The Afghan Wars 1839-1919 E-Book

T A Heathcote

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

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

First published in 1980, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, The Afghan Wars 1839–1919 speedily became a standard work of reference at military academies and staff colleges in the UK and overseas. Since then, with the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 and subsequent war in Afghanistan, copies of the book have been increasingly in demand by readers interested in finding out the context to one of the most complex conflicts of modern times. T.A. Heathcote departs from the Eurocentric approach of most British military historians and sets the causes and events of the Anglo-Afghan wars firmly in their Asian context, providing as much a political as a military history. Using official dispatches and private letters as well as existing histories, this book tells the story of all three Anglo-Afghan conflicts in a single, accessible volume. It remains essential reading for anyone with an interest in the study of warfare in one of the world's most hostile environments.

Leseprobe

Front cover image: ‘The Last Stand of the 44th Foot of Jagdalak’ by W.B. Wollen. (National Army Museum)

Frontispiece: The Shadow on the Hills. This cartoon by Charles Keene was published in Punch during the diplomatic tension prior to the outbreak of the Second Afghan War. The figure of armed India, flanked by the British lion, looks towards Afghanistan, where the shadow of the Russian bear lies upon the Khyber hills.

First published 1980 by Osprey Publishing Ltd

First published in paperback 2007

This paperback edition first published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© T.A. Heathcote, 1980, 2003, 2007, 2025

The right of T.A. Heathcote to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 83705 030 7

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

I

The Afghan Chequerboard:The country and the peoples of Afghanistan

II

The Beginning of the Great Game:British strategy and the North-West of India,1800–38

III

Over the Hills and Far Away:The first Afghan campaign 1839

IV

The Failure of the Grand Design:British disasters 1840–41

V

Retribution, Rescue and Recall:The British withdrawal 1842

VI

Masterly Inactivity and the Forward Policy:England, Russia, and Afghanistan 1854–78

VII

The Queen’s Pawns:The British invasions of Afghanistan 1878–79

VIII

The Two Knights: British generals in action 1879–80

IX

Stale-Mate: The ending of the Second Afghan War 1881

X

The King’s Move: Afghanistan and India 1919

XI

End Game: The conclusion of the Third Afghan War

Envoi: Afghanistan 1919–2021

Maps and Diagrams

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

To Victoria’s Grandparents

’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam

I

The Afghan Chequerboard

The country and the peoples of Afghanistan

Afghanistan, the land of the Afghans, has at different periods of history extended over various tracts of territory. But it has always been centred on the vast mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush, a western offshoot of the even mightier Himalayan chain. A further series of ranges runs southwards from the Hindu Kush, forming the Suleiman Mountains and the Safed Koh, which block the north-western approaches to the Indian sub-continent. These hills have an elevation of from ten to fifteen thousand feet above sea-level, and include peaks that tower five or ten thousand feet above their surroundings, rocky, hostile, devoid of vegetation, snowbound in winter, baking hot in summer.

North of the Hindu Kush (the ‘Hindu-killer’, so called because so many slaves brought from India died there on their way to Central Asia) the country forms part of the basin of the Oxus, which flows west and then north to the Aral Sea. South of it, the country belongs to the basin of the Indus, which drains southwards to join the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Thus Afghanistan, astride the watershed, is simultaneously the southernmost state of Central Asia and the northernmost state of South Asia.

West of the Hindu Kush the land is lower and flatter, turning in places to areas of level desert. This is drained by the River Helmand, which, after flowing alongside an area known as Registan, the place of sand, finally disappears in a vast swamp, the Hamun. This western region, with Herat in the north and Kandahar in the south, was until recent times the only all-weather route between South and Central Asia when the winter snows blocked the passes of the Hindu Kush.

The term Afghan, though in recent times applied to any citizen of the state of Afghanistan, generically refers to a people of Indo-Iranian stock. In the same way the term Englishman, though it may be applied to any citizen of England, normally means someone of Anglo-Saxon stock. Thus, many Afghan citizens are not ethnic Afghans, and indeed many ethnic Afghans are not citizens of the Afghan state, but subjects of neighbouring countries. The area north of the Hindu Kush, known as Afghan Turkestan, comprising the ancient provinces of Balkh and Badakhshan, is populated mostly by Uzbeks, a people of Turkish stock. Many of the western areas around the Hindu Kush are peopled by Hazaras, descendants of Mongolian garrisons settled there by Genghis Khan. Around Kabul, the present capital of Afghanistan, live the Qizilbashes, descendants of Iranian garrisons, settled there by Nadir Shah to hold his conquests. These, like most Iranians, belong to the minority Shi’a sect of Islam, while the rest of the inhabitants of Afghanistan are more orthodox, Sunni, Muslims.

The ethnic Afghans are otherwise called Pathans, from a local word Pasht, the back of a mountain range. They are divided into two main branches, with certain linguistic distinctions. In very general terms, the western Pathans speak Pashtu, and inhabit the country from Herat to Kandahar, while the eastern Pathans speak Pakhtu and live in the mountains and valleys around Peshawar. This, they would call Pekhawar, but the official title is that given in the days when the western Pathans, the Durranis, were politically dominant. Between the two great branches of the Pathan people, in the region south of the Hindu Kush from Kandahar to Kabul, live the Ghilzais. These are said not to be true Pathans but an amalgam with peoples of Turkish stock.

