Kabul Under Siege: Fayz Muhammad's Account of the 1929 Uprising

In January 1929, the reigning monarch of Afghanistan, Amir Aman Allah Khan, was driven from his capital by a former soldier turned outlaw. The uprising was a response to the ruler's attempts to modernize the tribal culture of Afghanistan. Kabul, then as now, was of considerable symbolic importance, and its loss sounded the death knell to the king's power and his reforms, much as the defeat of the Soviet-backed government in 1993 spelled the end of Marxist power in Afghanistan as well as its...