Turkey and Afghanistan: Culture,Security and Economics

Introduction

Before the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in October 1923, the Ottoman Empire, during its last century of existence, had developed connections with Afghanistan, which had become a buffer state between the respective territories of the Russian Empire in central Asia and British Empire in India. The so-called Great Game between these empires guaranteed Afghanistan, which had become consolidated under the rule of Dost Muhammad of the Barakzai clan in the mid-19th century, a degree of autonomy; but by 1880 it was forced to accept British control over the country’s foreign affairs in return for an annual subsidy. In 1877, the Ottoman Empire, then at war with Russia and under the rule of the pan-Islamic Sultan Abdülhamid II, unsuccessfully attempted to include Afghanistan in an anti-Russian military effort. While Amir Shir Ali Khan expressed “cordial and fraternal feelings” for the Ottoman Empire, he felt that Afghanistan was in no position to engage in war with Russia and felt that Britain was the most aggressive toward his country. It is ironic as the Ottoman mission was supported by British officials in India (Wasti, 1994, pp. 956, 959–960).

During the First World War, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, members of the Central Powers, sent a joint mission in 1915–1916 to meet with Amir Habibullah. The Afghan leader initialed a draft treaty of friendship with Germany, but was unwilling to abandon neutrality and risk joining the Ottomans in a proposed pan-Islamic jihad to overthrow British rule in India. His country was in a vulnerable position and dependent upon a subsidy from the British (Adamec, 1967, pp. 87–96). It should be noted that besides a shared faith in Islam, Turkic people—Turkmen, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz—have continued to reside in northern Afghanistan as they do across the borders in the central Asian territories of the former Russian Empire, the former Soviet Union, and today’s independent republics. Pan-Turkism also appealed to the triumvirate wartime leaders of the Ottoman Empire, Enver, Talaat, and Djemal. Following the First World War, Enver ended up in central Asia in 1921 assuming the title of the Amir of Turkestan and commanding Basmachi rebels seeking independence from Soviet Russian rule; his aim was to raise “the combined banners of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism to create an ideology competing with that of the Bolsheviks” (Landau, 1995, pp. 55–56). He was killed the following year some 30 miles north of Afghanistan, but before then Enver had written to Afghanistan’s King Amanullah, who had come to power in 1919 upon the assassination of Habibullah and had declared that country’s independence, of his intention to establish a “confederation of eastern Islamic governments” (Macfie, 1998, p. 230). Enver’s lieutenant Haci Sami went into exile in Afghanistan continuing to engage in “pan-Turk propaganda” (Landau, 1995, p. 56).

Mustafa Kemal, who abolished the Sultanate in 1922, established the Republic of Turkey the following year, and was conferred in 1934 the surname Atatürk by the Turkish Grand National Assembly. He rejected pan-Turkism in principle and was a rival of Enver. However, Atatürk did communicate with Djemal concerning developments in Afghanistan, where the latter was engaged in training the Afghan army from 1920–1921 (Gregorian, 1969, p. 238), but was assassinated in July 1922 in Tbilisi, Georgia as part of Operation Nemesis by Armenians, who held him and others in the triumvirate and Ottoman government responsible for the wartime genocide of their people (Bogosian, 2015, p. 258). In 1919, Afghan King Amanullah commenced a decade-long process of reform modeled on that of Atatürk in Turkey. Amanullah admired the successful efforts of Ataturk’s nationalists to ward off attempts of the victorious Entente European powers to divide up the Turkish homeland, while Atatürk gave encouragement to other reformist Middle Eastern leaders, including Reza Shah in Iran, and wanted to maintain good relations with the limited number of independent states in the region. Turkey provided Afghanistan with military and technical training as well as assisting educational programs. The two countries also signed a Treaty of Alliance in 1922, a Treaty of Friendship and Political and Economic Cooperation in 1928 and a Treaty of Non-Aggression together with Iran and Iraq in 1937.

Atatürk’s successor, İsmet İnönü, kept a militarily unprepared Turkey neutral during the Second World War—as did Afghan King Zahir with his country. Iran did not have the same option as it was occupied by the Soviet Union and Britain, given that Reza Shah was considered too friendly toward Germany and the country could serve as a supply route. During the Cold War, Turkey joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to insure its security vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, while Afghanistan felt that non-alignment provided the same protection; its neighbors Pakistan and Iran joined the Baghdad Pact, of which the United States was not a member, together with Turkey, Iraq and Britain. King Zahir was overthrown in 1973 by his first cousin Muhammad Daud, who established a republic. As Marxists felt threatened by Daud, they organized another coup in 1978, but faced strong resistance to their rule; the Soviet Union, concerned that Afghanistan’s instability and the possible collapse of a Communist regime there might allow the West to have a strong influence in that country and/or to have a detrimental impact on Soviet rule over Muslims in Central Asia, decided to militarily intervene in 1979. There was an interruption of bilateral cooperation between Turkey and the regimes in Kabul during the period of the Soviet Union’s decade-long intervention in Afghanistan—the Communist regime finally fell in 1992, three years after the Soviet withdrawal—and during the rule of the Taliban (1996–2001), which defeated the mujahidin warlords. Turkey participated in (and even headed for a time) NATO operations following 9/11 attacks and the overthrow of the Taliban. The Islamist Justice and Development (AK) Party came to power in Turkey the following year (2002); with its keen interest in promoting connections with the rest of the Muslim world, Turkey has provided technical assistance and developed economic and cultural ties over the last couple of decades. Pan-Turkism had a resurgence in Turkey in the early years of the post-Cold War era, but Turkish governments concentrated their attention on Azerbaijan and Turkic states in central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan).

