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

by William Dalrymple

Only in one matter did the Amir refuse to co-operate with the British. Macnaghten repeatedly urged him to visit Shah Shuja, but Dost Mohammad flatly refused, and even sent back the trays of food that the Shah had sent to his surrendered rival—a mortal insult in the Afghan honour system.

The refusal of the British to hand Dost Mohammad over to the Sadozais for execution caused Shuja huge offence. For weeks he had been urging Macnaghten to send assassins to have the Amir killed, and now at the very least he expected his old enemy to be blinded. But Macnaghten refused even to discuss the matter.

Meanwhile, continued Herati, “Macnaghten’s efforts to please his guest, and his neglect of the rights of His Majesty, led at length to his own death: again, as the poet said: ‘If you shower favours on bad men, you harm the good and virtuous.’

In Jalalabad the two were reunited with the rest of their harem: Dost Mohammad’s nine wives, the twenty-one spouses of his sons, 102 female slaves and another 210 male slaves and attendants, who along with numerous grandchildren and other relations brought the party to a grand total of 381 people in all.

in reality the insurgency was by no means over. Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammad’s most warlike son, had just managed to escape from Bukhara. He would soon prove a potent new centre of resistance, and far more violent, ruthless and effective than his father had ever been.

The Hajigak Pass is extremely formidable even in daytime and during summer. Moreover he had especially good reason to be cautious as the pass was controlled by Hazaras whom Haji Khan had suppressed some years earlier and who would no doubt have seized the opportunity to take revenge on their former persecutor.

This was rather rich coming from Dost Mohammad, who had in his time killed several of his enemies after pledging them safe conduct, notably the Mirs of Tagab, Kohistan and Deh Kundi.

The Russian attack on Khiva ended as disastrously as the British retreat from Kabul would do, with Perovsky losing half his camels and nearly half his men to the blizzards of the Central Asian winter.

George was more worried still, though in his case the anxiety was professional, for this was the man he had just chosen to take over the command of the army in Afghanistan. His appointment was to be announced after the departure of Sir Willoughby Cotton; General Nott, whom Auckland regarded as chippy and difficult and far from a gentleman, was to be passed over yet again; but, wrote Auckland, he “had only himself to blame.”

As Nott was all too aware, Elphinstone’s failings were not merely medical. Like many Queen’s officers of his generation, he had not seen action since he commanded the 33rd Foot at Waterloo more than twenty-five years previously, and after years on half-pay had returned to active service only in 1837, at the age of fifty-five, in order to pay off his growing debts.

His patron, and the man responsible for sending him to India, was Fitzroy Somerset, Lord Raglan, later famous for ordering the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade.

Despite having seen that Elphinstone was more or less an invalid and had no sympathy for India or the Indian sepoys he would have to lead, it did not seem to have occurred to Lord Auckland to question or cancel his friend’s command.

Like Auckland, Elphinstone was not known for his decisiveness and, again like Auckland, had spent much of his career depending on the opinions of his assistants. But while it was Auckland’s fate to have fallen into the hands of the hawkish Colvin and the pedantic yet undeniably bright Macnaghten, Elphinstone was more unlucky still in that he was given for his deputy one of the most unhelpful, unpleasant and unpopular officers in the entire army.

Brigadier General John Shelton of the 44th Foot was a cantankerous, rude and boorish man who had lost his right arm in the Peninsular War, and the incessant pain he suffered seemed to have darkened and embittered his character.

The entire cantonment took an instant dislike to Shelton. The surgeon John Magrath, who had come across him before in India, was soon describing him as “more detested than ever.”9 Nor did Shelton get on with the gentle and gentlemanly Elphinstone.

Elphinstone was not the only one puzzled by what should be done in Afghanistan. Even Macnaghten, the most delusionally optimistic of the British, now recognised that despite the surrender of Dost Mohammad all was not well.

To the south-east, the Punjab was now declining into hostile anarchy: within two years three Sikh rulers had followed each other as leaders of the Khalsa. As a result, a leaderless military regime of evasive and uncertain sympathies now lay between the army of occupation in Afghanistan and its commissariat base in Ferozepur.

