The Honey Thief (8 page)

Amanullah was even more determined than his father Habibullah had been to turn Afghanistan into a nation that he would not be ashamed to invite his European friends to visit. Early in his reign, however, he decided to sacrifice Afghanistan’s friendship with the British, judging that he could replace potential British visitors with those from Russia and France and Germany. He attacked the British in northern India with great success and made Afghanistan almost free of foreign control. This was a popular thing to do, for after killing Hazara, Amanullah’s supporters most enjoyed killing Englishmen.Amanullah went about Kabul in a motor car, stopping to wave to the people who cheered him. ‘We have much to do!’ he said, and the people replied, ‘Truly, Emir!’ ‘Afghanistan must become the jewel of Central Asia!’ he said. The people replied, ‘Truly, Emir, a jewel!’

But the Emir and the people had different ideas about the ways in which Afghanistan would be fashioned into a jewel. The people thought Amanullah was going to have more wells dug in the villages, and build a new palace of great splendour, perhaps have his engineers make a deep drain that would carry away the sewage of the city. Instead, Amanullah changed a law that compelled women all over Afghanistan to dress in accordance with the protocols of the strictest Saudis of Mecca. ‘A woman may wear at any time what the women of Paris wear,’ he said. Amanullah had been to Paris with his wife, Soraya Tarzi, and it was there that Soraya discovered a preference for Western garments.

‘Schools will be built that both boys and girls can attend,’ Amanullah said, for Soraya Tarzi had convinced him that it was only right that girls should be educated in the modern country he wished to create.

‘A man may live in Afghanistan as a Christian if he so wishes, or as a Jew, or as an atheist,’ Amanullah said, and he put it into the Constitution.

‘And Afghanistan must fight its battles with modern weapons,’ he said, and displayed a number of aeroplanes donated to Afghanistan by the Russians. The pilots of the aeroplanes were also Russians, but the day will come, said Amanullah, when Afghans will fly such machines.

‘And there will be many motor cars,’ he said. ‘Also many libraries with books from every country in the world. What do you say to that?’

The people said no. The people had never been to Paris and what they knew of the way Western women dressed shocked them. The people believed that schools were all well and good, but sending girls to school would lead to disaster because God had not intended that girls should go to school. The people thought that any Christians or Jews who wished to live in Afghanistan should think again, and that atheists should be hanged for their own good. The people thought that libraries were madness. As for the Russian aeroplanes – okay, keep them.

The people rebelled – or many of them, not all. The Hazara had always educated their daughters and thought that people foolish enough to sit in a library all day reading books would be doing little harm. Others were a little suspicious of modernisation, but not frightened of it. But the frightened people came to Kabul in big crowds and demanded that Amanullah dress his wife in the traditional Afghan way and stop taking holidays in the strange lands of the infidels. Amanullah said that he would take all the holidays he liked, and he did, but the army deserted him and he was forced to take a holiday in Switzerland with Soraya Tarzi and his children that lasted for the rest of his life.

Amanullah’s brother Inayatullah became king when Amanullah departed. It was a short reign of six days. Inayatullah spent all of the six days in fear and trembling, thinking that a rival, Habibullah Kalakani, would replace him. Inayatullah had good cause to be afraid because Habibullah Kalakani did indeed make himself king, although without murdering anyone of great importance. He spent nine months as king, fearing that each day might be his last. He especially feared Nadir Khan, a very powerful man, a descendent of Dost Mohammad, who had achieved great honour as a general. Like many powerful men in Afghanistan before him, Nadir Khan had been forced to make a choice between befriending the Russians and befriending the British. He chose the British, partly because he spoke very good English and no Russian at all. The British, who had learned to think like Afghans after years of fighting them one year and feasting them the next, arranged for Nadir Khan to win a series of battles against them in the south of Afghanistan. The agreement was that they, the British, would help Nadir Khan build a wonderful reputation as a hero of the battlefield, and then would help him become king. Once he was king, he would throw open his arms and embrace the British. Down in the south, the British kept soldiers in forts all along the frontier with India. When Nadir mounted his horse and raised his sword as a signal to attack, the British abandoned the forts, and the legend of Nadir the Terror of Englishmen was born.

