One Week

Afghanistan is bigger than France, but it has only one movie theater. The capital, ancient Kabul, has only one cafe. And the cafe is allowed to open one week in the year. Last week was it--and Kabul's mud walls fairly shook with the greatest celebration yet of Jash'n Istiklal.

Zoot Suits & Rams. Jash'n Istiklal commemorates the final withdrawal (in 1919) of British military power in Afghanistan. Though the Afghans are delightedly proud of their independence, Western influence was still obviously on the increase. Last week beady-eyed riflemen from the Hindu Kush and turbaned tribesmen from the rocky plains along the Oxus crowded the theater to watch Maria Montez hiss and writhe through Cobra Woman. At the cafe, Afghans tapped pointed shoes in time to a blatting jazz band while they guzzled imposing quantities of ice cream and soda pop. Kabul's young beaux wore U.S. zoot suits (but their girls went veiled).

The week's revelry opened with a parade of 70,000 Afghan soldiers accoutered with German helmets and a weird assortment of old and new British materiel; above the parade wobbled a rickety umbrella of old Italian biplanes. Tribesmen who had lugged a season's karakul skins into market bet their season's earnings on horse races and ram fights. The Western influence was apparent in the gambling, too: the most popular gadget shot darts from an air gun at a moving disc.

J. Robert Fluker, an ex-Kansas football star, now teaching math at Kabul University, tried to give the Afghans some good, clean fun by organizing the country's first boxing matches and baseball games. Premier Sha'h Mahmoud Khan, who has a son at Harvard (and is a Gershwin fan), lobbed out the first ball, and smiled inscrutably as the game progressed from error to error. Since Afghan bagpipers on the sidelines tootled furiously and folk dancers whooped and whirled, the errors were understandable.

Kabul's bazaars, the oldest in Asia, displayed the same kind of goods they had when Marco Polo stopped off there seven centuries ago. New items had been added. Mostly from the U.S. had come the lawn mowers, baby carriages, perfumes, canned goods.*

Neutrality & Neighbors. Afghanistan is now on the threshold of a vast modernization program under the direction of Public Works Minister Mohamed Kabir Ludin, a Cornell graduate, whose Chief Engineer is John B. Alexander of Portland, Ore. They are now assembling material and workers to build roads, irrigation projects, airfields, hydroelectric plants and schools.

But Western influence in Afghanistan has its competition. The Russian legation in Kabul is larger than the other legations combined. Russian propaganda is hampered--not by any innate Afghan democratic leanings, but by a rigidly enforced law which makes any political talk or activity, except that sponsored by the Government, a criminal offense.

Handsome, young (32) King Mohamed Zahir Shah wound up the week's celebration by expressing Afghanistan's neutrality policy in hard-boiled terms: "Afghanistan always wished and still wishes for the respect of its rights, freedom and integrity. It cannot accept in the slightest anything injurious or limiting the rights and independence of this country."

But the Afghans know that the British withdrawal from India will leave Afghanistan with only one powerful neighbor. The extra enthusiasm of Jash'n Istiklal last week might have been connected with the Government's doubt as to how long they would keep their 27-year-old independence after the British left the Khyber Pass.

* In 1944 Afghanistan, desperately in need of outside supplies, was finally made eligible for Lend-Lease. A U.S. official went to Kabul to ask the Afghans what they needed most. They said "everything." He suggested medicines as a starter. The Afghan committee withdrew with a drug catalogue, returned next day with a list that began: " 1) Medicine to ease a weary heart."

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