Kabul and its Pashtuns: the capital from Timur Shah to the Taliban

Kabul (کابل, Kābul) stands at almost 6,000 feet on the right bank of the Kabul river, in a valley ringed by mountains. [8] The Gazetteer's description of 1912 puts it six miles above the river's junction with the Logar, 98 miles from Jalalabad, 181 from Peshawar and 310 from Kandahar, with the Sher Darwaza heights to the south and the Bala Hisar and the Siah Sang ridge to the east. [7] Timur Shah made it the Pashtun kings' capital in the 1770s, and it has been the seat of political power since. [8]

It is not a Pashtun city. Elphinstone described Kabul as inhabited by Tajiks, and a Radio Free Europe correspondent reported in 2002 that Dari was the predominant tongue in the capital. [4, 12] Hazaras, Qizilbash, Hindus, Kashmiris and Pashtuns have all lived in it, and the sources give each a different weight in different years. The Pashtun part of its story is the kings who ruled from the Bala Hisar, the quarters and neighbours that carry Pashtun names, the fortunes of Pashto in a Persian-speaking capital, and the war of 1992 to 1996 and what followed.

A valley of many peoples

The valley is old. Adamec notes the name Kubha in the Rigveda and Kabura in Ptolemy, and Babur took Kabul in October 1504, loved it, and had his son Humayun born in the Bala Hisar on 6 March 1508. [5, 8] Elphinstone, quoting Babur, lists the peoples of the district in Babur's day: Turks, Aimaqs and Arabs in the plain; Tajiks, Pashais and Parachas in the towns and some villages; Hazaras, Tokhdaris, Afghans and Kafirs in the hills. Babur counted Afghani among the languages spoken there. [3] Kabul stayed under the Mughals until Nadir Shah of Persia took it in 1738. He left Qizilbash troops in four large garrisons and was assassinated in 1747. [5]

Those Qizilbash stayed. Elphinstone put them at ten or twelve thousand in the town, Persian-speaking Shias who spoke Turkish among themselves and had settled in the time of Nadir and Ahmad Shah. [3] Masson, who lived in Kabul in the early 1830s, counted about nine thousand houses, nearly half of them Shia, and a population of fifty to sixty thousand. He described Chandol, a walled quarter west of the old city with fifteen hundred or two thousand houses, inhabited only by the Persian and Turkic families who had settled after Nadir's death. [1]

Amir Sher Ali's census of 1876, which the Gazetteer prints, counts the city by community. It gives 140,700 people: Kabulis 103,050, Tajiks 12,000, Kizilbashis 6,500, Saifis 4,000, Hindus 4,000, Duranis 3,000, Kashmiris 3,000, Parachas 3,000, Ghilzais 2,000, Armenians 100 and Jews 50. The "Kabulis" are a mixed Sunni group that, the Gazetteer says, resembles the Tajiks but is classed apart from them. [7] The two Pashtun groups the list names, Duranis and Ghilzais, come to 5,000 together. The entry does not say who the Saifis are. The figure sits oddly beside Adamec's 60,000 for the 1920s, and the sources do not reconcile the two. [8]

No recent census counts Kabul by community. The National Statistics and Information Authority (NSIA) estimated in 2021 that 5.3 million people lived in Kabul, and the Voice of America described the city as having more than six million people in August 2021; both are estimates. [14, 15]

Timur Shah's capital

Ahmad Shah ruled from Kandahar and, in Dupree's account, preferred to spend spring and summer at Kabul, where he lived in a garden by the river and not in the Bala Hisar, so that people could see him. [5] His son Timur Shah moved the seat of government. Elphinstone says Timur distrusted the Durranis, who had been angered by the execution of a vizier, and moved from Kandahar, "in the midst of the Dooraunee country", to Caubul, "which is inhabited by Taujiks, the most quiet and submissive of all the subjects of the Afghaun monarchy". [4] Adamec dates the move to 1775 or 1776; Elphinstone and Dupree give no year. [4, 5, 8] The court that followed is told in Timur Shah, Zaman Shah and the Sadozai kings. Timur died in the citadel in 1793, and his unfinished octagonal mausoleum still stands in the middle of the city. [5]

