Afghanistan

I am researching the extraordinary history of the West's relationship to Afghanistan over the past 200 years. It is a very complex, and sometimes weird, story. These are notes on some of the characters and episodes involved.

Part One - 1971

There are many individuals and fragmentary events that have led to the present situation in Afghanistan. But there was a moment in 1971 when four separate things happened in and around Kabul that in their different ways reached back into the past and forward into the future.

That year the BBC sent a film crew to Kabul to recreate the first great military disaster of the British Empire - the retreat from Kabul in 1841. The BBC began by gathering Afghan tribesmen together to be extras. They acted out being taught cricket by the British. The Afghans then pretended to be fierce rebels storming out of the Kabul Bazaar to attack the British camp outside the city.

The BBC's adviser was Louis Dupree. He was an American who had lived in Kabul since 1955. He will appear in many different ways in this story. But for the moment all you need to know is that he had once walked the route of the British retreat alone in winter, and also that he knew everyone in power in Kabul.

Dupree had noticed that the demonstrations by the students at Kabul University were increasing, and often degenerating into fights. At the end of 1970 he took a photograph of one. It is grainy and indistinct, but he had caught a moment which was to have immense consequences for everyone in Afghanistan, and around the world.

Kabul university had been created by the West, in particular by America and West Germany.

Then the Soviet Union decided they had to pour money in too. So they built the enormous Kabul Polytechnic.

Both were seedbeds for western ideas, Foreign students and teachers from the west had flooded in and with them came the modern revolutionary ideas from the campuses in Europe and America. And very quickly the Kabul students set up a wide range of Leninist and Maoist groups.

Dupree had captured the moment when those groups had begun to confront a new group of revolutionaries on campus. They were the Islamists. The Islamists too had taken revolutionary ideas from the West but they had fused them with Islam. One of the Islamist groups had found a poem written by a Leninist student that praised Lenin using a term reserved only for the prophet Mohammed.

They sneakily showed it to a group of conservative mullahs in Kabul and all hell broke loose.

All sorts of people were in and around the demonstrations and battles that followed and many of them will appear later in this story.

Kabul was trying to imitate the West in other ways. Abdul Habib Aziz had recently opened the only supermarket in Afghanistan. Then in the spring of 1971 one of Italy's leading conceptual artists turned up in Kabul and decided to buy the building above Mr Aziz's supermarket and turn it into a hotel. The artist was called Alighiero e Boetti. Boetti is a fascinating and mysterious figure. He was part of the artistic avant-garde that emerged from 1960s radicalism in Italy.

Boetti was fascinated by chance and randomness. He would post letters to other artists he knew with the wrong address and then show the ones that were returned. His works often had secret codes built into them. Some of the codes have been cracked, others remain mysterious. No-one knows if the hotel was a conceptual art-work in itself or just somewhere for him and his friends to stay. But what is certain is that Boetti saw in Afghanistan a way of solving what he saw as the central crisis in the West, the overwhelming belief in the individual as an inspired creator.

Boetti had started as a member of the Arte Povera group. Like many avant-garde groups at that time they wanted to challenge the 'system', and to do that they attacked the notion of self-expression and the creation of things and objects - which they believed was central to consumer capitalism. Boetti said that what he saw in Afghanistan was the opposite. It was a country empty of created things.

"Afghan homes, for example, are empty: no furniture therefore no objects commonly placed on furniture. There are only a few carpets and mattresses on which people lie down, drink, smoke and eat. I also like the fact that Afghans wear the same clothes at day and at night. Nothing has been added to the landscape. Rocks are moved and used to build cube houses. The resistance with which Afghans oppose our civilisation has always amazed me."

Following his principles Boetti found Abib and Fatima. They were embroiderers, and he gave them maps of the world as it was then in 1971 with all its borders. It was, he said, a given diagram of power in the world. He asked the two women to create a series of embroidered maps where each country would be coloured by its own flag. After that Boetti said, I did nothing. And 500 women started making the maps overseen by Abib and Fatima.

Just as the Afghan student revolutionaries had strange dreams of the west which they were going to try and impose on Afghanistan, so Boetti was trying to use a strange fantasy version of Afghanistan to free himself from the conventions of the west.

Meanwhile the BBC crew had moved location along the road to Jalalabad. They were retracing the terrible retreat of British soldiers when out of 16,000 only one man made it the 115 miles. Again the BBC used local tribesmen to act out the massacre - showing how their ancestors had poured fire down on the terrified British soldiers.

The tone of the BBC programme is of its time. It is determined also to show the dark side of the British Empire, the horrific acts of cruelty ordered by the British high command. It is saying - we may have lost an empire but we have become better people, and such horrors will never happen again.

At the end of the film is a scene showing how the British would tie Indian rebels to cannon muzzles and blow them to pieces. But a few years ago that section was edited out and you have to get special permission to show it. Things had changed again.

It is very horrific and absolutely not for the squeamish, but if you want to have a look at it - here it is.

As the BBC were filming a group of students from Nottingham University drove past. They were a group of mountaineers who were on their way to their first expedition outside Europe. They were going to climb a peak in the Hindu Kush called Koh-i-Khaaik. Their leader was called Peter Boardman. He would become one of the world's most famous climbers, but this particular trip was going to go terribly wrong.

In 1977 Boardman recorded a description to camera of what happened both literally, and inside his own mind during his terrifying ordeal. And how Afghanistan had haunted him ever since.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Part Two 1972 - 1772

In early 1970s the Italian conceptual artist, Alighiero e Boetti often visited the hotel he had bought in Kabul, Number One Hotel. By 1972 it was being used not just by Boetti's friends but by more and more western travellers.

All around them in Kabul revolutionary forces were emerging who wanted to overthrow the King. One of these forces was Islamism. The westerners heard odd stories about a man called The Engineer on the university campus. He was supposed to be going round throwing acid in the faces of girls who didn't cover their heads.

Two hundred years before, the first modern Islamist had emerged to the north of Afghanistan, in the Caucasus. He was called Sheikh Mansur. Mansur fused ideas of nationalism and anti-colonial struggle with Islam and used them to lead a struggle against the Russian forces that were trying to occupy Chechnya and Daghestan.

In 1876 a professor in Turin discovered a collection of letters written by Sheikh Mansur to the professor's father. In them Sheikh Mansur reveals that he was in reality an Italian from Turin called Giovanni Battista Boetti.

He was a direct ancestor of Alighiero e Boetti.

The letters tell an amazing story. Giovanni Boetti had been born near Turin. In the early 1770s he had run away from home and become a monk for the Dominican order. He then travelled as a missionary in Asia Minor and had all sorts of adventures and scandalous intrigues and love affairs. Then at some point Boetti converted to Islam and became a "Mussulman Prophet" with the power to raise and lead an army of thousands of Muslims.

From other accounts of Sheikh Mansur it is clear that this power came from the fact that he had fused what were modern western ideas of nationalism and anti-imperialism with Islamic ideas. Up to that point the resistance to the growing Russian empire had been from secular leaders in Chechnya. And they had failed.

Mansur-Boetti was something new and mysterious.

In Quest of God and Freedom - L. Broers
Slavonic & East European Review, Vol 80, No 4

Then the Russians noticed Boetti. In 1785 General Potemkin wrote to Catherine the Great:

"On the opposite bank of the river Sunja in the village of Aldy a prophet has appeared and started to preach. He has submitted superstitious and ignorant people to his will by claiming to have had a revelation"

The Russians decided to send an army of three thousand men to destroy this prophet. They marched though the mountains and the farmland where Grozny now stands and across the river into the village of Aldy. But when they arrived they found no-one there. It was as if Boetti and all his army had disappeared. "As though they were ghosts" wrote one Russian.

The Russians destroyed the village completely and then set off on the return march. But Boetti had hidden his army in the forest covered mountains and he had set up an ambush. The Islamists slaughtered over half the Russian force and most of the survivors drowned trying to flee across the Sunja River. It was the start of what the Chechens today see as a 200 year war to remove the Russian occupation.

Here are photos of Giovanni Battista Boetti and his descendant Alighiero e Boetti. Both were cultural warriors - the fake Sheikh struggling against the Russian attempt to destroy Chechen national identity, the later Boetti struggling against the culture of individual self expression which he believed was corroding the west. The Sheikh used armed struggle, his descendent used the possibly less effective weapon of performance art.

But maybe its not true. Over the last 100 years scholars have argued about the authenticity of the letters.

Possibly they were extraordinary fantasy? An elaborate fiction about Islam and the west written by the older Boetti. Or possibly forged and planted in the archive by someone else? Noone knows for sure.

