Come from the Shadows. Terry Glavin
those concentric rings of roadwork radiating outwards from the centre of town were all about. They weren’t ancient at all.
Go grubbing around in Quranic texts or CIA plots for the origins of Talibanism, and you come up empty. Look to the evidence of history, and you come across a network of well-worn roads that run back through time. Most of them peter out in the deserts and the mountains, but one of them forms a straight line back to a virulent Pashtun chauvinism that erupted in the years when the Pashtun royalty was propping itself up with military, financial, cultural and ideological support from the Third Reich. The lash of ethnic cleansing and cultural obliteration that the Taliban wielded to scourge Afghans in the 1990s was first put to the backs of the people of Balkh sixty years before, with Nazi Germany providing the guns, money, technical wherewithal and revisionist propaganda that Pakistan’s ISI would so generously provide the Taliban all those years later.
For the past 175 years or so, Afghanistan’s emirs, kings, shahs, mullahs and presidents have always had to rely on foreign stipends, subsidies, tributes or other such financial life supports from some foreign power, somewhere. By the early 1930s, the German colony in Kabul was the largest foreign enclave in Afghanistan, and German master-race theorists had convinced themselves and their Afghan hosts that they had discovered in Balkh the ancient Germanic “cradle of Aryanism.” The Afghan government’s Almanac of Kabul of 1933 begins with an essay entitled “The Race of the Afghans,” which claims Balkh as “the cradle where our nation was nurtured, even more, of the Aryan race.” The ring roads radiating from the city were laid down according to Nazi inspiration and an imagined Aryan history that required Balkh province to be cleansed of its Jews by an edict of the kingdom and the ancient city of Balkh to be emptied of its non-Pashtun inhabitants by decree of the king’s interior minister, Mohammad Gul Khan Momand. The young British art critic and historian Robert Byron happened to have lunch with Momand during a visit to Balkh in 1934. Although he did not know it at the time, Byron had already encountered Momand’s handiwork, several days earlier. On the road to Balkh, Byron had seen a caravan of hundreds of Balkhi Jews, travelling in the opposite direction, fleeing to Herat.
The ring roadwork, the purgings and the deportations began in earnest that year. The destruction did not require obliteration on the scale of the Taliban bombing of the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas during the late 1990s. But anything in Balkh that stood too obviously as a rebuke to the new Aryan version of ancient Afghan history was bulldozed or reinvented to represent the ruins of something else.
During the 1930s, Momand was known to British intelligence as a fanatical devotee of “Pashtunization”—the imposition of the Pashto language in all government transactions, the erasure of non-Pashtun cultural influences from the affairs of state, the marginalization of non-Pashtun Afghans and the mass resettlement of Pashtuns in the Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek and Turkmen regions of the country’s north. To the people of Balkh, Momand was known as “the second Genghis Khan.” According to Tajik historian Akhror Mukhtarov, author of Balkh in the Late Middle Ages, “The last significant changes in the fortunes of the city were tied to the uprooting of the indigenous inhabitants of Balkh and the influx of a Pashto-speaking population . . . simultaneously, he [Momand] took steps to ensure that existing monuments and grave markers provided no reminder that anyone other than Pashtuns had ever lived in the city.”
Historian Robert D. McChesney of New York University’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies has paid close attention to “the susceptibility of monumental commemorative structures to reinterpretation and consequent renovation.” The stories accounting for the origins of Balkh’s monuments proved acutely vulnerable to revisionism during the tenure of Momand, McChesney observes. Momand was a principal figure among the Pashtun elite, with whom the notion of a German-Pashtun kinship arising from a shared, imaginary Aryan origin found a particularly “warm reception.” Their affections did not go unrequited. “In those years, the idea of a superior Aryan race was growing out of the anti-semitism at the heart of the National-Socialist movement in post-war Germany, and because of it, German diplomats and scholars had come to see a kinship between themselves and the Afghans as Aryans,” McChesney writes. “Promoting Aryanism literally took a more concrete form in the decision to build a new Balkh.”