But all these Afghans have generally been regarded by their Indian and Iranian neighbours as wild savage hillmen, uncouth barbarians, ever ready to prey on each other, to rob travellers passing through their country or even to sweep down upon the more fortunate and richer countries outside their own borders. The 1908 Imperial Gazetteer of India summed up what writers had recorded of the Afghans since they first appeared in history:

Their step is full of resolution, their bearing proud and apt to be rough. Inured to bloodshed from childhood, they are familiar with death, audacious in attack, but easily discouraged by failure. They are treacherous and passionate in revenge. … They are much under the influence of their Mullas, especially for evil.

They were also generally agreed to be proud of their country, their tribe, their descent, their prowess in arms, and, above all, their independence. Other races were despised as effete, and among themselves each man considered himself as good as or better than his neighbour. In short, the Afghan has always been like other highlanders in the way in which he is regarded by his plains-dwelling neighbours with mingled apprehension and condescension, for his high regard for personal honour, for his clan loyalty, for his readiness to carry and use arms to settle disputes, for his lack of respect for other people’s property, and for his religious intolerance.

The main wealth of Afghanistan has always been its flocks and herds of sheep and goats. Large numbers of camels and horses were necessary prior to the coming of modern automobiles, and were bred for export and for use in the carrying trade. Wool and hides still form an essential part of the economy. Traditionally, the government income on these commodities was levied in the form of customs transit dues, and a grazing tax of one animal in every forty.

The real money, in revenue terms, came from the land revenue, or government share of the crop – mostly wheat or barley, but also lucerne grown for fodder, and orchard fruits. This was assessed at rates varying from up to one-third, where land was irrigated from rivers, etc., to one-tenth, when it was dependent only on rainfall. Revenue was collected in kind, and taken to local treasuries. Whatever was not needed for the use of the government’s own men and beasts as sold to merchants and then back by them to the local consumers. But if there was a better market elsewhere, such as, for instance, a well-financed army of occupation, then the local consumer and his animals might well find themselves going hungry, as inflation drove up the price of their food. Thus, as we shall see, even an army that paid for what it took was bound to be hated, and the government it supported unpopular, because in a poor season there simply was not enough local produce to go round.

The tribal system, which ordered the life of most people outside the city areas, was certainly as potent in political terms as the national-state system of Europe in 1914. Men felt a fierce loyalty to their own tribe, such that, if called upon, they would without hesitation assemble in arms under their own tribal chiefs and local clan leaders. In the same way, men throughout Europe flocked to the colours in 1914, forming up in regional divisions and battalions, under command of the local nobility and gentry. In theory, under Islamic law every believer is under obligation to bear arms at the ruler’s call, but there was no more the need to enforce this than there was to introduce conscription to fill up the British Army in 1914. The Afghan shepherd or peasant, when called on, went to war for much the same mixture of reasons as the more ‘civilized’ European clerk or factory worker – a desire for adventure, a desire not to be left out, nor to lose esteem in the eyes of his fellows, a dislike or contempt of foreigners, perhaps even the chance of extra cash or enhanced personal prospects. The tribal system was not something particularly backward, or warlike. It was simply the best way of organizing large groups of people in a country that was geographically difficult, and in a society that had an uncomplicated way of life. Indeed, even at the present time, it is a force that governments disregard at their peril.

The administration of the country was conducted by a combination of this patriarchal tribal organization and the more sophisticated jagirdari, or quasi-feudal system. The relative importance of these two elements varied from area to area, according to the poverty or difficulty of the terrain. In areas that were remote or without much in the way of a crop, central government rarely had the power or desire to exert detailed control, and there tribalism predominated. In the plains and around the cities, which were accessible and worth having, central government asserted itself and the jagirdari system was the stronger.

The head of the tribe or great clan was the Sirdar, a title corresponding in importance to that of Earl or Count in medieval Europe. Sirdars were always from the same noble family of their tribe, though not necessarily succeeding through primogeniture. Their election (for life) was by the assembled elders of their tribe, ratified by the central government, usually as a matter of course.

The extent to which a tribal chief could enforce his authority depended on a number of variable factors. These included his own force of personality, the independence of spirit of his clansmen, and especially his success or failure in delivering financial rewards. The latter consideration, after all, weighs heavily with voters in any modern electoral system. In Afghanistan it was measured by the open-handedness of the chief in giving feasts, or presents to his followers, and in providing them with extra emoluments and employment as official retainers. (Nineteenth-century Afghans, demonstrably, have not had the monopoly of this attitude to government on the part of the governed.)

To fulfil his obligations to his supporters the Sirdar needed funds and patronage. The central government, on the other hand, needed troops, which it lacked the machinery to pay and maintain other than in limited numbers. The problem for both parties was resolved by a system of military tenure. Those able to provide fighting men (in practice the Sirdars, because of their claim on the loyalty of their tribesmen) were granted jagirs, commonly referred to as estates, but actually liens on the land revenue, the government’s share of the crop.