This article will examine Turkey’s relations with Afghanistan since 1919. While the closest ties have been (a) during the reign of Afghan King Amanullah when it coincided first with Atatürk’s leadership of the Turkish nationalists in Anatolia and later his presidency, which last until his death in 1938 and (b) more recently during the rule of the AK Party, those Turkish governments had and continue to have different motivations in developing those relations, but have utilized similar approaches. Also, security concerns given both countries’ past histories and the fact that they do not share common borders have been beneficial factors in the Turkish–Afghan relations.

Republic of Turkey and Afghanistan under the Rule of King Amanullah

Just after the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice agreement in October 1918 with the Entente, the triumvirate leadership went into exile. Britain subsequently occupied Istanbul and the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits region, but kept the sultan on the throne. The Entente imposed the restrictive Treaty of Sèvres on the Ottoman Empire in August 1920 allowing for the formal partition of Anatolia (the Asiatic portion of modern Turkey) amongst the French, Italians, Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds. Atatürk was appointed by the sultan’s government as an inspector-general in Anatolia; among his duties was to supervise the disarmament and demobilization of Ottoman military forces. Instead, he resigned from the army and set out to coordinate resistance to the Entente’s occupation of Turkey.

In December 1919, Atatürk established his headquarters in Ankara and over the next few years until the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, which is known in Turkey as the War of Independence, through diplomacy, and in the case of the Greeks and Armenians direct conflict, was able to achieve the abrogation of the Treaty of Sèvres as well as recognition of full Turkish sovereignty over Istanbul, the Straits and Anatolia.

Atatürk was able to bring many elements into his movement and the official statements that emanated from Ankara were all couched in terms of monarchist loyalty (at least until November 1922 when the sultan was denounced as a traitor for working with British occupation forces), and frequently blended a religious Muslim with a nationalist Turkish appeal. Simultaneously, Kemal (Atatürk) tried to make use of vague pro-Communist and pan-Islamist learnings among some of his followers in a bid for moral and material support from Russia and from foreign Muslims (Rustow, 1959, p. 545).

In March 1924, the caliphate was abolished as the sultan, who had simultaneously held the position of caliph, left into exile a year and a half earlier. Atatürk subsequently launched a program of secularization and in the process quashed a Kurdish revolt opposing such a policy. He also banned the Turkish Communist Party.

However, earlier during Turkey’s War of Independence Bolshevik Russia provided Atatürk’s nationalists with arms. In March 1921, Turkey and Russia signed a Treaty of Friendship, which allowed for each country to delineate and eventually achieve their respective political and military objectives on their mutual frontier, some seven months after agreeing to establish diplomatic relations (Hurewitz, 1979, p. 251). ¹ The Russo–Turkish treaty came just two weeks after Turkey and Afghanistan signed a Treaty of Alliance in Moscow. Djemal had been instrumental in facilitating the development of these treaties (Gregorian, 1969, p. 233).

The Treaty of Alliance was obviously designed to annoy Britain (Hanioğlu, 2011, p. 120). Turkey wanted to get that country to withdraw from its territory, while Afghanistan wanted Britain to respect its recently recognized independence. In Article 4, Turkey and Afghanistan promised to use all possible means in the event of an invasion of either one of them by an outside power, while in Article 8 Turkey committed itself to send a mission of teachers and army officers to provide education and training to Afghans for at least five years, and perhaps more if the latter agreed (Hurewitz, 1979, pp. 249–250; Şimşir, 2002, pp. 412–414). ² Vartan Gregorian notes that as “the seat of the Caliphate, Turkey had great prestige and could help neutralize the opposition of the traditionalists” to the process of modernization (Gregorian, 1969, p. 234).

However, in the long run, as Amin Saikal points out that Amanullah and his closest advisor, Mahmud Tarzi, while inspired by Atatürk “were convinced Muslims (who) … could not altogether approve of … (the Turkish leader’s) secular approaches to change and reform. Ideologically, they wanted an Islamic-based, western-inclined transformation of Afghanistan into a viable modern, sovereign nation-state.” In practical terms, as Afghanistan lacked a strong professional army, a “sufficient intellectual pool and politicized public … or trained manpower needed for revolutionary change,” Amanullah and Tarzi were grateful for assistance from Turkey and other foreign countries (Saikal, 2004, p. 60). Meanwhile, Afghanistan promoted universal access to education, adopted the solar calendar, uniform coinage, and constructed a new capital at Darul Aman, a few miles from Kabul, with European architecture, a theater and a trolley line (Wahab & Youngerman, 2010, p. 110).

