
32
The United States continued to deny military aid to Afghanistan
through the late 1940s and early 1950s as U.S. interests in South Asia
began to focus on newly created Pakistan as an increasingly important
ally.
33
U.S. diplomat Leon D. Poullada and some others believed that the
United States had an Afghan blind-spot where Afghanistan was always
mysteriously overlooked or deliberately ignored.
34
More likely, however,
the U.S. foreign policy establishment made pragmatic decisions on U.S.-
Afghan relations based on what it considered to be reasonable geopolitical
and strategic expectations of the region. At that time, Afghanistan remained
on the margins of the Cold War, a situation that would change dramatically
a few decades later.
POSTWAR GEOPOLITICS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE
PASHTUNISTAN DEBATE
While the United States demonstrated little interest in supplying aid
to Afghanistan at the end of World War II, Great Britain was more open
to the idea.
35
Under the Lancaster Plan, the British started to provide the
Afghans with equipment and training and, by 1947, the Afghan army and
air force had become dependent on British training and supplies. The
partition of India in that same year, however, quickly altered the political
landscape of the region.
36
Through an act of Parliament in July 1947, Great Britain offcially
partitioned British India into the two independent dominions of India
and Pakistan. Afghanistan immediately abrogated its treaties with
British India and challenged Pakistani claims to British territory along
the northwest frontier.
37
Afghanistan specifcally rejected Pakistans
intention to uphold the Durand Line as the new international border. On
September 30, 1947, Afghanistan was the only United Nations member
to vote against the admission of Pakistan. On J uly 26, 1949, an Afghan
loya jirga (national council) denounced all Anglo-Afghan frontier accords
and ceased to recognize the Pakistani-Afghan boundary.
38
Thus began a
prolonged dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan over the mounting
question of Pashtunistan, the land of the Pashtuns that stretches from
the Hindu Kush to the Indus River.
35
From the British perspective, diplomat Sir William Kerr Fraser-Tytler
explained, The British did not solve the problem of the tribes, and when
in August, 1947, they handed over the control of Indias North-Western
defences to the untried Government of Pakistan, they handed over likewise
a fuid, diffcult situation, fraught with much danger.
39
When the British
held a 1947 referendum for the autonomous tribal agencies, including
Malakand, Khaibar, Kurram, North Waziristan, and South Waziristan, they
offered two alternatives: annexation to India or to Pakistan. The British
did not include Afghanistan as a choice since they were aware that the
tribal areas of the northwest frontier had entered into international limbo
in August 1947. In legal terms, the tribal areas were part of British India
rather than India and thus did not become part of either India or Pakistan at
independence. British offcials determined that Pakistan would not have
been able to raise any legal objection if the tribes had placed themselves
under the protection of Afghanistan or if, with the consent of the tribes, the
tribal areas had been annexed by Afghanistan.
40
In the end, the inhabitants
of the North-West Frontier Province overwhelmingly chose to remain with
Pakistan, although many boycotted the referendum.
41
Afghanistan disputed Pakistans claims to the frontier provinces, but
Pakistan effectively excluded Afghanistan from frontier discussions
and responded with a series of partial blockades in 1948 that would last
intermittently for more than a decade.
42
In the most severe cases, open
confict arose, as in March 1949 when the Pakistani air force bombed
Moghulgay in Khost Province as part of a territorial dispute. For its part,
the Royal Afghan Air Force dropped anti-Pakistani leafets in border areas.
In addition, Afghan tribal forces staged unoffcial cross-border raids in
1950 and 1951 that were supported by the Afghan National Army. These
efforts had little impact other than to antagonize the Pakistani government.
On the domestic front, Mohammad Daud Khan, as minister for tribal
affairs, in November 1949 established the Khushal Khan Khattak School
for Pakistani Pashtuns to study in Kabul.
43
During this formative period,
Daud became the leading advocate for Pashtunistan, and his policies as
prime minister (195363) and president (197378) were a major obstacle
to normalizing relations with Pakistan.
Despite the efforts of Afghan politicians, the United States did not take
an active role in the Pashtunistan dispute. Prince Mohammad Naim, after
he left his post as charg daffaires in Washington in J uly 1949, announced
that he was deeply disappointed because he found U.S. policy on
Pashtunistan and toward Afghanistan in general one of complete disinterest
and indifference, according to State Department cables.
44
On the contrary,
U.S. policy makers were deeply concerned with the strategic implications
36
of the territorial confagration. Louis Dreyfus, U.S. ambassador in Kabul
from 1949 to 1951, feared that the dispute could push Afghans toward the
Soviets. The offcial policy as of February 1951 read:
Our interests would be seriously prejudiced by the failure of
Afghanistan and Pakistan to reach an accord on matters of
tribal status and treatment. . . . We should continue to encourage
Afghanistan to settle its differences with Pakistan and to promote the
regional cooperation which will preclude its excessive commercial
dependence upon the USSR which has obvious implications for
Afghan independence.
45
Out of public view, U.S. offcials tried to broker a deal as they developed
Pakistan into a strategic ally, but Pakistan would not commit. Meanwhile,
the Afghan government pursued two public and concurrent diplomatic
maneuvers. On one hand, Zahir Shah, Prime Minister Daud, and ex-Prime
Minister Shah Mahmud encouraged support of the Pashtunistan course.
On the other, Foreign Minister Naim and his deputy Aziz worked with
the United States and European nations to normalize Pakistani relations.
46

Complicating matters further, the U.S. charg daffaires in Afghanistan,
J ohn Evarts Horner, wrote that complete retreat by the Government of
Afghanistan from its admittedly unreasonable stand on this issue would
represent dangerous loss of prestige to the Kabul Government.
47
At the onset of the Cold War, the United States was much more
interested in pursuing regional security arrangements to check Soviet
expansionism than it was in resolving border issues between Afghanistan
and Pakistan. In the Middle East and South Asia, those efforts focused
on Turkey and Pakistan. As the National Security Council (NSC) framed
this discussion in 1954, The best prospect for creating an indigenous
regional defense arrangement in the Near East lies in the concept of the
northern tier, which would include Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq. The
Turkish-Pakistan Pact is the frst step in this direction.
48
J ames S. Lay J r.,
executive secretary for the NSC, had noted in a coordinating memorandum
that in determining to extend aid to Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey, the
U.S. has chosen states which are most keenly aware of the threat of Soviet
Russia and which are located geographically in the way of possible Soviet
aggression.
49
Planners in the United States ignored Afghanistan as part of
these regional security arrangements due to indefensible northern territories,
lack of economic and defense infrastructure, and political instability.
50
The Pashtunistan question would remain a key issue in Afghanistans
foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s. Daniel Balland argued that
37
it continuously poisoned relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It
even led to serious tension in 194950, 1955, and 1959, each instance leading
to a partial blockade of the common boundary and a progressive shift of
Afghan foreign trade to new transit outlets.
51
Then, from September 3,
1961, until May 29, 1963, a full-scale Pashtunistan crisis resulted in the
severing of diplomatic relations and the closure of the Afghan-Pakistani
frontier to traffc in both directions.
52
This action confrmed a pro-Soviet
shift in Afghanistan, further entrenching trade dependence and forging
military ties that would constrain Afghanistans relationship with the
United States and Europe until the end of the twentieth century.
Prince Mohammad Naim arriving at the White House in
1948 to present his credentials. U.S. diplomats saw Naim,
the kings cousin and Mohammad Daud Khans brother,
as the most pro-American of the senior Afghan offcials.
National Archives.
39
FOUR
Afghanistans Soviet Shift
and the U.S. Response
Afghanistans move to closer relations with the Soviet Union was a long
time coming. Prince Mohammad Naim, then deputy prime minister and
minister for foreign affairs, argued in 1954 that the sending of military
aid from the U.S. to Pakistan had created an immediate Soviet reaction
and the resulting situation presented one of the chief diffculties faced by
Afghanistan today.
1
One of the opening gambits by the Soviets involved
oil drilling in northern Afghanistan. In August 1952, the Soviet charg
daffaires at Kabul delivered an aide-mmoire to the Afghan government
stating that the Afghan plan to allow a French frm, under the auspices of
the United Nations, to pursue oil drilling in northern Afghanistan was a
violation of the Afghan-Soviet Neutrality and Non-Aggression Treaty of
1931. The Soviets protested that these explorations by a North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) member would endanger the safety of the
Soviet-Afghan frontier and undermine friendly relations between the
Soviet Union and Afghanistan.
2
Initially, the Afghan government rejected the protest, but it later
yielded to Soviet pressure and canceled the French project when it became
clear that the United States would not increase aid to offset any potential
impact on Soviet trade. John Evarts Horner, frst secretary and consul at
the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan, voiced timely concerns in October 1952
that the State Department seriously underestimates present and future
potentialities [of Soviet] pressure on this country, and utterly neglects
regional aspects. Further, no account seems to have been taken of Afghan
psychology or existence of important elements here willing to come to
terms with [the Soviets].
3
As a hedge against Soviet infuence in the early 1950s, U.S. offcials
focused on diplomacy and aid projects in Afghanistan.
4
Horner suggested
a Kabul-Kandahar Road and assistance to Afghan Air Force towards
purchase of and facilities for medium transport aircraft which would
provide regular government air service to [northern Afghanistan from
Kandahar] and at [the] same time greatly strengthen government military
40
strength as against subversion and tribal uprising without giving justifable
cause for alarm to either Pakistan or Soviets.
5
While U.S. offcials quickly
moved to fll the British void in southwest Asia and expanded economic
and military ties with Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, Afghanistan was largely
left out of that process.
6
The Cold War context here was important; notably,
the National Intelligence Estimate, Outlook for Afghanistan, for October
1954 indicated that Soviet economic penetration may well result in a
gradual shift of Afghanistan toward the Soviet orbit. . . . However, we do
not believe that the USSR will actually gain control of Afghanistan at least
within the next few years.
7
In December 1953, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and his wife,
Patricia, visited Afghanistan. Upon his return, Nixon asserted, I feel that
Afghanistan will stand up against the communists. He noted that he had
discussed the Pakistan aid problem with the prime minister and the king,
who suggested that it would be a good idea if Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Iran, and Turkey entered into something like an Atlantic alliance, with
aid going to these countries as a group instead of individually where they
might be a threat to each other. Not surprisingly, The Pakistanis had the
opposite view.
8

U.S. ambassador Henry A. Byroade later observed that the cold war,
as seen from Afghanistan, is only a metamorphosis of an older pattern of
confict. Anglo-Russian competition, which had created a balance of
power in South Asia, became more complex by the mid-twentieth century
with Iranian, Pakistani, Soviet, British, and American interests competing
for shifting sands. Byroade added a further dimension to the question of
Afghanistans development: Some of the most traditionalist Afghans
probably would be willing to go on paying the price of underdevelopment in
return for a kind of cocoon-like independence behind mountainous barriers.
9
The same National Intelligence Estimate of October 1954 offered a
sobering account of the increasing Soviet economic pressure on Afghanistan
caused by the lack of foreign trade and economic development, as well as
by a desire to counter U.S. strategic gains in South Asia and the Middle
East. Rather than showing indifference to or ignorance of Afghanistan, the
U.S. intelligence review anticipated Afghanistans lasting quandary:
Afghan leaders will attempt to obtain additional Western economic
aid to counterbalance that received from the USSR and will probably
display continuing interest in the idea of participating in Western-
backed military aid programs. However, it is unlikely that the
Afghans would actually accept membership in a Western-backed area
defense arrangement since they could almost certainly realize that
41
no foreseeable arrangement could furnish them suffciently realistic
protection against Soviet attack to compensate for the increased
hostility toward them which would almost certainly ensue.
10
A new generation of Afghan leaders came to power while their country
confronted the emerging Cold War competition and marched slowly toward
modernization.
11
Mohammad Daud Khan replaced Shah Mahmud Khan as
Vice President Richard M. Nixon (right), who visited Afghanistan in 1953,
showed Prime Minister Mohammad Daud Khan around Washington in 1958.
Daud sought aid for his country from the Soviet Union while also continuing
to try to maintain good relations with the United States. National Archives.
42
prime minister in 1953 and ended the supremacy of Mohammad Zahir
Shahs uncles. Daud, a former army general, was well connected with
the military: he had been commander of the Kabul Army Corps, minister
of war, minister of the interior, and commander of the Central Forces
(Quwar-i-Markazi). In addition to his support for rapid modernization and
economic development, Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and key advocate
for Pashtunistan.
12
As minister of war in the late 1940s, Daud had prepared
Afghanistans request for U.S. arms that had been rejected. Although he
preferred to work with the Americans, he had no trouble turning to the
Soviets with a similar appeal in the mid-1950s.
A series of events in March 1955 that came to be known as the Flag
Incident provided the stimulus for deeper Afghan-Soviet ties.
13
On March
27, 1955, Pakistan announced a reorganization of provinces, states, and
tribal areas of West Pakistan into one unit. Daud denounced the move,
which undermined the autonomy of the frontier provinces. Three days later,
an Afghan mob invaded the Pakistan embassy in Kabul and consulates in
Kandahar and Jalalabad and burned the Pakistani fags. Pakistani groups
responded on April 1, attacking the Afghan consulates in Peshawar and
Quetta. The violence forced yet another closure of the border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
14
Pakistani leaders ignored any trade implications and used the crisis to
advocate with U.S. diplomats for the removal of Daud from power.
15
The
United States, however, encouraged Pakistan to open its borders since U.S.
aid to Afghanistan depended on this access. U.S. offcials correctly feared that
decreased aid and curtailed trade through Pakistan would result in increased
requests from Afghanistan for Soviet assistance. When Pakistan joined two
U.S. security alliancesthe Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)
in September 1954 and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in
1955Daud approached the Soviet Union for military hardware. He
convened a loya jirga on November 15, 1955, to support self-determination
in Pashtunistan and to accept Soviet military support.
16
Ignoring their own
contributions to the crisis, Pakistani leaders blamed the United States
when Afghanistan turned to the Soviet Union.
On December 19, 1955, Nikita S. Khrushchev, frst secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Nikolai A. Bulganin, premier
of the Soviet Union, concluded a fve-day visit to Kabul with the offer of
a $100 million loan for Afghan development.
17
This loan included credits
for building hydroelectric plants, industrial complexes, irrigation projects,
modern airports, and a highway system north to the Soviet border. It was
the Soviet Unions frst major postwar economic agreement and the largest
loan outside the Warsaw Pact at the time. From Khrushchevs perspective,
43
The amount of money we spent in gratuitous assistance to Afghanistan is a
drop in the ocean compared with the price we would have had to pay in order
to counter the threat of an American military base on Afghan territory.
18
The
Soviets also renewed the 1931 Soviet-Afghan Treaty of Non-Aggression
and agreed to supply equipment to the Afghan military.
While the United States focused on agricultural and irrigation projects
in Afghanistan, the Soviets built long-term strategic infrastructure, including
hardened all-weather highways, airports, and airstrips, and expanded ports
along the Amu Darya. Khrushchev later noted that the highways that the
Soviets built for Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s were designed for Soviet
military transport and supply in the case of war with Iran or Pakistan.
19

The Salang Tunnel, along the highway north from Kabul through the Hindu
Kush to Termez, and Bagram air base north of Kabul were, and continue to
be, particularly important for strategic and commercial reasons.
Afghanistan was the second nonaligned nation after Egypt to receive
Soviet arms. From 1955 to 1979, the Soviet Union sent Afghanistan more than
$1.25 billion in military aid.
20
The frst arms deal between Afghanistan and
the Soviet Union, a $3 million sale of Czechoslovak weapons, occurred in
mid-1955. In August 1956, Daud accepted a further $32.4 million in Soviet
military aid, repayable in cotton, wool, and oilseed. From October 1956
The Salang Tunnel, two miles above sea level through the Hindu Kush, connects
Afghanistan with Central Asia. It was built with the Soviet aid that started in 1955,
with the tunnel opening in 1964. In this 2002 image of the Baghlan Province entrance,
an abandoned Soviet IMR combat engineering vehicle can be seen to the left. Photo
by Sgt. Todd M. Roy, USA. Department of Defense.
44
until the end of 1958, the Afghan military received one Il14 cargo plane,
three Il28 bombers, six MiG15 and seven MiG17 fghters, ten Yak11
and six Yak18 trainers, ten An2 utility aircraft, six Mi1 helicopters,
twenty-fve T34 tanks, mobile radios, and small arms.
21
Along with the equipment, the Soviet military provided technical
training and weekly courses in Marxism-Leninism to more than 4,000
Afghan offcers between 1956 and 1978.
22
One observer in the 1960s noted
that the Afghan armed forces had become almost completely dependent
upon the Soviets, not only for equipment but also for logistic support.
23