By the mid 20th century the force of Islamism had disappeared from the western mind. In the simple world of the cold war it seemed as if the dangerous complexities of nationalism and politicised religion had virtually disappeared. Here is part of a film made for the BBC in 1961 by Fitzroy Maclean. He was an upper class British adventurer who had links to the Secret Service. He was also reputed to be one of the models for James Bond.

Maclean's film is about Khruschev's attempt to wipe out all national identity in the Soviet Empire. Maclean is suspicious, he travels to the Caucusus and sees another possible unified future. A world where everyone will become American.

But he also adds a warning. He points out that throughout Asia and Africa the Soviets are doing precisely the opposite - encouraging nationalism as a weapon in their cold-war struggle with America. Might this not have unforeseen consequences for the Soviet Union in the future?

Last week six Italian soldiers died in a suicide truck bomb-blast in Kabul. The deaths shocked Italy and a state funeral was held in Rome. At the funeral Prime Minister Berlusconi became the first western leader to call for the western troops to withdraw from Afghanistan.

But Roberto Saviano the expert on the Neapolitan mafia - the Camorra - pointed out that Italy's relationship to Afghanistan was far more complicated. The soldiers who died, he said, came from the south of Italy, an area where their life chances have been blunted by corruption and organised crime. Their only option out of the trap was the army - which had then taken them to Afghanstan. The country that produces 90% of the heroin in Italy and the rest of Europe.

And it is that heroin that fuels the power and corruption of organised crime in Southern Italy.

But back in 1972 that trade with Afghanistan did not exist. Until the westerners began taking heroin. In his hotel in Kabul Boetti was one of the first, but many, many more would follow.

At the same time he was still pursuing his project of using Afghanistan to attack the western belief in the artist as individual creator. He got the Afghan women embroiderers he was working with to embroider another coded piece. But this time the code numbers referred to the anniversary of his birth and his predicted date of death - he was still trapped by individualism

The Afghans responded to the westerners' desire for drugs - for hashish and heroin - by selling them to the westerners. Then the drugs began to be smuggled out of the country. To start with the smuggling was done by the westerners themselves

This is a section of a BBC film shot in the summer of 1977 on the Afghan - Iran border. The customs officers are searching the line of travellers coming back from Afghanistan towards Europe. Then their eye is caught by the VW bus of an Italian lawyer and his wife.

The film returns to the Italian lawyer few days later in Mashhad prison. It is a brief but very moving interview. 18 months later the revolution in Iran was going to begin, and Mashhad prison would become one of the places where the revolutionary regime locked up its prisoners. It then became a place of mass execution as the Islamists around Khomeini hi-jacked the revolution.

I have tried to find out what happened to the lawyer - Roberto Sagressi (?). There is no "programme-as-completed" form for the film in the BBC archives. He just simply disappeared. It would be good to know what did happen to him.

In the face of Berlusconi's demand for withdrawal the other western leaders have asserted that they must continue the fight against the Taliban.

But who are the Taliban? They - like everything else in this story - remain a mystery. We never see them on the TV. They are always just out of sight behind the trees in the shots.

And again and again journalists who accompany the troops report that when they enter a village from which they have been attacked, which they have then bombed and shelled, there is no-one there. There are no bodies, not even blood on the ground. But they know the fighters have been there. The Taliban have disappeared the soldiers say "like ghosts"

Here's a fascinating report - both written and filmed - by Sean Smith of the Guardian. It was filmed during Operation Panther's Claw this year.

The Guardian, August 17, 2009

There are also growing reports that the Taliban are no longer a fundamentalist group. That those politics and ideas have been destroyed by greed for the power and profits that the drugs trade brings. They too have become the victims of heroin. They are gradually becoming are an eastern version of the Camorra. Both groups shaped and supported by the insatiable consumer demand in the West.

We aren't fighting what we are told we are fighting.

Here is a bit from a really good report by Stephen Grey which Newsnight broadcast. The troops enter a Taliban town. All "the ghosts" have disappeared - but they have left behind 11 tons of heroin.

In 1791 Giovani Batista Boetti was captured. He was taken to Catherine the Great who wanted to see the man who had used Islam to defeat the Russian mighty army. He was then locked up in St Petersburg fortress. He wrote one last letter to Professor Ottino's father. Posted from St Petersburg. Then he died in 1794.

But maybe the letter was a fantasy written by Boetti. And really Sheikh Mansur came from the village of Aldy outside Grozny. No-one knows

Almost exactly 200 years later his relative Alighiero e Boetti died - of cancer - but also weakened ,some believed, by his addiction. It was 1994. The day he died the Taliban began their march from the south to take over Kabul and they promised they would destroy the drugs trade. They were supported by the west.

At the same time the Russian army invaded Chechnya to suppress the insurgent nationalism and Islamism. Here is one of the earliest photos - a Russian helicopter downed in the same forests that Boetti - aka Mansur - had destroyed the Russians in 1785.

Alighiero e Boetti had asked that his ashes be scattered in the seven coloured lakes of Afghanistan called Bandi A Mir. But because of the fighting between the Taliban and the warlords it couldn't happen. His ashes still remain in Italy.

He had missed the predicted date of his death by 29 years.

TO BE CONTINUED

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PART THREE - THE LOST HISTORY OF HELMAND

When you look at footage of the fighting in Helmand today everyone assumes it is being played out against an ancient background of villages and fields built over the centuries.

This is not true. If you look beyond the soldiers, and into the distance, what you are really seeing are the ruins of one of the biggest technological projects the United States has ever undertaken. Its aim was to use science to try and change the course of history and produce a modern utopia in Afghanistan. The city of Lashkar Gah was built by the Americans as a model planned city, and the hundreds of miles of canals that the Taliban now hide in were constructed by the same company that built the San Francisco Bay Bridge and Cape Canaveral.

Here is what Helmand province looks like today.

The story of this strange forgotten project started with the holocaust which had the unforeseen consequence of making Afghanistan very rich.

The fur trade in Europe which had been predominantly run by Jews was closed down. It moved to New York where there was a growing demand for astrakhan coats - made with the fur of fat-tailed sheep from Afghanistan. Here is a classic piece of Afghan promotion of their key export. And a fat tailed sheep.

 

As a result dollars poured into Afghanistan and by 1946 the country had $100 million in reserve. The King, Zahir Shah, decided to spend the money on a dam. His aim was to create a modern state - and with it spread the power of the Pashtun tribes. So he hired the giant American firm Morrison Knudsen who had built the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, and they began surveying Afghanistan's biggest river - the Helmand.

Here is a page from the Morrison Knudsen Magazine that expresses the ambition and scale of the project. Little America in Afghanistan.

I want to thank Nick Cullather from Indiana University both for this and for many of the extraordinary details in this story. He is a brilliant historian.

 

And in the early 50s one of the MK engineers called Paul Jones wrote a book about his time in Helmand. He called it Afghanistan Venture. Here is bit from the book. It gives an idea of the idealism of the Americans involved - and possibly of the Afghans too.

 

 

But almost immediately things started to go wrong. In 1949 the first, small diversion dam was built. But it raised the level of the water table in the whole area. And that brought salt to the surface.

The American engineers realised this meant that the whole project probably wouldn't work. But at that very moment President Truman made a speech promising to give aid to poor countries. It was the start of the Cold War and Truman was going to use development projects and American money to stop countries from becoming communist.

The Americans liked dams. They were a way of challenging the communists because they would create more fertile land - so people could be better off  without having to redistribute land through a revolution. In 1952 the Helmand Valley Authority was set up. It was modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority - the TVA - created by Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Faced with this the engineers' doubts about the project were buried and forgotten. Massive loans poured in from America and two giant dams were built plus 300 miles of big canals.

But more problems emerged. Everything became waterlogged which led to weeds. Salt kept on suddenly appearing. And the reservoirs and the canals made the water cooler which meant that there couldn't be any vineyards and orchards any longer. In future they could only grow grain.

But again all the doubts and worries were overwhelmed because the American technocrats and politicians had become fascinated by a new idea. It was called "Modernization Theory". It said that there was a way of using science and technology not just to stop countries like Afghanistan going communist, but to actually transform them into democratic capitalist societies like America.

Modernization Theory had been invented by an ambitious academic at Harvard called Walt Whitman Rostow. He said that if you put the right technologies in place and educated key elites then the countries would inevitably develop into advanced capitalist societies. They would go through a series of logical stages (there were five) until you got what he modestly called "Rostovian Lift-off".

Rostow laid out his theory in a book he called "The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto".

Rostow's theories obsessed the American development agencies and they came up with all sorts of ideas about how to turn countries like Afghanistan into modern democracies.