As for dealings with Britain, in November 1921, Afghanistan signed a Treaty of Neighborly Relations as Amanullah made it clear that a treaty of friendship, which the British wanted, would only be agreed to at some later time, “contingent on the generosity which Britain would show toward Turkey … and the treatment it would give the inhabitants of India,” many of whom were Muslims (Adamec, 1967, p. 165). ³ Five months earlier, in June 1921, Afghanistan signed a Treaty of Friendship with Persia, in which in Article 9 the two parties agreed that in the event either went to war with a third party the other would maintain cordial bilateral relations and “not to favor this third Power in any respect” (Hurewitz, 1979, p. 261). ⁴ This treaty enhanced Amanullah’s position with his country’s indigenous Shi’a Muslims and completed the strengthening of ties with Afghanistan’s independent Middle Eastern neighbors.

However, when Atatürk abolished the caliphate in 1924 and Amanullah felt compelled to convene a Loya Jirga (Great Assembly) of Afghan Pashtun tribes, the Afghan Minister of Education severely criticized the action, yet a mild resolution was adopted by the group most likely drafted by Tarzi. In an interview following the gathering, Tarzi explained:

(W)e are proud to be Muslims, and we will not allow any blows against the honor of Islam. But today we do not see the honor to be in peril. Assured on that side … we are directing our efforts … to be strong and make Afghanistan a modern state (Gregorian, 1969, p. 262).

For that to happen, Tarzi continued, “We establish contacts with the most civilized nations … (and) accept from them the needed assistance in order to advance on the road of progress (Gregorian, 1969, pp. 262–263).” Tarzi knew that Amanullah was weak politically as he stated the following year, “Amanullah has built a beautiful monument without a foundation. Take out one brick and will tumble down” (Poullada, 1973, p. 154). In 2011, at a symposium on Atatürk at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn, Zahir Tanin, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, noted that while King Amanullah relied on many countries—including the Soviet Union, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan—for support in promoting his reform efforts, “more than anywhere else, he turned to the fledgling Republic of Turkey” (Center for Development Research, 2011).

Indeed, Turkey sponsored an administrative school to train civil servants and set up a medical training program “that became the nucleus of the future Kabul University” (Center for Development Research, 2011). Turks also assisted with the drafting of the Afghanistan’s 1923 Constitution, which although the religion of the country was Islam and the King was defender of the faith, Hindus and Jews were allowed religious freedom. However, the Loya Jirga of 1924 forced the King to amend the Constitution to have those non-Muslims pay a special tax and wear distinctive clothing (Constitution Society, 1923). ⁵ Those regulations were eliminated in the 1931 Constitution, but there was a distinct reference added that the King be an adherent of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, the same one accepted by devout Turkish Muslims (Gregorian, 1969, p. 300). Furthermore, Kazim Orbay trained the Afghan army in Afghanistan while some 50 officers were sent to Turkey for advanced instruction as Afghan tribes resisted conscription, recruits came mainly from ethnic minorities (Gregorian, 1969, p. 252).

Between December 1927 and July 1928, Amanullah took his first trip abroad; it was a “grand tour” that encompassed visits to the countries and leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Belgium in Europe as well as Turkey, Iran, and Egypt in the Middle East. During the tour, photos of Queen Soraya unveiled and in European clothing circulated in Afghanistan causing an uproar, but Amanullah’s experiences abroad encouraged him to implement further reforms upon returning home, the resistance to which in the form of a tribal rebellion led to his abdication and exile in Italy in 1929 (At that time, Tarzi sought refuge in Turkey). While in Turkey in May 1928, Atatürk warned Amanullah “no large-scale program of political and social reform could be initiated without a strong and well-trained army, and a loyal and disciplined bureaucracy” including a vanguard party with a nationalist ideology (Rasanayagam, 2003, p. 21; Saikal, 2004, p. 86).

Turkey and Afghanistan also signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation during Amanullah’s visit. Both countries were attempting to strengthen their positions in dealing with Britain and the Soviet Union by reiterating earlier promises of mutual assistance agreed to in the Treaty of Alliance; furthermore, in Article 5, Turkey would continue to provide expertise when requested to assist in Afghanistan’s national development and, in Article 6, the two countries would provide most-favored nation treatment in matters of commerce and residence (Hurewitz, 1979, pp. 398–399; Şimşir, 2002, pp. 418–421). ⁶ After Amanullah abdicated, he returned twice to Turkey, once in 1933 to visit Atatürk at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, and later in 1938 to attend the Turkish leader’s funeral (Mango, 2000, p. 488).

Turkey and Afghanistan from the Abdication of Amanullah until the Second World War

Following Amanullah’s departure from the country in January 1929, Habibullah Kalakani, an ethnic Tajik, ruled for nine months handing education and courts over to religious authorities, women were required to wear chadri (means a shroud from head to toe. It is also known as a chador in Iran and a burqa in the Arab world), and girls who had been sent to Turkey for schooling were forced to return home (Wahab & Youngerman, 2010, p113). Nadir Shah, former Minister of War under Amanullah and a member of the Musahiban family, a part of the royal clan, captured Kabul with a tribal army. Habibullah Kalakani was executed and the Loya Jirga confirmed his position as king. While Nadir Shah made concessions to religious authorities such as having civil and criminal law conforming to sharia and allowed only one school for girls to operate in Kabul for training nurses and midwives (Gregorian, 1969, pp. 299 and 309), he maintained good relations with Turkey and Iran. When Nadir Shah’s Afghan ambassador presented his credentials to Atatürk, he emphasized that “fraternal relations between the two countries are based on great historic and social tradition” (Gregorian, 1969, p. 333). Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1933 and succeeded by his son Zahir Shah, whose reign lasted for the next 40 years until he was deposed by his first cousin and former Prime Minister Muhammad Daud (Goodson, 2001, p. 205, note 107). ⁷

