Crimson Snow E-Book

Jules Stewart

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In the mid-nineteenth century, the British and Russian Empires played the 'Great Game,' a rivalry for supremacy in Central Asia. To secure a 'buffer zone' in Afghanistan, between India and Russian territory, Britain launched the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838. Initial success, including the imposition of a puppet regime supported by too few troops (a situation that has great resonance today), was followed by complete disaster in 1842, with 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilian camp followers killed by rebellious Afghans. Only one Briton is known to have escaped the massacre. This compelling story of imperial misadventure is told by Jules Stewart, a former Reuters journalist with considerable experience in the region and a specialist in North-West Frontier history, and has a foreword from General Sir David Richards, Chief of the General Staff and a former NATO commander in Afghanistan. It provides important parallels with our current commitments in this graveyard of ambitions, and illustrates how little has been learnt from the past.

Leseprobe

To the memory of my mother and father

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to many friends who offered their timely suggestions and corrections during the preparation of this book. I would especially like to thank Mark Baillie, Helen Crisp, Humayun Khan, Duncan McAra, the editorial team at Sutton Publishing and the research staff at the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Archives and the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations and Maps

Foreword

Chapter 1

North-Westward, Ho!

Chapter 2

‘An Aggression Destitute Even of Pretext’

Chapter 3

Dancing in the Dark

Chapter 4

‘Our Troops as Yet are Staunch’

Chapter 5

Blood was Falling, Blood on Snow

Chapter 6

The Empire Strikes Back

Epilogue

Notes and Sources

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

LISTOF ILLUSTRATIONSAND MAPS

1. Ahmad Shah Durrani.

2. Lord Ellenborough.

3. Sir William Macnaghten, British Envoy to Kabul.

4. The Governor General Lord Auckland.

5. Shah Shuja ul Mulk.

6. The fortress of Ghazni.

7. Akbar Khan.

8. Lady Florentia Sale.

9. British hostages in captivity.

10. Major Eldred Pottinger.

11. The house where Major-General Elphinstone died.

12. Captain Thomas Souter.

MAPS

The British cantonment at Kabul.

Jalalabad during the siege by Akbar Khan.

The retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad.

FOREWORD

General Sir David Richards KCB CBE DSO

‘It’s coming to a crash in Central Asia. I daresay it’ll be staved off for the present, but it must come to something hereafter, to be decided whether England or Russia should reign there, both pushing from different sides.’ Prime Minister Viscount Melbourne to Queen Victoria, 7 April 1839

Entertaining, easy to read, yet accurate and authoritative, I wish this excellent book had been published before I deployed to Afghanistan in May 2006 to command NATO’s International Security and Assistance Force. While Jules Stewart vividly recounts a sorry tale in British military and diplomatic history that took place 165 years ago, the lessons for the international community’s effort in Afghanistan today are pertinent and timeless.

I have read other descriptions of Great Britain’s failed attempt to impose its will on Afghanistan in 1841–2 but none capture what happened, or the enduring personalities and atmospherics of the country, as well as Stewart does. Despite being separated by so many years from Macnaghten and Elphinstone, repeatedly I found myself chuckling in recognition of an event, tactic or person and thinking ‘nothing’s changed’! Even knowing the country as well as I now do, the book sheds fresh and authoritative light on what makes Afghanistan and its people tick. Repeatedly my forerunners in that beautiful but blighted country misjudged its leaders, underestimating a fierce resolve to run their own lives. Too rarely did they seek properly to understand the ruthless nature of their opponents or the tribal loyalties and customs that determine responses to unfolding events. While certainly trying to do much better in 2008, in the event today’s diplomats and soldiers too frequently make the same errors.

Should the history of the First Afghan War stand as a lesson for today? In many respects the answer must be yes. The confused aims, the petty squabbling between vain people, the inability to act with a sense of urgency and in a manner that accords with the psyche of the people they seek to help, all these remain common threads today. As is the disconnection between military and political activity, well brought out by Stewart when he quotes George Lawrence’s letter to The Times on the prospects for the Second Afghan War: ‘… a new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting by the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country. … Although military disasters might be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out politically as useless.’ Resolving this conundrum remains the biggest issue for today’s policy makers, one aggravated by the inherently disunited nature of a multinational campaign. While military gains are made daily, in the absence of well-resourced, coherent and timely political and economic measures, they may count for nothing.

In other respects, though, I believe today’s war is different from those that preceded it, and here I appear to disagree with Stewart. This war is not a British-only affair. It is fought at the behest of the Afghan government, UN mandated and actively supported by over fifty of the world’s richest nations. After a hesitant start, lessons have been learnt. A greater sense of urgency and better coordination is now evident in the application of both military and non-military measures. Huge amounts of money are entering the country and beginning to have real effect. Importantly, reliable polling in late 2007 tells us that well over 80 per cent of the Afghan population still wants its democratically elected government and the international community to succeed. The Taliban are supported by less than 10 per cent of the population. It is for this reason that I quote again from Jules Stewart’s thought-provoking final chapter. He says: ‘The Afghans will always win’, inferring that they and the foreigner are always on opposite sides. While the lessons of history tell us that we do not have forever, in this Afghan war the Afghan people and the foreigner are for now on the same side. The trick will be to ensure that we remain so through a visionary and generous strategy that reflects the reality and needs of Afghan culture. In’sh’Allah!

Plan of the British cantonment at Kabul.

Jalalabad during the siege by Akbar Khan.

The retreat of the Army of the Indus from Kabul to Jalalabad (Author’s Collection)

Chapter 1

NORTH-WESTWARD, HO!

