2RHPZ
05-25-2004, 03:21 PM
I just got an old report about Afghanistan and I found it interesting. Different century, different millenium?
The Atlantic Monthly
January 1958
The Atlantic Report
Afghanistan
AFTER centuries of poverty-ridden isolation, Afghanistan is again
becoming the crossroads of Asia. Kabul's only hotel is not only about
the cheapest east of Suez (two dollars a day all-inclusive) but also
the most cosmopolitan. Its austere rooms are crowded with Russians,
Americans, Germans, Japanese, Persians, Turks, Indians, Ceylonese, and
Arabs. Numerous airways, including Dutch, Indian, Pakistani, and
Iranian, find it worth while to run regular flights into Afghanistan
from the west and south, while the Russians, now busy with plans to
build a modern airport at Kabul, offer cut-rate trips, payable in
black-market afghanis, to Moscow and other points north.
Unlike those in the past who came to loot and strip the land, many
modern visitors come with gifts. For this is the era of competitive
coexistence, and nowhere is the competition more obviously competitive
than in Afghanistan. Hearts and minds are the prize, the Soviet Union
and the United States the principal competitors, and rubles and
dollars the weapons.
Afghanistan's needs are almost bottomless. Slightly larger than Texas
and dominated by the towering ranges of the Hindu Kush mountains,
which rise to 20,000 feet and isolate the richer northern provinces
from the southern deserts, it is completely landlocked. It has no
railways; its four thousand miles of rough, all-weather roads are used
mostly by donkeys and camels; and its rivers are of little use for
navigation.
At least two million of the perhaps twelve million population are
nomads. They move with the seasons and live either in a Central Asian
yurt that looks like a beach tent and is made of felt, or in a
rectangular construction covered with goat's hair cloth.
Subsistence Farming
griculture employs nearly three quarters of the rest of the
population, yet less than 3 per cent of the land is cultivated, and of
this the greater part is in the little-populated region south of the
Oxus River, which forms the border with Russia. Fruit grows well in
small, fertile pockets among the stark and barren folds of the Hindu
Kush, where a hot summer sun and melting snows combine to produce
juicy peaches, grapes, apples, melons, pears, and apricots.
In periods when relations with Karachi are amiable, fruit is exported
to Pakistan and India, while the United States is a good customer for
the karakul (Persian lamb skin) crop, the country's principal earner
of foreign exchange. Nevertheless, agriculture generally is on a
meager, subsistence level. Most of the population never gets enough
food to eat or clothes to wear in winters that are as bitter as the
summers are hot.
Little is known of hygiene. The open sewers in the streets of Kabul
are used for washing and, in the summer, for reviving watermelons that
have withered in the heat. The infant mortality rate is extremely
high: even in Kabul, which boasts a very large proportion of the
country's two hundred doctors, one child in every seven dies in the
first year of life. Village folk rely on herbalists, snakebite men,
and the Muslim mullahs to treat them for their many ills.
The annual per capita income has been estimated at twenty dollars, a
sum that does not go far toward providing even the turban, sleeveless
jacket, and baggy pants that make up the rural Afghan's wardrobe, or
toward helping city dwellers to achieve the ultimate in sartorial
elegance?full Western dress, topped with a karakul cap.
Medieval Cities
he cities are few and small. Kabul, the capital and principal
stopping place for the camel caravans that ply between Central Asia
and India, has a population of about three hundred thousand. It has
entwined itself around the stark hills that once guarded the city
gates, with the new grafted onto the old, a form of growth that has
deprived it of the character one sees in other towns, where the
country's turbulent history is graphically expressed in the
architecture.
Built like medieval forts, with high, square, turreted outer walls,
these towns emphasize the historic need for defense. The houses follow
a similar pattern, turning their windowless backs on the streets, the
better to assure the safety of the inhabitants. Kandahar, in the
southeast, is Afghanistan's second city. Here about eighty thousand
people crowd behind mud walls and battlements built, so the legend
goes, by Alexander the Great in 327 B.C.
