War and Diplomacy in Afghanistan

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the territory of Afghanistan was occupied by a loose confederation of disparate Tajik, Hazara, and Pushtun tribes and principalities. The emir in Kabul was little more than the chief of one of them, and many tribal leaders, rather than paying tribute to him, received payments from him, allegedly for guarding the frontiers. Since the 1860s, control of Afghanistan had been the main prize in "the Great Game" played between the British and Russian empires as the Russians extended the security of their region by subduing one central Asian tribe after another, and as the British moved north from India seeking ground on which to anchor the defenses of the North-West Frontier Province of India (in present-day Pakistan). In 1907, confronted with a common German threat, Russia and Britain suspended the struggle, concluded the Anglo-Russian Entente, and settled their rivalry in Central Asia as well as in Persia. Afghanistan was placed within the British sphere of influence, and Afghan foreign relations, including those with Russia, were conducted by the government of British India in Delhi.

Ten years later, two events changed the terms of Russian and British relations with Afghanistan.^[60] The October Revolution brought to power a government which, unlike the Tsarist Empire, proclaimed its respect for Afghan independence, and the faithfully pro-British emir of Afghanistan (since 1901), Habibullah Khan, was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in February 1919. The new emir Amanullah Khan (1919-29) was associated with an enlightened and reformist-minded group of intellectuals in the Young Afghan movement. He was the son-in-law of Mahmud Tarzi, a man who had spent years in exile, who had strong Young Turk associations, who was well known outside the country as a leading Young Afghan anticolonialist, and who served as his foreign minister. Within months of coming to power, Amanullah adopted a program of radical reforms (which eventually resulted in a traditionalist revolt that drove him from power in 1929), declared Afghanistan an independent country, denounced existing treaties with Britain, opened negotiations with Soviet Russia, and declared a "holy war," calling on Indian Muslims to rise against British rule. In general, he displayed what Lord Curzon termed, with classic British understatement, "a truculent attitude."^[61]

2.  Soviet Turkistan and Afghanistan in 1922

Following a brief, three-week conflict, called the Third Anglo-Afghan War, Amanullah sued for peace. The Indian Army had confronted him within a few miles of the border, and the ability of British forces to bombard Kabul and Jalalabad from the air impressed him. Under the terms of the treaty of Rawalpindi (August 1919), Amanullah recognized British authority over the Pathan tribal belt of the North-West Frontier Province. The government of India recognized the independence of Afghanistan and surrendered control of Afghan foreign relations while at the same time

cutting off the subsidy the emir received. The Indian government had little choice but to surrender its strategically significant position. Although the Indian Army had repulsed the Afghan invasion, its military campaign had collapsed completely when the long-established practice of defending the Peshawar district of the North-West Frontier Province with local tribal troops failed disastrously. So many men deserted from the Khyber Rifles that the commanders found it necessary to ask each man individually whether he wished to remain in British service or to be discharged. Six hundred of seven hundred men opted for discharge, and the unit had to be disbanded.^[62] In the aftermath of the war, the government of India reevaluated its whole frontier policy, and the British Indian Army was permanently redeployed in the area.^[63]

The Red Army meanwhile had given support to the Afghan war effort, turning back a British Indian attack in Turkistan and forcing the enemy to give up the idea of opening up a second front against Afghanistan in the north.^[64] The basis for continuing Soviet-Afghan collaboration was then laid in April 1919. As tensions mounted between Kabul and London, Amanullah addressed two letters to Moscow, which did not arrive until six weeks later, having been passed with enormous difficulty through the military fronts of the Civil War.^[65] One letter, addressed to the NKID, requested formal diplomatic relations. The second was a personal greeting from Amanullah to Lenin calling him "the greatest hope of the Afghan people." Lenin responded promptly by praising the Afghans for their heroic defense of their freedom, calling Afghanistan "the world's only independent Muslim state," agreeing to an immediate exchange of diplomatic representation—making Afghanistan the first country in the world to recognize the Soviet government—and suggesting the possibility of "mutual assistance against every encroachment on the part of foreign plunderers."^[66] Soon thereafter, a second dispatch announced the impending delivery of "a completely outfitted radio-telegraphic station which represents the latest achievement of technology."^[67] Indications of Soviet-Afghan collaboration had a decisive effect on the terms of the Anglo-Afghan peace negotiations taking place at the same time.

