Macnaghten decided to leave Shuja’s already reduced household budget more or less intact and not to touch the expenditure committed to the new, reformed regiments of the Shah’s Afghan national army. Instead he chose to aim the cuts at the extremities rather than the centre. He called the Ghilzai and Khyber chieftains to a durbar in Kabul. There he told them that their subsidies were to be reduced by £8,000, with the worst reductions falling on the eastern Ghilzais and their leader, Mohammad Shah Khan, the father-in-law of Akbar Khan, who had been awarded the daunting title of “Chief
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