And it was the British who suggested to Nadir in October 1929 that it was time for Kalakani, who was not so friendly to the British, to go on a long holiday like the long holiday of Amanullah. On 16 October 1929, Nadir asked Kalakani for an audience at the palace in Kabul. Nadir looked happy and relaxed as he spoke with the King. He was wearing his smartest uniform and new round-lens spectacles manufactured in London. He told the King that in the near future, another man would sit on the throne of Afghanistan, and that the new king would be Mohammad Nadir. The King asked if ‘the near future’ meant months or years. Nadir said, ‘Tomorrow.’

As good as his word, Mohammad Nadir seized the throne on 17 October. He did not know it at the time, but his reign would last only four years. He had no idea that a fifteen-year-old boy living no more than a few kilometres from the Kabul Palace would shoot him through the heart on 8 November 1933. And the boy who would shoot Mohammad Nadir through the heart did not know that he was destined to kill a king, either.

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Abdul Khaliq was the eldest son of a Hazara family of Kabul. In his upbringing, there was nothing immediately obvious that would explain the mission he was to set for himself. His family was not as poor as most other Hazara families. His father Khuda Khaliq was a merchant and had not fought against Abdur Rahman’s soldiers. His mother was said to have a beautiful voice for singing. His uncles, who in time to come would spend a day at prayer in a prison cell while a scaffold for their execution was constructed, were not much involved in politics. Abdul Khaliq himself was a quiet, respectful child, attentive to his school studies.

After the King’s assassination, Mohammad Nadir’s generals would claim that Abdul Khaliq had acted under instructions from certain illustrious enemies of the Barakzai family; that he was a paid killer. But this seems unlikely. Mohammad Nadir’s enemies did not attempt to seize the throne after the assassination, and indeed, Mohammad Nadir’s son, Mohammad Zahir, succeeded him without any dispute or delay. No, the assassination was the work of a boy who had never marched in the streets of Kabul on behalf of his people; a boy who had never spoken to anyone about his politics; a boy who had never taken up arms against the King’s soldiers. It seems much more likely that Abdul Khaliq decided to kill the King to avenge the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hazara years earlier.

When I read the documents that tell us about the life and death of Abdul Khaliq, I imagine a boy who likes to daydream. That is how his friends think of him – as a dreamy young fellow, good-natured, harmless. But he carries a terrible pain in his heart, as do all Hazara boys of his age. He has heard the stories of Hazara chased through the streets of their villages, captured, flung against a wall and shot. They are told in every Hazara household – how could he not have heard them? He is a boy who cannot believe that such injustice, such savagery, can go unpunished. He doesn’t talk about it very much, but it dwells inside him, the great injustice, and one day his daydreams and the pain he carries merge together and he imagines something he has never imagined before. ‘Surely my people are waiting for a hero. Surely the pain the Hazara suffer will be relieved if a blow is struck for our freedom.’ He tells no one. It isn’t difficult for him to keep quiet, because he is always quiet. His mother says to him, ‘Abdul, what is going on in your head? You look like a sage, like a wise man, when you are no more than a boy. You worry me, Abdul.’ Abdul Khaliq makes no reply, but at least he smiles and the smile is what his mother was hoping for.

His plan is not formed. It isn’t even a plan. It is just a dream. What sort of blow might he strike? He doesn’t know. But the possibilities are few in number. He might kill himself in a public place as a demonstration of the agony that his people live with. But to kill himself without shedding a drop of his enemies’ blood seems without purpose. He could kill one of the generals who murdered Hazaras, but generals are always surrounded by soldiers. He could kill one of the King’s family, so that the King would know what it felt like to lose someone he loved – one of his sons, one of his daughters.

Or he could kill the King himself. The idea is so shocking that Abdul Khaliq draws in his breath and releases it slowly. He is amazed at his own boldness, and yet before enough time has passed for him to think of what might follow the assassination of the King, to reconsider, he has accepted that this will become his mission in life: to murder Mohammad Nadir. But it is not Mohammad Nadir he will be killing; it is a symbol of the oppression that the Barakzai family has subjected the Hazara to for fifty years.

Of course, he too will die; he, Abdul Khaliq will die. He accepts his destiny in the same dreamy way that he accepts the death of the King. He will be shot down by the King’s soldiers within seconds of the assassination.