Zahir Shah renewed the Turkish–Afghan Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in December 1937 for another 10 years. Turkish officers continued to provide military training in Afghanistan and had the largest mission in Kabul (Roberts, 2003, p. 68). However, until 1939, there were also German and Italian instructors and advisers. Afghan officers were sent for further instruction to Turkey as well as India, the Soviet Union and, until 1939, to Italy and Japan (Roberts, 2003, pp. 371 and 378). The Turkish Foreign Ministry website points out that between 1920 and 1960, Turkey “supported Afghanistan’s modernization efforts and played a crucial role in establishment of modern state structures and public institutions in the fields of administration, military, culture, education and health” and that during that time, 212 teachers, doctors, military officers, and other experts worked in that country (Turkey, MFA, Bilateral Political Relations). ⁸ Despite this help, as late 1949, fewer than 10 percent of school-age girls were in enrolled in educational institutions, mostly located in Kabul province (Gregorian, 1969, p. 356).

Eight months after the renewal of Turkish–Afghan Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, in July 1937, Afghanistan joined Turkey, Iran, and Iraq in the Saadabad Pact. William Hale in his comprehensive tome Turkish Foreign Policy, 1774–2000, which includes the late Ottoman period and refers to both the Empire and Republic as middle powers, notes that the agreement was

…intended to be a signal to the rest of the world to the rest of the world that the four independent Middle Eastern states would oppose any attempts by one of the European powers to pick them off individually, as Ethiopia had been (by Italy) … (However), it contained no provisions for mutual assistance or military commitments, and had mainly psychological value (Hale, 2000, p. 62).

Ferenc Váli in an earlier study, Bridge across the Bosporus, focused exclusively on the Turkish Republic. He dismisses the Saadabad Pact as a “weak nonaggression treaty,” but points out that it was “never denounced and, so technically, is still in force. After World War II, it was simply ‘forgotten’” (Váli, 1971, p. 277).

While Turkey and Iran signed a frontier agreement in 1932, the Saadabad Pact ensured that those two countries and Iraq would not give sanctuary to Kurdish rebels fighting against the other states (Hurewitz, 1979, p. 510). ⁹ The Saadabad Pact was of greater importance to Afghanistan as the monarchy portrayed it as “an example of pan-Islamic solidarity,” and felt that as the agreement settled its border disputes with Iran it served as a “friendly gesture” to the Afghan Shi’a Muslims. Also, the Afghan government could rest assured that Iran would not allow its territory to be used as a base for supporters of Amanullah, something it obviously feared almost a decade after the former king had been overthrown (Gregorian, 1969, p. 377).

From the Second World War until the Overthrow of Zahir Shah

Meanwhile, Germany increased its economic connections with Afghanistan establishing an air route to that country, setting up company offices in Kabul and exploring mineral resources near the border with British India. In August 1940, two months after France surrendered to Germany, King Zahir issued a decree of strict neutrality. Apparently while German agents in Afghanistan were reportedly considering a coup to restore Amanullah to the throne, Afghanistan’s Minister of National Economy told the Germans that his government was prepared to actively support an anti-British revolt among the Pashtuns across the border in India (now Pakistan). The German ambassador in Kabul expected Afghanistan to join the Axis, in return for airplanes and tanks, mediation of disputes with the Soviet Union—then in alliance with Germany—and support for Afghanistan having a territorial outlet to the Arabian Sea.

Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the occupation of Iran and exiling of the Shah by the Soviet Union and Britain, to rid Iran of German agents and to create a supply route, two months later, changed the political situation immensely; Afghanistan avoided a similar fate by expelling non-diplomatic personnel from the Axis states, having a Loya Jirga reaffirm its strict neutrality, and increasing agricultural sales to India (Wahab & Youngerman, 2010, pp. 118–120). The United States did not send a permanent diplomatic representative to Kabul until 1942—even though formal diplomatic relations were established in 1934—believing that Afghanistan did not have much economic and strategic value (Wahab & Youngerman, 2010, p. 118). Of course, with the Cold War, the American perspective would change, but close ties with Pakistan, with which Afghanistan had a border dispute, ¹⁰ would complicate relations.

Turkey remained neutral during almost the entire the Second World War, but in March 1945, one month after Turkey’s symbolic declaration of war against Germany and Japan to be invited to the United Nations Conference, the Soviet Union denounced its Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality, which was concluded with Turkey in 1925 and was due for renewal. In June, the Soviets demanded the following from Turkey as compensation for the restoration of peaceful relations: the return of Kars and Ardahan provinces to the Soviet Union—it was ceded to Turkey in 1921; the granting of a military bases near the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits; and a revision of the Montreux Straits Convention of 1936—which had ended international control of the Straits established in the Treaty of Lausanne (Deringil, 1989, pp. 178–183; Weisband, 1973, pp. 304–318). ¹¹ With the backing of the West, Turkey was able to refuse these demands. In March 1947, the United States enunciated the Truman Doctrine which resulted in the enhancement of Turkey’s military capabilities and in July of the following year, an agreement was concluded for Turkish participation in the Marshall Plan. When NATO was established in 1949, Turkey was not included despite the great interest Turkish authorities expressed in the Western alliance. While the United States was favorable to Turkey’s accession, Britain preferred the Turks to be the focal point of a Middle Eastern defense alliance, something Turkey subsequently engaged in organizing and was admitted to NATO (along with Greece) in 1951. After being rebuffed by Egypt and almost all other Arab states, Turkey and Iraq signed a pact of mutual security and defense in Baghdad in February 1955; Pakistan, Iran, and Britain joined what became known as the Baghdad Pact later in the year. It was during this time that the Soviet Union gained increasing influence in Afghanistan.

