Afghanistan: The Beginning (1)

A memoir of life in Kabul, Afghanistan from 1976 to 1978: Part I

Prologue

I did not choose Afghanistan. She somehow chose me.

Just 25 years old, I was an aspiring Peace Corps Volunteer ready for service. I had recently received a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics from the University of Utah and moved to Seattle, where I was teaching English as a second language at a private language school.

My Peace Corps recruiter in Seattle showed me descriptions of different jobs that were open around the world that matched my skills. Because I was fairly fluent in Spanish, he urged me to consider volunteering for a linguistic project in Uruguay. But my heart was set on a different job opening: teaching English at the University of Tunis.

My boyfriend at the time (a fellow graduate student in linguistics) was from Libya and had Tunisian friends at the university, so I would have a connection when I arrived. My undergraduate degree was in German and French, so I loved the idea of being on the Mediterranean, in a French-speaking country that was close to Spain and that would give me the opportunity to learn Arabic as well.

I applied for the teaching program and was accepted. I received a welcome letter, information about the university and the Peace Corps program, and the date that my job would start. In due time, I gave up my apartment in Seattle and my job teaching English and prepared for a 2-year stint abroad. As the date of departure neared, however, I became concerned because I did not yet have a plane ticket.

On a Friday morning, I contacted my recruiter, who said he would find out what was going on. Then I left to spend the weekend with my sister, who was living on Orcas Island—a forested bit of heaven north of Seattle. I received a call from the recruiter late Friday afternoon.

“I’m sorry to tell you, Clarice,” he said. “But there’s been a mistake, and your plane ticket was given to someone else. The next opening is in Kabul, Afghanistan. Call me back no later than Monday afternoon with your decision.”

I hung up the phone in shock. I was good at geography and knew where Afghanistan was located, but that was about all. On Saturday, I headed to the little library in Eastsound and found a National Geographic article about the country. After finishing it, I made a decision.

I called my recruiter back Monday morning and said, “I’ll do it.”

And so began an experience that has affected my entire life. I have told bits of the story to my two daughters and close friends over the years, but at the age of 72, I now want to document the story in writing. It has been 47 years since I arrived in Kabul, and my memory of many details has faded. Some details, however, are seared in my brain. Those are what I plan to share with you here and in following posts.

The journey to Kabul

My ticket to Kabul arrived on time. On July 4, 1976, I boarded a plane and flew to Washington, D.C. The next day, I met the other volunteers who were headed to Afghanistan with me. There were eight of us altogether: a 20-something married couple, a 60-something married couple, a 70-something woman, and a single man and a single woman, both about my age.

I remember that the trip lasted almost 24 hours from our departure in Washington, D.C. to our arrival in Kabul, but I don’t remember the details. I think we must have stopped to change planes in Europe—most likely Frankfurt—but I’m not really sure. I do remember, however, stopping in Tehran for three hours.

I remember this because Mehdi, a friend of my twin sister’s, picked me up at the airport. A few years before, he had enrolled in the University of Utah to study engineering, and he and my sister, who was also studying at the university, had dated for a while.

“Hello, Clarice,” Mehdi said. “It’s amazing to see you here. Let me show you a bit of Tehran.”

We walked to his car, and then Mehdi threaded his way expertly through traffic that went every direction while drivers constantly blared their horns. We eventually arrived at a tree-filled garden that was a haven of peace. The evening air was filled with the scent of roses and felt warm and heavy on my skin. We strolled past a water fountain covered in turquoise tiles and then sat on a bench in the shade of some trees to talk.

“How on earth did you end up heading to Kabul?” Mehdi asked.

“It wasn’t my original plan, but here I am,” I replied.

We got caught up on what my sister and I had been doing in the States and what he had been doing since returning to Iran. Mehdi was a kind and intelligent man, and knowing he wasn’t far away gave me courage for whatever was to come. After an hour or so, he drove me back to the airport, and I rejoined my fellow volunteers for the last leg of our journey to Kabul.

Someone from Peace Corps picked us up at Kabul International Airport and drove us to the large, comfortable Peace Corps compound, where we were welcomed warmly. Then we were taken to different apartments that had been rented for us. The three single women (Elaine, who was around my age, Helen, a retired French teacher, and me) were placed in one apartment, each with our own bedroom.

We would live together for two months while our in-country training took place. Peace Corps provided us with a male cook and housekeeper who shopped for food in the bazaar, made our meals, cleaned the apartment, and washed our clothes by hand. At the end of the two months, it would be up to us to find our own places to live and to start teaching in the schools to which we had been assigned.

Language training

We had language training in Dari every morning. Our classes were taught by a lovely Afghan man who was a professor at Kabul University and whose name I have long forgotten.

