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

by William Dalrymple

There was, however, to be no compromise on the Shah’s ceremonial, and his durbar was to be maintained in its full theatrical entirety. Remarkably, thanks to the intervention of Ochterlony, the Company was prepared not just to tolerate this pantomime, but to finance it annually to the tune of 50,000 rupees.

The head of Shuja’s household was Mullah Shakur Ishaqzai—“a short, fat person,” wrote Harlan, “[whose] rotundity … was adequately finished by the huge turban characteristic of his class, encased in voluminous outline by a profusion of long thick hair which fell upon his shoulders in heavy sable silvered curls.” The curls were there for a purpose: to hide the absence of his ears, which had been removed at Shuja’s orders as a punishment for an earlier failure of courage on the field of battle.

many of the ears, tongues, noses and genitals of Shuja’s servants had been forfeited at different points, resulting in “an earless assemblage of mutes and eunuchs in the ex-king’s service.”

Moreover, Shuja was also ahead of his time in establishing a school for his dependants: by 1836 there were approximately 3,000 school-age males enrolled.

OK but whats with the castrating.

After the death of Ochterlony in 1825, the man who had to deal with such disputes was the new Ludhiana Agent, Captain Claude Martin Wade. Wade was a Bengal-born Persian scholar, and godson of the French adventurer Claude Martin, who had lent money to Wade’s impecunious father and after whom he was named.

His own despatches, however, paint a more complex picture: Wade was affable, certainly, but also shrewd, dry, penetrating and cynical. When crossed he could also be prickly and territorial, strongly resisting any attempts to break his monopoly on controlling British relations with both the Sikhs and Afghans.

Though the boundaries between news-writers, “intelligencers” and outright spies were very porous at this period, Wade was effectively one of the first two spymasters of what later generations would call the Great Game, that grand contest of imperial competition, espionage and conquest that engaged Britain and Russia until the collapse of their respective Asian empires, and whose opening moves were being played at this period.45

Perhaps his most useful correspondent was a remarkable British deserter, originally known as James Lewis, who had fled the Company’s service and set himself up in Kabul under the assumed name of Charles Masson.

Masson was a keenly inquisitive Londoner who, after deserting his regiment and faking his own death during the siege of Bharatpur in 1826, had walked through north India, crossed the Indus and explored Afghanistan on foot, living like a wandering dervish. Armed with a copy of Arrian’s Life of Alexander the Great, he became the first westerner to explore Afghanistan’s archaeology.

This growing intelligence network was developed at a time of rapidly changing geopolitics. The Napoleonic threat was now over. Instead, by the 1820s it was Russia that kept the Company’s hawks fretting over their glasses of madeira.

“Our policy in Asia must follow one course only,” he wrote in his diary, “to limit the power of Russia.” Later he added: “Four months from leaving Khiva the enemy might be at Kabul.

Ellenborough, the son of Warren Hastings’s defence lawyer, was a brilliant but difficult and unappealing man, whose physical appearance, dominated by what one observer called “his horrid grey locks,” was so distasteful that George IV was alleged to have claimed that the very sight of Ellenborough made him sick.

He suffered a crushing humiliation when his first wife, the beautiful but wayward Jane Digby, left him and took a succession of lovers, first the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg, with whom Ellenborough fought a duel, then in quick succession the kings of both Bavaria and Greece, and an Albanian general, before ending up happily married to a Bedouin sheikh in Palmyra.

Though Ellenborough exaggerated the threat to the British dominions in India—St. Petersburg had in reality no plans to attack the British there—it was certainly true that Russia had recently shown itself extremely aggressive in its dealings with Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Persia.

Only a year after Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Moscow, the Russian artillery had massacred Fatteh Ali Shah Qajar’s Persian army, and proclaimed the “liberation” of the Eastern Christians of Armenia and Georgia.

This turned out to be only the first of a long series of Ottoman and Persian defeats which marked the Russian army’s relentless advance southwards.49 To make matters worse, the British had failed to come to the aid of their Persian allies, so leaving the Persians to face the Russians alone.

Russia was simultaneously inflicting defeats on the Turks so damaging that the Duke of Wellington believed they marked a “death blow to the independence of the Ottoman Porte and the forerunner of the extinction of its power.”51 By the end of the 1820s it seemed only a matter of time before the Russians seized both Teheran and Constantinople, turning Persia and Turkey into vast Tsarist protectorates.

In Chechnya and Daghestan, the Russians were conducting a series of genocidal punitive expeditions during which they sacked villages, killed the women and children, cut down the forests and destroyed the crops.