While Britain trained and equipped the Afghan army from the last part of the Second World War until the partition of India in 1947, when Afghanistan reopened its claim to territory in Pakistan inhabited by Pashtuns—the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and to which that country’s heads of state almost exclusively have belonged. Meanwhile, the Afghans sought economic and military assistance from the United States; the latter provided loans for an ambitious irrigation project along the Helmand River (and direct assistance during the 1960s and 1970s after Afghanistan turned toward the Soviet Union for economic and military aid), but refused to sell military weapons that might risk a Soviet reaction and especially while the border dispute with Pakistan remained unresolved (Wahab & Youngerman, 2010, pp. 120–121). In early 1954, Naim Khan, Prime Minister Muhammad Daud’s brother and Minister of Foreign Affairs, suggested to American officials that they use Turkey as a conduit. Turkey’s ambassador in the United States, while acknowledging that border dispute would need to be resolved, asserted that Afghanistan “occupied an important geographical position from the point of security of the Middle East,” while Naim Khan argued that “the safety of Afghanistan is … the safety of the whole Indian subcontinent” (Roberts, 2003, pp. 189–190).

During the Truman Administration, state department officials were wary of Pakistan, which they believed sought a military alliance with the West in order to protect itself from India. However, the Eisenhower administration was irritated with India’s policy of neutralism, which would later be called nonalignment, and felt that because of Afghanistan’s internal problems it was a liability and that its history of playing off the big powers was an indication that it would remain neutral and troublesome (Roberts, 2003, pp. 140 and 188–189). Turkey did not pursue the issue of Afghanistan’s involvement in Middle East defense, but notes on its Ministry of Foreign Affairs website that it had “close friendship relations and cooperation” with Afghanistan until the December 1979 Soviet invasion (Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (n.d.). Turkey-Afghanistan economic and trade relations).

At the same time as the “northern-tier” alliance of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan—which became known as the Central Treaty Organization or CENTO subsequent to Iraq’s 1958 Baathist revolution overthrowing the pro-British Hashemite monarchy—came to fruition, Afghanistan turned toward the Soviet Union for economic and military aid, but continued its policy of neutrality. Between 1955 and 1972, the Soviet Union provided 95 percent of Afghanistan’s military assistance, but by 1979, had trained 10 percent of its military establishment, some 10,000 officers and enlisted men, whereas only a few hundred officers had been trained by the United States, Britain, India, and Turkey (Roberts, 2003, p. 296 and 217, note 12). Up until 1971, the Soviet Union had provided US$517.1 million of assistance, while the United States was the second largest contributor with US$397.6 million (N. P. Newell & Newell, 1981, p. 51). ¹² Zahir Shah visited Moscow in 1957, two years after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to Kabul. Later, President Eisenhower stopped off in Afghanistan in 1959 returning from a trip that previously included India and Pakistan, while Zahir Shah visited the United States in 1963. However, Afghanistan did adopt economic plans modeled on Soviet and Turkish (during the Atatürk era) statist policies; indeed, Abdul Malik, the finance minister who introduced the 1956 Five-Year Plan had studied in Turkey during the 1930s (Wahab & Youngerman, 2010, p. 126).

However, the Communist Party was outlawed until the 1964 Constitution and only a small minority of military trained by the Russians in the Soviet Union embraced that ideology. Ironically, two out of the three key individuals in the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) established in 1965 spent time in the United States: Nur Muhammad Taraki, as a press attaché at Afghanistan’s embassy in Washington, DC (1952) and Hafizullah Amin, who was a student at Columbia University (1963–1964); they were leaders in the Khalq (Masses) faction, while Babrak Karmal, the other individual led the Parcham (Banner) faction. The latter group assisted Muhammad Daud in his bloodless coup in July 1973, which established a republic with him as president when Zahir Shah left the country for medical treatment in Italy; Muhammad Daud had excellent relations with the senior officers, while junior officers who had trained in the Soviet Union had connections with Parcham (N. P. Newell & Newell, 1981, pp. 58–65).

Turkey and Afghanistan from the 1973 Coup until 9/11

By 1975, Daud began to purge Parcham leaders from his government, but did not reverse reforms which expanded educational opportunity, instituted land redistribution, protected tenants, increased agricultural taxes, and nationalized banks and insurance companies. His policies led to high unemployment and inflation. Daud also purged liberals who had been serving in the constitutional monarchy of Zahir Shah, while persecuting religious conservatives and alienating tribal and rural community leaders. At the same time, he developed closer relations with Egypt, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf states, and reconciled differences with neighboring Iran and Pakistan to balance off relations with the Soviet Union. Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf states promised financial assistance (N. P. Newell &, 1981, pp.45–52). The Khalq and Parcham factions of the Marxist PDPA reunited in 1977 and launched a coup and assassination of Daud and members of his family in April the following year with Taraki becoming president and prime minister and Amin and Karmal as deputy prime minister.

