Meanwhile, in the west of Afghanistan, there were anxieties that Teheran was busy stirring things up near the Persian border. D’Arcy Todd, the officer who had taken on the difficult job of trying to win over the Wazir of Herat, Yar Mohammad Alikozai, had fulfilled Burnes’s prediction of the inevitable collapse of his mission by failing to stop the growing rapprochement between the Heratis and the Persians.