Not only did supply trains heading up the passes into Afghanistan often have to fight their way through ambushes and frequent attempts to hijack the baggage animals, there were a growing number of credible reports that senior Sikh sardars in Lahore and Rawalpindi were actively sheltering rebel Barakzai and Durrani chiefs and other Afghan rebel leaders, giving them a base in the Punjab and the hills around Peshawar from which they could strike back at British troops over the border in Afghanistan.

Before long, Auckland was beginning to flirt with the hawkish plans suggested by Colvin to annex the Punjab in order to close down the insurgents’ bases and ease the passage of supplies up to the front:

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.

Increasingly convinced that Yar Mohammad was intending to ally himself with Persia and lead an Islamic coalition against Shah Shuja and his British backers, on 10 February 1841 Todd had left his post without official permission and marched back to Kandahar, effectively breaking off diplomatic relations.

Even more threatening was the situation to the south and west of Kandahar, where both the Durranis and the formidable Tokhi and Hotaki Ghilzais had risen up against the British in Helmand and Qalat.

Unlike almost all the other British officers in Afghanistan, General Nott was proving a notably effective military commander against the rebels, and developed a quick-moving 5,000-strong anti-insurgency column which could be rapidly deployed in any direction; but as soon as he defeated an uprising in one place, another insurgency flared up elsewhere—thanks, he believed, to the “hatred in which we are held by the Dooranees as Infidels and Conquerers.

Nott now had as his political assistant the able and clever Henry Rawlinson, the man who had first sighted Vitkevitch heading for the Afghan border four years earlier, and whose epic ride back to Teheran had set off the chain of events which had led to the war. Having recently won the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his explorations in Persia and for his work translating the ancient Persian cuneiform script of the trilingual inscriptions at Behistun, Rawlinson now found himself posted to Kandahar where his job increasingly revolved around translating the calls to holy war being issued almost daily by the ghazis of Kandahar and Helmand.

As more and more of these documents began to accumulate from his informers, Rawlinson started to realise for the first time the full scale of the resistance the occupation was now facing. “I shall be most thankful when you re-enter this town with the 43rd Regiment,” he wrote anxiously to Nott, “for it is anything but pleasant to see the spirit of opposition to the government showing itself through all the districts, and to feel that, happen what may, there is no possibility of employing force in support of royal authority [until you return].”

Yet Macnaghten’s response when he read Rawlinson’s anxious despatches was as patronising as it was wrong-headed. He accused Rawlinson of “taking an unwarrantably gloomy view of our position, and entertaining and disseminating rumours favourable to that view.

These people are perfect children and they should be treated as such. If we put one naughty boy in the corner the rest will be terrified.

Dick

When one of Pottinger’s assistants was taken aside by a fakir to whom he had given alms, and warned that a massacre of their troops was being openly discussed in the bazaar, “recommending me strongly to spend the winter in Kabul,” Pottinger became convinced that another major uprising was about to break out.

The Kohistan chiefs, he wrote, had initially supported Shah Shuja, but found that the strictness of the Anglo-Sadozai administration “was inimical to their interests and power insomuch that it had given them a master who was able to compel obedience instead of one who was obliged to overlook their excesses.”

The reality was that resistance was growing everywhere against the British, and only in Kabul itself was there still some support for the Anglo-Sadozai regime. Even there the popularity of Shuja was crumbling.

Most British officials now recognised that the Anglo-Sadozai regime was failing—certainly few took so dismissive and over-confident an attitude as Macnaghten—but they differed from each other as to the solution needed to turn the situation around.

Burnes was also keen on marginalising Shuja and reforming his corrupt government. In August 1840, just before the surrender of Dost Mohammad, he had written Macnaghten a long memo expressing his view that the Shah’s government was inefficient, unpopular and expensive, and that greater British interference in the administration was the only way to save the regime.

In his private correspondence Burnes was more scathing, and pointed the finger of blame at Auckland and Macnaghten. “There is nothing here but downright imbecility,” he wrote to his brother-in-law Holland.26 “We are in possession of the cities,” he told his elder brother around the same time, “but have not got the country or the [support of the] people, and have as yet done nothing liberally to consolidate Afghanistan.

