a house divided, 1933–73Da’ud’s attempts to purge the pdpa and shift more into the Western sphere
of influence led inevitably to a showdown with the Soviet Union and his
own and his family’s lonely and bloody death.
Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, much has been made of King
Zahir Shah and Da’ud’s secularization and move to gender equality, both
by the Western media and monarchists who were restored to a meas-
ure of political power by the American intervention. Some media even
tend to portray the reign of King Zahir Shah as a kind of Golden Age of
democracy and social liberty, exemplified by pictures of unveiled women
walking Kabul’s streets in knee-length skirts. Yet this grossly overstated
the actual situation. The social liberalization was confined to Kabul and a
few other urban centres, in particular Mazar-i Sharif and Pul-i Khumri,
and only affected a minority of young, urbanized elites and government
officials. Burqa-clad women were a common sight in Kabul in the 1970s
and even more so in Kandahar, Ghazni, Jalalabad and rural Afghanistan.
As for the fleeting experiment in democracy, such as it was, this lasted less
than a decade and the government soon reverted to its former, repressive
ways after the press and independent Parliamentarians called government
officials to account, exposed nepotism, corruption and incompetence and
demanded equal rights for marginalized minorities.
Instead of seeking to provide the citizens of Afghanistan with basic
freedoms, successive governments under Zahir Shah and President
Da’ud focused on infrastructure projects. Dams and hydroelectric
power stations provided limited electricity to the capital and a few urban
centres and irrigated new areas in Balkh, Nangahar, Qunduz and in the
Helmand–Kandahar region, while new sealed roads improved internal
communications between the main cities. Rural and provincial roads
remained essentially untouched and were some of the worst in Asia, while
the majority of Afghanistan’s predominantly rural population saw little
benefit from government projects. Their primary intent anyway was to
increase trade and agricultural output, and hence state revenues, rather
than to alleviate poverty or raise the standard of living of ordinary Afghans.
Some projects, such as the Helmand-Arghandab scheme, were more about
national pride. The majority of infrastructure projects were funded by
foreign aid and loans rather than from state revenues; a policy based on the
assumption that when completed they would bring in substantial additional
revenues to the Exchequer and end up paying for themselves. When these
hopes proved to be false, the country found itself increasingly indebted to
foreign banks and nations, compromising Afghanistan’s neutrality. By the
early 1970s Afghanistan was in default on its debt repayments and Da’ud’s