To all intents and purposes the jagirdar became the government of the area whose revenue was assigned to him, partly because the prime concern of government was to collect the taxes, and partly because, as the local bigwig, the jagirdar was naturally looked to by people as the man who dealt with local problems or grievances, or who enforced legal judgements. The law itself was a combination of Muslim holy law and local custom, and interpreted by local religious leaders learned in the scriptures.

The power of the jagirdar was all the stronger when he was also the Sirdar or patriarch of the people in the area.

In return for the revenue the jagirdar retained the services of a specified number of fighting men whom he undertook to arm, equip and put into the field when required. After a limited period of mobilization, the cost of maintaining these troops fell to the government, a factor that tended to reduce the amount of time an army could be kept in being.

Any ruler who decided to resume jagirs, either because the military service for which they had been granted was no longer needed or had not been performed, was bound to provoke trouble. Without the revenue from jagirs the Sirdars would lack funds with which to avoid the charge of being a miser (a most damaging accusation among Afghans), and without the right to raise contingents for the army he lacked patronage with which to give his followers the chance of extra cash. And if the revenue from resumed jagirs were used by the ruler to employ regular troops, specifically mercenaries from outside the country, the Sirdars’ own importance as the holders of military power would be diminished. So these factors too played their part in influencing the outcome of the Afghan wars.

One other factor in the culture of the Afghans played a part in influencing their minds about war. It was, curiously enough in view of their subordinate position, the place of women in Afghan society. As mentioned above, the teachings of the Holy Law were strictly enforced, and this was nowhere more the case than with respect to the female half of the population. No respectable woman appeared in public unveiled, and the normal outdoor garment was the voluminous burkha, a sort of black shroud which enveloped the wearer from head to toe, with only a small lattice for her to see through. Indoors women were rigidly secluded in their own rooms, the zanana. Zan (women), zar (gold) and zamin (land) are the three ‘z’s’ from which Pathans say all quarrels derive. Girls were married in their early teens, and spent the rest of their lives shut away from all but their husbands and closest male relatives. Despite the clear prohibitions set out in the Holy Law, homosexual practices were not uncommon among the Afghans, and some neglected their wives in favour of the company of young men. Even in normal times one result of this was that adultery was said to be a common offence among Afghan ladies.

It is difficult to assess the truth of this. By the nature of things, extra-marital affairs would not be likely to produce the sort of documents that an historian, or a husband, might discover. And much the same sort of story was told about the virtue of English ladies in the Indian hill-stations, though generally speaking these were neglected by their husbands for the service of the government of India rather than for the sake of any more personable rival. But on the other hand there were cases of adultery among the English ladies, though their own life was restricted by the social conventions of the time, and though the punishment – divorce, disgrace, and possible penury – was severe. In Afghanistan the punishment could be even more severe – mutilation or death – but nevertheless, numerous cases of adultery were reported. Whether, either in Afghanistan or British India, the incidence of marital infidelity really was as high as it was believed to be by the disapproving or the envious is difficult to say. But certainly the effect of bringing any foreign army (with the customary licentious predilections of professional soldiers) into Afghanistan (where men regarded the seduction of any of their wives, sisters, or daughters as an insult to be avenged in blood), was bound to be explosive, and so, as we shall see, it was.

It was through this land that invaders had passed since before the dawn of history, from the steppes of Central Asia to the rich and fertile plains of India. Some, like the ancient Aryans, came to settle; some, like Alexander the Great, only to round off an empire; some, like the Mongols, to loot and murder. Wave after wave of conquerors came through over the centuries, establishing dynasties within India and gradually losing control of their Central Asian homeland to new invaders after them. Inevitably, Afghans became involved with the passing armies, sometimes as enemies, but frequently as allies. An Afghan prince of Turkish stock, Mahmud of Ghazni, known as the Iconoclast, made extensive raids into India during the eleventh century AD. After him came other Afghans, Turks and Pathans, who established the Sultanate of Delhi, which ruled over the whole of northern India until eventually it was replaced by the Mughals, another dynasty of Central Asian origin, in the early sixteenth century.

During the rise and fall of these various Iranian, Indian and Central Asian empires, the country of the Afghans was occupied by each in turn, according to its strength and weakness, and was at times divided between two or three at once.

It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the beginnings of the present Afghan state emerged. It was founded by one Ahmad, a chief of the Sadozai clan of the western branch of the Pathan people, then called the Abdalis. He commanded the Afghan bodyguard of the Iranian conqueror, Nadir Shah, who in 1737 humbled the Mughal Empire, sacked Delhi and slaughtered the citizens. This monarch added a new word to the Hindustani language – a Nadirshahi, or holocaust. On his departure from Delhi, after a stay of two months, he took with him all the Mughal imperial gold plate and jewels (including the fabulous Koh-i-Nur diamond), horses, silks, elephants and even the famous Peacock Throne itself, which was to become synonymous with the throne of the Iranian Empire. All the remaining Mughal provinces east of the Indus were ceded to Nadir Shah’s rule.