Jesus

Russia’s stated intention to re-create the old Byzantine Empire on the ruins of that of the Ottomans made such schemes appear perfectly plausible, at least to the foreign-policy hawks.

When in 1823 the Himalayan explorer William Moorcroft managed to intercept a letter from the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode, to Ranjit Singh, it seemed to confirm all the hawks’ worst fears. These fears, and the political paranoia they generated, triggered a wave of Russophobia in the British and British Indian press, where Russia increasingly came to be depicted as a barbaric and despotic menace to liberty and civilisation.

This was given momentum by the publication of Colonel De Lacy Evans’s overwrought polemic On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India. The book sketched out a scenario whereby 60,000 Russian troops could march across the Hindu Kush, take Herat, then appear at the base of the Khyber Pass and sweep all before them.

there were still only a handful of Russians in Central Asia and none within a thousand miles of Bukhara, let alone Kabul. Yet the book was widely read in political circles in London and, although the Colonel had never been to India or even to the region, this did not stop his alarmist text going on “to become the virtual Bible” of a generation of Russophobes.

Ellenborough’s despatch was to have far-reaching consequences. However much the threat it sought to counter was at this stage only a spectre of overheated British imaginations, by authorising a major new programme of intelligence-gathering in Central Asia it gave a huge new momentum to the Great Game—what the Russians would later call “the Tournament of Shadows”—and created an Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Himalayas where none had existed before.

From this point on a succession of young army officers and political agents began to be despatched to the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, sometimes in disguise, sometimes on “shooting leave,” to learn the languages and tribal customs, to map the rivers and passes, and to assess the difficulty of crossing the mountains and deserts.

More immediately, it radically changed the importance of Shah Shuja to the British: no longer was he an ex-monarch with over-grand ideas being maintained out of a sense of duty to a fallen ally; suddenly he was a major strategic asset against Russian encroachment and a key to British hopes of having an ally as ruler of Afghanistan.

One, led by Lieutenant Arthur Conolly, was designed to test out, on foot, the feasibility of reaching British India from Moscow. Conolly travelled to the Russian frontier at Orenburg, then changed into disguise and made his way through Bukhara and Afghanistan to Herat and the Indus. The journey turned out to be entirely feasible—at least for a determined individual—and much easier than Conolly had imagined, taking little over a year to complete at a leisurely pace.

The second expedition was a much more cunning and elaborate operation. This was to head in the opposite direction and gather information about the Indus, which Ellenborough believed could be made into the principal British transport route into Central Asia, just as the Ganges had earlier opened up the heart of Hindustan to British commerce.

British manufactures he imagined as the first line of defence against Russian advances—Scottish tweed and bundles of Manchester cottons would assist in transmitting enlightenment from Albion, and somehow stiffen Afghan resolve to resist the Tsarist tyranny of St. Petersburg. He therefore proposed to send a boat up the Indus manned by a team of disguised draughtsmen, cartographers and naval and military surveyors.

Given the Maharajah’s almost obsessive love of fine horses, Ellenborough agreed to the ruse of sending out from Suffolk a team of huge English dray horses, a breed never before seen in India.

Ellenborough settled instead on an unknown but ambitious twenty-five-year-old linguist and Pottinger protégé who had just won a prize for producing the first new map of the mouth of the Indus since Alexander Dalrymple’s celebrated chart of 1783. The name of this young officer was Alexander Burnes.

The horses, now used to life on the waves, seem to have taken it in their ample stride; but the carriage was badly damaged by seawater and was never quite the same again.

From this point the expedition made slow progress upstream for the 700 miles to Lahore. Burnes ducked potshots from the banks, while making detailed jottings on the landscape, peoples and politics of the country they were drifting past. Meanwhile his companions discreetly took soundings and bearings, measuring the flow of the river and preparing detailed maps and flow charts.

the expedition proved that the River Indus was navigable as far as Lahore in flat-bottomed boats. Barges would be able to take British manufactures as far as the Sikh capital, where they could be unloaded on the banks of the Ravi, and hence carried over the passes to Afghanistan and Central Asia on foot.