This support included deliveries of gasoline, ammunition, and spare parts,
giving the Soviets control over Afghan military operations. The Soviet
military had particular infuence over the Royal Afghan Air Force because
of its dependence on Soviet-bloc aircraft and advisors. Most Afghan air
crews also trained in the Soviet Union.
24
The military and economic modernization enabled by the Soviets was
complemented by Soviet support on the controversial Pashtunistan issue.
Following his 1955 visit, Khrushchev recommended that the Pushtun
people should decide by a free plebiscite whether they want to remain
within the borders of Pakistan, to form a new and independent state, or
to unite with Afghanistan.
25
A 1956 National Intelligence Estimate stated
that Dauds acceptance of extensive Soviet aid is motivated by his
desire to strengthen Afghanistan in its controversy with Pakistan over the
Pushtunistan issue and also to develop Afghanistan economically. The
authors continued, Daud has won effective support for his policies in the
limited circle of potentially signifcant Afghans, and he is not likely to be
ousted in the foreseeable future. So long as he remains in power he will
probably continue to seek Soviet aid and support.
26
U.S. RESPONSE
The goodwill built between the United States and Afghanistan during
World War II by Cornelius Van H. Engert was quickly lost during the
Cold War. In the 1956 National Intelligence Estimate cited above, U.S.
intelligence analysts identifed the need to increase aid to counter the
growing Soviet presence.
27
Ambassador Sheldon T. Mills suggested a
further corrective in 1958: During the past two years our economic aid
policy with respect to Afghanistan has been formulated as [a] reaction
to Soviet policy. What we are suggesting is that at that crossroads in
Afghanistans history we reach positively, rather than drift and have
our next major policy decision with respect to Afghanistan come as [a]
reaction to some Russian move.
28
Throughout the postwar era, U.S.
45
offcials rejected Afghan requests for military aid and displayed favoritism
toward pro-western Pakistan and Iran, both of which Afghanistan viewed
as rivals. While U.S. aid fnally arrived in the 1950s, U.S. planners did not
focus on intrinsic strategic interests in Afghanistan, but rather on limiting
Soviet efforts there.
29
One of the challenges faced by U.S. aid offcials in competing with the
Soviets was their different approach to fnancing assistance projects. The
Soviets funded their projects on credits that created long-term economic
dependence for Afghanistan, and they offered small investments with
immediate dividends.
30
U.S. aid programs, on the other hand, supported
long-term development in education and the massive Helmand Valley
project (discussed in chapter 5), which was chronically underfunded and
slowed by Pakistani blockades. Thus Afghans recognized the new Soviet-
funded roads and military hardware more easily than the intangible benefts
that the U.S.-backed initiatives would offer in the future. Ambassador
Byroade observed in 1961 that the delays in some of these projects have
been such as to cause many an Afghan to question the whole policy of the
United States toward their country. Noting the disparity of development
Capt. Everett W. Wood (left), the Pan American/Ariana instructor, presents pilot
stripes to Enaam-ul-Haq Gran, the frst Afghan to complete training to fy for
Ariana Airlines. The U.S. signed an agreement in 1956 for Pan Am to provide
training and assistance, and Pan Am ultimately purchased a signifcant stake in
Ariana. National Archives.
46
in areas assisted by the United States and the Soviet Union, Byroade added
the warning that Afghanistan is a sort of economic Korea.
31

In the frst rounds of funding, the U.S. government extended aid
through the Export-Import Bank of $21 million on November 23, 1949, and
$18.5 million on May 4, 1954, under President Harry S. Trumans Mutual
Security Program.
32
This cash infusion supported a variety of programs,
including Helmand Valley agricultural projects, transportation and road
projects, language and technical education, and wheat purchases from U.S.
farmers. Through the end of the 1950s and peaking in the mid-1960s, the
U.S. government invested heavily in two ventures in southern Afghanistan
that did not generate returns: one involved civil aviation and the expansion
of the Kandahar airport, and the other continued funding for an extensive
hydroelectric and irrigation project in the Helmand Valley.
On June 23, 1956, U.S. ambassador Mills and Afghan foreign minister
Naim signed an agreement in Kabul for $14.5 million to fund the construction
of Kandahar International Airport and to formalize an agreement for Pan
American World Airways to offer training and operational assistance.
33

American Jane Williams teaching at the Rabia-e Balkhi Girls High School in Kabul
around 1960. She was there as part of a U.S. government-sponsored program run by
Columbia Universitys Teachers College, which administered it from 1954 to 1978.
The school was almost totally destroyed during the civil war period but was rebuilt in
the 2000s. As of this writing, it has nearly 4,000 students. National Archives.
47
Pan American would ultimately purchase 49 percent of the Afghan Ariana
Airline through this arrangement and participate in goodwill exercises that
transported Afghan pilgrims during the annual hajj.
34
The International
Cooperation Administration (ICA) allocated these funds to give Afghanistan
a fast and economical air transportation system which is particularly suitable
to the country.
35
The plan was to curb Afghanistans aviation dependence
on the Soviet Union by expanding domestic air service and building new
airports to support it. Kandahar International Airport was completed in
March 1960, but the world-class facility was soon bypassed by jet aircraft
that could fy directly from Europe to South Asia without a stopover.
36
In
addition to its fnancial assistance, ICA also helped Ariana Airline acquire
a DC6B passenger aircraft, its sixth Douglas aircraft, on May 2, 1960.
The aircraft few from Washington, DC, National Airport to Newark, New
Jersey, and then to Afghanistan in time to support the hajj.
37
PRESIDENT EISENHOWERS VISIT TO AFGHANISTAN
In the late 1950s, Zahir Shah intensifed his diplomatic profle in the
world and promoted his bi-taraf (literally without sides, or nonaligned)
philosophy.
38
As he stated during Afghan Independence Day celebrations in
1957, The countrys foreign policy is based on the continued safeguarding
President Dwight D. Eisenhower received a royal welcome at Bagram air feld in December
1959. Dignitaries included the king, Mohammad Zahir Shah (right of Eisenhower), and
Prime Minister Mohammad Daud Khan (far left). Photo by Sultan Hamid. Eisenhower
Presidential Library.
48
and strengthening of good relations with friendly States. Efforts are being
made to establish and strengthen these ties with all the peoples and nations
of the world.
39
He then embarked on a two-year campaign to engage U.S.
leaders at the highest level of government and demonstrate Afghanistans
political and economic independence from the Soviet Union.
40
As part of this initiative, Prime Minister Daud visited the United States
as an offcial guest of the government from June 24 to 27, 1958.
41
During
one of their meetings, Secretary of State J ohn Foster Dulles expressed that
he understood the motives that led Afghanistan to accept Soviet assistance,
mentioning specifcally the fact that Afghanistan is a land-locked country
and its transit diffculties with Pakistan naturally led Afghanistan to seek
a route for its commerce to the north.
42
Meetings focused on affrming
Afghanistans independence while seeking additional ways the United
States could support Afghanistans economic development projects.
A little over a year later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower returned the
favor of a state visit when he landed at Bagram air feld and remained in Kabul
for six hours on December 9, 1959, as part of his Flight to Peace goodwill
tour of eleven nations.
43
This trip was the frst offcial use of Air Force One,
the new VC137 aircraft, and this stop was the frst presidential visit to
Afghanistan.
44
Upon his arrival, Eisenhower addressed the crowd to convey
Thousands of Afghans lined the roads to see the motorcade that carried President
Eisenhower into Kabul. He later wrote that I was heartened to see such spirit in
people of whose sympathies we had been doubtful. Photo by Thomas J. OHalloran.
Library of Congress.
49
the warm and friendly greetings of the American people to Afghanistan and
its people.
45
During a luncheon at Chilstoon Palace, Eisenhower underlined
the two countries shared values of peace and prosperity, adding that most
importantly, we share with the Afghan people a sense of the great spiritual
values deriving from our respective religious heritages. We are drawn
together in devotion to the abiding values of religion.
46
As they had during
Dauds visit to the United States, public pleasantries abounded, while
meetings focused on confrming Afghanistans neutrality and fnding ways
to maintain U.S. fnancial commitment to Afghanistan.
47
Of note, Eisenhower recalled his concern when Air Force One was frst
accompanied by Russian-built MIGspart of the Afghan Air Force in
Afghan air space, adding that our pleasure in our reception was dampened
by the presence of MIG aircraft on the feld.
48
Yet the genuine outpouring
of goodwill from the Afghan people surprised Eisenhower:
[We] experienced for the frst time in the tour the excitement of
a mob bursting out of control. Suddenly, and without warning,
we found our vehicles unable to move, almost sinking in a
sea of strange faces. But the faces were friendly in spite of the
inconvenience and unavoidable delay; I was heartened to see such
a spirit in people of whose sympathies we had been doubtful.
49
Soviet-built Bagram air feld during President Eisenhowers visit, with Soviet-provided
MiG15s to the left and Il28 bombers to the right. Photo by Thomas J. OHalloran.
Library of Congress.
50
After his visit to Kabul, Eisenhower privately expressed his
reservations about Soviet infuence in Afghanistan. According to the record
of a conversation between Eisenhower and Spanish head of state Francisco
Franco in late December 1959,
The Afghans say that they can remain independent and that their
purpose is to remain neutral. The President doesnt see how this
can be done, for while the royal family may continue to stay on
in power, the Soviets are gradually bringing roads through and
around the country and through other construction are also getting
more and more of a grip on the nation and in time the President
thought it would be likely to become Soviet dominated.
50
51
FIVE
The Helmand River Valley
Project and the
Pakistan Question
Far and away the most substantial U.S. involvement in Afghanistan from
the end of World War II until the Soviet invasion in 1979, with a particular
emphasis in the 1950s, was with various projects intended to develop the
Helmand River Valley in the southern half of the country. The Helmand
River is the largest in Afghanistan, providing 40 percent of the countrys
water resources. The Arghandab River serves as the major tributary to
the west and continues to the Sistan Basin. Adequate water has never
been an issue for the Helmand River Valley; however, the inability to
properly control and distribute the rivers resources has plagued the
region for centuries.
1
In 1910, Afghans began work to reconstruct irrigation canals around
Seraj, south of Musa Qala, that dated back several centuries. Engineers
completed the frst functional canals by 1914. In the 1930s, Germany and
J apan provided technical assistance for additional improvements. The
Japanese built nine miles of new canals at Boghra from 1937 to 1941. During
the war, Dr. S. W. Shah, a Cornell University-educated Afghan engineer, led
the expansion to twenty-fve miles.
2
When the war ended and its German and J apanese partners were gone,
the Afghan government turned to the United States for assistance. Due to the
strength of its trade in wool during the war, Afghanistan had accumulated
a $20 million trade surplus and allocated $17 million to agricultural
development plans in the Helmand and Arghandab River Valleys.
3
In 1945, the Afghan government began negotiations with Morrison-
Knudsen, the U.S. construction company that had built the Hoover
(Boulder) Dam, to build two diversion dams, one on the Helmand River
and the other on the Arghandab River, and to improve the irrigation
canals and roads in both areas. They reached an agreement in 1946,
forming Morrison-Knudsen Afghanistan (MKA), headquartered in San
Francisco, California. The Morrison-Knudsen dams were the frst major
U.S. development projects in Afghanistan, and the overall Helmand River
Valley project remains the largest single aid endeavor there to date.
4
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52
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53
Minister Shah Mahmud Ghazi Khan wrote in 1946: Americas attitude is
our salvation. For the frst time in our history, we are free of the threat of
great powers using our mountain passes as pathways to empire. Now we
can concentrate our talents and resources on bettering the living conditions
of our own people. He continued: I propose to reduce the army in size
to that of a small but well-trained internal security force charged with
maintaining order among the nomadic tribesmen. Money once used in
maintaining a large army will fnd better use in the already started national
improvement program.
5
The Americans initially envisioned the Helmand project as a replica of
the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for Afghanistan that included farms
for nomads, agricultural products for export, hydroelectric power, and
food mitigation, all generating revenue to pay for the endeavor. President
Harry S. Truman was an enthusiastic supporter of hydroelectric diplomacy
in general, advocating for a TVA in the Yangtze Valley and the Danube.
6

There were, however, problems with the Afghanistan project from early in
the process. Ambassador Louis G. Dreyfus J r. cabled the State Department
in September 1949 that present widespread criticism of [Morrison-
Knudson] and American effciency voiced by [Abdul] Majid [Zabuli]
seriously undermining U.S. prestige. For approximately $20,000,000 spent
Dahla Dam on the Arghandab River north of Kandahar was completed in 1952
and originally known as the Arghandab Dam. It was built by Morrison-Knudsen
Afghanistan, a subsidiary of the American frm that had built the Hoover Dam, among
other large-scale projects. Photo (2012) by Mark Ray. Department of Defense.
54
[the] only tangible returns Afghanistan has are one short road, one diversion
dam, and one incomplete canal. Nevertheless, Dreyfus favored approval
of a pending Export-Import Bank loan to avoid reduced U.S. prestige and
cooling of present cordial Afghan-U.S. relations.
7
On February 11, 1949, the Afghan economic mission to the United States
had requested $55 million from the Export-Import Bank of the United States
to fnance Helmand Valley development. Minister Abdul Majid Zabuli, a
successful businessman in Afghanistan, insisted that the development plan
represented an integrated series of interdependent agricultural and industrial
projects. The Export-Import Bank, however, approved less than half the
requested amounta $21 million loanin November 1949 to fund only
MKAs Arghandab, Kajakai, and Boghra canal projects. MKA responded
by cutting costs, including ground-water surveys, road paving, and other
support projects.
8
Afghan offcials recognized the economic and diplomatic importance
of the Helmand Valley initiative and made efforts to fortify it. In 1951, the
Afghan government gave more authority to MKA and created the Helmand
Valley Authority in December 1952 to oversee the project, elevating
the authority to cabinet status.
9
Engineers built the Dahla Dam on the
Arghandab River between J une 1950 and J anuary 1952 and completed the
Kajakai Dam on the Helmand River in April 1953.
10
American and Afghan
offcials alike were aware of the growing costs: the Afghan government
had already spent $95 million by the mid-1950s, with $39.5 million
fnanced by the Export-Import Bank.
Publicly, the United States continued to praise the Afghanistan projects.
A State Department Bulletin noted in July 1952 that help in overcoming
effects of ravages during the twelfth and fourteenth centuries by Genghis
Khan and Tamerlane on vital irrigation works in the Helmand Valley of
southwest Afghanistan is among provisions of the Point Four funds.
11

