Fifth in a series

We all remember Humpty Dumpty who “sat on the wall” and “had a great fall.” Then the poignant denouement: “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men/Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.” May my Afghan friends forgive this comparison of their country with Humpty Dumpty.

First say the name itself. “Humpty Dumpty” sounds funny – which these days Afghanistan most assuredly is not – but it also suggests something lumpy, absurdly shaped, and awkwardly constructed. Such is the shape, history and ethnic make-up of Afghanistan. Cobbled together by outsiders as a 19th century buffer state between Czarist Russia and the British Raj, it served a similar Cold War role during much of the 20th century.

Hence its awkward borders, most absurd of which is the long, skinny Wakhan Corridor in the far northeast whose sole purpose was to separate the empires of Russia and Britain. Hence also the great lump down its middle, the Hindu Kush mountains on which Humpty Dumpty is impossibly perched. These peaks reach 20,000 feet, mark the real border between Central Asia and the Subcontinent, and were not breached by an all-weather road until 1964.

Artificially concocted buffer states seldom make viable nation-states. Afghanistan, even before things fell apart in 1978, was riddled with tribal, religious, and regional factionalism. Politically, it sat for decades astride a Cold War wall between East and West. Soviet influence was paramount, but America served as a useful counter-balance. “They’re Hertz and we’re Avis,” U.S. Ambassador Robert Neumann used to quip in embassy pep talks circa 1973. “They’re bigger [in terms of geography and aid packages], but we try harder.”

Then, in April 1978, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. A communist coup ended five decades of relatively stable rule by the Musahiban family and toppled Afghanistan into a 23-year plunge which hasn’t hit bottom yet.

First came a decade of authentic and noble jihad [holy war] in which the Afghan people, incredibly to everyone but themselves, defeated the Soviet Union. Their victory was quickly squandered, however, by a decline into vicious warlord conflict which opened the way – ever downward – for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. A severe drought, the worst in thirty years, has now rendered yet another million Afghans homeless. And just life seemed to have hit rock bottom, U.S. bombs began to fall.

Can things get even worse, both for Afghanistan and for our own cobbled-together coalition? The Taliban display no indication of calling it quits. Winter’s coming. Ramadan’s coming. Our troops are far from home, even farther than the British troops who faced similar problems exactly 16 decades ago in the fall of 1841. History buffs may wish to check what happened to Tommy Atkins on that occasion.

But let’s say – let’s say – that the Taliban are defeated, that the terrorist camps are destroyed, and that Osama bin Laden is “neutralized.” Then what will happen to Humpty Dumpty? And what about “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men?”

King Zahir Shah reigned (and sometimes ruled) from 1933 to 1973 when he was deposed by his more aggressive cousin Daoud. Since then a gaggle of self-styled Afghan “leaders” have had little good to say about the former monarch. Progressives blame him for insufficient modernization. Islamists blame him for having modernized too much and “opened the door,” as they simplistically put it, to communism. Jihad commanders blame him for having sat out the 1980s holy war in his suburban Roman villa. Pakistan, which effectively prevented the king from joining that war, still lumps him together (wrongly) with Daoud and blames them both for reviving quarrels over the British-drawn (and cynically divisive) Afghanistan-

Pakistan border.

And Americans? Since the early 1980s and until very, very recently, American policy-makers blamed and disparaged Zahir Shah. Why? Because Pakistan intelligence officers – good chaps with crisp uniforms and Sandhurst accents – told them to. This feckless, unquestioning concurrence accounts in large measure for where we are now.

All this naysaying – in which each group’s negativism reinforced all the others – made it hard for town-bound diplomats, politicians and pundits to hear what rank-and- file Afghans were saying. They’ve been saying the same thing all along, for 23 years. Go to most villages inside Afghanistan. Go to most Afghan refugee camps outside its borders. Speak with ordinary Afghans, people who have no great political pretensions of their own. If possible, do without a translator for he, too, is likely to have a political agenda. Get the plain truth, in other words, from the Afghan people themselves: They want the King.

Old men with Old Testament beards – my contemporaries – remember the King and want him back. Middle-aged men, mere boys when Zahir Shah left Afghanistan, still cherish vague recollections of peace and relative prosperity. Young men, the guys with guns, tend to go with whoever gives them bullets, but even they have heard of the Golden Times – “auwqaat-i-telaai” – of Zahir Shah. And the women? We don’t hear much from them because Afghan culture, even before the extremist Taliban, kept most women apart from politics. Those whom I know, however, are even more vehement and united (and, for the most part, level-headed) than the men: They want the King.

Zahir Shah is now 86. Age is further complicated by psychological irony. To recall Kipling, Afghanistan is the country of “The Man Who Would Be King.” Everybody who is Anybody wants to be Somebody More. The great, ironic exception is Zahir Shah, who always seemed more at home on his farm (as a sort of oriental country squire) than in the palace (bombed this past week by U.S. planes). Amazingly in this culture cursed by overweening political ambition, Zahir Shah appears quite content to stay ex-king. At most, he’ll agree to act as interim figurehead.

Interim figurehead is exactly what post-Taliban Afghanistan will need. Our coalition, together with like-minded Afghans, must have such a role set to go for Zahir Shah and, without kissing him to death, provide the support to make that role viable. Other Afghan players, including much of the not-so-allied Northern Alliance and even “moderate” technocrats now associated with the Taliban, will rally ’round once the way is clear.

We – the anti-terrorism coalition and the international community – should also be included in “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.” Specifically, we should contribute in two key ways:

Create a U.N. peace-keeping mission to handle Afghanistan’s internal security and external security. There’s too much blood on too many hands for the Afghans to handle these vital duties themselves, at least for now. The U.N. Mission should be slated to last for five years.

Create a Marshall Plan for the economic and humanitarian reconstruction of Afghanistan. Call it the Bush-Putin Plan. It should be funded primarily by Russia (which destroyed Afghanistan in the 1980s) and the United States (which used Afghanistan in that decade and then abandoned it in the 1990s).

Superpowers have variously attacked, devastated, manipulated and abdicated responsibility for Afghanistan over nearly a quarter century. We have “fought to the last Afghan” … and then have forgotten him and his widow and orphans. Millions have died. Millions more have been maimed and/or displaced to squalor.

Time now to end their suffering … and to end our shame. Let’s all be “the King’s horses and the King’s men.” Then – and as Muslims say “God willing” – maybe Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has been associated with Afghanistan and the Muslim world for 30 years.