Durrani leadership of Afghanistan

1747-1978

1747-1818
Sadozai clan

1818-1826
Rule of the Barakzai brothers
Transitional period

Popalzai subtribe

1826-1978
Muhammadzai clan

Barakzai subtribe

Durrani tribe

Durrani tribe

Ahmad Shah Baba

Dost Muhammad

1747-1772

Timur Shah

1826-1839, 1843-1863

1772-1793

Sher Ali

Zaman Shah

1863-1866, 1868-1879

1793-1800

Muhammad Afzal

Shah Mahmud

1866-1867

1800-1803, 1809-1818

Muhammad Azam

Shah Shuja

1867-1868

1803-1809, 1839-1842

Yaqub Khan
1879

Amir Abdur Rahman

1880-1901

Amir Habibullah
1901-1919

King Amanullah
1919-1929

Nader Shah

Not Members of
Royal Family

1929-1933
*Zaher Shah
1933-1973
Reigned as monarch but power
exercised by Prime Ministers: Hashim
Khan, 1933-1946, Shah Mahmud,
1946-1953 and Daud Khan, 1953-1963
[Decade of Democracy 1963-1973
Prime Ministers
Dr. Muhammad Yusuf
March 1963-October 1965
Muhammad Hashim Maiwandwal
October 1965-November 1967
Nur Ahmad Itimadi
November 1967-July 1971
Dr. Abdul Zaher
July 1971-December 1972
Musa Shafiq, Dec. 1972-July 1973

Daud Khan

1973-1978

I.

Ahmad Shah creates macrosociety

a. Territory previously under Mughuls, Safavids, Uzbek princes, creates identifiable political unit
b. Coalesces different ethnic,linguistic, sectarian, cultural and territorial groups through multi-ethnic
accommodation and conquest empire
c. Gains vast territory for Afghanistan in Indian subcontinent

II.

Disintegration of Durrani Empire

a. Weak structure, personalized rule absent institutionalized mechanisms
b. Royal polygamy/no system of succession
c. Major power rivalry/Napoleon invasion of Egypt

III.

19TH CENTURY-internal disorder and external aggression

a. Fragmentation/civil war

At the coronation of Ahmad Shah in 1747, Hajji Jamal Khan, head of the Mohammadzai family,
and Ahmad Khan, head of the Saddozai family, were of equal rank and either could have been
elected king of Afghanistan. But according to the sources, Hajji Jamal Khan showed great
unselfishness and Ahmad Khan became king. Payenda, son of Hajji Jamal Khan, and father of Fateh
Khan.
Timur Shah died in 1793 and left 36 sons, 24 of whom were males. He had not appointed an heir to
the throne, but Prince Zaman whose mother was a Yusufzai Pashtun and a favourite of Timur Shah
and gained favour in his fathers eyes in the years before his accession to the throne. Zaman Shah,
took the throne with the active support of Payenda Khan, who was head of the Barakzai subtribe.
When Zaman Shah took the throne, he jailed his brothers in order to prevent a revolt who were
residing in Kabul. His brother, Humayun, governor of Herat, raised an army but it was put down by
Payenda who defeated the army. Zaman Shah wanted to replace individual influence of tribal
leaders with the strong central government. The continuation of tribal leadership meant the
perpetuation of feudalism in Afghanistan, a state of affairs which Zaman Shah strongly opposed.
Zaman Shah-reconquest of India, made preparations for war while fighting his brother Mahmud who was
based in Herat. Mahmud was supported by the Iranians and the British. At the same time, Zaman Shah had to
break down several rebellions by the governors in his eastern provinces. The tribal leaders, meanwhile, aware
of a decrease in their influence at court complained about the shahs lack of attention to the tribes. Zaman Shah
listened with indifference. Late in 1799, several tribal leaders formed an opposition group and planned to
remove Zaman Shah from the throne in favour of his brother, prince Shuja. Payenda also joined the opposition.
The Shah finally realized he could no longer put off his decision about the elimination of tribal leaders,
especially when faced with an increasing number of difficulties in the implementation of his own plans to
reconquer India. One day, at Kandahar, he received a report that the Durrani leaders had decided to dethrone
him and make Prince Shuja king. Zaman Shah ordered the arrest of the plotters including Payenda Khan.
The sons of Payenda fled and decided to avenge the death of their father, Payenda. Zaman Shahs brother,
Mahmud had found sanctuary with the Persian government and continued to be a source of anxiety to the
Shah. The rise of Payendas sons against Zaman Shah prepared the ground for Mahmuds return with, of
course, the assistance of Persia. Mahmud had previously lived in Iran as a guest of the Persian government and
hoped to gain the throne of Afghanistan with the help of the Persian government.
Mahmud received Persian assistance but initially failed and later he joined the forces of Payenda sons to
overthrow Zaman Shah. They raised an army and Zaman Shah who was busy trying to recapture India rushed
back to Kabul and raised an army to meet Mahmud.
Shah Mahmud ascended the throne of Kabul in 1801. Fateh Khan became his chief minister. Outside forces
applied pressure or helped to put Mahmud on the throne. The Persians and the British aided mainly to thwart
Zaman Shahs dream of reconquering India. The British were deliberately seeking to foment discord in
Afghanistan to prevent the Afghans from recapturing lost territories and also to prevent the Afghans from
helping Napolean in invading India. Not long after Mahmuds accession, Prince Shuja marched against thenew
king from the direction of Peshawar. Shujas purpose was to avenge the revenge the blinding of his full brother
Zaman Shah. Mahmud disappointed the tribal leaders because of his indifference to governing. Prince Shuja
gathered tribal allies and advanced to Shpan by the way of Jalalabad, where he was defeated by the kings
forces. Shuja attacked again but was defeated. Finally, with the assistance of the British government in India,
Shuja attacked Kabul again by way of Kandahar. Fateh Khan, left alone, assembled a new army of about
10,000 men and defeated Shuja. Later, one of the tribal leaders withdrew from Fateh Khans camp, forcing