One of the oddest was the belief that it was possible to scientifically discover who the crucial "transitional personalities" were in the society. These were people who had underlying "capitalist personalities" that they were unaware of. A psychologist called David McLelland invented a way of discovering who had these traits - and techniques to then develop what he called "the need to achieve". He was convinced you could use behavioural psychology to turn people throughout the world into model Americans.

Here are some sections from a public information film about McClelland and his belief that you could change the course of history by using his scientific methods.

McClelland worked tirelessly to prove his case. Here is one of his diagrams that shows that the frequency of achieving imagery in children's books in the late 19th century leads inevitably to a rise in inventions in America as they grow up - as shown by the number of patented inventions.

 

Out of the theories of Rostow and McClelland came a wave of educational and behavioural psychology projects to transform the Afghans into modern, motivated human beings. The Afghan government and the American agencies produced books full of photographs that showed these modernised beings in their new modernised world

 

 

 

And for the Americans the heroic figure in all this was the Engineer. They poured millions into building a brand new engineering department in Kabul university. Here is a promotional photograph of the new engineers.

 

But there was one transitional personality that the Americans were worried about. He was the Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud - he was also the King's brother in law and cousin. Daoud was a Pashtun and he wanted the Pashtuns to have permanent control over Afghanistan. He was a ruthless politician and spent his time playing the countries who wanted to give him aid off against each other.

Here is Daoud with Eisenhower and Khruschev and Chou En-Lai and other powerful people.

 

So the Americans decided to give Prime Minister Daoud the thing he dreamed of. They would turn Helmand province into a settled Pashtun area which would consolidate the Pashtun's powerful grip on the whole country.

It was an extraordinary project. The Americans set out to take thousands of families of Pashtun nomads who spent their time roaming the border area with Pakistan and settle them in small-holdings in Helmand. They would be turned into sedentary farmers. It was a giant piece of social engineering. Even Swiss experts were flown in to teach the Pashtuns how to use long-handle scythes to cut grass for their sheep.

The Americans liked it because it would take a lawless group of nomads who were always straying over the border into Pakistan and starting local wars and turn them into peaceful farmers.

Prime Minister Daoud liked it because it was an opportunity to increase Pashtun power - sometimes in not very nice ways. One of his political critics put it bluntly:

"He wanted to use these new settlers as a death squad to crush the uprisings of the non-Pashtun people of the southwest and central part of the country"

Out of this came not just new homesteads but a giant modern infrastructure. At its centre was the modern planned city of Lashkar Gar. As many of the engineers working there described it - like an American suburb. A model world that would help transform the warlike and unruly tribes people into democratic and achieving citizens.

Here is a link to a fantastic site of photographs taken by Michael Yon showing Lashkar Gah today. In this photo you can see the remnants of an American suburb of the 1950s

 

It was at this very moment that a world famous historian called Arnold Toynbee visited Helmand. Toynbee had spent his life studying the giant sweep of History to find out what made different civilizations rise and fall.

Toynbee drove from Kandahar to Lashkar Gah past all the giant canals and dams. He was shocked. What he was seeing, he said, was not a new civilization but "a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape. The new world they are conjuring up at the Helmand river's expense is to be an America-in-Asia"

Toynbee quoted Sophocles' warning: "The craft of his engines surpasseth his dreams"

What he meant was that you couldn't change history with just machines and science. Toynbee believed that what led to civilisations rise and fall was culture and religion.

A year after he returned Toynbee gave a series of lectures called "America and World Revolution" which was published as a book . In an interview with the BBC in 1962 he warns of the neglect of religion and religious values in this rush to modernity. It was the beginning of the conservative reaction to the techno-utopian dreams of progress of the 50s and 60's.

What is fascinating is that his argument - that religion is the only real force in the west that can give meaning and purpose in life - is exactly the same as the new political Islamist ideas that were beginning to emerge on the campuses of Cairo, Kabul and Islamabad.

Toynbee was an atheist, but he believed that without such meaning social structures in western society will corrode. It is the same conservative argument that you find in the writings of Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and Mawdudi in Pakistan.

But the King of Afghanistan loved the American modernisation project, and he now set out to transform not just the urban elite, but every Afghan into "transitional beings". And to do this he was going to get rid of the Burqa. Here is film of him at the parade for his birthday in 1961.

One of the most perceptive observers of that period in Kabul was the American archaeologist Louis Dupree, who will become central to this story. He had just arrived in Kabul and he wrote a letter describing the model the King had approved for women during the transition period:

" All the women wear the costume accepted for the transition period. No facial make-up, dark glasses, headscarf, a duster or a raincoat or a dress tailored to resemble a coat, and gloves. Some wear the dark glasses indoors others do not"

The project was the main talking point at a party in the US embassy, and a group of American women in Kabul decided to help push the King's transitional aims even further.

They were the wives of the American executives who ran the Afghan national airline, Ariana. Even the airline was part of the development project and it was owned and run by Pan American Airlines from San Francisco. The wives decided they would put on a fashion show to demonstrate to the Afghan women how to be truly modern

Pan Am in the US thought it was a good idea and approached Vogue Magazine to help. Here is the press realease from Pan Am public relations that tells what happened.

 

 

Pan American Airways, Inc - all their records are held at the University of Miami's Special Collection Department

And here are some of the Vogue sewing patterns from 1960. Images of what the airline wives hoped Afghan women would become.

 

I am sure there are both photos and film of the fashion show. I have been looking for them without success. It would be great to see them.

All this vast dream of modernity and, with it, the King's power, was entirely based on the success of the development projects - above all the Helmand dam and irrigation scheme. The trouble was that they were not a success in any way or form. In reality Helmand was a disaster.

There was so much water in the ground in some areas that houses and  mosques were crumbling into a growing bog. Even worse, underneath the new man-made oases, the engineers had discovered hard rock which made them even more waterlogged. So they had to dig deep bore drains - which removed 10% of the area from cultivation.

Then a study showed that crop yields were steadily falling. But the academics advising the American development agencies had a new theory that explained this. It was called Dual Economic Theory. It said that you not only had to modernise the infrastructure you also had to bring agriculture up to date.

So the American planners turned to the most up to date theory. It was called The Green Revolution (as opposed to The Red Revolution the Russians were exporting). It was based on the new type of high-yield wheat that had been developed by a scientist called Norman Borlaug. And the development agenicies brought in 170 tons of the experimental dwarf wheat developed by Borlaug in Mexico.

By now many of the nomads had settled and divided the land in Helmand into small plots. The problem was that to make the green revolution work and the wheat grow effectively the area would have to be turned back into vast open spaces. In other words the whole settlement system would have to be put in reverse.

Undeterred, the US Dept of Agriculture proposed that the Helmand Valley Authority remove all the settlers. Then they would "level the whole area with bulldozers and redistribute the property in large, uniform smooth land plots". They also said they were going to cut down all the trees.

But when they tried to do this the bulldozers and the American technocrats were confronted by the Pashtun farmers with rifles. They refused to allow their new homes to be destroyed.

The USAID reported back to Washington "this presents a very real constraint on the project".

Much of all this had been inspired by the ideas of the American academic Walt Rostow. By now Rostow had become one of the most powerful men in America, special adviser for National Security. And he was developing these ideas even further in another country. Vietnam.

By 1965 the Americans were fighting a bitter guerilla war against an unseen enemy, the Vietcong. The Vietcong hid among the thousands of villages in South Vietnam - from which they attacked the Americans. Rostow was convinced that you could use modernization theory to transform the country and defeat the communists.

He was a supporter of an idea called "Strategic Hamlets. The theory was simple -  you took all the "good" Vietnamese out of the villages and resettled them in new planned villages which would be protected by the Americans. There the villagers would be educated by psychologists and special cadres to become new "modern" citizens devoted to democracy.

Here is a picture of Rostow showing President Johnson his ideas.

 

And here is part of a BBC film shot in 1966 which vividly shows the system the Americans had created in Vietnam in all its weirdness. By now it had become the central strategy in the counter-insurgency.

In 1969 the Afghan government and the American planners finally promised "the year of yield take-off".

But there was a drought. The Helmand river became a trickle. The main reservoir created by the project dried up completely. Wheat yields were the lowest in the world - 4 bushels to the acre - Iowa's yield was 180 bushels to the acre. This created a massive food crisis which began to destabilize the government and the King.

There were student strikes. Many of the student leaders came from the engineering department which was now full of communist and Maoist cells. Then one of the communist students defected to a new group of revolutionaries - the Islamists. He was called Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, and he became notorious for his violence. Some say he went round throwing acid in the faces of women without headscarves, but he denies this and says that if he lived in the west he would sue for libel. He was given a nickname - The Engineer.

