Mohammad Daoud Khan: prime minister and first president of Afghanistan, 1909–1978

At a glance

• Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan (داود خان, Dāwūd Khān) was a Barakzai Durrani of the royal house, a cousin of King Mohammad Zahir Shah and husband of the king's sister Zaynab. Iranica gives his birth as 1909 in Kabul. [1, 10]

• He was prime minister from 20 September 1953 to March 1963. In those years Afghanistan took Soviet arms and credit, officials' wives appeared unveiled at the 1959 independence celebrations, and the border with Pakistan stayed shut for almost two years. [1, 10, 11]

• On 17 July 1973 he overthrew the monarchy while the king was abroad and became the first president of the Republic of Afghanistan. [1, 10]

• Officers of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan ended his rule on 27 and 28 April 1978, and he was shot dead in the presidential palace with most of his family. [1, 16]

• His remains were found in a mass grave near Pul-e-Charkhi in 2008 and buried with a state funeral in Kabul on 17 March 2009. [12, 14, 15]

A cousin raised in Hashim Khan's household

Daoud's father, Mohammad Aziz, was a brother of Mohammad Nadir Shah. The family belonged to the Yahyakhel line of the Mohammadzai clan of the Barakzai Durranis. Iranica says Daoud studied in Europe from 1921 to 1930 while his father, and for part of that time his uncle, lived in exile under Amanullah. In 1933 supporters of Amanullah assassinated both Nadir Shah and Mohammad Aziz, who was then ambassador in Germany. Nadir's son Zahir became king, and Daoud joined the household of his uncle Hashim Khan, who ruled as prime minister. In 1934 he married Nadir Shah's daughter Zaynab. [10]

Louis Dupree says Zahir Shah and Daoud had been classmates at the Afghan Military College, and that the bachelor Hashim taught the boys "the harsh facts of Afghan political life." [11] Daoud commanded the central forces at Kabul from 1939 to 1947 and was minister of defence in 1946. After a year as ambassador in Paris he became minister of the interior in 1949, with charge of tribal affairs. Iranica says that in this post he pressed the claim to self-determination for the Pashtun tribes inside Pakistan and sharpened the dispute with the new state. [10]

Sources disagree on his age. Iranica gives 1909, and both Ghaus and Dupree call him 43 in 1953. Dupree elsewhere says he was born in 1912, and an American embassy telegram of July 1973 called him 65. [1, 2, 10, 11]

The change of September 1953

Abdul Samad Ghaus, a deputy foreign minister of Daoud's republic, tells it this way. The prime minister, Shah Mahmud, resigned in early September 1953, and on 20 September the king named General Mohammad Daoud in his place. Ghaus calls him an ardent nationalist with a name for hard work and honesty. [1] Dupree says the transfer came with the approval of the royal family and without bloodshed, though Daoud arrested some outspoken critics. Daoud was commander of the central forces and had earlier left the interior ministry over a disagreement with Hashim. [11] Iranica calls the same event a bloodless coup against his uncle. [10]

Dupree lists the four problems Daoud meant to attack: the slow Helmand Valley project, a government leaning to the West, softness over Pashtunistan, and slow reform. Daoud "crushed opposition as it rose," Dupree adds, and did not go back to the liberal parliament of the late 1940s. [11]

Arms and credit from the Soviet Union

Daoud tried Washington first. In November 1953 his government asked the Export-Import Bank for 36 million dollars and was offered 18.5 million, for the Helmand project alone. In December Vice President Nixon visited Kabul and told the Afghans to drop Pashtunistan, which Ghaus says they took badly. In October 1954 Daoud's brother and foreign minister, Mohammad Naim, asked Secretary of State Dulles for arms. Two months later the answer was no, with advice to settle the dispute. [1]

Ghaus says the Afghans then turned north. In August 1955 they paid cash for three million dollars of Czechoslovak weapons. In December Bulganin and Khrushchev came to Kabul and offered a 100 million dollar loan over thirty years at 2 per cent. A Soviet military mission followed, then a long-term loan for rifles, tanks and aircraft, Soviet advisers in Afghanistan and Afghan pilots and tank crews in the Soviet Union. [1] Iranica dates the first arms agreement to 1955 and says Washington also gave development aid after 1956. [10]