An angular, wiry and witty man of five foot nine, “spare and thin,” Burnes was ambitious and determined, and had a cool head in an emergency. His friends admired his imagination and his intellectual agility: one wrote that he was “sharp, quick and rapidly decisive, expressive and penetrating.” On this journey, he had ample opportunity to deploy both his intelligence and his wit, not least when he crossed the frontier to the Punjab and his lumbering carthorses caused a sensation among Ranjit Singh’s officials.

thirteen years since Shah Shuja had fled Ranjit’s enforced hospitality through the city sewers.

the Sikh leader had taken the opportunity presented by the Afghan civil war to absorb most of the lands of the Durrani Empire east of the Indus and build a remarkably rich, strong, centralised and well-governed Sikh state in its place. As well as training his remarkable army, Ranjit had also modernised his bureaucracy and ran a formidable intelligence network, whose reports were sometimes shared with Wade in Ludhiana.

Ranjit has frequently exhibited himself to his good people of Lahore with a Moslem public woman, indulging in the least innocent of sports with her on the back of an elephant

Shit thats just showing off

Burnes even tried some of Ranjit’s home-made hell-brew, a fiery distillation of raw spirit, crushed pearls, musk, opium, gravy and spices, two glasses of which was normally enough to knock out the most hardened British drinker, but which Ranjit recommended to Burnes as a cure for his dysentery.

One man who remained stolidly immune to Burnes’s attractions was Shah Shuja’s keeper, the Ludhiana spymaster Claude Wade. Wade was never happy with anyone who stepped on his territory, which he tended to guard as jealously as any Afghan mastiff protecting its patch.

Wade quickly came to see Burnes as a major threat to his position, and as the number and quality of Burnes’s reports from Kabul began to increase, Wade began annotating them with sarcastic and patronising comments as they passed through Ludhiana, gleefully pointing out any errors he spotted.

Aware that he was now suddenly the desk-bound Afghan expert who had never actually been to Afghanistan, Wade grew still more irritated with his dashing younger rival when Burnes began to come to very different conclusions about British interests in the region to those canvassed by Wade’s agency.

Wade’s views had, however, not kept up with the changing reality. Since Shuja’s last failed attempt to recapture his throne, Shah Mahmoud had died and Afghanistan had fallen almost completely under the sway of the Barakzai brothers; only in Herat did Shah Mahmoud’s son, Prince Kamran, hold out as a last bastion of Sadozai rule.

Burnes, coming to it with fresh eyes, saw things differently. On his way through Ludhiana to see the Governor General, in between saying goodbye to Ranjit Singh and setting off for Afghanistan, he had come to pay court to Shah Shuja and had been unimpressed.

A vigorous despot was, however, exactly what Burnes had found in Kabul. Burnes had met all the Barakzai brothers on his travels, but there was no question in his mind who was the most impressive. Dost Mohammad Khan was now the sole ruler of Kabul and Ghazni, and well on his way to being acknowledged as the head of the clan despite his youth and his elder brothers’ jealousy of his rise.

Burnes wrote that he had heard that in his youth Dost Mohammad had been wild and dissolute, but had become a reformed man now he had gained power. He had given up wine, taught himself to read and write, and affected piety and a simplicity of manner and dress.

Nor was it just that Burnes thought Dost Mohammad was personally impressive. He also saw him clearly as Britain’s best bet for attaining influence in Afghanistan. As far as he was concerned the Sadozais had had their day, and as Dost Mohammad was so well disposed towards the British it would be possible to form an alliance with “no great expenditure of public funds.”

This was at variance with everything Burnes was reporting from the ground; but Wade made his case in exactly the way he knew would win the argument in Calcutta. He waited for Burnes to head on north from Kabul, where he was to reconnoitre the unmapped routes over the Hindu Kush, and then he made his move.

Wade was assisted by events in western Afghanistan, where the last bastion of Sadozai rule in Herat was about to be besieged by the Persians. Since the British had failed to come to the assistance of the Persians in the 1826–7 Russo-Persian War, the Persians had concluded that it was wiser to hug their Russian enemy close than entertain any further flirtations with the British, who had proved unwilling to risk outright war with Russia in their support.

These fears were in reality erroneous—in 1832 the Russians were actually trying to dissuade the Persian Crown Prince Abbas Mirza from going ahead with the attack. Nevertheless, Wade now played on these fears, writing to the Governor General that “the opinion that Russia is connected with these events has gained an ascendency in the minds of men

Along with his letter, Wade sent the Governor General an illuminated Persian manuscript from Shah Shuja, in which he formally asked for British assistance in what he described as a bid to outflank the Russian interference in Afghanistan. He had buried his former differences with his old enemy Ranjit Singh, he wrote, and he now wanted to return to Afghanistan and lead the resistance to the new joint Russo-Persian threat.