Kabul Before
the War

A King, a Constitution, and a Brief Opening

In 1964, King Mohammed Zahir Shah promulgated a new constitution — one of the most progressive in Afghanistan's history. It guaranteed equality before the law regardless of gender. It created a bicameral parliament with an elected lower house. It permitted a relatively free press. Ahmad Zahir's own father, Dr. Abdul Zahir, was a central figure in this process — first as Speaker of Parliament, later as Prime Minister.

The decade that followed became known as the "Democracy Decade" or the "Constitutional Decade." It was an imperfect experiment. The country remained overwhelmingly rural and poor. Tribal and religious authority was largely intact outside Kabul. But within the capital, something unusual was happening. A small, educated, cosmopolitan class was building institutions: universities, hospitals, newspapers, cultural organizations. And in the clubs, wedding halls, and radio studios of that city, a new sound was emerging.

Kabul as a Living Thing

In photographs from the late 1960s, Kabul looks like a city that could belong to several different worlds at once. Women in Western dress walk past women in chadari. Kabul University's campus is populated with men and women studying together. There are cinemas showing Iranian films and imported Hollywood pictures. There are restaurants with live music. There are garden parties in the neighborhoods of Wazir Akbar Khan and Karte Parwan where Dari poetry is recited alongside Frank Sinatra records.

The population of Kabul was perhaps 400,000 in 1970 — small by the standards of a national capital, but dense enough with the educated class to sustain a genuine cultural scene. The American University of Afghanistan had recently opened. The French Cultural Centre hosted art exhibitions. German engineers were building the Salang Tunnel. Soviets were building the Kabul Polytechnic. Americans were building the road to Kandahar. The cold war superpowers were competing for Afghanistan's allegiance through infrastructure, and Kabul sat at the intersection of all of it.

Hippie travelers on the "Overland Route" from Europe to India passed through, stayed in guesthouses in the Chicken Street area, and wrote home about the kebab stalls and the mountains and the surprisingly open atmosphere of the city. Kabul appeared in guidebooks. It was, briefly, on the map of places people went.

Where Ahmad Zahir Came From

Afghan music in the 1960s was undergoing its own version of the same modernization. Radio Afghanistan, established in the 1940s, had built an audience for classical Dari and Pashto singing. Artists like Ustad Sarahang and Ustad Mahwash represented the deep classical tradition — ghazals and thumri in the Hindustani style, rubab and tabla, the long melodic lines of raga-influenced performance.

Ahmad Zahir absorbed all of that — the ghazals of Hafiz and Rumi, the folk songs of Khorasan, the Pashto folk tradition. And then he layered over it what was coming in from the outside: the accordion he learned early, the electric guitar that arrived with foreign influence, the horn sections he heard on Iranian and Egyptian pop records, the rhythm arrangements he shaped into something that sounded both ancient and startlingly new.

His high school band, The Amateurs of Habibia, performing at Habibia High School (one of Kabul's most prestigious, where he earned the nickname Bulbul-e-Habibia — the Nightingale of Habibia), was where this fusion first found its form. By the time he was recording professionally in the late 1960s, he had created a genre that had no name because it had no precedent: classical Persian poetry, sung over Western pop orchestration, with the rhythmic feeling of Afghan folk music underneath.

Daoud’s Coup and the Narrowing

On July 17, 1973, while King Zahir Shah was in Italy for medical treatment, his cousin Mohammed Daoud Khan led a bloodless coup and abolished the monarchy. He declared a republic and named himself President. The constitutional decade was over.

Daoud's government was initially supported by the left-wing PDPA factions that helped him take power, but he moved to distance himself from them as he consolidated control. The press became more restricted. Political parties were banned. The opening of the 1964–1973 period began to close.

For Ahmad Zahir, these years were not yet fatal. He continued recording. His audience continued to grow. But the city around him was changing. The easy cosmopolitanism of the 1960s was becoming more fraught. The PDPA factions — Khalq and Parcham — were organizing. The Islamist opposition, which would eventually become the mujahideen, was also organizing. Kabul remained functioning, but the forces that would tear it apart were already in motion.

The Saur Revolution and What Came After

On April 27, 1978, PDPA tanks surrounded the presidential palace. Mohammed Daoud Khan and members of his family were killed. The People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was proclaimed. It lasted, in one form or another, until 1992 — but the Kabul that Ahmad Zahir had built his life in was functionally destroyed in its first months.

The new regime moved rapidly against perceived class enemies. Executions and disappearances began almost immediately. Thousands of teachers, professors, religious figures, landowners, and former officials were killed or imprisoned in the months following the coup. Ahmad Zahir's father, Dr. Abdul Zahir, went into hiding. Ahmad Zahir was blacklisted from radio and state media.

The Kabul that appears in the photographs from the 1960s — the women in Western dress, the coeducational university, the garden parties, the jazz clubs, the cinema — began to dismantle itself or go underground. Some of it would briefly resurface in the 1980s, strangled by a different hand. None of it would return in recognizable form until the early 2000s, and even then only partially, and then never again after August 2021.

Ahmad Zahir was killed on June 14, 1979. He had lived through the best years of the city he loved and none of the decades that followed. His music — recorded during the years when Kabul was still capable of producing it — became the document of an Afghanistan that no longer exists anywhere except in the memory of those who were there, and the cassette tapes, and the YouTube streams that run all night in the homes of the diaspora.