Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

by William Dalrymple

The first concerned the recovery of some lost family property. The largest diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Nur, or Mountain of Light, had been missing for more than a decade, but such was the turbulence of the times that no attempt had been made to find it.

Shah Zaman revealed that nine years earlier he had hidden the Fakhraj under a rock in a stream near the Khyber Pass, shortly before being taken prisoner. Later, he had slipped the Koh-i-Nur into a crack in the wall of the fortress cell where he was first seized and bound. A court historian later recorded, “Shah Shuja immediately dispatched a few of his most trustworthy men to find these two gems and advised them that they should leave no stone unturned in their efforts.

I mean they'd have to

At the age of only twenty-four, Shuja was now in the seventh year of his reign. By temperament a reader and a thinker, more interested in poetry and scholarship than in warfare or campaigning, it was his fate to have inherited, while still an adolescent, the far-flung Durrani Empire.

Considering its very ancient history, Afghanistan—or Khurasan, as the Afghans have called the lands of this region for the two last millennia—had had but a few hours of political or administrative unity.

Everything had always conspired against its rise: the geography and topography and especially the great stony skeleton of the Hindu Kush, the black rubble of its scalloped and riven slopes standing out against the ice-etched, snow-topped ranges which divided up the country like the bones of a massive rocky ribcage. Then there were the different tribal, ethnic and linguistic fissures fragmenting Afghan society: the rivalry between the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and the Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns; the schism between Sunni and Shia; the endemic factionalism within clans and tribes, and especially the blood feuds within closely related lineages.

In many places blood feuds became almost a national pastime—the Afghan equivalent of county cricket in the English shires—and the killings they engendered were often on a spectacular scale.

Under the guise of reconciliation, one of Shah Shuja’s chiefs invited some sixty of his feuding cousins “to dine with him,” wrote one observer, “having previously laid bags of gunpowder under the apartment. During the meal, having gone out on some pretext, he blew them all up.”

So when at the beginning of 1809 messengers arrived from the Punjab bearing news of an East India Company Embassy heading north from Delhi seeking an urgent alliance with him, Shah Shuja had good reason to be pleased.

the Company had been a major problem for the Durranis, for its well-disciplined sepoy armies had made impossible the lucrative raids down onto the plains of Hindustan which for centuries had been a principal source of Afghan income.

This not only offered some respite from the usual round of sieges, arrests and punitive expeditions, it potentially provided Shuja with a powerful ally—something he badly needed. There had never been a British Embassy to Afghanistan before, and the two peoples were almost unknown to each other, so the Embassy had the additional benefit of novelty.

Years later Shuja remembered one present that particularly delighted him: “a large box producing noises like voices, strange sounds in a range of timbres, harmonies and melodies, most pleasing to the ear.”6 The Embassy had brought Afghanistan its first organ.

The real reason behind the despatch of this first British Embassy to Afghanistan lay far from both India and the passes of the Hindu Kush. Its origins had nothing to do with Shah Shuja, the Durrani Empire or even the intricate princely politics of Hindustan. Instead its causes could be traced to north-eastern Prussia, and a raft floating in the middle of the River Neman.

The meeting followed the Russian defeat at the Battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807, when Napoleon’s artillery had left 25,000 Russians dead on the battlefield. It was a severe loss, but the Russians had been able to withdraw to their frontier in good order.

The stalemate was broken when the Russians were informed that Napoleon wished not only for peace, but for an alliance. On 7 July, on a raft surmounted by a white classical pavilion emblazoned with a large monogrammed N, the two emperors met in person to negotiate a treaty later known as the Peace of Tilsit.

Much of the discussion concerned the fate of French-occupied Europe, especially the future of Prussia whose king, excluded from the meeting, paced anxiously up and down the river bank waiting to discover if he would still have a kingdom after the conclave concluded. But amid all the public articles of the treaty, Napoleon included several secret clauses that were not disclosed at the time. These laid the foundations for a joint Franco-Russian attack on what Napoleon saw as the source of Britain’s wealth. This, of course, was his enemy’s richest possession, India.