On a summer evening in 1839, a young Cossack officer by the name of Captain Yan Vikevitch wearily climbed the steps to his St Petersburg hotel room. Vikevitch lit the coal fire in his room, ignoring the muggy heat that rose from the River Neva below his window. The gallant young officer then reflected on what he would say to his friends in the farewell letter he was about to write. Once the logs in the grate were burning brightly, Vikevitch gathered his expedition reports and diaries, and one by one, consigned them to the flames. He then took pen in hand and filled several sheets of coarse Russian notepaper with declarations of remorse over the failure of his mission to Afghanistan, as agent of Tsar Nicholas I, and the humiliation he had suffered only hours before at the hands of the Russian foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode. When he finished, the 30-year-old Lithuanian-born aristocrat laid down his pen, pulled his service revolver from its leather holster and blew his brains out.

One would not have considered the death of a relatively obscure tsarist army officer, no matter how tragic the circumstances, the sort of incident to visit disaster on a great empire. Yet Vikevitch’s suicide figured in the train of occurrences of that fateful year, which were swiftly to sweep the Raj to the brink of catastrophe and trigger the greatest single military debacle the British ever suffered in India.

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Nearly a decade before Vikevitch’s untimely demise, the Government of India in Calcutta had turned its gaze north-westward to the Indus, the great river that flows from the high Tibetan plateau on a southerly course to debouch 2,000 miles downstream in the Arabian Sea. Beyond the Indus lay the legendary trading posts of Central Asia – Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Khiva – tempting morsels for an empire bent on aggressive expansion. The Indus offered swifter access than the Ganges, the traditional waterway and overland route to these markets. The advent of steam navigation meant that cotton goods and other merchandise could be easily shipped upstream to these great bazaars, thus it was now imperative to secure the Indus as a commercial waterway for British commerce.

The Government of India was confronted with a number of obstacles to realising its commercial ambition, and these were hardly of a trivial nature. For starters, the land west of the Indus stretching to the rugged hill country that borders Afghanistan was the domain of the powerful and warlike Sikhs, while further south lay the deserts of Sind, whose amirs were capable of massing considerable forces against foreign trespassers. Between the Indus and Afghanistan the ferocious Pathan hill tribes had to be reckoned with, the fearsome warriors who always stood ready to swoop on an intruder. The British knew almost nothing about these fanatical tribesmen, and even twenty years later when the North-West Frontier was annexed to the Indian empire, the Government did its best to keep the Pathans at arm’s length. But beyond the Sikh kingdom and the territories of the Amir of Kabul, there lurked an even greater threat to Britain’s commercial interests in Central Asia. The Tsar’s armies were on the march, like a bubbling lava flow spreading across the steppes, drawing ever nearer to the borders of British India. Here lay the playing fields of the Great Game, the scene of intrigue and confrontation between two great powers vying for supremacy in Central Asia, a conflict immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, his masterpiece of not-so-fictional espionage.

With the Duke of Wellington in power at home and Britain’s military policy in the hands of Secretary at War Lord Palmerston, a name that became synonymous with ‘gunboat diplomacy’, there was never any question of government passivity towards Russian expansionism. St Petersburg’s advance in Turkestan and the defeat of the Persians by imperial Russian troops had set alarm bells ringing in London, giving urgency to the task of securing the lands beyond the Indus for British trade, while not overlooking strategic military considerations. British India needed to prepare for a military showdown, for those in power in London knew full well that the Russian offensive would not be halted by bolts of Harris tweed and other goods that Britain was anxious to place in Asian markets.

Russia’s race to the River Oxus and her defeat of the Shah of Persia’s forces brought the Tsar’s imperial armies to the northern and western frontiers of Afghanistan, and in the 1830s all eyes were on the porous borders of this ‘country’, a territory as politically fragmented in the nineteenth century as today. The stakes in the Great Game had been ratcheted up. No longer could this confrontation be played out as a race to capture markets of Central Asia, though the British continued to cloak their ambitions cautiously under the guise of commercial policies. For Britain, the spectre of Cossack cavalry patrols along the banks of the Oxus was the stuff of nightmares. The truth is that the threat was more apparent than real, for this line of advance would take an invader over the forbidding peaks of the Hindu Kush, an invasion route only slightly less formidable than the great Himalaya range itself. Far more worrisome was the presence of Russian troops in Persia and their proximity to Herat. This fortified city in western Afghanistan was an easy march from the Russian garrisons, and from there it was a straightforward trek along the 500-mile direct road to Kabul. Were Russia able to count on the allegiance, or at least the acquiescence, of the Amir of Afghanistan, there would be nothing to stop the Tsar’s armies from pouring across the Khyber Pass into India. The Government quite rightly regarded Herat, as manifested in its official records, ‘the Gate of India, from its being the main route of invading armies, it possesses more strategical importance than, perhaps, any other point in Asia’.1

For more than fifty years, the supremacy of the Honourable East India Company’s political, but not its commercial, functions in British India had been effectively subordinated to the Crown. The process of winding down ‘John Company’s’ power was dramatically brought to a close after the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, when the Company lost its administrative functions and India became a formal Crown colony. But in 1830 the East India Company was still a powerful and influential force, whose Board of Control campaigned vigorously to expand British trade beyond the Indus. In this ambition the Company found a willing ally in Lord Ellenborough, the man who held the Cabinet post of President of the Board of Control at the East India Company, effectively equivalent to Secretary of State for India. Ellenborough, who as one of Wellington’s closest confidants had the Iron Duke’s ear at all times, was a zealous Russophobe who took a prominent part in shaping the Government’s Indian policy. He was also a man given to volatile passions. In the same year that Ellenborough laid the foundations for the great push across the Indus, he divorced his wife for adultery with the German Prince Karl Phillip von Schwartzenberg, with whom he fought a duel and collected £25,000 in damages. Ellenborough looked on with horror as one by one, the tsarist troops gobbled up the Khanates of Central Asia. His diaries are filled with agitated notes on the Russian opening of the route to Baghdad, the presence in St Petersburg of Afghan and Sikh ambassadors and the inevitability, sooner or later, of a clash of arms between the two great empires on the banks of the Indus. Ellenborough warned Wellington of his conviction that Russia’s ultimate aim was to secure Persia as a road to the Indus.

