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

by William Dalrymple

Burnes also noted that, despite the massive army of occupation garrisoning the Peshawar valley, the Sikhs had found it very difficult to rule the rebellious Pashtuns who inhabited the area and that there had been so many tribal uprisings, assassinations and acts of insurrection in and around the city that the occupation of Peshawar had become a major drain on Sikh resources.

a “strict economy” was to be observed, and Burnes’s mission was to travel with far less pomp and many fewer presents than that of Elphinstone: Burnes in fact had only a single pistol and one telescope to give to Dost Mohammad. In the light of lingering Afghan memories of the lavishness of the gifts given by the last Embassy to Shah Shuja, these instructions did not bode well for the success of Burnes’s mission.

The Battle of Jamrud on 30 April 1837 was the climax of three years’ growing hostility between the Afghans and the Sikhs over Ranjit Singh’s occupation of Peshawar. As soon as he had dealt with Shah Shuja’s invasion of 1834, Dost Mohammad had turned his attention to trying to liberate the Afghan winter capital from Sikh control. Whether out of piety or strategy, or a mixture of the two, in February 1835 he had himself awarded the Islamic title of Amir al-Muminin, the Commander of the Faithful,

The declaration of jihad against the Sikhs brought with it a useful legitimisation of Dost Mohammad’s seizure of power.

he could now justify his rule by appeal to a higher Qur’anic authority, and the fulfilment of his duty as a good Muslim to wage holy war against the infidel and so—in theory—usher in a millennial Islamic Golden Age of purity and godliness. At the same time Dost Mohammad used the leadership of the jihad as a way to claim leadership of all the Afghan peoples,

In the event, the rabble were no match for the beautifully drilled and disciplined troops of the Khalsa and succeeded in doing little except provoking a massacre of the Muslim citizens of Peshawar by an angry Sikh soldiery.

Two months later, soon after Ranjit Singh had withdrawn his elite European-trained force, the Fauj-i-Khas, so that they could be guards of honour at a royal wedding in Lahore, 20,000 Afghan cavalry descended the Khyber, and on 30 April succeeded in surrounding Hari Singh near the walls of the new fort at Jamrud.

Akbar Khan encountered Hari Singh. Without recognising each other, they exchanged blows and after much thrusting and parrying, Akbar Khan won out, knocking Hari Singh to the ground, and killing him. With their commander dead and the army of Islam rolling towards them like a tide in flood, the Sikhs abandoned the field. They were pursued by the sardars as far as Jamrud Fort where they barricaded themselves inside.”

it was a huge boost to the prestige of Dost Mohammad and the first great victory of Akbar Khan, demonstrating how far he had inherited his father’s military talents. From this point he would increasingly become the most formidable Afghan commander.

For a time, it was unclear whether the hostilities would block his route into Afghanistan and bring about the cancellation of his mission. Either way, he realised the fighting would put the British in the awkward position of trying to remain allies of both sides in a war.

Masson, who had for many years known Afghanistan intimately and who was a confidant of Dost Mohammad, was much less enamoured by his ambitious and self-promoting celebrity visitor.

The second man to enter Burnes’s camp was a much grander figure, and arrived that evening on elephant-back preceded by a “fine body of Afghan cavalry.” This was Dost Mohammad’s increasingly powerful fourth son, Mohammad Akbar Khan, whose path to fame had just begun when he had killed Hari Singh two months earlier.

such was his beauty that Akbar Khan seems to have become something of a sex symbol in 1830s Kabul. Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, the author of the Akbarnama, the first epic poem written in his honour, gives over several pages to his wedding-night athletics with his lovely bride, the daughter of Mohammad Shah Ghilzai, “this houri of paradise, as bright as the sun, who put the moon and stars to shame.”

Yet for all his glamour, Akbar was clearly a complex and intelligent man, more emotionally volatile than Dost Mohammad, and also more aesthetically sensitive.

He closely questioned Vigne on the taste of pork, forbidden to all good Muslims, and was “so far from being a bigot that he several times ordered his servant to hand me water from his own cup,” at a time when most Afghans refused to eat or drink with Christians.

Dost Mohammad may have been impressed by Burnes and vice versa, but there is evidence from a variety of Afghan sources even at this early stage that not all of his courtiers, nobles and chiefs were pleased by the growing friendship of their Amir with the Firangi (foreign) infidel.

In the Afghan sources, Burnes is always depicted as a devilishly charming but cunning deceiver, a master of zarang, of flattery and treachery—an interesting inversion of British stereotypes of the devious Oriental.

