conclusionafter all, controlled Afghanistan’s foreign policy, had a strong say in who
ruled the country, paid the government’s bills and armed its military.
Frequent revolts and revolutions however consumed much of the country’s
scarce resources and as a consequence British subsidies failed to benefit
ordinary people. After independence the government continued to rely
on foreign subsidies in the form of loans, which were spent on prestigious
infrastructure programmes, such as the Helmand Valley Irrigation Scheme,
that failed to deliver the anticipated fiscal benefits, or on white elephant
projects such as Amir ’Aman Allah Khan’s new capital of Dar al-’Aman.
Britain’s closed-door policy of the nineteenth century, backed by heavy
government censorship, also denied Afghans contact with the outside
world until relatively recently. The state’s policies of mass relocations,
seizures of land and private assets, as well as the unreformed nature of
Afghanistan’s feudal agrarian system, corruption, nepotism, oppression
and government ineptitude, have all contributed to Afghanistan’s poverty.
The country has one of the worst track records in the world when it comes
to literacy, educational standards, social welfare and health. Afghanistan
remains an essentially pre-industrial society that failed to benefit from the
technological or social benefits of colonial administrations, such as sealed
roads, railways and electricity, and a public health system.
In the early twentieth century Afghan monarchists, led by Mahmud
Tarzi and his Young Afghans, attempted to impose some form of national
identity that would bind the nation together. Yet the model he and his
ideological heirs embraced was derived from European ideals that were the
antecedents of the secular, ethnocentric nationalism of the Young Turks
and Mustafa Kemal. Such a model was unsuited to Afghanistan’s multi-
cultural and multi-ethnic society and divided more than it united. Under
the influence of revolutionary Indian nationalists, the Wish Zalmiyan and
German National Socialism, Tarzi’s Afghaniyya mutated into a concept
of Pushtun supremacy heavily influenced by Nazi Aryanism. Despite the
inappropriateness of this ethnocentric model, Muhammadzais and mon-
archists still cling to this model of Pushtun nationalism as justification
for the Durrani claim to the divine right to rule Afghanistan. This posi-
tion was and is still tacitly endorsed by many American, United Nations,
European and Pakistani politicians, even as they attempt to incorporate
other ethnicities and religious factions into the political process. Yet all
ethnocentric nationalism, by its very nature, promotes minority interests
and is exclusive rather than inclusive.
Another problem is that the various state-sponsored ideas of nation-
alism that have been mooted since the late nineteenth century have been