In 1747 he led his army to deal with a revolt of the Kurdish tribes in the central Iranian highlands. When in camp at Kashan he ordered his Afghan officers to arrest on the morrow a number of Iranian commanders whom he suspected of plotting against him. Events proved his suspicions well founded, but his timing less so. A spy in his tent warned the conspirators, who, on the principle that ‘thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel just, but four times he who gets his blow in first’, resolved to act at once. Three of them entered the Shah’s tent in the night and murdered him there. As the tumult spread through the camp, the Afghan commander, Ahmad Shah Abdali, and some of his men fought their way to the royal tent to try and rescue Nadir, only to find his headless corpse lying in a pool of blood. Ahmad Shah had now to prevent himself and the other Afghans sharing their late employer’s fate, for they were surrounded by much larger numbers of Iranian soldiers, the Qizilbash or ‘red-tops’, so-called from the colour of their uniform head-dress. The Qizilbash disliked the Afghans because they had been the favourites of Nadir Shah, and had helped keep him in power; because they were foreigners, and rather barbaric ones at that; and because they were Sunni, not Shi’a, Muslims. Swiftly the Afghan division mounted and made its way out of camp. After a journey comparable with that of Xenophon and the 10,000 Greek mercenaries who long ago had themselves had to cut their way out after the overthrow of another Persian emperor, Ahmad Shah and his men reached Kandahar.

On the way out of Iran they met a large caravan bringing up much of the treasure that had been looted from Delhi eight years before, the Koh-i-Nur diamond included, all of which Ahmad appropriated to his own use. Finding himself not only in command of a force of experienced and battle-hardened soldiers, but also with the money to pay them and others who supported him, he soon made himself master of Afghanistan. Iranian government of the country had died with Nadir Shah, and the Afghan nobles elected Ahmad Shah to be their king. Ahmad Shah took the title Durr-i-Durran, or Pearl of Pearls, from a pearl earring it was his custom to wear, and from this time his tribe, the Abdalis, became known as the Durranis.

Ahmad Shah seized Kabul from the Qizilbash garrison left behind by Nadir Shah, and in 1748 followed the historic route down into India. His first attempt was repulsed by the defenders of the existing empire, but he returned the following year, and in 1749 the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam only saved Delhi by agreeing to cede to Ahmad Shah all the trans-Indus territory previously ceded to Nadir, plus the province of Sind.

He then turned to the north of Afghanistan, and after a siege of fourteen months captured the city of Herat. He went on to bring the city of Nishapur and the surrounding province of Khorasan, in north-east Iran, under his sway. Next he marched east from Herat and occupied Maimena, Balkh and Badakshan, thus by 1750 establishing his rule over the territory lying between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus. In 1752 he again marched into India, annexed Lahore and incorporated the West Punjab into his empire, and in the same year wrested control of Kashmir from the now helpless Mughals. In 1756 he raided Delhi, and carried off all the loot he could find there.

The kingdom which he had created, stretching from the Indus to the Oxus, and from Kashmir to Khorasan, he handed over to his son Timur. Afflicted now with a cruel illness, thought to be a cancer of the face, Ahmad Shah retired to a fortress in the Suleiman Mountains, where he died in 1773, aged fifty, in the twenty-sixth year of his reign.

Timur Shah was Ahmad’s second son, though his father’s chosen successor. His brother, Suleiman Mirza, proclaimed himself king in Kandahar, but was soon forced to flee. Timur transferred the capital of his kingdom from Kandahar to Kabul in summer and Peshawar in winter, moving from the plains to the hills at the onset of the hot weather as the Mughals had done and as the British would do in time to come. Timur’s reign was a long and generally stable one. It lasted for twenty years, and although during this time Sind became virtually independent, as did Balkh and the Oxus valley (aided by the Amir of Bokhara), the Afghan kingdom was still a large and potentially important state.

Timur left twenty-three sons, from various mothers, but had not nominated an heir at the time of his death (possibly from poison) in 1793. There followed a period of anarchy, bloodshed and civil wars. Zaman Shah, fifth son of Timur Shah by his first wife, was in control of the Kabul garrison, and when his brothers assembled there to choose the new king, he imprisoned them until they were obliged by starvation to agree that Zaman had the best claim to the succession. One of the two brothers who had not gone to Kabul, Mahmud, escaped to Iran, and eventually established himself at Herat.

‘Shah Shuja ul Mulk’, the Sadozai Durrani king of Afghanistan. He deposed and succeeded his brother Mahmud Shah in 1802, but was in turn deposed by Mahmud Shah in 1809. Restored by Anglo-Lahore forces in 1839, he was assassinated in April 1842. (Lithograph after Vincent Eyre; National Army Museum)

Zaman Shah followed his father’s policy of building up the central government to make himself less dependent on the great tribal Sirdars. Thus he appointed as his Wazir or Treasury Minister (and thus, since the business of most governments is concerned with the levying and disposal of the revenue, his chief adviser) one Wafadar Khan. But Wafadar Khan was held in little esteem by the Afghan nobles, who regarded him as a creature of Zaman’s, and accused him of misappropriating revenue to his own use. A party plotted together to get rid of Wazir Wafadar, and if Zaman Shah would not agree, to depose him and replace him by his brother Shuja-ul-Mulk. They were arrested and beheaded in Zaman Shah’s presence. Among those executed was Painda Khan, head of the second great division of the Durranis, the Barakzai clan, though his part in any actual conspiracy was by no means certain.

