Reforming the Afghans.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19481, 30 November 1928, Page 8

Reforming the Afghans.

In a cable message from Delhi yesterday of three lines it was announced that King Amanullah has "reopened" the road to Kabul. This was good news, but not quite so interesting as the equally brief announcement some time back that three Mullahs had been tried, condemned, and executed at Kabul for sedition. King Amanullah, even by Western standards, is a slightly impetuous reformer, but there is no reason to suppose that the purpose of. his refornis is not the good of his people. If he were the ordinary kind of Oriental autocrat —we must not Westernise him so far as to regard him as a democrat —he would have had the Mullahs with him, either by buying them up in advance or by persuading them since that their interests and his are identical. But his zeal for reform ig as genuine as, say, Kemal Pasha's, whose methods he is perhaps copying a little too closely, and even Signor Mussolini is not more anxious for the good of his Country. We must remember also before we condemn his impetuosity that he knows a good deal more about Afghanistan than even the best informed of his critics, and that it is more true in the East than anywhere else that he who hesitates is lost. King Amanullah is not hesitating. In the few months that have passed since his return from the West he has changed habits and customs that have existed for centuries and started 6& million people marching to music that they had never heard before. How long it will last depends, of course, on the length and strength of his right arm, but there is no indication yet that it is weakening.