The Khyber Rifles E-Book

Jules Stewart

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

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Recruited from the Pathan tribes that live in the no-mans land between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Khyber Rifles fought for the British Raj against their own kith and kin. Jules Stewart tells the story of Colonel Sir Robert Warburton, the man who raised the Khyber Rifles in 1878, and describes the Khyber Rifles in action.

Leseprobe

THE

KHYBER RIFLES

To Oliver and Dudley, the good guys in anyone’s book

And, of course, to Helen

THE

KHYBER RIFLES

From the British Raj to Al Qaeda

JULES STEWART

This book was first published in 2005 by Sutton Publishing Limited

This paperback edition first published in 2006

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL52QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Jules Stewart, 2005, 2013

The right of Jules Stewart to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9558 3

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

List of Maps

Foreword

Acknowledgements

1 ‘To stop is dangerous, to recede ruin’

2 ‘The Earth is Full of Anger’

3 ‘These misguided, ignorant yet plucky barbarians’

4 Kensington to the Khyber: Warburton of the Frontier

5 Baptism by Fire in the Khyber

6 Another Century, Another Uprising

7 Guardians of a Frontier Ablaze

Epilogue: ‘I Wonder What Happened to Him?’

Appendix: Table of Hostilities on the North-West Frontier 1839–1947

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

List of Maps and Illustrations

Maps

Tribal Locations of the Pathans (based on Olaf Caröe, The Pathans, London, Macmillan, 1958)

The North-West Frontier: Administrative Divisions (based on David Dichter, The North-West Frontier of Pakistan, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967)

Tirah: the Forbidden Land of the Afridis (based on Taepu Mahabat Khan, The Land of Khyber, Peshawar, Uzbek Publishers, 2001)

Foreword

Troubles on the North-West Frontier of Pakistan are with us and will be with us for years to come, and those troubles from time to time involve not only neighbours but also geographically distant peoples. At the end of the sixteenth century the Emperor Akbar had the first carriageable road driven through the Khyber Pass, but he failed in his efforts to control the tribes, resorting as have his successors through the years, to payments to achieve passage for traffic on that road.

Only once have I travelled through the Khyber Pass on that amazing train which Jules Stewart describes, but many, many times by car and I commend his account of the pass, of the peoples who live there and of those charged with maintaining order, to a wider audience than just those interested in the affairs of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was once invited by the Chief Ministers of the North-West Frontier Province and of Baluchistan to travel from Peshawar to Quetta through the tribal territory and the plans were well advanced for me to make the journey under the protection of tribal lashkars, when the central government in Islamabad intervened and forbade the trip. It is a sensitive area and foreigners who seem to be taking too close an interest arouse suspicions. This book helps us to understand the basis for those suspicions.

When I first saw Jules Stewart’s manuscript, it really ended in 1919 with the sad events of the Third Afghan War. We are now presented with a wide-ranging survey of a hundred and fifty years’ history, providing the reader with an understanding of the ongoing effort to develop this troubled area on the southern edge of Central Asia. Since 11 September 2001 no one can afford to ignore the problems of this troubled area and I recommend this book to intelligent readers everywhere.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to those whose help and guidance made researching and writing this book such an enjoyable undertaking.

In Britain: The helpful archive staff at the British Library India Office, Royal Geographical Society and London School of Oriental and African Studies, Helen Crisp for her all-round support, Major John Girling, Robin Hodson, Colonel Tony Streather and Graham Wontner-Smith for sharing their Frontier experiences with me, Mark Baillie for his useful suggestions, Peter Hopkirk for his guidance and encouragement, my agent Duncan McAra and the team at Sutton Publishing.

In Pakistan: Khyber Rifles Commandant Colonel Muhammad Riaz Shahid, Colonel Syed Akbar Husain for making the right people available, Faisal Haq Khan for his companionship and for cutting through red tape, Captain Shafiullah Khan and Major Farooq Nasir Pirzada for their invaluable help with researching the project, National Bank of Pakistan Chairman Ali Raza for his logistic support, Zubyr and Durdana Soomro for their hospitality, and my fearless driver Akbar.

