Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · Buffer State · Neutral

Afghanistan - 1939

Afghanistan in 1939 is governed by Mohammed Zahir Shah, twenty-five years old and on the throne since the assassination of his father Nadir Shah in 1933, with effective power held by his uncle Sardar Hashim Khan as prime minister. Population about 12M, neutrality declared at the outset of the war in September, and a foreign policy oriented around the buffer-state position between British India and Soviet Central Asia that Afghan governments have managed since the late nineteenth century. The strategic identity is the small mountainous state whose entire foreign-policy tradition is keeping two great powers - Britain and Russia/Soviet Union - at arm's length while extracting modernization assistance from a third (historically Germany, increasingly the United States after 1945).

Starting position

The Royal Afghan Army of 1939 is about 70,000 men, organized in fourteen division-equivalents but with effective fighting strength concentrated in the regular Kabul-based units around perhaps 25,000. Equipment is overwhelmingly old - mountain artillery, single-shot rifles, a token armored component (a few Italian-supplied L3/35 tankettes), and an air force of about 30 aircraft (Hawker Hinds, Yak trainers from Soviet supply). The serious investment of the 1930s has been infrastructure - roads, telegraph, agricultural irrigation - funded largely by German technical missions and credits. The Saadabad Pact of 1937 with Iran, Turkey, and Iraq formalizes the regional non-aggression and consultative framework. The British and Soviet diplomatic missions in Kabul are watching each other through Afghan intermediaries with the elaborate suspicion that Great Game habit has sustained for sixty years.

What turns the campaign

What Afghanistan wants is the neutrality respected by both London and Moscow (the historical pattern: respected through 1941, then strained when British and Soviet pressure on Afghanistan jointly demanded the expulsion of Axis nationals, which Kabul agreed to in October 1941), the German technical relationships preserved at a level that does not invite Allied retaliation, the Pashtun tribal politics on the Northwest Frontier (Waziristan, the autonomous tribal areas of British India) managed without producing the kind of cross-border crisis that has periodically forced British military operations, and the modernization-without-foreign-domination project that has been the continuous Afghan governmental ambition since Amanullah's reforms maintained at a sustainable pace. What Afghanistan fears is a German military presence demand that converts the technical relationship into a basing arrangement London cannot ignore, a Soviet move on the northern frontier (the 1925 Soviet incursion at Urtatagai is the recent precedent), and any Pashtun tribal mobilization that the British military demands Afghan complicity in suppressing.

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