Habibullah Khan
Habibullah Khan was emir of Afghanistan from October 1901 to February 1919, the son of the Iron Amir who inherited the state his father had made and ran it more gently. He kept the country out of the world war against the wishes of most of his court. He was shot in his tent for it. The reign was the opening after the closure. There were the amnesty for the exiles his father had made, the Habibia college of 1903 on the Indian model, the first in the country, the military academy, and the hydroelectric plant at Jabal Saraj. There were the first cars and the first telephone, the journal Seraj-ul-Akhbar that Mahmud Tarzi edited from 1911 and that brought the Young Turks' ideas to Kabul, and the young Afghans around Tarzi and around his own son Amanullah, who married Tarzi's daughter, and who wanted more than he would give. The British renewed his father's treaty in 1905 on the same terms, the foreign relations theirs and the subsidy his. The Anglo-Russian convention of 1907 divided his country into their spheres without asking him. He refused to recognise it and could do nothing about it. The war was the test. The German-Turkish mission of Niedermayer and Hentig reached Kabul in September 1915 to bring him in against India with the promise of the Pashtun lands. His brother Nasrullah and his son Amanullah and the mullahs wanted it. He received the mission for ten months. He signed a treaty that promised to fight if Germany sent a hundred thousand men and twenty million pounds, which was a way of saying no. He sent the mission away in May 1916. He then asked the British in 1918 for his reward, a seat at the peace conference and full independence. They did not give it. He was shot through the ear while asleep in his hunting camp at Kalla Gush in Laghman on 20 February 1919, by whom has never been settled. His brother Nasrullah took the throne at Jalalabad for a week. His son Amanullah took it in Kabul with the treasury and the army and kept it. He was born in Samarkand, in his father's exile. He had a hundred wives and concubines. The reign is remembered as the one in which the country could have been opened and was, a little.
- Lived: 1872 CE – 1919 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: emir, monarch
