Afghans: Trouble for Britain

The Toronto Daily Star

OCTOBER 31, 1922

CONSTANTINOPLE.—Afghanistan is another weapon that is being forged against the British Empire by Kemal and his Pan-Eastern friends. For over a year Kemalist officers have been training Afghan troops, getting them ready for the moment to strike. Now they are ready.

I happen to know something about the inside history of contemporary Afghanistan with its aims and hatreds. It came to me from Shere Mohamet Khan, who lived in Rome for a while and is now Afghan minister for war.

Shere Mohamet—the Khan is the Afghan suffix meaning prince—was tall, dark-haired, hawk-faced, as straight as a lance, with the bird-of-prey eyes and the hooked nose that mark the Afghan. He looked like a man out of the Renaissance, though his breed are the original Semites and go back as an unconquered people to the days of the Medes and Persians.

The old Amir of Afghanistan was Abderahman Khan. All his life he hated the English, who were using Afghanistan as a buffer state between India and Russia, and who forbade them to have diplomatic relations with any country except England, runs Shere Mohamet’s story.

He was a great man, was Abderahman, a hard man, a farseeing man and an Afghan. He spent his life consolidating Afghanistan into a strong nation, and in training his son. His son was to carry on his work, to make war on the English.

The old man died. The son, Habibullah Khan, became Amir. The English invited him to come down to India, on a state visit, and he went to see what manner of people these English were. There the English got him. First they entertained him royally. They showed him many delights and they taught him to drink. I do not say he was not an apt learner. He was no longer a man and an Afghan.

He came back to Kabul, that was just after the armistice in 1918, and the Afghans killed him. He was assassinated. It was really an execution. Then there was a meeting of the Great Council in Kabul and Nasirullah Khan, the oldest grandson of the old Amir, was questioned.

“Will you defend Afghanistan if you are chosen king?” they asked him.

“I will defend Afghanistan,” he answered.

“Will you make war on the English?”

“I will try,” he answered.

They let him go out of the council room.

Aminullah, the next grandson, was brought in.

“What will you do if you are chosen king?” they asked him.

“I will do two things,” Aminullah answered. “I will defend Afghanistan and I will make war on the English.”

So they chose him king, and a few weeks later he led his troops over the pass into India.

That is Shere Mohamet’s story.

Very few people even remember that there was an Afghan war, just after the armistice. It was the Royal Air Force that won it by bombing out the Afghan cities back of the lines and destroying the mud forts where the hill men, having had no experience with planes before, congregated. At any rate it was a British victory and so announced.

But when they signed the treaty of peace, Great Britain gave up every right that she had always fought for in Afghanistan. Other countries were permitted by treaty to have diplomatic and consular representatives in Afghanistan, arms were permitted to be imported, arms were even permitted to be imported through India. The war may have been a British victory but the peace was certainly an Afghan victory. The Afghans had always hated England but now they felt contempt for her.

So now there are Soviet Russian consulates in all the Afghan cities, the Afghans are armed with modern arms and are trained by Kemalist officers. Aminullah, “my great king,” Shere Mohamet calls him, has not forsworn his oath to make war on the English—and he has not gone down to the fleshpots of India.

When Kemal attacks Mesopotamia, and sooner or later he will, there will be a well-equipped, well-trained Afghan army come down the Khyber Pass that will not be the ill-equipped, unschooled band of hill men that were defeated in 1919. They have an alliance with Mustapha Kemal now. They are elated over the Kemalist successes and even their existence is a perpetual threat against the British rule in India that prevents her from drawing a single regiment from there in case of trouble elsewhere.

The Afghans will fight. It is their métier. Shere Mohamet has a story that illustrates the Afghan spirit.

“When I came home to my house in Kabul from the council that decided on the last war, my wife and my daughter had my pistols and my sword and all my kit laid out for me.

“ ‘What is this?’ I said.

“ ‘Your things for the war. There is going to be a war, is there not?’ said my wife.

“ ‘Yes. But I am the minister of war. I do not go to this war. The minister of war does not go to the war itself.’

“My wife shook her head. ‘I do not understand it,’ she said very haughtily. ‘If you are this minister of war who cannot go to war, you must resign. That is all. We would be disgraced if you did not go.’ ”

That is the spirit the Kemalists trained, and armed by the Russians it makes another Eastern problem that does not look easy of solution.