Obituary Sundays - Monday Edition

Mohammed Zahir Shah, called to rule Afghanistan at the age of 19 on the assassination of his father, Nadir Shah, presided over a regime which tried to continue the transition from medieval tribalism to a modern unitary state, which had begun under King Amanullah in the 1920s. In this, guided at first by his uncle who was also Prime Minister, he had a certain amount of success, given the volatile and unstable state of the country.

His reign of 40 years, from 1933 to 1973, was in sheer duration a remarkable achievement in a state whose rulers have tended to die violently. Even today some look upon it as Afghanistan’s golden age. Certainly none of the country’s successor regimes has ever seemed to have comparable legitimacy.

Zahir Shah trod the tightrope of keeping his country neutral during the Second World War and afterwards. He was one of the few leaders of any country to receive aid simultaneously from both America and the Soviet Union in the postwar period and his European education and background made him able also to encourage firms from Europe to invest in engineering projects. Nevertheless the country’s economy remained weak and its infrastructure primitive. Zahir Shah’s deposition while he was out of the country by his cousin, Lieutenant-General Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, another former Prime Minister, ushered in a period of savage faction fighting.

That Zahir Shah’s name should have again been mentioned as a potential unifying leader of Afghanistan, almost 30 years after his overthrow, was a testimony to his perceived qualities within a country which has been racked by various forms of civil strife ever since the coup which lost him his throne. In April 2002, in the wake of the overthrow of the Taleban government of Mullah Muhammad Omar, Zahir returned to Afghanistan, not, as he said, to stake any claim to reign over the country again but to be close to the process through which the country’s interim leaders would decide its destiny.

At that time it was believed in the West that he might, in fact, have the support of as many as 80 per cent of the Afghan population. His being of the majority Pashtun people was to some extent to his advantage. But at the same time it exposed him to attack from those of the anti-Taleban forces who made no distinction between being Pashtun and Taleban at any level and were strongly opposed to the involvement of Pashtuns in the interim administration. In the event the leadership of the post-Taleban Afghanistan fell to a Pashtun chief of the Popolzai tribe, Hamid Karzai, who, in June 2002, was elected President of the country by a loya jirga (tribal assembly) after a period of six months in which he had headed an interim authority, whose formation had been overseen by Zahir Shah.

Thereafter Zahir Shah gave his support to Mr Karzai, though the latter’s real grasp on power in the country remained, and remains, precarious.

Mohammed Zahir Khan was born in Kabul in 1914, the son of Mohammed Nadir Khan. He was educated in Kabul until the age of ten, when he went to Paris with his father, who had been appointed Minister there by King Amanullah, the first Afghan ruler to be to be styled King.

Zahir completed his schooling at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and later studied at the Institut Pasteur and the University of Montpellier. In this process he added fluent French to the Arabic, English and Dari (an Afghan form of Persian) of which he already had command.

In the meantime, in 1929 Amanullah, whose pace of reform was adjudged to be too wholehearted and hectic, had been driven out of Afghanistan by a coup staged by a band of outlaws who seized Kabul. Nadir returned to Afghanistan, recruited an army, defeated the rebels and was himself proclaimed king. The following year Zahir broke off his studies and returned home to join his father, who ensured that he received military training on infantry courses previously established with Turkish instructors and then appointed him an assistant in the Ministry of Defence. In 1932 he became acting Minister of Education.

Zahir's father was soon to fall victim to the political ferment of the times, shot and stabbed to death by a student in the palace gardens as he was leaving the royal harem. Propelled to the throne at 19, Zahir was lucky to find in his father’s Prime Minister, Sardar Hashim Khan, a trusted adviser who had no ambitions for the leadership. He was to stay at Zahir’s side until 1946, watching him mature into an increasingly sound and even progressive ruler.

In the 1930s a programme of development was undertaken with German financial credit, this continuing with American assistance after the war. In 1949 King Zahir returned to Europe on a six-month tour, during which he observed industrial trends and, in the process, encouraged the initiation of German and Swedish engineering projects in Afghanistan.

