Jochen Becker
1979 and following
Between Kabul and Tehran

Factory in Kabul. Scene in Afghanistan 1362

Informal settlement in Afghanistan 1362

The cross signs this urban area as clear of mines. Kabul 2002. (Foto: Sandra Schäfer)

Relation City/Country
Before the civil wars decimated its population to one million, Kabul was almost a metropolis counting two million residents, while contemporary estimates range up to five million. Every fifth Afghan would thus live in the capital today. In the mid-1970s, as the two architects and authors of this volume, Ajmal Maiwandi (7) and Anthony Fontenot, point out, Kabul was a "modern oasis". In 1977 two thirds of the industry and almost seventy percent of the workforce were concentrated here. Between 1956 and 1975 the World Bank alone invested more than 230 million dollars (Maiwandi/Fontenont 2004: 242). "For years there was a perception that if one could modernise Kabul, then the rest of Afghanistan would follow" (ibid.: 244). Today a large part of the international relief funds and foreign investments also remains in Kabul, a fact intensifying the historically grown, strict separation between city and country, capital and province. Afghanistan's cities have always been the contested terrain of domination, and Kabul, as the capital city, the central location of political conflicts. The rural regions, on the other hand, have no influence to speak of on the state.

In Kabul of the 1970s, the elites who returned from studies in Europe, Moscow or the United States encountered each other again. Reforms such as the secularisation of society, the strengthening of the central state, the protection of minorities, the ban on slavery, the introduction of compulsory school attendance and military service, Western-style clothing, and the emancipation of women - which President Amanullah had already put on the political agenda in the 1920s and 30s - began to gain a foothold, at least in the cities. Party politics remained limited to the centres and, in particular, their universities, schools and military academies. Until the withdrawal of the Soviet forces, a middle-class milieu evolved in which, in the 1960s and 70s, communist, Maoist and socialist-Islamic camps fought ideological battles.

While Kabul became an ever more modern city, the province counted as the territory of the nomads and traditionalists. The rural regions were, and still are, to a great degree detached from 20th-century modernization and kept dependent on feudal structures or warlords. The severe winters, the unique geographical features, as well as the war zones with still more than ten million land mines render large parts of the country difficult to access. These regions served both the mujahideen and the Al-Qaeda troops as ideal retreats and territories for their smuggling activities.

Fragmentization and structures independent of the state characterize the country until today. As Zahra Breshna describes in her contribution to this volume, the autonomy of small units is inscribed even in the pattern of settlements. The national terrain is fissured; due to the fact that no colonial power intervened, there are still more than thirty different languages in use today. Local, tribal and familial links are more powerful than ethnic identities; clientelistic clans and religious affiliations are more important than notions of the nation-state. In former times, taxes already mainly ended up in the hands of regional rulers. Since a census was never held, the country's population can only be estimated at between 25 and 30 million.

Modernization from the Outside
For a long time Afghanistan lacked an infrastructure in the form of roads or telegraph lines, which in other countries were often provided under the rule of European colonial powers. Even today, a railway network, which most of the neighbouring countries possess, does not exist. The country profited all the more from modernization through development aid. In the mid-1950s Afghanistan additionally received more than thirty million dollars in American military aid and simultaneously began a military cooperation with the Soviet Union. The Afghan military gradually took shape along the lines of Soviet foreign policy. Almost all important infrastructure projects and large public buildings are of Soviet or American origin. (8)

With the "reign of terror" of the communist Khalq Party (Schetter 2004: 98), in 1978 a politics commenced that was primarily oriented toward the Sovietized, progressive, modern cities and that brushed the rural population aside as religious and reactionary. "Most Afghans did not understand Islam or communism as a sophisticated ideology but as the continuation of the duality between city and country. Islam was the synonym of the traditional social system, while communism was associated with the politics of modernization and centralization in Kabul" (ibid.: 109).

On Christmas Eve of 1979, Soviet troops occupied the centre of Kabul. Within a short period of time, 85,000 soldiers were stationed in the country. While Western states boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, two thirds of the Afghan army deserted within just a few months. Since the war mainly raged in the countryside, a large part of the rural population fled to Kabul. While the Soviet forces controlled the airspace and the cities - bombing villages, fields and irrigation plants - the mujahideen operated in the mountainous border region to Pakistan. They attacked schools and murdered thousands of teachers allegedly associated with the state. The Soviet military operations cost between one and 1.6 million Afghan lives, while 40,000 Soviet casualties were reported. "The war triggered the word's largest mass exodus since World War II. By the mid-1980s, around 15 million Afghans, half the population, was taking refuge in flight" (ibid.: 104). (9) Between 1980 and 1990 the mujahideen were supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with weaponry and money amounting to two billion dollars each.