In 1972 parliament was suspended and a year later the Prime Minister Daoud joined with the army to mount a coup that got rid of the King. It was the beginning of the chaos that would lead the country into anarchy and disaster. And the end of the dreams of the Helmand Valley Project. The Americans began to leave, abandoning a vast infrastructure that started to decay.

But during the Soviet war both sides found a use for the remains of the project. The giant reservoir was used to dump bodies tortured and killed by the Khalq communists. While the Mujahedin used the water chanels for cover when fighting the Russians

And the new soil was very suitable for a new crop - the opium poppy. It grows well in dry climates and in alkaline and saline soils, and poppy-growing increased massively in Helmand in the 1980s. And with it the heroin trade.

 

Then in 1994 the Taliban movement began in Helmand province as an alliance of Pashtun clans

While in power the Taliban government finished a central part of the Helmand valley project that the Americans had left unfinished in the 1970s. It was a hydroelectric plant that would use Kajaki dam to bring electricity to the city of Kandahar. The Taliban finally finished it in early 2001.

Then later that year American B52s bombed the plant. Here is the BBC news report of the American attack on the dam in November 2001.

But even that wasn't the end. In 2007 British troops found themselves fighting the Taliban amongst the ruins of the American dam project. Here is a news report. The reporter makes no mention of the extraordinary and tortuous history that sits behind him in the wall of the dam.

It's followed by a report from 2008 when a convoy battled through Taliban attacks to bring a new turbine to the dam. The aim - the British said - was to start a development project which would finally help Afghanistan become a modern country. 

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The more you dig into the history of the West's relationship to Afghanistan, the stranger and more complicated it gets.

In 1978 a group of Afghan marxists overthrew the royal family who had ruled Afghanistan for 150 years. They set out to turn Afghanistan into a modern socialist utopia but it quickly descended into bloody horror.

Many in the West saw it as the Soviet Union trying to turn Afghanistan into another satellite. But if you trace back where the "communist" ideas that inspired the revolutionaries came from you find something very odd. The revolutionary ideas didn't just come from the Soviet Union.

They also came from somewhere else. From America.

 

PART FOUR: THE MARMOT WHO WOULD BE KING

In 1963 the King of Afghanistan had sacked his Prime Minister, Mohammed Daoud

Ten years later - in 1973 - Daoud deposed the King and declared a republic.

But Daoud was the King's first cousin and his brother-in-law. So power remained in the hands of the royal Durrani clan.

His only opposition were a small group of revolutionary marxists called The Peoples' Democratic Party of Afghanistan. But like all revolutionaries they had split into different factions and hated each other.

Then Prime Minister Daoud got paranoid. He decided the marxists were preparing a coup against him. So he ordered that they be arrested. But something strange happened. Hafizullah Amin, who was one of the marxist leaders, was not arrested. When the police arrived at his house they just confiscated lots of leftist pamphlets and surrounded the house. No-one knows why.

Amin was very jolly. Everyone liked him. Even the Islamists nicknamed him 'the infidel', but everybody in Kabul knew that he could never be trusted because he lusted after power so much.

Here are some frame-grabs of Amin. 

As the police stood outside, Amin decided he really would stage a coup. He used his children to send out instructions to the revolutionary cells he had built up in the Afghan military, and within hours tanks began to rumble towards Kabul and the Presidential Palace.

Here is a bit from a wonderful film that Amin had made which tells the story of that night. It stars himself as himself. This extract shows the police coming in and seizing the literature, then he gives his wife some money and spends the night directing the coup over army radio and finally rides into power on a tank.

Prime Minister Daoud knew nothing of all this and thought the marxists were under arrest. All the military commanders in Kabul were told to order their troops to sing and dance to celebrate the arrest of the "kafirs" - the communists.

But the next morning Daoud woke up to discover the coup underway. His Minister of Defence rang the local base commander and ordered him to move his troops to protect the Presidential Palace. The Commander replied:

"How can I? They're all out singing and dancing as you ordered - and have been for hours"

Then he rang the 8th Rocket Division. The Commanding Officer said he would send the rockets, but instead he told his troops to keep dancing. He was waiting to see which side won.

Here is some film of an Afghan man dancing followed by some slowed-down film of Amin announcing the coup at the radio station. You can get a sense of what he was like as a person.

Finally at 7pm the Minister of Defence and three of the Chiefs of Staff were found hiding in a chicken coop behind the palace. The rebels shot them and then went upstairs and slaughtered Daoud and 30 of his family. It was the end of a royal dynasty that had ruled Afghanistan for 150 years.

The new President of the revolutionary council was Mohammed Taraki. Hafizullah Amin was made Foreign Minister. At their first press conference Taraki insisted that they were not communists but socialists and politically democratic. Here is one of the first TV reports after the revolution. The reporter is neutral but suspicious.

In the West it was assumed that the revolutionaries were just Soviet puppets who had been trained in Moscow. But in Kabul one American decided to find out if this was true. He was an anthropologist called Louis Dupree who worked in Afghanistan for the American Universities Field Staff.

What he discovered was rather surprising. Out of the 21 members of the revolutionary cabinet only one civilian had been educated in the Soviet Union. Three of the generals had received military training in the USSR, but none of the revolutionaries had ever attended or been invited to international communist meetings.

Dupree firmly concluded their revolution had not been born in Moscow.

In reality much of it may have been born in another country: America, where many of the revolutionaries had studied and had been indoctrinated with all sorts of new ideas about how to transform Afghanistan.

Out of the top revolutionary elite who had taken over Afghanistan many had studied in America, and 14 of them had studied at just one American University - Columbia University in New York. They had gone there as part of what Columbia called "The Afghan Project" - an attempt to produce a new generation of teachers who would go back to Afghanistan and transform a tribal people into modern western style individuals.

They had been at Columbia in the 1960s when American universities had been swept by revolutionary student politics and this had done much to radicalise them. Above all Hafizullah Amin - who would organise the coup and be the main ideologist of the Afghan revolution.

Amin told Dupree that his radicalisation had happened when he went from Columbia to a course at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1963. Madison at that time was the main centre of what was called the "New Left" - a movement which was about to break out and take over most American universities. Here's a page from 'The Badger' - the 1963 Wisconsin-Madison University yearbook.

 

Madison was full of foreign students. One of the leading leftists Nina Serrano - who called herself "A Madison Bohemian" - described them in the 1950s:

'the foreign students stood out in a sea of blonds. I'd never seen so many Middle Eastern, African and Asian people. Among them were two out of place Afghan students. They were even more disorientated than I. Religious practice made them afraid to eat hamburger because they thought it might be made of ham. They survived the first few weeks on cakes and other deserts. I identified with them as a fish out of water, but they were afraid to speak to me. They frequently visited our one-room apartment, but I could never get a response from them when I joined the conversation. I was shocked when I found out it was because I was a woman and a friend's wife.'

The key figure at Madison was an historian called William Appleman Williams. He was determined to create a new framework for radical politics so it could escape from the trap of the Cold War - the conflict of two giant monoliths. He did this by reaching back to a forgotten radical tradition in America, Progressivism.

Progressivism had been born in the 1890s in Wisconsin as the battle between the independent farmer on the land and what were called "The Interests". They were the bankers and the big industrial corporations on the East coast who sucked the life-blood of the farmers and crushed their individual freedom.

The hero of the Progressive movement was the senator for Wisconsin, Robert La Follette. He spent his lifetime struggling against the politicians in Washington who had been bought and corrupted by the bankers and the giant railroad companies. Villains like JP Morgan and Rockefeller whom La Follette believed were destroying the true  revolutionary tradition of America. Here is a cartoon of La Follette. 

Appleman Williams awoke the ghost of La Follette and remade Progressivism. It became not just a battle against bankers and corporations, but also against the giant structures erected by governments on both sides in the Cold War. It was a struggle of the individual against a new totalitarianism run by Soviet and American elites that was crushing both their peoples' freedom through fear.

But at its heart, this New Left radicalism still had its roots in the simple image of the mid-western farmers free on their land. The most romantic expression of this came in the songs of Woody Guthrie in the 1930s and 40s. Guthrie saw himself as a communist, but he never joined the Party - he wanted to be free to roam wherever he wanted.

Here is Pete Seeger singing the radical verses of "This Land is Your Land" that had been dropped and forgotten by the 1960s. Followed by Guthrie himself singing the rest. Its the song that most perfectly expresses the Progressive dream.

These were the ideas that Amin would have listened to in the summer camps at Madison in 1963. How far they inspired or shaped his political ideas is impossible to know. Everyone from that time is dead.