In Kabul Bulganin said: "We sympathize with Afghanistan's policy on the question of Pashtunistan." Ghaus reports that Daoud told the Soviet leaders that no danger would reach Russia through Afghanistan so long as nobody meddled in its internal affairs. [1] Time magazine called him the Red Prince. Iranica calls him "an autocratic modernizer" who kept to non-alignment and played the two powers against each other. [1, 10] In June 1959 he addressed both houses of the United States Congress, and in December 1959 President Eisenhower came to Kabul. Ghaus also repeats a report that Khrushchev, in March 1960, offered to finance the whole second five-year plan if Soviet advisers sat in every ministry, and that Daoud refused. He gives it as the word of one source. [1]

Pashtunistan and the closed border

Pashtunistan (پښتونستان, Pəx̌tunistān) was, in Ghaus's account, the cause Daoud cared about most. Ghaus gives the Afghan reading of the 1950s. Pakistan merged its western provinces into "one unit" in March 1955, which Kabul took as a step towards destroying Pashtun identity. A mob attacked the Pakistani embassy in Kabul, and Pakistan blockaded Afghan transit trade until the quarrel was patched up in September 1955. A Loya Jirga in November 1955 backed the government's line and authorised arms from any source. [1] The background to the claim is in The Durand Line, 1893.

The clash came in 1960 and 1961. Dupree says Daoud twice sent several thousand troops into Bajaur on false intelligence about tribal fights. The first force, in September 1960, included irregulars and "army troops dressed as tribesmen," and the Bajauri Pashtuns themselves drove it back. A larger attack in May 1961 followed an appeal from the Nawab of Dir and his son for help against the Khan of Khar. Pakistani aircraft and the locally recruited Bajaur Scouts beat it, and a regular Pakistani regiment sent in afterwards was withdrawn after an ambush. [11] Ghaus confirms the incursions and thinks Pakistan's part in stirring up Kandahar over the veil probably helped bring them about. [1]

On 23 August 1961 Pakistan closed its consulates in Afghanistan and asked Kabul to close its consulates and trade agencies in Pakistan. [1, 11] A Pakistani white paper listed grievances about its consular staff: Afghan servants who would not work for them, high rents, police surveillance and insults. [11] Ghaus calls the move Ayub Khan's way of getting tough. Kabul gave a week's notice, then broke relations on 6 September and closed the border to all traffic. [1] Dupree quotes Daoud telling a West German journalist: "The border will remain closed until the Pushtunistan issue is settled." [11] Pakistan said it would still honour its transit obligations. Dupree writes that many foreigners and Afghans thought Kabul would have done better to keep relations and let goods through. [11]

Pakistan's side rests on its reading of the Durand Line. In October 1960 the American ambassador in Karachi, William Rountree, reported that there was no prospect of better relations if they depended on Pakistan accepting that Afghanistan had any legitimate voice in the tribal territories. He added that Pakistan said it would stop propaganda whenever Kabul did and would discuss any problem except Pashtunistan, but would make no concession involving its sovereign territory. [3] A Karachi despatch of April 1960 summarised the same stand in law: Pakistan's border extends up to the Durand Line, and the question is an internal matter. [4]

Ayub Khan told Averell Harriman in March 1961 that the Bajaur fighting of September 1960 had ended in a crushing defeat of intruders by Pakistan's own tribesmen, and that Afghan agents were busy in the tribal area trying to stir revolt. He called the Afghan complaints of bombing grossly exaggerated, a reconnaissance and the small-scale bombing of two houses. [5] In April he told Rountree that Bacha Gul was distributing money and arms in Bajaur, and that Pakistan had a perfect right to take whatever measures were needed to keep internal security. [6]

On the consulates, the editors of the American record note that Pakistan charged that the Afghan consulates and trade agencies were centres of subversion and hostile propaganda. [7] Pakistan's ambassador in Washington, Aziz Ahmed, told Under Secretary Bowles in September 1961 that it was not true that Pakistan had stopped the traffic, and that the real problem was "Paktoonistan". [8] In October Ayub Khan told the American envoy Livingston Merchant that Pakistan would keep the 1958 transit agreement and wanted traffic to resume, on two conditions: no reopening of the Afghan consulates, and no Pakistani trucks and drivers crossing into Afghanistan, where Pakistan could not protect them from mistreatment. [9]

Soviet aircraft flew out the Afghan fruit crop in 1961 and 1962, and a new Soviet transit agreement was signed in November 1961. American aid goods piled up in Karachi, Peshawar and Chaman, and the United States began routing supplies through Iran. [1] Dupree says the Soviet planners' "economic penetration experiment could not have received a greater boost." [11]

