Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard (off stage: Moses Horwitz, Louis Feinberg and Jerome Horwitz) seldom figure in accounts of Afghanistan. Ancients of my ilk and era remember them instead as The Three Stooges, slapstick comedians par excellence in America’s long-gone dreamtime of cultural innocence. “No violence, no nudity, no profanity,” reads one web site tribute to their genius for PG-rated buffoonery. The harshest and most famous Stooge insult: “Knucklehead.”

Afghan history likewise features three stooges, albeit of a different sort: Shah Shuja, Babrak Karmal, and Dr. Najibullah. Here “stooge” means puppet rather than clown. The acts were political rather than comical, and they played to far less appreciative audiences. Each Afghan stooge was installed and kept in place by an outside power. Each was forced, despite personal misgivings, to do the outsider’s bidding far more than Afghan political culture allows. Each stooge ended badly, as did the policies of his outside sponsor.

Why tell their stories? Because a similar dynamic now threatens Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the United States. Let’s take Afghanistan’s three stooges in turn … and try to avoid a fourth.

Shah Shuja first came to power in 1803 and ruled for an ornate but feckless six years before a brother chased him towards pensioned exile in British India. (While still pre-occupied with Napoleon in Europe, both Britain and Russia were already anticipating their imperial rivalry that was to follow in Central Asia. One Great Game tactic entailed each side’s maintaining a stable of temporarily out-of-luck Afghan royals who could serve as figureheads when opportune moments arose.)

Shuja was both dandified and dumb. His first tour as monarch featured a crown which British envoy Montstuart Elphinstone found “so complicated, and so dazzling, that it was difficult to understand, and impossible to describe.” He also sported the Koh-i-Noor diamond, then more than twice its current size. In 1813 the banished Shuja gave this priceless gem – up front – to a Sikh leader who’d promised to support restoration. Diamond pocketed, the Sikh reneged on his promise. America’s Three Stooges would have known the word for throne-less, gem-less Shuja: “Knucklehead.”

IQ, however, was not a criterion when the British decided in 1838 to install an acquiescent regime in Kabul. As in our own Cold War more than a century later, unfounded fear that “the Russians are coming” led to all manner of lunacy, including employment of pliant bumblers like Shuja. By then somewhat long in the tooth – in the words of one parliamentary critic a “superannuated puppet” – Shuja was nominated by an even more doddering British viceroy because of a supposed popularity which “had been proved throughout Afghanistan, by the strong and unanimous testimony of the best authorities.” These “authorities” included Sir Alexander Burnes, a James Bond wannabe: “… the British Government have only to send him [Shuja] to Peshawar with an agent [Burnes] and two of its own regiments as an honorary escort, and an avowal to the Afghans, that we have taken up his cause, to ensure his being fixed forever on the throne.”

Result: The worst defeat in British military history. Shuja was installed by a 20,000-strong “Army of the Indus”… of whom one man made it back alive in January 1841. Burnes was butchered in Kabul. Shuja survived another three months but was killed on his first venture outside the city. Afghans, more politically concentrated then than now, put their own man in power. His subsequent two-decade rule is still remembered as a model of justice. Shuja is remembered as a stooge.

Fast-forward to late December 1979 when, for the only time in the Cold War, the Russians did undertake a brand new conquest. A military coup had resulted in a Soviet-friendly regime twenty months earlier. Problem: Its Marxist ideology had provoked rank-and-file Afghans to counter-revolution. Only a massive intervention – albeit phrased as “limited and friendly” – could preserve the Brezhnev Doctrine of historical irreversibility: Once Marxist, always Marxist.

Enter Babrak Karmal, a longstanding bigwig in the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, who broadcast a request for Soviet assistance from a transmitter in Soviet territory and then rumbled into Kabul aboard a Soviet tank. Babrak became known as watan frush – “seller of his country” – and thus Afghan Stooge No. 2.

