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December 16 - December 21, 2021
Haji Khan Kakar was a slippery, ambitious and unscrupulous figure even by the standards of nineteenth-century Afghan power politics.
he always played his hand with skill. He managed to choose his moment of side-changing with perfect timing, rising in power and importance with each successive act of treachery. Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, in the Akbarnama, describes him as “the outsider, the traitor, the master of betrayal” who would use charm and flattery to achieve his duplicitous ends, “mixing poison in sugar.”
Unaware of the wrecked and starved state of the invading army, in the four days that followed an ever-growing number of Kandahari noblemen crossed the lines into Shuja’s camp and offered their fealty to the returning King. For Shuja it was the miracle he had almost despaired of ever seeing take place. For Dost Mohammad’s two Barakzai half-brothers in Kandahar, there was nothing to be done but watch the defections with growing despair:
Five days later, on 25 April 1839, Haji Khan was on the left side of Shah Shuja as he rode in triumph through fields of ripe wheat and barley, and the rich belt of walled gardens and orchards that still surround the outskirts of Kandahar.
Followed by Burnes and Macnaghten and only a small escort of close supporters, Shah Shuja rode unprotected through the open gates and streets of Kandahar, the city that had successfully defied him only five years earlier.
One hundred and fifty years later in 1996, Mullah Omar would come too when he was awarded the same title by the Pashtun ‘ulema and here he too would swathe himself in the Prophet’s cloak to give him the religious authority to bring all the people of Afghanistan under Taliban control. Now Shuja wrapped himself in the same cloth as a symbol of the legitimacy of his return as the king to the dynastic throne of his brother, father and grandfather.
The Army of the Indus had made it against the odds as far as Kandahar, and through good luck and exaggerated reports of their might and numbers had sufficiently unnerved their enemies to capture the ancient capital of southern Afghanistan without firing a shot. Macnaghten in particular was elated.
To the sound of an Indian regimental brass band playing an English anthem—“God Save the King”—Shuja was ceremonially enthroned as King of Afghanistan, while the Army of the Indus marched past in all its ragged glory.
Yet, for all this optimism among the Shah’s supporters, an event took place immediately after this durbar that is not referred to in a single British source, but which according to all the Afghan accounts was crucial in beginning the process of discrediting Shah Shuja in the eyes of his new subjects. Mohammad Husain Herati gives the earliest as well as the fullest account of what happened. “At this time, an unfortunate incident occurred,” he wrote. A girl from a good family was going about her business when an inebriated foreign soldier crossed her path, grabbed her and dragged her into a
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Like many then present in Kandahar he had no objection to the return of the King, but he was horrified that he had done so on the back of an army of foreign infidels. After the incident of the rape, he made his way to Kabul, where he based himself in the Nawab Bagh and “sought opportunities to foster a coalition with like-minded Mujehedin to oust the British from the country.”
Although they were repeatedly told that the British had not come to take their country away from them, they could not forget the history of Hindustan.61
Before long orders had gone out that no sepoys or British troops could stray out of the camp “unless going in a body and well armed.”62 It was a ruling that would never be lifted for the rest of the occupation.
While Shah Shuja was being installed in Kandahar, Wade and Prince Timur were making rather less progress in Peshawar. Despite Wade’s disbursement of more than 50,000 rupees in bribes, there was no sign that the Khyber tribes were ready to let Shuja’s forces through.
Like Mehrab Khan of Qalat, the Afridis and the other frontier tribes had been loyal followers of Shuja and repeatedly protected him at the lowest ebb of his fortunes; at least one—Khan Bahadur Khan of the Malikdin Khel tribe—was closely related to Shuja by marriage. But all were suspicious of his new alliance with the infidel Sikhs and British.
It did not help that Prince Timur was far from a charismatic figure. The nervous and ineffectual Crown Prince was meant to act as a lure for the Khyber chiefs. But Timur was not a natural leader—his portrait shows him to be a slight and anxious-looking man—and his stumbling performance at the durbar Wade had laid on to introduce him to Peshawar did not bode well.
For the previous two months it had been clear that once Lord Auckland had disappeared back to Simla, the wily Maharajah was doing all he could to drag his feet rather than provide the troops or supplies he had pledged.
By mid-May, when Shah Shuja and the main army were already gorging on the peaches, apricots and apples of Kandahar, only one battalion of irregular cavalry—around 650 sowars [cavalrymen]—had yet turned up in Peshawar.
A month later, Wade received worse news still: Ranjit Singh had taken to his bed “after a fainting fit”; he died on 27 June, at the age of fifty-eight. His last act was to make a series of huge charitable disbursements.