For more than two thousand years Afghanistan was either the center or
an important part of great Central Asian kingdoms and empires. Later,
in the era of British and Russian expansion in Asia, Afghanistan
learned that survival depended primarily on its ability to play one
great power against another. Thus, from the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the Afghans wove their way through the plans and
plots of London and St. Petersburg, until, in 1919, they finally threw
off British "protection" and won full independence.
A Royal Oligarchy
Modern Afghanistan officially describes itself as a constitutional
monarchy. This is not strictly accurate. Though there is a National
Assembly of 171 deputies elected from different parts of the country,
its members?and the 45 senators, who are appointed by the King for
life?do not enjoy freedom of expression. They may oppose the Supreme
Council of State, or cabinet, but only within officially approved
limits.
Real control is vested in a royal oligarchy: King Mohammed Zahir Shah,
his cousin, Prime Minister Sardar Mohammed Daoud (who is also minister
for defense), and two other senior members of the family, Sardar Ali
Mohammed, who is the first deputy prime minister, and Sardar Mohammed
Naim, second deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs.
Although the cabinet meets once a week, most important decisions
appear to be made at the weekly Thursday night dinners in the Palace,
where male members of the royal family meet for free and frank
discussions on the government of their wild and rugged state. But
their writ is far from absolute. The loyalty of many tribesmen depends
on the size and regularity of the government's subsidies.
The People of Afghanistan
lthough Afghanistan means the Land of the Afghans, there is no true
Afghan. The nearest claimant to the title is the Pukhtun, tall,
handsome, and almost fair. The Pukhtuns comprise nearly half of the
population. Tough, proud, warlike, and organized on a tribal basis,
their historic role has been one of fierce resistance to the invader.
The are today represented at all levels of Afghan society.
Another fair people, the Tajiks, form the second largest ethnic group.
They are the artisans and the shopkeepers and nonnomadic farmers.
Uzbeks and Turkomen, many of whom fled from Russia during the first
days of Stalin's land-reform program and settled on the south bank of
the Oxus River, are among the minority groups.
West of Kabul, in a wild and mountainous area, live the Hazaras, a
Mongoloid people whose presence in Afghanistan legend attributes to
Genghis Khan. While most of the other inhabitants of Afghanistan are
Sunnite Muslims, the Hazaras belong to the Shiite sect, whose
antagonism to the Sunnites predates Christianity's Reformation split
by nearly a thousand years.
Islam came to Afghanistan in 871. It persists in its most rigid and
conservative form. With the exception of Saudi Arabia and the Yemen,
most Muslim countries are in the processes of abandoning purdah. But
not Afghanistan. In Kabul no woman dares to venture into the streets
unless clad in the borqa, a shapeless tent that covers the entire body
including the eyes, which can see without being seen.
Cabinet ministers are required by law to be Muslims, and everywhere
the mullahs exercise great authority. They serve the religious,
medical, social, and legal needs of the people. Foreigners are
regarded doubtfully. Foreign diplomats stationed in Kabul
automatically search their offices and homes for concealed
microphones, expect that their private mail will be opened, and have
learned to regard their servants as paid spies. By law, no Afghan who
travels abroad may marry a foreigner.
Access to the Sea
uspicious of Russia, Britain, and Pakistan, not especially friendly
with Iran, and remote from neighboring China, Afghanistan sought, in
1947, to end its vulnerable isolation by demanding access to the sea.
This was to be achieved by the creation of Pukhtunistan, so that the
five million Pukhtuns who live in what is now Pakistan, and are close
kin to the Pukhtuns of Afghanistan, would have their own state
consisting of the former North-West Frontier Province, Chitral, Swat,
Buner Baluchistan, and the former Baluchistan States Union, thus
making the Arabian Sea their western boundary.
The Afghans based their claim on what they believe to be the
illegality of the border treaty concluded by Sir Mortimer Durand and
Emir Abd-er-Rahman in 1893 and on the fact that an earlier Afghan
Emir, Ahmad Shah Durrani, who died in 1773, had ruled all the land
between the Indus and the Oxus Rivers. Through its controlled press
and radio in Kabul and by stirring up the tribesmen with money and
arms, Afghanistan for many years made Pukhtunistan a hot issue and
even provoked Pakistan into closing the border to Afghan trade.
