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

by William Dalrymple

the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

Amid all this civil and fratricidal war, Durrani Afghanistan quickly fractured into anarchy. It was during this period that the country accelerated its transformation from the sophisticated centre of learning and the arts, which led some of the Great Mughals to regard it as a far more elegantly cultured place than India, into the broken, war-torn backwater it was to become for so much of its modern history.

“a land that produced little but men and stones,”

The feud between the two clans, the Barakzais and the Sadozais, was already bitter and bloody, and was soon to cause a conflict that would ravage the whole country, dividing the tribes and providing a range of opportunities for the neighbouring powers to intervene. Before long it would become the central conflict of early nineteenth-century Afghanistan.

Here Elphinstone sat scribbling in his diary, trying to make sense of the Afghan character in all its rich contradictions. “Their vices,” he wrote, “are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity, and obstinacy; on the other hand, they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious, and prudent.”45 He was astute enough to note that success in battle in Afghanistan was rarely decided by straightforward military victory so much as by successfully negotiating a path through the shifting patterns of tribal allegiances. “The victory is usually decided by some chief going over to the enemy,”

wrote Elphinstone, “on which the greater part of the army either follows his example or else takes flight.”46 c

It was in many ways less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted. The tribes’ traditions were egalitarian and independent, and they had only ever submitted to authority on their own terms. Financial rewards might bring about co-operation, but rarely ensured loyalty: the individual Afghan soldier owed his allegiance first to the local chieftain who raised and paid him, not to the Durrani shahs in faraway Kabul or Peshawar.

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.52

On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India.

In years to come, this process of imperial competition would turn into something far more serious than any game and lead to deaths, wars, invasions and colonisation on a massive scale, profoundly changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Afghanistan and Central Asia. 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. Ellenborough’s despatch also led to the immediate deployment of two covert intelligence operations.

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. As time would show, this approach was not just duplicitous: it was a recipe for diplomatic disaster that would soon blow up in the faces of everyone involved.

As so often in international affairs, hawkish paranoia about distant threats can create the very monster that is most feared.

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.

“these people are tribes of my nation, and their protection & support is an obligation as well as a duty … Reflect & consider if

the Afghans can quietly submit to be injured and oppressed without resisting? As long as I retain life in my body, I can neither separate myself from my nation nor the nation from

“You have brought an army into the country,” he said. “But how do you propose to take it out again?”33 c

“There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against,” he wrote, “than the overweening confidence with which we are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of our own institutions, and the anxiety that we display to introduce them in new and untried soils. Such interference will always lead to acrimonious disputes, if not to a violent reaction.”79

The young Queen wrote in her diary that the invasion was “a stroke for the Mastery of Central Asia,” while her politicians assured her that the war had for the time being settled the question

of whether it was Britain or Russia which was to have “possession of the East.”

By aiming to create a modern, drilled force at the expense of the chieftains, Macnaghten was taking away Shah Shuja’s only real opportunity to reward his nobility for their support and undermining the power and wealth of his most important followers.

nor ought it ever to be forgotten that a system, though excellent in itself, may not be good as applied to this country, nor may it be such as to meet appreciation.

The ’ulema understandably didn’t like being lectured on the Sharia by the conceited Macnaghten, who was now writing, “I have gained a complete victory over the Moollas who have since freely admitted that my knowledge of the Mahomedan Law is superior to their own.”80

There followed weeks of guerrilla warfare, with Dost Mohammad making surprise attacks on government outposts and inflicting casualties, but lacking the strength to take on the massed forces of the Company. Meanwhile General Sale systematically laid waste to rebel-held villages, destroyed the rebels’ trees and crops, and besieged the rebel-held forts around the Koh Daman, while Burnes tried to bribe the Kohistan chiefs to betray and hand over the Amir. By the end of September, Burnes had managed to pry the Mir Wali and his Uzbeks away from

Dost Mohammad, leaving the Amir with just a few hundred Kohistani supporters;

“There were 13 clashes and skirmishes, and never in that time did the English even glimpse the lovely face of victory.

Eventually the English abandoned their search and straggled back into Charikar half-dead, leaving much of their supplies and equipment behind.”

“we made the Mir our enemy for ever.”

Making an enemy out of him was one of the most serious errors made by the British in the whole campaign.

there were a growing number of credible reports that senior Sikh sardars in Lahore and Rawalpindi were actively sheltering rebel Barakzai and Durrani chiefs and other Afghan rebel leaders, giving them a base in the Punjab and the hills around Peshawar from which they could strike back at British troops over the border in Afghanistan.

