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December 16 - December 21, 2021
At the same time, Burnes was winning the argument within the British administration over the need to increase control over Shuja by replacing the loyal and influential Mullah Shakur with a more pliantly pro-British alternative. Interference in Shuja’s administration had been steadily growing for two years, and with the decision now taken to sack Mullah Shakur the real government of Afghanistan was finally taken entirely into British hands.
Blind to “the inner rottenness” of Nizam al-Daula, Macnaghten favoured him so excessively that within months “he became inflated with self-conceit and began to behave towards great men and small with overbearing rudeness.”
For Shah Shuja, it marked a new level of public humiliation. Continually aware of his debt to the British, he wished to show gratitude and be a loyal ally, but was far too proud a man to accept being reduced to an impotent puppet.
Just how badly Nizam al-Daula handled the Afghan nobility became apparent shortly afterwards. At the end of August 1841, Macnaghten received a despatch from Auckland telling him that the financial breaking point had now been reached: the Company had been forced to take out a £5 million loan from Indian merchants at exorbitant rates of interest just to continue paying salaries.
Moreover, in London a Tory government had just come to power by one vote, and the new Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, showed no wish to continue financing what he and his colleagues regarded as one of Lord Palmerston’s expensive and unnecessary Whig wars.
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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He was merely hastening the inevitable demise of the feudal system and calling the bluff of the more barbaric nomad tribes who had done little to deserve the protection money the Kabul government was in the habit of lavishing upon them. In the event, however, it proved to be the single biggest misjudgement of his entire career and within weeks it had brought the entire edifice of the occupation crashing down.
Colin Mackenzie agreed, and emphasised the degree to which the Ghilzai saw it as an outright betrayal: “Sir William reported that the Chiefs ‘acquiesced in the justice of the reduction’; but on the contrary they considered it a direct break of faith. The whole deficiency amounted only to Rs 40,000, and this attempt at economy was the main cause of the outbreak and all its subsequent horrors.”
Part of the problem was that by the autumn of 1841 the chiefs and their dependants simply could not afford the cuts. The military reforms had already eaten into their incomes, the real value of which was fast falling due to hyperinflation: the 4,500 troops and 11,500 camp followers who were resident in Kabul had put a huge burden on the poorly integrated Afghan economy and the effect of the sudden flood of silver rupees and letters of credit into the country was a sharp rise in commodity prices: by June 1841, according to Macnaghten, some basic products had risen by 500 per cent.
This was especially so of grain, driving the Afghan poor to the edge of starvation. Mohan Lal realised this, and tried to warn Burnes of the consequences.
To make matters worse, the exact details of the cuts and how to implement them were left by Macnaghten to the tactless and unpopular Nizam al-Daula to work out.
Macnaghten took Nizam al-Daula’s advice to reduce particularly the subsidies of the Ghilzai khans on the grounds that “They eat up thousands of rupees, all wasted quite unnecessarily: if these are stopped, no one will dare protest!” However, “the Ghilzais did dare protest, and loudly too,” recorded Herati.
The Ghilzais had a point. Since the time of the Mughals, both the Ghilzais and the Khyber and Peshawar tribes had been paid rahdari (road keeping) to maintain the road and protect the armies and traders en route to India.
Every king had paid this subsidy, but now Macnaghten informed the chiefs that he was arbitrarily abrogating this agreement in contravention of customary tribal law and his own written undertakings.
Maulana Kashmiri in his Akbarnama presents the departure of the khans from Kabul less as an angry protest and more as a considered strategy. According to him, the Afghan sardars, fearful that their loss of salaries would be followed by forced exile to India or even London, decided to take action.
As fate would have it, the beginning of the Ghilzai rebellion coincided with General Elphinstone going down with a new attack of gout.
A month earlier, Elphinstone’s surgeon, Dr. Campbell, had inspected his patient and been horrified by what he discovered. According to his confidential report, “Genl. Elphinstone has been very seriously ill ever since his arrival here. His malady attacked him in all his limbs, making a perfect wreck of him.
Elphinstone had sent the report to Auckland and asked to be relieved of his command; now he was finalising his plans for returning to India, and hence to retirement among his beloved Scottish grouse moors.
As part of the cuts, Macnaghten had also decided to further reduce the small British garrison remaining in Afghanistan and to send back to India “Fighting Bob” Sale and his brigade. Sale was now instructed to make a detour on his return journey to knock down a few Ghilzai forts and quell any signs of the uprising that he encountered on his way out of the country:
As he left, Broadfoot told the General about his own anxieties: he had tried to get the smiths and armourers in the city to manufacture some mining tools to be used in the siege of the Ghilzai forts, but they had all “refused to work for the Firangis as they were busy forging arms, for what purpose we have since learned, though Burnes said it was for the wandering tribes about to migrate.”
It was already becoming clear, as an official report to Calcutta pointed out, that in the high passes “our regular European and Hindoostanee Troops fight against Afghans in their native hills to a great disadvantage. The superior agility of the latter enables them to evade pursuit and their jezails or long guns carry with deadly precision to a distance where our muskets are harmless.”
One of the casualties was “Fighting Bob” himself, who had his leg shattered with the ball of a jezail within the first minute of the ambush. “I could not help admiring old Sale’s coolness,” said his Brigade Major. “He turned to me and said, ‘Wade, I have got it,’ and then remained on horseback directing the skirmishers until compelled from loss of blood to make over command to Dennie.”