The Abu Nasr Parsa shrine and its surrounding gardens were to form the epicentre of a grand new city, with straight roads leading from its heart and circular roads emanating outwards as well, reminiscent of Washington, D.C., or Paris. The Abu Nasr Parsa shrine had served generations of Balkhis as a necropolis, surrounded by the precincts of a lively and welcoming Sufi madrassa. Momand obliterated everything but the shrine’s core and re-imagined it as an exemplary artifact of Aryan architecture, “the focal point of Aryan dreams,” as McChesney puts it.
The Afghan-Nazi relationship was sufficiently cozy that by 1936, the Reich had agreed to provide Afghanistan’s twenty-two-year-old Pashtun king, Zahir Shah, with military supplies worth 15 million deutsche marks. German military specialists took on a mentoring role for the Afghan army. By 1937, Lufthansa was running regular flights between Berlin and Kabul, and it wasn’t just Afghanistan that got swept up in the Nazi orbit. In February 1941, the German consulate in Tehran was pleased to report: “Throughout the country spiritual leaders are coming out and saying that ‘the twelfth imam [akin to the Judeo-Christian notion of the messiah] has been sent into the world by God in the form of Adolf Hitler’ . . . One way to promote this trend is sharply to emphasize Muhammed’s struggle against the Jews in the olden days and that of the Führer today.”
The Second World War brought an end to direct Nazi influence in Afghanistan and to Balkh’s reinvention as the birthplace of the Aryan race. At least two thousand Afghan Jews had managed to evade the deportations of 1934, and many of Balkh’s original families eventually managed to return to their homes and their farms. Still, the 1930s-era effort to manufacture an Aryan Absurdistan can explain why the people of Balkh differ among themselves about the provenance of so many of the ruins, shrines and tombs that distinguish their little town.
Interior Minister Mohammad Gul Khan Momand is still remembered in some Afghan circles as a great statesman and Afghan patriot. The Pashtun chauvinism he nurtured during his tenure has unambiguously lived on. It is impossible to be certain in the absence of a proper census, but Pashtuns appear to make up somewhere between a third and a half of the Afghan population. Even so, Pashtun master-race delusions persist in the commonplace, reactionary notion that the Pashtuns are the only “pure” Afghans and are consequently entitled by their ethnicity to govern the country. Pashtun chauvinists educated in Nazi universities remained in the most intimate corridors of power in Afghanistan well into the 1960s. Afghan journalist Soraab Balkhi takes the point further, pointing to the “crypto-fascist” Afghan Mellat Party, which purports to be a kind of Afghan social-democratic party. The Afghan Mellat, founded in 1966 by the Nazi-educated Pashtun chauvinist Ghulam Farhad, persisted into the twenty-first century as a force in President Hamid Karzai’s Pashtun-dominated inner circle. “The party itself had gone through many changes, but has always kept the same imperious, self-serving goals,” Balkhi writes.
The Taliban are a Pashtun phenomenon, though to leave it at that would be woefully imprecise and invite slander against the Pashtun people. Neither are the Taliban merely a function of the Pashtun elite’s encounters with the Nazis—Talibanism is sufficiently grotesque without having to bring European fascists into it. But it does warrant attention that the Taliban and their Islamist contemporaries—Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Khomeinists and so on—have antecedents distinguished by an admiration for and often open collaboration with European fascism. North Americans may recoil from “clerical fascists” as a descriptive term for the Taliban. For many Afghans, however, it is completely without controversy that the Taliban years resembled nothing so much as the state-sanctioned purges, pogroms and expulsions visited upon Afghanistan’s Shia Muslims, Hazaras, Tajiks and Jews during the 1930s.
When the Taliban swept through Balkh in the 1990s, it was as though Mohammad Gul Khan Momand had returned a second time and Genghis Khan a third time. As always with the bloodletting Afghanistan’s various late-twentieth-century militias and armed groups exacted from each other, it is worthwhile noting that “atrocities were committed on all sides.” The Northern Alliance carried out at least one mass execution of captured Taliban soldiers. But nothing was equivalent