So many parallels to recent events in Afghanistan

were still nominal allies, but in reality many were

“We are in possession of the cities,” he told his elder brother around the same time, “but have not got the country or the [support of the] people, and have as yet done nothing liberally to consolidate Afghanistan.

So much like the Russian and American occupations.

At the time of his death, Sir Alexander Burnes, soldier, spy, traveller, diplomat and thwarted deputy Envoy, was only thirty-six years old.

There had been around 300 rebels in the morning when the attack on Burnes’s compound took place; but within forty-eight hours some 3,000 fighters had assembled in the city; three weeks later, the numbers had swelled to an almost unprecedented 50,000 as a whole range of groups with quite different motives and grievances were mobilised to take on the British.

But the rebels certainly used the rhetoric of religious war in order to recruit for and justify their revolution—a relative innovation in the internal history of the Afghan peoples, as most previous conflict had been between Muslims.a

“The murder of our countrymen, and the spoliation of public and private property, was perpetrated with impunity within a mile of the cantonment, and under the very walls of the Bala Hisar. Such an exhibition of weakness on our part taught the enemy their strength—confirmed against us those who, however disposed to join in the rebellion had hitherto kept aloof, and ultimately encouraged the nation to unite as one man for our destruction.”

It was this paralysis which allowed a spontaneous protest by some disgruntled chiefs—one they imagined would be a hopeless gesture of

anger, not the beginnings of a major revolution—to unite the people under the banner of Islam and grow quickly into one of the most dangerous challenges the British would face anywhere in their empire in the nineteenth century.

“Vacillation and incapacity ruled in our military counsels and paralysed the hearts of those who should have acted with energy and decision,” concluded Lawrence. “By their deplorable pusillanimity an accidental emeute, which could have been quelled on the moment by the prompt employment of a small force, became ...

“How can we abandon the cantonments when they have cost us so much money?”

As Mohan Lal pointed out, the decision of the British to abandon Shuja was of course a major breach of faith. “No regard was shown to the articles of the Tripartite Treaty,” he wrote, “and Shah Shuja ul‑Mulk was left at the mercy of his enemies, to whom we had given shelter during his government of the last two years.

an unequal fight between treacherous Indian crows and brave Afghan hawks: whenever they took one mountain, the next mountain was always still left in open rebellion. In truth the English would never ever, even after years and years, have managed to pacify Khorasan. The English with their crow-like Indian troops stayed with their bones scattered and unburied on the mountain-slopes of Afghanistan, while the brave Afghan fighters looked for martyrdom, and were victorious in this world and the next: blessed they are indeed who taste the cup of martyrdom!

I asked if they saw any parallels with the current situation. “It is exactly the same,” said Jagdalak. “Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, ‘We are your friends, we want to help.’ But they are lying.” “Whoever comes to Afghanistan, even now, they will face the fate of Burnes, Macnaghten

and Dr. Brydon,” agreed Mohammad Khan, our host in the village and the owner of the orchard where we were sitting. Everyone nodded sagely into their rice: the names of the fallen of 1842, long forgotten in their home country, were still common currency here.

“These are the last days of the Americans,” said the other elder. “Next it will be China.”

The parallels between the two invasions I came to realise were not just anecdotal, they were substantive. The same tribal rivalries and the same battles were continuing to be fought out in the same places 170 years later under the guise of new flags, new ideologies and new political puppeteers. The same cities were garrisoned by foreign troops speaking the same languages, and were being attacked from the same rings of hills and the same high passes. In both cases, the invaders thought they could walk in, perform regime change, and be out in a couple of years. In both cases they were unable to prevent themselves getting sucked into a much wider conflict. Just as the British inability to cope with the rising of 1841 was a product not just of the leadership failures within the British camp, but also of the breakdown of the strategic relationship between Macnaghten and Shah Shuja, so the uneasy relationship of the ISAF leadership with President Karzai has been a crucial factor in the failure of the latest imbroglio.

Sherard’s analysis of the failure of the current occupation in his memoirs, Cables from Kabul, reads astonishingly like an analysis of that of Auckland and Macnaghten: “Getting in without having any real idea of how to get out; almost wilful misdiagnosis

of the nature of the challenges; continually changing

objectives, and no coherent or consistent plan; mission creep on a heroic scale; disunity of political and military command, also on a heroic scale; diversion of attention and resources [to Iraq in the current case, to the Opium Wars then] at a critical stage of t...