While Turkey maintained relations with the Marxist state as did other countries, Muslim and Western nations as well as China and members of the Nonaligned Movement condemned the Soviet invasion in December 1979. Just before then, Amin overthrew and assassinated Taraki, who was subsequently assassinated by the Soviets; he was succeeded by Karmal, who was replaced in 1986 with another member of the Parcham faction, Muhammad Najibullah, who was the last Marxist president. When the Soviets withdrew, in February 1989, Western embassies ceased operations, but Turkey continued to maintain a diplomatic presence in Kabul. The United States lost interest in supporting the mujahidin forces that had fought against the Soviets and the Marxist regime in Kabul (and eventually amongst themselves), but that was not the case with Afghanistan’s neighbors and Arab countries in the Persian Gulf.

Najibullah resigned in 1992 and was given refuge at the United Nations compound in Kabul, where he was left alone by the mujahidin composed of the Tajik forces of Burhanuddin Rabbani and his military commander Ahmad Shah Masud in temporary alliance with the Uzbek forces of Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had previously been a general in the army of Afghanistan. The Taliban took advantage of the divisions within the mujahidin and occupied Kabul in 1996 also executing Najibullah, whose wife and family had been living in New Delhi for four years. Its Pashtun forces were supported by Pakistan (with financial help from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) as the Taliban was regarded as a reliable force to bring stability to Afghanistan and as the previous government in Kabul was supported by India, Iran, and Russia (Rashid, 2001, pp. 44–45 and 49; Rashid, 2009, p. 25).

In 1998, Dostum fled to Turkey, from which he had received financial but not military aid for the past half-decade for his autonomous territorial entity in northern Afghanistan. The United States and Israel at first viewed the Taliban as an enemy of Iran, but Turkey—which was in a military alliance with Israel during the 1990s—always regarded that group was a security threat to the region; following its capture of Kabul, the Taliban’s treatment of women, its encouragement of the drug trade, and its provision of refuge to Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida put an end to those ideas for the United States and Israel (Rashid, 2001, p. 154: Rashid, 2009, p. 15). Indeed, according to American journalist Steve Coll in his book Ghost Wars, an investigation of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) involvement in Afghanistan from 1979 to 2001, classified databases of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and that agency, respectively, contained warnings in 1998 that al-Qaida might use aircraft in terrorist actions against the United States and that in November of that year Turkish authorities quashed a plot to fly an explosive-laden airplane into Atatürk’s tomb in Ankara on the anniversary of his death (Coll, 2004, p. 420).

Turkey and Afghanistan since 9/11

Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and in the midst of the ensuing civil war amongst the mujahidin warlords, Turkey, despite its ties to the ethnic Uzbeks, emphasized national reconciliation. When NATO became involved in Afghanistan after 9/11 under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), established in December 2001, Turkey contributed to training and equipping the Afghan national police and military, providing non-combat security missions and logistical operations. Meanwhile, the Turkish Coordination and Cooperation Agency (Türk İşbirliği ve Koordinasyon Ajansı or TİKA), which has three offices in Afghanistan—in Kabul, Herat and Mazar-i Sharif—engaged in reconstruction projects (TİKA, 2020). ¹³ As a result of its actions in Afghanistan, Turkey generated much goodwill from the populace, the Afghan government in Kabul and the Taliban. While having close ties with Pakistan, Turkey sought to bring India into the process of Afghanistan’s national reconciliation (Bishku, 2016, pp. 93–94).

From June 2002 to February 2003 and again from February 2005 to August 2005, Turkish Major General Hilmi Akin Zorlu and Lieutenant General Ethem Erdağı, respectively, commanded ISAF. That organization continued its mandate until December 2014, at which time Turkey’s contingent of troops numbered 361, the seventh largest out of 42 countries (NATO, 2014). ¹⁴ In November 2005, General Erdağı had the following to say about the role of ISAF:

Before the deployment of the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF), the situation in Afghanistan was similar to that in Bosnia. The central state had collapsed; the independent militias had taken over the army and the police, and all the conditions necessary for a potential ethnic struggle were present. On top of that, Afghanistan was economically the least developed country in the world. The international community’s, and thereby ISAF’s, most important mission in Afghanistan is nation-building (Erdağı, 2005).

And specifically, about Turkey’s role he said:

Turkish soldiers took it as a duty to demonstrate to the Afghans that they are not occupying forces in the country. Accordingly, for instance, they chose to patrol on foot and not in cars, and when they patrolled, they never wore bulletproof jackets, even if it meant putting their lives on the line. For the locals, this meant respect. In return, local Afghans showed admiration for the Turkish troops and were willing to cooperate with them. In order to defuse the negative effects of the intimidation the Afghan people feel because of the economic, military, and manpower strength displayed by the international community, respect shown to the people is key to gaining their trust (Erdağı, 2005).