The unveiling of 1959

Daoud's social reforms were as public as his foreign policy. Dupree describes how his legal advisers, trained religious scholars, tested the veil against Islamic law, found no absolute basis for it, and acted "dramatically but unofficially." At the Jeshn celebrations of 1959, in late August, the wives and daughters of officials on the reviewing stand appeared with their faces bare. Iranica says Daoud and his chief commanders stood there with their wives unveiled and let it be known that any woman who wished could follow. [10, 11]

A delegation of religious leaders came to see him. In Dupree's account Daoud told them that if they could find "incontrovertible justification" for the veil in Islamic law, he would be the first to send his wife and daughter back into purdah. The mullahs went away and preached against the government, about fifty were jailed on charges of treason and heresy, and they were freed after about a week. Dupree adds that officials were made to bring unveiled wives to public functions, while unveiling stayed voluntary for everyone else, and that Pakistani newspapers ridiculed the move. [11]

Resignation, 1963

Radio Afghanistan announced on 9 March 1963 that Daoud had sent in his resignation on 3 March, after nine and a half years in office. [11] Iranica says the confrontation with Pakistan caused an economic crisis that forced him out. [10] Ghaus gives two causes. The Afghan leadership had agreed that the Pashtunistan quarrel was overheated, and Daoud offered to go so that a new government could restore relations. He and the king also differed on politics. Daoud wanted a single party first, Zahir Shah favoured wider liberalisation and wanted royal family members kept out of the cabinet. [1] The 1964 constitution did bar them. [10]

Dupree believed Daoud could have used the army to stay and did not. In his opinion he stepped down "for the good of the nation." He gives this as his own judgement. [11]

The coup of July 1973

King Zahir Shah was in Italy for medical treatment when Kabul woke on 17 July 1973 to tanks at the palace and a silent radio. At 7:20 the announcer said that Sardar Mohammad Daoud would speak. Ghaus remembers that the name brought relief to many listeners. In his broadcast Daoud declared a republic, and Ghaus says he described the constitutional period as a "pseudodemocracy." [1] The Americans reported that night a "brilliantly organized takeover" by a small number of young officers, which had abolished the monarchy and voided the 1964 constitution. [2]

The military side is disputed. Iranica says Daoud was helped by Soviet-trained officers, among them members of the Parcham faction. [10] Ghaus agrees that the coup leaned on a small circle of Russian-trained communist officers, because ten years out of office had cut Daoud off from the regular officer corps. He insists it was "definitely not a Russian initiative," while allowing that Moscow was probably kept informed. [1] An American embassy report two months later called the Soviet role "mysterious," although many were convinced Moscow had been close to the plot. [2]

A republic with one party

Daoud suspended the 1964 constitution and made himself head of state, with a Central Committee of mostly leftist officers and civilians. [1] In September 1973 police arrested the former prime minister Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal and forty-four others for plotting a coup. Ghaus says interrogators strangled Maiwandwal, that Daoud was angry, and that the official story of suicide was nonetheless published. [1] Iranica says that "a still tiny band of Islamic revolutionaries" rose against Daoud in 1975 and made bases at Peshawar. [10]

In April 1975, after a visit to Tehran, Daoud said at Herat that Afghanistan would not tolerate an "imported ideology." By the end of 1975, Ghaus says, communists had been purged from the interior ministry and most others. [1] Iranica agrees that by 1975 most Parchamis had gone and that Daoud was courting the Shah of Iran and the Gulf monarchs for money. [10] A Loya Jirga met in February 1977, adopted a new constitution, made the Party of National Revolution the only legal party and elected Daoud president for seven years. Ghaus says government measures kept communists out of the assembly. [1]

Bhutto, Zia and the "spirit of Kabul"

With Pakistan Daoud began hard. His first speech named Pashtunistan as the one remaining political difference, and Ghaus says Prime Minister Bhutto answered with anger and a propaganda campaign, accusing Kabul of backing the Baluch revolt. Ghaus denies it and describes help for Baluch refugees as old policy. [1] The American record shows both sides. When Kissinger met Daoud in Kabul on 1 November 1974, he found a hard liner whose officials were "almost totally preoccupied" with Pakistan. Bhutto, he noted, was equally set against being told how to run his affairs. [2]