He explained to us that Afghanistan is a multiethnic, multilingual, mostly tribal country. About 42% of the population consists of Pashtuns, whose traditional homelands are in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, as well as in northwestern Pakistan. They speak an eastern Iranian language called Pashtu.

The next largest group are Tajiks (27%), and the third largest are Hazaras (9%). Both the Tajiks and the Hazaras speak Dari, which is a dialect of Persian (i.e. Farsi). The fourth largest group are the Uzbeks (9%), a Turkic people whose traditional homeland in Afghanistan is in the north. In addition to these four major ethnic groups, there are many others, all speaking different languages.

Due to the numbers and influence of people who speak Dari and Pashto, they are the two official languages of Afghanistan. Dari is the main language used in government, business, and the arts and is therefore the lingua franca for the entire country.

Both Pashtu and Dari are written with the Arabic alphabet due to the influence of Islam, but the languages themselves are not related to Arabic at all. Instead, they are part of the Indo-European family of languages that stretches from India across Central Asia to Europe. This means that Dari, Pashtu, Sanskrit, German, French, Spanish and English all share one common ancestor.

A bit of geography

Afghanistan is a mountainous, landlocked country about the size of Texas. Its population (in 2023) is approximately 41 million. Some of the most important mountain ranges include the Hindu Kush, Pamirs and Karakoram. The highest mountain peak is Noshaq. Located in the Hindu Kush Mountains, it reaches a height of 7,492 m (24,580 ft).

The country is bordered by Iran to the west and Pakistan to the south and east. To the north are Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. All three of these stan countries gained their independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1976, they were simply part of the Soviet Union, separated from Afghanistan by the Amu Darya (Oxus) River.

In the northeast of Afghanistan, there is a narrow bit of land sandwiched between Tajikistan and Pakistan. Called the Wakhan Corridor, it borders China for 57 miles.

In addition to Kabul, which is the capital, there are three major cities. Herat is in the west near the border with Iran, Kandahar is in the south near the border with Pakistan, and Mazar-i-Sharif is in the north near the border with Uzbekistan.

Afghanistan has an arid climate, which means that summers are really hot and winters are really cold. Because the country receives so little rain, there is often a problem with drought.

A bit of history

In the afternoons, our small group sat in a beautiful walled garden under some tall trees while different people taught us about Afghanistan’s history and culture. The garden belonged to a house, but I can’t remember now if it was part of the Peace Corps compound or somewhere else! I do remember, however, how pleasant it was to spend the summer afternoons there.

One teacher in particular stands out in my memory: Louis Dupree. Louis (pronounced Louie) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist and scholar of Afghan culture and history. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard and worked as a senior research associate of Islamic and Arabic development studies at Duke University. He and his wife, Nancy, spent most of their time living in Kabul and were both experts on the country.

Louis explained to us that Afghanistan’s culture and history have been greatly influenced by its key geographical location in central Asia, and it has been invaded again and again by armies seeking power and wealth. A major example of this is Alexander the Great, who spent four years (331 to 327 BCE) in Afghanistan with his army of thousands fighting and conquering various kingdoms until his empire extended from Macedonia to India.

The empire of Alexander the Great

Alexander founded numerous cities during his conquests, including Alexandria, Egypt. In Afghanistan, he likely founded both Herat and Kandahar, as well as communities further north. After he died at the age of 33 in Macedonia, his empire fell rapidly apart.

In Afghanistan, Greek soldiers in the northern province of Bactria (see the map above), declared independence and founded the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, which lasted for more than three centuries.

“Louis Bernard, a French archaeologist, began excavating a site in Bactria called Ai-Khanoum in 1964,” Louis said. “And it is still continuing. So far, they have found a complete Greek city, with an acropolis and an amphitheater capable of holding 6,000 people!”

Buddhism arrived in Afghanistan around 305 BCE. Interestingly, the Hellenistic culture began to mix with Buddhist religious art and created a kind of hybrid. For example, Louis said that archaeologists had discovered small statues of Buddhas that had Greek gods carved on their shoulders!

The Buddhist religion flourished in Afghanistan for over 1,000 years. Islam arrived for the first time around 663 CE, but the change from Buddhism to Islam was gradual. In fact, it was not until the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, invaded Afghanistan in the 13th century (1219-1221) that Buddhism disappeared completely.

The 19th-20th century

In the 19th century, the British arrived. Ostensibly concerned with the growing influence of Russia in Afghanistan, they launched two wars from India. The first took place from 1839 to 1842, and the second took place from 1878 to 1880. The British managed to reach Kabul during both wars, but they were eventually defeated and forced to retreat to India.