The women of that land Are of such delectable beauty One could slay a hundred Firangis With the power of her buttocks”

This was apparently not just the fertile imagination of the Maulana at work—Masson also notes with some anxiety that Burnes had shown far more interest in the women of Kabul than was wise, especially for an accredited diplomat.

Burnes was not to know that, even as he wrote, several hundred miles to the south his mission was being sabotaged so as to make it almost impossible for him to reconcile the two warring partners. Still less was he to suspect as yet that the man who would effectively kill off his Embassy was the very same man who had despatched it, the new Governor General, Lord Auckland.

George Eden, Lord Auckland, was a clever and capable but somewhat complacent and detached Whig nobleman. He was of a delicate build, with a thin, boyish face, narrow lips and long, elegant fingers. A confirmed bachelor of fifty-one, but looking a decade younger, he made little secret of how bored he was with the bourgeois civil servants and obsequious Indian rajahs he was forced to mix with.

he took the job of governor general as it was the best administrative job available for him, though he knew or cared little for Indian history or civilisation, and on arrival did remarkably little to illuminate himself about either.

Reliance on his staff had made him popular at the Admiralty, his previous job, but it proved disastrous when he moved to India. Here, sent to rule a world of which he was completely ignorant, he quickly fell into the hands of a group of bright but inexperienced and hawkishly Russophobic advisers led by William Macnaghten—the man who had covertly supported...

Thoby Pr...

What is it with the British?

On his leisurely journey “Up the Country,” Auckland was to be accompanied by his two waspish but adoring unmarried sisters, Emily and Fanny Eden, his pompous and pernickety Political Secretary, Macnaghten, and various other viceregal officials, attachés, wives and babies as well as Macnaghten’s notoriously bossy and demanding wife, Frances, and her entourage of a Persian cat, a rosy parakeet and five attending ayahs.

The scale of the Governor General’s establishment underlined the oddness of Auckland’s position. As his nephew and Military Secretary, Captain William Osborne, remarked, “Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor General of British India. A private English gentleman, and the servant of a joint stock company [that is, the East India Company], during the brief period of his government is the deputed sovereign of the greatest empire in the world; the ruler of a hundred million men.

From the very beginning, Lord Auckland, his sisters and their guests suffered from an enervating imperial ennui born of a patronising—if mildly amused—disdain for the distant colony through which they were forced to pass.

Afghanistan was a country Auckland knew or cared about even less than he knew or cared about India, and from the beginning he showed a marked antipathy to its most powerful ruler, Dost Mohammad Khan. Dost Mohammad, by contrast, had gone out of his way to court the new Governor General.

He then concluded, in words that his actions would soon disprove, “My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British government to interfere in the affairs of other independent nations, and indeed it does not immediately occur to me how the interference of my government could be exercised for your benefit.”

All Auckland’s information on Afghanistan came through Macnaghten and Wade, neither of whom had ever visited the country. The advice of Burnes, whose despatches from Kabul gave a more accurate assessment of the real balance of power in the country, could only reach the Governor General heavily filtered through the double distorting lens of Macnaghten’s summaries and Wade’s patronising commentaries, both of which tended to undermine all that Burnes was suggesting.

In this way, Wade and Macnaghten kept assuring Lord Auckland that Burnes was simply wrong in his assessment of Dost Mohammad: the Amir, they insisted, was an unpopular and illegitimate usurper, with only the most tenuous hold on power.

In reality, none of this had ever been the case and was now less true than ever—Dost Mohammad had established his suzerainty from the Hindu Kush to the Khyber, had got his half-brothers in Kandahar to accept his leadership after saving them from Shah Shuja’s siege and, to crown it all, had now been declared the Amir and the leader of the Afghan jihad.

Burnes was on the spot, and clearly in a better position to weigh up the relative strengths of the different powers than any other British official, but Macnaghten had never liked the ambitious young Scot, whom he believed to be naive, inexperienced and over-promoted.

In addition to these distortions, neither Wade nor Macnaghten seemed to have briefed Lord Auckland on how recently Ranjit Singh had occupied Peshawar, or how central its importance was to the Afghans, who still regarded it as their second capital. As a result, Auckland took the factually inaccurate position that the town was unequivocally a Sikh possession, and that Dost Mohammad was being unreasonable and aggressive in wanting it back.

Auckland also began to take on Wade’s view that it was in the interests of the Sikhs, and therefore of the British, for Afghanistan to remain fragmented, rather than to help Dost Mohammad consolidate his rule and accept him as an ally.