It was Wade who immediately realised the much more serious implication for the invasion of Afghanistan. If it had been difficult to gather the promised army when Ranjit Singh was alive, it was going to be next to impossible now he was gone: few of Ranjit’s noblemen had shared his enthusiasm for an alliance with the British,
More serious still were the implications for feeding and supplying the Army of the Indus: what chance would there be of sending food, arms, money and reinforcements into Afghanistan when disorders looked almost certain to engulf the Punjab plains separating the invading army from its supply base in British India?
The two-month break in Kandahar had been brought to a close after worrying intelligence had arrived from both Herat in the west and Ghazni to the east. In Herat, the Wazir Yar Mohammad Alikozai was not showing the gratitude that the British had expected him to demonstrate for their part in ending the terrible Persian assault on his city. Instead, within weeks of the Persian retreat, he had quarrelled with the British envoy, Eldred Pottinger, who had just spent £30,000 in charitable disbursements in the city, cut the hand off one of Pottinger’s servants and attempted to have the envoy himself
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Macnaghten was uncertain if the fault for the breakdown in relations lay with Yar Mohammad or with the inexperienced Pottinger, so he decided to despatch an embassy to try to win back Herat. Macnaghten asked Burnes to lead this mission, but the latter shrewdly declined, wanting to be around in Kabul ready to step in and replace Macnaghten when the latter returned and suspecting—rightly as it turned out—that the mission to Herat was unlikely to succeed.
Herat presented the British with a dilemma they would become increasingly familiar with during the occupation—and one that later colonisers of the region would also have to face: should you try to “promote the interests of humanity,” as Todd put it in one letter to Macnaghten, and champion social reform, banning traditions such as the stoning to death of adulterous women?
Meanwhile, Wade’s spies in Kabul were reporting that Dost Mohammad was living up to his reputation for efficiency and had been energetically preparing for the British advance by building up his army and repairing the fortifications of Ghazni. He sent a mass of stores down the Kabul River to Jalalabad, and procured a fatwa of jihad against Shah Shuja from the ’ulema of Kabul.
the further the troops marched from the banks of the Arghandab and the network of bubbling irrigation runnels which extended the cultivation to the melon beds at the edge of the valley, the drier the land became. White grasslands blowing in the wind around Qalat e-Ghilzai slowly gave way to a rockier, hillier, more marginal landscape of quartz and shale-scrub, dotted with white opium poppies and purple thistles.
On 18 July, Keane received two pieces of intelligence. Firstly, the Popalzai plot to open the city gates had been discovered, and Shuja’s loyalists had been replaced with Ghilzai tribesmen loyal to the Barakzais. Secondly, it was learned that the Barakzais were preparing to make a strong resistance around Ghazni.
By sunrise on the 20th, the minarets of Ghazni were seen rising over the scrub, and beyond them the massive fortress, one of the largest and most impregnable in Central Asia. “Instead of finding it, as the accounts had suggested, very weak and incapable of resistance,” wrote Keane, “a second Gibraltar appeared before us: a high rampart in good repair built on a scarped mound, flanked by numerous towers and surrounded by a well constructed [escalade] and a wide wet ditch. In short, we were astounded.”
As had been feared, the garrison put up stiff resistance as soon as the British closed in. They harassed the advancing lines of sepoys with their cavalry and outgunned them with heavy fire from the ramparts as the invaders attempted to take up positions around the fortress.
This was also the first time the Afghans showed the accuracy of their long-barrelled jezails, the sniper-rifle of the nineteenth century, as their marksmen found their range and began to bring down large numbers of exposed sepoys.
A massive cannon called Zuber Zun, the Hard Hitter, was fired from the fort and camels, soldiers and horses were blown into the air like paper-kites.”
That night the British could see signalling with blue lights from the ramparts. The signals were answered by other lights on the mountains to the east.
the army was attacked from the rear by a party of 2,000 wild-eyed ghazis (holy warriors) on horseback. Soon after dawn they appeared on the heights behind the camp carrying the green flags of jihad. As bugles sounded the alarm, the foremost of the jihadis managed to ride over the defensive ditches straight into the middle of Shah Shuja’s part of the camp, screaming “Allah hu-Akbar!” and fighting with suicidal bravery until they were surrounded.
As the Shah stood there fuming, one of the ghazis produced a hidden dagger and tried to lunge at him. As soon as the man was overpowered and killed, Shuja’s bodyguards beheaded the entire group of prisoners, much to the horror of Macnaghten.