The seizure of India as a means of impoverishing Britain and breaking its growing economic power had been a long-standing obsession of Napoleon’s, as of several previous French strategists.

At the Battle of the Nile on 1 August, however, Admiral Nelson sank almost the entire French fleet, wrecking Napoleon’s initial plan to use Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India.

So Napoleon now hatched plans to attack India through Persia and Afghanistan. A treaty with the Persian Ambassador had already been concluded:

At Tilsit, the secret clauses spelled out the plan in full: Napoleon would emulate Alexander the Great and march 50,000 French troops of the Grande Armée across Persia to invade India, while Russia would head south through Afghanistan.

the British were not caught unawares. The secret service had hidden one of their informers, a disillusioned Russian aristocrat, beneath the barge, his ankles dangling in the river. Braving the cold, he was able to hear every word and sent an immediate express, containing the outlines of the plan, to London.

In the end Minto opted for four separate embassies, each of which would be sent with lavish presents in order to warn and win over the powers that stood in the way of Napoleon’s armies.

Sent off to India at the unusually young age of fourteen to keep him out of trouble, he had learned good Persian, Sanskrit and Hindustani, and soon turned into an ambitious diplomat and a voracious historian and scholar.

As Elphinstone made his way to his first posting in Pune, one elephant was reserved entirely for his books, including volumes of the Persian poets, Homer, Horace, Herodotus, Theocritus, Sappho, Plato, Beowulf, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Dryden, Bacon, Boswell and Thomas Jefferson.

The first Embassy to Afghanistan by a western power left the Company’s Delhi Residency on 13 October 1808, with the Ambassador accompanied by 200 cavalry, 4,000 infantry, a dozen elephants and no fewer than 600 camels.

the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and 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.

His family came from Multan in the Punjab and had a long tradition of service to the Mughals. It was appropriate therefore that his power derived in part from the enormous treasure chest of Mughal gems plundered by the Persian marauder Nadir Shah from the Red Fort in Delhi sixty years earlier; these Ahmad Shah had seized within an hour of Nadir Shah’s assassination.b

he was ultimately defeated by a foe more intractable than any army. He had had his face eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a “gangrenous ulcer,” possibly leprosy or some form of cancer. At the height of his power, when after eight successive raids on the plains of north India he finally crushed the massed cavalry of the Marathas at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, Ahmad Shah’s disease had already consumed his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place.

The great tragedy of his new Durrani Empire was that its founder died before he could fix the boundaries of his country, build a working administration or properly consolidate his new conquests.

Like the Qizilbash, his own Sadozai dynasty were Persian-speaking and culturally Persianised and Timur Shah looked to his Timurid predecessors—“the Oriental Medici” as Robert Byron dubbed them—for his cultural models. He prided himself on being a man of taste, and revived the formal gardens of the Bala Hisar fort in Kabul first constructed by Shah Jahan’s Governor of Kabul, Ali Mardan Khan.

Because he was a man of short stature, a bejewelled stepstool was also made for him to mount his horse.”

under Timur Shah’s eventual successor, Shah Zaman, the empire disintegrated. In 1797, Shah Zaman, like his father and grandfather before him, decided to revive his fortunes and fill his treasuries by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hindustan—the time-honoured Afghan solution to cash crises.

Wellesley’s Indian campaigns would ultimately annex more territory than all of Napoleon’s conquests in Europe.

He decided to thwart Shah Zaman, not through direct force of arms, but through diplomatic stratagem. In 1798, he sent a diplomatic mission to Persia, offering arms and training, and encouraged the Persians to attack Shah Zaman’s undefended rear. Shah Zaman was forced to retreat in 1799, and in the process left Lahore under the governorship of a capable and ambitious young Sikh.

Rajah Ranjit Singh had helped Shah Zaman save some cannon lost in the mud of the River Jhelum during the chaos of the Afghan retreat, and by charming the Shah, and impressing him with his efficiency, he was given charge of much of the Punjab, although he was only nineteen years old.