Painda’s eldest son, Fateh Khan, escaped to join Mahmud Shah at Herat, and urged that prince to place himself at the head of the Barakzais against Zaman Shah. Mahmud responded to the call, the Barakzais flocked to his banner, and with their help he captured Kandahar. Zaman Shah’s army deserted him. He himself was betrayed and handed over to Mahmud, who had him blinded and imprisoned in the Bala Hissar, the great fortress-palace of Kabul.

The real power behind Mahmud’s throne was Fateh Khan, the Barakzai Sirdar. It was he who had obtained the surrender of Kandahar, he who had arranged the desertion of Zaman Shah’s army, and he who suppressed a rising of the Ghilzais. In 1801 he encountered and defeated an army under Shuja-ul-Mulk, and followed up the victory by occupying Peshawar on Mahmud’s behalf.

But while Fateh Khan was fighting to win the Indian provinces, Mahmud had become indolent, and back at Kabul a new conspiracy was formed to overthrow Mahmud and place Shuja on the throne. Shuja, in 1802, was at Quetta, in northern Baluchistan, where he levied a forced loan on a rich caravan passing through the Bolan Pass, and with the proceeds made his way to Kabul. There he found the city in an uproar and Mahmud besieged in the Bala Hissar by the city mob. Fateh Khan, returning from the Khyber with an army of 10,000 men, found that Mahmud’s cause was lost, and even his own levies refused to fight against Shuja.

Mahmud, deserted by all, was deposed. Shah Shuja took the vacant throne and released his blinded brother, Zaman, whose blindness, by Islamic law, disqualified him from ruling over a Muslim land. Mahmud was imprisoned, but later released and allowed to go to his own estates at Herat. The merchants of the Bolan caravan were given their money back, an act of unexpected generosity. Only Mulla Ashik, the man who had arrested Zaman Shah, his king and guest, and given him to Mahmud, suffered the death penalty in an otherwise remarkably bloodless change of rule.

Despite Shah Shuja’s generosity, neither Mahmud nor Fateh Khan relaxed their enmity towards him, nor their determination to seize power once more for themselves. Despite a serious defeat in 1808, they renewed their hostilities against Shah Shuja in 1809, at a time when he himself was in Peshawar, but many of his best troops were trying, unsuccessfully, to restore Durrani rule over rebellious subjects in Kashmir. News came almost simultaneously that Mahmud had captured Kabul and that the army in Kashmir had been cut to pieces in the narrow mountain passes. Shah Shuja moved to meet Mahmud with what troops he could muster, but was defeated. Mahmud Shah resumed his throne in 1809, but his second reign was to prove even more disastrous than the first.

At first all went well. Shuja was driven out of Peshawar in 1810. In 1811, Mahmud Shah came down from Kabul to look at his new conquest. He went on to a meeting at Rawalpindi with the Maharaja Ranjit Singh, once the viceroy of the western Punjab under the Durranis, now ruler of a powerful and growing Sikh kingdom based on Lahore. Fateh Khan occupied Kashmir in the spring of 1813, one move ahead of Ranjit Singh, who (having conquered the neighbouring province of Jammu) had hoped to add it to his own domains. But, on the other hand, Ranjit did obtain control of the city and fort of Attock, the best crossing place on the Indus, where the Durrani governor had defied both Mahmud’s and Shuja’s authority. This governor, Jahandad Khan, fearing Fateh Khan’s approach, gave up his keys to Ranjit Singh. Fateh Khan then brought his army into action against that of Ranjit Singh, but, his fortune beginning to turn, was defeated at the battle of Attock (July 1813).

‘Muhammad Akbar Khan, Barakzai’, son of the Amir Dost Muhammad. This imaginative representation, from the Illustrated London News of June 1842, shows the way the British public saw the man who drove them from Kabul, a doughty opponent with overtones of Saladin and the wars of the Crusades.

Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk was at this time in Ranjit Singh’s camp. The Maharaja used his considerable powers of guile and persistence to persuade Shuja to present to him, in exchange for a promise of Sikh aid in recovering Kabul when an opportunity arose, the famous Koh-i-Nur diamond. Shuja had little real choice, for he was virtually now a prisoner of state. In 1814 he was allowed by Ranjit Singh to cross into British India. The British authorities granted him a state pension to enable him to keep up his household and family in a reasonable standard of dignity.

