If you can believe it, I once made a serious go at becoming a historian. I wanted to go to history grad school, but I hadn’t taken any coursework as an undergrad. Feeling extremely self-conscious and very far behind, I set out to get caught up. I took classes, first at U.Mass and then at Boston College. I went to AHA meetings and lectures at local universities. I read tons of book reviews. It was simultaneously enrapturing and terrifying.
But it was not to be. It’s hard to make up that much lost time, and I didn’t really have the mindset for researching in original sources, a skill that my “catch up” survey classes didn’t push. Now that I know better and have no serious desire to be a professional history, I would really love to do some original research (which probably explains why I’m so fascinated with tombstones these days).
And more than anything, I’m prone to scratch at an itch until I’m satisfied that I know enough about it to be able to define its key features, its edges, its historiography, and the why (not just the when and what). Since I finished my class early this month I’ve been reading voraciously about Afghanistan.
Afghanistan: the crossroads of the world, the graveyard of empires. Its recorded history extends thousands of years — Alexander of Macedonia lent his name to Kandahar, for goodness sake, and there’s another four to five thousand years in the archaeological record before he showed up. I’ve been reading a bit about that history recently, and I’d like to share it with you; but there’s way too much for one dispatch.
Its modern history intersects many of the 20th century’s historical themes: empire, globalization, the Cold War, and transnational terrorism. I think I was like most people who could only briefly describe Afghan history by giving a few keywords: Soviet invasion, mujahideen, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot more to it than the plot of a Rambo movie. Since Sunday marked the round-number anniversary of the beginning of what might euphemistically be called the “Afghan’s troubles,” let’s take a closer look at the last thirty years of Afghanistan’s history.
Important note: Be sure to see the “Important Note on Sources” at the end of this dispatch.
An Overview
The last thirty years in Afghan history trace an arc that began with instability and war and continued downward to disaster intermingled with stability through totalitarian theocracy before the reemergence of a fragile civil society in the midst of war. It’s fair to say that Afghans have endured one insurgency or another since 1978. Here are some of the key dates for future reference:
- April 27, 1978 — Communist coup
- December 24, 1979 — The Soviet Army invades
- February 15, 1989 — The Soviets withdraw
- April 1992 — The communist government falls to the Mujahideen
- September 1996 — The Taliban take Kabul
- December, 2001 — The Taliban flee Kandahar
The Saur Revolution
Picture it, Kabul 1978. King Zahir Shah had been living in exile for five years since a mostly bloodless coup led by President Mohammed Daoud Khan. Afghanistan was a poor developing country with powerful neighbors. Its western neighbor, Iran, was close to theocratic revolution in 1979. Pakistan, to the east and south, had seen General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq seize power in a coup the year before. And the Soviet Union loomed large on its northern border. Though nominally unaligned, the Soviets poured billions of rubles of influence south over the preceding decades in the form of economic and military aid.
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