Fateh to retreat toward Kandahar. Shah Shuja entered Kabul. Mahmud surrendered but his life was spared, he
was then sent to prison and Shah Shuja sat on the throne of Kabul in 1803.
Shah Mahmud once again sat on the throne of Kabul in 1809. Shah Mahmud 1809-1818
Fateh Khan is blinded by Kamran who becomes governor of Herat . Fatehs brothers, the Barakzai brothers are
now the enemies of Shah Mahmud. Kamran and Shah Mahmud repeatedly try to gain the support of the
Barakzai brothers and when they fail in their attempt, they try to get Fateh Khan to cooperate, he refuses, and
then Mahmud and Kamran finally decide to kill Fateh Khan. Fateh Khans brothers, with Dost Muhammad at
the lead, defeat Mahmud and force him to flee. Some Saddozai princes served as puppets, but the Barakzais
now controlled all of the Saddozai kingdom.
They eventually took the throne of Kabul.
Kamran and Shah Mahmud eventually ended up in Herat where they ruled until 1842. By the early months of
1819, the Barakzai brothers (brothers of Fateh Khan) controlled most provinces in all of Afghanistan except
Herat, where Mahmud and Kamran held on. Muhammad Azim ruled Kabul, Yar Muhammad ruled in
Peshawar.
The period from 1819-1826 was a transitional one between the rule of the Saddozai and Muhammadzai. No
one geographic region clearly dominated the others, and a state of restlessness prevailed. Foreign forces
exploited the sad state of affairs on purpose to keep the Afghan tribes in dissension, one from another.
As the internal Afghan situation deteriorated, the Sikhs, the Afghans only formidable competitors found the
time ripe to take over Kashmir, Peshawar and Derajat. Ranjit Singh
Afghan political life was dominated throughout the first quarter of the 19 th century by a fierce struggle
between the princely Sadozai and Muhammadzai clans of the Durrani tribe. The Sadozais were supported by
the Popalzais and the Muhammadzais were supported by the Barakzais. The struggle sparked by the attempts
of the Sadozai dynasty to consolidate political authority in its hands by curbing the power of the Barakzais
and the other Durrani subtribes, was compounded by the blood feud that had grown out of the killing of the
Muhammadzai leaders Payenda Khan and Fateh Khan. That act had not only alienated the Muhammadzai and
the Sadozai clans but also pitted their respective subtribes, the Barakzais and Popalzais, against each other.
After initially successful resistance by the Sadozai rulers Shah Mahmud and Shah Shuja, the kinsmen of
Payenda Khan and Fateh Khan forced Shah Shuja into exile in India (1813); Shah Mahmud was driven to
Herat where he founded a Sadozai principality. Mahmud is deposed by his son, Kamran and he dies in 1829
The rest of Afghanistan came under either nominal or effective control of the Barakzais. The brothers of the
murdered Fateh Khan ruled the region of Peshawar (Sultan Muhammad Khan)
Kashmir (Nawab Jabbar Khan), Kandahar province (Kohendil Khan, Rahimdil Khan, Poordil Khan) and Kabul
(Muhammad Azim Khan) Dost Muhammad (Ghazni). The intertribal and intrafamily strife between 1818 and
1834 not only dismembered and weakened the Afghan empire but also resulted in the loss of Kashmir, Multan,
Peshawar and Baluchistan. The Uzbek chieftains of northern Afghanistan who were nominally tributaries of
the Amir of Bukhara, dominated that region of the Afghan empire.
b.
c.
IV.