The job of putting the Government’s hawkish plan into action fell to a 54-year-old seasoned India hand named William Cavendish-Bentinck, or Lord Bentinck, the second son of the Duke of Portland, who twice served as Prime Minister. Bentinck had been appointed Governor of Madras while still under 30. He later served as Envoy to Sicily and commanded a division in Spain during the Peninsula War. Having distinguished himself as a soldier, politician and administrator, in 1827 his father’s close friend, Prime Minister George Canning, recalled William from Rome, where for ten years he had been languishing in agreeable idleness, to serve as Governor General of India.

Bentinck’s primary objectives were to put the Government’s financial house in order, following the ruinous Burmese War, and do everything in his power to advance the judicial and administrative systems, all of which he accomplished with a considerable degree of success. He was not concerned with achieving great military victories or annexing new territories to Britain’s Indian empire, but the home Government entertained other priorities. One of Bentinck’s first charges was to despatch a mission up the Indus to the Punjab, to deliver five massive English dray horses as a gift from King William IV to the Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh, a diminutive, mouse-like figure who had lost an eye to smallpox. This was ostensibly in return for the Kashmir shawls that the previous Governor General, Lord Amherst, had delivered to the King of England as a gift from the Sikh chieftain. In reality, the embassy to Ranjit was little more than a camouflage for conducting a survey of the river, the aim being to assess its navigability as a trade route to Central Asia.

It was now time for one of the leading players in the First Afghan War drama to step onto centre stage. Bentinck’s choice for envoy to the court of Ranjit Singh was a 25-year-old Scottish adventurer and accomplished linguist who was languishing in the rather mundane position of assistant to the resident in Cutch, a remote district of Gujarat in western India. For Lieutenant Alexander Burnes, Bentinck’s marching orders, which were despatched via the Governor of the Bombay Presidency, Sir John Malcolm, came as a wish fulfilment. Burnes had set off in early 1830 to carry out just such a survey of the Indus valley, but he was recalled at an early stage for fears that his voyage might provoke the amirs of Sind, whose country he would have to cross. Bentinck had by now warmed to the project, all the more so when Burnes returned a glowing report of the opportunity of extending the blessings of British civilisation to the peoples of Central Asia. Burnes’s boss, the Political Agent Sir Henry Pottinger, had meanwhile embarked on his own mission to cajole the amirs of Sind into opening the Indus to British trading interests. Burnes became the first European since Alexander the Great to navigate the course of the Indus, and with Pottinger the two men scored successes beyond the Government’s most optimistic expectations by securing separate treaties from the amirs and Ranjit Singh, thus granting British vessels transit rights on the river. The wily Ranjit was not unduly troubled by the prospect of British shipping moving through his dominions. As Sir Penderel Moon accurately points out, the Government’s enthusiasm for steam navigation on the Indus was something of a chimera, for the Maharaja knew ‘more than Bentinck or Burnes about its [the Indus’s] shallow, sand-banked waters’.2

Burnes’s star was clearly in the ascendant. By now he had completed his perilous journey through the wilds of Central Asia, that was to earn him the dashing sobriquet of ‘Bokhara Burnes’. It was in that fabled city that Burnes narrowly escaped the clutches of the murderous Amir Nasrullah Bahadur Khan, who was later to have two British officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly, cast into a vermin-filled pit and publicly beheaded. On this journey, Burnes was also conceded an audience with the Afghan ruler Dost Mohammed Khan, a meeting that set the scene for his later official embassy to Kabul. On this occasion, commerce and politics were not on Burnes’s agenda, though he obviously made a favourable impression on the Amir, who offered him the command of the Afghan army. When Burnes graciously declined, the Dost asked if he could recommend a friend.

On a visit to England in 1834, the young explorer was given a hero’s welcome by London’s literary glitterati, who celebrated the publication of his book on travels to the remotest parts of Central Asia, a best-seller which earned the author £800, a small fortune in those days. Burnes became the most sought-after dinner party guest in fashionable Mayfair salons. He was showered with honours: the Royal Geographical Society awarded him their Gold Medal, he received the French Geographical Society’s Silver Medal, the Royal Asiatic Society elected him a member, as did the Athenaeum Club, and he was everywhere fêted by statesmen and fellow explorers, including the legendary explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt.

Burnes the intrepid Scots traveller arrived back in India at the height of the anti-Russian hysteria, with Bentinck’s successor, the Earl of Auckland, casting about for a trustworthy agent to lead a delegation to Afghanistan. Auckland was a lifelong bachelor, exquisitely educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, who travelled about India with his two adoring sisters, who acted as his hostesses. After performing some splendid humanitarian work to relieve the famine of 1838, Auckland’s thoughts began to turn to British India’s North-West Frontier, which bulked large in the Empire’s foreign policy. Sadly, he was singularly ill-suited to challenge the spread of Russian influence in Afghanistan. One of his biographers describes him as a man ‘prey to Russophobia … he acted precipitately, induced a crisis which probably need not have occurred, and did not show any great talent in dealing with it’.3 This is getting ahead of the story, but it is worthwhile bearing in mind that from the Burnes mission forward, Britain’s Afghan policy rested in the hands of a diffident, vacillating administrator who was almost totally ignorant of Asia.

The purpose of the mission to Kabul, on the face of it, was to persuade Dost Mohammed to open his country to East India Company traders. Persuading the Dost to shut the door on Russian interference in his country’s affairs was all but written into the brief. Burnes was the obvious choice to lead the expedition to Kabul and it was in that city that he eventually met his end, the first high-profile victim of Britain’s Afghan folly.