In a fascinating, award-winning article titled Love and Ruin, James Verini writes:

Britain and Russia spent much of the 19th century vying for control of Central and South Asia in the sadistic enterprise known as the Great Game. Rodenbough proudly related that during the First Anglo-Afghan War, “Kabul and other towns were leveled with the ground; [Afghan] troops were blown from guns, and the people were collected together and destroyed like worms.” However, the Afghans had one elusive advantage over their would-be occupiers: Unlike the Britons and the Russians, they were not, had never been, a feudal people. Afghan political life was arranged around complex authority-sharing conclaves known as jirgas and shuras. When trouble arose, elders, chiefs, and religious leaders would act together to protect their territories. In this way, they had rebuffed one attempted conquest after another. Uninterested in cohering in peacetime, in war Afghans were something to watch; the British may have blown their enemy from cannons, but eventually they left in humiliation.

The British still managed to wreak havoc, however. Louis explained that the borders of Afghanistan were not fixed until the 1880s when Russian and British cartographers drew lines on a map that suited their own geopolitical interests. Before that, the country was simply a loose coalition of territories that had been governed by a monarch since the mid 1700s. When the Russians and the British drew their map, they failed to consider the complex mixture of cultures and religions suddenly thrown together within the boundaries of this new country, setting Afghanistan up for numerous internal conflicts and challenges in the years to come.

The British launched a third war in 1919 that involved several ineffective skirmishes on both sides. In the end, they signed a peace treaty on August 8, 1919, that finally recognized Afghan independence.

In Louis’ most important book, titled Afghanistan, he wrote:

The insolence of the Afghan, however, is not the frustrated insolence of urbanized, dehumanized man in western society. But insolence without arrogance, the insolence of harsh freedoms set against a backdrop of rough mountains and deserts, the insolence of equality felt and practiced (with an occasional touch of superiority), the insolence of bravery past and bravery anticipated.

I think Louis summed up the character of Afghans beautifully in this quote, and I think it is one reason foreigners—including the Russians, the British and the Americans—have so often underestimated Afghans. To their regret and their peril.

Regime change

When I arrived in Afghanistan in 1976, it was a republic with one party headed by President Mohammad Daoud Khan. Just three years before that, in 1973, Daoud had overthrown the king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, in a bloodless coup d’etat while the king was in Italy for medical treatment. Interestingly, Daoud was King Zahir Shah’s first cousin, his brother-in-law, and his former prime minister.

Until the coup, kings had ruled Afghanistan for more than 225 years. Zahir Shah became king on 8 November 1933 at the age of 19 following the assassination of his father. He ruled for the next 40 years during a period marked by peace. The king maintained Afghan neutrality during World War II and undertook major highway construction projects with funding from both the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1964, he put in place a new constitution that introduced free elections, created a parliament, protected women’s rights, and guaranteed universal suffrage.

The 1950s to the 1970s were the height of the Cold War. As the United States and Europe vied with the Soviet Union for power and influence, Afghanistan was caught in the middle. As a result, the country had numerous political factions. Some supported the West, some supported the Soviet Union, and the Pashtus along the Pakistani border began pushing for autonomy.

Over time, Mohammad Daoud Khan came to believe that the multiparty system was unwieldy and hampered decision making. Once in power, he abolished the parliament, nationalized the banks, increased spending for the military, and attempted to lessen the influence of the Soviet Union on Afghanistan. In the process, he angered the Soviets, the liberals (who supported a multiparty system led by the king), and the traditionalists.

Afghan women in 1976

Both King Zahir Shah and President Daoud had progressive policies when it came to the rights of women. When I arrived in 1976, schoolgirls were wearing skirts to their knees and their heads were uncovered. Almost half the students in Kabul University were women, and the classes were co-ed. There were women in government and female scientists, professors, lawyers and doctors.

This being said, many families were still quite conservative—especially outside of the urban centers—and thousands of women still wore chadris. These are the all-encompassing outer garments that cover Afghan women from head to foot. They begin with an embroidered cap that fits over the head and has a grill across the eyes so women can see (a little) but not be seen. Tiny pleats of fabric then fall from the cap to the feet.

As the months went by, I met some western-educated Afghan women who wore the latest fashions from Paris under their chadris—or who would put on a chadri to buy something in the bazaar if their hair and makeup were not perfect. But most women wore them for cultural and religious reasons.

As our training came to a close, I was assigned to teach English to students and teachers alike at the Kabul Teacher’s College. I also met a Peace Corps Volunteer named Alcy who had rented a house and needed a roommate. And so my day-to-day life in Kabul began.

Recommended Reading

Afghanistan by Louis Dupree

Love and Ruin by James Verini

What about you?

Did you visit or live in Kabul during the time of King Zahir Shah or President Daoud? What do you remember about what life was like back then?