Two anglo-afghan wars

Dost Muhammad and Sher Ali limited reforms

Emergence of Amir Abdur Rahman

a.
Anglo-Russian

Initially Abdur Rahman only controlled Kabul

1. In his autobiography, Amir Abdur Rahman very vividly depicts the state of
affairs upon his ascension to the throne. He mentions that at the time of
his succession to the throne, he had to face the difficulty of having no
house to live in because the palace of the Bala Hissar which was the
ancestral home of the Afghan kings had been destroyed by the British
during the Anglo-Afghan War and there was no other house ready. Neither
was there any other type of lodging where he could live temporarily, since
there were no hotels at all in Afghanistan. He goes on to say that very

few, perhaps hardly any, examples in history where a king has been
without a room in which to sleep. Until the time that it took him to build a
new palace for himself, he lived in tents and in borrowed mud-houses
belonging to his subjects
2. There was not a penny in the State Treasury with which to pay the army or
any of the state servants; not only that, there was no such thing as a
Treasury at all! The revenue from the country had been already borrowed
and collected for a year or two in advance by Sher Ali, Yaqub, and the
English army, so he could not collect anything from the revenue himself,
because it had been borrowed already.
3. War materials and ammunition, which were necessary for keeping peace in
the country did not exist
4. Chaotic internal conditions--- Herat was separated from his kingdom and
placed under the rule of Ayub, who was stirring up the people against him,
and preparing for war. Kandahar was placed by the British under the rule
of Sardar Sher Ali, then governor of Kandahar, who was, on the other
hand, persuading people to join his party. At Maimana, the Governor
named Dilawar, was intriguing against him. Throughout the rest of the
country, according to Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, because of the weakness
of former kings he mentions Shah Shuja, Sher Ali, and Yaqub, every chief,
sayid, or mullah was proclaiming himself an independent ruler, and
extorting money from the subjects. The Kings had neither the courage nor
the power to punish such usurpers and to put the country into a state of
peace and order.
For most of his reign, two themes dominated: internal imperialism and the
drawing of Afghanistans borders
Internally, the country could still be characterized as a patchwork of
decentralized provincial kingdoms. The tribal leaders continued to remain
independent from Kabuls rule, so the Amir initiated the policy to bring all
the different parts of the country under one centralized rule. Louis Dupree
calls this internal imperialism.
AAR says in his autobiography that of the civil wars that took place since
the day of his accession to the throne, some were small and were quickly
suppressed through an ordinary force and attention without causing him
much anxiety, or being followed by any serious consequences. There were
others, which took rather a serious form, and extended over a long period;
more than that, there were troubles and signs of a general rebellion all
over the country, which resulted in 4 civil wars; namely
War with Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1881---he says that at this time the
ignorant priests had tried to incite the people all over the country to rise
against me in a religious war, but they failed to do so
2. The Ghilzai rebellion---lasted 2 years
3. The rebellion of his cousin, Muhammad Ishaq, son of Muhammad Azam,
in Turkestan in 1888
4. The general uprising in the Hazarajat from 1891-1893

Wholesale executions and deportations usually followed the suppression of

each rebellion or the conquest of independent areas.
AAR described his task as one of putting in order all those hundreds of
petty chiefs, plunderers, robbers, and cutthroats. This necessitated
breaking down the feudal and tribal system and substituting one grand
community under one law and one rule
Forced migrations helped break the traditional power of the tribal
kingdoms. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, AAR shifted thousands of
Ghilzai Pashtun (his major enemies) and others from southern and southcentral Afghanistan to north of the Hindu Kush where their descendants
still live. By moving large numbers of his enemies, AAR accomplished two
immediate aims: he removed dissidents from areas which they might
again infect with the germs of revolt, and he created a force loyal to
himself, for although the Ghilzai might be anti-Durrani while living in their
own territorial tribal zones, they were pro-Pashtun in the northern nonPashtun areas. Also in an attempt to mollify the non-Pashtun elements,
Abdur Rahman abolished the sarmardeh, a tax imposed on non-Pashtun
peoples by Amir Sher Ali Khan.
As he conquered his country and subjugated the different groups in
various parts of the country, he instituted various innovations in governing
Afghanistan. Unlike prior rulers, he kept his sons in Kabul and appointed
loyal followers as provincial governors. The provincial governors
contributed greatly to the breakdown of the territorial tribal system. The
villagers and tribesmen, who were not used to recognizing any but tribal
law, knew little about the initial actions of the central government. The
new provincial boundaries, drawn by Abdur Rahman, and the old tribal
areas seldom coincided, however. Many tribes were split and divided
between two and more provinces or subprovinces. The provincial army,
under the command of the provincial governor enforced the governors
dictums and the Amirs farman.
Although AAR was fundamentally an autocrat he did create a Supreme
Council, similar to the modern cabinet. The Council had no prime minister,
and no authority; it could only advise. He also created a General Assembly.
Or Loya Jirgah. But the ultimate source of his power, his institution for
control and implementation was the army.
While he was busy pacifying the interior of his country, attempting to
create a nation-state, foreign powers drew his external boundaries, with or
without his consent. One scholar called it demarcation with representation.
An early major boundary dispute is famously known as the Panjdeh crisis
of 1885, it ultimately cost AAR several thousand square miles of Herat,
and brought the British and the Russians on the verge of war. Earlier
Russian advances in Central Asia precipitated the crisis.
1884-Russian armies completed their conquest of the Turkoman with the
submission of the Merv Oasis, once a part of Iran, and this alarmed British

