Here, finally, Lord Auckland brought himself to focus on events in Afghanistan in a way he had not previously. For the past two months he had seriously underestimated the threat posed by Vitkevitch and the Russians; now, reading the latest intelligence from Peshawar and Herat, he was belatedly plunged into a state of high anxiety and began to swing instead towards a major overreaction. One reason for this was the arrival of a series of apocalyptic despatches from MacNeill outside Herat, who was just about to withdraw from the Persian camp in protest at the way the Shah was ignoring and
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