Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield

Author:Thomas Barfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9781400834532
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Musahiban Policies: Stability über Alles

For the Musahibans nothing was more important than preserving the internal stability of Afghanistan, which they defined as maintaining their own rule over the country. Such a goal may not seem ambitious but it was far from easy to achieve. Power remained highly concentrated within Nadir’s extended family over the course of almost fifty years. In a country of weak institutions, their success in remaining united (or at least keeping the fights within the immediate family) provided the ballast to keep the ship of state on an even keel. They also had a long-term vision about how to structure the relationship between state and society to avoid conservative rebellions while still modernizing the country. It was a strategy of limited and gradual social change accompanied by economic development. Changes would begin in Kabul and move outward in a manner that would facilitate change without imposing it. To this end, the Musahibans realized that most Afghan rural rebellions that were later justified in Islamic terms had initially been provoked by the state’s economic demands for money and conscript troops. They still needed cheap manpower for the military, but they did seek to reduce the state’s economic pressure on the countryside in return for greater political subservience. Over the decades, taxes on rural production and people gradually declined in real terms until they were no longer a significant revenue source. In their place the Musahibans put the revenue burden on trade tariffs, government monopoly enterprises, and (particularly in its last twenty years) foreign aid and loans.

These strategies had developed in reaction to the Amanullah’s difficulties, and were designed to both prevent the turmoil that brought his regime down and reestablish an unchallengeable central government. The Musahibans perceived the greatest threat to their rule as arising from any alliance between Afghanistan’s disaffected rural population and the conservative Islamic establishment, but over time its own policies made these groups ever more marginal and less politically significant. As the state gradually eliminated rural taxation (and thus the need for corrupt tax officials who scoured the land to collect it), the tension between Kabul and the countryside subsided. Similarly, the Musahibans gradually marginalized the clergy and Sufi order leaders who played a powerful role in the 1930s, until by the 1960s they were no longer able to set state policy and had been pushed into the background. The success of both these strategies appeared sealed by the mid-1970s, when the government easily suppressed a new nonclerical Islamist movement that had attempted to foment a rebellion in the countryside. Not only was there no positive response to the call for insurrection; the imprisonment of many established clerics during the ensuing government’s crackdown produced little protest. But the very strategies used to sideline the conservatives had also empowered the modernist ideological descendants of Amanullah who believed that the Musahiban rule was too reactionary. Underestimating these people would prove the dynasty’s undoing.

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