a house divided, 1933–73of the Soviet oil exploration mission in northern Afghanistan pointedly
told the American historian and archaeologist Louis Dupree: ‘We are here
for a long time... why don’t you Americans go home? Afghanistan is our
neighbour, not yours.’ 38
Da’ud’s decision to accept substantial Soviet assistance was not popu-
lar with many Afghans who disliked the Soviet Union’s state atheism and
Communist ideology, while the religious elites opposed the liberaliza-
tion of education as well as the government’s secular views on social and
legal matters. The close alliance with the Soviet Union was not welcomed
either by the descendants of the basmachis and other Central Asian refu-
gees who had fled the Russian occupation of their homelands and Stalin’s
Collectivization. Behind his back people jokingly referred to Da’ud as the
Surkh Sardar, the Red Prince.
The fall of Prime Minister Da’udThe most dramatic gesture of Da’ud’s policy of social liberalization took
place in August 1959 during Independence Day celebrations. In an act
reminiscent of the era of Amir ’Aman Allah Khan, female members of
the royal party appeared in public with their faces unveiled. Unveiling, or
The Reform as it was euphemistically known, was officially voluntary but
it was ‘pressed rather hard’, in state institutions particularly in schools,
the civil service and government-run factories. 39 In Pul-i Khumri, veiled
women were denied service at the state cotton mill and the traffic police
fined drivers of horse-drawn carriages for taking passengers wearing the
burqa. The unveiling led to an immediate backlash by Islamic conservatives
who petitioned Da’ud to reinstate parda. Da’ud responded by challenging
them to prove from the Qur’an and Hadith that concealment was a reli-
gious obligation, which they failed to do. Instead the Islamists resorted
to direct action, holding a series of public demonstrations that quickly
turned violent. In November riots in Kandahar, fuelled partly by the veil-
ing controversy and partly by government attempts to impose taxes on
Durrani landlords, led to the deaths of some sixty protestors after police
opened fire on the crowd.
In the same month a poorly managed local dispute in Khost over
timber rights escalated into a full-scale rebellion. Da’ud mounted a show
of force and sent the army and air force, now armed with Soviet heavy
weapons, to shell and bomb the rebels into submission, whereupon thou-
sands of tribesmen fled into Pakistan’s Waziristan. Da’ud later offered the
rebels an amnesty but the suppression of the Khost uprising provided