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Nostalgic Desire: the Restoration of Dar Ul- Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan

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Nostalgic Desire: the Restoration of Dar Ul- Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan AUTHOR AUTHOR NOSTALGIC DESIRE: THE RESTORATION OF DAR UL- AMAN PALACE IN KABUL, AFGHANISTAN I feel sure that 100 years hence a monument will be erected at Kabul, the capital, to King Amanullah, to commemorate his patriotism and great reforms, for which my countrymen were, perhaps, at the time of their introduction, not quite prepared.1 — SIRDAR MUHAMMAD YUNUS KHAN, THE FOREMER CHARGÉ D'AFFAIRES OF THE AFGHAN LEGATION IN LONDON, OFFERED THE PREDICTION ABOVE IN 1930 FOLLOWING THE DEPOSITION OF THE REFORMIST KING AMANULLAH KHAN (R. 1919-1929) AT THE HANDS OF THE RURAL REBELLION.2 PART 1: THE PROPHECY Almost ninety years later, Afghan diplomat Sirdar Muhammad Yunas Khan’s prophecy is coming true. What the diplomat did not know then was that the monument in question had already been constructed in 1923. Before going into exile, Amanullah Khan commissioned Dar ul-Aman palace as the seat of parliament within an ambitious new city planned by German experts, which would also bear his name (Fig. 1). Following the civil war in the 1990s, the palace and its gardens have stood in ruins atop a hill fourteen kilometers west of Kabul. The structure rises to a total height of thirty-three meters, each floor spanning fifty-four hundred square meters. For some, Dar ul-Aman is a memorial for Amanullah’s unrealized vision to establish an Afghan nation-state independent from British suzerainty. Or for his belief in the perfectibility of a vast population through citizenship and development. Amanullah led the offensive against the British in the Third Anglo-Afghan War between 6 May and 8 August 1919, securing the Durand line as the territorial border between British India and the Afghan Kingdom. He then promulgated the first constitution in1923 , which necessitated a physical space that could hold the representative body politic—the parliament. 1. “Afghan Sirdar Says Reforms Will Last,” The New York Times. 7 February 1930. 2. For an introduction to the modern history of Afghanistan, see Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012). 110110 110 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00010 by guest on 28 September 2021 However, even before the ratification of the constitution, already in 1922 Amanullah had set forth his priorities to build a new capital city, which would hold administrative buildings, palaces, and residential neighborhoods. In this way, the palace could be understood as a symbol of a sovereign state and its claims of material and territorial domination. Ultimately, the sheer financial cost of the King’s ambition was backed neither by the population, nor the treasury, which according to British sources had around 150 million rupees when Amanullah began his reign.3 During his 1928 European tour with Queen Soraya, Amanullah reportedly intended to purchase 15 million gold marks worth of German goods for Afghanistan’s development. This was in addition to the one million pounds sterling he had already transferred to various European banks to purchase equipment for the electrification of the new city among other things.4 But the imagined bright electric lights of his capital never came to be. His failure opened up speculation about the poor timing of the reforms, while others criticized their authoritarian nature and affinity with European and Turkish models of secularism. Amanullah’s building projects were accompanied by a comprehensive set of top-down political, economic, and social reforms. In trying to explain his downfall, Muhammad Yunus Khan neatly pits the forces of modernization against those of tradition. He argues that “Amanullah’s Westernization program” was implemented too early for the comfort of the ignorant “priestly classes,” who then provoked tribal factions to rebel.5 In this manner, forced conscription, tazkeras (identity cards), heavy taxation, public education, literacy, national criminal law (to supplant tribal authority), western dress codes, codification ofsharia (Islamic law) that included the regulation of child marriage and polygamy, and the end of purdah (segregation of women), provided the sites of contention for the 1924 Khost rebellion and the 1929 rebellions that would lead to Amanullah’s exile. Notably, in this explanation, tribal factions did not seem to have any legitimate grievances regarding the increased centralization of state power. Who was to bear the costs of these massive state building projects? By selectively pointing to religious conservatism in rural areas, Muhammad Yunus Khan ignored questions of economic inequality, authoritarianism, and uneven regional development. 3. Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan's Foreign Affairs to the Mid-Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany, and Britain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 85. 4. Ibid., 120. 