Maj. Gen. Glen E. Edgerton, USA (ret.), managing director of the Export-
Import Bank, said in 1954, speaking of the overall effort, that this great
project constitutes a basic feature of the economic development program
of Afghanistan and, when completed, will stand as an enduring monument
to the enterprise of the Afghan people and to the friendship and cooperation
of Afghanistan and the United States.
12
Out of public view, however, concerns grew. Nearly a year before
Edgertons statement praising the project, a report to the Export-Import
Bank noted that the effort was underfunded for the scale of the endeavor
and hindered by Pakistani border politics and low educational levels of
the Afghans it would employ and eventually beneft. According to the
report, both locals and U.S. aid groups experienced a cultural disconnect
55
and could not overcome a lack of appreciation of this America in Asia
project.
13
There were also U.S. concerns that the failure of the project for
any reason would be a severe blow to American prestige and American
relations in this part of the world, as one offcial put it in 1953.
14
Secretary
of State J ohn Foster Dulles cabled the embassy in Pakistan in 1955 that
the Morrison-Knudsen Corporation activities in Afghanistan must be
discontinued in [the] near future if [Pakistans] embargo of their shipments
continues. This company is one of [the] chief infuences which maintains
Afghan connections with [the] West. Its departure would create [a] vacuum
which [the] Soviets would be anxious to fll.
15
In a report published in 1955, economist Peter G. Franck noted that
although a United Nations preparatory mission had recommended that
the UN provide assistance to Helmand Valley projects already started,
UN headquarters entertained doubts about the economic soundness of the
projects proposed and the Governments administrative capacity to complete
them. As Louis Dupree observed, Neither the Afghan government nor the
American engineering company understood the monumental problems of
Kajakai Dam, on the Helmand River, is the largest dam in Afghanistan. It was
completed in 1953 by Morrison-Knudsen Afghanistan. USAID began installing
hydroelectric power stations in 1975, units that became U.S. bombing targets in 2001.
They were subsequently restored, and development efforts on and associated with the
dam have been a major focus in the 2000s. It is shown from the reservoir side in a
2012 image, with the spillway to the right. Photo by Mark Ray. Department of Defense.
56
enfolding an entire region in the embrace of a single project.
16
Infrastructure
and local interest were almost entirely absent. Costs quickly escalated,
and offcials realized how diffcult it was to ship U.S. equipment halfway
around the world, with Pakistan hindering deliveries through transit fees
and closed borders.
A Tudor Engineering Report that evaluated the Helmand River Valley
project in 1956 anticipated added income to the Afghan economy from
the increase in arable land. One State Department offcial noted that the
project is using the waters of the Helmand River to irrigate lands some of
which have not been extensively cultivated in more than 2,000 years. It
also includes industry, power, and transportation features.
17
But hoped-
for revenues that would eventually make the project self-sustaining and
proftable never materialized. Indeed, in a later study, economist Nake M.
Kamrany found no signs of its fnancial liquidity.
18
In the later 1950s, the Afghan Ministry of Interior funded the development
of villages around Nad-e Ali in Helmand Province to settle Pashtun, Uzbek,
and Baluch nomads. But the logistics and impact of resettling the local nomadic
Mohammad Kabir Ludin, Afghan ambassador to the United States, signs documents
for an $18.5 million loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States in May
1954. Maj. Gen. Glen E. Edgerton, USA (ret.), managing director of the bank, looks
on. Photo by Joseph ODonnell. National Archives.
57
population were not well considered. These problems, combined with poor soil
conditions, led to the new villages being abandoned by 1960.
19
There were other issues as the project developed. Geographer Aloys
A. Michel observed in the late 1950s that United States interest centers
on the Helmand Valley and has, wittingly or not, taken the position of
favoring Kandahar over Kabul as the transportation and commercial center
of the nation. He cautioned that this stance ultimately is untenable, for
the Durrani Afghans long ago decided, despite their personal attachment
to the South, that the only way to rule Afghanistan was from Kabul.
20
In a concluding observation in his 1959 work, Michel stated that
at present the ICA [U.S. International Cooperation Administration]
agricultural program in the Helmand [Valley] has practically collapsed,
and no amount of United States Government support for the Kandahar
International Airport or Industrial Center or for Arghandab power can
offset the damage done to American prestige by the failures in Nad-i-
Ali.
21
Kamrany later noted that of the seven major objectives of the
project, . . . only one objective was successfully accomplished, i.e., the
project provided protection against foods; but at a very high cost!
22
The Afghan government released Morrison-Knudsen from its contract
in 1959, with recriminations on both sides. As Ambassador Henry A.
Byroade observed:
I am normally against a proliferation of projects, and feel that a
few big projects are better in the long run than a scattering of
effort. This is an unusual situation, however, and if we can double
our effect here by new things with a bit of fair, then it seems we
should do so. The new Minister of Agriculture stated we were
putting too many eggs in one basket in the Helmand Valley and
that there was a feeling that too many of our subsequent projects
had been designed simply to make that successful.
23
Major U.S. investments in the Helmand and Arghandab River projects
continued into the 1970s, despite the lack of infrastructure, the diplomatic
challenges of Pashtunistan, and a growing awareness of opium poppy cultivation
in the region. While the concept of the Helmand Valley development is
basically Afghan, Ambassador Byroade explained in 1961, U.S. fnancing
and the employment of a U.S. contractor by the Afghans have tended to identify
the United States closely with it. Even into the 1960s, American offcials
held onto the idea that the most effective instrument available to maintain an
effective U.S. position in Afghanistan is our aid program.
24
But the ongoing
struggles and fnancial burdens of the project imperiled U.S. infuence.
58
THE PAKISTAN QUESTION
When the Afghan government accepted massive Soviet funding for
development projects during the 1950s, Afghan offcials cited U.S. support
of Pakistan as a major factor in its decision.
25
The Afghan government was
so concerned with Pakistans growing military strength that it even began
funding its defense at the expense of agricultural programs, which resulted
in poor decisions on the Helmand River Valley project and a new reliance
on U.S. wheat imports to feed its people.
26
Despite this assistance, U.S.
support for Pakistan continued to plague its relationship with Afghanistan.
27
U.S. offcials were aware that prosperity in Afghanistan relied on a
partnership with Pakistan. A National Security Council assessment in 1957
reported that Afghanistan has already incurred so heavy a burden of debt
to the Communist bloc as to threaten its future independence, noting that
the Afghans were also willing to accept Western assistance and technical
advice and hope to have the best of both worlds. The United States
wanted to assist the improvement of communications through Pakistan
to Afghanistan, to bring about closer and more amicable Afghan-Pakistan
relations and also give Afghanistan an alternative to its dependence on
the USSR. The desire was to encourage Afghanistan to minimize its
reliance upon the Communist bloc for military training and equipment,
and to look to the United States and other free world sources for military
training and assistance.
28
The following year, however, Afghan-Pakistani relations further
deteriorated. While Pakistani president Iskander A. Mirza had presided
over a dtente on the Pashtunistan issue, Gen. Muhammad Ayub Khan
reignited tension when he seized power in Pakistan in October 1958.
Ayub Khan, himself an ethnic Pashtun of the Tarin tribe, demanded that
Afghanistan yield on the Pashtunistan issue. That was not going to happen
with Mohammad Daud Khan as Afghanistans prime minister. As his
brother the foreign minister, Mohammad Naim Khan, explained to Dwight
D. Eisenhower during the presidents brief visit in 1959, the Pashtunistan
dispute had deep roots in history and in the mentality and emotions of
the people; anything that went wrong in Pushtun Pakistan reacted strongly
here, causing bitterness, tenseness and diffculties in their relations.
29
When Nikita S. Khrushchev, then premier of the Soviet Union, visited
Afghanistan in early March 1960, he supported Afghanistans position on
Pashtunistan and reiterated the Soviet desire for a plebiscite in Pakistans
tribal regions to determine their future.
30
On September 23, 1960, the U.S.
embassy in Kabul reported a threatening situation in Bajaur, Pakistan,
59
where pro-Afghan and pro-Pakistan groups had escalated hostilities.
Prime Minister Daud met with Ambassador Byroade and indicated that
Afghanistan would be forced to protect local tribes if Pakistani troops
quelled the violence.
31
From the Afghan point of view, the Durand Line was
not an issue since local tribes did not observe the international boundary
of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, Daud focused discussion on the fact
that Afghanistan supported Pashtun tribes irrespective of their location.
32
A
month later, President Eisenhower informed Mohammad Zahir Shah that
the United States would not mediate and expressed hope that Afghanistan
and Pakistan would engage in bilateral negotiations to resolve their
conficts.
33
The Soviets exacerbated the situation again in March 1961
when Khrushchev publicly declared that Pushtunistan has always been
part of Afghanistan.
34
Tensions continued to mount until September 3,
1961, when Afghanistan closed its border and Pakistan shut Afghanistans
consulates. The borders remained closed until May 29, 1963.
While U.S. offcials hoped to mediate the Afghan-Pakistan dispute,
they were hindered by their position as Pakistans ally.
35
Importantly for
broader U.S. strategic interests, Eisenhower had reached an agreement
with Pakistani prime minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in 1957 to
Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev at a meeting of the United Nations General
Assembly in New York, September 1960. His open support of Afghanistan on the
Pashtunistan issue created challenges for the United States in its relations with both
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Photo by Warren K. Leffer. Library of Congress.
60
build a secret base for U2 aircraft, located at the Peshawar Air Station in
Badaber, Pakistan.
36
The base was also used by the 6937th Communications
Group, U.S. Air Force Security Service, for a communications link
between Karamursel, Turkey, and Peshawar, Pakistan.
37
Understanding the
importance of the U2 base in Peshawar to the United States, Pakistani
offcials leveraged the issue.
38
According to one analysis in 1964, The
A dixieland combo of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe Bands Ambassadors jazz ensemble
plays outside the mausoleum of Abdur Rahman Khan in Kabul in 1968. The group
was in Afghanistan to perform at the Jeshyn Fair, an event celebrating that countrys
independence. USAF in Europe Band.
61
Pakistani President knows that the strongest card he holds is the U.S.
communications facilities at Peshawar. . . . He almost certainly calculates
that closing the facilities would bring a drastic reduction in the U.S. military
and economic assistance on which Pakistan is so heavily dependent and for
which there is no alternative in sight.
39
At the same time, the border closing
placed increased pressure on U.S. aid programs to Afghanistan. The Afghan
government requested an alternate transportation route through Iran, but
the United States preferred the less costly passage through Pakistan and
decided to wait. U.S. policy makers continued to make their Afghanistan
policy conditional upon improved relations with Pakistan and hoped for a
resolution to the differences.
In the end, the solution arose in Afghanistan. The closed borders
wreaked havoc on the Afghan economy, and mediation to open them
was slow and arduous. The royal family, fearful of Dauds pro-Soviet
policies and autocratic rule, had been moving toward his removal. Zahir
Shah asked Daud to step down as prime minister, and Daud resigned on
March 10, 1963. Mohammad Yusuf, a physicist, became the new prime
minister (196365), followed by Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal
(196567). They led Afghanistan toward a more cosmopolitan society and
a constitutional monarchy. They also improved relations with Pakistan,
and the Pashtunistan issue was sidelined until the mid-1970s.
Prime Minister Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal of Afghanistan in Washington, DC, in
1967 at the White House with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Photo by Yoichi Okamoto.
Johnson Presidential Library.
62
* * *
Outwardly, Afghanistan enjoyed a relatively stable period in the 1960s
and the early 1970s as world leaders focused their Cold War attentions
elsewhere. When President Lyndon B. J ohnson invited Prime Minister
Maiwandwal to Washington in March 1967, he remarked: Historically,
the relations between our countries have been close and cordial. Today
they are warmer than ever before. Unquestionably, the Afghan-U.S.
relationship continued to focus on development aid. Prime Minister
Maiwandwal specifcally noted in his reply Afghanistans appreciation
for American help in building our infrastructure, mentioning the Kabul-
Kandahar highway and another under construction. He also highlighted
U.S. help developing our educational systems, our agriculture, our water
resources, and our transportation system.
40
From the late 1940s until the late 1970s, Afghan offcials balanced
Cold War competition in Afghanistan.
41
As Daud once quipped, I feel the
happiest when I can light my American cigarette with Soviet matches.
42

However, a new and increasingly unstable period began on J uly 17, 1973,
when Daud overthrew Zahir Shah in a nearly bloodless coup dtat while
the king was abroad for medical treatment.
43
Daud abolished the monarchy
and declared himself the frst president of Afghanistan. Pakistan, playing
on fears of Soviet infuence in Afghanistan and concerned about a return of
the Pashtunistan debate, immediately pressed the United States for more
military aid.
44
In fact, following Dauds return to power, he was much
more moderate on the Pashtunistan question than he had been during
his previous rule and more focused on modernization. As Amin Saikal
explained, Dauds intentions were two-fold: to reduce his dependence on
local communists and the Soviet Union as well as military expenditure,
and expand economic and trade ties with Pakistan.
45
By the mid-1970s,
Afghanistans relationships with Pakistan and Iran had greatly improved.
But Daud gradually lost control of relations with the Soviets, ultimately
with devastating results.
63
SIX
Socialist Afghanistan and
War with the Soviet Union
In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet scholars developed a concept of a native
military intelligentsia to confront the weakness of socialist revolutionary
movements in developing nations.
1
In Afghanistan, Soviet planners hoped
this new military elite would assume leadership positions in future national
movements. Accordingly, the socialist Peoples Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA, Hizb-e-Demokratik-e-Khalq-e-Afghanistan) started
actively recruiting Afghan offcers trained in the Soviet Union. By the
early 1970s, the strategy began to demonstrate success. A communication
to Washington from the U.S. embassy in 1971 observed that there was
no effective organization within the military to counter or even catalog
the long-term, possibly subversive effects of Soviet training of the many
military offcers who go to the USSR for stints as long as six years.
2

In 1973, 1978, and 1979, Soviet-trained offcers played pivotal roles
in Afghan political change.
3
Without a popular base supporting the leaders,
however, the rapid succession of coups led by mid-level offcers introduced
political disarray in Afghanistan. As foreign minister in 1971 and as prime
minister in 1972, Mohammad Musa Shafq sought reconciliation with
Pakistan on the Pashtunistan issue and agreements with Iran on the use
of the Helmand River. When Afghanistan suffered a drought in 1972, Iran
offered $2 billion in aid over ten years. Soviet leaders quickly responded
to the Iranian overture, using their military ties to engineer a coup in 1973
led by former Prime Minister Mohammad Daud Khan and the military.
The offcers intended Daud to be a fgurehead, but he subsequently
outmaneuvered and demoted many of them.
4
After the 1973 coup, the Soviet military increased shipments of
equipment, including T54 and T55 tanks, Il28 bombers, armed
personnel carriers, and light and medium feld artillery pieces.
5
Despite
this augmentation in the Afghan militarys inventory of arms and
equipment, Daud moved to decrease the number of Soviet advisors in
Afghanistan. In 1976, he reassigned Soviet advisors from the company
to the battalion level.
64
Daud turned away from the Soviet training monopoly in 1974 when
he sent military offcers abroad to India and Egypt, nations that also used
Soviet weapon systems. Still, Daud never cut military ties with the Soviets,
and Afghanistan remained dependent on their hardware and training.
6
Daud also included PDPA members in his new government, where
they continued their strategy of recruiting military offcers. At the time,
the PDPA was divided between two factions, both with military links.
The frst of these, Parcham, was dominated by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Dari-
speaking Kabulis. The members of Khalq, its rival, were largely Pashtuns
from the provinces. Generally, the Soviet Politburo supported both sides,
establishing ties with whichever group prevailed. But the Soviet military
apparatus had specifc links to each group: Soviet military intelligence
(GRU) supported Khalq, while the Committee for State Security (KGB)
supported Parcham.
7
During the 1970s, Khalq increased its infuence
within the Afghan military, asserting that military promotions should
be based on ability rather than family and tribal connections. Daud,
however, returned family members to the military elite. By the late
1970s, despite differences between the two factions, the PDPA became a
signifcant political force.
Daud began more openly eschewing the Soviets in 1978. His
domestic economic reforms had proven unsuccessful, and he pursued
new support and new regional allies in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and China.
His seven-year economic plan, outlined for 1976 through 1983, followed
Soviet models but was based on massive fnancial aid from Iran.
8
A new
reordering of alliances would not take place, however. As Daud was
organizing the visit of the Shah of Iran to Kabul and his own visit to
Washington, a series of events led to another coup, his own downfall,
and the preservation of Soviet ties.
Unrest at the funeral of Parcham activist Mir Akbar Khyber sparked
massive demonstrations and a confounding series of events in Kabul.
Shocked by the power of the socialist movement, Daud ordered the arrests
of PDPA leaders Nur Muhammad Taraki, Hafzullah Amin, and Babrak
Karmal. On April 27, 1978, Amin, who was merely under house arrest,
ordered army offcers loyal to the Khalq faction to initiate a coup dtat,
later known as the Saur Revolution.
9
At seven oclock on the evening of
April 27, Col. Abdul Qadir Dagarwal, a Soviet-trained pilot, announced
in Dari and Mohammad Aslam Watanjar in Pashto on Radio Afghanistan
that a revolutionary council of the armed forces would replace the Daud
government.
10
Only the 7th Division at Rishkor, the 15th Armored Brigade,
and the Republican Guard remained loyal to Daud.
11
Henry Bradsher, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, observed that whatever the genesis of
65
the downfall of [Daud], it was accomplished by a small number of military
men . . . at the air base side of Kabul International Airport. Only some 600
men, 60 tanks and 20 warplanes were involved in approximately nineteen
hours of rebel action against the more numerous loyalist forces.
12
By the
morning of April 28, Daud and his brother Mohammad Naim Khan were
dead, and new rulers controlled Kabul.
Examining both Soviet and Afghan sources, Bradsher raised questions
about the level of direct Soviet involvement in the coup. The Soviet embassy
in Kabul seemed to be as surprised as other embassies, but Soviet leaders
acted quickly to publicize their close ties and maintain their record as the frst
capital to recognize the new Afghan government.
13
U.S. offcials hedged in
their responses, avoiding terms that would trigger the Foreign Assistance
Act of 1961, which prohibited assistance to any Communist country.
14
From April 27, 1978, until the Soviet invasion on December 24, 1979,
the new Afghan leaders demonstrated little capacity to govern.
15
Rapid
economic and social changes, the increasing number of Soviet advisors,
and political infghting among Afghan communists led to instability and
The Soviets built this control tower at Bagram air feld in 1976 as their involvement
in Afghanistan began to intensify. It was heavily damaged during the civil war, but
after U.S. troops took control of the base in late 2001, the U.S. Air Force renovated the
facility and used it until a new tower was completed in 2008. The building remained
in service, housing Air Force units as part of Camp Cunningham. Photo (2009) by
Capt. David Faggard, USAF. Department of Defense.
66
greater dependency on the Soviets. On May 1, 1978, Taraki became prime
minister, and he promptly carried out a purge of Parcham supporters in
the military and the government.
16
Bradsher recorded that many foreign
observers felt that the Communist coup was greeted by most Afghans with
relief. . . . Those hopes were quickly shattered.
17
Taraki established PDPA offces at each level of the Afghan armed
forces, and he made Soviet training a requirement for elite units in Kabul.
Soviet advisors, newly assigned to the platoon level, proliferated. Soviet
advisors numbered 350 in 1977; 2,000 in May 1978; 7,000 in August 1978;
and more than 10,000 in December 1979. Soviet advisors could even wear
Afghan military uniforms and assume combat and leadership roles in the
Afghan National Army.
18
During the summer of 1978, Moscow offcials attempted a low profle
in Afghan relationsdespite providing $250 million in Soviet weapons to
the Afghan armyand focused on developing relations with the PDPA.
19

In news conferences, the PDPA deliberately rejected Soviet ties and
communist nomenclature, asserting nonaligned status.
20
When Taraki visited Moscow from December 4 to 7, 1978, he and Soviet
General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev signed the Treaty of Friendship,
Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev (right) with President Gerald R. Ford during a summit
meeting in Vladivostok, USSR, in November 1974. Brezhnev concluded a treaty with
Afghan leaders in December 1978 that closely linked Afghanistan with the Soviet
Union. National Archives.
67
Good Neighborliness, and Cooperation on December 5. Their ties were
then undeniable. Article 4 of the treaty underlined the importance of security,
independence, and territorial integrity and reaffrmed the military
connections between the two countries. Although the Soviets did not
commit themselves to prevent the downfall of the PDPA, many have
argued that this treaty effectively established Afghanistan as a Soviet
satellite. With Soviet support secured, Afghan leaders then embarked
on a campaign of arrests of secular and religious leaders not aligned
with the new regime. Prisons grew overcrowded, and there was a
surge of executions.
21

J ournalist Edward Girardet described the administrative inexperience
of the new Afghan cabinet members, observing that most of them had
been lower or middle rank civil servants. He added that it was even
worse in the provinces, where those who took control of government
offces had few if any qualifcations whatsoever. Many were quite simply
ignorant thugs or opportunists who used their newly acquired positions
to improve their social standing, settle old rivalries, or feather their nests
through self-bestowed privileges and bribes.
22
The year 1979 proved pivotal for U.S. interests in Afghanistan. On
February 14, four armed militants kidnapped the U.S. ambassador, Adolph
Spike Dubs, and demanded the release of imprisoned members of the
National Oppression Party (Settem-e Melli) in exchange. The Afghan
government refused negotiations, then organized a rescue attempt by
Afghan police and Soviet security force advisors that failed and resulted
in the death of Ambassador Dubs.
23
U.S.-Afghan relations quickly deteriorated following the Dubs
Affair. Publicly, Harold H. Saunders, the assistant secretary of state for
near east affairs, testifed to Congress: For its part, the U.S. Government
seeks no special position in Afghanistan. We look for a relationship based on
mutual respect and shared interests in regional stability, the independence
and territorial integrity of all states in the area, and nonintervention.
24