The North-West Frontier: Administrative Divisions

Tirah: the Forbidden Land of the Afridis

Malcolm Morris, OBE

Australian Ambassador to Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1973–5

ONE

‘To stop is dangerous, to recede ruin’

The summit of the Khyber Pass rises 3,600 feet above sea level, a barren, rock-strewn wasteland swept in winter by blasts of icy spindrift, baked in summer by temperatures that soar above 110°F. Perched on a rocky promontory near the summit stands Michni Fort, the most remote outpost of the legendary tribal militia, the Khyber Rifles. Below to the west lies a land drenched in the blood of Greek, Persian, Moghul, British, Russian and American invaders. From here, one's gaze is drawn across the desolate Afghan flatlands stretching to the western horizon, beyond which lurk the eternal snows of the Hindu Kush. Gazing down from Michni, it is hard to repress a shudder at the dark and sombre defiles of this pass, so pregnant with disaster. They invoke an uncomfortable reminder of the fate that befell those who throughout history have entertained thoughts of Afghan conquest. The fanatical mullahs who preach jihad to their brethren must be endowed with magical powers, to have so effectively sprinkled amnesia dust in the eyes of each successive wave of invaders. For the US forces now engaged in the futile exercise of dropping bombs on rocks in Afghanistan arrived only twelve years after the mighty Soviet Red Army trudged home exhausted and humiliated, and a century and a half after the British Raj suffered its costliest ever military disaster, a few desperate miles from the Khyber Pass.

The British displayed more tenacity than even the armies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in their determination to subjugate the wild Afghan tribesmen. In 1878, thirty-six years after Britain’s calamity on the retreat from Kabul, the army once again crossed the Khyber. This time it was determined that British soldiers would not be exposed to surprise attack on the road. To ensure the army safe passage into enemy territory it was necessary to secure the Khyber Pass, the strategic route between Afghanistan and British India. But instead of stationing regular troops on the inhospitable and dangerous cliffs that tower over the road, the British came up with an ingenious scheme: why not recruit the local tribesmen into the fold, offering them the incentive of paid employment in the Government of India plus the freedom to use their weapons with impunity? After all, the Pathans knew every sniper’s nest above the pass like the back of their hands, and their long-barrel matchlocks could easily out-range British breech-loading Sniders. Thus was born the rag-tag embryo of what was to become the Khyber Rifles, the guardians of the Khyber Pass.

With the raising of the first of the Frontier Corps the British found that the tribesmen’s loyalty could in part be bought, in part commanded by officers of a very special calibre, men who spoke their language and understood their ways. The government had made significant strides in dealing with the Pathans since that fateful day in 1842 when the army marched out of the gates of Kabul to its destruction, leaving in its wake a legacy of arrogance and ineptitude. But the experience had been gained at a terribly high cost.

On a bitter January morning, a rider slumped across a dying pony was spotted stumbling across the Afghan plain towards the shortly-to-be-besieged British garrison of Jalalabad, 90 miles east of Kabul. William Brydon was a 33-year-old Scottish surgeon attached to the doomed Army of the Indus, commanded by Major-General William Elphinstone, an ageing soldier crippled by gout, an ailment that he had hoped to cure by taking the posting to India. From the outset grave doubts had been expressed about the General’s suitability for the task of leading an army against so cunning an adversary as the Afghan. Elphinstone’s previous battle experience had been at Waterloo twenty-six years before.

Brydon was close to gasping his last when a detachment of cavalry officers galloped from the fort to escort him to safety. He was rushed to the infirmary where the garrison’s surgeon worked feverishly to stem the flow of blood from multiple sword cuts to his hand, knee and head, with a musket ball wound in his leg for good measure. That evening, hunched by the fire in the officers’ mess, Brydon savoured his first proper meal in more than a week. As for his wounds, ‘how, and when, these happened,’ he recounted in a numbed state of mind, ‘I know not’. But Brydon did retain an appallingly vivid recollection of what he had endured during the seven-day retreat from Kabul, a tale that filled his listeners round the fire with a stunned horror. It was the tale of a massacre, the slaughter of more than 16,000 men of the once victorious Army of the Indus, including wives and children and thousands of camp-followers, who on a freezing January morning had tramped out of Kabul, jubilant with the prospect of returning home to the warmth and civilisation of India. In spite of the knee-deep snow that turned each step into a gruelling struggle, the retreating British were confident of reaching safety ninety miles away at Jalalabad in a fortnight’s march. Instead, the entire column perished within three days of abandoning Kabul.

The British forces garrisoned in Kabul had been lulled into a state of complacency by the ease with which the Afghans had been beaten into submission by their new masters in 1838, one year after the royal teenager Victoria had ascended to the throne of England. The first two years in Kabul passed without major incident, and with mulberry blossoming in spring the troops, no longer an expeditionary force, were settling down as an army of occupation. Bungalows were erected, gardens laid out, wives sent for, and not a soul among them could anticipate the calamity that lay in waiting like a tiger crouched in a thicket. The enemy king Dost Mohammed had surrendered in November 1840 and was given honourable asylum in India. The British Lion roared with victory, and all was well.

