Amanullah Khan
Amanullah Khan was emir and then king of Afghanistan from February 1919 to January 1929, the son who took the throne when his father was shot. He declared the country independent of British control within a month, fought the third Anglo-Afghan war of May 1919 to get it. He got it at Rawalpindi in August, the first Afghan ruler to conduct his own foreign policy. Then he tried to make the country Turkey in a decade and lost it to a bandit from Kohistan. The reforms came from Mahmud Tarzi, his father-in-law and foreign minister. They came from Kemal, whom he met on the European tour of 1927 and 1928 that took him to Rome, Paris, Berlin, London, Moscow and Ankara. There was the constitution of 1923, the first the country had, with a legislature and civil rights. There were the secular courts alongside the religious ones, the abolition of slavery and the subsidies to the mullahs and the tribes, the schools for girls, the conscription by lot, the taxes in cash, and the solar calendar. There were the Western dress required in Kabul, and the queen Soraya unveiled in the newspapers of Europe. That was the photograph the mullahs carried through the villages. The Khost rising of 1924 was put down with aeroplanes flown by Germans and Russians. The rising of November 1928 was not. The Shinwaris took Jalalabad, the Tajik brigand Kalakani, the son of the water-carrier, came down on Kabul from the north. Amanullah cancelled the reforms one by one in December. He abdicated on 14 January 1929 in favour of his brother Inayatullah, who lasted three days. He drove to Kandahar in his Rolls-Royce, and raised an army there. He marched on Ghazni in the spring and was beaten. He crossed into India in May 1929 and went to Italy. He lived there thirty-one years. Nadir Khan took Kabul from the bandit that October and did not call him back. He was born in Paghman. He died in Zurich in April 1960 and was buried at Jalalabad beside his father. The Soviet-backed government of the 1980s put his face on its posters as the reformer the mullahs had stopped. That was one way of reading it.
- Lived: 1892 CE – 1960 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: king, monarch