President J ames E. Carter J r. curtailed aid programs that were impossible
to fulfll with the growing unrest, withdrew aid workers who could not be
protected, and began providing radio equipment, medical supplies, and
money to the Afghan resistance movement.
25
President Ronald W. Reagan
continued and later expanded this assistance after he took offce in 1981.
26
In the face of unforgiving land reforms and government interference
in daily life dictated by the new socialist government, popular armed
resistance burgeoned, starting in Nuristan and Badakhshan. Similar
revolts followed in Paktia, Paktika, Ningrahar, Kapisa, Uruzgan, Parwan,
Badghis, Balkh, Ghazni, Farah, and Herat. In March 1979, Capt. Ismail
68
Khan, later an infuential mujahideen and governor of Herat, led a revolt
of the 17th Infantry Division in Herat against the PDPA and Russian
advisors based there. This revolt was unique in that power fell entirely
into the hands of local insurgents.
27
According to press reports, mutineers
went door to door hunting and executing Soviet advisors. Dissidents cut
telephone communication, blocked the road from Kandahar to Herat,
closed Shindand air base, and attacked Soviet citizens for ten days until
armored Afghan military units arrived and Soviet MiGs carried out air
strikes in Herat.
28
Yuri V. Andropov, chairman of the KGB, told a crisis section of
the Politburo on March 17, Bearing in mind that we will be labeled as
an aggressor, but in spite of that, under no circumstances can we lose
Afghanistan.
29
The Soviets responded immediately with increased
military aid: light tanks, armored personnel carriers, and Mi24 Hinds,
the most advanced Soviet helicopter gunship at the time.
30
In early April
1979, Gen. Alexei A. Yepishev, chief of the main political directorate
of the Soviet army and navy, visited Kabul to evaluate the military and
Tajbeg Palace, on a hillside overlooking Kabul. The Soviets stormed it in December
1979 and killed Afghan president Hafizullah Amin. The structure became the
staff headquarters for the Soviet Fortieth Army during the occupation. Also
known as the Queens Palace, it was built in the 1920s for Queen Soraya in
conjunction with the construction of Darul Aman Palace for Amanullah Khan
(see p. 21). Like that structure, Tajbeg Palace was heavily damaged during the
fighting in the late 1980s and 1990s. Photo (2013) by Spc. Andrew Claire Baker,
USA. Department of Defense.
69
political situation and to express Soviet concerns to Prime Minister Taraki.
Yepishev had experience putting down political unrest in Soviet satellites,
having played a key role in the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in
1968. After his visit, Soviet advisors made all major military decisions.
31

Soviet pilots routinely patrolled Afghan air space, and a Soviet division
moved to the Afghan border.
32
In the summer of 1979, the Soviet air
force took over Bagram and Shindand air bases. The Soviet Union also
increased arms deliveries to Afghanistan, including T62 tanks, MiG21
and MiG23 fghters, Su20 bombers, Mi24 helicopter gunships, and
Mi16 helicopter transports.
33
Despite increased arms shipments in the
summer, the Politburo viewed intervention as less advisable, choosing to
preserve dtente and hoping for the best in Afghan stability.
34
In August 1979, Gen. Ivan Pavlovskii, deputy minister of defense
and commander in chief of Soviet ground forces, led a sixty-three-person
Soviet military delegation, including eleven general offcers, to evaluate the
crisis in Afghanistan. When Pavlovskii returned to Moscow in November,
he advised against military intervention. Consensus within the Politburo
to invade was building, however. Taraki and Amin made at least sixteen
formal requests for Soviet troops between mid-April and mid-December
1979, reinforcing the push in Moscow for intervention.
35
Three key Soviet
offcials in Kabulthe Soviet Ambassador to Afghanistan, Alexander
The remains of a Soviet aircraft (probably a MiG21) at Bagram air base outside
Kabul, February 2002, with U.S. Army UH60 Black Hawk helicopters in the
background. The Soviets took control of the air bases at Bagram and Shindand in the
summer of 1979. National Archives.
70
M. Puzanov, chief of the KGB mission in Afghanistan; Lt. Gen. Boris
Ivanov; and Lt. Gen. Lev N. Gorelov, the chief Soviet military advisor to
Afghanistanargued that in view of possible stepped-up activity by the
rebel formations in August and September . . . it is essential to respond
affrmatively to the request from the Afghan friends and to send a special
brigade to Kabul in the immediate future.
36
The state of affairs rapidly disintegrated in September 1979 after Amin
took control of the government from Taraki. Within the Soviet Politburo,
leaders began to shift toward intervention, citing Amins erratic behavior
and the strategic importance of Afghanistan.
37
The KGB responded by
launching Operation Zenith in October, dispersing special forces across
Afghanistan to determine popular reaction to a Soviet intervention. In
November and December, the Soviet military began to orchestrate it. A
Soviet special forces battalion of Central Asian airborne troops deployed
to Afghanistan on November 9. Soviet conventional ground forces moved
to the Afghan border in late November.
On November 28, Lt. Gen. Viktor S. Paputin, frst deputy minister of
internal affairs, arrived in Kabul on a mission to pressure Amin to step
down or to invite Soviet troops to assist in stabilizing Afghanistan. Amin
refused, but the Soviet military continued with its plan. Two more Soviet
battalions landed at Bagram air base north of Kabul in early December. On
As the war progressed, the Soviets built training facilities in Afghanistan, such as this
one north of Kandahar. It later became a Taliban base. It is shown in a 2005 photo
after U.S. forces captured the camp. Photo by PFC Leslie Angulo, USA. Department
of Defense/National Archives.
71
December 12, the Politburo met and approved a handwritten resolution,
Concerning the Situation in A.
38
On December 1819, Soviet troops
cleared the highway to the Salang Pass.
By the end of 1979, the entire country was in revolt. Based on
extensive frsthand contacts, Nake M. Kamrany described a broad-based
Afghan movement against the Soviets: It is not one person or one group
that is resisting the Soviet system in Afghanistan. It is every Afghan in
every village. And these villages do not have the means to communicate
with each other. They have no system or means of communication. He
continued: What happens in Afghanistan is that each village has its own
resistance in its own way. Some of them knock out a Soviet tank, some of
them just wait and shoot at soldiers, some of them burn down a government
building. In whatever form, it is a resistance from within.
39
Louis Dupree observed four key struggles at the time:
l uncoordinated, generalized guerrilla war against the Kabul
regime;
l competition, mainly in Peshawar, between conservative and
moderate religious leaders in the Pashtun area to monopolize
funds from friendly Arabs;
l attempts by mujahideen to establish local bases of power
(Nuristan, Hazarajat, and Badakhshan) so that any new regime
in Kabul would have to grant regional autonomy to the various
ethnolinguistic groups; and
l the internal struggle for power within the Khalq leadership.
40
U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew K. Brzezinski warned President
Carter in March 1980 of Soviet creeping intervention in Afghanistan.
41

More recent Russian analysis confrms the thesis that mission creep led to
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
42
Offcially, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began on December 24,
1979, when tens of thousands of ground troops crossed the Amu Darya
into Afghanistan and 7,700 more few to Bagram, Kabul, and Shindand
air bases. The Soviet military brought exiled Parcham leaders, including
Babrak Karmal, with them to install as the heads of a new pro-Moscow
government. On December 27, a combined Soviet special forces group,
with GRU, KGB, Ministry of Defense, and airborne elements, stormed
Tajbeg Palace and killed Amin as part of Operation Storm 333.
43
Less than two weeks after the incursion, President Carter declared that
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is the greatest threat to peace since
the Second World War. Carter added a few weeks later that the Soviets
72
have seriously misjudged our own nations strength and resolve and unity
and determination and the condemnation that has accrued to them by the
world community because of their invasion of Afghanistan.
44
The United
States halted grain exports to the Soviet Union and led a boycott of the
Summer Olympics in Moscow in 1980.
45
Brzezinski told the president
that, with American help to Afghan forces, the Soviets might become
ensnared in Afghanistan the way the United States had been in Vietnam.
46

The Reagan administration expanded this effort. In the early 1980s,
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William J . Casey developed
a wide-ranging international coalition to fund and train the mujahideen
movements.
47
Karmals new government proved unable to consolidate power with
Soviet troops on the ground and, increasingly, the PDPA began shunning
Soviet activities in Afghanistan.
48
The Soviet military did little to win
goodwill, carrying out massive reprisals and forcing hundreds of thousands
of Afghan refugees into Iran and Pakistan. For its part, the Afghan National
Army suffered extensive desertions as troops left to join the mujahideen.
The force, numbering 80,000 men at the beginning of 1979, declined to
50,000 in December 1979 and 25,000 at the end of 1980.
49
Extended age
limits and service terms stabilized the force at 40,000 by 1986 despite
the continued diffculties to conscript, organize, and mobilize troops. The
Soviet Union brought a new generation of young Afghan volunteers to
train, with ever more limited results.
50
Abandoned Soviet tanks in Bamyan Province. The Russians left a tremendous amount
of materil when they withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, fnding it impractical to
transport it back across the Hindu Kush. Photo (2013) by Sgt. Christopher Bonebrake,
USA. Department of Defense.
73
Strategically, the Soviet army focused on securing Kabul and the
Afghan highway system linking Kabul to Kandahar, Herat, and Termez.
Much of the countryside remained outside government control throughout
the 1980s.
51
Soviet forces in Afghanistan operated under the command
of the Fortieth Army headquarters in Kabul, with operational control and
support in Termez. The original rules of engagement permitted Soviet
soldiers only to return fre or to liberate captured Soviet advisors. After a
major antigovernment and anti-Soviet demonstration in Kabul on February
21, 1980, Moscow ordered the Fortieth Army to begin active operations
together with the Afghan army to defeat the detachments of the armed
opposition.
52
Soviet troops were unprepared for local Afghan resistance
and the resilient guerrilla force.
53
From 1979 until 1989, the Fortieth Army conducted 220 operations
and 400 combined operations. Increasingly frustrated with the lack of
long-term success against an elusive insurgent enemy, the Soviets turned
to using aerial butterfy mines, chemical weapons, and even booby-
trapped toys.
54
Afghan forces were under Soviet operational control
throughout the war.
55
President James E. Carter Jr. and his national security advisor, Zbigniew K. Brzezinski.
Carter called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the greatest threat to peace since the
Second World War. Brzezinski speculated that the Soviets might become ensnared
in Afghanistan the way the U.S. had been in Vietnam. National Archives.
74
The confict resulted in inestimable damage to Afghanistans already
poor infrastructure and economy. By J anuary 1980, growing unrest had
driven more than 400,000 Afghan refugees to Pakistan and more than
30,000 to Iran.
56
On Afghanistan Day, March 21, 1982, President Reagan
implored:
The tragedy in Afghanistan must not be allowed to drag on
endlessly. This confict imperils the stability of the region. It has
seriously poisoned the international environment. Afghanistan
itself is being brutalized. The suffering of the Afghan people is
immense. I earnestly hope that the Soviet Union will join with us
in an urgent effort to bring a swift withdrawal of its forces to end
this needless confict.
57
Two years later, Vice President George H. W. Bush visited a refugee
camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, and told his audience: My dear Afghan
brethren, you and your people have suffered greatly. You have shown
courage and fortitude beyond the usual measure. You have my heartfelt
admiration and that of my countrymen. You have earned the admiration
of free men everywhere.
58
At the same time, U.S. leaders made a
concerted effort to thank Pakistan for its support of Afghanistan and
Afghan refugees.
59
President Ronald W. Reagan with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at a
summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. Gorbachev ultimately made
the decision for the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan, beginning in 1988.
Reagan Presidential Library.
75
Soviet military leaders had advocated withdrawal once Karmals new
government was in place in 1980.
60
When the Afghan army proved unable
to provide the necessary security, however, Soviet political leaders
wavered and did not make a decision. In general, Soviet leaders lacked
commitment to resolve the crisis in Afghanistan as they dealt with a host
of domestic issues from 1981 to 1985. Not until Mikhail S. Gorbachev
came to power, and following a yearlong attempt at a military solution,
did the Soviets advocate the National Reconciliation Campaign and put
a new Afghan leader in place to facilitate a Soviet departure.
61
On May
5, 1986, Karmal resigned and Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, head of the
paramilitary Government Intelligence Service (Khadamat-e Etelaat-e
Dawlati, or KHAD), succeeded him. The Soviets gave him two years to
prepare for their military withdrawal. When the Soviet minister of foreign
affairs, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, and long-time Soviet ambassador to the
United States Anatoly F. Dobrynin visited Kabul in December 1986 to
evaluate the political situation, they observed, Of friendly feeling toward
the Soviet people, which had existed in Afghanistan for decades, little
remains. Many people have died, and not all of them were bandits. . . . The
state apparatus is functioning poorly. Our advice and help is ineffective.
. . . Everything that we have done and are doing is incompatible with the
moral character of our country.
62
In some instances, the U.S. Air Force few Afghan rebels to the United States or Europe for
treatment, such as these arriving at Norton Air Force Bace, California, in 1986. They were
transported by a 375th Aeromedical Airlift Wing C9A Nightingale. At left is Col. Marvin
Ervina, commander of the 63d Military Airlift Wing. Department of Defense.
76
The United States continued to express support for the anti-Soviet
Afghans. President Reagan told Afghan resistance leader Burhanuddin
Rabbani during a White House visit in J une 1986 that in your struggle to
regain your nations independence, the American people stand with you.
This policy has broad and deep bipartisan support; it is an unshakeable
commitment. Your goal is our goalthe freedom of Afghanistan. We will
not let you down.
63
One of the signature details of the U.S. campaign to undermine the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was the CIA effort to supply Stinger
missiles to the mujahideen.
64
Charlie Wilsons War, as it came to be
known, was a riveting yarn with covert intrigue, but it had little impact
on the war itself. Rodric Braithwaite observed that Gorbachev took the
decision to withdraw from Afghanistan a full year before the frst Stinger
was fred.
65
There is little doubt that the Stinger missile affected tactics
night fying, combat landings, high-altitude bombing, and the deployment
of faresbut it did not undermine Soviet air power. While the Stinger,
frst introduced in combat in September 1986, did give the mujahideen an
important antiaircraft tool, Kalinovsky explained, it hardly changed the
course of the war.
66
On May 15, 1988, Soviet troops began to withdraw, and the
commander of the Fortieth Army, Gen. Boris V. Gromov, crossed the
Friendship Bridge into the Soviet Union on February 15, 1989, as the last
Soviet combatant to leave Afghanistan.
67
On the pullout, Soviet journalist
Alexander Prokhanov wrote, The departure of our troops is not a defeat.
The army is in excellent fghting form. The morale of offcers and men is
high. It is an organized departure from a country that we did not intend
to occupy, did not intend to destroy and subjugate. The troops are leaving
as the vector of politics changes into reverse, and the army follows that
vector.
68
After the Soviet withdrawal, the Afghan government maintained
a weekly 600-truck convoy to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet air force
continued to airlift supplies.
69
Despite their enthusiasm for the success of the mujahideen resistance,
many U.S. offcials held reservations about its viability as a political
movement. In 1988, Robert B. Oakley, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan,
observed that the fght against heroin-Kalashnikov culture is almost
as critical to the future of Pakistans security as the fght against Soviet
domination of Afghanistan has been.
70
It remains an open question why U.S.
offcials invested so little in the so-called moderate mujahideen, particularly
groups led by Pir Ahmed Gailani and Pir Sibghatullah Mojaddedi.
Instead, U.S. policy makers focused on ousting the Najibullah
government. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian
77
Affairs J ohn H. Kelly released a statement in March 1990: We believe
that no stable political settlement is achievable as long as the Najibullah
regime remains in power. The Resistance is both united and passionate
on this point: a transfer of power away from the present regime and to
a new government is necessary for this chapter, with all its attendant
tragedy, to be brought to a close.
71
In September 1991, U.S. secretary
of state J ames A. Baker III and Soviet foreign minister Boris N. Pankin
released a joint statement agreeing on the cessation of hostilities, support
for elections during the transition period, the repatriation of refugees, and
the prompt reconstruction of Afghanistan. Both parties pledged to cut off
arms supplies by J anuary 1, 1992.
72
When the Soviet Union formally dissolved in December 1991,
however, its military support to Afghanistan vanished. Najibullahs
government lasted until April 27, 1992, when mujahideen forces entered
Kabul and a new civil war commenced.
73
As Thomas J. Barfeld explained,
In retrospect, it was clear that the resistance had been given a task they were
U.S. Congressman Charles N. Charlie Wilson (D-TX), who worked with CIA
operatives to have Stinger missles provided to the Afghan resistance, is shown in a
personal photo with mujahideen fghters in Afghanistan. Naval History and Heritage
Command Photo Archive.
78
incapable of accomplishing. The mujahideen had no previous experience in
assaulting heavily defended cities, and their forces had never been integrated
into a common defense structure.
74
As the 1990s progressed, Russia proved disinterested in playing an
infuential role in Kabul.
75
Meanwhile, U.S. relations with Pakistan, its
Afghan partner, frayed as Pakistan sought nuclear armament. Confict
in Afghanistan shifted from guerrilla warfare supported by international
actors to more conventional and territorialized war.
76
79
EPILOGUE
From the Soviet
Withdrawal to 9/11
In his study of the Soviet withdrawal, historian Artemy M. Kalinovsky
argued that Mohammad Najibullah found ways to sabotage Soviet-led
outreach when he felt it suited his interests. After the Soviets withdrew, the
PDPA took more courageous steps in terms of opening up the government
and society, establishing links with tribal leaders, and shedding its
communist image.
1
Still, challenges existed that continued to undermine
the already weak Afghan government. Corruption pilfered 85 to 90 percent
of Soviet aid at the end of the 1980s.
2
Even more ominously, well-funded,
Pakistani-supported military-political organizations were waiting for the
collapse of the PDPA to establish their own government in Afghanistan.
On March 18, 1992, mujahideen forces led by Abdul Rashid Dostum,
with support from Ahmad Shah Massoud, an infuential Tajik mujahideen
leader, captured Mazar-i Sharif without resistance. By April 14, Massoud
occupied Charikar, J abal ul-Seraj, and Bagram air base. Najibullah
unsuccessfully attempted to fee to India but instead took refuge at the
United Nations offces in Kabul.
3
While several military factions descended on the capital, mujahideen
party leaders met in Peshawar, Pakistan, to devise a political solution.
The Peshawar Accords, a peace and power-sharing agreement among the
major Afghan mujahideen parties, created the new Islamic Republic of
Afghanistan and established an interim government, under the leadership
of Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, to be followed by general elections.
4