Once again, the audience did not applaud as hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops tried to conquer Afghanistan. Babrak struggled to achieve legitimacy but was limited by his Moscow minders. Millions of Afghans died as martyrs or left as refugees. Geriatric Soviet leadership propped Babrak up until Mikhail Gorbachev replaced him. Exit Babrak Karmal, Afghan Stooge No. 2, who died in pathetic Russian exile.

Gorbachev replaced Karmal in 1986 with a more brutal, able, and realistic man. Dr. Najibullah, once an authentic doctor of medicine, had become chief of Karmal’s secret police and, in every sense, knew where the bodies were buried. This healer-killer could, conceivably, have reconciled the country under some sort of post-Soviet, progressive nationalism. For better or worse, his opponents – the Islamic mujahedin and their outside supporters (U.S., Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc.) – found him unacceptably tainted. The last Soviet soldier left on Feb. 15, 1989. Najib stayed in power, remarkably, until 1992 when the mujahedin conquest of Kabul forced him into asylum at Kabul’s UN compound. Disdainful of diplomatic niceties, the Taliban seized, hanged, and castrated him in 1996. So much for Afghan Stooge No. 3. And so much for his outside sponsor, the Soviet Union.

Back to American slapstick. Note that there were never more than Three Stooges. Moe and Larry endured for decades, while Curly died young and was replaced. The characters, however, never exceeded three. May it be the same for Afghanistan! The last thing that country needs is for its president, the excellent Hamid Karzai, to be rendered Afghan Stooge No. 4.

As with his predecessors, stooge-dom is the last thing Karzai wants. A naturally modest man, he’s been cast by history (and U.S. policy-makers) as the leader of a country whose “recovery” will take pluck, luck, and comprehensive outside support. He must reconstruct a country which, in some ways, never really was. (See this column Nov. 8 and 13, 2001.)

Already, however, some Afghans are calling Karzai “Shah Shuja.” Why this slur? And what can we do to help stop it?

The “stooge-sayers” are mostly unreconstructed Pushtuns who, having enjoyed hegemony in the past, blame fellow Pushtun Karzai for not providing it again. He can’t – because Tajiks ousted the Taliban from Kabul and still control the city. And he shouldn’t – because a truly viable “new” Afghanistan must be free of ethnic hegemony. Karzai, bless him, is the first to agree.

Trouble is, U.S. actions can make Karzai seem a stooge. Afghans know full well that we helped infiltrate him post-9/11, then ex-filtrated him when surrounded by the Taliban, then re-infiltrated him and made him into the Main Man. Worth doing? Absolutely, but the memory of that dependence needs to fade.

Instead our actions seem to reinforce the stooge impression. Afghans have also noted Karzai’s several subsequent alterations of policy to suit US dictates: most recently, his re-statement of cabinet selection procedure at June’s Loya Jirga, and his subsequent emphasis (in a Wolf Blitzer CNN interview) on the need for an Afghan National Army. In fact, Karzai (quietly) and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (vociferously) and most other non-U.S. administration observers put more priority on the expansion of ISAF, the International Security and Assistance Force.

More stooge-like yet – and a by-product of our failure to play a lead role in ISAF – is the recent arrangement whereby American troops are now guarding Karzai! With security generally deteriorating, his own Afghan guards are now deemed inadequate or untrustworthy (take your choice). Here is the quintessence of stooge-dom … and exactly what happened to Shah Shuja (until British troops fled), Babrak Karmal (until Soviet troops deposed him), and Dr. Najibullah (until Soviet troops deserted him). They were all stooged.

Yes, Karzai should be guarded, if necessary by outsiders, but far better if the United States were to enter ISAF and have ISAF troops guard him. Most Afghans, for the first time in history, actively want international peacekeepers. Fewer and fewer want U.S. war-makers. Yes, the hunt for al-Qaida should continue urgently, but all will be lost in Afghanistan if we stooge Hamid Karzai.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.