"At present," he wrote,

flourishing Afghanistan is the only independent Muslim state in the world, and fate sends the Afghan people the great historic task of uniting about itself all enslaved Mohammedan peoples and leading them on the road to freedom and independence.

The Workers' and Peasants' Government of Russia instructs its embassy in Afghanistan to engage in discussions with the government of the Afghan people with a view to the conclusion of trade and other friendly agreements, the purpose of which is not only the buttressing of good neighborly relations in the best interests of both nations, but together with Afghanistan the joint struggle against the most rapacious imperialist government on earth--Great Britain, the intrigues of which, as you correctly point out in your letter, have hitherto disturbed the peaceful and unhindered development of the Afghan people and separated it from its closest neighbors.

In a conference with your extraordinary ambassador, the worthy Mohammed Wali Khan, I learned that you are prepared to enter into negotiations in Kabul on the question of a treaty of friendship and also that the Afghan people wishes to receive military aid against England from the Russian people. The Workers' and Peasants' Government is inclined to grant such assistance on the widest scale to the Afghan nation, and, what is more, to repair the injustice done by the former government of the Russian tsars...by adjusting the Soviet-Afghan frontier so as to add to the territory of Afghanistan at the expense of Russia.

Amanullah had written to Lenin in April, offering an alliance between the two governments and stating, "I am neither a communist, nor a socialist, but my political program entails the expulsion of the British from Asia. I am an implacable foe of the capitalization of Asia by Europe, the principal representatives of which are the British. In this I approximate to the communists, and in this respect we are natural allies."

The new emir had come to power in Afghanistan after the February 1919 assassination of his father. He had broken with his father by siding with the Young Afghan movement, which called for independence from Britain.

The Russian Revolution gave a mighty impulse to the struggle of oppressed peoples, particularly those who had been under the boot of the czarist government. One month after the triumph of the October insurrection, the Bolshevik government published many secret documents from the czar's ministry of foreign affairs, including agreements with London and Paris allocating areas of influence in the Middle East and Asia.  
 
1919 war against Britain
The emir proclaimed the country's full independence. According to government member Shah Wali Khan, the Afghans prepared for war in the knowledge that the power that had "taken the Afghan independence would not surrender [its] rights easily without war." Working people, tribespeople, and layers of the middle classes enthusiastically greeted the government's call for a struggle against Great Britain, "the traditional foe of Afghan independence."

In April Amanullah requested assistance from Lenin, and the following month Afghan troops engaged British forces based in India, at the time a British colony, which included present-day Pakistan. The Third Afghan war, as the conflict is known, lasted a month, and included aerial bombing by the Royal Air Force of Kabul and Jalalabad. Although the military outcome of the fighting was not decisive, the combination of ongoing Afghan resistance with anticolonial struggles in the British-dominated territories of Ireland, Egypt, Iraq, and India had stretched British forces thin, persuading London to withdraw from the conflict and formally recognize the country's independence.

The victory was the fruit not just of the widespread rebellions and unrest against British colonial rule, but also of decades of struggle and resistance inside Afghanistan.  
 
Struggles of the 19th century
Afghanistan had long been disputed strategic territory in the competition between the British rulers and the Russian czars for domination of Central Asia known as the "Great Game." In 1838 the British East India Company's Army of the Indus pushed into Afghanistan, eventually setting up camp in Kabul the following year.

Their victory proved short-lived. In 1841 Afghan forces united, counterattacked, and forced, according to one British account, "the most terrible retreat in the history of British arms." The retreating column which left Kabul in January 1842 numbered 17,000 in all, including 700 European infantry and cavalry forces, some 3,800 Indian sepoy soldiers, and 12,000 others, including camp followers and European and Indian family members. Targeted by constant attack, and falling victim to frostbite and exposure, the majority of the company was wiped out. One survivor reached British-garrisoned Jalalabad, the march's destination, on a horse provided by a wounded Indian. Some 122 soldiers, officers, and civilians were taken prisoner and survived, and around 2,000 people, many crippled from frostbite, made it back to Kabul, where they were reduced to begging in the streets.

Stung by the humiliating defeat, the British government mounted a punitive expedition in August of the same year. Two armies drove toward Kabul, relieving the garrisons at Kandahar and Jalalabad, and venting their fury on Afghan villages. "The Europeans and Indians extracted a heavy vengeance in blood and property from the people in the area," reports one history book. "Many atrocities were committed by the vengeful British soldiers," states another. On reaching Kabul, General Pollock, one of the two commanding generals, ordered the destruction of the city's great central bazaar. It took two days for his engineers to finish the job with explosives. Meanwhile, the British troops embarked on an orgy of looting.

Having accomplished their mission, the British withdrew from Kabul. Conflicts were confined to border skirmishes until 1877, when Afghanistan's Emir Sher Ali broke with previous policy, rebuffed British representatives, and welcomed a Russian mission into Kabul, inflaming the rivalry between the tsarist regime and the British government. The next year London organized an invasion and fighting lasted until 1881. This second Afghan war ended with the forcible imposition of a pro-British policy.  
 
Russian Revolution: impact and example
As Lenin's letter shows, the communist leadership of the revolutionary government in Russia recognized the significance of the events in Afghanistan. They reached out to the peoples oppressed by czarism who had been inspired by the events of 1917 to step up their anti-imperialist struggles.

In September 1920 the Communist International, formed under the leadership and example of the Russian Revolution, organized the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku, Azerbaijan. Meeting one year after Lenin's letter to Amanullah, the congress adopted a Manifesto to Peoples of the East, which asked, "What is Britain doing to Afghanistan? By bribing the emir's government it has kept the people in subjugation, poverty, and ignorance, trying to reduce this country to a desert, in order that this desert may guard India, which Britain oppresses, from any contact with the outside world."

The document declared that "the peoples of the East have long stagnated in the darkness of ignorance under the despotic yoke of their own tyrant rulers and of foreign capitalist conquerors. But they have been awakened by the roar of the World War and the thunder of the Russian workers' revolution, which has released the people of Russia, an Eastern people, from the century-old chains of capitalist slavery."

The Congress called on the peoples of the East to wage a "holy war" against "the common enemy, imperialist Britain."

"This is a holy war for the liberation of the peoples of the East, for the ending of the division of humanity into oppressor peoples and oppressed peoples, for complete equality of all peoples and races, whatever language they may speak, whatever the color of their skin, and whatever the religion they profess," the document stated.  
 
 
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