Macnaghten, meanwhile, was pursuing a third approach: he was still toying with the idea of actually bolstering Shuja’s power, possibly just to irritate Burnes, but like his deputy wanted to expand the regime’s frontiers and to attack Herat, believing, correctly, that Yar Mohammad was encouraging the tribes to rise up against the British.

But against all these ambitious schemes for bringing in more soldiers and hugely extending British control, there stood the unassailable fact of a now almost completely drained treasury in Calcutta.

By February 1841, the head of the accounts department working on the figures in Calcutta was forced to write to Auckland and break the news that “ere six months elapse, the treasures of India will be completely exhausted.”29 By March, the full scale of the problem was dawning on Auckland.

Yet while policy was in confusion, and money was running out, on the ground the occupation was becoming daily entrenched, with the first and toughest of the memsahibs making the now dangerous journey through the Punjab to the Kabul cantonment.

John Magrath, the grumpy cantonment surgeon, thought Ladies Sale and Macnaghten were “both equally vulgar and equally scandalous” (without, sadly, giving more details), and was also dismissive of Lady Macnaghten’s abysmal household skills.

Seeing Macnaghten reunited with his wife, Shuja now decided to bring his blind brother, Shah Zaman, and both their harems up from Ludhiana. This was presumably partly because he was missing them, but also because he must have calculated that it was important to move them before the Punjab got any more dangerous, or even closed completely, so cutting him off from his family.

To make the commission more difficult still, Shuja decided to send along with his women much of his savings and his celebrated box of Mughal jewels, and word of this soon leaked out.

The sisters had been brought up between Bengal and Versailles, where their French grandfather, the Chevalier de L’Etang, had been a page to Marie Antoinette, and they spoke Hindustani, Bengali and French among themselves.

One of Adeline’s younger sisters married Lord Auckland’s adviser Henry Thoby Prinsep, which—even though Emily Eden described Prinsep as “the greatest bore Providence ever created”—meant that Mackenzie had a direct link over Elphinstone’s and Macnaghten’s heads into Lord Auckland’s council, something that would later prove extremely useful.

In all, it made up a party of nearly 6,000 people, which together with their baggage needed 15,000 camels to transport. Yet the two young officers expected to protect this temptingly valuable and vulnerable convoy with only 500 men.

The caravan made slow progress, but by careful scouting and intelligence work, they managed to pass safely through the first two-thirds of the Sikh dominions.

Matters however took a more serious turn when they got news, just before crossing the Indus at Attock, that there had been a large-scale mutiny in Peshawar. Worse still, the four disaffected battalions—around 5,000 men—who had heard of their coming, were now blocking the road just ahead of them with all their artillery waiting in position,

He then crossed around Peshawar, faced down a second stand-off with more mutinous border guards at Jamrud “who seized a lot of property and made an attempt of a search of the Begum’s palkees [litters],” and eventually mounted the Khyber Pass—all without firing a shot.

As they moved on through Jalalabad towards Kabul, both men were appalled by the state of Afghanistan, which they immediately realised was on the verge of breaking out into a major uprising.

Broadfoot was also horrified by the sheer lack of knowledge displayed by the British about the Afghanistan they were trying to rule. “Our apathy in this respect is disgraceful,” he exclaimed,

Mackenzie was appalled by the whole farce, and wrote to his in-laws in Calcutta telling Thoby Prinsep that he believed the occupation in its current form was now untenable and that the whole situation was most “alarming … our gallant fellows in Afghanistan must be immediately reinforced, or they will perish.”

whatever feelings Shah Shuja might have for the young Queen, he was daily feeling less and less affection for her servants in Kabul, despite describing Macnaghten in his letter as “the high and exalted in rank, the resting place of excellence and valour, the germ of wisdom and discretion, the lofty in worth, the high in place, the distinguished and honourable councillor.” Instead the Shah, “regarding his position as more secure than hitherto, and feeling himself less dependent on us to maintain him in it, began to evince some impatience at our presence,” as Macnaghten’s Military Secretary George Lawrence noted.