Talks opened when Bhutto visited Kabul from 7 to 10 June 1976. By Ghaus's account Daoud accepted Pakistani wording that spoke of "differences" in the plural, joking that there were now "a variety of differences," and agreed to the five principles of peaceful coexistence. He told an aide that Afghanistan had to secure the Pashtuns' rights "to the maximum extent possible." Daoud visited Pakistan from 20 to 24 August 1976. Bhutto fell in July 1977, and General Zia-ul-Haq came to Kabul in October, where Ghaus found him the most open Pakistani leader he had met. [1]

Moscow, April 1977

Ghaus attended the talks in Moscow from 12 to 15 April 1977. Daoud had decided to ask Brezhnev privately whether Soviet subversion in Afghanistan had his approval. On the second day Brezhnev, through an interpreter, complained that experts from NATO countries were working in Afghanistan and asked for them to be sent away as spies. Ghaus reports that Daoud answered: "we will never allow you to dictate to us." He called the partnership one of equals and said Afghanistan "shall remain poor, if necessary, but free." Daoud then stood and left. When Brezhnev offered the private meeting, Daoud said there was "no longer any need for that meeting." [1]

Iranica gives the meeting in one sentence: Brezhnev warned Daoud about his growing ties with the Shah of Iran, and Daoud replied that Afghanistan would have relations with whomever it pleased. [10] The two accounts differ on what Brezhnev objected to, and only Ghaus was in the room. He adds that Daoud still told his officials to keep relations with Moscow as friendly as possible. [1]

The Saur coup, 27 and 28 April 1978

On 17 April 1978 Mir Akbar Khyber, a Parchami leader, was shot dead in Kabul. His funeral became a march whose speakers accused the government. Daoud had the party leaders arrested from 26 April and Hafizullah Amin on the morning of the 27th, according to Ghaus. [1] The party, its leaders Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, and what followed are in the Saur revolution and the Soviet war.

Communist officers began the coup around 11:00 on 27 April. Tanks of the Fourth Armoured Force took the Ministry of Defence and ringed the presidential palace, and by late afternoon the air force at Bagram was in their hands. Daoud had his family brought into the palace and told his ministers to carry on working. Jets and helicopters attacked the palace that evening and again about 2:00 on the 28th. [1] Ghaus argues that Soviet planning and advisers decided the outcome, and says Soviet aircraft may have flown from Tashkent. He gives these as reports and eyewitness word. [1]

About 6:00 on 28 April a crowd entered the room where Daoud, his family and two ministers had stayed behind. Ghaus writes that "it is said" Daoud answered a demand to surrender with: "I am not surrendering to a bunch of godless aliens." He, his brother Naim, nearly all their relatives, small children among them, and the two ministers were shot. [1] The United Nations mission in Afghanistan counts Daoud and 18 members of his family killed. [16] Iranica gives the date of his death as 27 April. [10]

Remains found, funeral held

The communist government never said where the bodies lay. In 2008 President Karzai set up a commission, and in July a former Defence Ministry official, Pacha Mir, said he had watched the burial and paced out the grave, 65 steps from the main road, at the Pedigan wasteland near Pul-e-Charkhi prison. He told Radio Free Afghanistan that Daoud and 12 relatives were brought there on the night of the coup and 16 more bodies the next night. [12] In December 2008 officials said the body had been identified. [13] On 12 January 2009 the deputy health minister, Faizullah Kakar, said Daoud lay with 16 relatives in two graves on a military training ground. The evidence included artificial teeth matching a cast made by a German dentist in the 1970s and a golden amulet holding a small Quran, a gift from the Saudi king. [14]

The state funeral took place in Kabul on 17 March 2009 at the presidential palace, with President Karzai present, flags at half mast and a gun salute. [15] Daoud's daughter, Durkhanai Noor, spoke of "my martyred father," and Kakar had called him "martyred president Daud Khan." [14, 16] Ghaus dedicated his book to the Afghan martyrs of 28 April 1978. [1] His family, his former ministers and the government that reburied him remember him as a martyr; Iranica and Dupree write only that he was killed.

How he is judged

Dupree, writing in 1973 before the republic, called Daoud dynamic and dogmatic and said few cabinet members chose to disagree with him. [11] Ghaus, who served in the republic, says Afghans welcomed his return for the growth of the 1950s and the country's standing abroad, and that the republic "came into being by the sole will of Mohammad Daoud." [1] Iranica says his links to Moscow earned him a nickname and that he was an autocratic modernizer. [10] In Ghaus's telling, Pakistan's leaders had always seen Daoud as the hardest Afghan hard-liner on Pashtunistan. [1]