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

by William Dalrymple

In the weeks that followed, Burnes put a brave face on his increasingly uncomfortable situation. He was well aware how close he was to having his mission unravel, especially as there was still no sign that Lord Auckland had grasped the seriousness of what was happening in Kabul, or that he had taken in how close he was to losing both Persia and Afghanistan to the Russians.

Burnes decided to seize the initiative. That same month he promised Rs 300,000 to the Kandahar Barakzais to help them defend themselves against the Persians if Herat fell and the Shah’s army marched into Afghanistan.

Burnes did still have one trump card: Dost Mohammad had made it very clear that he would have preferred an alliance with Britain to one with Russia, and had gone out of his way to demonstrate this. Vitkevitch was being kept virtually under house arrest in the haveli of Dost Mohammad’s Minister, Mirza Sami Khan, a much less grand lodging than that given to Burnes, and had still not yet been received by Dost Mohammad;

The astonishingly undiplomatic orders that Burnes eventually received from Lord Auckland in answer to his repeated pleas were written on 21 January and arrived in Kabul exactly a month later. At one stroke Auckland undid all of Burnes’s work and hopes.

In particular Auckland continued to show a complete lack of interest in the idea of an alliance with Kabul, as he made very clear in the letter he addressed to Dost Mohammad. Auckland told the Amir he must forget Peshawar and “relinquish the idea of governing that territory.” He must also “desist from all intercourse with Persia, Russia and Turkistan.” All the British would do in return, “which is all I think that can in justice be granted,” would be to persuade the Sikhs not to invade Kabul and so save the Amir “from a ruinous war.”

Finally there was a warning: if Dost Mohammad should continue to consort with Persia and Russia, the Indian government would support Sikh expansion into Afghanistan and “Captain Burnes … will retire from Kabul where his further stay cannot be advantageous.”

There was not the slightest hint of compromise to meet Dost Mohammad’s entirely legitimate anxieties and aspirations. Instead Auckland had actually hardened his position against the Amir, who was now being told he could not correspond with Persia and Russia except with British permission, that he must surrender all claims to Peshawar and Kashmir and, most unpalatable of all, beg Ranjit Singh for forgiveness.

In an apparent fit of absent-mindedness, Auckland had in a single stroke handed over to the Russians a great swathe of territory from Persia through Central Asia to Afghanistan—something Vitkevitch realised as soon as he came to hear of the letters’ contents.

Burnes was devastated. All his views had been ignored, and all his work destroyed. As Masson later reported, for a while Burnes “abandoned himself to despair. He bound his head with wet towels and handkerchiefs, and took to the smelling bottle. It was humiliating to witness such an exhibition, and the ridicule to which it gave rise.”

the conclusion was still inevitable. Intermediaries, including Nawab Jabar Khan, Dost Mohammad’s Anglophile brother who had sent his son to be educated by Wade in Ludhiana, attempted to bring the two sides together, but the insulting and patronising tone of Auckland’s letter, as much as its actual contents, had made a compromise impossible.

Events at Herat strengthened Russia’s hand, even as the British were undermining their own position. The siege of the town was tightening its grip.

In a sign of the way the winds were blowing, on 20 March Dost Mohammad’s Minister, Mirza Sami Khan, invited Vitkevitch as his guest of honour to celebrate Nauroz, the Persian New Year. Burnes was pointedly not invited until the party had already begun and then refused to go; but he asked his Indian assistant, Mohan Lal Kashmiri, to go in his stead.

Burnes relied on and trusted Mohan Lal completely, not least as he had shown himself willing to pay the ultimate price for his loyalty and friendship to Burnes: in December 1834 his own Kashmiri Pundit community had formally outcaste him as a result of his open expressions of religious scepticism and frequent caste violations.

Mohan Lal later wrote in English a remarkable book of his travels and a scholarly two-volume biography of Dost Mohammad.

Vitkevitch was on the verge of winning the contest for Kabul. On 23 March, Dost Mohammad went to see Burnes for the last time. He had lost hope, he told his friend.

Meanwhile, certainty was growing that the Persians and their Russian allies would soon take Herat and march on into Afghanistan; in response the ethnically Persian Qizilbash Shias of Kabul processed triumphantly through the Kabul streets with a new confidence.

In formal durbar, while Burnes sat alone in his rooms on the other side of the palace complex, Vitkevitch told the Amir that Russia did not recognise the Sikh conquests in Afghan territory and that in the eyes of Russia, Peshawar, Multan and Kashmir all still belonged de jure to Afghanistan.

In reality, it was not quite as bad as Afghan hindsight remembered it. The British were escorted out of town by the Amir’s youngest son, Ghulam Haidar Khan, and as a last gesture of personal friendship Dost Mohammad sent Mirza Sami Khan with three stallions which reached the party at the village of Butkhak, twelve miles from Kabul.

Before Jalalabad, Burnes boarded a raft which would take him down the Kabul River to Peshawar. By this stage Vitkevitch was already well on his way to Kandahar. This was the next stage in his mission, where he was to negotiate a treaty with Dost Mohammad’s Barakzai half-brothers, who, having been rejected by Auckland, had now also agreed to join Dost Mohammad, the Persians and the Russians in the siege of Herat.

