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COMMENTARY
July 28, 2007
Zahir Shah
There were good reasons for not putting Mohammad Zahir Shah -- who died this week, at the age of 92 -- back on the throne of Afghanistan. For one thing, he was a peace-loving man. Unusual in a Pashtoon -- especially one who was highly ethnocentric, impatient with the country’s “diversity,” and frankly prejudiced against those whose native language was Persian. But though he could sound rebarbative, he had a long record of giving the store away, rather than fighting with anybody.The worst was when his unspeakable socialist cousin, Mohammad Daoud Khan, pulled a coup d’etat in 1973, declaring a republic while opening windows through which the Soviet Communists promptly crawled. Rather than object, Zahir Shah agreed to go quietly. (He was in Italy with eye problems at the time, and decided he liked it there.) He had ascended the throne in 1933, naturally after the death of his father, although his father’s death was quite unnatural. That father, Nadir Shah, from an old Peshawar family, had not ascended the throne on the other side of the Khyber in a strictly constitutional way. It is a myth that the Afghan habit of assassinating her leaders goes back only to the 1970s (when political questions were too frequently settled by cabinet shoot-out). Nor, for that matter, did Islamic zealotry first appear at that time. It is as natural to the mountains of Afghanistan, as to the Highlands of the Scots. (Indeed, the comparison can be a fruitful one, for remoter Scotland by the 16th century had descended to about the point Afghanistan was rising to in the 20th.) Nevertheless, murderous ideological “Islamism” of the Wahabi strain, fuelled by the vast unearned oil revenues of the sheikhs of Arabia, did arrive in recent times. Rather than fight, Zahir Shah liked to bicker. He bickered with Pakistan, at a time when good relations with Pakistan were crucial to Afghanistan’s future. He was a “modernizer,” or so he thought, constantly bickering with tribal chiefs who refused to wear shirts and ties. Reputed to be under the thumb of his women, he bravely chattered about women’s rights. (Some schools for girls were perhaps his principal legacy.) When set up, after his deposition, as “the king over the water” -- a symbol of resistance to Soviet occupation -- he kept letting everyone down. He ought to have struck a colourful figure. Instead, he proved an old hypochondriac: like so many who live past ninety years, the last three-score on their “last legs.” He was an adorable old man, who ended his days under multiple layers of anachronism. I recall him as a benign presence, in greasy photographs, crudely-framed in tea shops, when I was wandering pointlessly around Afghanistan as a young man. I am glad to have caught a glimpse of the country before it went utterly to hell: poor, proud, magnificent Afghanistan, prospering in rifles, opium, and chaos -- about seven countries for the price of less than one, and each of those a tribal tapestry. If the world could only have left Afghanistan alone! But there is no going back through the turnstiles of history. Still, the customs of all nations are deeply seated. For the foreseeable future, Afghanistan requires a King, and her Loya Jirgah (assembly of tribal lords). Hamid Karzai is called “President,” but is by birth and gesture really a monarch. His job is to be the cosmopolitan influence, in a tribal field of give and take. And to stay alive, somehow, nominally leading the fight against the Jihadis -- themselves a foreign influence. A monarchy suited Afghanistan, would still suit her, as it still suits the most humane and open of other Islamic nations, and has been through time the power to moderate irruptions of fanaticism in the mosques. It is because an Islamic king has religious prestige, in a cultural order that does not finally distinguish between civil and religious authority, that he is in a position to protect minorities, and resist craziness. Democracy, dropped out of the sky without generations of cultural preparation, can only assist the fanatics. We misconceive our role, in Afghanistan, if we think it is to bring democracy. Instead, our job is the modest one, of helping the Afghans re-establish their own way of life, by killing as many of their Jihadis as possible. In this cause, we are truly the allies of the peoples of Afghanistan. In any other, we are foreign imperialists, playing into the hands of the enemy who flew aeroplanes into Washington and New York. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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