As Zaman retreated, thwarted from plundering India and hemmed in by the Sikhs, British and Persians, his authority waned and one by one his nobles, his extended family and finally even his half-brothers rebelled against him.

The end of Shah Zaman’s rule came during the icy winter of 1800, when the Kabulis finally refused to open the city gates to their luckless king. Instead, one cold winter’s night, with the falling snow soft on his lashes, he took shelter from the gathering blizzard in a fortress between Jalalabad and the Khyber. That night, he was imprisoned by his Shinwari hosts, who locked the gates, murdered his bodyguard and later blinded him with a hot needle:

he eluded the search parties and with a few companions wandered on unmarked tracks from the poplars and holly oaks of the valleys to the crystalline snows of the high passes, cresting the kerfs and shelves of the mountains, sleeping rough and biding his time. He was an intelligent, gentle and literate teenager, who abhorred the violence spiralling around him, and in adversity sought solace in poetry.

Shah Shuja crafted a beautifully written autobiography, where he talks of his days as a homeless wanderer on the snow-slopes of the Safed Koh, padding around the silent shores of high-altitude lakes of turquoise and jade, waiting and planning for the right moment to recover his birthright.

when sectarian rioting broke out: “The people of Kabul,” wrote the Shah, “remembered the gentleness and generosity of my brother Zaman’s governance; and they compared it to the insolence of the usurper and his ruffianly troops.

According to a Sunni source, a Qizilbash rogue seduced a young Sunni boy who lived in Kabul into going home with him. He invited some other pederasts to take part in this loathsome business and they performed a number of obscene acts on the helpless lad.

Well I guess if you're looking to make shit up tp start a war go all out.

Most serious Afghan feuds tend to involve close blood-relations, and the “usurper” in this case was Shah Shuja’s estranged half-brother, Shah Mahmoud. When he refused to punish the overmighty Qizilbash who made up both his bodyguard and administrative elite, outraged Sunni tribesmen poured into Kabul from the surrounding hills and besieged the walled Qizilbash compound.

He forgave all who had rebelled against Shah Zaman, with the single exception of the clan of the Shinwari chieftain responsible for blinding his brother: “The officers arrested the culprit, and his supporters, and razed his fort to the ground. They looted everything and dragged the man to Shuja’s court. Then for his sins, they filled his mouth with gunpowder, and blew him up.

Finally, according to Mohammad Khan Durrani, they strapped the offender’s wife and children to Shuja’s artillery and blew them from the mouths of the cannon.

Amid all this civil and fratricidal war, Durrani Afghanistan quickly fractured into anarchy. It was during this period that the country accelerated its transformation from the sophisticated centre of learning and the arts, which led some of the Great Mughals to regard it as a far more elegantly cultured place than India, into the broken, war-torn backwater it was to become for so much of its modern history.

The great colleges, like that of Gauhar Shad in Herat, had long shrunk in size and reputation for learning; the poets and artists, the calligraphers and miniaturists, the architects and tile makers for which Khurasan was famous under the Timurids, continued their migration south-eastwards to Lahore, Multan and the cities of Hindustan, and westwards to Persia.

Yet the reality was that the great days of high Timurid culture and elegant Persianate refinement were fast disappearing. Virtually no miniature painting survives from Afghanistan during this period, in striking contrast to the Punjab, where Pahari artists were then producing some of the greatest masterpieces of all Indian art.

Shuja’s authority rarely extended further than a day’s march beyond wherever his small army of supporters happened to be camped. This chaos and instability created increasing difficulties for the kafilas—the great caravans heading to and from the cities of Central Asia—which in the absence of central authority could be taxed, tolled or looted by any tribal leader at will.

Afghanistan was still capable of supplying the whole region with three lucrative products—fruit, furs and horses. The looms of Kashmir still produced the finest shawls in Asia, and its crocuses the best saffron.

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. There was also the additional asset of the family’s fast-diminishing treasure chest of Mughal jewels.