The melancholy events that enfolded on the march from Kabul in 1842 came about largely as a result of the East India Company seeking to cut back on expenditures. One of history’s earliest episodes of corporate downsizing was to touch off a major human and political cataclysm. With wisdom that may be generously described as dubious, the cost-conscious government babus in Calcutta had decided to reduce the subsidies that were doled out each year to the Khyber tribal chieftains. These allowances were given on the tribesmen’s commitment to keep open the lines of communication with the army and its outposts across the border in Afghanistan. The British could generally rely on the tribal maliks to keep their word, that is so long as the baksheesh kept rolling in. But directly the bribes dried up, the all too predictable outcome was an immediate Pathan uprising. Revolt swept swiftly and suddenly across Kabul in November 1841. The incapacity of the British command to deal with the situation was surpassed only by the treachery of the Afghans. The British Envoy Sir William Macnaghten, a fastidious, pinched-mouth career bureaucrat, had taken it upon himself to break the news to the tribesmen: following orders from the East India Company he announced abruptly to the maliks assembled in jirga, the government subsidy was to be slashed from £8,000 to £4,000. The tribal leaders went away to ponder this piece of intelligence, and their response was to summarily cut off the key road connection to and from British India, the Khyber Pass. A tidal wave of horsemen fell upon every caravan that ventured up the road, looting the baggage trains and spreading havoc among the camel drivers. Spurred on by the Dost Mohammed’s favourite son, Akbar Khan, a slight, feline creature with a wispy moustache and almond eyes, who bore a deep hatred for the feringhee, the flames of revolt spread up and down the Frontier, to finally engulf the unsuspecting British forces and their families in Kabul, where the situation was deteriorating by the hour.

Kabul was now effectively cut off from the powerful garrison at Jalalabad. Another British Envoy to the city, the adventurer Alexander Burnes who had attempted to negotiate an alliance with Dost Mohammed, was the first high-profile figure in the cantonments to fall victim to the mob. On 2 November the Afghans torched the Residency, hacked Burnes to pieces, along with two British officers and all the sepoy guards inside. The kindly but doddering Elphinstone, when told of the assassination, took pen in hand and wrote to Macnaghten: ‘We must see what morning brings and then think what can be done.’ Macnaghten barely had time to ponder his commander’s soothing words. As the government’s caretaker administrator, Macnaghten was looking forward to taking up his new appointment as Governor of Bombay. He arranged to meet Akbar Khan for truce talks at a spot by the banks of the Kabul river, a quarter mile from the Residency. No sooner had Macnaghten alighted from his horse, he was brutally murdered in the presence of the amir’s nephew. The crafty Afghan, who was in his early twenties, disclosed to the attending mob that the British envoy was plotting to abduct a tribal chief, and that was provocation enough for the tribesmen to fall upon Macnaghten. To the delight of the Afghans already intoxicated with the scent of British blood, Akbar Khan ordered Macnaghten’s head to be paraded through the city on a pole. As for the rest of the hapless Envoy’s remains, the rabble took it upon itself to hang Macnaghten’s headless corpse from a hook at the entrance to the bazaar.

The game was now well and truly up. This supreme humiliation of the British master roused the horde to even loftier enterprises. The frenzied tribesmen next laid siege to the cantonments, the vulnerable bungalows and barracks where the British had foolishly chosen to hold up instead of behind the secure hilltop walls of the Bala Hissar citadel. The well-defended palace-fortress was occupied by Shah Shujah, the despised weakling the British had placed on the Afghan throne after the Governor-General Lord Auckland engineered Dost Mohammed’s removal. Britain’s amir-in-waiting, however, made the fatal mistake of taking his position too seriously. He haughtily refused to allow the British, his benefactors and only realistic source of protection, to take up residence in the Bala Hissar. Shah Shujah suffered his inevitable fate: he fell to Akbar Khan’s dagger as soon as the army trudged out the city gates on the ill-fated retreat from Kabul. To give Elphinstone his due, he had recommended the building of a fort for the garrison, but this proposal clashed with the tight-fisted policies of the East India Company’s bean counters, who rejected the army’s request for £2,400 to carry out the works. After all, the occupation of Kabul was already costing the Honourable Company £1 million a year. Lieutenant Vincent Eyre, one of the few British survivors of the Afghan disaster, observed with some irony that ‘The credit of having selected a site for the cantonments, or controlled the execution of its works, is not a distinction now likely to be claimed exclusively by anyone.’1 Eyre, the garrison’s Deputy Commissary of Ordnance, expresses in his memoirs of captivity under Dost Mohammed a stark wonder of how the government could have ‘in a half-conquered country’ left their forces in so extraordinary and injudicious a military outpost as the exposed cantonments:

