afghanistanhad they been introduced gradually and on a foundation of consensus.
However, one reform that was never on ’Aman Allah Khan’s agenda was
surrendering the monarchy’s traditional autocratic powers to an elected
Legislature. The token devolution of Executive power to a State Council
and the lack of any effort at creating a more participatory government
is one of the many ironies of the constitutional debate. It suggests that
neither ’Aman Allah Khan nor his supporters had much of an idea about
what constitutional government really meant or how it functioned. Even
Tarzi showed little interest in any substantive reform of the Executive and
wholeheartedly endorsed the country’s autocratic monarchical system.
In the end ’Aman Allah Khan and his supporters had only them-
selves to blame for their failure. Tragically, instead of ushering in an era
of progress and modernization, ’Aman Allah Khan’s reign ended with the
whole idea of reform being stymied and stigmatized and the administra-
tions that succeeded him found it that much more difficult to implement
change. Even today in Afghanistan the terms ‘reform’ and ‘progress’ have
negative connotations of violent revolution, social upheaval, seculariza-
tion and Westernization. As for gender issues such as female education,
women’s right to work and the parda system, these remain ideological
minefields to this day.
Despite the collapse of ’Aman Allah Khan’s attempted cultural revolu-
tion, a number of the reforms he introduced have survived. Afghan remains
the sole official designation of nationality; the afghani is still the official
currency and the jerib the standard measure of land. The Loya Jirga has
been perpetuated and has become increasingly intertwined with myths
about its roots in an ancient form of Pushtu tribal democracy. Thursday is
still the official weekly half-day holiday for civil servants and all Afghans
carry identity cards. ’Aman Allah Khan’s tricolour flag survived, with modi-
fications, until the fall of President Da’ud in 1978 and was rehabilitated in
2001 by President Karzai.
What is worrying about ’Aman Allah Khan’s legacy is that many urban-
ized Afghan intellectuals, particularly Muhammadzais, continue to look
back wistfully to his reign as a Golden Age that was ruined by the forces
of religious fanaticism and ideological obscurantism – an anticlerical
rhetoric that itself is derived from the polemic of Mahmud Tarzi. This
rose-tinted vision of a ‘land of lost content’ prevents an objective critique
of the flaws in Tarzi’s nationalism and ’Aman Allah Khan’s vision of reform
and modernization. 63 As Ashraf Ghani perceptively wrote before his elec-
tion as President of Afghanistan, ‘Both [’Aman Allah Khan’s] reforms
and his failures have set the pattern for successive generations of Afghan