Mohammed Zahir Shah, called to rule Afghanistan at the age of 19 on the assassination of his father, Nadir Shah, presided over a regime which tried to continue the transition from medieval tribalism to a modern unitary state, which had begun under King Amanullah in the 1920s. In this, guided at first by his uncle who was also Prime Minister, he had a certain amount of success, given the volatile and unstable state of the country.

His reign of 40 years, from 1933 to 1973, was in sheer duration a remarkable achievement in a state whose rulers have tended to die violently. Even today some look upon it as Afghanistan’s golden age. Certainly none of the country’s successor regimes has ever seemed to have comparable legitimacy.

Zahir Shah trod the tightrope of keeping his country neutral during the Second World War and afterwards. He was one of the few leaders of any country to receive aid simultaneously from both America and the Soviet Union in the postwar period and his European education and background made him able also to encourage firms from Europe to invest in engineering projects. Nevertheless the country’s economy remained weak and its infrastructure primitive. Zahir Shah’s deposition while he was out of the country by his cousin, Lieutenant-General Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, another former Prime Minister, ushered in a period of savage faction fighting.

That Zahir Shah’s name should have again been mentioned as a potential unifying leader of Afghanistan, almost 30 years after his overthrow, was a testimony to his perceived qualities within a country which has been racked by various forms of civil strife ever since the coup which lost him his throne. In April 2002, in the wake of the overthrow of the Taleban government of Mullah Muhammad Omar, Zahir returned to Afghanistan, not, as he said, to stake any claim to reign over the country again but to be close to the process through which the country’s interim leaders would decide its destiny.

At that time it was believed in the West that he might, in fact, have the support of as many as 80 per cent of the Afghan population. His being of the majority Pashtun people was to some extent to his advantage. But at the same time it exposed him to attack from those of the anti-Taleban forces who made no distinction between being Pashtun and Taleban at any level and were strongly opposed to the involvement of Pashtuns in the interim administration. In the event the leadership of the post-Taleban Afghanistan fell to a Pashtun chief of the Popolzai tribe, Hamid Karzai, who, in June 2002, was elected President of the country by a loya jirga (tribal assembly) after a period of six months in which he had headed an interim authority, whose formation had been overseen by Zahir Shah.

Thereafter Zahir Shah gave his support to Mr Karzai, though the latter’s real grasp on power in the country remained, and remains, precarious.

Mohammed Zahir Khan was born in Kabul in 1914, the son of Mohammed Nadir Khan. He was educated in Kabul until the age of ten, when he went to Paris with his father, who had been appointed Minister there by King Amanullah, the first Afghan ruler to be to be styled King.

Zahir completed his schooling at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and later studied at the Institut Pasteur and the University of Montpellier. In this process he added fluent French to the Arabic, English and Dari (an Afghan form of Persian) of which he already had command.

In the meantime, in 1929 Amanullah, whose pace of reform was adjudged to be too wholehearted and hectic, had been driven out of Afghanistan by a coup staged by a band of outlaws who seized Kabul. Nadir returned to Afghanistan, recruited an army, defeated the rebels and was himself proclaimed king. The following year Zahir broke off his studies and returned home to join his father, who ensured that he received military training on infantry courses previously established with Turkish instructors and then appointed him an assistant in the Ministry of Defence. In 1932 he became acting Minister of Education.

Zahir's father was soon to fall victim to the political ferment of the times, shot and stabbed to death by a student in the palace gardens as he was leaving the royal harem. Propelled to the throne at 19, Zahir was lucky to find in his father’s Prime Minister, Sardar Hashim Khan, a trusted adviser who had no ambitions for the leadership. He was to stay at Zahir’s side until 1946, watching him mature into an increasingly sound and even progressive ruler.

In the 1930s a programme of development was undertaken with German financial credit, this continuing with American assistance after the war. In 1949 King Zahir returned to Europe on a six-month tour, during which he observed industrial trends and, in the process, encouraged the initiation of German and Swedish engineering projects in Afghanistan.

Zahir was astute enough to keep countries both sides of the Iron Curtain in play. In the 1950s he visited Moscow for talks with the Soviet leadership and this led to financial and material aid to Afghanistan. Pakistan and India were, too, wooed equally and even handedly, while his neutral country sought common cause with Tito’s non-aligned Yugoslavia.