The position eventually fixed upon for our magazine and cantonments was a piece of low swampy ground, commanded on all sides by hills or forts. It consisted of a low rampart and a narrow ditch in the form of a parallelogram . . . 1000 yards long and 600 broad, with round flanking bastions at each corner, every one of which was commanded by some fort or hill.2

The Mission compound, which served as the residence of the envoy, officers and assistants of the occupation force, was a death trap. Its very existence ‘rendered the whole face of the cantonments, to which it was annexed, nugatory for purposes of defence’. With a doddering old man like Elphinstone at the helm, the garrison’s predicament could hardly have been more desperate. Eyre lavishes praise on his commanding officer’s professional acumen, his courtesy and kindly attitude towards all ranks. But of Elphinstone the leader of men, he sadly notes, ‘He had, indeed, but one unhappy fault as a general – the result, probably, of age and infirmity – and this was a want of confidence in his own judgement, leading him to prefer everybody’s opinion to his own . . . until he was at a loss which course to take.’ In the end, Elphinstone’s dithering and indecision ‘proved the ruin of us all’.3

Most of Elphinstone’s contemporaries tended to agree that defending the Kabul garrison was too overwhelming a task for him to take on in his deteriorated state of mind and body. The ominous clouds gathering over the Army of the Indus and its civilian charges was, in the opinion of the indomitable Lady Sale ‘enfeebling the powers of (Elphinstone’s) mind’. Lady Florentina Sale was the embodiment of Victorian self-confidence and pluck. Her husband, Sir Frederick Sale, was dispatched to command the garrison at Jalalabad, while she remained at Kabul Cantonment with the main body of the army. This grande dame had nothing but contempt for what she dismissed as ‘reprehensible croaking’ by British officers who spent their time bemoaning the imminence of disaster. When the Afghan mob finally attacked and scaled the walls of one fortification using poles picked up from the ground as ladders, Lady Sale snorted, ‘A child with a stick might have repulsed them.’4

With tragic inevitability, Elphinstone capitulated to Akbar Khan’s threats and agreed to withdraw his army from Kabul. This decision precipitated the most calamitous defeat ever to befall a British fighting force: a 16,000-strong column betrayed and exterminated by an Afghan rabble-rouser, who moreover had personally guaranteed the retreating column safe conduct to India.

Before Elphinstone and his army were permitted to abandon Kabul that freezing January morning, the amir demanded six hostages be delivered to ensure certain pledges undertaken by the British officials. The prisoners were later to be liberated by Major-General George Pollock, but fortunate as they were to escape the ghastly fate awaiting those who marched with Elphinstone, their months in captivity could hardly be described as a bed of roses. Captain James Airey recalls in his diaries that on the day the prisoners rode out of Kabul in the company of their liberator General Pollock, he was alarmed to learn of a ‘reverse’ suffered by the Second Division in the Khyber Pass. The report was in fact erroneous. The British forces managed to rout the Afghans who had attempted to block the advance of the Army of Retribution. But it was distressing news for a group of officers anticipating a triumphant march home after ten months of confinement in the hands of their bloodthirsty captors. ‘You cannot conceive how glad I am to have left Afghanistan,’ Airey writes:

I always hated it and the last ten months were a period of anxiety that was anything but pleasant. During the first five or six months we poor hostages were never certain how long we should have our heads on our shoulders, for the people of Kabul used to often to assemble around the house in which we were and insist on our being brought out to be killed. Had it not been for the man in whose custody we had been placed, who defended us at the risk of his own ruin, we should have all been murdered.

Airey adds with some understatement, ‘It is rather a disagreeable sensation at first to be awakened in the morning by the cries of people insisting on having your blood.’5

Eyre was another of the lucky survivors who was taken back into captivity to join the small band of British hostages left behind after the departure of Elphinstone’s column. His account of the journey is one of the few contemporary tales of the full horror of the carnage that befell the once-proud Army of the Indus:

The retreating army had marched over the same ground on the previous day, and terrible was the spectacle presented to our eyes along the whole line of road. The snow was absolutely dyed with streaks and patches of blood for whole miles, and at every step we encountered the mangled bodies of British and Hindoostanee soldiers, and helpless camp followers, lying side by side, victims of one treacherous undistinguishing fate, the red stream of life still tricking from many a gaping wound inflicted by the merciless Afghan knife. Here and there small groups of miserable, starving and frost-bitten wretches, amongst whom were many women and children, were still permitted to cling to life, perhaps only because death would in their case have been a mercy.6

Eyre raised a cry of outrage at the horrors he witnessed on that march, never doubting that ‘these events will assuredly rouse the British Lion from his repose’. As indeed they did.