In Afghanistan, Mahmud Shah had relapsed into sadistic gloom, and was more and more influenced by his vicious son Kamran. In 1818 Fateh Khan was in Herat, at the head of an army with which he had driven back an attempt by the Iranians to capture the city. Kamran, who was the local governor, refused to open the provincial treasury to enable Fateh Khan to pay the troops. Fateh Khan, as Wazir, had every right to control the government’s money, and was not prepared to tolerate opposition from Kamran, nor to conceal the fact that he was himself the power behind the throne, an Afghan ‘Warwick the King-Maker’. Accordingly, he sent his young brother, Dost Muhammad, accompanied by his Sikh lieutenant, to seize the money that they needed. Dost Muhammad had already gained something of a reputation for wild behaviour (his nickname at this time was ‘Little Wolf’) and the two of them broke into Kamran’s palace, where they laid violent hands not only on the treasure but also on Kamran’s sister. This princess, a young woman who seems to have inherited all the spirit of her Durrani ancestors, was wearing about her person a famous jewelled girdle, which after a struggle they succeeded in removing.

Kamran used this incident as an opportunity for disposing of Fateh Khan, whom he regarded as an over-mighty subject who should be put down. The Wazir, returning to Kabul expecting to be rewarded for saving Herat, was suddenly accused of conniving at the rape of a Muslim lady by an idolatrous Sikh. He was blinded, and subsequently put to death in the presence of Mahmud and Kamran in circumstances of revolting cruelty.

The twenty-one brothers of the murdered Wazir swore to avenge his death. At the head of their Barakzai clansmen they rose in rebellion, and within a few months swept Mahmud Shah and Kamran out of Kabul, Ghazni and Kandahar, driving them to Herat, where sporadic fighting between the two parties continued for some years. Eventually, on his father’s death, Kamran set up an independent state of Herat, and a renewed attempt by the Shah of Iran to absorb this into his own domains was one of the many events leading up to the First Afghan War. Not until 1863 was Herat reunited with the main Afghan state.

After the revolution of 1818 there followed a period of instability and feuding among the Barakzai brothers. During this period Afghan control over the outlying provinces steadily diminished.

In 1826 Dost Muhammad Barakzai came to power, partly through his own powers of leadership, partly because he was even more successful at intrigue and treachery than his surviving brothers, partly because he had been Fateh Khan’s favourite, and partly because he was supported by the Qizilbash palace guard, his mother having belonged to one of the noble Qizilbash families which lived around Kabul. But with a sense of reality as to the extent of his kingdom, which was virtually restricted by now to Kabul and Ghazni, he styled himself Khan rather than Shah. His brother Kohen Dil Khan ruled independently over Kandahar, while another brother, Sultan Muhammad Khan, governed Peshawar and the neighbouring areas as a tributary of Ranjit Singh.

Shah Shuja never accepted the Barakzais’ control over his country. In the confusion following the flight of Mahmud Shah he had attempted to re-establish himself in Upper Sind and the Derajat, at the foot of the Suleimans. He actually held Peshawar for a few days, but by 1821 was back in his residence at Ludhiana under British protection. In 1832 the Amirs of Sind, apprehensive of being swallowed up by the expanding British Indian Empire, offered to recognize Shah Shuja as their nominal sovereign and give him free passage through Sind to Kandahar, from where he could advance on Kabul. Ranjit Singh offered him the men and money for this plan in return for the formal cession of Peshawar to the state of Lahore. Shah Shuja, not being in possession of Peshawar, agreed to this diminution of the kingdom he hoped to regain, and so marched, via Sind and the Bolan Pass, to occupy Kandahar for a few months in 1834. Dost Muhammad advanced to meet him, and Shah Shuja was defeated in battle. His mercenaries lost heart, and Shuja was forced to flee to Herat, where Kamran repaid the generosity once shown to his father, and allowed Shuja to return to Ludhiana in 1835. Dost Muhammad, to celebrate his victory, gave himself the title of Amir.

The real beneficiary of this episode was Ranjit Singh. Now claiming to be the lawful ruler of Peshawar he sent a large army, which drove out Sultan Muhammad and annexed the province to his own domains. Sultan Muhammad at first took refuge with his brother Dost Muhammad, even though he resented the latter’s claim to be Amir. The governorship of Peshawar was entrusted to a Sikh general, Hari Singh.

Whereas the rest of the Punjab had never really been colonized by the Afghans, the Peshawar area was peopled predominantly by Muslims of Afghan descent and had, since the decline of the Mughals nearly a century before, been an Afghan province. Dost Muhammad decided to contest Ranjit’s title by force. He therefore sent his best troops, under his eldest son Muhammad Akbar Khan, down the Khyber in April 1837. At the end of the month Akbar attacked the fort of Jamrud, guarding the southern end of the pass. The Sikh army in the field was defeated, and the gallant Hari Singh slain. But the fort held out, and after a few days’ plundering, Akbar Khan led his army back through the Khyber Pass to Jalalabad.

It was over the question of who was to rule the province to Peshawar, Sikh or Afghan, that British attempts to establish friendly influence over both of these states were to fail. The British had to come down on the side either of Ranjit Singh or of Dost Muhammad, or else replace one of them by someone who, for the sake of British friendship, would resign himself to the loss of the province.