The Bala Hisar

The Bala Hisar, the citadel on the hill east of the old city, was the royal residence under the Sadozai kings and the Barakzai amirs. Masson describes two parts, the lower fortress and the upper. [1] In Dost Mohammad's time, Dupree writes, the lower fortress held three palaces, barracks, stables, a bazaar and about a thousand houses, chiefly of wood and some of them carved and painted. Above it the upper fortress held the armoury and the dungeon called the Black Pit. [5] Burnes lodged in the Bala Hisar during his stay in Kabul. [2]

The citadel's end came in 1879. In September mutinous Afghan troops attacked the British Residence of Sir Louis Cavagnari in the lower fortress, killed nearly all its members and burned it. [5] After General Roberts took Kabul, a magazine in the upper fortress exploded, and Roberts ordered the whole citadel demolished. He wrote that destroying the fortified palace where the massacre had taken place, "the symbol of the power of the Afghans", would be a fitting punishment and a lasting memorial of the British ability to avenge their countrymen. The work was carried out in the spring and summer of 1880. [5] The Gazetteer's 1912 account says the lower fortress was completely dismantled and the upper kept as a grain store. [7] Adamec says it was rebuilt in 1939 as a garrison and military college. [8] Amir Abdur Rahman built his own walled palace, the Arg, on the plain to the north, and Adamec dates the move to 1888. [5, 8] See Abdur Rahman Khan.

Barakzai Kabul

Dost Mohammad, a Barakzai, held Kabul from 1826, and European visitors of his reign wrote about it at length. [5] Masson found the houses mostly of mud and unburnt brick, divided into quarters (mahalla) and lanes (kucha) closed by small gates that were built up in time of war. [1] The covered bazaar of the Chahar Chatta was the city's pride. [5, 7] The life of Dost Mohammad is in his own article.

When the British brought Shah Shuja back in 1839, Kabul was the scene of the rising of November 1841, the death of Sir William Macnaghten at the hands of Dost Mohammad's son Akbar Khan, and the retreat of January 1842, told in the Anglo-Afghan wars and in Wazir Akbar Khan. Shah Shuja was killed near the Bala Hisar on 5 April 1842. [5] When General Pollock returned that September, Dupree writes, the city was deserted, its people having fled to Istalif. On 10 October Pollock ordered the Chahar Chatta destroyed, and soldiers and camp followers set most of the city on fire except the Bala Hisar and the Qizilbash quarter of Chandawal. [5] The Gazetteer says Dost Mohammad rebuilt the bazaar about 1850. [7]

Kings and rebels, 1880 to 1933

Amir Habibullah brought electricity to the city, and King Amanullah, after the independence of 1919, began a new capital at Darulaman, six miles out, with a parliament building and trolley lines to the old city. [5, 8] In mid-January 1929 Bacha Saqao, a man from the Koh Daman who Dupree says was a water-carrier's son, took the city, and Amanullah left for Kandahar. [5] See Amanullah Khan. Nadir Khan, recalled from his post in France, crossed from India in March 1929 and pushed through Paktia, and the advance led by his brother Shah Wali reached Kabul at the beginning of October. Bacha Saqao fled, was captured and was hanged. [5] The Minar-i-Nejat, the column at the entrance to the Bala Hisar, commemorates Nadir's entry. [5] His story is in Mohammad Nadir Shah.