What is absolutely clear is that Amin and the others who led the revolutionary Council had become marxists. And they looked for help and military aid from the Soviet Union. The Kabul Times was full of Marxist slogans and attacks on what were called "the bowel-lickers of imperialism" (although it was later altered to "bowl-lickers" after complaints)

But their reform programme was like an American Progressive dream. The making of extortionate loans to the peasant farmers was banned. Every farmer was to be allowed to own their own land. There was no mention of collectivization. There would be equal rights for women, and forced marriages were banned.

The only problem was that the peasant farmers hated it. They were deeply conservative and didn't want change. They weren't interested in progress. Then the Islamist parties told them that the new regime was godless - and armed revolts began to break out.

Here is film of one of the early parades in Kabul promoting reform, and film of the young idealistic revolutionaries going out into the countryside to measure out the new small-holdings. The grateful peasants kiss their new land certificates.

But this wasn't the first time that Afghanistan had met the dreams of American Progressivism. In the 1830s a lone American had risen to great power in Kabul, and had dreamt of turning the country into what he called "An Empire of Liberty"

He was called Josiah Harlan. Harlan was an extraordinary adventurer and mercenary who had ended up in Kabul in 1828. He was fascinated by the reigning Amir - called Dost Mohammed Khan. Dost Mohammed maintained his power only by his prestige and a constant flow of bribes to the tribal chieftains who ruled different areas of the country. As they talked, the prince asked Harlan about America.

'"How was America ruled?", he said. I explained to him the nature of our government which he pleasantly remarked resembled the Afghan system of tribes"

Here is the only photograph of Harlan, and the sketch he made of Dost Mohammed Khan in Kabul.

 

After many adventures Harlan ended up running Dost Mohammed's army for him. And in 1838 Harlan set off on an epic journey north from Kabul to defeat a rebellious warlord. Harlan led the way seated on an elephant. As they crossed a mountain pass Harlan saw a small animal peering at him and he asked the Afghans what it was. They told him it was called a "mountain ant". It was a marmot. Harlan decided to keep it, and he rode on to war with the marmot in his pocket.

Here is a picture of a Marmot.

But then Harlan had a transforming experience. High up in the north he met the Hazara tribes. Harlan decided he had stumbled on a people unlike any other in Afghanistan. They lived a life driven by a code of honour which was, he wrote, "the foundation of a pure system of moral virtue"

He especially admired the role of the Hazara women. They weren't hidden behind veils or trapped in their houses. They lived and worked and hunted - and even fought alongside their husbands. Above all they were involved in public matters:

For centuries the Hazara had been an oppressed minority. Their leader, Mohammed Reffee Beg, asked Harlan to help him conquer his enemies. In return he made Harlan the Prince of Ghor, the new leader of the Hazara people.

Harlan hated the British Empire and the brutality of  its rule. He was driven by the romantic revolutionary ideas of America's founders. They had fled the corruption of old Europe and its repressive empires to found a new kind of society in the west. A new empire, but one based on the ideal of individual freedom.

And Harlan now had a vision of his own. That with the noble independence of the Hazaris, led by him as King, together they could transform Afghanistan into a new kind of place. "Such resources" wrote Harlan "would, in the hands of an intelligent agent, establish the foundations of an empire."

And he rode off back to Kabul.

One hundred and sixty two years later, in September 2001, the Americans turned up again and asked the Hazaras to help transform Afghanistan into a new kind of free country. But the Hazara had to be persuaded.

By April 1979 the Marxist revolution had become a disaster. Large parts of Afghanistan were in revolt. In response Hafizullah Amin had begun a series of purges. He had already killed the royal supporters and many of the Islamists. But now he started to kill and torture the urban professionals - the doctors and teachers. Then he turned on the different factions in his own party and the revolution began to eat itself.  Finally, in September, he had President Taraki killed. Taraki was held down and suffocated with a cushion.

Here are a series of frames showing Amin a few weeks earlier swearing his loyalty to Taraki, the man he was about to assassinate.

Amin now had what he had always wanted. Supreme power. He tried to prove how nice and open he was by publishing a list of 12,000 people who had been killed in the purges. The only problem was that many Afghans have similar names - there are thousands of Mohammed Alis and Abdul Mohammeds - and tens of thousands of people descended on the Ministry of Interior desperately wanting details.

So he stopped publishing the list. Which led to more protests and violence.

The Soviets were horrified. The secret Politburo minutes and telephone transcripts that have recently been published by the Wilson Center - you can find them here - show the Soviet leaders shocked by what Amin was doing to Afghanistan. They are terrified that the country will descend into chaos.

Brezhnev shouted in a meeting in the Kremlin:

"What scum Amin is. You smother a man with whom you participated in a revolution!"

He seemed to have forgotten how many of his predecessors in Russia had behaved. But it was the turning point. The Soviets decided that that they would have to get rid of Amin.

Then Amin rang Brezhnev and pleaded with him for Soviet troops to help fight the Islamists. Much to Amin's surprise Brezhnev said yes. What he didn't realise was that the troops would be coming to kill him.

Rumours began to spread that the Russians were on their way. Here is footage of the Islamist leader Gulbaddin Hekmatyar reacting to the news. No-one in the west knew who he was and he is captioned by his nickname. It had been given to him when he studied at the engineering department of Kabul University. "The Engineer"

In 1839 Josiah Harlan, Prince of Ghor, rode back in triumph to Kabul with the marmot peeking out of his pocket. He was full of dreams of using his military power and his new position to turn Afghanistan into a utopian kingdom with himself as an enlightened leader.

But as he arrived he discovered that the British were on their way. They had marched from Punjab, through Kandahar, and  had overwhelmed Dost Mohammed Khan's army. They were coming to put their own puppet ruler on the throne. The British were terrified that Dost Mohammed would make an alliance with the Russians - and so they were going to remove him.

Harlan watched as power began to drain away from Dost Mohammed - and with it his own utopian dreams for Afghanistan. Here is a vivid description from Harlan's journals that are quoted in Ben MacIntyre's wonderful book about Harlan:

"He called for his attendant, but a fallen prince has not even a faithful slave. The guards had disappeared. A servant audaciously pulled away the pillow which sustained the prince's arm. Another commenced cutting a piece of the splendid persian carpet.

In an instant the unruly crowd rushed upon the pavilion, swords gleamed in the air and descended on the tent and the ropes. the carpets, pillows, screens - all were seized and dispensed among the plunderers

The report of an explosion concentrated the attention of the disorganized army. An immense column of white smoke rose into the still, clear air, like a genie conjured by the magic of war. The prince turned his horse towards that dense cloud, and plunged alone into the screening veil that obscured his fallen fortunes."

Harlan stayed in Kabul and watched in mounting anger as the British ignored the complex balance of power between the different tribes and allowed their puppet ruler to exact vengeance on all his enemies. The British military spent their time awarding themselves medals and playing cricket outside the city walls.

But within 18 months all but one of the 16,000 British would be slaughtered by the Afghans.

In December 1979 in Moscow the politburo decided to issue the order to kill Amin and to send hundreds of thousands of troops to take control of the Afghanistan. But one man believed this would lead to disaster. He was the Chief of the General Staff - Marshal Ogarkov. He went to the Kremlin to plead with the Soviet leaders and here is what he told them. It is a remarkable prediction of what was to happen.

Source: Wilson Center Cold War Project

But Ogarkov was ignored and demoted.  His bad luck continued. Here he is a few years later defending the shooting down of Korean airline flight 007.

On the 12th December the first troops arrived in Kabul to kill Amin.

First they positioned snipers along the main highway. But Amin's convoy drove too fast.

Then they tried again. This time they put poison in his can of Pepsi in the Presidential palace. But Amin's nephew drank it instead.

Then - on the 27th - Amin gave a banquet in a palace outside Kabul. It was surrounded by minefields and protected by 2000 troops. But the Soviets smuggled in a chef who put poison in the food. This time it worked and all the guests slipped into comas.

The Afghans rang Kabul for help - and two Russian doctors turned up. They walked into a banqueting hall full of men and women lying on the floor with their eyes rolling in agony. The doctors found Amin upstairs in his underpants.

The doctors thought he was an ally of the Soviet Union so the pumped his stomach and revived him. Then the Russian troops attacked the palace.

The final image of Amin comes from one of the doctors. He describes watching Amin lurching along a  corridor in the palace dressed only in Adidas shorts holding his hands high. They were wrapped in medical tubes which led to needles in his veins. He held the vials full of saline solution "as though they were grenades". He was looking for the Soviets who he still believed would rescue him.

But when he found them they threw a grenade at him. And then they shot him.

