Both of Auckland’s original casus belli were now removed: Russia and Persia were publicly backing down. If there had ever been any real threat to British India it was now over. This would have been an ideal moment to reopen negotiations with Dost Mohammad and achieve all the aims of the war without a shot being fired. There was, after all, still a major famine in north India which had left tens and quite possibly hundreds of thousands starving to death—there are no official statistics—and whose horrors had been greatly exacerbated by the British encouragement of poppy growing over food crops.
