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

by William Dalrymple

On 1 December 1832, William Fraser, who had recently been appointed the Resident in Delhi, began to receive reports from his informers in the city that there were Afghans in the bazaars buying up very large quantities of arms and ammunition. It was unclear whether these sales were legitimate, or what they were for, so Fraser had the dealers arrested and their purchases impounded. He then wrote to Calcutta to ask what should be done with the men.

Shah Shuja was preparing for a military expedition to Afghanistan with the direct, if secret, sanction of Bentinck himself.

the Persian threat to Herat, and Ellenborough’s determination to resist the Russians, had changed political calculations. Bentinck now ruled that, while the British official position would remain one of studied neutrality, Shah Shuja would be allowed discreet help to mount his expedition, including a four-month advance on his pension—a total of 16,000 rupees.

Macnaghten, by contrast, had absolutely no doubts about his own abilities, and instead rather fancied his facility for political intrigue. He also believed he knew Afghanistan far better than he actually did, although he had never been anywhere near the region and all he knew came from his reading of Wade’s despatches.

So was born a dangerously contradictory and two-faced British policy towards Afghanistan, with Burnes making friendly overtures to Dost Mohammad and the Barakzais, even as another arm of the government was secretly backing an uprising against them.

By mid-May, Shuja had crossed the Indus and entered Shikarpur without opposition. He then taxed the town’s bankers, filled his coffers with their coin and began drilling his troops. Six months later, on 9 January 1834, Campbell’s troops saw off an attack by a force of Baluchi tribesmen sent by the Amirs of Sindh to arrest Shuja.

For Shuja, success now bred success. A month later, when he finally set off northwards, his army had grown to 30,000 men and the Shah was in good spirits.

In April Shuja marched his troops through the Bolan Pass, and as agreed Ranjit Singh moved north-west from Lahore, the armies of the Sikh Khalsa providing a diversion by crossing the Indus at Attock and taking Peshawar. The troops of the Barakzais, divided between the two fronts, could offer effective opposition to neither invading army.

Only in May 1834, when Shuja’s troops finally marched into the Kandahar oasis, did his run of luck begin to fail. The Barakzais had had time to prepare for his arrival and, by the time Shuja marched up to the city walls, supplies had been laid in and the city’s defences were ready to withstand a lengthy siege.

Now they tried to scale the Fort walls at night with scaling ladders. These they carried in furtive silence in the dark to below the walls, and waited for sleep to disarm the watchers within. Then they planned to erect the ladders and storm the unsuspecting citadel. Sleep however attacked the royal besiegers first

After two months, the siege had become a stalemate, with both sides holding firm in their positions. It was at this point that news arrived that Dost Mohammad was approaching with 20,000 Barakzai troops from Kabul to aid his besieged half-brothers within the walls. Although Shuja had great numerical advantage—some estimates talk of his army having now swelled to 80,000—he was anxious that Dost Mohammad might cut off the water supply to his troops, so he fell back from his safely entrenched position in front of the city walls to a well-watered belt of gardens along the Arghandab River to the north-east.

Among the captured baggage lying strewn in the gardens of Kandahar were letters of support from Wade, proving British complicity in the failed coup. Wade tried to put a good face on it all, saying that it was a result no one could have anticipated; but it now looked more and more as if Burnes had been right about the popularity and efficiency of the Barakzais, and that Wade had all along been backing a serial loser in Shah Shuja.

“There is now no possible chance for Shuja’s restoration,” he said, “unless an ostensible demonstration of Russian diplomacy should transpire at Kabul.”93 If the Russians were to make a direct move on Afghanistan with Barakzai assistance, then Shuja might yet find himself indispensable to British ambitions.

The Shikarpuri Sindhi money-lending community had long specialised in financing wars and dealing in arms, and the tradition continues to this day: the most notable Shikarpuris in this business today are the Hinduja brothers, who, among many other such deals, were allegedly involved in the controversial sale of the Bofors guns to Rajiv Gandhi’s government in the 1980s.

It is a book written by James Burnes, A Sketch of the History of the Knight’s Templars (1840), that first links the Freemasons to the Templars and Roslyn Chapel near Edinburgh. It is the ultimate progenitor of a wash of popular nonsense like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.

The low, barren desert hills on the disputed borderlands between Persia and Afghanistan are no place to get lost at night. Even today it is wild, arid, remote country, haunted only by soaring hawks, packs of winter-wolves and opium smugglers working the old caravan routes.

During this time he had become fascinated by the trilingual inscriptions carved on the orders of the Achaemenid King Darius at nearby Behistan, the Rosetta Stone of ancient Persia. Every evening he would clamber his way up the near-vertical rock face, or even have himself lowered in a laundry basket, to take rubbings, then return to his tent to labour away into the night in an ultimately successful attempt to decode the Persian cuneiform script on the cliff wall.