Pashtun names, quarters and neighbours

The old city kept some places named for Pashtuns. The Gazetteer's list of the streets and quarters of 1880 includes a Mahala Achakzai, and Masson, who arrived in Kabul in 1831 by Dupree's dating, writes of "the Atchak Zai Afghans of the city". [1, 5, 7] He tells how, during Muharram, a clash broke out between those Achakzai and the Shia Jianshirs, in his spelling, who were wailing and beating their breasts for the sons of Ali. He does not say who began it. Several lives were lost, the Sunni population were about to arm, Chandol manned its ramparts, and Dost Mohammad appointed agents for the two sides, who let the matter subside without a settlement. [1] On the north bank, below the Asmai heights, lies Deh Afghanan, whose name is Persian for the village of the Afghans; the sources do not say how it came by the name. [5, 7] Dupree calls it one of Kabul's most ancient landmarks. [5] See the Achakzai.

Pashtuns from outside came and went with the seasons. Burnes describes the Lohani Afghans, a pastoral and migratory people who went to India to buy goods and reached Cabool and Kandahar by the middle of June. A party of Lohani merchants called on him in Kabul in December, in trouble over a seized caravan, and Masson lists lambs of the Lohani and Ghilzai flocks among the delicacies of the spring bazaar. [1, 2] Elphinstone placed the Wardak, an Afghan tribe, in the valley running south from the Kabul plain toward Ghazni. [3] See the Wardak and the Ghilzai.

The new quarters built from the 1940s have names from the same world: Adamec lists Wazir Akbar Khan, Khushhal Khan Mina, Nur Muhammad Shah Mina and Nadir Shah Mina, and in 1953 Jada-yi Maiwand, Maiwand Street, was cut through the old city. [8] The Maiwand column on it, put up by King Zahir Shah in 1959, bears an inscription from a Pashto poem about the battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880. In Dupree's guide, the girl Malalai tells the wavering soldiers: "If you do not taste of martyrdom today on this field of Maiwand, By God I am afraid you'll lead an ignominious life forever more." [5] The battle is in Malalai of Maiwand and Sardar Ayub Khan. Nadir Pushtun Wat, named for King Nadir Shah, runs from Pushtunistan Square to the column. [5]

Pushtunistan Square has a fountain finished for the Jeshn of 1962, with a Pushtunistan flag and emblem above a monument, and Pushtunistan Day was kept there each year on 31 August. [5] Dupree gives the dispute behind the name from both sides. After 1947 the Afghan government challenged the Durand Line and argued that the tribal agencies should have been allowed to choose independence, which in its view might later have joined Afghanistan. The British-sponsored jirga of the tribes had voted to go with Pakistan, and Pakistan's government answered, among others, with a 1956 official publication that Dupree lists as The "Pukhtunistan" Stunt. [6] The line itself is in the Durand Line, 1893.

Pashto in a Persian-speaking capital

Dupree glosses Dari as "language of the court" and says that it is the lingua franca, although the constitution of 1964 names both Dari and Pashto official languages and designates Pashto the "national language". [6] Pashto was still heard. At a dinner given by a Bokhara merchant in Kabul, Burnes heard songs in many languages, and he wrote that Pashto "is softer when sung than when spoken" but that Hindustani was the Afghans' favourite, with, in their phrase, "more salt in it". Moollah Khodadad, called to the Bala Hisar, was told in Afghani that a pannier had been prepared for him, meaning he was to be sent on a journey. [2]

In the twentieth century Pashto got institutions in Kabul. The Pashto Society, founded at Kandahar in 1931, moved to Kabul in 1935 and was merged two years later with the Literary Society of Kabul, founded in 1930, into the Pashtu Tolana, the Afghan Academy. The Pashto Society's aim had been to make Pashto the official language in place of Dari. [8] Abdul Rauf Benawa headed the Academy from 1946 to 1951 and Gul Pacha Ulfat from 1956; their lives are in Abdul Rauf Benawa and Gul Pacha Ulfat. [8] Radio Afghanistan, first called Radio Kabul, began under Amanullah in 1925, and in the form Adamec describes it carried a domestic service in Pashto and Dari. [8]