5. Ibid. 6. The Kabul City Council originally began a public fundraising effort in 2012 with a goal of raising almost 30 million USD after being exasperated by the state’s negligence of landmarks. It is unclear whether 16.5 million USD will be enough to fund the total restoration. 7. This decision has also been controversial from an ethno-political perspective, where it appears that Ghani—a Pashtun president—is favoring the memorialization of a former Pashtun king, in contrast with his hesitance and delay in granting a state burial to the Tajik Habibullah Kalakani (r. January-October, 1929) who has often been disparaged as the illiterate ‘bandit king’ that deposed Amanullah Khan, interrupted the Pashtun monopoly on state power, and reversed the modernizing trajectory of the Afghan state. 111 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00010 by guest on 28 September 2021 GUPTA Nevertheless, his prophecy is being fulfilled by none other than President Ashraf Ghani who on March 9, 2016 allocated 16.5 million USD6 for the total reconstruction of Dar ul-Aman palace.7 A former World Bank expert on human development and cultural anthropologist who received his doctorate from Columbia University, Ghani is well- versed in theories of state-building. In their 2009 book Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World,8 Ghani and Clare Lockhart use the “sovereignty gap” as a concept to analyze failed states like Afghanistan who according to them are legally sovereign, but unable to fulfill the ten core functions of the state: 1( ) legitimate monopoly on the means of violence, (2) administrative control, (3) management of public finances, (4) investment in human capital, (5) delineation of citizenship rights and duties, (6) provision of infrastructure services, (7) formation of the market, (8) management of the state’s assets (i.e. the environment, natural resources, and cultural assets), (9) international relations (i.e. entering into international contracts and public borrowing), and (10) rule of law. Moreover, Ghani and Lockhart believe that international financial and aid institutions increase this “sovereignty gap” and undermine the state’s legitimacy by creating parallel institutions. Through their analytical framework, it is possible to understand why Ghani would be drawn to Amanullah’s disrupted legacy to establish a strong centralized state independent of foreign interference. Moreover, the development of the modern state of Afghanistan is inscribed within the palace’s history, itself. It has served as the Ministry of Public Works, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice and Supreme Court, the General Staff Building, and the Ministry of Defense. The space has also directly provided the shelter, food, and educational needs for the populace when it operated as a medical school for Kabul University, a raisin storage space, refugee camp and temporary housing settlement for resettled nomads.9 Although Dar ul-Aman has had multiple after lives, survived two coups, three fires, countless bullets, grenades, and bombs, in a comic- tragic turn, it could never fulfill its intended purpose. This article thus reads the restoration of Dar ul-Aman as a contemporary iteration of a recurrent “nostalgic desire.” Svetlana Boym suggests that this desire often manifests as a “longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time.”10 In Boym’s work, nostalgia is not antimodern, 8. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 9. Mariam Ghani and Ashraf Ghani, "Afghanistan: A Lexicon," in ed. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes—100 Thoughts (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 12. 10. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xv. 11. Ibid., xvi. 12. The new parliament was funded by the Indian Government. 112 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00010 by guest on 28 September 2021 NOSTALGIC DESIRE rather it is coeval with modernity. She writes, “[n]ostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: alter egos.”11 Echoing Boym’s mirroring configuration, the new Afghan parliament inaugurated in2015 was constructed directly across the street from Dar ul-Aman.12 This article thus argues that since its construction, the image and memory of Dar ul-Aman has circulated in many imaginary landscapes that reinforce this “nostalgic desire.” Part Two will discuss how these circulations occur on three different scales: (1) a video installation that travels through international art circuits, (2) currency that traverses national territory, and (3) the preservation projects of national leaders who seek to fix the unstable history of Dar ul-Aman into a collective national myth. The current restoration thus, raises a number of pointed questions: What kind of collective myth will this monument embody? How will Amanullah’s legacy be memorialized? Will it be represented as a battle between the enlightened metropolis vs. the ignorant periphery? Or, will Amanullah be forgotten and the palace renamed and remythologized? PART 2: THE MYTH A starting point of critique of this restoration project is the lack of clarity around what exactly the collective national myth is that will be presented in the restoration of Dar ul-Aman.
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