“I was not anxious to accost these strangers,” Rawlinson later reported, “but on cantering past them, I saw, to my astonishment, men in Cossack dresses, and one of my attendants recognised among the party, a servant of the Russian mission.”2 Rawlinson knew immediately he had stumbled onto something. There was no good reason for a party of armed Cossacks to be on these remote desert tracks heading for the Afghan frontier, and at this particular moment there was every reason for a British intelligence officer to be suspicious of any Russian activity in these crucial border marches.

Within a few months of their arrival, Rawlinson and his party had realised they were being closely watched by the Russians. “A Russian officer, an aide de camp of Baron Von Rosen [the Russian Viceroy of the Caucasus], arrived in camp today,” Rawlinson had reported in October 1834. “He was despatched by his General to pay his respects to the Ameer.

The cold war between Russia and Britain in 1830s Persia had turned particularly chilly in March 1833 with the arrival in Teheran of the suave Count Ivan Simonitch. Like the French officers who had come to the court of Ranjit Singh, Simonitch was a Napoleonic veteran who was looking for wider horizons after Waterloo and the exile of Napoleon.

Since the arrival of Rawlinson and his military mission, Simonitch had managed to gain the Shah’s confidence, and achieve far more access and influence than the stolid MacNeill, the former Legation doctor, originally from the Outer Hebrides, who proved no match for Simonitch in terms either of sophistication or of strategy.

By 1837 Simonitch had helped nudge the newly crowned Shah to use his British-armed troops to make yet another attack on the disputed city of Herat, offering him a lure of 50,000 gold tomans and the remittance of debt, in return for the Shah’s promise to allow the establishment of a Russian Legation in Herat once the conquest was completed. It was a brilliant stroke—encouraging the Shah’s ambitions in such a way that they threatened British interests in India—and turned the British-trained regiments directly against the interests of their trainers and suppliers.

MacNeill was left with no alternative but to sit in his Teheran study and scribble an alarmist polemic which he published anonymously as The Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East. “The only nation in Europe which attempts to aggrandize itself at the expense of its neighbours is Russia,” he fumed.

This spirited diatribe ignored the obvious fact that the expansion of British possessions in India had continued without interruption throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, gobbling up far more land and overturning many more thrones than anything achieved by Russia; but the book was nevertheless well received and widely read in London, and added to the growing certainty in Westminster that a major clash with Russia was looming in Persia and Afghanistan.

Recently, MacNeill’s spies at the Russian Legation in Teheran had passed on confusing intelligence—“absurd stories about a Muscovite prince” who was said to be expected on the Iranian frontier at the head of a body of 10,000 men who would assist the Persians in their siege of Herat. The details of the intelligence sounded suspect; but they seemed to hint at the existence of some Russian move on Afghanistan via Persia.

Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the Great Game, Kim, contains a celebrated scene in which the Raj spymaster, Colonel Creighton, trains Kim to remember detail by making him play the game subsequently known as Kim’s Game: being given a short period of time to memorise a tray of random objects, then to turn off the light, remove the tray, and make the student attempt to write a complete list of every detail.

“Bringing presents to me!” said the Shah in astonishment. “Why I have nothing to do with him; he is sent direct from the [Russian] Emperor to Dost Mohammad in Kabul, and I am merely asked to help him on his journey.”11

Rawlinson understood immediately the importance of what the Shah had just told him: it was the first proof of what British intelligence had long feared: that the Russians were trying to establish themselves in Afghanistan by forging an alliance with Dost Mohammad and the Barakzais, and to assist them and the Persians in extinguishing the last bastion of Shah Shuja’s Sadozai dynasty in Herat. Rawlinson also realised he needed to get back to Teheran as quickly as possible with this information.

Later in life, Rawlinson would be famous for two things, firstly for deciphering cuneiform, and secondly, along with Arthur Conolly, for coining the phrase “the Great Game.” But now it was his skill as a rider which proved most useful. He was, after all, the son of a racehorse breeder in Newmarket and had grown up in the saddle; he was also a man of enormous physical strength: “six feet tall, with broad shoulders, strong limbs and excellent muscles and sinews.”

MacNeill in turn immediately sent an express messenger to Lord Palmerston in London and another to the new Governor General of India, Lord Auckland, in Calcutta. “The Russians have formally opened their diplomatic intercourse with Kabul,” he wrote. “Captain Vicovich or Beekavitch, alias Omar Beg, a soonee Mahommedan subject of Russia, has been accredited, I am informed, as chargé d’affair[e]s to Ameer Dost Mohammed Khan.”

the mysterious officer was not heading to India. His mission was to undermine British interests in Afghanistan and forge an alliance between the Tsar and Dost Mohammad.

One or two of Rawlinson’s suppositions about the officer were correct, but most were mistaken. He was not a Muslim, nor was he a Russian, nor was he ADC to the Governor of the Russian frontier post of Orenburg, nor was his name at birth either Beekavitch or Vitkevitch. Instead the officer was in fact a Roman Catholic Polish nobleman born Jan Prosper Witkiewicz in Vilnius, today the capital of Lithuania.