Yakov Surits, who subsequently had a long career of ambassadorial posts in Turkey, Germany, and France, was appointed "extraordinary and plenipotentiary representative of the RSFSR in Central Asia with residence in Kabul"—suggesting to one scholar that his duties included directing subversive activities from northwest India to Chinese Turkistan.^[68] He was succeeded in March 1921 by Fedor Raskolnikov, the mastermind of the Gilan Soviet Republic, and the man who made Kuchik Khan a world revolutionary figure.

A dynamic and charismatic personality,^[69] Raskolnikov took his name from the protagonist of Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment , and while a student he had worn his hair long, wrapped himself in a long, dark coat, and affected a typical "nihilist" stance. His Bolshevik credentials went back nearly to the foundation of the party—he had been editorial secretary of Pravda when it first appeared in 1912. Drafted for the World War, he attended the naval academy, and by the time of the October Revolution he was a junior officer and an important revolutionary organizer among the sailors of Petrograd. His bravery and achievements during the Civil War were legendary. Raskolnikov was married to Larissa Reisner, who was well known before the revolution as a decadent-leaning poet and subsequently as a prominent "aesthetic revolutionary." A man of letters himself, he organized literary magazines and authored books following his service in Kabul. His presence in Kabul contributed significantly to the romanticization of diplomatic representation in Afghanistan that characterized numerous "diplomatic novels" published in the USSR and, eventually, the film Mission to Kabul . During his posting in Kabul, Raskolnikov and Reisner separated and then divorced. She returned to Moscow in early 1923, and the following autumn accompanied Karl Radek to Germany, where she acted as liaison between the KPD leadership in Berlin and the Comintern delegation in Dresden during the abortive "German October" revolution. After Raskolnikov's appointment to Kabul ended in 1924, he held important positions in the NKID and in the Communist International, including the directorship of the Eastern Division of the Comintern Secretariat. While abroad at a diplomatic post during the purges of the 1930s, and knowing the fate of ambassadors who returned to Moscow when recalled, he declined to go back and instead published a bombshell "open letter" to Stalin in the French press, accusing him of betraying the revolution and becoming a despot. For this he was rehabilitated during the Khrushchev thaw, and during glasnost he became the object of admiration among reformers.

In Kabul, Soviet diplomacy could operate without the embarrassment of the Comintern. No socialist or Communist party existed in Afghanistan, and the CI displayed little interest in inspiring and supporting one. With Afghanistan, the Comintern employed the rhetoric of bourgeois nationalism rather than of proletarian revolution, and aimed it directly at the Pan-Islamic proclivities of the Young Afghan nationalists. As Afghanistan was the only independent state in the Muslim world, so Lenin told the new Afghan ambassador, the "great historical task befell it of unifying around itself all the enslaved Muslim nations, and of leading them on the path of freedom and independence."^[70] Moreover, Afghanistan was of great strate-

gic significance both to the military security of the soviet republics and to the cause of global anti-imperialist revolution. An independent and neutral Afghanistan, like an independent and neutral Persia, diminished British predominance on the southern rim of the socialist republics and formed the basis for a possible anti-British nationalist movement on the frontiers of India. These prospects, rather than the hope of creating a socialist revolution there, attracted the Bolsheviks to Kabul.

