Muhammad set up a system of tax farming in which his sons
played a central role, and expanded the territories under his control
(Noelle, 1998), but the system faced a crisis upon his death, and
while his son Amir Sher Ali put in place some further embryonic
state institutions during his reign from 1868–79, they were not suf-
ficiently robust to survive the Second Anglo–Afghan War, from
1879–80, in reasonable shape.
Many would date the foundation of the modern Afghan state
from the reign of Amir Abdul Rahman Khan (1880–1901). First,
he established a bureaucraticstate of a type for which there was
no precedent in Afghanistan, even though he remained dependent
on tax farming to raise internal revenue, which came largely from
land taxes (Kakar, 1979: 73–91). Second, through an extremely
bloody process of internal conquest, he subordinated numerous
internal power holders to a dominant central authority, and in the
process resettled large numbers of Pushtuns amidst non-Pushtun
populations (Tapper, 1983). The human costs of this process of
conquest were enormous (Edwards, 1996: 123; Lee, 1996: xxii),
something which should be borne in mind by anyone inclined to
see Abdul Rahman Khan as a role model for an Afghan ruler in the
twenty-first century. This was also a problem for his immediate
successors, his son Habibullah (1901–19) and his grandson
Amanullah (1919–29), neither of whom was disposed to use terror
on anything like the scale which Abdul Rahman Khan had been
contented to accept; and in the case of the latter, it led to a crisis.
His ambitious plans for the modernisation of Afghanistan, stimu-
lated by his father-in-law and mentor, the journalist and intellectual
Mahmoud Tarzi, presumed state capacities, and a degree of legiti-
macy of state action, which simply were not present (Poullada,
1973). His nemesis, Habibullah Kalakani, a controversial figure in
the history of Afghanistan (Khalili, 1984; McChesney, 1999) him-
self enjoyed only a brief and turbulent interval on the throne,
which came to an end when he was overthrown, and executed in
violation of a pledge of safe conduct sworn on the Holy Koran by
his captors – a precedent not forgotten by modern Tajik opponents
of Pushtun domination. The lesson of the crisis was one which his
12 The Afghanistan Wars