Russian-American Rivalry
ince the Persian border is largely trackless desert, Afghanistan then
turned for assistance to its northern neighbor. At times of crisis the
Soviet Union kept Afghanistan's four thousand trucks on the road by
rushing in emergency supplies of gasoline and in May, 1955, it offered
transit rights through Russia.
The United States was not idle during this period, but aid initially
came primarily through the Import-Export Bank for a considerable
reclamation and resettlement project in the Helmand Valley in the
south. Later, it approved wheat loans and grants totaling $3.2 million
and $14.5 million for the construction of an international airport at
Kandahar, the building and improving of airports elsewhere, and
technical and managerial assistance for Aryana Airways, the Afghan
airline. The United States rejected a number of Afghan aid projects,
including the paving of Kabul's streets, which have a habit of
disappearing during the hundred-mile-an-hour gales that sweep down
from the Hindu Kush.
The Russians paved the roads, and incidentally made a splendid job of
it. They also provided the buses and taxis; a grain silo and a bakery
that turns out sour, off-white bread; and a group of gasoline storage
tanks.
Russian Roulette
o many Afghans, however, the drift toward ever closer relation with
the Soviet Union seems a sort of Russian roulette, fascinating but
frightening. The government could not bring itself to refuse
Khrushchev's offer of a $100 million loan in December, 1955, but it
immediately threw out a lifeline to the West and relaxed its
Pukhtunistan demands with the result that relations between Kabul and
Karachi are better at the moment than they have ever been. Kabul hopes
the Americans will off-set the Russian aid by developing and improving
the road and rail links south through Pakistan.
Today almost half of Afghanistan foreign trade is with the Soviet
Union; the trade will grow when Afghanistan begins to repay in goods
the interest and capital on Russian loans, which include such military
equipment as MIG fighters, tanks and artillery.
Afghanistan realizes there are dangers in being too friendly with the
U.S.S.R. It hopes it can survive by playing Washington against Moscow,
just as it once played St. Petersburg against London.
Here a lot of old afghan photos from 1910s 1920s 1930s:
http://www.bassirat.net/news/themgalerie.php?t=4
The Atlantic Monthly
January 1958
The Atlantic Report
Afghanistan
AFTER centuries of poverty-ridden isolation, Afghanistan is again
becoming the crossroads of Asia. Kabul's only hotel is not only about
the cheapest east of Suez (two dollars a day all-inclusive) but also
the most cosmopolitan. Its austere rooms are crowded with Russians,
Americans, Germans, Japanese, Persians, Turks, Indians, Ceylonese, and
Arabs. Numerous airways, including Dutch, Indian, Pakistani, and
Iranian, find it worth while to run regular flights into Afghanistan
from the west and south, while the Russians, now busy with plans to
build a modern airport at Kabul, offer cut-rate trips, payable in
black-market afghanis, to Moscow and other points north.
Unlike those in the past who came to loot and strip the land, many
modern visitors come with gifts. For this is the era of competitive
coexistence, and nowhere is the competition more obviously competitive
than in Afghanistan. Hearts and minds are the prize, the Soviet Union
and the United States the principal competitors, and rubles and
dollars the weapons.
Afghanistan's needs are almost bottomless. Slightly larger than Texas
and dominated by the towering ranges of the Hindu Kush mountains,
which rise to 20,000 feet and isolate the richer northern provinces
from the southern deserts, it is completely landlocked. It has no
railways; its four thousand miles of rough, all-weather roads are used
mostly by donkeys and camels; and its rivers are of little use for
navigation.
At least two million of the perhaps twelve million population are
nomads. They move with the seasons and live either in a Central Asian
yurt that looks like a beach tent and is made of felt, or in a
rectangular construction covered with goat's hair cloth.
Subsistence Farming
griculture employs nearly three quarters of the rest of the
population, yet less than 3 per cent of the land is cultivated, and of
this the greater part is in the little-populated region south of the
Oxus River, which forms the border with Russia. Fruit grows well in
small, fertile pockets among the stark and barren folds of the Hindu
Kush, where a hot summer sun and melting snows combine to produce
juicy peaches, grapes, apples, melons, pears, and apricots.
