On Afghan Chessboard, Is Ex-King Making Right Move?

The only man alive who governed Afghanistan more or less successfully has grown old in genteel exile. Secluded in this gated suburb of Rome, he often has seemed more absorbed by the bright red display of his electronic chessboard than by the cycle of wars that erupted after his reign.

Deposed in 1973, Mohammad Zaher Shah has weighed several appeals to return and unite his former subjects; each time he vacillated and the moment passed. Yet it is his aloof, irresolute nature that has cast him again, since the collapse of Taliban rule, as a would-be healer--the only Afghan player who seems not to covet power for himself.

This time, at age 87, the former king is seizing his chance.

Meeting in Germany, anti-Taliban factions created an interim governing council last week and invited Zaher Shah--not as a monarch but as an elder in chief--to convene a loya jirga in the spring. That assembly will chart a two-year transition to democratic rule and pick a provisional head of state, a job for which the popular octogenarian is the early favorite.

As word of the accord reached here, Zaher Shah placed a hand on the shoulder of Gen. Abdul Wali, his lifelong friend, and gazed past him as if focused on a distant horizon. “Abdul,” he said, “we are going home.”

The return of the deposed king would complete an extraordinary leap across the modern history of a nation whose troubles inspired an earlier monarch to dub part of it Yaghistan--land of the unruly. But some worry that Zaher Shah’s energy and authority are too diminished to satisfy his people’s nostalgic longing for a magic touch.

Born in 1914, five years before his country threw off British domination, Zaher Shah saw his father assassinated and inherited the throne at 19. His 40-year reign was an interlude of calm that coincided with America’s history from the Great Depression to Watergate. Since then, Afghans have endured rising Cold War tensions, a decade of embattled Soviet occupation, civil war, five years of repressive Islamist rule by the Taliban and the entrenchment of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network, culminating in the Sept. 11 attacks on America.

To U.S. officials and other outsiders who promoted his comeback, Zaher Shah is a fitting figurehead. He is part of the Durrani dynasty, whose rule spanned 226 years, and a member of the Pushtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, from which the Taliban drew most of its support. White-bearded tribal chiefs, nearly as old as he, address him respectfully as baba, or grandfather.

For many Afghans, he symbolizes a golden age--and a desperate hope to retrieve it.

“Zaher Shah is our last peaceful leader,” said Haji Murad Khan, chief of the Shinwari tribe in rural eastern Afghanistan. “After that we’ve had nine governments, six governments, something like that. We’ve had all these governments, and none has really ruled the country. So when we speak to our youngsters, we tell them that the time of Zaher Shah was the good and peaceful time. . . . We won’t have anyone else.”

The exiled king issued a statement Friday promising to return to Kabul, the Afghan capital, “in a very short time.” He urged Afghans to unite behind the new council led by incoming Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, a close ally and distant relative. And he said he was grateful that the U.N.-led power-sharing conference near Bonn had based its blueprint for Afghanistan on his own.

Central to that plan is the loya jirga, a traditional form of assembly involving hundreds of tribal and regional leaders. Loya jirgas were convened by Durrani kings to consult their subjects, but Zaher Shah has renounced any ambition to restore the monarchy for himself or his heirs.

Instead, he has told visitors, he will play whatever nation-healing role the assembly may define for him. “His majesty is not going to campaign for head of state,” one advisor said. “He wouldn’t need to.”

A survey of Taliban-controlled areas taken during the summer by a Pakistani polling firm for the State Department showed just over half the 3,000 respondents favoring Zaher Shah as their ideal leader. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief, was second with the backing of 11%.

Older Afghans remember the former king’s tolerance and decency. Mohammed Esmail, his former chauffeur, once wrecked the royal Cadillac while driving alone to get gasoline. Esmail recalls fearing Zaher Shah’s wrath, but “he just said, ‘What happened? It’s good you were not hurt.’ ”

“The whole nation is waiting for him,” said Esmail, who drove Zaher Shah to the airport on what turned out to be the monarch’s last day in Afghanistan 28 years ago and plans to be there when he returns. “People now need such a man to treat their wounds.”

But behind the aura lies an enigma: Zaher Shah was, historians say, a reluctant, indecisive monarch who preferred hunting, skiing and horseback riding but still managed to keep the country’s tribal and ethnic rivalries in check.

His reclusive exile, sustained by Saudi aid and punctuated by missed opportunities to go home, has only deepened the mystery about his state of mind and capacity to reconcile what is now a more fractious Afghanistan.

“All his ideas about the country are from TV and magazines,” said Abdul Attab Atef, chief doctor at a hospital in the northern Afghan city of Taloqan. “I don’t know whether the king is the same person he was 35 years ago. We don’t have any idea whether he will make things better or worse.”

Zaher Shah’s reflections on his country’s fate--insights that surely could help his compatriots--are tightly held. Relatives say he has kept a handwritten diary throughout his exile but refuses to publish it for fear of offending anyone. Visitors seeking his opinion often leave puzzled by a courteous but austere host who asks more questions than he answers.

Although the Taliban regime’s collapse has put his seclusion under siege, obliging almost daily audiences with Western and Afghan envoys, Zaher Shah is rarely seen in public.

The deposed king’s pronouncements, including an appeal to victorious anti-Taliban warlords to avoid looting, have been relayed--in royal fashion--through courtiers or bland written statements that begin, “In the name of Almighty God.”