The Afghan ruler whom Burnes was charged with winning over to the British cause required little persuasion, for Dost Mohammed went to great lengths to profess himself a steadfast friend of the Raj. No sooner had Lord Auckland taken possession of the sprawling mansion of Government House in Calcutta, the Amir fired off a flamboyant letter of welcome expressing his ‘extreme gratification of your Lordship’s arrival, enlightening with your presence the seat of government, and diffusing over Hindoostan the brightness of your countenance’. Auckland’s coming, in the eyes of the enraptured Dost, figured as nothing less than ‘the envy of the garden of Paradise’. The king went so far as to invite Auckland to ‘consider me and my country as your own’.4 He would have cause to regret that remark.

Auckland had inherited his predecessor’s determination to secure new markets for British manufacturing, as well as the home Government’s fears of Russia’s designs on India. The Governor General assured Dost Mohammed of his wish that Afghanistan, despite historical realities to the contrary, then as now, should be a ‘flourishing and united nation’, benefiting from ‘a more extended commerce’. So that the Dost would better comprehend exactly what the Government of India had in mind, Auckland would, ‘ere long, depute some Gentleman to your Court, to discuss with you certain commercial topics, with a view to our mutual advantage’. Auckland reminded the Dost of Bentinck’s grand scheme to open the Indus to navigation and he gave assurances that the new British ruler of India would second this ‘philanthropic purpose’. One could already detect the insinuation that the Amir ruled his country at the British Government’s pleasure, though two more years were to pass before Auckland despatched an army into Afghanistan to oust the man for whom he now declared to hold in ‘unfeigned regard and esteem’. The letter went on to assure the Dost of Britain’s peaceful intentions towards Afghanistan. ‘My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British Government to interfere in the affairs of other independent states, and indeed it does not immediately [author’s italics] occur to me how the interference of my Government could be exercised for your benefit.’5 True enough, though Auckland soon found reasons aplenty to remove the Amir from power for British India’s benefit. In light of what followed, one is at pains to suppress a wince at the Governor General’s hypocrisy.

Auckland handed Burnes his plan of action in September 1836. He was instructed to conduct a commercial mission to the countries bordering the Indus, proceeding first to the Court of the amirs of Sind, to remind the potentates of their obligations under a recently concluded treaty giving permission for British survey work and navigation along the river. Burnes was instructed to lay down buoys and erect navigation landmarks, and to ensure the shipping lanes were open for British vessels between the river and the sea. Once Burnes had obtained undertakings from the tribal chieftains of Sind, he was to continue upriver to Attok, a city under Sikh dominion, to secure Ranjit Singh’s permission for British shipping to go through his territory, since this was not covered in the general treaty. Lastly, Burnes was to journey onwards to Kabul, with instructions to brief Dost Mohammed on the Government’s commercial objectives. Burnes was to take with him gifts for the Sind chiefs and the Afghan ruler. These were ‘not to be of a costly nature, but should be chosen particularly with a view to exhibit the superiority of British manufactures’. Burnes was furthermore under instruction to have ‘strict regard to economy in all your arrangements, which you will easily be able to do, as parade would be unsuitable to the character of a commercial mission’.6 These orders came to Burnes via Auckland’s Chief Secretary William Macnaghten, another leading protagonist in the Afghan drama. Here one detects the first portent of disaster, for it was Macnaghten’s parsimony, albeit under orders from the Supreme Government, that ignited the powder keg in Kabul. For his troubles, Macnaghten shared Burnes’s fate of being hacked to pieces by an Afghan mob. Four months before Burnes’s arrival in Kabul on 20 September, Auckland wrote to the Dost apprising him of his old acquaintance’s forthcoming visit to discuss ways of facilitating trade between Afghanistan and India.

When Burnes rode into Kabul, the Dost, another of the main characters in the spectacle on which the curtain was about to lift, had been on the throne for a decade. The Amir was 43 years old and at the pinnacle of his power, a position he had reached through the time-honoured Afghan expedient of stepping over the bodies of his opponents. The Dost was a Barakzai, one of the two rival clans that belonged to the ruling Afghan Durrani dynasty, the other being the Saddozai family. The decades of tribal feuding that preceded the Dost’s accession to the throne marked a period of almost impenetrable intrigue in Afghan politics. But it is worth noting the highlights to better understand the roles of the two major factions in their later dealings with the British invaders. It would certainly have served the British well to ponder the machinations of Afghan duplicity and ruthlessness before marching an army into that country.

The death in 1773 of Ahmed Shah, founder of the Durrani Empire that once extended as far as Delhi, plunged the Afghan clans into twenty years of internecine strife that has been likened to England’s Wars of the Roses, with Lancaster and York the counterparts of the Afghan Barakzai and Saddozai tribes. When Ahmed Shah’s grandson, Zeman Shah, took over with the support of the Barakzais, he set out to conquer the Punjab and restore Afghanistan to its former glory. His ambitions were soon undermined by plots to overthrow him, so the Amir rounded up as many enemy tribal leaders he could lay his hands on, and let loose an orgy of decapitations. One of the plotters, Futteh Khan, managed to escape the executioner’s axe and fled to Persia where he linked forces with Mahmud, Zeman’s disloyal brother, who happened to be one of the chief plotters. Together, the two conspirators were able to defeat and imprison Zeman. It is strictly forbidden for an Afghan pretender, no matter how princely, to sit on the throne of Kabul if he is sightless. So taking a belt-and-braces approach to affairs, Mahmud had his brother’s eyes pierced by a lancet. Mahmud’s rule was a tumultuous one, fatally weakened by threats of Persian invasions and tribal discontent. Very soon another of Zeman’s brothers, Shah Shuja ul Mulk, rose up to topple Mahmud, who was locked away in the bowels of the Kabul dungeon. Shuja was reputed to be a disreputable character, once a wanderer on the edge of starvation, a peddler and a bandit who raised money by plundering caravans. It was as a mere creature of circumstance that he reached the throne, though he was never able to enforce his writ beyond Kabul and Peshawar, as Mahmud’s brother Firuz held Herat, and Futteh reigned as the warlord of Kandahar. In 1809 Mahmud escaped from his cell and with Futteh defeated Shuja near Gandamak, the place where thirty-three years later the last remnants of the British Army were to be annihilated.