It was primarily the need for assistance from Soviet Russia in the event of a renewed Anglo-Afghan war that brought Amanullah into treaty negotiations with Moscow. He seems to have aimed at a comprehensive offensive-defensive alliance, a step the NKID was not prepared to take. However, the Soviet government was willing to grant financial and military assistance, and a formal Soviet-Afghan treaty of recognition and friendship was initialed by Surits and Mahmud Tarzi in September 1920 and signed the following February.^[71] Both governments promised to refrain from entering into agreements with third parties against the interests of the other—a provision of much greater potential benefit to Russia than to Afghanistan. In exchange, Moscow promised Kabul, in addition to the radio station promised in the summer of 1920, a telegraph line from Kabul to Kushka via Kandahar, a yearly subsidy of one million rubles in gold or silver, and technical specialists. No mention was made of the military aid Surits had promised the previous spring—airplanes with crews, an air force training school, antiaircraft guns, and 5,000 rifles with ammunition.^[72] The agreement strengthened Amanullah's hand in maintaining Afghan independence from Britain, and after 1921, Afghanistan was no longer the extension of the British Empire it had been in 1914. Lenin and Chicherin believed moreover that the treaty would accelerate the liberation of the oppressed peoples of Asia,^[73] and the Foreign Office in London feared that Kabul would become the instrument of a Bolshevik campaign to overthrow British rule in India. Neither happened.

Instead, major tensions developed in the new Soviet-Afghan friendship, largely as a result of Russian efforts to sovietize the former Tsarist Empire in Central Asia and of Amanullah's ambition to incorporate part of it into a confederation of Islamic states in Central Asia. The confederation he imagined included the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva and entailed direct Afghan sovereignty in the Turkmen districts of Kushka, Panjdeh, and Merv. Persia, regarded as too weak to oppose or rival Afghan aggrandizement, was expected to accept Kabul's domination. In the event that the former Russian Empire disintegrated further, all of Turkistan would be included. If British power in India receded, Amanullah would lay claim to the lands of the Pushtun tribes to the south and to the maritime province of

Sindh Sind with its port at Karachi. As might be expected, Moscow looked with favor upon Afghan claims made at the expense of British India and Persia, but not upon Amanullah's claims to Soviet Turkistan.^[74]

The Afghan-Soviet rivalry in Turkistan was intensified by the basmachi rebellion, which Amanullah sought to win over to his Pan-Islamic movement, and which the Soviets were intent on suppressing. The basmachi (from the Uzbek term for bandit) were armed bands organized around local chiefs, called kurbashi , who exercised both military and political authority over their followers. They had begun as improvised self-defense organizations during the period of semianarchy that existed in the region from early 1918 to late 1920. The sovietization of Turkistan, the nationalization of cotton and vine growing, famine, and unemployment swelled their ranks and transformed them into a loosely organized, counterrevolutionary, anti-Soviet resistance in the defense of their independence and their traditional way of life. The rebellion of the basmachi began in, and was centered in, the Fergana Valley of what became Soviet Tadzhikistan, where it had strong support from the local population. With the Soviet takeover in Bukhara and Khiva, it spread to those areas too. By December 1921, basmachi forces numbered 20,000, and the movement was growing into something approaching an Islamic revolt against Soviet power The basmachi were Muslim and Turkistani and identified themselves as mujahedeen . The forces opposing them—mainly ethnic Russians—closed Muslim religious schools and curtailed the activities of the clergy. Muslim units of the Red Army proved to be unreliable and deserted to the basmachi ; important Muslim figures in the Bukharan government defected; and the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party had to take over coordination of the Communist parties of Turkistan, Bukhara, and Khoresm. The basmachi rebellion became the most formidable mass anti-Soviet revolt prior to the Afghan resistance of 1978.^[75]