His aversion to the news media--he declined to be interviewed for this article--dates to a 1991 attack by a dagger-wielding man posing as a Portuguese journalist. A tin of cigarillos in Zaher Shah’s breast pocket, a substitute for the Havana cigars his doctors had ordered him to give up, saved his life.

Since Sept. 11, Italian police have set up checkpoints outside his relatively modest four-bedroom villa. Masked anti-terrorist agents patrol his small garden, and it is there, behind a black steel gate rather than on the road outside, that Zaher Shah must now take his daily 40-minute walk. “I am a prisoner,” he has complained to visitors.

Skepticism About Ex-King’s Capabilities

Some critics wonder whether the former king is engaged, energetic or even lucid enough to stage an effective comeback. His narrow circle of Pushtun kinfolk, they suspect, is shielding him from scrutiny and manipulating his image to gain clout for itself.

Leaders of the Northern Alliance, whose fighters seized Kabul last month, tend to dismiss Zaher Shah as a feeble irrelevance. Asked whether he consults the former king, Younis Qanooni, the alliance’s chief delegate to the Bonn talks, said recently: “How can I? He’s too weak to speak for more than a few minutes.”

That portrait is exaggerated, say Western officials who converse with Zaher Shah. “He has two or three good hours a day,” said one, who found him “not very energetic but sound of mind, very much on top of things.” Another said the deposed king commands total respect from his entourage, makes strategic decisions and lets aides manage the details.

“He does not have the vocation to be used by others,” insisted Gen. Wali, Zaher Shah’s 77-year-old first cousin, son-in-law and former military commander. “He’s a very soft man, soft-spoken, but inside he’s as solid as steel.”

The former king’s authority and the deference of his courtiers were on public view for a fleeting moment in October. Abdul Haq, a Pushtun warlord seeking Taliban defectors in the former king’s name, had been captured in Afghanistan and hanged. Reporters and television crews were summoned to the royal villa for a memorial service.

A trim, impeccably dressed man with a long face and hawkish features, Zaher Shah walked with regal bearing into the garden, slightly stooped, to be greeted by 14 male relatives and aides. (Homaira, the 86-year-old former queen, and other women in the family remained in the house.) One at a time, the men kissed him on each cheek, then bowed and pressed his right hand to their faces.

The group formed a circle and prayed in silence for less than a minute, then hurried inside at the urging of security police.

Haq’s execution was one of several recent blows that left the former monarch tearful and depressed, his aides say. He watched TV footage of the World Trade Center’s destruction and remarked to a relative that he felt as if “those planes hit my body.”

Marked early in life by political violence, Zaher Shah has since maneuvered to avoid it at any cost.

He grew up amid upheaval that forced an uncle off the throne and Zaher Shah’s father, Mohammad Nadir Khan, out of the government and into exile in Paris. When Zaher Shah was 14, his father went back, raised an army, captured Kabul and became king. The son finished university studies in France but was present when a student killed Nadir Khan during a celebration at the palace.

For the next 31 years, Zaher Shah reigned in name only while first one uncle, then another, then his first cousin and brother-in-law, Mohammed Daoud, ran the country. In 1964, the king asserted his rule, proclaiming a constitutional monarchy that gave women the right to vote and barred members of the royal family from holding Cabinet posts. Daoud was forced to resign as prime minister.

A Rosier View of Zaher Shah’s Record

The king’s record looks rosier in hindsight than it did to observers at the time.

Zaher Shah presided over a rare era of personal freedom in Afghanistan and won substantial aid from the United States and the Soviet Union by playing the superpowers against each other.

But his “experiment in democracy” failed to produce a stable parliamentary system. Reluctant to delegate authority, he ruled erratically by decree as four powerless prime ministers came and went in frustration.

“During a period in which this system must look to him for leadership, he is unsure as to when and how to intervene,” U.S. Ambassador Robert G. Neumann wrote in a recently declassified 1970 cable from Afghanistan. “This indecision has been the foremost obstacle to economic modernization.”

“Clearly he is no visionary,” Neumann added, but rather an “indirect, cautious, furtive, clever” operator more intent on mediating frictions among feudal tribal networks than on breaking their restrictive hold on economic wealth.

Three years later, rebellious army officers--stirred by the slighted Daoud--overthrew the king, who was in Italy recovering from eye surgery. Daoud abolished the monarchy, and Zaher Shah renounced the throne to avoid harm to 20 captured relatives.

Then he slipped into a quiet world of chess, landscape painting and occasional expeditions for a cappuccino on the Via Veneto. He never learned Italian or traveled Rome’s social circuit; his mind, relatives say, remained in Afghanistan.

Nor did his country forget him. As the beleaguered Soviet army prepared to leave Afghanistan, royalists agitated for his return. U.N. envoy Diego Cordovez tried in 1987 to negotiate Zaher Shah’s acceptance as a conciliatory interim ruler who would call elections.

But Pakistan objected, pushing for a military victory by Islamist resistance groups, and the “king’s option” collapsed.

“Zaher Shah simply failed to gather the physical and intellectual strength that was needed to face the risks and dangers that lay ahead,” Cordovez wrote later. Had the former king returned home, the envoy concluded, “no resistance leader could have challenged him.” But the deposed king feared for his life.

Now, 14 years later, Zaher Shah is still the target of occasional threats by jealous warlords and other rivals. But the old man is more philosophical.

“At my age there is nothing that can happen to me,” he told a recent visitor.

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Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Taloqan, Paul Watson in Kabul and Megan Stack in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.