Shuja escaped to the Punjab, where he had his first encounter in Lahore with Ranjit Singh. Apart from Shuja’s frustrated attempt to enlist Sikh support to regain his kingdom, little is known of what transpired in this meeting. In fact, the deposed Afghan king found himself virtually Ranjit’s prisoner – it was only through Shuja’s wife’s pleading, and the promise to hand over the fabled Koh-i-Noor diamond to Ranjit, that Shuja’s freedom was secured. This massive 105-carat gem, once the largest diamond in the world, was in the early nineteenth century part of the Afghan Amir’s royal treasures. Legend has it that it was discovered 5,000 years ago in India, and had been held by various Indian and Persian princes who fought bitterly over it for centuries. It was finally seized by the British as a spoil of war, and became part of the Crown Jewels when Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877. Rather than being given leave to depart, Shuja was allowed to escape. This he effected by digging a tunnel with his staff to the city’s main drain, where transport had been arranged. Travelling by night, Shuja fled first to Simla, and finally to Ludhiana, where he and his 600 wives took up residence at vast expense to the British exchequer.

The Government of India would soon have great things in store for the deposed Saddozai pretender, who was meanwhile invited to bide his time as a British pensioner in Ludhiana in the company of his pathetic brother Zeman. Mahmud did honour to the Afghan tradition of brutality, repaying Futteh Khan’s services by having him blinded and murdered in 1818. This proved to be a deadly error, for his treachery so enraged the Barakzai clan that it sparked a bloody fratricidal war, as a result of which, Mahmud was deprived of all his territories but Herat. His remaining possessions were divided among Futteh Khan’s brothers. Of these, Dost Mohammad received Ghazni, to which in 1826 he added Kabul, the jewel of the Afghan trophies.

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In 1833 Shah Shuja, in collusion with his British hosts and the Maharaja Ranjit Singh, came out of his retirement to mount one final, inglorious campaign to regain the throne of Kabul. Shuja laid the groundwork for his advance on Afghanistan in late 1831 by offering to leave Ranjit’s supremacy in Kashmir and Peshawar unchallenged. For his part, should the Sikh leader agree to acknowledge Shuja as Amir, ‘the Maharaja’s name will become famous throughout the world’. When this propitious moment came to pass, Shuja pledged Ranjit his unconditional allegiance and vowed to respect the territories under the Sikh’s dominion. Ranjit replied with an offer of a detailed treaty, setting out among other things, the gifts that were to be exchanged between the two sovereigns, prohibiting the slaughter of cows and, more to the point, demanding that the Sikhs relinquished all claims to the lands held by Shuja. Following eastern tradition, the Saddozai pretender sat down to negotiate some parts of the treaty, taking issue, for instance, with the prohibition on slaughtering cattle, but in the end both parties agreed to treat the enemies of either as a common foe.

Before starting on his expedition, Shah Shuja understandably sought to put his family’s financial affairs in order. To this end he wrote to the Governor General, explaining that on arrival in Ludhiana he had three children and a pension of 4,000 rupees a month. Now that his brood had swollen to twenty-nine children, the hard-pressed Shuja was obliged to sell his jewels and other possessions to support his extended family. Could the Governor General, he implored, see his way clear to extending a reasonable advance before Shuja set out to invade his homeland? Bentinck assured him that his family would not be abandoned to destitution, to which Shuja despatched another note requesting six months of his stipend in advance. Bentinck sent him the money and on 28 January 1833, Shuja was on the march, crossing the Indus six months later to set up camp in Shikarpore, with Kandahar in his sights. The amirs of Sind took umbrage at Shuja crossing their territory and sent an army against him, which was routed with severe losses on both sides. Exhilarated by the scent of victory, on 9 February 1834 Shah Shuja ordered his tents to be pitched in the direction of Kandahar. The city was taken in May, roughly coinciding with Ranjit Singh’s triumphant march into Peshawar. Dost Mohammed was rumoured to have taken poison, while other reports had him fleeing the capital with the taxes he had levied to prosecute the war with Shuja. Both stories turned out to be false: Ranjit himself informed the Government that the Dost was in fact marching fast to Kandahar at the head of 30,000 cavalry and infantry, only to then turn his host around and return to Kabul in despair on learning of Ranjit’s entry into Peshawar. After several months’ sulking in his palace, the Dost took his courage in both hands and again sallied forth to meet the hated Saddozai at Kandahar. The Amir’s Kandahar brethren rallied their battered forces to join hands with the Dost, and together on 2 July they inflicted a crushing defeat on Shuja, in a battle that left 5,000 dead along the Kabul road. Shuja fled to Ludhiana to take up his former life as a British pensioner, but this was only for another year, after which he was brought out of retirement to once again lay claim to his throne, this time with the backing of the two most powerful armies in India.

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Burnes entered Kabul with great pomp and splendour in the autumn of 1837, where he was received at the Jalalabad Gate by a body of Afghan cavalry led by the Amir’s favourite son, the duplicitous Akbar Khan who five years later was to mastermind the massacre of the Kabul garrison. Akbar was on that day at his most solicitous, offering Burnes a ride into the city on his own elephant, to conduct him to his sumptuous quarters in a garden adjacent to the palace.