The conflict reached its most intense level with the arrival in Bukhara of Enver Pasha, former war minister of the Young Turk ruling triumvirate of the Ottoman Empire. Ultra-ambitious and opportunistic, Enver had dreams of a Pan-Turanian Islamic federation in Central Asia. He signed his documents as "Commander-in-Chief of all Forces of Islam, son-in-law of the Caliph [he was married to the daughter of the last Turkish sultan], and Representative of the Prophet." Along with other Young Turks, he stood accused of organizing the 1915 genocide of the Armenian people, and at the end of the World War he was sought by the Kemalist nationalists of Turkey as a traitor and by the Allies as a war criminal. In the summer of 1920, Enver and another leading Young Turk, Djemal Pasha (subsequently shot on the steps of the Tiflis Cheka by Armenian fidai nationalist guerrillas),

arrived in Moscow, after having earlier contacted Karl Radek in Berlin, and offered their services to the revolution. Although Lenin distrusted Enver, he was prepared to use him in the cause of Islamic anti-imperialism.

Together Enver and Djemal participated in the Baku Congress, and Enver was sent to Turkistan in November 1921. There he was expected to act as a pro-Bolshevik leader of well-known nationalist and Pan-Turkic reputation, consolidate Soviet control over the Turkmen of Central Asia, and promote anticolonial rebellion against British influence throughout the region. However, instead of winning the Muslims of Central Asia to the cause of world revolution, Enver assumed a Pan-Islamic program, defected to the anti-Soviet basmachi rebels, and joined with Ahmed Zeki Velidi (Torgan) in an effort to bring unity to the movement. The deposed emir of Bukhara named him commander in chief of Bukharan resistance forces, and by the spring of 1922 he had gathered together some independent tribal chiefs, acquired about 7,000 supporters, and captured Dyushambe (subsequently the capital of Tadzhikistan). Enver rejected the efforts of the NKID to negotiate a truce with him, stating: "Peace is only acceptable after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Turkistan soil. The freedom fighters, whose commander I am, have sworn to fight for independence and freedom until their last breath." In return he dispatched an ultimatum to Moscow in May demanding national independence for the "peoples of Bukhara, Turkistan, and Khiva."^[76]

Moscow responded angrily, temporarily suspended the Soviet-Afghan treaty, and sent Ordzhonikidze and the Third Red Army to Turkistan, where they took ruthless punitive measures. Crops and wells were destroyed and hostages were taken and executed. Aerial bombardment and, allegedly, poison gas were used. Entire villages were wiped out in what became known during the glasnost era as "the most unknown Soviet war." The Russians deployed a relatively small force (estimates of troop strength vary) but one far superior to the basmachi in size, training, and especially in firepower. When Enver insisted in fighting open battles against superior forces, he suffered major defeats at the hands of the Red Army. His supporters drifted away, and he was killed in a skirmish with Russian troops near the Afghan frontier in August 1922.

Enver had never succeeded in fully uniting the basmachi chiefs and the British had rejected his pleas for military assistance. Amanullah gave up the struggle in November in order to turn his attention to the south, where British Indian forces were gaining control of the relatively independent tribal areas along the Indo-Afghan frontier. He abandoned his project for an Afghan-led Central Asian Islamic Confederation. Enver's successor kept the struggle alive among the basmachi in the hope of massive British

and/or Afghan military assistance that never came. In the end a combination of military operations and the economic and social concessions that accompanied the New Economic Policy extinguished the revolt. The basmachi rebellion in the Fergana Valley was defeated by a Red Army offensive in 1923 that employed cavalry, artillery, armored cars, and airplanes. A hard-core but incoherent anti-Soviet resistance persisted in the mountains of southern Bukhara until 1928 and on the steppes of Turkmenistan until 1935. Thus the basmachi resistance was tenacious, but the most remarkable story of the conflict may be the ability of the young Soviet state to win a significant guerrilla war in one of the most inaccessible regions of the world.