Policy sometimes outran use. Dupree tells how, under Daoud's prime ministry of 1953 to 1963, an attempt to turn government memoranda into Pashto failed when officials who could not read it had clerks translate their Persian into Pashto and the recipient had it translated back. [6] Kabul has its own dialect of Dari, which Dupree calls "slurred Brooklynese". [6] A professor of Pashto at Kabul University, Bakhtmir Wazir, told the Christian Science Monitor in 2002 that when he was a student, under a Pashtun-led government, Pashto classes were oversubscribed. [13]

The war for Kabul, 1992 to 1996

The Soviet-backed government of Najibullah fell in April 1992. Human Rights Watch (HRW) records that as it fell, officials sorted themselves along ethnic lines: Pashtun officers in the interior ministry, mostly Khalqis, looked to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of Hezb-i Islami, Tajik officers to Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Uzbeks and Turkmen to Rashid Dostum. [9] Massoud's and Dostum's forces entered Kabul on 24 April, pushed Hezb-i Islami out, and on 26 April the parties in Pakistan announced the Peshawar Accords, which left Hekmatyar out. [9] Hekmatyar rejected them and, in HRW's account, shelled the city from the south for years. [10] A UN estimate gives 500,000 people leaving Kabul by the end of that summer. [9] The mostly Pashtun Ittihad of Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf and the mostly Hazara Wahdat fought in west Kabul from May. Both took hostages: Ittihad Hazaras, and Wahdat Pashtuns, Tajiks and others. A journalist told HRW: "Sayyaf's men would look for Hazaras. Hizb-e Wahdat forces would look for Pashtuns." [9] An elderly Pashtun described being arrested by Wahdat in May 1992. [9]

HRW says Jamiat, Ittihad and Wahdat all fired into civilian areas, and that much of west Kabul was still in ruins in 2005 from the fighting of 1992 to 1996. [9] From January 1994 Hekmatyar and Dostum joined against Rabbani and Massoud, and HRW's 2001 report estimates that 25,000 people, most of them civilians, died in Kabul in 1994 and that a third of the city was reduced to rubble. [10] The numbers are estimates and no side's account of who began each round is the same: HRW says there is no single explanation of who started the Ittihad and Wahdat fighting. [9]

The Taliban in Kabul and after

The Taliban, whose stated aims in HRW's words were "to restore stability and enforce (their interpretation of) Islamic law", took Jalalabad on 11 September 1996 and Kabul by the end of the month, and the bulk of the United Front forces holding the city withdrew north intact. [10] Adamec dates the capture to 27 September. [8] Around five Taliban reportedly entered the United Nations compound, according to Amnesty International, took out Najibullah and his companions and hung their bodies from a lamppost, and Amnesty said the Taliban had killed hundreds in rocket attacks on residential areas in and around Kabul. [11] Amnesty also noted the restrictions on women in the areas the Taliban already held. [11] Adamec writes that the Taliban renamed the radio station Radio Shar'jat and banned music on it. [8]

The Taliban also pressed Pashto on the capital. Kabulis told RFE/RL's Dan Alexe in January 2002 that they remembered the attempt with distaste; a resident said the Taliban had planned to replace the Dari textbooks at Kabul University with Pashto ones, and a young man said he had avoided Pashto under them. Some people, Alexe wrote, saw the policy as revenge for the old dominance of the better-educated, Dari-speaking north over the Pashtun south. [12] A Kabul policeman told the Monitor he had been dismissed for speaking Dari. [13] The sources read give no Taliban statement on language policy, so only the other side's account is here. The story of those years is in Civil war and the Taliban emirate and Mohammad Najibullah.

After the Taliban fell in late 2001, Dari became the language of the interim government. Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, spoke Dari, with a few words of Pashto in his inaugural speech, and Pashtuns, the Monitor reported, worried that Dari speakers dominated the new administration. [13] The later years are in The Afghan Republic and the war, 2001 to 2021. The Taliban retook the capital on the weekend of 14 and 15 August 2021, and on 17 August their spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, gave his first news conference in Kabul, saying women would have "all their rights within Sharia". [14] What followed is in Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.

For the Pashtun lands to the east, see Peshawar and Jalalabad, and for the earlier capital, Kandahar.