The next day the Soviets installed their puppet ruler. He was called Babrak Karmal

Here is extraordinary film of the main Kabul prison being thrown open ten  days later. It is on a plain outside the city and it housed the thousands of political prisoners who had survived Hafizullah Amin's wrath. The Soviets had let them out to prove that a new era of openness and freedom was about to begin in Afghanistan.

By the end of the 1960s the New Left in America had collapsed. Many of its members turned their back on politics and went into the commune movement. Rather than try and change society they would change themselves - as independent farmers on the land.

Others turned to revolutionary violence - they thought it would provoke repression in America and that this would make Americans realise that they lived in a fascist state.

But there was a third group of leftists in America who thought both these solutions were stupid. Many of them had started as Trotskyites who believed in Trotsky's theory that you couldn't have revolution in just one country. That to have a real permanent revolution it had to be world wide.

By the 1960s these ex-Trotskyites had given up on the Soviet Union. Instead they pinned their hopes on America as the source of world revolution. They became known as the Neoconservatives. Many of them believed that America's true destiny was to spread its ideals world wide. This would mean overthrowing the Soviet empire - through force if necessary - to create a new global "Empire of Freedom"

A number of very ambitious young neoconservatives who thrilled to these ideas were now serving in Ronald Reagan's campaign. And they seized on Afghanistan as the way to do this.

Josiah Harlan returned to America. He spent his time promoting the use of camels for both farming and for the army. In 1854 the American Camel Company was set up and began to import camels from Asia. They were very good at their job, but American horses and mules hated them. Whenever the horses met a camel they ran away.

Josiah Harlan died in San Francisco in 1871, leaving a few lonely camels in the plains of the mid-west.

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PART FIVE - INTERCONTINENTAL

The King of Afghanistan was called Mohammed Zahir Shah. He believed in modernity.

His family had ruled the country for over 150 years and he was driven everywhere in a black chevrolet.

Zahir Shah loved to show off how modern his country was. The key place was the Kabul International trade fair in 1956. Here is a picture issued by the King showing the site glowing at night.

 But the fair became a battle in the Cold War. The Americans discovered that the Russians and the Czechs were planning giant pavilions but the United States had nothing. Then they found a visionary designer called Buckminster Fuller. Fuller had designed vast radar domes in the Arctic as part of America's nuclear early warning system. These domes watched the whole world in case the Soviets launched their Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

Here is Fuller in front of what he called his "radomes"

Fuller believed his domes represented a new way of organising the world as an interconnected system run by computers and managed by an elite group of technocrats, like him, who he called "Comprehensive Designers". He produced visionary schemes including building a vast dome over Manhattan.

Now Buckminster Fuller was given his chance in Kabul. Here he is telling the story.

Here is a still of the talking cow in the Kabul pavilion that Buckminster Fuller was rude about. Plus the talking chicken that was next to it.

The next modern thing the King wanted was a national airline. To get one he went to another cold war visionary called Juan Trippe. Trippe ran Pan American World Airways and, just like Buckminster Fuller, he believed his modern technology - his jet-liners - could create a world-wide system that both extended American power and brought stability to the world.

Trippe set up Afghanistan's national airline - Ariana. Again the King produced glowing images that showed his country had joined the modern world system - "Air Age Globalism"

It didn't all go well. Soon after the first jet, a Boeing 727, was delivered to Ariana it crashed into a house outside Gatwick airport. It was 1.30 in the morning in January 1969. There were 66 people on the plane, 50 died.

Here is a report - including local people who describe rescuing Afghans from the wreckage.

18 months later the King of Afghanistan flew to Britain on an Ariana plane for a state visit. He landed safely and he and his entourage caught the train to Victoria station where the Queen of England was to meet them. As they did so, Valerie Singleton from Blue Peter was organising a very special Afghan way of greeting the King.

But the Pan Am jet planes were only part of Juan Trippe's vision of how to spread American power and help make the world a better place. He also built hotels in the cities that Pan American flew to. They all looked pretty much the same and had one name - Intercontinental. Trippe summed up the idea behind the Intercontinental:

'Mass travel in the jet age may prove to be more significant to world destiny that the atom bomb. For there can be no atom bomb potentially more powerful that the air-tourist - charged with curiosity, enthusiasm and goodwill, who can roam the four corners of the world, meeting in friendship and understanding the people of other nations and races.'

So in 1969 Kabul got its Intercontinental Hotel, managed by Pan American. Here's a postcard of it, and a link to a 3-D model of it you can fly round in Google Earth

The Intercontinental was perched above the city with wonderful views. It was where the western businesspeople, the diplomats and the rich tourists all stayed. But it also quickly became the place for the Kabul elite to go - for tea, for parties, and for weddings. They were the modern people of Kabul who were helping to make the King's vision come true.

They were also a "slimy opportunistic clique" - according to Nancy Hatch Dupree. She was an American archaeologist who knew everyone in Kabul.

And then rock music came to Kabul, courtesy of the Intercontinental Hotel.

The Intercontinental's food and beverages manager asked a musician called Claude Selvaradna to create a house band for the hotel. Claude had been a sergeant in the Sri Lankan army but now he lived in Kabul and he knew that rock music was the future. He brought in some musicians from Sri Lanka and put together a band he called The Esquire Set.

Claude was happy to let the Esquire Set drink, but he was firmly against drugs. He believed that good rock music was possible without drugs. The Esquire Set started at the Intercontinental Kabul in 1971 and soon became a major attraction - especially at themed evenings which included a "Kung Fu Dance".

Here is a picture of the Esquire Set playing, plus a live audio recording of their version of Whole Lotta Love.

And then the hippies came to Afghanistan. They didn't stay in the Intercontinental but instead  went to the cheap hotels around Chicken Street in Kabul, including The Number One Hotel started by the Italian conceptual artist Alghiero e Boetti. And they bought lots of Afghan coats. Here is a great postcard of one of their favourite shops. Note the photo of the King in the corner.

The hippies didn't see themselves as tourists. They thought they were against western capitalism and imperialism. But this was a comforting story they told themselves to hide from themselves that all this experience was only possible because of their immense political power. They too were part of the dominion of the west.

They even created their own new global industry. The hippies began the heroin trade between Afghanistan and Europe.

Here are some "travellers" experiencing Afghanistan and Pakistan and philosophizing as they go. Plus a good moment when they meet an Aghan and his camel in a sand storm.

And here is part of an interview with a girl who went on the trail to Afghanistan and beyond in 1970. The still is of the house in England where her parents lived. You can feel a strange uncertainty in her interview. It is the feel of a class no longer comfortable with its own values and its power, confused and adrift in a wider world. Enormous changes were happening all around them which they can only dimly glimpse through the bubble of their own experience.

The film finds her at the end of the trail on a rooftop in Delhi. The programme commentary later says that she came back to England and had psychiatric treatment. I would love to know what happened to her subsequently.

By 1970 Kabul was becoming one of the central parts of a western network that stretched across the Middle East and into Asia. A dream of a new world order where everyone becomes westernised, listens to rock music and is a tourist - or a traveller. A new global network - just like Buckminster Fuller and Juan Trippe had envisaged.

But there were forces emerging who saw that network as a powerful symbol of their oppression. They were the Palestinians. They believed that the west - and in particular America - was colluding with Israel to prevent them returning to their homeland. And they were about to attack the two central symbols - the jet plane and the hotel.

It began in September 1970 in Amman in Jordan. And what happened there would lead, eventually and in strange contorted ways, to the apocalyptic horror conceived in Afghanistan 31 years later.

First a group of Palestinian terrorists hijacked four airliners all bound for New York from different airports. Two were American - Pan Am and TWA, the other two were BOAC and Swissair. They landed three of them at a desolate airfield in the Jordanian desert. The Palestinians promptly renamed it "Revolution Airport".

Here are some film rushes from the airfield and reports of what happened next. All the passengers - British and American - are struggling to make sense of this new thing, the "skyjack". Then the women and children from the planes are released and driven to safety in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman.

But at that very moment King Hussein of Jordan decided that he must crush the thousands of Palestinian fighters who were refugees in his country. The hijack had been the last straw, and he unleashed his army on the Palestinians. The hotel immediately became the centre of the battle and the freed hostages found themselves trapped yet again, accompanied this time by a bunch of western television journalists.

For days the westerners hid in the hotel from an enemy outside that none of them could see. The journalists were reduced to interviewing each other. One of them, called Murray Sayle, sees what is going to come towards the west.

And then the Palestinians blew the planes up. But they let all the hostages go before they did it.

In 1973 the King of Afghanistan got hit in the face by a volleyball. His doctor told him he was fine, but the King didn't trust Afghan doctors. So he flew to London to see an eye specialist. Here is the US ambassador telling Washington what has happened.

