backs to the future, 1929–33unworkable duality that was perpetuated in all subsequent constitutions.
Many of the provisions were honoured in the breach, especially those
Articles that related to personal freedom and civil liberties. What the
Constitution did do was to recast Afghanistan’s national values in a
Deobandi mould, a ‘re-sacralisation’ of the state that Nadir Shah and his
brothers considered an acceptable price to pay for holding on to power. 15
What this meant in practice was that the 1931 Constitution formalized an
Islamization programme unprecedented in Afghanistan’s history until the
era of the Taliban.
‘Abd al-Majid Zabuli and the centralization of the economyWhen it came to the issue of reform and modernization, Nadir Shah and
his successors trod carefully and concentrated on upgrading the nation’s
infrastructure, which was far less controversial than social or legal reforms.
There were improvements in telecommunications and the postal service,
new roads fit for motor vehicles and a number of large-scale irrigation
and hydroelectric dams were inaugurated. One of the many issues Nadir
Shah had to face was the government’s empty coffers and an economy that
was in tatters. He appointed ‘Abd al-Majid Zabuli as Minister for National
Economy to address this crisis. Zabuli, a Taraki Ghilzai, was one of the
richest merchants in the country who had inherited his family’s Tashkent-
based import–export business. After his father’s death he moved his base
to Moscow, where he developed close ties with high Soviet officials. Then
in 1929 he shifted operations to Berlin, where he married the daughter of a
German policeman. A few months later Nadir Shah invited Zabuli to come
to Kabul and draw up plans to address the country’s chronic fiscal crisis. 16
Zabuli drew up a Seven Year Plan modelled on Lenin’s New Economic
Policy, which placed Soviet-style state monopolistic capitalism at the heart
of national economic recovery, shifting the raising of revenues from trad-
itional taxes on land and agricultural yields to state control of, and duties
on, imports, exports and other major commodities. The outcome was
that over the ensuing years the state became one vast corporation that
controlled all major assets and commodities. To implement what was tanta-
mount to nationalization by the back door, Zabuli established a branch
of his business empire in Kabul, the Shirkat-i Sahami-yi Afghan, usually
referred to by its plural form Shirkat-i Ashami, and private individuals were
offered the opportunity to invest in dozens of state-controlled shirkats,
or joint stock companies. In 1932 Zabuli convinced Nur al-Mashayekh to
legitimize the creation of a joint stock bank, the Bank-i Milli, which paid