While Turkey played a non-combat role from the beginning, as of 2011, ISAF began a transition of shifting security to Afghan forces, and by the summer of 2013 those troops took the lead in military operations.

In January 2015, ISAF was replaced with the non-combat Resolute Support Mission (RSM), which was designed to provide training, advice, and assistance to Afghan security forces and institutions and in which in October 2019 had 38 countries contributing troops; Turkey once again had the seventh largest contingent at 579 (NATO, 2019). ¹⁵ Turkey operates in the Kabul/Bagram central hub with other forces, while the United States runs operations in Kandahar in the south and Laghman province in the east closest to the Pakistani border, Italy is in Herat in the west, and Germany in Mazar-i Sharif in the north.

In addition, Turkey has provided training to female Afghan soldiers at a high school for the Turkish police in Sivas (Rahmani, 2018). TİKA’s operations are more widespread, but in 2010 only accounted for one-third of Turkey’s US$107 million in assistance to Afghanistan since 2001. However, as of 2013 more than 80 schools had been built (Kardaş, 2013). Over the last year, TİKA constructed an annex for a hospital in Herat, provided food aid to thousands of families in Faryab province in the north, distributed saffron bulbs and provided technical assistance to farmers in Herat province, opened a research center for poet and Sufi mystic Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi at Parwan University, and a mosque to serve Muslim soldiers at Kabul airport as there was only a church at the command post (Uslu, 2018). ¹⁶ Since 2004 TİKA has engaged in 1,056 projects in Afghanistan (TİKA, 2018).

Beginning in April 2007 and continuing until 2013, Turkey hosted annual tripartite summits to facilitate direct communications between Afghan and Pakistani leaders. The one in April 2009 was the first time that the military and intelligence chiefs of Pakistan and Afghanistan had held discussions. In March 2011, Turkish, Afghan, and Pakistani infantry units conducted joint military exercises. At the summit in November of that year, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari emphasized that Turkey was an important intermediary in solving problems between Pakistan and Afghanistan when he stated, “Turkey is our friend and a brother Muslim country. This is why I think it’s appropriate for Turkey to support and guide us when we need it” (Kaya, 2013, p. 26). Turkey’s close ties with Pakistan may account for the fact that Turkish troops have not been attacked by the Taliban. Indeed, in December 2011, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, who served in that office until 2014, suggested during a visit to Turkey that that country host a liaison office for the Taliban to facilitate reconciliation (Kaya, 2013, p. 26). This was something Zardari had approved of in a visit to Turkey in April 2011 (Reuters, 2011). The Taliban preferred Doha, Qatar, where they opened an office in June 2013, a year and half after they announced that they would do so (Kucera, 2012; Reuters, 2013).

Meanwhile, in September 2011, former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani was assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber in Kabul. The Afghan government blamed Pakistan for being behind this action, something the latter denied. Following the November 2011 trilateral summit mentioned above, during which Karzai and Zardari agreed to conduct an investigation of the assassination, there was much larger conference. In attendance were representatives from the United States, Russia, China, India, EU and NATO countries, the UN, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Central Asian states. At the larger conference, Karzai was quoted as saying, “Our deepening friendship with India and Turkey is a model for how we seek to shape our future relationships with some of the key regional partners” (Bagchi, 2011). Just like Turkey, India provided assistance for national reconstruction and political support for the Afghan government; for that, the Taliban carried out a suicide car bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008 killing over 50 people. India is also Afghanistan’s number on export market (United States, Central Intelligence Agency, 2020). ¹⁷ Relations between Turkey and Afghanistan continued to thrive after Karzai left office.

In October 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became the first foreign head of state to visit Afghanistan after the establishment of the National Unity Government of Ashraf Ghani as president and Abdullah as chief executive officer following a disputed election a few months earlier; during that visit Ghani presented Erdoğan with the Ghazi Amanullah Khan Medal, Afghanistan’s highest civilian honor, and said “Afghanistan is your second home” and “We thank you for … your friendship and for representing the leadership of the Islamic world” (Republic of Turkey, Presidency, 2014). ¹⁸ Erdoğan noted the importance Turkey held regarding Afghan–Pakistani relations, “(A)ny problem between Pakistan and Afghanistan would cause difficulties for us. The advance of the two fellow countries in solidarity will strengthen both Pakistan and Afghanistan” (Republic of Turkey, Presidency, 2014).

One astute observer notes that although Ankara professes neutrality between the two countries, Turkey’s “soft corner toward Pakistan is difficult to hide” given its history during the Cold War in military alliance, its support on the Kashmir issue and continuing close ties (Kaura, 2017). Ghani subsequently made an official visit to Turkey in December 2015 and again in December 2017 for an emergency summit of Islamic Conference Organization following US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. By that time, Erdoğan was interested in Turkey gaining control over the 12 schools of Fethullah Gülen’s organization, whom his government blamed for the failed coup in July 2016; those educational institutions, which had been operating in Afghanistan since 1995, were turned over to Turkey’s state-run Maarif Foundation in February 2018 (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2018). During Ghani’s first visit, Erdoğan assured the Afghan leader that “Turkey is the greatest supporter of the Afghan national unity government, Afghanistan’s problems are our problems, and their success is our success” (Kızıl, 2015). Besides security concerns and cultural connections, Turkey and Afghanistan have economic interests as witnessed by the fact that in his 2015 visit to Turkey, Ghani attended a meeting of the Turkish–Afghan Business Council.

