Amanullah Khan: independence, reform and the crisis of 1929

Coming to the throne

Amanullah (1892–1961) was the third son of Amir Habibullah, who was assassinated in February 1919 while Amanullah was governor of Kabul, with control over the army and the royal treasury, an advantage that helped him prevail over his uncle Nasrullah. [1] The Iranica entries give slightly different dates for the assassination, 20 and 21 February. The entry on the wars says Amanullah ascended the throne on 25 February, and Poullada that an open durbar was held on 13 April. [1] [2] [3] He was strongly influenced by Mahmud Tarzi, an intellectual, author and publisher of the journal Siraj al-Akhbar, whose daughter Soraya he had married in 1914. Tarzi pushed him towards anti-colonial, pan-Islamic and reformist ideas. [1]

Independence

Amanullah demanded full sovereignty in foreign affairs, and after British hesitation he declared a holy war, which became the Third Anglo-Afghan War (3 May to 3 June 1919). [1] [2] As Daniel Balland describes it, Afghan forces, helped by Wazirs and Mahsuds from India, attacked the garrison at Thal while the Indian army advanced on Jalalabad and bombed Kabul from the air. The British, who feared a new war so soon after the 1918 armistice, and tribal uprisings along their frontier, agreed to an armistice and then to the Treaty of Rawalpindi on 8 August 1919, ending what Balland calls their forty-year protectorate over Afghanistan. [2] The treaty secured for Afghanistan full independence, including the right to conduct its own foreign affairs, and was followed by a Treaty of Friendship, signed on 22 November 1921, that let each country open a legation in the other's capital. [1] [3] [5] In the following years most major powers recognised Afghanistan; the United States did not do so until 1934. [1]

The reforms

With independence secured, Amanullah turned to modernisation. Leon Poullada divides his reforms into three stages: legal codification in 1919–23, which included Afghanistan's first constitution, dated 9 April 1923 by Poullada though Balland dates its approval by the 1,052-member Loya Jirga to 1924; military and executive reforms in 1924–26; and a brief third stage in 1928–29 that emphasised social and religious change. [1] [2]

The reforms were wide. The army was reorganised and military service put on a lottery. Educational standards were imposed on the religious establishment and its privileges curbed. Tribal subsidies and internal customs duties were abolished and taxes paid in cash. The first Afghan budget was drawn up, import-substitution industries were founded and agriculture was encouraged with tax incentives and land reform. Slavery was banned, polygamy discouraged and women encouraged, but not required, to unveil and take part in public life. Education for girls and boys was a priority, secularised and expanded to include foreign languages and study abroad. Roads, bridges and public buildings were built, along with Afghanistan's first opera house and a small railway linking Kabul with a new administrative capital, Dar al-Aman. [1] Balland adds that the solar Hijri calendar officially replaced the lunar calendar in 1922, that more than seventy ordinances were issued over nine years with the help of French and Turkish experts, and that in June 1926 Amanullah symbolically replaced the title amir with the more prestigious shah. [2]

Resistance

Most of the measures had little effect outside the cities, Balland points out, and several came close to threatening tribal autonomy. A tax on animal breeding was poorly received, and a law on identity cards and passports was read as an attempt to restrict free movement across the Durand Line. It became the pretext for a violent revolt of the Mangal of Paktia in 1924–25, which led to a cooling of the reforming zeal in the government. [2] Poullada adds that the army reforms, carried out by a Turkish military mission, were well meant but poorly implemented and left the army almost useless in the final rebellion. [1]

After a seven-month tour of the Near East and Europe in 1927–28, during which Amanullah and Queen Soraya were impressed by what Atatürk and Reza Shah had done in Turkey and Iran, he announced a much wider programme in late 1928. Balland lists suppression of polygamy, improving the position of women, a battle against corruption and family patronage and the secularisation of public life. [2] A minor revolt of the Shinwari in November 1928 gave the mullahs the opening to launch a violent campaign against him, accusing him of being a usurper and an enemy of Islam. [2]

Fall and exile

In a few weeks all of eastern Afghanistan was in revolt, according to Balland, and royal garrisons were defeated one after another. Habibullah Kalakani, a Tajik from Kohdaman known as Bacha-ye Saqao, took Kabul on 15 January 1929 and proclaimed himself amir. Amanullah had abdicated on 14 January in favour of his half-brother Enayatullah and fled to Kandahar. [2] M. Jamil Hanifi's Iranica entry on Kandahar adds that Amanullah publicly displayed the Cloak of the Prophet there to rally the Durrani, but their leaders did not fully support him. [4] An attack by the Ghilzai at Ghazni on 19 April 1929 forced him to abandon his march on Kabul. He left for British India in late April and then went to Italy. [2] [4]

He died in Italy on 21 September 1961, according to Poullada; Balland gives 1960. [1] [2] Nader Khan, a former minister of war under Amanullah, took Kabul in October 1929 with the help of Wazir and Mahsud fighters, and as Nader Shah reversed most of the previous decade's reforms. [2]

Why did it fail?

Historians disagree. Poullada writes that many Afghans believe the revolt was a British plot, but careful research in the British archives has failed to substantiate that, and there is considerable evidence against it. [1] A long-accepted theory holds that a conservative, orthodox people rose against reforms affecting women, the veil and polygamy, coeducation, and secularised law. Recent scholarship, Poullada reports, rejects it and argues that the rebellion was a classic tribal separatist movement against the centralising thrust of Amanullah's political and economic reforms. [1]

In this view the resistance was aimed less at the social and educational changes than at threats to tribal autonomy, the interests of the khans and the privileges of the ulama: the anti-corruption drive, the lottery draft, the end of tribal and religious subsidies, equitable tax collection, and roads and telegraphs that brought tax collectors, teachers and law enforcers into tribal areas. The tribes who rebelled, Poullada notes, were the least affected by the social and religious reforms, which were almost entirely urban. [1] Balland, for his part, mentions that the Shinwari revolt of 1928 may have been manipulated by the British secret service, and describes the attack on Amanullah as an old antagonism between the Durrani and Ghilzai confederations. [2]

Legacy

Poullada concludes that Amanullah's reign is important both as a prototype of an attempt to modernise a tribal society and because almost the entire structure of later Afghan modernisation was built on the base he created. [1] Habibullah, Amanullah and Queen Soraya are buried in a mausoleum at Jalalabad. [6]