The note proved a stratagem: by telling the British to expect a frontal attack, and beginning to launch one, the Ghilzai managed to surprise the British when their main force appeared to the rear, where some of Shah Shuja’s newly recruited Hazirbash cavalry had been bribed to let them within the camp:
That night Sale’s brigade lost a further eighty-nine men, as well as much of their baggage and ammunition, which was removed to the Ghilzai fortress in Tezin on ninety of the Company’s own camels. The expedition which was supposed to chastise the Ghilzais turned out to have a very different victim to that intended: in the narrow web of the mountain passes, the spider had become the fly; and the hunters found to their surprise and discomfort that they had now become the prey.
By a combination of sniping from cover and well-timed rushes on the baggage train and rearguard, “they again slew this day a great many more of our men, and carried off no inconsiderable portion of booty; of which it would be hard to say whether our people grudged them most the nine new hospital tents, which with all the furniture they appropriated, or certain kegs containing not fewer than thirty thousand rounds of musket ammunition.”
Few now believed the negotiations would do more than buy time, while some such as Henry Durand thought it a huge mistake. “It was a time for action,” he wrote. “Fighting Bob,” he believed, should have been “striking not talking.”74 But the payment did allow Sale to send the wounded back to Kabul with an armed escort in order to warn the authorities there of the scale of the uprising, and for the rest of the column to head on down towards Jalalabad at speed.
Here Sale and his officers paused to rest and recover for ten days—though, as the chaplain was quick to emphasise, it was a sober moment and “nobody indulged to excess in the use of spirituous liquors.” It was here that what remained of Macnaghten’s new Afghan regiment, the Janbaz, “broke out in open mutiny and tried to kill the English officers … It was now evident that the whole country had risen against us, and it was not a mere rising of the Ghilzai chiefs to get their subsidies restored.”
Rumours were beginning to arrive of heavy fighting in the passes behind them and around Kabul itself. So a Council of War was convened to decide the best course of action. Rather than keep going on to India, or return to Kabul, Sale and his officers decided to continue the remaining thirty-five miles downhill to Jalalabad, refortify the town and wait to see what happened next. Though no one was yet aware of it, this decision would change the course of the war.
Broadfoot got to work rebuilding the fortifications on the afternoon of their arrival. Breaches in the curtain were filled, parapets and loopholes constructed, and ten artillery pieces were raised on to the bastions and prepared for firing. Foraging parties were sent out to gather food and fodder, and obstacles blocking the line of fire from the walls began to be demolished. The repairs were made just in time.
Most alarmed of all was Eldred Pottinger in Charikar, who was now so certain that his small garrison of Gurkhas was about to be massacred that he rode back to Kabul to reason with Elphinstone and Macnaghten in person. Elphinstone sat looking panicked, then dithered and fussed, but failed to send him any concrete help, least of all the cavalry and artillery Pottinger had desperately requested, saying that all the troops were needed in Kabul. Macnaghten meanwhile said he did not have time to see Pottinger, and mocked his written report:
Macnaghten seemed by now doggedly determined not to allow any news, however dire, to ruffle his complacency. This was all the more remarkable as the trouble was clearly spreading to Kabul, where the British were now being openly insulted by shopkeepers in the street, “and the whole demeanour of the people,” as Colin Mackenzie noted, “was that of anticipated triumph in the destruction of the English.”
Part of the reason for this obstinacy was that he had just received the news that Lord Auckland had rewarded him for his Afghan labours with the most agreeable post the East India Company could offer a civil servant: the governorship of Bombay, complete with its beautiful Palladian Residence on Malabar Hill.
The man who was most likely to be appointed to pick up the reins after Macnaghten’s departure was Alexander Burnes. For months he had being increasingly sidelined by the Envoy, with little to do but to mug up on his favourite authors.
Yet the truth was that Burnes’s many talents had largely been wasted during the occupation. He knew Afghanistan better than any other British official or traveller with the single exception of Masson, he loved and understood the country, and his political instincts were as shrewd as his judgement was usually impeccable. His Achilles heel was his ambition, which had led him to get involved with an entirely unnecessary invasion and a mishandled occupation, both run by a foolish martinet who neither listened to nor respected his ideas.
Like his rival Vitkevitch, Burnes was a brave and resourceful young man. Like Vitkevitch, he was an outsider who by dint of hard work moved himself centre-stage in the greatest geopolitical struggle of his age; but both had found, in different ways, that in the end they remained pawns in the wider imperial game.
Burnes’s response was instead to throw himself into the pursuit of pleasure. In this way he made himself the hate figure he remains to this day in Afghanistan; and it was this, according to the Afghan accounts, that sparked the final fatal explosion in Kabul.
In the end, however, it was agreed that they would wait for an incident of bad conduct on the part of the occupiers to justify rising up in insurrection. On the evening of 1 November, in the first week of Ramazan (Ramadan), the leading sardars found the flashpoint they were waiting for. “It so happened, by God’s will, that that night a slave girl of Abdullah Khan Achakzai ran away from his house to the residence of Alexander Burnes,” wrote Mirza ‘Ata.
fucking a slave girl isn’t worth the ritual bath that follows it: but we have to put a stop right here and now, otherwise these English will ride the donkey of their desires into the field of stupidity, to the point of having all of us arrested shortly and deported into foreign imprisonment.