According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, from 2010 to 2018 bilateral trade totaled over US$1.8 billion consisting of mostly imports from Turkey. Between 2003 and 2016, 127 Turkish companies were operating mostly in construction and contracting in Afghanistan on 627 projects worth some US$6 billion. Turks are the biggest foreign investors in contracting with other capital invested in health services, energy, and mining (Turkey, MFA, Economic and Trade Relations). In 1964, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan established the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD) organization, which was renamed the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) in 1985; seven years later, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and all the former Soviet republics in Central Asia joined the ECO. Its purpose is to promote trade and investment between the member states (ECO website). In addition, since 1995, the Regional Economic Cooperation Conference on Afghanistan (RECCA) has met seven times in various venues—Kabul (2005), New Delhi (2006), Islamabad (2009), Istanbul (2110), Dushanbe (2012), Kabul (2105), and Ashgabat (2017)—to act as a regional platform to coordinate contributions to the economic development of Afghanistan (Afghanistan, MFA, RECCA website).

One result of this organization’s activities is the establishment during 2017 Ashgabat meeting of the Lapis Lazuli Trade Corridor composed of railroad lines, highways, and ferry service from both Aqina in Faryab province and Turghundi in Herat province in Afghanistan, meeting up before Ashgabat and continuing to Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, crossing the Caspian Sea to Baku and continuing on to Tbilisi with one route branching off to Poti, Georgia on the Black Sea and the other proceeding through Batumi, Georgia, on to Ankara and finally to Istanbul (Daily Outlook Afghanistan, 2018). Other connections between Turkey and Afghanistan are provided by Turkish Airlines, which serves both Kabul and Mazar-i Sharif non-stop from its hub in Istanbul (Turkish Airlines website) and Ariana Afghan Airlines, which flies non-stop from Kabul to both Ankara and Istanbul (Ariana Afghan Airlines website). ¹⁹

In April 2018, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım visited Kabul where he stated: “We are so glad that Afghan–Turkish friendship is not limited to security, but it also increasingly continues in in the fields of education, defense, trade substructure and other fields of life” (Uslu, 2018). Yıldırım also urged the Taliban to engage in peace talks with President Ghani’s government in Kabul (Salahuddin, 2018); despite representatives from the Taliban office in Qatar meeting with Turkish officials in Ankara three months earlier that organization thus far has refused to do so (Ramani, 2018). Nevertheless, Pakistan has facilitated discussions between the Taliban and US government during 2019 (National Public Radio, 2019), while talks were held briefly in Moscow between the Taliban and Afghan opposition members including former President Karzai in February 2019 (Al Jazeera, 2019). The current situation still has a long way to go to achieve what Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Işık noted was Turkey’s vision for Afghanistan on a trip to Kabul to visit President Ghani in June 2016: “a center of big construction projects, (with) … peace and stability, where everyone lives in solidarity with its neighboring countries” (Anadolu Agency, 2016).

Conclusion

During the last decades of the Ottoman Empire’s existence, pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism were important ideological factors for Ottoman officials in conducting foreign relations along with practical concerns for security. Muslim solidarity had strong appeal in Afghanistan among the populace and with officials who also had to deal with important security issues. Afghanistan achieved its independence from Britain following the First World War, but could not escape being drawn into the continuing rivalry between Britain and Russia, or rather the soon-to-be Soviet Union, which was able to recapture the Muslim Khanates in central Asia; through its presence in that region, the Soviet Union was able to either keep Afghanistan neutral or exert its influence during the Cold War.

Following the First World War, Atatürk established a secular republic in Turkey from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire by fending off the influence of the European imperialist states and by cooperating initially with Bolshevik-ruled Russia. The Turkish leader also cooperated with independent Muslim-populated neighbors to promote security as well as political, economic. and social reform within the Middle East region. Afghans were (and continue to be) more conservative culturally and religiously than Turks, but not to continued cooperation between Afghanistan and Turkey especially in matters related to security.

Both Turkey and Afghanistan remained neutral during the Second World War, but following that conflict while Turkey joined the Western alliance through its membership in NATO and with Iran (until that country’s Islamic Revolution) through the Baghdad Pact later named CENTO, Afghanistan remained neutral; such was the case during the Cold War until the Marxist coup of 1978. It was also during the Cold War that Turkish–Afghan relations were overshadowed by Turkey’s close ties with Pakistan. The mujahidin warlords who had fought the Soviets were defeated by the Islamist Taliban, which though overthrown by the US intervention following the 9/11 terrorist attacks still hold sway in much of the Afghan countryside.

Meanwhile, Turkey elected the Islamist government of the AK Party in 2002. Its objectives were (and continue to be) to develop extensive political, cultural, and economic relations with other countries in the Muslim world. In part to facilitate those goals with regard to Afghanistan, Turkey has participated in NATO’s security role in that country. While developing ties with the Afghan government in Kabul, Turkey has attempted in recent years to help the Afghan government reach an accommodation with the Taliban. In pursuit of that objective, Turkey has sought to coordinate its relationships with both Afghanistan and Pakistan.