Then the King went to a rest cure in Italy, and while he was having a mudbath in Ischia off the coast of Naples his cousin (who was also his brother-in-law) deposed him.

Nothing really seemed to change in Kabul. There were strange reports that "religious fanatics" were targeting emancipated women in the city. They threw acid at them. In all two hundred women were hospitalised with burns. One man was arrested and 5,000 Afghan women gathered outside the Prime Minister's office shouting "Give him to us, Give him to us!" But Afghans still went to nightclubs.

And then the first Afghan rock band was formed.

Azam Parwanta lived in Kabul. One evening his cousin Jamal Masumi came round and they went for a long walk. They both confessed to each other that what they dreamed of was forming a band which would play western rock at the Intercontinental. They decided that evening to make the dream happen.

Here is a picture of Azam and his cousin rehearsing. They called their band The Stars.

Azam set out to plan his assault on the Intercontinental. There was no sheet music in Kabul, and Azam couldn't really read music anyway. So he listened over and over again to his favourite song on cassette tape until he had worked out all the parts. And then he gave it to the band. It was Nights in White Satin.

Here is audio of The Stars playing Nights in White Satin. The Stars were going to fulfil their dream - to make it big in Kabul - but more of that in a future instalment.

Meanwhile in Britain Afghan fashion had trickled down the social layers - until it reached Jonathan King and Top of the Pops. Here he is in a sleeveless Afghan coat on Top of the Pops (I'm sorry its black and white).

And the Afghan hound had by now become the most popular dog in Britain. Here is a report about its popularity, and film of the new sport of Afghan hound racing at the Wolverhampton Dog Track. But in both cases the Afghan hounds had a terrible tendency not to do what they were told and instead started attacking each other.

 

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PART SIX - THE WAR ON POP

In November 1975 the first rock festival was held in Afghanistan. It was in the gymnasium of Kabul University. Everyone was very excited, especially as the headliners were one of Afghanistan's two prog-rock bands - The Stars.

And the Stars were excited because they had been approached by Afghanistan's most famous pop star and top heart throb, Ahmad Zahir. He had asked them to help him record his next album.

But things didn't get off to a very good start. Here is some audio of the beginning of the festival. The whole thing was recorded by the American anthropologist Louis Dupree. The festival is introduced by Helmut Gaisberger who was the food and beverages manager of the Intercontinental hotel. Louis Dupree's voice begins it.

At the very same time, in New York, a group of renegade Democrat supporters were meeting. They wanted to find a way of alerting a sleep-walking America to the immediate threat from the Soviet Union. Many of them saw themselves as a new movement and a cynical journalist had given them a new name - Neoconservatives. But they had decided they rather liked it.

They agreed to set up a pressure group called The Committee on the Present Danger. None of them could have imagined that within five years they, and their ideas, would become one of the main influences that led America into its first military intervention in Afghanistan, supporting the Mujaheddin.

One of the leaders of the group was a neoconservative called Norman Podhoretz. The thing he hated most was rock music.

To understand why you have to go back to 1958 when Podhoretz wrote a furious outburst against Jack Kerouac and his "beat bohemianism". Most historians of the neoconservatives see it as the moment when the movement first burst onto the scene.

Podhoretz's article was called "Know-Nothing Bohemians". All the Beats cared about, he said, was their own sensations. That led them to seek out the mad, the bad and the dangerous in their desperation for ever more intense experience - through drugs and even crime.

 

 

In the process they were corroding the moral bonds that held society together. The racy publicity they were being given through films made it worse. Here is a poster for the film The Beat Generation. The movement, Podhoretz said, was "hostile to civlization".

 

 

 

And here is Podhoretz being interviewed by the BBC about Kerouac's On The Road and the terrible nihilism it was unleashing in America.

 

 

 

 

 

In 1960 there was no pop music in Afghanistan. There was a loose group of westerners who played what was called "cocktail lounge music". They were led by Manfried Wertz who was the son of a world-famous German geologist, and Jan Vanderpant who was described as "a swinging British Dentist."

But then the first rock band was created. Chris and Ursula Hilario had come from the Philippines to Kabul. Ursula ran the USAID staff house and Chris organised the Afghan Boy Scout movement.

Ursula really loved to dance at parties but found the cocktail lounge music not to her taste. So she arranged for a professional musician called Rooney Poliquit to fly from Manila to Kabul.

In 3 weeks he had taught 3 of Ursula's sons and one of her daughters to play (she had 7 sons and 3 daughters in all). Then they formed a band and put on a dance at the USAID Staff House. They called themselves The Blue Sharks and they were an immediate sensation in Kabul.

Here are some photos of the Blue Sharks - and a photo of Mr and Mrs Hilario.

Sadly there seem to be no recordings left of the Blue Sharks. Danny Hilario (bass) says that his younger brother Chris Jr (drums) accidentally taped over the only cassette he had of one of their performances.

But it is not an exaggeration to say that The Blue Sharks brought western pop music to Afghanistan. Their music fascinated many of the children of the new Afghan middle-class elite that was growing up around the King. One of them was the young Ahmad Zahir. He had gone to Habibia High School in Kabul and had started to perform with the school band.

Here is a photo of him with the band - Habibia Amateurs.

Plus a recording of The Amateurs with Ahmad Zahir singing and playing the accordion. The music is an extraordinary collage. It includes Indian classical and Persian, plus the beginnings of a pop beat sensibility, all mixed with a marching drum sound which musicologists say comes from the Afghans hearing the British military bands in the 19th century.

I think the whole sound is just wonderful - especially the quality of the recording.

In 1963 Norman Podhoretz's hatred of the liberal counterculture in America was about to get much much worse.

Podhoretz wasn't a simple conservative reactionary. He came from the left and some of his criticism's were very sharp. He spotted the Achilles heel of the hipster movement in the way that it fetishised the "instinctiveness" of black culture, especially the music.

"Their love for negroes is tied up with this worship of of primitivism, not with any radical social attitudes. Ironically enough, in fact, to see the Negro as more elemental that the white man, as Ned Polsky has acutely remarked, is an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place".

Podhoretz had become the editor of a highbrow magazine called Commentary, and these arguments drew him close to the black radical James Baldwin. Here is part of a film made by Baldwin for Panorama about the black experience in the northern cities.

In an interview in the film Baldwin argues that the white liberals were only pretending to be "the negro's friend". In reality they were ruthlessly using black culture as a weapon in their quest for power. He was agreeing with Podhoretz.

But then Baldwin betrayed Podhoretz.

Podhoretz  had commissioned Baldwin to write an article about the Black Muslim movement and Malcolm X because of its anti-white separatist strategy. Baldwin agreed and set to work. But then he went suspiciously silent, and after a few weeks Podhoretz discovered that Baldwin had taken it to The New Yorker, who paid him a lot more. It was then published as The Fire Next Time - which became one of the bibles of the sixties counterculture.

Podhoretz was furious. But no-one he told seemed to sympathise with him. They all took Baldwin's side.Then the realisation dawned on him. They were doing this only because Baldwin was black. To Podhoretz it was a new way of being patronising and racist to black people.

Podhoretz then stormed round to Baldwin's apartment and ranted at him for hours. After a while - probably to get rid of him - Baldwin told him to go and write his anger down. Podhoretz did just that - and published it as an article called "My Negro Problem - and Ours".

The article said that all white liberals secretly had a twisted hatred and envy of blacks, and that integration would never work.  You can read it here. It caused a sensation and Podhoretz became a celebrity. But only because everyone despised him.

But Podhoretz decided this just proved he was telling the truth. All the liberals in America were a corrupt elite just like the elites who ran the Soviet Union, while people like him who dared to tell the truth were "oppressed" just like the dissidents in Russia. He was the Solzhenitsyn of America.

It was the beginning of the the neoconservative conviction that, unlike the liberals in America, they could see the truth about how power really worked in the world.

In Kabul pop culture was taking off, and the rising star was Ahmad Zahir. He had done something unique with his music. He had taken high classical traditions from both Indian music and Persian poetry and fused them not just with a pop sound - but with the ability to make Afghans feel he was communicating his own personal experience through the music. Something no-one had done before and Afghans adored him for it.

Here are lots of photos of him - all from the fantastic Ahmadzahir.org.

And here is a song he did with Zhela called Gufte Ke Mebosam Tura which I think conveys that feeling.

Ahmad Zahir was part of a phenomenon that was happening across the Muslim world. A wave of modernity had led to the rise of new powerful elites, and it was the children of those elites who were creating a new fusion of western pop with music and poetry from inside their own countries.