In the hours that followed, it was Mohan Lal who played the most crucial role in saving the British from the mess they had created for themselves. The previous day, as the invading army had been approaching the fortress, a senior Barakzai prince and rival of Dost Mohammad, Abdul Rashid Khan, had crossed the lines and surrendered himself to Mohan Lal, whom he knew from the munshi’s days as an “intelligencer” in Kandahar working for Wade in the mid-1830s. Debriefing him in his tent, Mohan Lal discovered that according to the Prince the fortress had one major weak point. Most of the fortress
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A plan was quickly put together. An artillery barrage and a diversionary attack to the south would provide cover for a party of engineers to creep up and lay the charges to blow the Kabul Gate. This would be followed by a mass assault with fixed bayonets.
When Durand raised these risks with Keane, the Commander-in-Chief replied that there was simply no alternative, as there was only two or three days of food left in the commissariat.
In his exposed position Shuja came under heavy fire from the ramparts, but remained there with icy courage, impressing his British minders who had been told misleading stories about his previous premature exits from the field of battle.
The troops were led into the breach by William Dennie, followed after a pause by a column led by General Robert Sale, known to his men as “Fighting Bob,” as he refused to stay at the back and always threw himself into the fiercest hand-to-hand fighting.
His friend Neville Chamberlain was less impressed by the behaviour of the British troops. Atrocities were now taking place all around with “soldiers breaking into the houses to look for plunder, and in this way many were killed … I shall not describe the cruelties and actions I saw that day as I am sure it would only disgust you with mankind; but I am happy to say very few women and children were killed,
OH WELL THEN GOOD JOB OLD CHUM jfc
The scholarly Mirza ‘Ata was especially interested in a part of the booty which no British source seems to have noted: the Kandahar palace library—“Several thousand precious and unique books in Persian and Arabic, covering all the sciences, logic, literary criticism, principles of jurisprudence, syntax and grammar.”97
It was a spectacular victory: the impregnable fortress of Ghazni had been captured within seventy-two hours of the army first sighting it. As well as a thousand fatalities, around 300 Afghans were wounded and 1,500 taken prisoner. In contrast, the British suffered only seventeen killed with around sixty-five wounded.98 But, as Durand later pointed out, the success of the assault was largely due to luck, as by leaving behind the siege guns and marching without sufficient supplies Keane had “committed a grievous military error;
If the British had won a remarkable victory against the odds, the Afghans had hardly disgraced themselves. They had shown their fighting skills, and the bravery of the defenders, even when all was lost, created legends that began to grow almost immediately.
News of the fall of Ghazni reached Dost Mohammad in Kabul in less than forty-eight hours. He had spent three months renovating and strengthening the greatest fortress in the land, and it had fallen to the Kafir (infidel) invaders within three hours.
First, and most damagingly for the Amir, his favourite and most effective son, Akbar Khan, whom he had deputed to guard the Khyber and block the advance of Wade and Prince Timur, had fallen suddenly sick. There were rumours of poison, and for two days Akbar Khan’s life hung in the balance.
The capture of Ali Masjid and Ghazni within forty-eight hours of each other encouraged other disaffected tribesmen. In Istalif, thirty-five miles beyond Kabul, the Tajik Kohistanis rose up against the Barakzais under their religious leader, the Naqsbandi Pir and hereditary Imam of the Pul-i-Khishti mosque, Mir Haji, and expelled their Barakzai Governor, Dost Mohammad’s eldest son, Sardar Sher ‘Ali Khan.
As a young man, Dost Mohammad had had many of the Kohistani maliks killed when he ruled the area for his elder half-brother Fatteh Khan, and having been offered financial inducements by Wade, Mir Haji now encouraged his people to rise up and claim the revenge for which they had been waiting twenty years.103
So Jabar Khan was sent to Ghazni with an offer—Shah Shuja could return to the throne, on the condition that under the Sadozai crown Dost Mohammad could continue as wazir, “which situation, by hereditary claim, he had a right to secure.” After all, his half-brother Fatteh Khan had been wazir to Shah Zaman, and his father Payindah Khan was wazir to Shuja’s father, Timur Shah. To Pashtun eyes it was both the customary and the obvious solution to the problem, and Jabar Khan was amazed when the offer was peremptorily turned down by the British.
Only Mohan Lal, with his long experience of Afghan notions of honour, understood how insulting this rejection was: “it was quite unnecessary to offend such a valuable friend as the Nawab at this critical time,”
News of Dost Mohammad’s flight arrived in the British camp on 3 August 1839. It took only three more days for the army to march the final few miles to Kabul. On 7 August, eight months after they had left Ferozepur, the Army of the Indus finally marched into the Afghan capital with Shah Shuja at its head,
Silent crowds filled the street, standing up as the Shah passed, and reseating themselves as the British officials followed; but there were no cheers and no rejoicing. According to George Lawrence, the Kabulis showed “the most complete indifference [at the return of the Shah], expressing no sign of welcome or satisfaction at his accession to the throne.