Education, women's emancipation and Russian-style prefab housing on the one hand, and the convention of a "High Council of Clergymen and Mullahs" on the other, demonstrated the double strategy of the Soviet realpolitik. Moreover, the status of the local languages was enhanced to that of national languages. "The policy of nationalities stood in stark contrast to the conception of a nation-state advocated by all previous rulers and regimes: For the first time, Afghanistan was no longer the country of the Pashtuns but a country of different nationalities" (ibid.: 108). The government was intent on shattering the feudalism in the countryside and breaking the rule of the mullahs by means of programmes against illiteracy and the endorsement of political "enlightenment". Up to 100,000 people were locked up in prison following numerous waves of arrest, or immediately shot dead.

Although the Soviet president Gorbatchev termed "Afghanistan a bleeding wound", the war entered into an especially brutal phase shortly after he took office in 1983. Following the supply of American Stinger shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles to the mujahideen, 270 Soviet aircraft worth two billion dollars were destroyed. The Soviet Union was no longer in a position to win the war, and in April 1988 Afghanistan and Pakistan finally signed a peace agreement with the United States and the Soviet Union in Geneva. Islam was declared the state religion in Afghanistan and an Islamic university was founded in Kabul. From then on, pilgrimages to Mecca as well as more than 20,000 mullahs throughout the country were financially supported by the state. President Najib changed his name to Najibullah and stabilized his power by calling to convene loya jirgahs, assemblies of regional rulers.

Parastate and Informal Structures
When the Cold War ended, both world powers withdrew from the still unresolved conflict and power struggle between the various factions in Afghanistan. Now Iran and Pakistan exerted increased influence on their fragile neighbour. The country began to disintegrate even faster in economic terms: "Northern Afghanistan was integrated in the economic circular flow of the central Asian CIS states, and trade flourished between western Afghanistan and Iran, while many tribes and warlords in the Pashtun tribal belt were oriented toward Pakistan, financing themselves through illegal businesses (opium trade, smuggling)" (Schetter 2004: 119). Despotism, extorting tolls, hold-ups, and expropriations dominated the country.

The alliance of the mujahideen eroded on account of escalating battles over the control of poppy cultivation for opium. From the Panshir Valley, Ahmed Shah Masood created a sort of independent state with its own laws, taxes, schools and health services. At the end of the 1980s, "military and civil structures evolved in Afghanistan that evaded the influence of the government as well as that of the resistance. The government itself contributed to this by setting up independent militias" (ibid.: 114f.). Soon the militias offered their services to the highest bidder: "During the day this militia ensured Kabul's power supply, only to interrupt it at night. The military groups reinforced their position by means of such alternating alliances" (ibid.: 116).

The actual devastation of Kabul took place between 1992 and 1996. While the city was for the most part spared during the Soviet occupation, it was now massively destroyed by the permanent bombardments of rivalling militias, during which up to 80,000 people were killed. This was compounded by massacres of the civilian population, torture and rape. Conrad Schetter even speaks of features of "ethnic cleansing" (ibid.: 119). After the overthrow of Najibullah, around 1.5 million Afghans had returned to their homeland; now a new mass exodus commenced. This time, however, Iran and Pakistan kept their borders closed.

In the mid-1980s immigration from the provinces, land occupation and unregulated buildings characterised the erstwhile modern capital Kabul, which now increasingly acquired rural traits. With the dissolution of state facilities, people driven from the interior of the country occupied public land as well as empty government buildings and turned them into spaces for housing. Whereas in the 1970s Kabul had experienced a thrust of modernization, by the mid-1980s eighty percent of the houses were made of simple, mostly self-produced clay bricks. Today Kabul is a metropolis of the Global South scarred by massive destruction inflicted by the civil wars. The numerous building ruins are still used or converted for other purposes by simple means; trash and rubble is recycled or resold on the black market. "It was this constant small-scale informal reconstruction, displacement, and recycling that managed to keep parts of Kabul from being completly erased" (Maiwandi/Fontenot 2004: 248).

The disintegration of the country promoted a populist Islamicization as well as a gradual increase of the significance of ethnic identities, although the war against the Soviet occupation had at first strengthened the idea of one nation. Starting in 1994 the Taliban (religion students) became established in the madrasahs (Koran schools) in the Afghan-Pakistan border region. They fought petty criminality and extorting tolls, and promised security for a war-weary and disoriented population. At the same time, the Taliban exerted despotic terror to enforce virtue, they mutilated and murdered in public, (10) and in September 1996 captured Kabul. Especially the cities, as alleged hotbeds of vice, were now strictly regulated. The control over the merchandise movements between the global marketplace Dubai, Iran, Pakistan and the CIS states is said to have yielded 2.1 billion dollars a year for the Taliban, supplemented by income in the form of twenty percent of the profits gained through heroin production. (11) A practice of clientelism replaced statehood and a regulated tax system.

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