Retaliation was swift and deadly. Pollock avenged the annihilation of Elphinstone’s army by forcing the Khyber Pass with 14,000 men and delivering Akbar Khan a resounding defeat in two hard-fought battles. The army then marched on to Kabul, reaching the city gates on 16 September, where in language that Pollock quite accurately surmised the Afghans would understand, he proceeded to blow up the bazaar. On 12 October Kabul was evacuated and the army retired to India, once again by way of the Khyber Pass. By express desire of Lord Ellenborough the troops had seized as war booty the gates of Mahmud of Ghazni’s tomb, thought to be the ones that had been removed from the temple of Somnath in Gujarat in ad 1025. In fact they were of a later date and quite worthless. Nevertheless, the British Army had, in keeping with tradition, won the last battle. The rebel Akbar Khan made good his escape but not before he had deprived his conquerors of the pleasure of having his father’s usurper Shah Shujah murdered as he stepped out of the Bala Hissar. A twist of political fate saw Dost Mohammed, Britain’s former arch-enemy, who was later to prove himself one of Afghanistan’s most enlightened potentates, brought out of his gilded exile in Delhi in 1843 and restored to the throne, where he ruled for twenty more years, dying in 1863 at the age of 80 and still in possession of power. There seemed to be no objection to Akbar Khan reappearing on the scene as his father’s wazir (or Chief Minister) until his death four years later at the early age of 29. Auckland could now reassure the mandarins at the East India Company that Afghanistan basked in a reign of tranquillity and stability. Britain had an ally on the throne, one who could be trusted to resist any threat of attack by the tsar’s armies. For it was of course Russia’s overtures to Dost Mohammed that had served as the pretext for the British invasion of Afghanistan, despite the fact that St Petersburg stood squarely on the sidelines during the disastrous events leading up to and during the First Afghan War. Burnes’s mission to Kabul was to negotiate a friendship treaty with Afghanistan and determine the extent of Russian intrigues in the amir’s court. Burnes had arrived in Kabul in 1837, at a time when Dost Mohammed was in a state of despair over the pincer thrust closing in on his empire, with the Persians, backed by the Russians, laying siege to Herat and the Sikhs holding the sacred city of Peshawar. Burnes failed to obtain an alliance with the Afghan ruler, thus leaving the British in a state of high anxiety over the arrival of a rival mission to Kabul in the person of a young Cossack officer, Captain Ivan Vitkevich, who had been received with pomp and splendour by Dost Mohammed. The government was now fully convinced that the amir constituted a menace to the security of India and therefore had decided to act. This, notwithstanding the fact that so outstandingly unsuccessful was this Russian mission that no sooner had Vitkevich returned home he destroyed his papers and put a revolver to his head. The passivity of Russia in the First Afghan War and the later débâcle on the road to Jalalabad showed to what disastrous an extent the government had miscalculated the tsarist threat.

One of the hostages set free by the amir was Lieutenant Robert Warburton, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Indian Army, who was in command of eighty Punjabi sepoys. On his release Warburton was most probably relieved to learn that these recruits, untrained fighting men of doubtful fidelity, would not be returning to Kabul. Two years before, Warburton had taken as his bride an Afghan princess, a niece of Dost Mohammed. While the slaughter on the road to Jalalabad was taking its grim toll on the Army of the Indus, the amir’s son Akbar Khan found out that this noblewoman, in his fanatical eyes a traitor who had defiled herself by marrying an infidel and an enemy of his people, was in hiding somewhere in Kabul. Akbar spent months chasing his prey. But the woman, who had many confidants in the serpentine alleyways of Kabul, managed to escape his net and was able to join her liberated husband in the tiny British garrison at Ghilzai. There, on 11 July, she gave birth to a son who was christened Robert, after his father.

That event, which was to have such a pivotal impact on Frontier history, took place before the badly shaken Government of India had woken to a fact of military life: defending the empire west of the Indus would require the presence of a frontline force to garrison the Khyber and other vulnerable invasion routes from Afghanistan. More than thirty years were to pass before the first dashing native Frontier levies came into being. When that day arrived, the man called in to raise the Khyber Rifles, the first of these corps, fell to the son of an Anglo-Irish Indian Army officer and an Afghan princess, Captain (later Colonel Sir) Robert Warburton.

The Afghan War of 1839–42 was the first time Britain had come up against the Pathan tribes of the Frontier, seasoned, fanatical warriors who made up the bulk of the amir’s fighting forces. The massacre on the Kabul road symbolised the loss of innocence for an imperial army that for more than eighty years, since the day of Robert Clive’s victory at Plassey on the steaming plains of Bengal, had rolled victoriously westward across the subcontinent. The North-West Frontier was destined to remain a vexatious thorn in the British Lion’s side for yet another century, roughly spanning the period from Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne until the evening in 1947 when the Union Flag was lowered for the last time over the Khyber Pass.