Mojaddedi became president on April 28; Pakistan, the European
Economic Community, and the United States recognized the new state
on the same day. On April 29, Massoud entered Kabul with his army.
5

Gulbuddin Hekmatyars Islamic Party (Hizb-e Islami), however, refused
to participate and continued its assault on Kabul.
In early May, Dostum, Hekmetyar, and Massoud began to articulate
their competition for Kabul. Mojaddedi requested an extension to his
power-sharing agreement but was refused by the other mujahideen leaders.
On J une 29, Mojaddedi stepped down and handed power to Burhanuddin
80
Rabbani, leader of the Islamic Society of Afghanistan (J amiat-e Islami).
Rabbani chose Massoud as his minister of defense. For the next two years,
Massouds forces waged continuous warfare against Hekmatyar and his
allies, and the confict regionalized within Afghanistan. Kabul remained
the epicenter of war throughout this period.
6
Since the early 1980s, Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had
supported Afghan parties that shared President Zia ul-Haqs view of
Islamizing Pakistani society.
7
With the failure of Pakistans primary ally,
Hekmatyar, to capture Kabul, Pakistani intelligence and military leaders
invested in a new militant political group of young Afghan refugees and
veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Taliban. It had initially focused on
gaining infuence in the area around Kandahar and securing transportation
networks for legal and illegal commerce, but the Taliban soon began a
campaign to occupy other parts of Afghanistan. Martin K. Ewans described
the groups impressive arrival to the civil war: The Taliban forces that
proceeded to advance through Afghanistan in the winter of 19941995
were equipped with tanks, APCs, artillery, and even aircraft.
8