II

The Beginning of the Great Game

British strategy and the North-West of India, 1800–38

The British became involved with Afghanistan in order to secure the overland route to India. It was not that they wished to use this route themselves, but rather that they wished to control, even if necessary to deny, the use of this route by others. To the British, supreme at sea, the favoured route to India lay on the water, where their merchantmen sailed under the serene protection of the all-powerful Royal Navy, and where enemy warships or troop transports had little chance of reaching Indian shores. But the route through Afghanistan was one which no line-of-battleship could block. As other European powers, first Napoleonic France, and then Imperial Russia, began to show interest in this fact, the minds of British statesmen grew uneasy. They began to take measures to bar the inland gateway to their Indian Empire.

There are some curious resemblances between the courses of the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War. In both of them, a powerful dictator sought to impose a New Order on Europe. In both of them, there were times when Britain, seeing herself as the last bastion of freedom, stood alone against an embattled continent. In both of them, Russia at one time became an ally of the tyrant, only to be invaded by him, and then to form an alliance with the British. In both cases, when the tyrant was defeated, the Russian rulers were for a short time the darlings of Western liberals. And in both cases, too, disillusion soon set in and the defeated nation came to be regarded as a potential ally against the expansion of Russian despotism.

During the Napoleonic period proposals were made for Iranian troops with French support, or Russian troops with Iranian co-operation, to march from the territory of the Shah to threaten British India. But British diplomatic counter-measures, and the ending of the Franco-Russian alliance, brought these to naught. In the post-war period, British policy was to contain Russian expansion by propping up the Sultan of Turkey and by trying to forestall Russian influence at the court of the Shah of Iran. But by 1830 there seemed an increasing likelihood that both these potentates would eventually fall under Russian domination, and in January that year instructions were sent to the British Governor-General in India to inaugurate a new diplomatic initiative towards the independent states of north-west India and Central Asia.

It was feared by the British that, if the Russians, or Russian influence, became established within striking distance of India, this by itself would be enough to unsettle any Indian princes discontented under British rule. Thus the British would have to spend considerable sums on defence not only against the remote threat of a Russian invasion, but also the real possibility of internal disorder, inspired by the hope of Russian aid, if not by the actual appearance of Russian agents and Russian money. The Russians must therefore be kept at a distance. In particular, Bokhara and Khiva should be the targets of British commercial penetration, and although no military aid was to be promised to these states, the Government of India was authorized to offer liberal financial aid in order to secure their friendship. To make the passage of British goods into Central Asia quicker and cheaper than was possible by using the only route then open to them (sea to Calcutta, then up the Ganges and overland across the Punjab to Peshawar), a more direct route was to be opened. This was to be by sea to Karachi on the coast of Sind and then up the Indus, either to Sukkur and overland to Kandahar via the Bolan Pass, or on to the Punjab and overland to Kabul via Peshawar. These routes would give the British lower transport costs than their Russian competitors, and British piece-goods, with their textile industry in the full flood of industrialized production, would then undersell the Russians with ease.

It was decided to make a gift of six dapple-grey English dray-horses to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore, who delighted in filling his stables with good horses presented in the cause of diplomacy. The horses were to travel, not overland from the British frontier with the eastern Punjab, but up the Indus to the western Punjab, thus giving the British an excuse for obliging the Amirs of Sind to allow British vessels on that river. The Amirs gave in to British pressure, and in March 1831 the river boats duly went up the Indus, with British officers charting the river bed and surveying the adjacent lands as they went along, which was in fact one of the objects of the whole operation.

The officer responsible for actually presenting the horses to Ranjit Singh was Alexander Burnes, then aged twenty-five, a lieutenant in the East India Company’s Bombay Army who had already made his mark as an promising young member of the political service. After making the presentation he went from Lahore overland to Simla, the summer capital of British India. On the way, in August 1831, he paid a visit of courtesy to the Afghan Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, then resident at Ludhiana as a pensioner of the British, who remarked that were he back on his throne he would be only too glad to open to the British the road through his domains to Central Asia.

Iran, since her defeat by the Russians in 1828, had almost become a Russian satellite, and thus any extension of Iranian territory was seen by the British as an increase in the area under Russian influence. The British special envoy at Teheran, Hugh Ellis, had the difficult task of trying to persuade the Shah that his best interests lay in friendship with the British, as a defence against further Russian pressure, while at the same time warning that Iranian expansion in the direction of India would not be acceptable to the British. The Russian Ambassador, Count Simonich, had the easier task of encouraging the Shah in what he wanted to do, which was to return to the scene of his previous military successes on Iran’s eastern border. He had actually been besieging Herat in November 1834 when the news of his grandfather’s death had come, and obliged him to break off the siege in order to claim his throne. The Russians, by encouraging him to renew this venture and reclaim Herat for the Iranian Empire to which it had historically belonged, not only made themselves congenial to the Shah but also diverted his attention from any thoughts of regaining the northern provinces his grandfather had been obliged to cede to them. Ellis, in vain, represented to the Shah that the military adventures to which the Russians urged him could only have the effect of weakening his army and his treasury, and thus of impairing his independence still further.