The basmachi war clearly demonstrated the limits of Amanullah's rapprochement with Soviet Russia. Following the September 1920 Soviet revolution-invasion in Bukhara, the emir and his entourage had escaped into the mountains to the east, and from there the advance of the Red Army drove him to take refuge in Kabul. Amanullah considered himself the protector of the emir. He granted diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of Bukhara only under intense pressure from Moscow, and as the anti-Soviet resistance in Central Asia intensified after the arrival of Enver, Amanullah gave to the exiled emir of Bukhara and to the basmachi direct and covert military assistance and also allowed them to use northern Afghanistan as a base of operations. Nadir Khan, the war minister and Amanullah's successor as emir of Afghanistan (1929-33), personally coordinated military operations from northern Afghanistan. At one point (July 1922), he took up a position with a considerable force on the Afghan-Soviet frontier and addressed a message to Chicherin making his intentions clear: "I have the honor to warn Your Excellency that unless the Bolsheviks stop their unfriendly activities against Bukhara, the government of Afghanistan will be forced to annex it. This is the only way to help the Islamic state of Central Asia against treacherous Bolshevik plotting."^[77]

These tensions did not, however, disturb the essential geopolitical basis of Soviet-Afghan affinity—their mutual desire to turn back the efforts of the government of British India to gain control of the independent Pushtun tribes of the Peshawar district of the North-West Frontier Province. When this "forward policy" resumed, Amanullah visited Peshawar in 1923 and met with tribal leaders. Together they concluded that the situation was dangerous for the security of Afghanistan as well as for the Pushtun tribes, and Kabul distributed sizable amounts of money. With the connivance and encouragement of Amanullah, some tribes conducted raids against British forces and then took refuge in Afghanistan. This constituted an opportunity for the Soviet government, in the words of Larissa Reisner, to

"remind the British, particularly after Lausanne, of their weak spot in the East."^[78] It was also a chance to renew collaboration with Amanullah following the basmachi war.

To support Amanullah and the Pushtun against the "forward policy," Raskolnikov in February 1923 recommended to the Commission for Turkistani Affairs in Tashkent that arms and money be distributed to tribal leaders. Both were forthcoming; the radio transmitter promised in 1920 was constructed; preparations were made to deploy eleven military aircraft; and the NKID authorized Kabul to import arms from Italy across Soviet territory.^[79] Anglo-Afghan tensions mounted in this latest continuation of "the Great Game," and by the end of the year a "Fourth Anglo-Afghan War" seemed imminent. The British openly threatened to bomb Kabul from bases in India, but were deterred by the presence of Soviet aircraft. Only Amanullah's surrender to demands that tribesmen who resisted British Indian authority be arrested prevented war.

Soviet support for Amanullah's regime continued in the face of a conservative rebellion against the emir that erupted in March 1924. Centered in the mountainous eastern province of Khost, the revolt prefigured the opposition to Amanullah that would force him to abdicate in 1929. The rebels opposed the landslide of progressive reforms Amanullah had introduced beginning in April 1923—centralized administration, constitutional government, development of education, encouragement of trade and industry, legal recognition of private property in land, direct taxation, suppression of slavery, and a formal penal code.^[80] The rebels came within 80 km of Kabul, where they were stopped when Soviet (and German) planes and pilots, in a remarkable feat of contemporary aviation, crossed the Gindikush mountains and bombed, strafed, and dispersed them.^[81]

The direct military assistance rendered to Afghanistan from 1919 to 1924 indicated the extent to which Soviet Russia was willing to go to protect an independent and intentionally progressive regime against its enemies, both those within and those without. By establishing and maintaining normal and friendly relations with internally and externally stabilized regimes in Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey, the Soviet government largely restored the prewar borders of the Russian Empire along the southern perimeter of what would become the Soviet Union and reinforced "anti-imperialist" regimes against British control and influence. In Afghanistan the objectives of Soviet policy were consistent with the principles of conventional international relations. The ECCI made no effort to promote social revolution among the tribes of Afghanistan, and no attempt was made to create an Afghan Soviet Republic or even to inspire a Communist party.^[82] No dual policy was conducted in Kabul. The purposes of global

revolution were not absent from Soviet-Afghan relations, however, for Afghanistan occupied a place of importance in the Comintern's project for revolution in India.