Pakistans offcial supporters were not the only advocates for the
Taliban. As journalist Gretchen Peters explained, Mullah Omars
movementalmost from its inceptionwas highly dependent on and
intertwined with the opium network spanning the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border. Drug traffckers and tribes growing poppy were critical to the
Talibans swift and astonishing rise to power. According to Peters,
Fueled by drug money and joined at the hip with al-Qaeda, the Taliban
turned Afghanistan into the worlds frst fully fedged narco-terror state.
9
The Taliban succeeded in providing security to the Afghan people
where other mujahideen movements failed. Mullah Muhammad Omar
led the initial Taliban group in southern Kandahar Province as a
response to local banditry, brutality by local militias, and broad social
malaise.
10
While the two major mujahideen groups, Hizb-e-Islami and
J amiat-e Islami, had an antagonistic relationship with young Talibs,
Omar was associated with the moderate group, Islamic Revolution
Movement (Harakat-e Inqilab-e Islami) that was part of the Peshawar
Seven, supported by the United States and Pakistan.
11
That moderation
proved to be an illusion. Anthropologist Olivier Roy argued in 1998 that
the problem with the Taliban is that they mean what they say. . . . The
Taliban are not a factor for stabilization in Afghanistan.
12
Conversely,
Kalinovsky observed, The Taliban earned Pakistans support because
they held the promise of restoring order and of being useful to the ISI.
Similarly, the United States largely turned a blind eye to the Taliban and
their excesses.
13
This stabilization was a mirage.
81
Direct Russian support for the Afghan government ended with the rise
of the Taliban in 1994. After this point, the Russian government engaged
in complex proxy battles in a new phase of the Afghan civil war alongside
other regional powers, including Pakistan, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and
Uzbekistan. Faced with the prospect of Islamic revolution in Central Asia,
the Russian government began to support militias with anti-Soviet pasts.
In 1996, Massoud and Dostum, two former rivals, joined to resist the
growing Taliban threat and formed the United Islamic Front, also known
as the Northern Alliance. Massoud had played a major role in the resistance
against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, earning him the distinctions the
Lion of Panjshir and the Afghan who won the Cold War. Dostum,
considered the leader of Afghanistans Uzbek community, had fought on
the Soviet side until the collapse of Najibullahs government in 1992 and
shifted alliances on several occasions thereafter. This pair and their forces
proved little match for the well-equipped Taliban.
14
In May 1996, Osama bin Laden, under pressure from the Saudi, Libyan,
and Egyptian governments, shifted the base of al-Qaeda operations from
Sudan to Afghanistan. Bin Laden thus returned to his jihadist roots, where
his leadership during the battles of J aji was lauded by Arab journalists and
served as his introduction to the power of the press.
15
As Peter L. Bergen
observed, The Afghan war changed bin Laden. The humble, young,
An opium poppy feld in the Marja district of Helmand Province. The Taliban, almost
from its inception, was dependent on the drug trade and built a strong network in this
region. Photo (2012) by Sgt. Michael P. Snody, USMC. Department of Defense.
82
monosyllabic millionaire with the open checkbook who had frst visited
Pakistan in the early 1980s would, by the middle of the decade, launch
an ambitious plan to confront the Soviets directly inside Afghanistan
with a group of Arabs under his command. That cadre of Arabs would
provide the nucleus of al-Qaeda.
16
While the Saudis had cut off his wealth
in Sudan, bin Laden beneftted from his return to Afghanistan, forging
a mutually advantageous relationship that drew upon Arab fnancial
contributions to the Taliban in the Afghan civil war and buttressed the
Talibans international reputation.
17
From Afghanistan, bin Laden declared war against the United States in
August 1996, citing the continuing presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia fve
years after the Persian Gulf War and declaring that the walls of oppression
and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets.
18
Despite
multiple international efforts to dislodge him from Afghanistan, bin Laden
and the Taliban remained codependent: bin Laden supported the Talibans
military and political efforts to consolidate Afghanistan as an Islamic
state, while the Taliban provided protection for bin Laden.
19
Ultimately, bin
Ladens public vitriol clashed with Mullah Omars political interests, and
the latter invited bin Laden to Kandahar in 1997.
20
The Taliban had brought much of northern Afghanistan under its rule
by 1998, buying off rivals, carrying out systematic attacks on civilians, and
forcing Dostum into exile in Turkey. Only Massoud proved able to defend
his territory in northeastern Afghanistan from Taliban militias, but that
success ended with his assassination, at the hands of al-Qaeda members
posing as journalists, on September 9, 2001.
21
Two days later, al-Qaeda
Northern Alliance troops, who fought with U.S. forces against the Taliban in the early
stages of Operation Enduring Freedom, at Bagram air base to greet U.S. secretary
of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, December 16, 2001. Photo by Jim Garamone.
Department of Defense.
83
terrorists launched an assault on the United States that led to direct U.S.
military engagement in Afghanistan.
After weeks of unsuccessful negotiations with the Taliban to turn over
al-Qaeda militants involved in terrorism in the United States, U.S.-led
coalition forces initiated a campaign on October 7, 2001, to establish air
superiority, destroy terrorist training camps, kill or capture al-Qaeda leaders,
and eliminate terrorist activities in Afghanistan. As U.S. forces joined with
the Northern Alliance and began to capture cities across Afghanistan in
November and December, U.S. offcials observed a complex system of
strategic interests, challenges, and realities on the ground.
A propaganda poster, found by U.S. troops in 2002, showing al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden. The architect of the 9/11 attacks was killed in Pakistan in
2011 by U.S. Special Forces. National Archives.
84
* * *
Reaching back to the history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan,
Kalinovsky made an intriguing comparison, writing in 2011 that Hamid
Karzai, who took power after U.S. forces helped to topple the Taliban in
2001, now seems cast in the role of Babrak Karmaldistrusted by his
patrons and by his countrymen, isolated and with little infuence even
over his supporters.
22
As U.S. forces continue their own withdrawal from
Afghanistan, the lessons of the Soviet experience weigh heavily. Yet a
longer view of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan reveals a more nuanced
and patient approach. The United States has long supported Afghanistan
with economic aid and diplomatic friendship in measured terms and
hopeful enthusiasm. This pattern will surely persist in the twenty-frst
century.
It is best to remember Winston S. Churchills poignant observation
about the Afghans: They, when they fght among themselves, bear little
malice, and the combatants not infrequently make friends over the corpses
of their comrades or suspend operations for a festival or horse race. At the
end of the contest cordial relations are at once re-established. And yet so
full of contractions is their character.
23
A U.S. Air Force F15E Strike Eagle from the 332d Air Expeditionary Group takes
off for a mission over Afghanistan during the early stages of Operation Enduring
Freedom, November 7, 2001. National Archives.
85
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Giving the 1907 Romanes Lecture, Lord Curzon had just returned from the position
as viceroy of India (18991905). He was very familiar with Afghanistan, and he had traveled
extensively in Central and South Asia in the 1880s and 1890s. He had served as under-
secretary of state for India (189192) and under-secretary of state for foreign affairs (1895
98). Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Frontiers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 7, quoted
in Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: Americas War in Afghanistan (New York:
Norton, 2009), 277.
2. For Afghanistans ethnic groups, see Thomas J. Barfeld, Afghanistan: A Cultural and
Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6667; Robert Nichols, A
History of Pashtun Migration, 17752006 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2463;
Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization,
18801946 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 4651; Amin Saikal, Modern
Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2021;
Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistans Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of
the Taliban (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 2930; Louis Dupree, Afghanistan
(1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5765.
3. Although Pashtun is now conventional, historical references use a variety of terms for
this same ethnic group, depending on the geographic location of the sources. The British used
Pathan, drawing from the Hindi term. Kandahari and southern Afghans used Pashtun
and Pushtun. Northern Afghans, including Tajiks and Uzbeks, as well as groups in the
Trans-Khyber region, used Pakhtun or Pukhtun. For this group, see Brian Glyn Williams,
Afghanistan Declassifed: A Guide to Americas Longest War (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 1627; Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan:
State Formation and Collapse in the International System, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2002), 2629; Olaf K. Caroe, The Pathans: 550 B.C.A.D. 1957 (New
York: St. Martins, 1958); Akbar S. Ahmed, Pukhtun Economy and Society: Traditional
Structure and Economic Development in a Tribal Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980); Colin M. Enriquez, The Pathan Borderland: A Consecutive Account of the Country
and People on and beyond the Indian Frontier from Chitral to Dera Ismail Khan, 2d ed.
(Calcutta, India: Thacker, Spink, and Co., 1921); Rob Hager, State, Tribe, and Empire in
Afghan Inter-Polity Relations, in Richard Tapper, ed., The Confict of Tribe and State in Iran
and Afghanistan (New York: St. Martins, 1983), 83118.
4. Goodson, Afghanistans Endless War, 25. As Winston S. Churchill put it: The people
of one valley fght with those of the next. To the quarrels of communities are added the
combats of individuals. Khan assails khan, each supported by his retainers. Every tribesman
86
has a blood feud with his neighbor. Every mans hand is against the other, and all against the
stranger. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898; reprint, Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, 2010), 3. According to a proverb, Pashtuns fght for three reasons: zar,
zan, zamin (gold, women, and land).
5. Barfeld, Afghanistan, 19; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 2551;
Dupree, Afghanistan, 5765; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 2021. For a color rendition of the
map on p. 3, see http://www.loc.gov/item/92684507.
ONE
1. Charles Miller, Khyber, British Indias North West Frontier: The Story of an Imperial
Migraine (New York: Macmillan, 1977), xiv, 1112.
2. Abdul Hai Habibi, Paxto Literature at a Glance, Afghanistan 20, no. 4 (1968): 60,
quoted in Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 337.
3. Thomas J. Barfeld, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2010), 99.
4. Dupree, Afghanistan, 338; Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle
and Survival (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 28. The Sikh Empire (17991849)
forged a powerful state in northern India until it was conquered by British forces in the mid-
nineteenth century.
5. Dupree, Afghanistan, 334; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 2427.
6. Barfeld, Afghanistan, 48; Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan:
Politics of Reform and Modernization, 18801946 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1969), 98, 104; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 3334; Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short
History of Its People and Politics (New York: Perennial, 2002), 37.
7. Malcolm E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran, and Afghanistan, 1798
1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 23839.
8. Capt. Arthur Conolly of the 6th Bengal Light Cavalry, a British intelligence offcer,
coined the term Great Game around 1831 to explain the competition between Russia
and Britain in Asia. Conolly published a two-volume work, Journey to the North of India,
Overland from England, through Russia, Persia and Affghaunistaun, in 1834 and was
beheaded in 1842 in Bukhara (in current-day Uzbekistan) on the order of the Afghan amir.
Rudyard Kipling widely popularized the term Great Game in his 1901 novel Kim. Peter
Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha
America, 1994), 12, 123; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 287 n. 43.
9. Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game
and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999), 156.
10. Joseph J. Collins, Understanding War in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: National
Defense University Press, 2011), 17.
11. Sir Percy M. Sykes, A History of Afghanistan, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1940),
1:4012; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 75.
12. John William Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley,
1851), 1:130.
13. Ben Macintyre, The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). See also Josiah Harlan, Central Asia: Personal
Narrative of General Josiah Harlan, 18231841, ed. Frank E. Ross (London: Luzac, 1939);
Josiah Harlan, A Memoir of India and Avghanistan (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1842).
14. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 139.
87
15. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse
in the International System, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 48.
16. Dupree, Afghanistan, 41819.
17. Abd al-Rahman Khan, The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, 2 vols.
(London: J. Murray, 1900), 2:17677.
18. Barfeld, Afghanistan, 5. Also see the survey of Abdur Rahmans reign in Saikal,
Modern Afghanistan, 3741.
19. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 4041; Nancy Tapper, Abd Al-Rahmans North-West
Frontier: The Pashtun Colonisation of Afghan Turkistan, in Richard Tapper, ed., The Confict
of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (New York: St. Martins, 1983), 253 (quote). Abdur
Rahman also embraced the title light of the nation and religion (zia-ul-millat-wa-ud din) to
refect his broad, interethnic dominance.
20. Tapper, Al-Rahmans North-West Frontier, 23361.
21. Abdur Rahman did, however, abolish the samardeh, a tax on non-Pashtuns.
22. Barfeld, Afghanistan, 155; Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 90.
23. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 134.
24. Barfeld, Afghanistan, 161.
25. al-Rahman Khan, Life of Abdur Rahman, 2:280. Also see Dupree, Afghanistan, 415.
26. al-Rahman Khan, Life of Abdur Rahman, 2:78.
27. Richard F. Nyrop and Donald M. Seekins, eds., Afghanistan: A Country Study, 5th
ed. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), 38, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/aftoc.html.
For the major sections of the agreement, see Ludwig W. Adamec, Historical Dictionary of
Afghanistan, 3d ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 399402.
28. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 39.
29. al-Rahman Khan, Life of Abdur Rahman, 2:158, 164.
30. An excellent historical study on the early stages of the frontier debate is Yapp,
Strategies of British India.
31. al-Rahman Khan, Life of Abdur Rahman, 2:174.
32. Ibid., 2:17172.
33. Ibid., 2:158, 178.
34. Rdiger Schch, Afghan Refugees in Pakistan during the 1980s: Cold War Politics
and Registration Practice (Research Paper No. 157, United Nations High Commission for
Refugees, Geneva, Switzerland, June 2008), http://www.unhcr.org/4868daad2.html.
TWO
1. Clifford Orwin, Stasis and Plague: Thucydides on the Dissolution of Society,
Journal of Politics 4 (November 1988): 834; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (3.82);
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Thomas Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 204.
2. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse
in the International System, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 52.
3. Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and
Modernization, 18801946 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 39394. For an
overview of Habibullahs reign, see Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle
and Survival (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4259.
4. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 164; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 4546.
5. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 166.
88
6. Ibid., 206. For British attempts to undermine Habibullah, see Saikal, Modern
Afghanistan, 5355.
7. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 184. Mahmud Sami, a Turkish colonel,
ran the college after 1907.
8. Leon B. Poullada and Leila D. J. Poullada, The Kingdom of Afghanistan and the United
States: 18281973 (Lincoln, NE: Center for Afghan Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha,
and Dageforde Publishing, 1995), 13. See also A. C. Jewett and Marjorie Jewett Bell, An
American Engineer in Afghanistan: From the Letters and Notes of A. C. Jewett (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1948). Various Afghans informed Jewett that he was the frst
American to visit their country in decades. One told him that the last American had been there
in 1840; another said 1880. The Poulladas piece together stories of this and other early Afghan-
American contact up through the 1930s in the frst two chapters of their book.
9. Convention between Great Britain and Russia Concerning the Interests of Their States
on the Continent of Asia, September 24, 1907, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1907 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1910), 1:552, http://digicoll.
library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=turn&id=FRUS.FRUS1907v01&entity=FRUS.
FRUS1907v01.p0664&q1=552.
10. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 21112; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan,
5156.
11. For the Turkish-German mission to Habibullah, see Gregorian, Emergence of Modern
Afghanistan, 22023; for the entire period of the war, see Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistans
Foreign Affairs to the Mid-Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany, and Britain
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 1541.
12. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 22731; Louis Dupree, Afghanistan
(1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44243; Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A
Short History of Its People and Politics (New York: Perennial, 2002), 12026; Thomas J. Barfeld,
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010),
18183; Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 4651; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 6365.
13. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 230; Ewans, Afghanistan, 12223.
14. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 6263.
15. According to Saikal, the wording of the treaty was so ambiguous as to allow the
Afghans to read in it British acknowledgement of their full independence; and the British to
fnd grounds in it still to make sphere of infuence claims on the country. Ibid., 64. See also
Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 9098; Sir Percy M. Sykes, A History of Afghanistan,
2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1940), 2:284, 35859.
16. Ewans, Afghanistan, 12425.
17. Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 5257.
18. Leonid B. Teplinskii, Sovetsko-Afganskie otnosheniia [Soviet-Afghan Relations],
19191960 (Moscow: Izd-vo sotsialno-ekon. lit-ry, 1961); Sergei B. Panin, Sovetskaia
Rossiia i Afganistan [Soviet Russia and Afghanistan], 19191929 (Irkutsk: Irkutsk State
Pedagogical University, 1998); Mikhail Volodarskii, Sovety i ikh iuzhnye sosedi, Iran i
Afganistan [The Soviets and Their Southern Neighbors, Iran and Afghanistan] (19171933)
(London: Overseas Publications, 1985).
19. Panin, Sovetskaia Rossiia i Afganistan, 44; Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 5657.
20. For the Jadid movement in Central Asia, see Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim
Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
Alexandre Bennigsen, The Soviet Union and Muslim Guerrilla Wars, 19201981: Lessons
for Afghanistan (Rand Note N1707/1, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, August
1981), http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2005/N1707.1.pdf.
89
21. Volodarskii, Iran i Afganistan, 178. See also Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign
Affairs, 7071, on Enver Pashas leadership of the Old Bukhara forces at Termez, Baisun,
and Shahr-i Sabz.
22. Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 6972; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 6874;
Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 23439. Saikal observed that Amanullahs
inability to provide active support for the Central Asian Muslims, in particular the Basmachi
Movement, markedly undermined his credibility. From the start, one of his main pillars of
legitimacy was a claim to be, above everything else, an Islamic ruler; but when a real test came
to substantiate this claim in the face of Soviet actions, he could not do so (p. 74).
23. Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghan Air Force, in Adamec, Historical Dictionary of
Afghanistan, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 38. Also see British intelligence
reports on the early Afghan air force in Anita L. P. Burdett, ed., Afghanistan Strategic
Intelligence: British Records, 19191970, 4 vols. (London: Archive Editions, 2002), 2:12537.
24. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 255.
25. Maurice Pernot, LInquitude de lOrient: En Asie Musulmane (Paris: Hachette,
1927), 43; Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 108; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern
Afghanistan, 247.
26. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 7379; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan,
23954.
27. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 8288; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan,
25456.
28. See Leon B. Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 19191929: King
Amanullahs Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1973), 14395, for a comprehensive study of Amanullahs reforms and the rise of tribal power.
29. Senzil K. Nawid, Religious Response to Social Change in Afghanistan, 191929:
King Aman-Allah and the Afghan Ulama (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 138.
30. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 266, 27879; Grigorii S. Agabekov,
O.G.P.U.: The Russian Secret Terror (New York: Brentanos, 1931), 15960; Grigorii S. Agabekov,
Ch. K. za rabotoi (Berlin: Strela, 1931), 27683; Joseph Castagn, Soviet Imperialism in
Afghanistan, Foreign Affairs 13 (July 1935): 698703.
31. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 28081.
32. The title amir connoted a commander, general, admiral, or prince, while malik
signifed a king or chief.
33. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 99; Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 11618,
19495. Shah Mahmud Khan and Shah Wali Khan, along with Mohammad Hashim Khan, would
play infuential roles later as the uncles of both Mohammad Zahir Shah and Mohammad Daud.
34. Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 2024; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern
Afghanistan, 32132.
35. Hazaras are Persian-speaking Shia Muslims in central Afghanistan; Mangals are a
Pashtun tribe in Paktia and Khost; and Mohmands are Pashtuns in Kunduz, Nangarhar, and
Kunar. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 297.
36. Ibid., 29798.
37. Abdul Khaliq was immediately apprehended and publicly executed. His relatives,
fellow students, and teachers were executed as well. In Pashtun tribal code, badal (revenge)
requires retribution for insults or the shedding of blood. The practice serves as a deterrent
to lawlessness but often results in destructive cycles of violence. See Adamec, Historical
Dictionary, 10, 71.
38. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 1068; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan,
37578.
90
39. Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 21327.
40. Ibid., 21617; Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 37892.
41. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 10910.
42. Ernest F. Fox, Travels in Afghanistan, 19371938 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), xvii.
43. Department of State Treaty Information, Bulletin No. 95, August 1937, 5, 3335; Gregorian,
Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 37678; Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 23334.
44. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 110, 11315.
45. American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 19771980 (Washington, DC:
Department of State, 1983), 883.
46. Milan L. Hauner, The Soviet Threat to Afghanistan and India, 19381940, Modern
Asian Studies 15 (April 1981): 287309. For a survey of Afghanistans balancing act with
Germany, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, see Hauner, Afghanistan between the Great
Powers, 19381945, International Journal of Middle East Studies 14 (November 1982): 48199.
47. Adamec, Afghanistans Foreign Affairs, 21727, 23843.
THREE
1. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
33441.
2. Charles Evans Hughes to Warren G. Harding, July 18, 1921, Papers Relating to
the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1921 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
State, 1936), 1:258 (hereafter FRUS), http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-
idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1921v01&isize=M&page=258. Also see Amin Saikal, Modern
Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 66.
3. Harding to Amanullah Khan, J uly 29, 1921, FRUS, 1921, 1:261, http://digicoll.library.
wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1921v01&isize=M&page=261.
4. Proposal for the Establishment of Diplomatic and Consular Representation between
the United States and Afghanistan, FRUS, 1926, 1:55760, http://images.library.wisc.edu/
FRUS/EFacs/1926v01/reference/frus.frus1926v01.i0007.pdf.
5. Leon B. Poullada and Leila D. J. Poullada, The Kingdom of Afghanistan and the
United States: 18281973 (Lincoln, NE: Center for Afghan Studies, University of Nebraska
at Omaha, and Dageforde Publishing, 1995), 4142; Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan, 1900
1923: A Diplomatic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 236.
6. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt, East of the Sun and West of the Moon
(New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), 9. The brothers set out in May 1925 on an expedition
for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago to procure a collection of wildlife from
the Pamir and Tian Shan Mountains, including several specimen of ovis poli, a rare species