Witkiewicz and two others were stripped of their titles and rank in the nobility and sent to different fortresses on the Kazakh steppe as common soldiers, without the right to promotion. They were forbidden all further contact with their families for ten years, and sent off on the long march south on foot and in chains.15

Soon Vitkevitch had memorised the entire Koran by heart, and began inviting the nomadic Kazakh elders back to his lodgings, giving them tea, pilaf and lamb, and learning from them their customs and manners as well as the rich idiom of their language.

Before long, Vitkevitch was being used as an interpreter, then later was sent out alone on missions through the Kazakh steppe.

He had found his career, but only at the cost of joining the Russian imperial machine he had grown up hating, and faithfully serving the state that had destroyed his life, and about which he presumably still harboured the most bitter feelings.

If Humboldt had begun Vitkevitch’s rise, the person who did more than anyone else to continue it was, quite unknowingly, Alexander Burnes. On his return from his expedition to Bukhara, Burnes had published his Travels into Bokhara, and found himself an overnight celebrity. He was invited to London to meet both Lord Ellenborough and the King, was lionised by society hostesses and gave standing-room-only lectures to the Royal Geographical Society, which presented him with its Gold Medal. On the publication of the French translation of his book soon afterwards, Voyages dans le Bokhara was again a bestseller and Burnes...

Ironically, it seems to have been Burnes’s writings that first provoked Russian interest in Afghanistan and Bukhara, not least to head off British intrigues so close to the Russian frontier. As so often in international affairs, hawkish paranoia about distant threats can create the very monster that is most feared.

Twice, Vitkevitch was sent off to Bukhara. The first time he travelled in disguise with two Kirghiz traders and made the journey in only seventeen days through deep snow and over the frozen Oxus.

On his second visit, in January 1836, Vitkevitch went openly as a Russian officer, to request the release of several Russian merchants who had been detained by the Amir of Bukhara. On arrival in the caravan city he recorded that he was immediately asked: “Do you know Iskander? I thought they meant Alexander the Great but they were, in fact, talking of Alexander Burnes.”

After defeating Shah Shuja outside Kandahar in 1834, Dost Mohammad had discovered letters from Wade encouraging the Afghan chiefs to support the restoration of the Sadozai monarchy with Shuja at the helm. Britain’s secret aid for the Shah had come as a great shock to Dost Mohammad, who had believed that he and the Governor General were on excellent terms.

First, however, he had to fight his away out of Bukhara, as the Amir had abruptly placed sentries around his lodgings, confiscated his camels and refused him permission to leave.

Over the months that followed, Vitkevitch and Hussein Ali made their way slowly through the steppe to Orenburg, and then on across the length of Russia to St. Petersburg. Hussein Ali was struck down with dysentery on the road, but Vitkevitch nursed and encouraged him, using the enforced periods of rest to learn fluent Dari from his companion.

News of Mirza Hussein Ali’s mission had been greeted with enormous excitement by all the officials concerned with the incipient Great Game. Count Simonitch had written from the Teheran Legation urging that this opportunity should not be lost. British influence in Persia was already on the wane, he wrote. Now the chance had come to include Afghanistan in a tripartite alliance of Russia, Persia and “Kabulistan.”

On arrival in St. Petersburg, the letter from Dost Mohammad was closely examined and proved to be all that was hoped. Dost Mohammad wrote that the British were on the verge of conquering all of India, and that he alone was capable of stopping their advance, if only he were to be supplied with arms and money in the way that the Russians were doing with the Persians:

Vitkevitch’s notes for his journey south were burned just before his mysterious death, but Captain Blaramberg’s memoirs survive.

For here Simonitch informed Vitkevitch of two pieces of intelligence which greatly excited the Pole. The first—which later turned out to be false—was that Mirza Hussein Ali’s mission had already aroused the suspicion of British intelligence, which, said Simonitch, had tailed the two travellers all the way from Kabul.

None of this was true—the British were at this stage entirely ignorant of the Afghan mission to the Tsar—but in order to safeguard the mission Vitkevitch was provided by the Embassy with a Cossack escort to look after him as he headed on to Nishapur and hence to the Shah’s camp at Herat. It was this escort that did finally alert British intelligence—in the person of Rawlinson—to the existence of Vitkevitch’s mission.

The second piece of news was even more to Vitkevitch’s taste. For Simonitch’s spies in Afghanistan had just informed him that Vitkevitch would not be alone in Kabul. His British counterpart Alexander Burnes was heading in the same direction, on his second mission to Central Asia.

In the three years since his conquest of Peshawar at the time of Shah Shuja’s attack on Kandahar in 1834, Ranjit Singh had moved half his army into the city, turning the former Durrani winter capital into a massive Punjabi barracks.