In periods when relations with Karachi are amiable, fruit is exported
to Pakistan and India, while the United States is a good customer for
the karakul (Persian lamb skin) crop, the country's principal earner
of foreign exchange. Nevertheless, agriculture generally is on a
meager, subsistence level. Most of the population never gets enough
food to eat or clothes to wear in winters that are as bitter as the
summers are hot.
Little is known of hygiene. The open sewers in the streets of Kabul
are used for washing and, in the summer, for reviving watermelons that
have withered in the heat. The infant mortality rate is extremely
high: even in Kabul, which boasts a very large proportion of the
country's two hundred doctors, one child in every seven dies in the
first year of life. Village folk rely on herbalists, snakebite men,
and the Muslim mullahs to treat them for their many ills.
The annual per capita income has been estimated at twenty dollars, a
sum that does not go far toward providing even the turban, sleeveless
jacket, and baggy pants that make up the rural Afghan's wardrobe, or
toward helping city dwellers to achieve the ultimate in sartorial
elegance?full Western dress, topped with a karakul cap.
Medieval Cities
he cities are few and small. Kabul, the capital and principal
stopping place for the camel caravans that ply between Central Asia
and India, has a population of about three hundred thousand. It has
entwined itself around the stark hills that once guarded the city
gates, with the new grafted onto the old, a form of growth that has
deprived it of the character one sees in other towns, where the
country's turbulent history is graphically expressed in the
architecture.
Built like medieval forts, with high, square, turreted outer walls,
these towns emphasize the historic need for defense. The houses follow
a similar pattern, turning their windowless backs on the streets, the
better to assure the safety of the inhabitants. Kandahar, in the
southeast, is Afghanistan's second city. Here about eighty thousand
people crowd behind mud walls and battlements built, so the legend
goes, by Alexander the Great in 327 B.C.
For more than two thousand years Afghanistan was either the center or
an important part of great Central Asian kingdoms and empires. Later,
in the era of British and Russian expansion in Asia, Afghanistan
learned that survival depended primarily on its ability to play one
great power against another. Thus, from the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the Afghans wove their way through the plans and
plots of London and St. Petersburg, until, in 1919, they finally threw
off British "protection" and won full independence.
A Royal Oligarchy
Modern Afghanistan officially describes itself as a constitutional
monarchy. This is not strictly accurate. Though there is a National
Assembly of 171 deputies elected from different parts of the country,
its members?and the 45 senators, who are appointed by the King for
life?do not enjoy freedom of expression. They may oppose the Supreme
Council of State, or cabinet, but only within officially approved
limits.
Real control is vested in a royal oligarchy: King Mohammed Zahir Shah,
his cousin, Prime Minister Sardar Mohammed Daoud (who is also minister
for defense), and two other senior members of the family, Sardar Ali
Mohammed, who is the first deputy prime minister, and Sardar Mohammed
Naim, second deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs.
Although the cabinet meets once a week, most important decisions
appear to be made at the weekly Thursday night dinners in the Palace,
where male members of the royal family meet for free and frank
discussions on the government of their wild and rugged state. But
their writ is far from absolute. The loyalty of many tribesmen depends
on the size and regularity of the government's subsidies.
The People of Afghanistan
lthough Afghanistan means the Land of the Afghans, there is no true
Afghan. The nearest claimant to the title is the Pukhtun, tall,
handsome, and almost fair. The Pukhtuns comprise nearly half of the
population. Tough, proud, warlike, and organized on a tribal basis,
their historic role has been one of fierce resistance to the invader.
The are today represented at all levels of Afghan society.
Another fair people, the Tajiks, form the second largest ethnic group.
They are the artisans and the shopkeepers and nonnomadic farmers.
Uzbeks and Turkomen, many of whom fled from Russia during the first
days of Stalin's land-reform program and settled on the south bank of
the Oxus River, are among the minority groups.
West of Kabul, in a wild and mountainous area, live the Hazaras, a
Mongoloid people whose presence in Afghanistan legend attributes to
Genghis Khan. While most of the other inhabitants of Afghanistan are
Sunnite Muslims, the Hazaras belong to the Shiite sect, whose
antagonism to the Sunnites predates Christianity's Reformation split
by nearly a thousand years.