Next door in Pakistan a film actor and singer called Waheed Murad almost singlehandedly created Pakistani pop when he produced and starred in a film called Armaan in 1966. Because of the war with India the previous year all Indian films were banned - and Armaan, directed by Pervez Malik, smashed all records. It had lots of songs written by Sohail Rana who was the son of a famous Urdu poet.

Together these rich kids created what became called "filmi pop" - and the film Armaan is the vehicle through which they did this. The most famous example in the film is "Ko Ko Koreena" which I think is just wonderful.

Armaan, Film Arts, 1966

And on the other side of Afghanistan in Iran the same young elite was emerging. Here is a report from Panorama in 1961 about life in modern Tehran. The reporter sees it all through the prism of the cold war, while the young people interviewed want to talk about the new openness. What neither of them are aware of is the extraordinary time-bomb that was building up around Tehran. Just as in Kabul and Karachi the modernisation had led to millions of peasants flooding into the cities. But they - and their children - were completely excluded from the good life of the elites.

And Western rock stars came to Afghanistan. In the early seventies James Taylor came and did some impromptu performances in Kabul. Louis Dupree said this had a big influence on aspiring Afghan musicians in Kabul. James Taylor, like Ahmad Zahir, was also the child of a ruling elite. His family was directly descended from America's Founding Fathers. And he too wrote about personal experience. But in his case it was about drugs and death. Here he is performing Fire and Rain - it's about the suicide of a friend and his own addiction to heroin.

James Taylor went back to America and he became the first rock star to do a benefit performance for a politician. It was for George McGovern who was the Democratic presidential candidate.

The Neoconservatives hated George McGovern, not only because he wanted to give up in Vietnam but also because he supported lesbians, gays and all kinds of radical causes. And what was worse George McGovern had insulted Norman Podhoretz's wife.

The two men had arranged to have dinner. Podhoretz arrived late and McGovern complained that while waiting he had had to sit looking at two ugly women. Podhoretz turned round and looked at the women."One of them is my wife" he said. Podhoretz later denied that the incident ever happened.

Here is a news report from the Democratic Party convention in Miami in 1972. It is about the "Non-delegates" - the forces of the counterculture who had descended on Miami and were demanding to participate. This was Norman Podhoretz's party and he was despairing of it.

But the Neoconservatives were by now a powerful dissident movement within the Democratic party. One of them was a young strategist called Ben Wattenberg.

In 1970 Wattenberg published an analysis of American voting patterns called The Real Majority. It argued that the country was now divided between a liberal elite preoccupied with cultural issues like race, sexual politics and abortion, and a vast forgotten hinterland who were "unyoung, unpoor and unblack". Wattenberg's heroine was the 47 year-old housewife from Dayton who feared and despised the liberal elite. Harness that power, he said, and you can change the world.

But then the Neoconservatives got screwed yet again. Richard Nixon, the Republican President, read Wattenberg's analysis and stole all his ideas. In the 1972 campaign Nixon deliberately set out to win over the disaffected Democrat voters that Wattenberg had identified. Again and again in speeches he contrasted them and their traditional values with the liberal counterculture and its corrupt hypocrisies.

Here is Nixon campaigning in 1972 along with a typical speech. Plus a wonderful bit where Nixon is booed in a vast stadium by some radicals. If you look at his face you can see the scorn he feels - and the sheer pleasure as he realises how much work the protestors are doing for him.

And it worked. Nixon won re-election with one of the biggest majorities ever in American history.

At the same time a new conservative force was being unleashed across the Islamic world.  And, like in America, it was the mass of the new urban lower middle classes who despised the liberal elites.

One of the events that started this was the death of President Nasser in Egypt in 1970. Nasser had been the great symbol of a new, modern Arab world, and when he died the frustrations felt by the millions of new city-dwellers began to emerge. Like in America these new urbanites were fundamentally conservative - and if someone could harness their power they too could change the world.

Here is a BBC reporter in 1970 in Cairo trying to do a piece-to-camera announcing Nasser's death. What then happens illustrates in an odd but vivid way the new, unruly forces that had emerged in the cities.

By the mid 70s rock music in Kabul had moved on from singer-songwriters to prog-rock and disco. At the end of 1975 the first rock festival was held in Kabul. After its shaky start things got going at about 4pm in the afternoon. It was headlined by the only two rock bands in Afghanistan. The Stars and The Four Brothers.

The Stars looked down on the The Four Brothers as being a little too experimental. And the two groups disagreed on the western bands they liked - except they both thought Emerson Lake and Palmer were really good.

Here are the Stars doing their version of "Rock the Boat" by the Hughes Corporation.

Followed by the Four Brothers doing an "experimental" version of "Black Magic Woman"

Ahmad Zahir had also moved more towards rock. Here is a photo of him with The Stars. It was taken during the album they recorded together in Kabul.

And he had also embraced the new phenomenon of the pop video or "promo". Below is a link to one of the two he made - with the requisite late-psychedelic video overlays. Its a song called Khuda Bowad Yaarit.

And Ahmad Zahir had also done what good rock stars were supposed to do. He had become political. In the mid-70s both Islamist radicals and leftists began to challenge the regime of President Daoud - and Ahmad Zahir reflected the new, darker mood in the lyrics of his songs.

Then, in 1978, the Marxists seized power in a coup. It quickly descended into bloody horror, and Zahir became an open critic of the regime. His songs were banned from Radio Afghanistan. In one of them he played with words. He repeatedly used the Persian word "tariki" which means "darkness'. It was an explicit reference to President Taraki who headed the regime.

Then Taraki was killed by his deputy, Hafizullah Amin, and things got very bad for Ahmad Zahir. There are all sorts of stories about Zahir during 1979. One was that he and Hafizullah Amin's daughter fell in love. He also continued to criticise the regime, modelling himself on one of his heroes, John Lennon. He saw himself playing the same role as Lennon did in the west - telling the truth through rock music.

Then one afternoon in June 1979 he and his best friend went on a drive with two others out of Kabul. They went north and in the evening they arrived at the road just outside the Salang Tunnel. Noone knows what then really happened. The police say there was a traffic accident and Ahmad Zahir was killed. But everyone who saw the body says that the back half of Zahir's head had been blown off by a bullet.

His best friend and the two others have sworn a vow of silence as to what happened.

Zahir's death stunned Afghanistan. It was seen as symbolising the end of an incredible period of openness and freedom, as the regime continued to kill and torture thousands of others. Here is a picture of his grave and a picture of what the Taliban did to it when they arrived in Kabul 17 years later.

Meanwhile the Neoconservatives brooded. It was obvious to them now that they were going to have to take the final step and ally with the Republicans. Norman Podhoretz became one of the leading members of the Committee on the Present Danger. Here is a bit from one of the films made by the Committee - trying to convince America that the Soviets were preparing to take over the world. Most of the film is incredibly boring but at the end they include a speech given in America by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the voice-over translation gets more and more hysterical.

Then in December 1979 just what the Neoconservatives had been predicting seemed to come true. The Soviet army came through the Salang Tunnel and occupied Afghanistan. The next year Reagan swept to power and 50 members of the Committee on the Present Danger were appointed to the Reagan administration.

And at the same time John Lennon was assassinated in New York. To the Neoconservatives it symbolised the end of a terrible corrupt era in America. It was the death of the hated counterculture.

Norman Podhoretz's daughter had married another Neoconservative called Elliot Abrams. After Lennon's death Abrams gave his opinion - using words that could have been lifted from his father-in-law's rant about liberal hypocrisy and blacks 15 years before:

"I'm sorry. Why is John Lennon's death getting more attention than Elvis Presley's? Because Lennon is perceived as a left-wing figure politically, anti-establishment, a man of social conscience with concern for the poor. And therefore, he's being made into a great figure. Too much has been made of his life. It does not deserve a full day's television and radio coverage. I'm sick of it."

Elliot Abrams went off to help support the Contras in Nicaragua for President Reagan, while many of the other Neoconservatives set out to persuade the president to send sophisticated weapons to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan

Then they found the most surprising ally.

Ahmad Zahir's sister Zahira had fled to the US. She set up a hair salon in Washington DC. It was in the Watergate building. This led her to get lots of high-profile clients, and then one day in the early 80s President Reagan asked her to cut his hair.

Her business took off - and in the years to come she would cut Mrs Thatcher's hair when she visited Washington, then George Bush Snr's hair. And finally George Bush Jnr.

When she was cutting President Reagan's hair they talked about what was happening in Afghanistan and the terrible effect the Soviet invasion was having. Zahira urged the president to send the mujahideen Stinger missiles that could shoot down the Russian helicopters. The president said he would go away and think about it.

 

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