Hardly had Burnes been a fortnight in Kabul, when it became apparent that he had interpreted the Government’s brief as something far more extensive than the simple negotiation of a commercial treaty. This may have been cockiness on the part of a highly ambitious young celebrity, though there is no ruling out Auckland’s connivance in investing the mission with a hidden agenda. The official papers make no reference to any political role, yet by 4 October Burnes was briefing Macnaghten on such matters as the Persian influence in Kabul, and the extent to which the powerful Persian community of that city could bring pressure to bear on Afghan politics. Burnes had some uncomfortable news to report to the Governor General. The Kizilbash, or Persian Shi’a warriors who were close to the Dost, had taken an extremely hostile view of the British agent’s arrival in Kabul. The Amir, Burnes informed Macnaghten, was seeking an alliance with Persia, and this in turn fuelled the Government’s fears of a Persian attack on Herat. The city was in the hands of the Saddozai chieftain Kamran Shah, Shah Shuja’s nephew, who ruled as the puppet of his villainous vizier (chief minister) Yar Mohammed, who was for Burnes ‘the wickedest man in Central Asia’. John Kaye’s description leaves little doubt to the vizier‘s utter repulsiveness: ‘… a stout, square-built man, of middle height, with a heavy, stern countenance, thick Negro-like lips, bad straggling teeth, an overhanging brow, and an abruptly receding forehead’.7 The Kizilbash knew that the Government of India would react with alarm to any form of alliance between the Dost and the Shah of Persia, hence Burnes’s efforts to draw Afghanistan into the British camp came as an unwelcome development.

The letter was despatched to Fort William, the Governor General’s official residence in Calcutta, and the following day Burnes fired off another report, this one dealing with his first formal meeting with Dost Mohammed, which had taken place on 24 September. On that day Burnes had strolled from his residence to the throne room of the Bala Hissar, Kabul’s massive hilltop fortress, where he was greeted by the Dost, with nobody else from his courtly entourage in attendance, apart from his son Akbar Khan. Burnes had always held the Amir in high esteem, and his admiration was in no way diminished by the unhappy circumstances of Burnes’s final departure from Kabul in the spring of 1838. ‘Power frequently spoils men,’ Burnes wrote in his account of the mission to Afghanistan, ‘but with Dost Mohammed neither the increase of it, nor his new title of Amir, seems to have done him any harm.’8

The meeting began shortly before lunch and carried on, with a break for supper, until midnight. Burnes wasted no time in spelling out the Government’s plans for the Indus and the countries bordering the river. The Dost listened, nodding politely as Burnes expounded at length on the benefits Afghanistan would derive from the flow of British goods to Kabul and the markets beyond the Hindu Kush. All the while, Burnes knew what was at the back of the Amir’s mind, and this had little to do with commercial treaties. When at last Burnes fell silent, the Dost began putting forth his own case, a debate that would have the Amir and Auckland locked in a thorny, time-consuming political wrangle, and one that inevitably doomed the British mission to failure.

Dost Mohammed lived with an obsessive desire to assert his sovereignty over Peshawar, the summer capital of the Afghan Court, a city lying in a pleasant valley some 200 miles east of Kabul in present-day Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Peshawar had always been regarded as the jewel in the Afghan crown and its loss to Ranjit Singh was a source of perennial vexation to the Amir. The strategically important valley was conquered by the Sikh armies in 1823, though at that time Ranjit hesitated to annex the territory outright to his Punjab dominions. The Vale of Peshawar, as it is known, was contested by Afghan and Sikh forces for years thereafter, until in 1834 Ranjit felt himself powerful enough to call Peshawar his possession alone. Dost Mohammed made two futile attempts to wrest control of the city: in 1835, when the Amir withdrew rather than risk battle with a superior force, and again in 1837, when Akbar Khan was forced to retire from the battlefield at Jamrud, at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, despite having won a pyrrhic victory over the Sikhs. Peshawar remained a Sikh possession until 1849, when the Punjab and with it, the North-West Frontier territory, were annexed by the British. Dost Mohammed could never reconcile himself to the loss of Peshawar and he employed this as his opening gambit with the British Envoy, who was now seated cross-legged before him on a pile of embroidered cushions.

‘But,’ replied the wily Amir to Burnes’s entreaties to open up Afghanistan to British goods, ‘I am involved in difficulties which are very prejudicial to commerce. My hostilities with the Sikhs narrow my resources, compel me to take up money from merchants, and even to increase the duties to support the expenses of war.’9 The meaning behind the Amir’s remarks, though laced with Oriental ambiguity, was quite clear to Burnes: the price for free access to Afghan markets and trade routes was an undertaking by the British Government to help restore Peshawar to Afghan suzerainty.

Burnes had foreseen the Dost’s reaction and was ‘not unprepared for his irritation’, smarting as the Amir understandably was from the recent loss of his prized possession. The British Envoy quietly reminded his host that as history had shown, it was all but hopeless for the fragmented Afghan forces to challenge the hated foe Ranjit Singh on the battlefield. What Burnes left unsaid, and of this the Dost was all too painfully aware, was that the British Government and Ranjit Singh were bound by a treaty of friendship. Any move by Britain in favour of the Afghan cause would constitute a violation of that treaty and bring the risk of open confrontation with the powerful Sikh maharaja. This was a risk the Government was not prepared to take – at least not yet.

Dost Mohammed did not immediately give up hope of British intervention to help him wrest Peshawar from the Sikhs. A few weeks after his interview with Burnes, the Amir addressed his Kandahar kinsmen in a letter brimming with optimism, to the effect that a settlement over Peshawar might yet be achieved with the aid of British diplomacy. This amounted to an eleventh-hour attempt to dissuade the Kandahar chiefs from sending one of their sons as emissary to the Court of the Shah of Persia, who was at that moment massing an army against Herat, a piece of intelligence the Dost had obtained by intercepting Burnes’s correspondence with Calcutta. It was the sinister Yar Mohammed who had persuaded his master Kamran Shah to seek Persian help to resist the Dost’s efforts to bring Afghanistan’s second city under Kabul’s hegemony. The vizier was also conniving with the Amir’s brothers in Kandahar, despite the clan rivalry, to forge an alliance with Herat. Dost Mohammed countered by urging the sirdars (chieftains) to ally themselves not with the Persians, but with the British, who are ‘near to us, and famous for preserving their word’. The Dost would soon have ample cause to dismiss Auckland’s assurance, that ‘it is not the practice of the British Government to interfere in the affairs of other independent states’, as a remark dripping with deception.

