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of government, but as he matured Zahir Shah asserted more power. In 1964 he created an elected parliament, but it was a largely ineffective body dominated by landlords, religious scholars, and tribal leaders whose conservatism made them actively oppose any modernization.10 Political parties were illegal. Almost comical gridlock and stagnation were the norm. During 1970 not a single piece of legislation was passed. Other years saw only one or two bills become into law.11 Afghanistan remained isolated, economically stagnant, underdeveloped, impoverished, and politically unorganized. Five governments were elected and collapsed in less than a decade. One development proposal from West Germany worth $10 million in aid lingered in parliament for three years without action.

As drought became famine, the king and his squabbling little parliament lived in a fantasy world. When aid efforts were finally launched, corruption rendered them useless—just another scheme by which to steal from the people. In Chakhcharan, at the heart of the famine, frustrated and hungry farmers attacked a government building.12 Meanwhile, in Kabul, the ferment of the late 1960s arrived; university students took to the streets and battled each other on campus—communists versus Islamists, Maoists versus Stalinists, all of them versus Spiro Agnew, who stopped by for a visit in 1970.13 Among these activists were the men who in the 1980s would lead both the communist government and the mujahideen.

These student protests were not caused by the weather, or the climate, or the farmers’ suffering, but they were related to all that. Especially as farmers began to die, famine in the countryside became a stark symbol of the king’s incompetence and distance from the nation.

By the summer of 1973, the country was in its third year of drought and famine. The wheat harvest was again very bad. An ethnographic film made that year showed an Afghan farmer explaining the troubles: “The past two years have been hard. No one can explain God’s will. No rain has fallen and many are hungry. We get up early in this hot climate. We have tea and bread and work until 4 in the afternoon.”14

The New York Times reported, “There has been much discontent in Afghanistan over government efforts to deal with a famine brought on by a three-year drought. More than 80,000 people are said to have died in the famine.”15 Another New York Times report put it this way: “No one knows how many people live in Afghanistan—estimates range from 9 million to 17 million—and no estimate even exists of those who have starved to death.”16 The king, meanwhile, was vacationing off the coast of Naples, at the mineral springs on the island of Ischia. As it turned out, his vacation would last almost forty years.

The Famine Coup

On July 17, 1973, something finally snapped. Lieutenant General Mohammed Daud Khan, the king’s cousin and brother-in-law, seized power in a coup d’état. Eight people were reported killed in small firefights between police loyal to the king and soldiers following Daud. 17 The bald-headed Daud had been Zahir Shah’s closest adviser for much of the late 1950s and early 1960s. As prime minister during those years, Daud essentially ruled the country on the king’s behalf. Daud was a modernizer, and he courted both the United States and the Soviet Union to build roads, dams, schools, and factories. But in 1963, Zahir Shah pushed aside Daud.

Once back in power, Daud declared martial law, abolished the monarchy, and set up a presidential republic with himself as head of state. Within days of the coup, food prices had dropped. His enemies were jailed, sometimes killed, often exiled.18 An intense Pashtun nationalist and irredentist, Daud considered the Afghanistan-Pakistan border an illegitimate colonial imposition. Drawn up in 1893 by the British diplomat Mortimer Durand, the eponymous Durand Line ceded huge Pashtun-dominated swaths of royal Afghanistan (including the winter capital, Peshawar) to British India. After 1947 these lands became part of Pakistan.

As president, Daud started antagonizing