The Pathans revealed themselves as a different sort of adversary from the native fighting forces the British had encountered east of the Indus. These tribesmen of the hills were not easily bought off, much less converted to the cause of the Raj, and they certainly were not to be subdued for long by force of arms. But the government recognised the urgent need to fortify the North-West Frontier in order to safeguard the integrity of India’s most remote and volatile border, in particular the vital passes that could serve as invasion routes for Afghan as well as Russian armies.

Auckland, an aristocrat who cut a dashing figure in society, was a life-long bachelor who relied on his two adoring sisters to carry the burden of the social affairs he so detested. To the Governor-General went the misfortune of presiding over the calamity of the First Afghan War. The North-West Frontier was by this time a key piece in Britain’s jigsaw of imperial strategy, and Auckland was as fearful as was the rest of government of Russia’s hidden agenda in Afghanistan. Sadly, he was the obvious scapegoat for the disaster that wiped out Elphinstone’s army, and was therefore recalled to London soon after General Pollock routed the amir’s forces.

In the aftermath of the war, Britain’s push to the North-West was directed mainly at the Sikhs, against whom the army waged two successful campaigns. Then came the 1857 Mutiny, and this calamity put a damper on aggressive territorial expansion for more than two decades. Under the viceroyship of John Lawrence, a pious and severe administrator whose chief interests were forestry, sanitation, railways and irrigation, British India turned its attention to retrenchment and reform. Lawrence favoured a ‘close border’ system, which on the North-West Frontier meant holding the line short of tribal territory. A decade or so later, the brilliant soldier and ‘Master of Baluchistan’, Captain Robert Sandeman, planted the seeds of what was later to flourish as the ‘forward policy’, a return to territorial expansionism that defines the life-blood of empire. Sandeman had something of the precursor in him when he enlisted local Baluchi guides to deal with a spate of banditry plaguing the Dera Ghazi Khan district, an arid wasteland that fell under his jurisdiction as Deputy Commissioner. Although the confrontation was settled in a peaceful council with the maliks, the image of a British officer riding off on a military mission in the company of loyal tribesmen could be taken as the embryo of a future Frontier force.

By this time the government was forced to acknowledge that leaving the vast, uncharted tribal territory to its own devices as a buffer against the intrigues of Afghanistan and the advance of Russia, was no longer a tenable strategy. The Viceroy Lord Lytton bemoaned the fact that British officers who ventured a mile or two into this no man’s land were unlikely to be seen alive again.

This explains the volte-face from a policy of stagnation to a return to imperial expansion eagerly embraced by the hawks that had come to roost on the ramparts of Whitehall. The prevailing view in the India Office was that the North-West Frontier must at all costs be made secure against the threat of Russian invasion. Britain’s sensitivity to Russian movements in Central Asia was so acute that in 1891 the army organised a punitive expedition against the mir of Hunza for having allowed Cossack troops to reconnoitre his mountain kingdom. Sir Frederick Roberts, later Lord Roberts of Kandahar, was at that time Commander-in-Chief in India. ‘Fighting Bob’ Roberts commanded an extraordinary level of respect from the ranks, and he was an immensely popular military hero also affectionately known to his troops, British and Indian alike, as the ‘Lion of Kandahar’. Such was Roberts’ prestige with the sepoys that when he retired from service in 1893 the Muslim soldiers under his command, who included numerous tribesmen from the Frontier, sent him off with a public address dripping with breathtaking adulation:

We, the Mahomedans of the Punjab, have dared to approach Your Excellency with eyes tear-bedimmed, but a face smiling. The departure of a noble and well-loved General like yourself from our country is in itself a fact that naturally fills our eyes with tears . . . A boon for which the Natives of India will always remember your name with gratitude, is that you have fully relied upon, and placed your confidence in, the Natives, thus uniting them more firmly to the British Crown, making them more loyal, and establishing the good relations between the Rulers and the Ruled on a firmer footing to their mutual good.7

Roberts was thoroughly mistrustful of the tsar’s designs on India. He makes mention in his memoirs of one Colonel Yanoff, who had crossed the Hindu Kush with his Cossacks by the Korabhut Pass, advancing as far as the borders of Kashmir. Even more outrageous was the Russians’ treatment of two British officers found journeying along the road to India by way of the Pamirs and Gilgit, who were ordered to leave what the leaders of the Cossack party claimed to be ‘newly acquired Russian territory’. Roberts writes: ‘As this was a distinct breach of the promise made by the Russian government, and an infringement of the boundary line as agreed to between England and Russia in 1873, it was necessary to take steps to prevent any recurrence of such interference.’8 Hence a small force was despatched to this almost inaccessible region to carry out the ‘brilliant little Hunza-Naga campaign’ and punish the mir who, Roberts notes with indignation, ‘had openly declared himself in favour of Russia’. So while Warburton was earning his spurs as a promising young cadet, Britain was busily getting herself embroiled in another lather over the ‘Russian menace’, a conflict that would once again put the army on the march across the North-West Frontier passes into Afghanistan.