The British Raj employed a cadre of agents beyond India’s borders, usually at diplomatic posts in various rough spots throughout Central Asia. These men were known as ‘newswriters’, a euphemism for informant. On 22 October, one of these anonymous newswriters delivered to Burnes a report confirming his worst suspicions, namely that the Kandahar sirdars had resolved to send a legation to Persia. The chief sirdar‘s son, Mohammed Omar Khan, had departed Kandahar with a retinue of 150 soldiers and servants, bearing as gifts an elephant for the Shah and four Kashmir shawls for the Russian Ambassador to Tehran. He took with him a letter from his elders, in which the sirdars all but prostrated themselves before the ‘King of Kings’. In it, the chief sirdar put himself entirely at the Shah’s disposal, ‘particularly with reference to the capture of Herat’. The Kandahar envoy offered the Shah his ‘entire submission, and my solicitude for the service of your Majesty’.10 The Kandahar chiefs had elected to strengthen ties with Persia, Burnes was told, on the one hand for fear their brother Dost Mohammed would exploit his friendship with the British to their exclusion, but more immediately to pacify the Shah, whose advance eastward posed a threat to their independence. Far more worrying for the Dost as well as for Burnes, intelligence had leaked regarding Persia’s promises of an alliance with Kandahar, the result of which would be, once Herat had fallen to the Shah’s Russian-backed army, the cessation of that city to the Kandahar sirdars. Under such a scenario, Dost Mohammed would certainly be dispossessed of his throne by the combined Persian–Kandahar forces, though little did he realise at the time who were to be his real usurpers.

With the Persians and their Russian allies massing under the gates of Herat, and Dost Mohammed pleading for British support in his feud with Auckland’s ally Ranjit Singh, commercial relations had now become a secondary issue in Burnes’s mission to Kabul. The Dost was caught in the jaws of a vice, and to his tormented mind, only the British could extract him from his predicament.

Unfortunately, this was not how Auckland saw it – or how he was persuaded to see it by his all-powerful chief secretary, the Russophobe Macnaghten, and other influential voices in the Governor General’s entourage. One of the more intriguing of these characters, who could have been cast in a supporting role in the drama now beginning to unfold, was James Lewis, alias Charles Masson, archaeologist, numismatist, army deserter and spy, who in 1834 pitched up in Kabul as newswriter to the Government of India. For reasons unknown, Masson had deserted from his regiment, the Bengal Artillery, at Agra in 1827, and made his way on foot beyond British jurisdiction to the Indus, wandering across those badlands in native dress. Masson must have been moving under an incredibly lucky star, for his flaming red beard and green skullcap would hardly have rendered him inconspicuous to the inquisitive native eye. All the more pity that no known portrait of Masson has survived. When he reached Bushire, a town on Iran’s south-west coast, Masson concocted a tale for the British resident, bizarrely claiming to be an American from Kentucky who had been engaged in archaeological research for the past ten years in his travels across Europe and Asia. That Masson was an archaeologist of note there is no doubt, for the former clerk of a London insurance company happened to be the discoverer of an immense lost city north of Kabul, that had been founded by Alexander the Great. Masson’s collection of Buddhist relics are held by the great museums of England, including the British Museum (6,200 coins), the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge and the Victoria and Albert in London.

In late 1832, Karmat Ali, the newswriter in Kabul, alerted the Government to the presence of a shabbily dressed Englishman in Kabul who, despite his deplorable demeanour, had a fluent command of Persian and appeared to be engaged in some sort of surveying work, judging by the astrolabe and sextant he carried with him. Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Claude Wade, Political Agent at Ludhiana, got on the case and in two years’ time he had gathered enough evidence to reveal Masson’s true identity. Wade reported his findings to Calcutta and shortly thereafter, in exchange for services as Government agent, Lord Ellenborough at the Board of Control wrote a secret despatch, on the Governor General’s recommendation, conferring on Masson a royal pardon for having deserted the ranks. A few weeks later, Masson was on the Government’s payroll as resident intelligence agent in Kabul, directly answerable to Captain Wade. Masson’s only interest in Afghanistan was to explore its ancient ruins and dig up coins: he had no wish to take on the role of informer and only reluctantly did he become a player in the Great Game. One can safely assume that his appointment amounted to a matter of thinly disguised blackmail – take the job or face a court martial and the hangman’s noose.

Once Masson was installed in Kabul he began forwarding regular despatches to Ludhiana, and Wade in turn struck up a lively correspondence with Macnaghten, to whom he regularly fed doses of Masson’s observations on Afghan royalty. Masson’s prejudices lay firmly in the Saddozai camp, that is, with Shah Shuja. Of the defeated pretender, Masson argued that Afghanistan would have benefited from a victory over Dost Mohammed in Shuja’s recent attempt to unseat his Barakzai rival. ‘The wishes of all classes turn to his [Shuja’s] restoration,’ he writes in a despatch to Wade, in which he later states, ‘It occurs to me that less violence would be done to the prejudices of the people, and to the safety and well-being of our relations with other powers, by facilitating the restoration of Shah Shuja than by forcing the Afghans to submit to the sovereignty of the Amir.’ Of the Barakzai clan in general, Masson held a very gloomy view: ‘They are indeed their own enemies, but their eternal and unholy dissensions and enmities have brought them to be considered as pests to the country, and the likelihood is that affairs will become worse, not better.’ Masson’s pro-Saddozai sympathies were reinforced by reports from Sir John McNeill, the British Government resident in Tehran, who assured Wade that the Saddozai family had ‘a strong hold on the prejudices, if not on the affections, of a large portion of the Durranis [Afghans]’.11 Thanks to Wade’s correspondence with Macnaghten, these two high-ranking informants effectively helped to poison the mind of the chief secretary and through him, the Governor General, against the Dost and his Barakzai clan.

