Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

by William Dalrymple

The warm and fearless Nancy Hatch Dupree walked me around the site of the Kabul cantonments and the hill of Bibi Mahru and helped in a thousand other ways. At the age of eighty-four she continues to commute between her homes in Kabul and Peshawar, sometimes driving herself down the Khyber Pass, sometimes by Red Cross flights:

the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will.

each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

The Indians know neither how to dress nor how to eat – God save me from the fire of their dal and their miserable chapattis!’

In contrast to the confidence of previous generations, more and more Afghans were beginning to see their own country as an impoverished dead-end, ‘a land that produced little but men and stones’, as one of Shah Shuja’s successors later put it.

Shuja’s only real assets were the loyalty of his blind brother, Shah Zaman, and the advice of his capable wife, Wa’fa Begum, who some believed to be the real power behind the throne.

Rehman Baba was the great Sufi poet of the Pashtun language, the Rumi of the Frontier. ‘Sow flowers, so your surroundings become a garden,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet. We are all one body, Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.’

It was in many ways less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted.

Wa’fa Begum, meanwhile, was loyally working to get him out. After her husband’s defeat she had made her way to Lahore, where according to Sikh sources she independently took it upon herself to negotiate a deal with the Sikh Maharajah, Ranjit Singh, offering him the Koh-i-Nur if he helped release her husband from prison.

‘those once bitten by a snake fear even a twisted rope’.

Maharajah: ‘His conversation is a nightmare. He is almost the first inquisitive Indian I have seen, but his curiosity makes up for the apathy of the whole nation. He asked me a hundred thousand questions

Governor General on the day of Burnes’s departure to say how much he had enjoyed meeting this ‘nightingale of the garden of eloquence, this bird of the winged words of sweet discourse’.