Britain’s forward policy in the North-West Frontier, which in its broadest sense can be defined as securing control of the border up to the Durand Line,* aimed to set up a military and political buffer against Russian aggression. The scheme was conceived in the wake of an unprecedented official visit to India by the Prince of Wales, later to be crowned Edward VII. In fact, the strategy of pressing ever westward was inspired by Clive himself, the historic ‘father’ of the forward policy who after his brilliant victory at Plassey had proclaimed, ‘To stop is dangerous, to recede ruin.’ The plan was to neutralise the single most dangerous obstacle to Britain ‘realising its destiny in Central Asia’, namely Russia. Indian Army strategists saw in this mission an opportunity to push the dominion of British India right up to the North-West Frontier, thus securing the border with Afghanistan and, while they were about it, perhaps take some key outposts west of the Khyber.

In 1874 Britain was at the zenith of her imperial power. The archetypal Victorian, Benjamin Disraeli, had just been returned to a second term as Prime Minister, and the only figure of relevance to raise a voice against expansionism was the Viceroy Lord Northbrook, a man of impeccable India credentials whose grandfather had been chairman of the East India Company. Northbrook’s un-Victorian-like restraint, however, was by no means an insurmountable obstacle for the likes of Disraeli’s hardline Governor-General of India, Lord Salisbury. The chief India administrator managed to hound Northbrook out of office, with a relentless bombardment of telegrams demanding that British agents be stationed on Afghan soil in order to keep a watchful eye on Russian movements in Central Asia, a diktat that Salisbury knew would fly in the face of Northbrook’s close border proclivities. Northbrook, resentful as were most viceroys of being bossed about by politicians comfortably perched in the ivory towers of Whitehall 6,000 miles away, threw in the towel and returned to his Hampshire estates to enjoy his considerable fortune and outstanding collection of paintings amassed by his family, the Baring banking dynasty. Northbrook’s replacement, the talented linguist and poet Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, later ennobled to the peerage as Lord Lytton, arrived in Calcutta in time to help celebrate the magnificence of Queen Victoria’s proclamation as Empress of India, a title he clearly intended to see carried forward to the subcontinent’s remotest boundaries – and beyond.

The Disraeli-Salisbury-Lytton triumvirate lost no time in pursuing their forward policy by demanding that the Afghan ruler Sher Ali allow a British mission to take up residence at the court of Kabul. While these negotiations were in progress a piece of intelligence landed at Government House in Calcutta that sent the General Staff’s antennae flying about: Sher Ali had been wining and dining an official delegation from St Petersburg led by General Nikolai Stolietoff. What was even more galling, the tsar’s emissaries had travelled to Kabul at the behest of the amir himself. According to a contemporary report by Major Reginald Mitford the Viceroy’s reaction was to call for a ‘total cessation of all official intercourse with the Afghan capital’. Lytton was never happy to accept the settled district of the North-West Frontier as India’s boundary with Afghanistan, and he squarely aligned himself with those who bemoaned the close border policy as a total failure. Shortly thereafter, Calcutta was to heave a sigh of relief when the amir broke his official silence to announce that, after all, he would be delighted to receive a British mission. In reality, the crafty amir was simply seeking to keep his options open. Sher Ali was testing the temperature of the water, trying to decide which of the great foreign powers in Asia, Russia or Britain, would come up with the best deal. Taking the amir at his word, Lytton despatched a mission through the Khyber Pass, only to have it intercepted by Afghan troops and turned back at Ali Masjid fort. It is unlikely the British grasped the significance in the Afghans having chosen this spot to confront their intruders – an old Moghul proverb has it that ‘He who holds Ali Masjid rules at Delhi.’