In our time, suicide missions are in the news every day. A young man, occasionally a young woman, is fitted with a vest of explosives, makes a journey to a certain target, then counts down the last two minutes, the last twenty seconds of his life, of her life. It is thought by some that these young men and women have been comforted by the belief that an eternity of bliss awaits them; that the gates of Heaven will be opened wide to admit them, and that rose petals will be strewn by angels along the path leading them to a throne of glory. But the prospect of being welcomed to Paradise is not the true solace of those who accept suicide missions. Their first comfort is that they will have stood up to injustice. Then the young men and young women think of those who will be left behind; of their families, provided for by those who have encouraged them to strap on a vest of explosives; they think of a better life for their brothers and sisters, who will be given a full education; they think of their grandparents, who will be offered an electric fan to cool them in the summer months, and an armchair, a television set, a new set of dentures, medical treatment for hypertension, a good pair of spectacles, a flushing toilet.

Perhaps their fathers and mothers will be comforted in their grief not by electric fans and dentures and armchairs, but by the praise they will hear all over their neighbourhoods for the sacrifice that has been made; for the blow that has been struck against a callous enemy. A suicide mission is a bargain struck between the young man who accepts his premature death, and his community. It is not a bargain with Heaven, although Heaven plays its part.

Abdul Khaliq’s plan is not a suicide mission, in the way that we have come to understand such missions. He has chosen only one man as his victim, not some dozens of people in the midst of a crowd. He has not been granted a licence to murder by a mullah. This is simply an argument between Abdul Khaliq and a man whose family have for decades murdered Hazaras in their villages. Nor will Abdul Khaliq’s family be rewarded in the way that the families of modern suicide bombers are sometimes rewarded. Just the opposite. A number of them will be hanged. Others will be thrown into prison for the remainder of their lives.

Abdul Khaliq cannot afford to think about the fate of his family. It has been announced that Mohammad Nadir will visit his school on 8 November 1933. The King will shake the hands of students who are graduating; students who might have a further opportunity to enter Kabul’s university and study to become historians, doctors, lawyers. Abdul Khaliq is himself a graduate of the school. He will have the opportunity to shake the hand of the King. But he is not thinking of the honour of meeting the King. Certainly he is not thinking of a career in teaching, or medicine, or law. He is thinking of guns; of where he can acquire one; of how he can conceal it on the day of the graduation ceremony. He is thinking in a very practical way of the right part of the King to aim for. The face? No, the face is not a big enough target, and he has heard of people shot in the face who survived, although without a nose or a chin. The heart would be a better target. No one can survive a bullet through the heart. Or will the King be wearing all of his medals and decorations? Can a bullet pass through the medals, which would probably cover the whole left side of his tunic? Abdul Khaliq has to consider this problem and others over the few days remaining until 8 November.

Acquiring a handgun is not such a big problem. Guns are everywhere in Kabul. Many ordinary Afghans, then and today, are more expert in the use of firearms than soldiers in well-equipped armies. Making good use of a weapon of any sort has a long tradition in a warrior state like Afghanistan. Every Afghan, of every ethnic group, can name a dozen great warriors who honoured their people in battle. It is not the great victories of these heroes that are honoured, but their bravery. A victory might be a matter of luck, or of careful planning, or of superior numbers. But bravery has nothing to do with luck and planning and everything to do with the iron in a man’s soul. It is iron that Afghans honour.

Abdul Khaliq has a friend who has a friend who knows a man with a gun, a pistol. Abdul Khaliq asks his friend to speak to the friend who knows the man with the pistol. When he is asked why he needs a pistol, he says, ‘A thief may come to the house.’ The friend does not believe that Abdul Khaliq needs a pistol to defend the home of his family from thieves, but he says, ‘So be it,’ and within a few days, he provides the pistol and a number of bullets. Abdul Khaliq hides the gun and bullets from his family, but when he finds the chance, he unwraps the pistol from the oiled cloth in which he keeps it and holds it in his hand, feeling its weight, studying its mechanism. He already knows how he will conceal the pistol when he joins the assembly of students who will meet the King. He will sew a pocket on the inside of the right-hand sleeve of his coat and the pistol will sit in this pocket securely. He is left-handed, so when the King is close, greeting the student next to him, Abdul Khaliq will retrieve the pistol from his right sleeve with his left hand and be ready to fire in an instant.