Abdur Rahman Khan: the amir who unified Afghanistan, 1880–1901

From exile to the throne

Abdur Rahman Khan, born in 1844, was the son of Mohammad Afzal, the rival of Sher Ali, and a grandson of Dost Mohammad. He took an active part in the civil war between his father and his uncle before finding refuge in Samarkand, where he lived on a Russian pension for ten years. [1] When the Second Anglo-Afghan War left Afghanistan without a ruler, the British had two candidates to consider: Abdur Rahman, who returned in February 1880 and quickly gathered the government troops in Bactria, and Sher Ali's son Mohammad Ayub Khan, who was in Herat with a large army. Although the Russians supported Abdur Rahman, the British, according to Daniel Balland, offered him the throne because they thought he would be the more capable ruler of a strong buffer state. [1] [3]

On 22 July 1880 he was officially declared amir by General Roberts, after he accepted all the clauses of the Treaty of Gandomak, though he successfully demanded that the British representative at Kabul be an Indian Muslim and not an Englishman. [1] Five days later Ayub Khan, with a force of 25,000, defeated the British at Maiwand; Roberts defeated him on 1 September, and the British left all of Afghanistan except Kandahar, where a garrison stayed until April 1881. [1]

Putting down rivals

The most dangerous challenges came from two cousins, both sons of former amirs: Mohammad Ayub, whose prestige had risen after Maiwand, and Mohammad Ishaq, the popular governor of Afghan Turkestan. Abdur Rahman ended Ayub's claims in a quick campaign, with the fall of Kandahar on 22 September 1881 and of Herat on 2 October. Ishaq rebelled and failed in 1888. [1]

A second series of revolts arose from the amir's wish to reduce the autonomy of the tribes, especially by introducing new taxes. Most were put down rapidly, but the Ghilzai insurrection lasted until 1887 and the Shinwari, who controlled the western approach to the Khyber Pass, did not submit until 1892. [1] The Iranica entry on the Jabbar Khel, a Ghilzai branch which led the rebellion of 1886–87, records that its chief Esmat-Allah Khan and his eldest son were executed, other sons were exiled to India, and after the rebellion was crushed thousands of Jabbar Khel families were forced to move to Afghan Turkestan. [2] Balland adds that the large-scale settlement of Pashtun colonists north of the Hindu Kush, rewarded with land grants, uprooted certain rival tribes, particularly Ghilzai, and Pashtunised the north. [1] M. Jamil Hanifi notes in the Iranica entry on the Ghilzai that large numbers of Ghilzai were forced to settle in northern Afghanistan in the 1880s. [4]

Annexations

Abdur Rahman then set out to annex territories that had remained virtually independent. The Maimana khanate was reoccupied in 1884. The difficult conquest of the Shia Hazarajat in 1891–93 and the easier conquest of Kafiristan in 1896 were both accompanied, in Balland's words, by ferocious repression: part of the Hazara population was condemned to exile, and the Kafirs were forced to convert en masse to Sunni Islam; their country was renamed Nuristan, the land of light. [1] In 1896 representatives of "all the tribes" were assembled in Kabul to swear loyalty to the amir and give him the title Zia al-Milla wa'l-Din. [1]

How he ruled

Balland attributes the amir's success largely to the financial subsidies and arms Britain gave him under the Gandomak agreement, though he emphasises that this does not detract from his very real political ability. Balland names several instruments: the strengthening of the royal family's cohesion, the exile or house arrest of influential tribal chiefs, and a rigorous criminal code that made families collectively responsible. [1] Schinasi writes that when he came to the throne Kabul was a city in ruins: the Mughal covered bazaar had been destroyed by the British in 1842, and the Bala Hisar and part of the city in 1879. [5]

May Schinasi writes that the amir had a taste for architecture and built a collection of palaces and residences in and around Kabul, among them Bagh-e Bala, Bostan Sarai and the Mihman Khana, and at Bagh-e Alamganj the Workshops, the first steam-powered factories in Afghanistan, producing military equipment, textiles and household goods. [5]

He also made changes to social life and the economy. Balland lists the abolition of the levirate in 1883 and of slavery in 1895, though he doubts that either had immediate effects, as well as a campaign against highway robbers, and a policy of building strategic roads, bridges and caravanserais. A state monopoly gave the government control over a large part of internal and external trade. The first public clinic was opened by English doctors in 1895. Balland also points out the limits of these changes: they were concentrated in Kabul, nothing was done for education, and a spirit of isolationism rejected any modernisation of communications. [1]

Borders, the Durand Line and Kandahar

Abdur Rahman's reign saw Afghanistan's frontiers settled with its two imperial neighbours. Commissions with Russia delimited the north-west border in 1884–86 and the north-east in 1895, and with India in 1894–96. [1] On 12 November 1893 the amir and Sir Mortimer Durand, the Indian foreign secretary, agreed the frontier on the side of India, the Durand Line. It has long been an international boundary, though, writes James Norris, Afghans are inclined to call it the creation of unequal treaties. [6] Balland observes that the line confirmed Afghanistan's loss of control over the main routes to the Indus valley and created a major Pashtun irredentist problem. [1]

Kandahar, once the capital, lost ground. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi writes that by 1900 Kandahar and other cities had been superseded by Kabul, where political and economic capital concentrated under Abdur Rahman, whose brutal rule was fuelled by substantial external subsidies in the form of cash grants, weapons and industrial technology from his British Indian patrons. [7]

Death and legacy

Abdur Rahman died on 3 October 1901 in his new summer palace of Bagh-e Bala. When he died, Balland concludes, Afghanistan was a strong state with recognised boundaries for the first time in its history. His son Habibullah, whom he had chosen as successor in 1895, took the throne without opposition. [1]

Historians weigh his reign differently. The unification and centralisation were real, but they depended on foreign subsidies and on coercion that fell hard on particular groups, among them the Ghilzai, the Hazara and the Kafirs, and they left a legacy of tension over the frontier. This article presents the facts on which the Iranica entries agree and notes where they give a judgment. [1] [2] [4] [6]