740.0011 European War 1939/23276: Telegram
The Minister in Afghanistan (Engert) to the Secretary of State
[Received August 1—11:55 a.m.]
40. I called upon the Prime Minister, Mohammed Hashim Khan, yesterday for the first time. He is, the Department will recall, an uncle of the King and has for the past 9 years been real ruler of Afghanistan. After a few minutes conversation, it was quite evident to me that he is one of the outstanding personalities not only of his country but of the political world today. We talked for an hour and a quarter and as he understands English well and speaks it fairly fluently conversation with him was easy. It is also a pleasure because his mind is amazingly well balanced, he is extremely intelligent and he is capable of an objective and impartial point of view which is quite unoriental. In fact he reminds me more of Venizelos10 or Smuts11 than anybody I have ever met.
The sequence of his remarks was that the democracies had made some fearful mistakes and had lost many opportunities during the past 20 years, including our failure to support the League of Nations. He then referred to the recent German successes in Russia and said they might have far-reaching results for Afghanistan whether the Afghans liked it or not. When the United States entered the war he had hoped it would shorten it but now he was predicting it would be a very long war and nobody could predict how it would affect Afghanistan before the full strength of America could make itself felt especially if Japan should attack Russia too. He said he was [Page 53] not pessimistic by nature and that deep in his heart he felt a better world would emerge from this catastrophe, but as a practical man with heavy responsibilities he had to face realities and he would welcome signs that the democracies would not go on making mistakes indefinitely.
I repeated to him what I had said to the King and to the Foreign Minister—see my 34, July 25, 4 p.m.12 and my 35, July 27, 10 a.m.13—and also gave him some recent figures of our related production. I expressed my firm belief that the combination of the United States and the British Empire was invincible and that he should not feel unduly alarmed by events on the Russian front as the Germans still had a long way to go before they could menace Iran or Afghanistan.