Before Taliban

Introduction / 3
few absolute monarchs left on this earth of ours.” All reports indicated that
he was “a capable young ruler indeed” and something of a visionary who
was trying to bring his kingdom into the modern world. But the most interesting
thing about him from Thomas’s point of view was how he had come
to sit on the throne of this turbulent kingdom, “for Amanullah Khan was
not one of those who as heir to a throne, peacefully succeed their fathers. Far
from it.” His rise to power had been a violent one, with many still unexplained
twists and turns. It was, in fact, the stuff of legend, the kind of story
Lowell Thomas loved to tell, particularly when it could be put into the
mouth of an “old Afghan” storyteller:
It all began with the mysterious death of the King Habibullah, but there
is also another mystery. The present Ameer [Amanullah] forgave his
two elder brothers and merely made them renounce their rights to the
throne. But nobody knows what became of the uncle. He was made a
prisoner, and that was the last that any of us ever heard of him. Perhaps
he may be deep in one of our prisons. Perhaps he is dead. Only Allah
knows.
The prospect of meeting Amanullah at the end of the journey was just the
narrative gambit that Thomas needed for his travelogue, and with that goal in
mind he assembled his party for the journey to Kabul. “Soon, if Allah willed
it, and if Amir Amanullah Khan, Light of the World, did not change his mind,
and if his zesty subjects did not shoot holes in our car, and if none of the disasters
that usually overtake travelers east of Suez befell us—why, then we
would pass out of the old Bajauri Gate at Peshawar and journey to mysterious
Afghanistan, where so few Westerners had preceded us.” 3 Strangely,
however, the events that followed this invocation turned out rather flat.There
were, of course, the requisite heat, dust, and flat tires, but the trip itself proved
anticlimactic—so much so, in fact, that Thomas was forced to stage and photograph
the tribal ambush of a motorcar to illustrate the dangers of the
Khyber Pass. The ensuing days on the road to Kabul proved no more noteworthy,
up to the time that they were finally to meet the amir, an encounter
that Thomas hoped would be “the high spot of our Afghan adventure.”
Following the wont of monarchs, Amanullah made his visitors bide their
time for several days, but finally the summons arrived, brought to them by
horsemen “shining with cloth of gold turbans and scarlet and gold uniforms.”
They were to go to the summer palace outside Kabul and there meet
“His Majesty Amanullah Khan, Ameer of Afghanistan, King of Kabul and
Light of the World.” The road to the palace took Thomas and his companions
first across an open plain and then up a steep mountain road until they
entered a long avenue of graceful chinar trees that opened onto “a scene that