Vitkevitch had achieved more for Russia than any of his superiors had even dared hope. His triumph over Burnes and the British was total.105 Shortly afterwards the Shah of Persia invested him with the Order of the Lion and the Sun.

Burnes realised that ironically the failure of his mission meant that the need for an Afghan expert was now greater than ever. He knew that war with Kabul was now possible, perhaps even probable, and despite all his misgivings about the direction British policy was taking, he was sufficiently ambitious still to want to be at the helm of whatever it was that Lord Auckland now had planned.

Even before Burnes reached Peshawar, the wheels of the Company machine were cranking into action to demonise Dost Mohammad and punish him for what Auckland interpreted as his defiance.

This arrogant prick

The existence of Simla was itself a comment on the astonishing complacency of the British in India at this period: for seven months of the year, the Company ruled one-fifth of mankind from a Himalayan village overlooking the borders of Tibet and connected to the outside world by a road little better than a goat path.

Here, over the two decades since the area had been “discovered” by Captain Charles Kennedy in 1822, the Company had begun building on a long, narrow, high-altitude Himalayan saddle a small fantasy England, a sort of early Victorian theme park of their own imagination, complete with Gothic churches, half-timbered cottages and Scots baronial mansions.

Here, finally, Lord Auckland brought himself to focus on events in Afghanistan in a way he had not previously. For the past two months he had seriously underestimated the threat posed by Vitkevitch and the Russians; now, reading the latest intelligence from Peshawar and Herat, he was belatedly plunged into a state of high anxiety and began to swing instead towards a major overreaction. One reason for this was the arrival of a series of apocalyptic despatches from MacNeill outside Herat, who was just about to withdraw from the Persian camp in protest at the way the Shah was ignoring and humiliating him and his staff, much to the delight of Count Simonitch.

In a letter to his masters in London Auckland put it more formally, writing that he was exploring the idea of “granting our aid, in concert with Ranjit Singh, to enable Shah Shuja ul-Mulk to re-establish his sovereignty in the Eastern division of Afghanistan, under engagements which shall conciliate the feelings of the Sikh ruler and bind the restored monarch to the support of our interests.”

For good measure, Auckland also sent several camel loads of alcohol for the bibulous Maharajah, who according to Emily “had requested George to send him samples of all the wines he had, which he did, but took the precaution of adding some whisky and cherry brandy, knowing what Ranjit Singh’s drinking habits are. The whisky he highly approved of, and he told Macnaghten that he could not understand why the Governor General gives himself the trouble of drinking seven or eight glasses of wine when one glass of whisky would do the same work.”

Such banter was partly a smokescreen to disarm the British and disguise from them the acute political intelligence Ranjit Singh always displayed in negotiation. This was something Osborne was perceptive enough to recognise:

Ranjit Singh’s negotiating skills soon made themselves apparent and before long the wily Sikh leader was running rings around the uptight Macnaghten. One colleague wrote that “poor Macnaghten should never have left the secretary’s office. He is ignorant of men, even to simplicity, and utterly incapable of forming and guiding administrative measures.

Auckland had not initially thought of committing British troops to the project of unseating Dost Mohammad: the fighting he hoped was all to be done by Ranjit Singh and Shah Shuja, and, as on Shuja’s last expedition, the British would provide only money, equipment and moral and diplomatic support. But given the trouble he was already having holding his new conquests in Peshawar, Ranjit had little enthusiasm for Lord Auckland’s invitation to invade Kabul.

In early June, Macnaghten reported discouragingly that Ranjit “would not dream of marching a force to Kabul.”119 Slowly, however, the Maharajah made it clear that he might be open to persuasion, hinting that if he were given the financial centre of Shikarpur, the Khyber and Jalalabad, he might be prepared to join a punitive expedition to chastise and unseat his old Afghan enemy.

In reality, Ranjit was probably only using these demands as a bargaining counter. For when he gave in and said that he now only wanted to be confirmed for perpetuity in possession of Peshawar and Kashmir, to receive £20,000 from the British as well as a large cash payment from the Amirs of Sindh, and for Shah Shuja in addition to pay him an annual tribute including “55 high bred horses of approved colour and pleasant paces,” camel loads of “musk melons of sweet and delicate flavour” and “101 Persian carpets,” Macnaghten accepted the offer immediately, and promised to press Shuja and the Amirs to deliver.

As the negotiations inched forward, what had originally been planned as a Sikh expedition in British interests slowly began to transform itself over the course of several weeks int...

Up to this point, no one had thought of informing Shah Shuja that he was imminently to be placed back on his old throne. Nor had Macnaghten, who had done so much to drag Shuja back out of retirement, ever actually met the man he had been championing for so long.

Recently, he had lost his remarkable wife, the formidable Wa’fa Begum, and, to add to the pain, fanatical Sikh akalis almost immediately desecrated the tomb he built for her at the dargah (shrine) of Sirhind.

