afghanistanmka’s all-weather road. From the 1950s American teachers and educators
taught English, rewrote the national curriculum and paid for the print-
ing of textbooks and primers. American aid also helped construct Kabul
University, Pan Am trained Afghan pilots for the national carrier, Aryana,
while Boeing supplied the country’s first jet airliners.
The fall of ‘Abd al-Majid ZabuliThe technical problems, escalating costs and burgeoning debt result-
ing from the Helmand-Arghandab scheme caused tensions between
Prime Minister Shah Mahmud and Zabuli, who had committed most
of the Bank-i Milli’s foreign currency reserves to the project. When the
scheme continued to fail to deliver the anticipated fiscal benefits, Zabuli’s
management of the scheme was called into question. The confrontation
was fuelled by Shah Mahmud’s concern that Zabuli had been given too
much power and that he had politically dangerous aspirations. This anx -
iety was fully justified, for Zabuli, supported by Da’ud and Na‘im, had
increasingly dabbled in quasi-political activity by founding the Wish (or
Wikh) Zalmiyan (Awakened Youth) in Kandahar, a cultural movement
that promoted Pushtu and Pushtun identity. Three years later Zabuli and
Da’ud established the Klub-i Milli (National Club) as the Kabul branch
of the Wish Zalmiyan, which was covertly a forum for young, left-wing
reformers. Zabuli also employed several radical activists, including Nur
Muhammad Taraki, the future leader of the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan. Indeed, according to Saikal, ‘the entire generation of post-
war politicians, including those of Marxist persuasion, grew up under
Zabuli’s influence’. 26
The confrontation between the two men came to a head in the late
1940s when the Bank-i Milli refused to honour a credit note issued by the
prime minister. During a stormy cabinet meeting Shah Mahmud demanded
Zabuli tell him by what authority the bank dare overrule a firman he had
signed, to which Zabuli sarcastically retorted, ‘not everything is under
the control of the government or under your authority’. 27 A furious Shah
Mahmud called in the guards and ordered them to expel Zabuli, though
after the intervention of other cabinet ministers he left of his own accord.
For a while Shah Mahmud contemplated imprisoning or even executing
Zabuli, but instead he packed him off to Karachi to negotiate with the
Pakistan government over the issue of Pushtunistan.
When Da’ud became prime minister in September 1953, he demanded
Zabuli surrender control of the Bank-i Milli’s shirkats to the government.