Zahir was astute enough to keep countries both sides of the Iron Curtain in play. In the 1950s he visited Moscow for talks with the Soviet leadership and this led to financial and material aid to Afghanistan. Pakistan and India were, too, wooed equally and even handedly, while his neutral country sought common cause with Tito’s non-aligned Yugoslavia.

The success of these initiatives owed a good deal to the support of Zahir’s energetic cousin, Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, who had become Prime Minister in 1953. In an apparent spirit of reform, Zahir demanded Daud’s resignation in 1963, decreeing that no member of the royal family could hold office as Prime Minister. Working with Daud’s successor, Dr Yusuf, Zahir introduced a new democratic constitution, which aimed to combine Western political ideas with Islamic religious beliefs and social customs. Zahir could not really make this mental leap and continued to refuse to let political parties operate in the country. The new parliament was largely packed with the king’s nominees, rather than reflecting any of the country’s political groupings, and this stifling of political aspirations inevitably led to rising tension as time went by.

Zahir had for some years been suffering from a degenerative eye condition, which required treatment abroad. While taking the cure at the mud and mineral baths on Ischia in the Bay of Naples in July 1973, he was overthrown in absentia by Daud, who promptly proclaimed Afghanistan a republic, renounced his royal titles and assumed the offices of Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defence.

Zahir remained in Italy thereafter, periodically breaking silence to comment on the state of his country, and occasionally seeming to be on the verge of playing some role in its affairs. As the Soviet Union prepared to withdraw from the country in the late 1980s he was spoken of as a possible force for unifying Afghanistan by the leaders of several moderate guerrilla groups. The Soviet leadership also appeared to be enthusiastic about such an idea but when the Soviet Ambassador in Kabul did meet Zahir for talks in Rome in December 1988, the former king seemed lukewarm about the idea.

By the time Zahir eventually did signify an interest, in the spring of 1989, the time was past. Enthusiastic supporters clashed on the streets of Peshawar in Pakistan with hardline Afghan guerrilla leaders, determined that Zahir should never return either as monarch or in any other political guise. In 1991 Zahir was stabbed in Rome by a Portuguese convert to Islam, posing as a journalist.

Yet, with Afghanistan (and neighbouring Pakistan) in chaos once more in the wake of the terrorist suicide attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, Zahir’s name again surfaced as a potentially unifying force. Old and ill as he was, the notion seemed at first to be no more than a pipe dream.

As time went on and the American bombing campaign against the Taleban exposed the country once more to the spectre of the age-old clash between its Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek peoples, Zahir's candidature as a, perhaps interim, leader began to take on a more serious purpose. Though by now in his late eighties, he himself appeared to acquire a new lease of life at the prospect and in April 2002 he left his Rome villa to return to the country over which he had ruled for so long. Opinion within the country, which had been so utterly opposed to him when the possibility of his return had been floated a dozen years before, was suddenly much more receptive to this solution to Afghanistan’s seemingly unending miseries, though Zahir always made it clear that he had no personal ambitions to restore the monarchy.

When the 2,000-strong loya jirga — the first tribal assembly since Zahir Shah’s overthrow in 1973 — gathered to elect Afghan’s leader in June 2002, the former king cleared the air by making it quite clear that he had no intention of running for any office, and that he backed the interim Prime Minister, Mr Karzai, for the presidency. Though Pashtun delegates to the loya jirga expressed their dismay, regarding the former king as being a strong counterweight to the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks who had dominated the interim authority, Zahir Shah remained as good as his word. He even demurred when it was proposed to give him the purely honorary title “father of the nation”.

Zahir's increasingly frail health would have made any active participation in government an impossibility. He had twice broken bones slipping in bathrooms while on visits to France for medical purposes and subsequently required treatment for enteric disorders.

In the event, a constitutional loya jirga of 2004 produced a constitution declaring Afghanistan an Islamic republic, effectively consigning the monarchy to oblivion. But Zahir Shah remained in the country, living quietly in Kabul.

Mohammed Zahir Shah married, in 1931, his cousin, Princess Homaira, daughter of Sardar Ahmed Shah. She died in 2002 in Italy, while preparing to join her husband in Afghanistan, but her body was taken to Afghanistan to be buried in a Kabul cemetery. There were five sons and two daughters of the marriage