Shuja had been kept briefed by his own network of spies and informers, and he was all too aware that he was being treated as a puppet—or a mooli, a radish, as the Afghans call it. He was especially humiliated that the action for which he had been waiting three decades had finally been arranged behind his back without even the most cursory reference to him as to how it would be executed. Nor was he at all happy about paying any tribute to Ranjit Singh, the man who had tortured his son and stolen his most valuable possession, even if in the treaty the tribute was disguised as a “subsidy.”

he was in no mood to be further delayed in implementing his plans by the sensitivities of Sadozais, who were hardly in a position to strike a bargain in the way the Sikhs had. Shuja was curtly informed of the plans, and of the boundaries of the somewhat diminished and truncated Afghanistan he was going to be allowed to rule.

Charles Metcalfe, who had been acting Governor General in the period up to Auckland’s arrival, and who many believed should have had the job in preference to him, had expressed his deep forebodings about Auckland’s Afghan policies. “We have needlessly and heedlessly plunged into difficulties and embarrassments,” he wrote, “from which we can never extricate ourselves without a disgraceful retreat.

Britain’s foremost Afghan expert, Mountstuart Elphinstone, was equally sceptical. “If you send 27,000 men up the Bolan Pass to Candahar (as we hear is intended) and can feed them, I have no doubt you will take Candahar and Cabul and set up Shuja,” he observed. “But for maintaining him in a poor, cold, strong and remote country, among a turbulent people like the Afghans, I own it seems to me hopeless.

When Burnes was summoned to give advice at the Governor General’s Residence in Simla on 20 July, he was warned not to muddle Auckland or attempt to change his mind. According to Masson, “when he arrived, Torrens and Colvin came running to him and prayed him to say nothing to unsettle his Lordship; that they had all the trouble in the world to get him into the business and that even now he would be glad of any pretext to retire from it.”129

Nonetheless, the pieces were now slowly falling into place, with the invasion plans driven forward relentlessly by Macnaghten and the hawks in the administration despite Auckland’s anxieties and reservations.130 Every day, the scale of the invasion and the degree of British participation gradually increased until a full 20,000 British troops were committed: the largest military operation undertaken by Company forces for two decades, and the first really major conflict since the defeat of Tipu Sultan forty years earlier.

But he was not unhappy: his orders had come in an envelope inscribed “Sir Alexander Burnes.” At first he thought it was an error; only on opening it did he discover he had been given a knighthood. His mission may have failed, and Macnaghten may have been given the political command of the expedition he had hoped for; but his willingness publicly to support a policy he had always opposed, against a ruler he had liked and whose hospitality he had enjoyed, had been noted by his superiors.

Auckland’s manifesto was more or less pure propaganda—a deliberate and blatant inversion of the available intelligence—and was recognised at once by the Indian press as “a most disingenuous distortion of the truth.”134 One Indian civil servant pointed out that the manifesto used “the words ‘justice’ and ‘necessity,’ and the terms ‘frontier,’ ‘security of the possessions of the British Crown’ and ‘national defence’ in a manner for which fortunately no precedent existed in the English language.”

This was of course a complete travesty of the facts, but it was too late now for Auckland to change his position even if he wanted to; thanks to the hawks he had surrounded himself with, events had now acquired their own momentum.

SOUNDS FAMILIAR

The hunky male eighteen-year-old Chippendales of Islamic heaven, counterparts to the supermodel houris.

Then, as with Shah Shuja’s previous expedition five years earlier, Afghanistan would be invaded by two routes. One army, led by the Shah’s eldest son, the Crown Prince Timur, assisted by Colonel Wade and a regiment of Punjabi Muslims supplied by Ranjit Singh, would move north through Peshawar up the Khyber Pass and hence towards Jalalabad.

This force would loop south around the Punjab, as Ranjit had now banned British soldiers from marching through his lands. It would then head through the Bolan Pass to attack southern Afghanistan below Kandahar before heading on to Ghazni. Both forces would converge on Kabul to restore Shuja to his throne in the Bala Hisar.

The Simla Manifesto had been explicit that the Shah would return home “surrounded by his own troops.” The problem was that Shuja at this point had no troops; indeed his only followers were his usual handful of mutilated household servants. So the first thing was to recruit a new army, the Shah Shuja Contingent. Would-be recruits began arriving in Ludhiana throughout the summer of 1838. A few of them were Indian Afghans of Rohilla descent whose ancestors had migrated to the Ganges basin in the eighteenth century, but most of them were local “Hindoos … camp followers from the Company’s military stations.”

There was also the issue, as one British officer put it in a letter, that it was clearly a “fiction [that] the ‘Shah [was] entering his dominions surrounded by his own troops’ when the fact is too notorious to escape detection and exposure, that he has not a single subject or Affghan amongst them.”

in late August, ahead of the rest of the army, Shuja and his Contingent were quietly marched off out of sight through Ferozepur to Shikarpur, there to begin intensive drilling. Before long, the Contingent had deviated from its intended route, run amok and looted Larkana.