of wild sheep, argali, frst described by Marco Polo for European audiences. Theodore
Roosevelt, To the Roof of the World, Boys Life, November 1926, 1011, 61; Peter Collier,
The Roosevelts: An American Saga (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 3028. For the
Roosevelt brothers impact on subsequent travel to the region, see William J. Morden, Across
Asias Snows and Deserts (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1927).
7. Mohammad Zahir Shah to Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 24, 1934, FRUS, 1934,
2:748, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.
FRUS1934v02&isize=M&page=748.
8. William Phillips to Roosevelt, August 21, 1934, FRUS, 1934, 2:749, http://digicoll.
library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=turn&entity=FRUS.FRUS1934v02.
p0849&id=FRUS.FRUS1934v02&isize=M.
91
9. Roosevelt to Zahir Shah, August 21, 1934, FRUS, 1934, 2:750, http://digicoll.
library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=turn&entity=FRUS.FRUS1934v02.
p0850&id=FRUS.FRUS1934v02&isize=M.
10. Provisional Agreement regarding Friendship, Diplomatic, and Consular Representation
between the United States and Afghanistan, March 26, 1936, 49 Stat. 3873, Executive Agreement
Series 88, in Charles I. Bevans, comp., Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United
States of America, 17761949, Vol. 5: Afghanistan-Burma (Washington, DC: U.S. Department
of State, 1970), 12. See also discussion related to the agreement in FRUS, 1936, 3:17, http://
images.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/EFacs/1936v03/reference/frus.frus1936v03.i0005.pdf.
11. Leon Poullada also mentioned negotiations between the A. J. Alsdorf Corporation
of Chicago and the Afghan government for tanks, armored cars, and howitzers. Poullada and
Poullada, Afghanistan and the United States, 128.
12. See correspondence in FRUS, 1937, 2:597614, http://images.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/
EFacs/1937v02/reference/frus.frus1937v02.i0024.pdf. This deal, which was three years in the
making, was fnalized in Berlin without the participation, and largely without the knowledge, of
the U.S. government.
13. Memorandum, Wallace S. Murray to Cordell Hull, May 7, 1938, FRUS, 1938,
2:75253, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.
FRUS1938v02&isize=M&page=752.
14. John A. DeNovo, American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 19001939
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), 31415; Kristen Blake, The U.S.-Soviet
Confrontation in Iran, 19451962: A Case in the Annals of the Cold War (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 2009), 1516; Stephen L. McFarland, A Peripheral View of the
Origins of the Cold War: The Crisis in Iran, 19411947, Diplomatic History 4 (Fall 1980):
33351; Olaf K. Caroe, Wells of Power: The Oilfelds of South-Western Asia: A Regional and
Global Study (London: Macmillan, 1951).
15. Wallace S. Murray, American Diplomatic Representation in Afghanistan,
J uly 27, 1937, FRUS, 1937, 2:610, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-
idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1937v02&isize=M&page=610.
16. Louis G. Dreyfus J r. to Hull, J une 27, 1941, FRUS, 1941, 3:259, http://digicoll.library.
wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1941v03&isize=M&page=259.
17. See discussion in FRUS, 1941, 3:25563, http://images.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/
EFacs/1941v03/reference/frus.frus1941v03.i0008.pdf.
18. Cornelius Van H. Engert, A Report on Afghanistan (Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Offce, 1924). For Engerts trip and the State Departments response to his lengthy report
(225 published pages), see Poullada and Poullada, Afghanistan and the United States, 1517.
19. Engert to Hull, J uly 25, 1942, FRUS, 1942, 4:51, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/
cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1942v04&isize=M&page=51.
20. Reply of the President (Roosevelt) to the Remarks of the Minister of Afghanistan
(Aziz), July 4, 1943, in Leland M. Goodrich and Marie J. Carroll, eds., Documents on American
Foreign Relations, Vol. 5: July 1942June 1943 (Boston, MA: World Peace Foundation, 1944),
605. Roosevelt stated: You will fnd, I am sure, Mr. Minister, that the love of freedom upon
which we in the United States so pride ourselves is similar to your own and that there is much
in the mutual idealism of our two peoples to cement the friendship now being manifest.
21. Engert to Hull, November 6, 1943, FRUS, 1943, 4:32, http://digicoll.library.wisc.
edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1943v04&isize=M&page=32.
22. Ibid.
23. Engert to Hull, February 14, 1943, FRUS, 1943, 4:21, http://digicoll.library.wisc.
edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1943v04&isize=M&page=21.
92
For Afghanistans balancing of German, Soviet, and British interests, see Ludwig W. Adamec,
Afghanistans Foreign Affairs to the Mid-Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany,
and Britain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 24447, 26263.
24. Engert to Hull, April 29, 1943, FRUS, 1943, 4:23, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/
cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=turn&entity=FRUS.FRUS1943v04.p0035&id=FRUS.
FRUS1943v04&isize=M.
25. Hull to Engert, November 23, 1943, FRUS, 1943, 4:3435, http://digicoll.library.wisc.
edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1943v04&isize=M&page=34.
26. Karakul Sheep, Life, July 16, 1945, 6568; Ali Mohammad, Karakul as the
Most Important Article of Afghan Trade, Afghanistan (Kabul), 4 (December 1949): 4853.
27. Harold R. Maddux to Wallace S. Murray, Suggestion by Military Attach that a U.S.
Military Mission be Sent to Afghanistan, June 12, 1944, in Poullada and Poullada, Afghanistan
and the United States, appendix 4.
28. Engert to Hull, August 7, 1942, FRUS, 1942, 4:54, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/
cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1942v04&isize=M&page=54.
29. Engert to Hull, May 27, 1943, FRUS, 1943, 4:25, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/
cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1943v04&isize=M&page=25.
30. The group included Lt. Gen. Mohammad Daud Khan, Kabul Army Corps; Lt. Gen.
Muhammad Umar Khan, Afghan army; Col. Muhd Ali Khan, signals offcer; Maj. Abdur
Razak Khan, Afghan air force; Maj. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, cavalry offcer; and Maj. Muhd
Nasim Khan, artillery offcer. History of the XX Bomber Command, December 1944, Air
Force Historical Research Agency, reel A7757, frames 1012.
31. Jacob C. Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger,
for Council on Foreign Relations, 1969), 301.
32. Memorandumof Conversation, Washington, DC, November 19, 1948, FRUS, 1948,
5:492 (frst quote), http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.
FRUS1948v05p1&isize=M&page=492; Memorandumof Conversation, Washington, DC, December
8, 1948, FRUS, 1948, 5:493 (second quote), http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-
idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1948v05p1&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=493.
33. Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1983), 19.
34. Poullada and Poullada, Afghanistan and the United States, 4.
35. The U.S. military did provide some noncombat equipment at the end of the war.
The State-Army-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee (SANACC), the precursor to the
National Security Council, argued, For all practical purposes Afghanistan is almost totally
dependent on foreign sources for its military requirements. Up to now the Afghan Army
has obtained from the U.S. only surplus hospital and non-combatant equipment, through the
purchase for cash of U.S. surplus property in India in 1945. See SANACC 360/14, Appraisal
of U.S. National Interests in South Asia, April 19, 1949, FRUS, 1949, 6:23, http://digicoll.library.
wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1949v06&isize=M&page=23.
36. Jeffrey J. Roberts, The Origins of Confict in Afghanistan (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2003), 7475.
37. Ibid., 120.
38. Daniel Balland, Boundaries of Afghanistan, in Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Encyclopedia Iranica
(London: Routledge, 1982), 4:40615, online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/boundaries-iii.
39. Leon B. Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 19191929: King Amanullahs
Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 29; see also
William Kerr Fraser-Tytler, Afghanistan: A Study of Political Developments in Central and
Southern Asia, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
93
40. Letter from South East Asia Department to Chancery, April 28, 1949, in Ludwig W.
Adamec, Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan, 3d ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 407.
41. For U.S. offcial sources on the Pushtunistan Dispute, see FRUS, 195254, 11:1365
1498, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1
95254v11p2&isize=M&page=1365; FRUS, 195557, 8:163258, http://digicoll.library.wisc.
edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS195557v08&isize=M&page=163.
For an Afghan offcial tract, see Rahman Pazhwak, An Article on Pakhtunistan, a New
State in Central Asia (London: Royal Afghan Embassy, 1960). Also see Saikal, Modern
Afghanistan, 12223, 13034; Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 2526; Victoria
Schofeld, Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Confict, rev. ed. (London: Tauris Parke,
2010), 25864; Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 15976; Rizwan Hussain, Pakistan and
the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 6182.
42. On J anuary 1, 1950, Pakistan blockaded fuel trucks destined for Afghanistan. It
repeated this action in 1953, 1955, and 1961. Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of
Its People and Politics (New York: Perennial, 2002), 158; Edward Girardet, Afghanistan: The
Soviet War (New York: St. Martins, 1985), 95; Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Tara Vassef,
The Forgotten History of Afghanistan-Pakistan Relations, Yale Journal of International
Affairs 7 (March 2012): 3845, http://yalejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Article-
Gartenstein_Ross-and-Vassef.pdf.
43. Khushal Khan Khattak (161389) was a malik, or chief, and warrior-poet who
advocated for Afghan unity (in this case, Pashto speakers) to overthrow their Mughal rulers.
Adamec, Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan, 22021.
44. Poullada and Poullada, Afghanistan and the United States, 99.
45. Department of State Policy Statement, United States Policy with Respect to
Afghanistan, February 21, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6:20089, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/
cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1951v06p2&isize=M&page=2008.
Diplomat-turned-scholar Leon Poullada much later observed that the Pushtunistan dispute was
the loose thread in the fabric of Afghan independence. The Soviets skillfully pulled this thread
and unraveled Afghan freedom. Poullada and Poullada, Afghanistan and the United States, 82.
46. Dean G. Acheson to Embassy in Afghanistan, September 29, 1952, FRUS, 1952
54, 11:1456, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d887; Charles
Little to Department of State, July 10, 1954, FRUS, 195254, 11:14121413, http://history.
state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d856. For more background on U.S.-Pakistan
relations on these issues, see Haqqani, Pakistan, 16265; Hussain, Pakistan, 6872.
47. J ohn E. Horner to Department of State, October 2, 1952, FRUS, 195254, 11:1457,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d888. For the Afghan views,
see Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 12324; for the Pakistani side, see Hussain, Pakistan, 6971.
48. National Security Council, United States Objectives and Policies with Respect to
the Near East, July 23, 1954, NSC 5428, FRUS, 195254, 9:527, http://history.state.gov/
historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v09p1/d219. This amended the original policies of NSC
155/1, following developments that included a change of power in Iran, the visit of Vice
President Richard M. Nixon to the region, and successful Pakistani lobbying for military aid.
49. J ames S. Lay J r., United States Objectives and Policies with Respect to the Near
East, Memorandum for the National Security Council, J uly 6, 1954, p. 23, para. 29 c,
available through the National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB78/propaganda%20126.pdf.
50. This sentiment was shared by the British since the mid-nineteenth century. It was
then reinforced by the British Committee of Imperial Defence at the turn of the twentieth
94
century. See Christopher M. Wyatt, Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and
Strategy during the Great Game (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 91101.
51. Balland, Boundaries of Afghanistan. The signing of the frst transit agreements
between Afghanistan and the USSR on July 17, 1950, and between Afghanistan and Iran
on December 3, 1960, coincided with periods of heightened border tension with Pakistan.
Paul Robinson and Jay Dixon explained that the Soviet treaty provided for an exchange of
agricultural products in return for Soviet petroleum, cotton, cloth, sugar and other commodities.
In addition, the agreement provided for duty-free transit of Afghan goods over Soviet territory,
in Aiding Afghanistan: A History of Soviet Assistance to a Developing Country (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013), 49.
52. Balland noted that there was an eight-week period from January to March 1962
when the import of American aid supplies to Afghanistan was permitted. Balland, Boundaries
of Afghanistan.
FOUR
1. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to John Foster Dulles, October 12, 1954, Foreign Relations
of the United States, 19521954 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1983), 11:1423
(hereafter FRUS), http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d864.
2. Henry A. Byroade, Soviet Dmarche to Afghanistan, October 10, 1952, FRUS,
195254, 11:145861, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d889.
3. J ohn E. Horner to Department of State, October 2, 1952, FRUS, 195254, 11:1456,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d888.
4. See Nake M. Kamrany, Peaceful Competition in Afghanistan: American and Soviet
Models for Economic Aid (Washington, DC: Communication Service Corporation, 1969), for
a close read of U.S. and Soviet aid to Afghanistan during the 1950s and 1960s. The Helmand
River Valley project is discussed in the next chapter.
5. Horner to Department of State, September 23, 1952, FRUS, 195254, 11:1453,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d886.
6. Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 12021.
7. National Intelligence Estimate, Outlook for Afghanistan, October 19, 1954,
FRUS, 195254, 11:1482, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/
d905. See also Harry N. Howard, The Regional Pacts and the Eisenhower Doctrine,
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 401 (May 1972): 8594.
8. Angus I. Ward to Department of State, December 15, 1953, FRUS, 195254, 11:1407,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d85; Richard M. Nixon, Report
to National Security Council, December 23, 1953, FRUS, 195254, 11:1407n, http://history.
state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d852.
9. Henry A. Byroade, The Changing Position of Afghanistan in Asia, Department
of StateBulletin, January 23, 1961, 125, 127 (hereafter DOS Bulletin; full archive online
at http://www.bpl.org/govinfo/online-collections/federal-executive-branch/department-of-state-
bulletin-1939-1989/).
10. National Intelligence Estimate, Outlook for Afghanistan, October 19, 1954, FRUS,
195254, 11:148197 (quote p. 1483), http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-
54v11p2/d905. This analysis ultimately proved accurate. See Nake M. Kamrany, The Six Stages
in the Sovietization of Afghanistan (Boulder, CO: Economic Institute for Research and Education,
1983), 39, on the systematic Soviet economic and cultural penetration of Afghanistan.
95
11. See R. K. Ramazani, Afghanistan and the USSR, Middle East Journal 12 (Spring
1958): 14452.
12. Mohammad Daud was ultimately an expansionist and sought the return of Pashtun
lands to the east and Baluch lands to the south. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 11516, 181.
13. See Pushtunistan Dispute, FRUS, 195557, 8:163258 (http://history.state.gov/
historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v08/ch4), for extensive materials on a range of topics, including
mob confrontation of two Americans in Kabul and on the impact of this confict between
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
14. Leon B. Poullada and Leila D. J . Poullada, The Kingdom of Afghanistan and the
United States: 18281973 (Lincoln, NE: Center for Afghan Studies, University of Nebraska
at Omaha, and Dageforde Publishing, 1995), 104; Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Tara Vassef,
The Forgotten History of Afghanistan-Pakistan Relations, Yale Journal of International
Affairs 7 (March 2012): 4142, http://yalejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Article-
Gartenstein_Ross-and-Vassef.pdf.
15. Horace A. Hildreth to Department of State, May 6, 1955, FRUS, 195557, 8:182
83, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v08/d89.
16. Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics (New York:
Perennial, 2002), 15456.
17. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), 508; Ewans, Afghanistan, 156; Jacob C. Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military
Dimension (New York: Praeger, for Council on Foreign Relations, 1969), 301. Khrushchev
declared that we trade less for economic than for political reasons. Paul Robinson and Jay
Dixon, Aiding Afghanistan: A History of Soviet Assistance to a Developing Country (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 51.
18. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston,
MA: Little, Brown, 1970), 508. See also Ewans, Afghanistan, 157; Robinson and Dixon,
Aiding Afghanistan, 51.
19. Alam Payind, Soviet-Afghan Relations from Cooperation to Occupation, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (February 1989): 113.
20. Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1983), 24.
21. Eva Grenbck, Arms Trade Registers: The Arms Trade with the Third World
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 32; Wynfred J oshua and Stephen P. Gibert, Arms for
the Third World: Soviet Military Aid Diplomacy (Baltimore, MD: J ohns Hopkins University
Press, 1969), 5657.
22. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 126; Payind, Soviet-Afghan Relations, 112.
23. Harvey H. Smith, Area Handbook for Afghanistan (Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Offce, 1969), 378.
24. Patrick J. Garrity, The Soviet Military Stake in Afghanistan, 19561979, Journal
of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies 125 (September 1980): 3136;
Kamrany, Six Stages, 910.
25. Donald N. Wilber, ed., Afghanistan (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files,
1956), 185.
26. National Intelligence Estimate, Probable Developments in Afghanistans International
Position, January 10 1956, FRUS, 195557, 8:218, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/
frus1955-57v08/d111.
27. Ibid., 8:21719, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v08/d111.
28. Sheldon T. Mills to Department of State, January 3, 1958, FRUS, 195860, 15:216,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d100.
96
29. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 2831; Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 130.
30. For the Soviet preference for credits to minimize corruption, see Robinson and Dixon,
Aiding Afghanistan, 12829.
31. Byroade, Changing Position of Afghanistan in Asia, 133; Dupree, Afghanistan,
52630. On the other hand, Kamrany noted coexistence and even unintentional cooperation
between Americans and Soviets on the ground in Afghanistan during the 1950s and 1960s.
From a U.S. policy perspective, however, competition with the Soviets in Afghanistan was a
concern, and aid projects were a political tool. Kamrany, Peaceful Competition in Afghanistan,
17, 58, 8689, 104.
32. Export-Import Bank Loan to Afghanistan, DOS Bulletin, May 31, 1954, 836.
The $21 million in 1949 equates to $206 million in 2013 dollars, while the $18.5 million
from 1954 would be approximately $160 million. See also Kamrany, Peaceful Competition
in Afghanistan, 23.
33. Memorandum on Afghanistan, Allen W. Dulles to John Foster Dulles, August 6,
1956, FRUS, 195557, 8:242, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v08/
d121. The U.S. government initially pledged $14.8 million to develop air transport facilities to
reduce dependence on Soviet air routes. American Foreign Policy Current Documents, 1956
(Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1959), 1303 (hereafter AFP Current Docs).
34. In a related move to generate public support, the International Cooperation
Administration (ICA) announced that it had contracted an aircraft from Pan American to
make ffteen to twenty round-trip fights from Kandahar to Jeddah over a sixty-day period to
help Ariana, the Afghan airline, transport pilgrims performing hajj. U.S. Will Help Transport
Afghan Pilgrims to Mecca, DOS Bulletin, July 2, 1956, 25.
35. ICA Aid to South Asia in Fiscal Year 1956, DOS Bulletin, September 24, 1956, 494.
36. March 1960 Report, March 31, 1960, Reports, Program Reports, ICA/Morrison-
Knudsen Contracts, Project Files Relating to Transportation, 19541961, Records of U.S.
Foreign Assistance Agencies, 19421963, Record Group 469, National Archives. See
also Yuri V. Bossin, The Afghan Experience with International Assistance, in John D.
Montgomery and Dennis A. Rondinelli, eds., Beyond Reconstruction in Afghanistan: Lessons
from Development Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 83.
37. U.S. Helps Afghan Airline Acquire Plane for Fleet, DOS Bulletin, May 23,
1960, 831. Also, Robert M. Snyder of the U.S. Operations Mission in Afghanistan gave a
speech in Kabul on October 29, 1958, that outlined ICA technical and economic assistance in
agriculture, mining, education, and road and air transportation. Snyder, What ICA is Doing
in Afghanistan, Department of State Publication 6671 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Offce, 1959).
38. Ewans, Afghanistan, 159.
39. Mohammad Ali, Afghanistan, The Mohammedzai Period: A Political History of the
Country since the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century with Emphasis on its Foreign Relations
(Kabul: Kabul University Press, 1959), 2012.
40. Ambassador Sheldon T. Mills reported that Afghanistans foreign policy as it
relates to position in struggle between free world and Communist bloc is no longer fxed in
pattern of close collaboration with Soviet which was evidence of Khrushchev-Bulganin visit,
December 1955, but now is in state of fux. Mills to Department of State, January 3, 1958,
FRUS, 195860, 15:215, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d100.
41. Joint statement by Eisenhower and Daud, Washington, DC, June 27, 1958, AFP Current
Docs, 1958, 106768.
42. Memorandum of Conversation, Department of State, Washington, DC, June 24, 1958,
FRUS, 195860, 15:227, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d108.
97
43. Eisenhower described the trip in his memoir, The White House Years: Waging Peace,
19561961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 49799. He spent relatively little time in
Afghanistan compared with stops in India (fve days) and Pakistan (three days).
44. Memorandum of Conversation, Kabul, Afghanistan, December 9, 1959, FRUS,
195860, 15:32125, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d151.
45. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks Upon Arrival at Bagram Airport, Kabul,
December 9, 1959, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower,
1959 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Offce, 1960), 821, http://quod.lib.umich.
edu/p/ppotpus/4728423.1959.001/867?rgn=full+text;view=image.
46. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Toast of the President at a Luncheon Given in His Honor
by King Mohammad Zahir, Kabul, Afghanistan, December 9, 1959, ibid., 82223, http://
quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ppotpus/4728423.1959.001/868?rgn=full+text;view=image.
47. The business elements of the trip were expressed in a joint statement: President
Eisenhower gave assurances of the American desire to continue to assist Afghanistan in
its task of strengthening its economic and social structure. Joint Communique, Kabul,
December 9, DOS Bulletin, December 28, 1959, 934.
48. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 497.
49. Ibid., 498.
50. Memorandum of Conversation, Madrid, Spain, December 22, 1959, FRUS, 195860,
15:327, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d153.
FIVE
1. There are several extensive online collections that include documents related to
development efforts in the Helmand River Valley covered in this section: Kabul University/
University of Arizona Afghanistan Digital Collections (http://www.afghandata.org:8080/xmlui/
handle/azu/1); Oregon State University Middle East Water Collection (http://oregondigital.
org/digcol/mewaters/); Oregon State University Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database
(http://ocid.nacse.org/tfdd/); and a collection posted by a retired analyst from the U.S. Agency
for International Development (http://scottshelmandvalleyarchives.org/).
2. Lloyd Baron, Sector Analysis: Helmand-Arghandab Valley Region, U.S. Agency
for International Development, February 1973, typescript, Library of Congress, 7, http://
www.afghandata.org:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/azu/531/azu_acku_pamphlet_hd2065_6_
b37_1973_w.pdf; Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), 482.
3. Report on Development of Helmand Valley, Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Tudor
Engineering Company, 1956), http://www.afghandata.org:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/azu/524/
azu_acku_pamphlet_hd1698_a3_r4_1956_w.pdf.
4. For an overview and key context connecting these efforts to the later developments that led
to the attacks of September 11, 2001, see Nick Cullather, Damming Afghanistan: Modernization
in a Buffer State, Journal of American History 89 (September 2002): 51237; for the full scope of
U.S. aid to the project, which continued until 1979, see Cynthia Clapp-Wincek and Emily Baldwin,
The Helmand Valley Project in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: U.S. Agency for International
Development, 1983), http://scottshelmandvalleyarchives.org/docs/evl-83-02.pdf.
5. New York Times, August 9, 1946, 5.
6. Nake M. Kamrany, Peaceful Competition in Afghanistan: American and Soviet
Models for Economic Aid (Washington, DC: Communication Service Corporation, 1969), 31,
34; Cullather, Damning Afghanistan, 52027 (quote p. 524).
98
7. Louis G. Dreyfus Jr. to Dean G. Acheson, September 19, 1949, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1949 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1977), 6:1778 (hereafter FRUS),
http://images.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/EFacs/1949v06/reference/frus.frus1949v06.i0016.pdf.
8. Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 109; Dupree, Afghanistan, 484. Zabuli founded the Afghan
national bank and played a signifcant role in Afghan economic development from the 1930s
through the 1950s. For background on Zabulis political and commercial signifcance, see
Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 109, 163; for details on Zabulis larger economic plan, see
Kamrany, Peaceful Competition in Afghanistan, 24.
9. It was expanded and renamed the Helmand-Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA) in 1965.
10. Daniel Balland, Arghandab River, in Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Encyclopedia Iranica
(London: Routledge, 1982), 2:398400, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/argandab-river.
The Dahla Dam was originally known as the Arghandab Dam.
11. Four Point ProgramsAfghanistan, Department of State Bulletin, July 14,
1952, 62 (hereafter DOS Bulletin; full archive online at http://www.bpl.org/govinfo/online-
collections/federal-executive-branch/department-of-state-bulletin-1939-1989/). Kamrany, Peaceful
Competition in Afghanistan, 2526, provides some context on the Point Four Program in
Afghanistan, signed with Kabul on February 7, 1951.
12. Export-Import Bank Loan to Afghanistan, DOS Bulletin, May 31, 1954, 836.
13. N. H. Kirk, Status of the Eximbank Loan to Afghanistan, August 11, 1953, FRUS,
195254, 11:146670, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d895.
Recent experiences of NATO Provincial Reconstruction Teams indicate how important these
local relationships can be to a projects success.
14. N. H. Kirk, Status of the Eximbank Loan to Afghanistan, August 11, 1953, FRUS,
195254, 11:1469, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v11p2/d895.
15. John Foster Dulles to Horace A. Hildreth, July 12, 1955, FRUS, 195557, 8:189,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v08/d93. Cullather argued that to the
Eisenhower administration, Morrison Knudsens outpost in Kandahar was the scientifc frontier
of American power in Central Asia. Cullather, Damning Afghanistan, 528.
16. Peter G. Franck, Technical Assistance through the United Nations: The U.N.
Mission in Afghanistan, 19501963, in Howard M. Teaf and Peter G. Franck, Hands Across
Frontiers: Case Studies in International Cooperation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1955), 1361 (quote p. 36); Dupree, Afghanistan, 483.
17. Report on Development of Helmand Valley, Afghanistan, i, 5, 18993; Afghanistan
Reclamation Project Expected to Produce Added Income, DOS Bulletin, August 19, 1957, 31516.
18. Kamrany, Peaceful Competition in Afghanistan, 31, 34.
19. See Cullather, Damning Afghanistan, 52930, for the ethnic and political
implications; see also Dupree, Afghanistan, 5034. The villages were ultimately abandoned
by 1960 due to poor soil conditions, but during the early years of the project, there was
palpable enthusiasm for it within the U.S. government. Kamrany, Peaceful Competition in
Afghanistan, 36, mentions that 1,330 families moved as part of this project.
20. Aloys Arthur Michel, The Kabul, Kunduz, and Helmand Valleys and the National
Economy of Afghanistan: A Study of Regional Resources and the Comparative Advantages of
Development (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1959), 425.
21. Ibid.
22. Kamrany, Peaceful Competition in Afghanistan, 32. The seven objectives were:
1) to provide new farms for nomads and landless villagers; 2) to raise the standard of living
of peoples in the valley; 3) to produce agricultural and manufactured products for export;
4) to develop electric power; 5) to create government income to eventually pay off the
99
investment; 6) to provide protection against foods; and 7) to provide early uses of all waters
of the Helmand River except that portion to which Iran was entitled. Kamrany, Peaceful
Competition in Afghanistan, 29.
23. Henry A. Byroade to Department of State, April 14, 1959, FRUS, 195860, 15:266,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d126.
24. Henry A. Byroade, The Changing Position of Afghanistan in Asia, DOS Bulletin,
January 23, 1961, 130 (frst quote); Dean Rusk to Embassy in Afghanistan, January 25,
1963, FRUS, 196163, 19:483 (second quote), http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/
frus1961-63v19/d246. For continuing U.S. aid, see Clapp-Wincek and Baldwin, Helmand
Valley Project in Afghanistan.
25. Samuel M. Burke and Lawrence Ziring, eds., Pakistans Foreign Policy: An Historical
Analysis, 2d ed. (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 14773; Farooq N. Bajwa, Pakistan
and the West: The First Decade, 19471957 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 5595;
Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 92121.
26. The latter was striking since Afghanistan had always been an agricultural exporter
before the 1950s.
27. Ambassador Chester B. Bowles wrote to Dulles on December 30, 1953: I believe
we will isolate Pakistan, draw the Soviet Union certainly into Afghanistan and probably
into India, eliminate the possibility of Pakistan-Indian or Pakistan-Afghan rapprochement,
further jeopardize the outlook for the Indian Five Year Plan, increase the dangerous wave
of anti-Americanism throughout India and other South Asian countries, open up explosive
new opportunities for the Soviet Union, gravely weaken the hopes for stable democratic
government in India, and add nothing whatsoever to our military strength in the area. Quoted
from Bowless personal papers in Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The
United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 174.
28. National Security Council, Statement of Policy on U.S. Policy Toward South Asia,
January 10, 1957, FRUS, 195557, 8:3334, 37, 42, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/
frus1955-57v08/d5.
29. Memorandum of Conversation, Kabul, Afghanistan, December 9, 1959, FRUS, 1958
60, 15:324, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d151. This comment was
repeated during Naims visit with Eisenhower eight months later. Memorandum of Conversation,
New York, NY, September 23, 1960, ibid., 15:356, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/
frus1958-60v15/d171.
30. Richard Gott, ed., Documents on International Affairs, 1960 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964), 48386.
31. Editorial Note, FRUS, 195860, 15:359, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/
frus1958-60v15/d172.
32. Byroade to Department of State, September 29, 1960, ibid., 15:36062, http://
history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d173.
33. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Mohammad Zahir Shah, October 21, 1960, ibid., 15:366,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v15/d177.
34. Nikita S. Khrushchev, speech, March 6, 1960, Moscow, USSR, American Foreign
Policy Current Documents, 1960 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1964), 5012
(hereafter AFP Current Docs). Khrushchev viewed the Pashtunistan confict as a means
to pressure Pakistan for its ties to Washington. See Roby C. Barrett, The Greater Middle
East and the Cold War: U.S. Foreign Policy under Eisenhower and Kennedy (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2007), 403.
35. White House press release, October 17, 1961, and notes, AFP Current Docs, 1961, 692.
100
36. McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery, 267; Nawaz, Crossed Swords, 18587; Burke
and Ziring, Pakistans Foreign Policy, 19597.
37. Nawaz, Crossed Swords, 185. Peshawar Air Station in Badaber was later used as
a training camp for Afghan mujahideen as part of Operation Cyclone, the CIA program to
fund the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. Peter L. Bergen argues convincingly of
the limited contact between CIA offcers and Afghan and Arab mujahideen, as operational
activities and training were ceded to Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Bergen, Holy
War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 6566.
38. McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery, 320; Nawaz, Crossed Swords, 18687. The
base in Peshawar was the departure point of Francis Gary Powerss ill-fated U2 mission on
May 1, 1960.
39. Quoted in McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery, 320.
40. Prime Minister of Afghanistan Visits the United States, DOS Bulletin, April 17,
1967, 62731.
41. Jacob C. Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger,
for Council on Foreign Relations, 1969), 303.
42. There is no established source for this frequently cited remark.
43. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 174; Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of
Its People and Politics (New York: Perennial, 2002), 179; M. Hassan Kakar, The Fall of
the Afghan Monarchy in 1973, International Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (May 1978):
195214.
44. Nawaz, Crossed Swords, 35051; Burke and Ziring, Pakistans Foreign Policy, 43234.
45. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 181.
SIX
1. Muhammad R. Azmi, Soviet Politico-Military Penetration in Afghanistan, 1955
to 1979, Armed Forces & Society 12 (Spring 1986): 32949; Vladimir Shlapentokh,
Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990),
14748. Earlier tradition is evident in J ohn L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and
Society in Russia, 14621874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 23172.
2. Quoted in Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1983), 27.
3. An examination of the biographies of the leaders of the three effective coups reveals
this. According to Alam Payind, the Soviet military trained 4,000 Afghan offcers between 1956
and 1978. Payind, Soviet-Afghan Relations from Cooperation to Occupation, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (February 1989): 112.
4. Military offcers and coup leaders with direct Soviet ties included Pacha Gul
Wafadar, Faiz Muhammad, Mohammad Raf, Abdul Qadir Dagarwal, Abdul Hamid Muhtat,
Mohammad Aslam Watanjar, Sherjan Mazdoryar, and Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoi. For
discussion of the coup leaders, see Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People
and Politics (New York: Perennial, 2002), 17980; Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A
History of Struggle and Survival (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 175; Bradsher,
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 5657; Fred Halliday, Revolution in Afghanistan,
New Left Review, NovemberDecember 1978, 344.
5. See The Military Balance, 19731974 (London: International Institute for Strategic
Studies, 1973), 49; The Military Balance, 19751976 (London: International Institute for
Strategic Studies, 1975), 52; The Military Balance, 19771978 (London: International Institute
101
for Strategic Studies, 1977), 5556; The Military Balance, 19791980 (London: International
Institute for Strategic Studies, 1979), 6263. This was the third time in a decade that the Soviets
conferred military aid to Afghanistan: November 14, 1966; September 4, 1969; and May 22,
1973. See Vasilii S. Khristoforov, Afganistan: Praviashchaia partiia i armiia (19781989)
[Afghanistan: The Ruling Party and the Army] (Moscow: Granitsa, 2009), 16.
6. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 17884.
7. See Anthony Arnold, Afghanistans Two-Party Communism: Parcham and Khalq
(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983).
8. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 5966.
9. See ibid., 74109, for an overview of the Saur Revolution.
10. Ibid., 77. This announcement was premature since the palace had not yet been captured.
11. Ewans, Afghanistan, 187.
12. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 76.
13. Ibid., 8285.
14. Afghanistan Task Force, Afghanistan: Soviet Invasion and U.S. Response (Issue
Brief IB80006, Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC, May 2, 1980), 3, http://
digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs8151/m1/1/high_res_d/IB80006_1980May02.pdf.
15. Thomas J. Barfeld, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2010), 22533.
16. On May 1, 1978, the PDPA announced the names of the twenty-one cabinet members
of the new government. There were eleven Khalqi and ten Parcham party members. Four had
received training in the Soviet Union and spoke Russian, yet almost all spoke English. There
were nine Pashtuns, eight Tajiks, two Hazaras, and two Uzbeks. See Louis Dupree, The
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, 1979: Rhetoric, Repression, Reforms, and Revolts
(Report No. 32, American Universities Field Staff, Hanover, NH, 1979), 2.
17. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 89.
18. Rosanne Klass, Afghanistan: The Accords, Foreign Affairs 66 (Summer 1988): 934.
19. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 96.
20. Arnold, Afghanistans Two-Party Communism, 61. U.S. Afghanistan expert Louis
Dupree supported this argument in A Communist Label is Unjustifed, New York Times,
May 20, 1978, 18.
21. Barnett R. Rubin, Political Elites in Afghanistan: Rentier State Building, Rentier
State Wrecking, International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (February 1992): 7799.
22. Edward Girardet, Afghanistan: The Soviet War (New York: St. Martins, 1985), 105.
23. The Kidnapping and Death of Ambassador Adolph Dubs, February 14, 1979,
Kabul, Afghanistan (Offce of Security, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, 1980).
24. Harold H. Saunders, statement before subcommittee on Asian and Pacifc Affairs, House
Foreign Relations Committee, September 26, 1979, American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents,
19771980 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 1983), 809 (hereafter AFP Basic Docs).
25. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden,
from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 4246; Bradsher,
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 99.
26. Christian Friedrich Ostermann, New Evidence on the War in Afghanistan, Cold War
International History Project Bulletin 14/15 (Winter 2003Spring 2004): 13940.
27. Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), 98104.
28. Patrick J. Garrity, The Soviet Military Stake in Afghanistan, 19561979, Journal of
the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies 125 (September 1980): 34; Washington
Post, May 10, 1979.
102
29. Quoted in Coll, Ghost Wars, 40.
30. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 102; Khristoforov, Afganistan, 2728.
31. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 15051.
32. Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 197989 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 55.
33. George Jacobs, Afghanistan Forces: How Many Soviets Are There? Janes Defence
Weekly, June 22, 1985, 122833. Military Balance, 197980, 106, noted that twenty-two Mi8s,
twenty PT78s, and twelve Mi24s were granted in March and April 1979.
34. Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19.
35. Taraki and Amin had considerable misgivings about Soviet intentions. See M. Hassan
Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 19791982 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995), 4045.
36. Quoted in Robert F. Baumann, Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus,
Central Asia, and Afghanistan (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1993), 133.
37. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 2021; Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 11025.
38. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 21; Odd Arne Westad, Concerning the Situation in A:
New Russian Evidence on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan, Cold War International
History Project Bulletin 89 (Winter 199697): 12832, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/
default/fles/e-dossier_4.pdf.
39. Nake M. Kamrany, The Six Stages in the Sovietization of Afghanistan (Boulder, CO:
Economic Institute for Research and Education, 1983), 14. On mujahideen ideology, see Robert
Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: How and Why They Fight (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 20547.
40. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 77677.
41. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 198.
42. Vladimir Snegirev and Valery Samunin, The Dead End: The Road to Afghanistan, ed.
Svetlana Savranskaya and Malcolm Byrne (Washington, DC: National Security Archive, 2012),
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB396/Full%20Text%20Virus%20A.pdf.
43. Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 8994; Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic
Terrorism, Tribal Conficts, and the Failures of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs,
2011), 17178. Also see Aleksander A. Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest Afgana [The Tragedy
and Valor of the Afghan] (Moscow: GPI Iskona, 1995), 14451; Khristoforov, Afganistan,
3738; Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 16988.
44. Remarks at a White House Briefng for Members of Congress, January 8, 1980 (frst
quote); Meet the Press, January 20, 1980 (second quote), Public Papers of the Presidents of the
United States, 19801981 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Offce, 1981), 1:40, 111. For
an overview of the U.S. response, see Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 189204.
45. Budget Message, Public Papers of the Presidents, 198081, 1:230; Bradsher,
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 190. For the Olympic boycott, see Nicholas E. Sarantakes,
Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011); Stephanie W. McConnell, Jimmy Carter, Afghanistan,
and the Olympic Boycott: The Last Crisis of the Cold War? (PhD diss., Bowling Green State
University, 2001).
46. Brzezinski has given slightly different variations to this story in interviews over the years,
particularly in relation to covert U.S. aid that began in July 1979. For a parsing of his statements,
see John B. White Jr., The Strategic Mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski: How a Native Pole Used
Afghanistan to Protect His Homeland (masters thesis, Louisiana State University, 2012), 8290,
97, http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04252012-175722/unrestricted/WHITE_THESIS.pdf.
103
47. Coll, Ghost Wars, 89106. Operation Cyclone was the code name of the CIA program
to arm, train, and fnance the Afghan mujahideen. See also Thomas T. Hammond, Red Flag over
Afghanistan: The Communist Coup, the Soviet Invasion, and the Consequences (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1984), 12021.
48. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 22737; Kakar, Afghanistan, 6669;
Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest Afgana, 15155.
49. Military Balance, 197778, 5556; Military Balance, 197980, 6263.
50. Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 13639; Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest Afgana, 17880.
51. Lester W. Grau, trans. and ed., The Bear Went over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics
in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996), offers Soviet views on
tactics and operations in Afghanistan.
52. Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest Afgana, 450; Khristoforov, Afganistan, 4142;
Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 140. This was the frst of four major phases of the Soviet war in
Afghanistan: phase one (December 1979February 1980); phase two (March 1980April 1985);
phase three (April 1985January 1987); and phase four (January 1987February 1989). See
Russian General Staff, The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost, trans. and
ed. Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 1214,
for descriptions of each phase.
53. Scott R. McMichael, The Soviet Army, Counterinsurgency, and the Afghan War,
Parameters 19 (December 1989): 2135, http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/
Articles/1989/1989%20mcmichael.pdf. As an example, Liakhovskii described his variable
relationship and intermittent confict with Ahmad Shah Massoud. Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest
Afgana, 494525.
54. Chemical Warfare in Afghanistan, Department of State report for Congress,
March 22, 1982, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1982 (Washington, DC:
Department of State, 1985), 90912 (hereafter AFP Current Docs); An Update on Chemical
Warfare in Afghanistan, Department of State report for United Nations, November 1982,
ibid., 91920.
55. Russian General Staff, Soviet-Afghan War, 4852.
56. The number increased to 750,000 by May 1980. Afghanistan Task Force, Afghanistan,
4, 6. According to Kathleen Newland and Erin Patrick, more than six million Afghans became
refugees during the 1980s. Newland and Patrick, A Nation Displaced: The Worlds Largest
Refugee Population, WorldView 14 (Fall 2001): 5153, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/
displaced.php.
57. Ronald W. Reagan, Appeal to Soviet President Brezhnev for Peace in Afghanistan,
March 20, 1982, AFP Current Docs, 907.
58. George H. W. Bush, speech, May 17, 1984, Peshawar, Pakistan, AFP Current Docs,
1984, 614.
59. Ibid., 61415; Howard B. Schaffer, Working Toward a Political Settlement while
Continuing Our Support for the Resistance, statement before subcommittee on Asian and Pacifc
Affairs, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, June 14, 1989, AFP Current Docs, 1989, 46667.
60. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 1644.
61. Ibid., 93121.
62. Ibid., 11314.
63. Ronald W. Reagan, statement by the president, June 16, 1986, AFP Current Docs,
1986, 472.
64. George Crile, Charlie Wilsons War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert
Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
65. Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 205.
104
66. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 43. Edward B. Westermann, The Limits of Soviet
Airpower: The Failure of Military Coercion in Afghanistan, 19791989, Journal of Confict
Studies 19 (Fall 1989): 3971, underlined the psychological importance of the Stinger missile
since accuracy and effectiveness of subsequent air operations suffered even more.
67. This was a complex, heavily debated, and extended process for Soviet leaders. See
Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 14777; Igor Tsybulskii, Boris Gromov (Moscow: Molodaia
gvardiia, 2008), 21827.
68. Quoted in Baumann, Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars, 148.
69. Lester W. Grau, Breaking Contact Without Leaving Chaos: The Soviet Withdrawal
from Afghanistan, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 20 (April 2007): 23561.
70. Quoted in Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Drugs, Thugs, and Crime are
Reshaping the Afghan Wars (New York: Picador, 2010), 56.
71. John H. Kelly, Policy Toward Afghanistan, March 7, 1990, AFP Currents Docs,
1990, 643.
72. Joint Statement and Commentary issued by Secretary of State Baker and Soviet
Foreign Minister Pankin, September 13, 1991, Moscow, USSR, AFP Current Docs, 1991, 650.
73. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 2068; Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending, 23740.
74. Barfeld, Afghanistan, 241.
75. Gen. Boris Gromov even wrote in a major Moscow newspaper in December 1999 that
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a huge political mistake. See Tsybulskii, Gromov, 227.
76. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 209; Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending, 23537; Johnson,
Afghan Way of War, 24954.
EPILOGUE
1. Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 107.
2. Thomas J. Barfeld, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2010), 248.
3. Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), 23738. Najibullah lived in the United Nations headquarters
in Kabul until September 27, 1996, when Taliban soldiers took him to his torture and death.
4. The text of the accords is in Amera Saeed, Afghanistan, Peshawar, and After, Regional
Studies (Islamabad) 11, no. 2 (1993): 10358.
5. Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending, 239.
6. Ibid., 24050; Aleksandr A. Liakhovskii and Viacheslav Nekrasov, Grazhdanin,
Politik, Voin: Pamiati Akhmad Shakha Masuda [Citizen, Politician, Warrior: In Memory
of Ahmad Sheikh Massoud] (Moscow: n.p., 2007), 23353; Peter Tomsen, The Wars of
Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conficts, and the Failures of Great Powers (New
York: Public Affairs, 2011), 48696.
7. Neamatollah Nojumi, The Rise and Fall of the Taliban, in Robert D. Crews and Amin
Tarzi, eds., The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008), 91.
8. Martin K. Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics (New York:
Perennial, 2002), 255.
9. Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Drugs, Thugs, and Crime are Reshaping the
Afghan Wars (New York: Picador, 2010), 7475. See also Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up:
Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), ch. 5.
105
10. Nojumi, Rise and Fall of the Taliban, 101; Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending,
246; Robert Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: How and Why They Fight (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 25456.
11. Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistans Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and
the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 108; Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2000), 1819, 84.
12. Olivier Roy, Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan? in William Maley, ed.,
Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press,
1998), 211.
13. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 211.
14. Brian Glyn Williams, The Last Warlord: The Life and Legend of Dostum, the Afghan
Warrior who led U.S. Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Regime (Chicago, IL: Chicago
Review Press, 2013), 161207.
15. His battles with Soviet special forces took place in the spring of 1987. Ali H. Soufan
with Daniel Freedman, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-
Qaeda (New York: Norton, 2011), 63; Peter L. Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring
Confict between America and al-Qaeda (New York: Free Press, 2011), 16.
16. Bergen, Longest War, 15.
17. For an overview of bin Ladens relationship with the Taliban, see Soufan, Black
Banners, 52, 5672; Bergen, Longest War, 1135; Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda:
Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008),
3760; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York:
Knopf, 2006); Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through Our Enemies Eyes: Osama bin
Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (Washington, DC: Brasseys, 2002), 151
93; The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks Upon the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Offce, 2004),
6370; Priscilla D. Jones, The First 109 Minutes: 9/11 and the U.S. Air Force (Washington,
DC: U.S. Air Force History and Museums Program, 2011), 4651.
18. Rashid, Taliban, 133.
19. In April 1998, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations William B. Richardson visited
Afghanistan and requested that the Taliban expel bin Laden. He was the highest-ranking U.S.
offcial to visit Afghanistan in decades. 9/11 Commission Report, 111.
20. 9/11 Commission Report, 65; Rashid, Taliban, 133.
21. John F. Burns, Threats and Responses: Assassination; Afghans, Too, Mark a Day
of Disaster: A Hero Was Lost, New York Times, September 9, 2002, http://www.nytimes.
com/2002/09/09/world/threats-responses-assassination-afghans-too-mark-day-disaster-
hero-was-lost.html.
22. Kalinovsky, Long Goodbye, 22425.
23. Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898; reprint, Mineola,
NY: Dover Publications, 2010), 6.
MICHAEL R. ROULAND is a historian with the Naval History and
Heritage Command, Washington, DC. Before accepting this
position in 2013, he worked for the U.S. Air Force Historical
Studies Offce in Washington, where he wrote this manuscript.
He holds a doctorate in history from Georgetown University.