Islam came to Afghanistan in 871. It persists in its most rigid and
conservative form. With the exception of Saudi Arabia and the Yemen,
most Muslim countries are in the processes of abandoning purdah. But
not Afghanistan. In Kabul no woman dares to venture into the streets
unless clad in the borqa, a shapeless tent that covers the entire body
including the eyes, which can see without being seen.
Cabinet ministers are required by law to be Muslims, and everywhere
the mullahs exercise great authority. They serve the religious,
medical, social, and legal needs of the people. Foreigners are
regarded doubtfully. Foreign diplomats stationed in Kabul
automatically search their offices and homes for concealed
microphones, expect that their private mail will be opened, and have
learned to regard their servants as paid spies. By law, no Afghan who
travels abroad may marry a foreigner.
Access to the Sea
uspicious of Russia, Britain, and Pakistan, not especially friendly
with Iran, and remote from neighboring China, Afghanistan sought, in
1947, to end its vulnerable isolation by demanding access to the sea.
This was to be achieved by the creation of Pukhtunistan, so that the
five million Pukhtuns who live in what is now Pakistan, and are close
kin to the Pukhtuns of Afghanistan, would have their own state
consisting of the former North-West Frontier Province, Chitral, Swat,
Buner Baluchistan, and the former Baluchistan States Union, thus
making the Arabian Sea their western boundary.
The Afghans based their claim on what they believe to be the
illegality of the border treaty concluded by Sir Mortimer Durand and
Emir Abd-er-Rahman in 1893 and on the fact that an earlier Afghan
Emir, Ahmad Shah Durrani, who died in 1773, had ruled all the land
between the Indus and the Oxus Rivers. Through its controlled press
and radio in Kabul and by stirring up the tribesmen with money and
arms, Afghanistan for many years made Pukhtunistan a hot issue and
even provoked Pakistan into closing the border to Afghan trade.
Russian-American Rivalry
ince the Persian border is largely trackless desert, Afghanistan then
turned for assistance to its northern neighbor. At times of crisis the
Soviet Union kept Afghanistan's four thousand trucks on the road by
rushing in emergency supplies of gasoline and in May, 1955, it offered
transit rights through Russia.
The United States was not idle during this period, but aid initially
came primarily through the Import-Export Bank for a considerable
reclamation and resettlement project in the Helmand Valley in the
south. Later, it approved wheat loans and grants totaling $3.2 million
and $14.5 million for the construction of an international airport at
Kandahar, the building and improving of airports elsewhere, and
technical and managerial assistance for Aryana Airways, the Afghan
airline. The United States rejected a number of Afghan aid projects,
including the paving of Kabul's streets, which have a habit of
disappearing during the hundred-mile-an-hour gales that sweep down
from the Hindu Kush.
The Russians paved the roads, and incidentally made a splendid job of
it. They also provided the buses and taxis; a grain silo and a bakery
that turns out sour, off-white bread; and a group of gasoline storage
tanks.
Russian Roulette
o many Afghans, however, the drift toward ever closer relation with
the Soviet Union seems a sort of Russian roulette, fascinating but
frightening. The government could not bring itself to refuse
Khrushchev's offer of a $100 million loan in December, 1955, but it
immediately threw out a lifeline to the West and relaxed its
Pukhtunistan demands with the result that relations between Kabul and
Karachi are better at the moment than they have ever been. Kabul hopes
the Americans will off-set the Russian aid by developing and improving
the road and rail links south through Pakistan.
Today almost half of Afghanistan foreign trade is with the Soviet
Union; the trade will grow when Afghanistan begins to repay in goods
the interest and capital on Russian loans, which include such military
equipment as MIG fighters, tanks and artillery.
Afghanistan realizes there are dangers in being too friendly with the
U.S.S.R. It hopes it can survive by playing Washington against Moscow,
just as it once played St. Petersburg against London.
Here a lot of old afghan photos from 1910s 1920s 1930s:
http://www.bassirat.net/news/themgalerie.php?t=4