Nor did Lord Auckland believe, contrary to all the evidence, that Herat was in danger from the Persians or that the Barakzais were likely to make an alliance with the Shah of Persia.

It was a comprehensive misreading of the situation: by underrating Dost Mohammad’s power, Auckland and his hawkish advisers misunderstood both the reality of his steadily growing hold on Afghanistan south of the Hindu Kush and the balance of power between the Sikhs and the Afghans. They also underestimated how cleverly Count Simonitch, exceeding his instructions from Moscow, was manoeuvring to bring the entire region within the Russian-led, anti-British coalition that the Russian envoy hoped would soon encompass not just Persia and Afghanistan but also Bukhara and Khiva.

To add to Burnes’s problems, Lord Auckland felt no sense of urgency. He was much more concerned with the trials of his viceregal camping trip and the famine in Hindustan, whose victims were now floating down the Ganges past his boat every morning.

In an effort to change Auckland’s mind, Burnes sent a long report on “the Political State of Kabul” to Calcutta towards the end of November. In this he argued persuasively for the consolidation and extension of Dost Mohammad’s power as the surest means of shutting out the Russians from Afghanistan.

Moreover, Auckland was now becoming increasingly entrenched in his oddly rabid hostility towards Dost Mohammad who, he wrote to London, “ought to be satisfied that he is allowed to remain at peace and is saved from actual invasion.

The Persian army was now reported to be moving in its full strength to invest the mighty Timurid walls of Herat.

This latest Persian attack had been several years in the planning, and did not in fact need any Russian pressure or encouragement. But the size of the army sent to take the capital of western Afghanistan—over 30,000 strong—and the presence in the Persian camp of a large number of Russian military advisers, mercenaries and deserters working for the Persians still came as a shock to Burnes.

Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger was the nephew of the spymaster of Bhuj, and Burnes’s former boss, Sir Henry Pottinger. His presence in Herat was probably more than fortuitous, and provided a stream of much-needed information for the British during the siege.

Here the siege is seen as a titanic struggle between the two peoples, one Sunni, one Shia; and the fortitude of the Herati defenders, subject to the most horrific privations, was depicted as an epic of Afghan bravery and resistance. Indeed two of the most important Afghan historians living at the time devote almost as many pages to the siege of Herat as they do to the British invasion which followed it.

According to these Afghan sources, as soon as news arrived that the Persian army was heading towards Herat, Shah Kamran ordered grain and forage to be brought in, and the fruit trees in the gardens outside the walls to be cut down.

By 13 November, the advance guard of the Persian army had arrived outside the border fortress of Ghorian. The Herati chronicler Riyazi in the ‘Ayn al-Waqayi recorded how the Persians captured the mighty castle in less than twelve hours with the aid of their British-trained artillery:

A few days later, the first divisions of the enormous 30,000-strong Persian army marched along the valley of the Hari Rud towards the walls of Herat, easily driving off the squadrons of cavalry sent out against them. “A skirmish was fought and many men died,” wrote Fayz Mohammad, “but when the vast numbers of the main Iranian army hove into view, the Heratis were unable to continue the fight and retired into the city

On the morning of Tuesday, 19 December, two days after this unwelcome news had reached Kabul, Burnes and his assistants were looking out of their Bala Hisar residence, waiting for a messenger to bring in the latest despatches from India. Burnes had been hoping that Auckland would change his position on Afghanistan after he had read his long report, and he desperately wanted to be able to give Dost Mohammad some good news. The influence of his enemy, the newly arrived Persian envoy, was growing daily stronger since the news of the encirclement of Herat, and he knew he badly needed to boost British popularity and prestige.

“We are in a mess here,” wrote Burnes to his brother-in-law, Major Holland, shortly afterwards. “Herat is besieged and may fall, and the Emperor of Russia has sent an Envoy to Kabul to offer Dost Mohammad Khan money to fight Ranjit Singh!! I could not believe my eyes or ears, but Captain Vitkevitch, for that is the agent’s name, arrived here with a blazing letter, three feet long, and sent immediately to pay his respects to myself.

Burnes then added: “I never again saw Mr. Vitkevitch, although we exchanged sundry messages of ‘high consideration,’ for I regret to say I found it impossible to follow the dictates of my personal feelings of friendship towards him, as the public service required the strictest watch.”89 This was no understatement: Burnes had already begun to intercept his dining companion’s letters back to Teheran and St. Petersburg, and vice versa.