politicians. This was the prelude of Slowly, the Russians pushed within
shooting distance of the Afghan outposts in the Panjdeh. Insulting letters
were exchanged between the Afghan and Russian military commanders.
Britain communicated to the Russians that an attack on the Panjdeh would
be a threat to the British.
March 30, 1885---the Panjdeh incident occurred. Russian troops moved
towards the Afghans in battle order; the Afghan commander shifted his
men across the Murghab River to meet the threat. Nobody knows who
fired first, but a battle took place, and although the Afghans fought
bravely, according to both British and Russian observers, they were
overwhelmed in the end and forced to retreat. The Russians occupied the
Panjdeh Oasis and this precipitated the drawing of Afghanistans
boundaries.
The Russians had gained the territory that they wanted; the British hoped
to stop them there. Next came the battle of the conferences.
The Russians agreed to give up Zulfiqar, the point of farthest advance, but
kept the Panjdeh. The proposed line ran from Zulfiqar on the Hari Rud to
Khoja Saleh on the Amu Darya. The British agreed, and the Afghan Amir
had no choice in the matter. Actually, AAR personally did not consider
Panjdeh as important as Zulfiqar, Maruchak, and Gulran.
So, a compromise, reached at the expense of Afghan territory and British
integrity, averted a major war. More Russian-British arguments led to
further Afghan relinquishment of more land in the Panjdeh area.
By 1891, the Russians attempted to explore and annex the Wakhan area.
This would have given Russia a common border with British India.
Considering themselves, totally threatened, the British reacted strongly
and forced Russia to negotiate. AAR was just a bystander. Britian and
Russia agreed to give Russia all the land north of the Amu Darya and
Afghanistan all land south of the Amu Darya. Also, the British forced
Afghanistan to accept control of the Wakhan, a rugged area still
incompletely mapped. AAR objected. This was designed to prevent the
Russians from having a common border with British India. Another Joint
Boundary Commission fixed the extreme northeast boundary in 1895-96.
The boundary moves through a mass of perpetual glaciers to touch China.
In 1964, the Afghans and Chinese actually demarcated this boundary on
the ground for the first time.
By 1896, the northern boundaries of Afghanistan were fixed. Nobody
bothered to define the boundary along the Amu Darya itself. This led to
several disputes, none serious, until 1946, the mid channel river became
the official border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan.
The British had been penetrating the Pashtun tribal areas since 1877
1879

Under British pressures, AAR agreed to receive a mission under Sir

Mortimer Durand in 1893. To demarcate once and for all British and Afghan
responsibilities in the Pashtun area, the Durand Mission travelled to Kabul
in September 1893.. Before Durand left Kabul on November 14, 1893, both
sides agreed on a boundary from Chitral and Baroghail Pass up to
Peshawar, and from there to Koh-i Malik Siyah in this way that Wakhan,
Kafiristan, Asmar, Mohmand of Lalpura and one portion of Waziristan came
under my rule, and I renounce my claims for the railway station of New
Chaman, Chagai, the rest of Waziri, Biland Khel, Kurram, Afridi, Bajaur,
Swat, Buner, Dir, Chilas, and Chitral.
The first threat to Amir Abdur Rahmans power came from his cousin,
Mohammad Ayub Khan, hero of the Battle of Maiwand. Ayub moved from
Herat in July 1881 and he defeated the forces of Amir Abdur Rahman
Khan., commanded by Ghulam Haidar Charkhi near Girishk on July 20. For
a while it seemed as though Ayub had overpowered the Amir and might
soon sit on the throne himself. But AAR personally took to the battlefield
and defeated his cousin on September 22, 1881. Ayub Khan retreated to
Herat and found himself cut off from the city by two of Abdur Rahmans
generals, Abdul Quddus Khan and Anbia Khan Taimani.