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

by William Dalrymple

it was also clear from this attempt to reach out to the Afghans that the British were not interested in cultivating Shah Shuja’s friendship for its own sake, but were concerned only to outflank their imperial rivals: 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.

In 1797, Shah Zaman, like his father and grandfather before him, decided to revive his fortunes and fill his treasuries by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hindustan—the time-honoured Afghan solution to cash crises.

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.

different types of grapes grow, and other fruits as well—apples, pomegranates, pears, rhubarb, mulberries, sweet watermelon and musk-melon, apricots, peaches, etc—and ice-water, that cannot be found in all the plains of India. The Indians know neither how to dress nor how to eat—God save me from the fire of their dal and their miserable chapattis!”

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.

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.

without a ruler with a full treasure chest, or the lure of plunder to cement the country’s different interest groups, Afghanistan almost always tended to fragment: its few moments of coherence were built on the successes of its armies, never of its administration.

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.

hawkish paranoia about distant threats can create the very monster that is most feared.

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. Like Vitkevitch he had specific instructions to win over Dost Mohammad Khan. The man whom Vitkevitch had shadowed and to some extent modelled himself on was heading to the same destination, charged with exactly the same task. The two men had in fact much in common. They were of nearly the same age; both came from the distant provinces of their respective empires, with few connections to the ruling elite, and having arrived in Asia within a few months of each other had both worked their way up through their own merit and daring, and especially their skill in languages. Now the two would come face to face, in the court of Kabul, and the outcome of the contest would do much to determine the immediate future not only of Afghanistan, but of Central Asia. The Great Game had begun.

As Burnes prepared to return to his army, having failed to procure any of the supplies he needed, or even the most tenuous support of Mehrab Khan, his host was no less prescient in his final warning. “You have brought an army into the country,” he said. “But how do you propose to take it out again?”33

Haji Khan Kakar was a slippery, ambitious and unscrupulous figure even by the standards of nineteenth-century Afghan power politics. His ancestors had long played the role of regional power-brokers and king-makers. Having risen in the service of Dost Mohammad, who had appointed him first governor of Bamiyan and then commander of his elite cavalry, he had already twice deserted the Amir, most recently at the Battle of Jamrud in 1837. But 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.” Now, at this crucial juncture, on the excuse of leading a raid on the British camp, he took the opportunity to cross sides with all his followers, hoping to make his fortune from the rich and naive foreigners, and to take up Shuja’s written offer of a senior place in his government. In the process, he began a haemorrhage of defections and broke the already wavering morale of Kandahar’s defenders.

Macnaghten seemed by now doggedly determined not to allow any news, however dire, to ruffle his complacency.

the truth was that Burnes’s many talents had largely been wasted during the occupation. He knew Afghanistan better than any other British official or traveller with the single exception of Masson, he loved and understood the country, and his political instincts were as shrewd as his judgement was usually impeccable. His Achilles heel was his ambition, which had led him to get involved with an entirely unnecessary invasion and a mishandled occupation, both run by a foolish martinet who neither listened to nor respected his ideas. Like his rival Vitkevitch, Burnes was a brave and resourceful young man. Like Vitkevitch, he was an outsider who by dint of hard work moved himself centre-stage in the greatest geopolitical struggle of his age; but both had found, in different ways, that in the end they remained pawns in the wider imperial game. When Vitkevitch realised that his life’s work had been ignored and wasted, he had shot himself in a fit of depression and disgust. Burnes’s response was instead to throw himself into the pursuit of pleasure. In this way he made himself the hate figure he remains to this day in Afghanistan;

It was nonetheless an extraordinary defeat for the British and an almost miraculous victory for the Afghan resistance. At the very height of the British Empire, at a point when the British controlled more of the world economy than they would ever do again, and at a time when traditional forces were everywhere being massacred by industrialised colonial armies, it was a rare moment of complete colonial humiliation.

After all the waste and destruction of an expensive and unnecessary war of dubious legality, with the honour and reputation of British arms tarnished and British authority undermined; after spending £15 million (well over £50 billion in modern currency), exhausting the Indian treasury, pushing the Indian credit network to the brink of collapse and permanently wrecking the solvency of the East India Company; after losing maybe 40,000 lives, as well as those of around 50,000 camels; and after alienating much of the Bengal army, leaving it ripe for mutiny, the British had left Afghanistan much as they found it, he concluded: in tribal chaos, with Dost Mohammad about to return from exile and on the verge of retrieving his throne.