‘Sir Alexander Burnes, 1806–1841’. Bombay Political Service. The Elchi or diplomatic representative of the British at Kabul, where his womanizing caused great offence to the Afghans. He, together with a number of male and female companions, were murdered by the Kabul mob, 2 November 1841. (Lithograph after Vincent Eyre)

Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, lodged a protest at Simonich’s proceedings. The reply, from the Russian Foreign Secretary, Count Nesselrode, was that the British must surely have been misinformed. Count Simonich, said Nesselrode, had no instruction to urge the Shah to attack Herat, and had indeed tried to dissuade him from so doing. Certainly, he added, the Tsar’s government did not believe that the Shah’s own best interests would be served by prosecuting a military campaign against Herat.

Thus, when the Shah again marched against Herat, in July 1837, the British and Russian ministers at his court both declined to accompany his court, and remained with their suites at Teheran as a mark of diplomatic disapproval.

The Shah, nevertheless, was determined to finish the task he had begun three years before. Kamran Shah, the Afghan ruler of Herat, was more than just the last symbol of the dynasty of Abmad Shah Durrani, who had humiliated the Iranians in the previous century. He was, as ever, faithless and treacherous, and had openly broken the truce made with the Shah in 1834 by raiding and taking slaves from the Iranian districts of Sistan.

A lengthy march of four months’ duration brought Shah Muhammad and his army under the walls of Herat at the beginning of December 1837. Kamran’s garrison, secure behind their defences, defied the Iranians, but no-one could tell which side would exhaust its supplies first. The siege dragged on, and in March 1838 the British Ambassador, John McNeill, joined the Shah’s camp, persuaded him to put off a planned assault, and at a meeting with Kamran’s able though unscrupulous Wazir, Yar Muhammad, secured terms which seemed to meet all the Shah’s demands. On returning to the Iranian camp he discovered that Count Simonich had followed him from Teheran and, during his own absence inside Herat, had persuaded the Shah to proceed with the siege.

Tension between McNeill and the Iranian court steadily worsened. At the beginning of June 1838 he decided to break off diplomatic relations and departed from the Shah’s camp, stating that he would leave Iranian territory and cross into Turkey. At the end of June a desperate assault by the Iranian troops, spearheaded by a battalion of Russian mercenaries under General Berowski, a Polish adventurer in the Shah’s service, was thrown back by the defenders of Herat and Berowski himself was killed. Russian military prestige began to diminish in the Iranian camp. British military prestige began to increase when it became known that a leading part in the defence was being played by Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger, of the East India Company’s Bombay Artillery.

McNeill, in early July, heard of the failure of the Russian-led assault at Herat, and also of the landing of a small British force on the Iranian island of Kharak in the Persian Gulf. This had been sent in response to his previous requests for a military demonstration to show that the British really meant what they said about keeping the Shah out of Herat. At the same time he received clear authority from Palmerston to warn the Shah that he must withdraw from Herat or face the consequences, which would be war with the British. The Shah, disappointed in the achievements of his Russian friends, yielded before the ultimatum and abandoned the siege. Count Nesselrode declared that Simonich had far exceeded his instructions and that he was being recalled.

But no-one had been sure that Herat would hold out, nor that, faced with a British ultimatum, the Shah would turn back from his march to the east. So policies had been put in train to ensure that the three countries between Iran and British India (Sind, the Punjab and Afghanistan) were either friendly to, or dominated by, the British Government.

The Punjab was simple enough. Some of the small Sikh states were already directly under British protection. The rest of the country was ruled by Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore, who had been on terms, if not of friendship, at least of agreement, with the British since the treaty of Amritsar, 1809. Lahore, with its large army of regular troops, trained and equipped on the European model, had become a powerful buffer state. Indeed the only anxiety was lest it become too powerful and be not a buffer against external invaders, but a threat to the British themselves.

Thus, in August 1836, the British Governor-General, Lord Auckland, warned Ranjit Singh that his apparent inclination to follow his annexation of Peshawar, by expanding down the Indus to take over control of Shikarpur and Upper Sind, would not be welcomed by his British friends. After a few months’ negotiation, the Maharaja accepted that Sind was, at least for the time being, outside his sphere of influence.

Ranjit Singh’s claim to Shikarpur, once part of the Durrani Empire, but since 1824 held by the Amirs of Sind, was that Shah Shuja had ceded it to him in return for supporting Shuja’s attempt to regain the Afghan throne in 1833–4. The fact that Shuja, despite his pretensions, had not actually held Shikarpur either before or after the failure of his expedition, seems to have embarrassed neither side, any more than it did in the similar case of Peshawar. But Peshawar did not control the Indus, nor the route to southern Afghanistan via the Bolan Pass. Expansion by Lahore in the area of Peshawar affected the route to Kabul via the Khyber Pass, but the Sikh state already controlled access to this route from the Indian side, and there was no special reason for the British to object to Ranjit Singh implementing this part of his treaty with Shuja.