The Government tragically failed to take on board what amounted to Masson’s worthiest piece of advice, that no British army should be employed in restoring Shuja to the throne of Kabul. Masson stepped off stage in early 1838 when he was recalled to Peshawar, where he resigned from government service. In keeping with his turbulent career, on his way home Masson was caught in the siege of Kalat, in Baluchistan, as the British forces were advancing on Afghanistan. When Masson was sent to convey the defenders’ demands to the British Political Agent at Quetta, he was imprisoned as a traitor and spy. He was released several months later and made his way back to England, where he married an 18-year-old farmer’s daughter from Watford and lived the last nine years of his life on a small East India Company pension, quietly writing and working on his coin collection.

Burnes, who had met Masson and eventually succumbed to his case for the Saddozai camp, soldiered on in Kabul as honest broker between the ever more obstinate entreaties of the Amir and Auckland’s refusal to yield an inch. Burnes’s diplomatic predicament took on a greater urgency two months after his arrival at the Amir’s court, when in November 1837 a large Persian army, backed by Russian advisers, advanced into Afghanistan fielding 10,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and 30 guns. The dreaded, though not unexpected, siege of Herat was under way. Mohammed Shah’s designs on Herat had been in the forefront of the Government’s thinking for at least a year. Macnaghten let the cat out of the bag in November 1836, in a policy statement despatched to McNeill in Tehran. Auckland’s omnipotent chief secretary told the British representative in Persia that he must consider British India’s commercial interests in the region subordinate to political concerns. Above all, Macnaghten stressed, Afghanistan needed to be protected against foreign aggression ‘from the west’, meaning Persia and far more worryingly, Russia. Macnaghten was convinced that the Persians’ contemplated advance on Herat was a plot hatched by the Russian Ambassador to Tehran. ‘Under these circumstances, it seems impossible for the British Government, either in England or in India, to view with indifference the gradual encroachments of Persia in the direction of our India dominions.’12 McNeill was instructed to depute a British officer to Herat to mediate in the feud between Mohammed Shah and the city’s ruler, Kamran Shah. This was the cue for one of the most colourful characters in the cast of players to make his appearance. The man waiting in the wings was Eldred Pottinger, a 27-year-old Irishman serving in the Indian Army, who in a year’s time was to successfully organise the defence of the besieged city.

The bitter feud between the Shah of Persia and the ruler of Herat to which Macnaghten alluded, and which served as the pretext for the Persian invasion, was Kamran Shah’s unsavoury practice of rounding up members of the city’s Shi’a population and selling them into slavery. Persia was then, as Iran is today, a majority Shi’a Muslim country, in contrast to the Afghans who are predominately Sunni. Burnes himself saw this ‘outrageous conduct’ as justification for sending an army against the city. Macnaghten was equally repulsed by the slave trade, which Britain had outlawed in 1807, but it was the second part of a report from Burnes that sent his antennae flailing about. Burnes doubted Persia’s ability to bring Herat to its knees single-handed. ‘If she succeeds in humbling Kamran without the co-operation of the Afghan chiefs [that is, the Kandahar sirdars],’ he wrote, ‘it must be through the influence of Russia, by whose counsels there can be very little doubt she is directed to Herat.’13

On the face of it, there was every good reason for alarm at the prospect of a Russian-backed army massing at the gates of an Afghan city. Herat and its surrounding territory is where all the great roads leading to India converge. Kaye, who was a Great Game contemporary, asserts that it would be possible for a light force to forge a passage across the Hindu Kush, ‘but it is only by the Herat route that that a really formidable well-equipped army could make its way upon the Indian frontier from the regions of the north-west. Both the nature and the resources of the country are such as to favour the success of the invader [author’s italics]’.14 Chilling stuff, but it is useful to note that with regard to Russian designs on India, the Government had nothing whatsoever to go on but circumstantial evidence.

Kamran Shah and his vizier Yar Mohammed marched back to Herat on 17 September at the head of the army, having spent the previous weeks campaigning in Seistan in eastern Persia, where they laid waste to the fortress of Jowayan, a victory the Afghans achieved at vast military and political cost, as was soon to become evident. The effect of the siege was to leave Kamran’s military forces badly crippled, and inflame the Shah of Persia’s determination to crush his Afghan enemy. Kamran returned to find the city’s bazaars buzzing with rumours of an impending advance by the Persian army. On 23 November, these fears materialised into reality when the advance Persian guard took up its position on the plain outside Herat’s north-west gate, to commence a bombardment that was to continue almost unbroken for a year.

Mingling in the crowd that stood in the marketplace to witness Kamran Shah’s victorious return from the Seistan campaign was Lieutenant Pottinger, the nephew of Burnes’s former chief Henry Pottinger. The young Bengal Artillery officer had spent several months travelling across Afghanistan disguised as a horse trader, the identity he assumed for an intelligence-gathering mission on orders of his uncle. On reaching Kabul, Pottinger adopted the cover of a Muslim syud, a descendant of Mohammed. Both these subterfuges were carried off with sufficient aplomb to see Pottinger safely across hundreds of miles of bandit-ridden, cut-throat country, from which he had arrived safely at Herat in early September 1937. He took up residence in one of the city’s caravanserais, passing unrecognised as a European among the assembled merchants from the distant reaches of Central Asia.

Pottinger revealed his identity in a letter he sent to Yar Mohammed, in which he enquired whether his services might be of use in organising the city’s defences. The vizier