Sher Ali, suspecting that Britain’s friendly advances might conceal a more shadowy agenda, perhaps even a secret plan to occupy or break-up his kingdom, sent a detachment of troops to the Khyber Pass to halt the advance of a party led by Sir Neville Chamberlain. Brigadier-General Chamberlain, now 58 and a seasoned veteran of the Mutiny as well as several hard-fought Frontier campaigns, took this as an affront to his personal dignity. He fired off a telegram trumpeting his outrage to the Secretary of State for India, who quickly responded in kind, with Disraeli’s consent: the Khyber Pass was to be cleared immediately of these insolent Afghans. The exchange of entreaties, and eventual open threats between Kabul and Calcutta, eventually boiled down to an ultimatum from the British camp: let Chamberlain’s mission pass unhindered through the Khyber by 20 November or suffer the consequences. Predictably, Sher Ali was no longer in a conciliatory mood. The deadline passed without any signs of withdrawal by the Afghan troops. Thus, on 21 November, with the onset of winter, the government activated Plan B. An army of nearly 30,000 British and native troops marched across the border into Afghanistan, preceded by a message cabled by the Viceroy to the War Office in London, stating with exquisite pomposity, Jacta est alea, the die is cast. The Second Afghan War was under way.

The army moved forward in three columns. The first came up from the south, from Quetta to Kandahar, the line of defence chosen by Roberts to repel any Russian attack on India through Afghanistan. The second column advanced across a central front into the Kurram valley. The third marched north from Peshawar through the Khyber Pass to Jalalabad. What is today a Khyber Rifles outpost, Ali Masjid, came close to becoming the scene of disaster for the 15,000-man northern column advancing through the Khyber under the command of Sir Samuel Browne. The fortress commands a formidable defensive position above the pass, and at that spot nearly 4,000 enemy troops and native tribesmen lay in waiting for the Peshawar Valley Field Force. Browne, the one-armed veteran of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, saved the day by outmanoeuvring the Afghan forces. He ordered one of his brigades to mount a flanking manoeuvre and then simultaneously launched a frontal infantry attack, setting the Afghans on the run at bayonet point. The other two columns achieved their objectives and within three months the British expeditionary force was camped in the snow outside the gates of Kabul. Sher Ali fled to Turkestan, where he was shortly to die. His son Yakub Khan, known to the amir as ‘that ill-starred wretch’, assumed the throne and finding himself outgunned, he promptly capitulated to the conquering British. Victory was sealed in the treaty of Gandamak, in May 1879, ‘after much of the delay and equivocation inseparable from dealing with Asiatics’, recalls an official. The amir was forced to cede a wide swathe of borderland, including the jewel in the crown, the 32-mile length of the Khyber Pass. For good measure, he also ‘consented’ to receive a British resident at his court. Disraeli’s policy objectives had been achieved, the key strategic route between both countries was finally in British hands, and once more the might of British arms basked in glory. But not for long.

On a brisk autumn morning in September 1879 the commander of the newly installed Kabul Cantonment, the exaltedly-named Major Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, an Anglo-Frenchman whose father had served as one of Napoleon’s generals, along with his party of eighty fighting men were going about their morning drill and barracks duties. Without warning, the Residency came under siege by a sword- and musket-wielding mob of fanatical Kabulis. Finding they could not storm the place, the attackers set fire to the doorway below, and when that gave way they stormed in and overwhelmed the defenders. With the connivance of Yakub Khan, the screaming multitude cut down the garrison, leaving not a man alive. Thus was fulfilled the gory prophecy of former Viceroy Sir John Lawrence, who had warned that by taking up residency in Kabul Cavagnari and his men ‘will all be murdered – every one of them’. The British, it seems, had not learnt the lessons of their past dealings with the Afghans. They had once again fallen victim to the amir’s treachery.

The task of redeeming British battle honours fell to Roberts, the legendary military hero who, at the very moment Cavagnari and his troops were being butchered in Kabul, was marching his troops back to India across Afghanistan’s mountain wilderness. The amir, sensing that he had perhaps ventured into deep water, fired off a letter dripping with cynicism, in the hope that the Government of India might forestall reprisals for his duplicity in the Residency bloodbath. ‘I am grieved with this confusing state of things,’ Yakub Khan wrote. ‘It is almost beyond conception. By this misfortune I have lost my friend, the Envoy, and also my kingdom. I am terribly grieved and perplexed.’9 Roberts was unmoved by this piece of mendacity. When informed of the outrage that had befallen Cavagnari and his men, he swiftly turned his column round and marched his 7,500 men to Kabul, where he informed the amir that he was out of a job. Yakub Khan was ousted from Kabul with the same apparent ease that the Taliban were ejected from the capital 133 years later. But within three months it was to appear just as deceptive a victory. Almost immediately, the handful of tribal warlords who had melted into the hills with their fighters ahead of Roberts’ arrival staged a mass uprising. After several days of desperate fighting, Roberts found himself boxed into the same corner as his predecessor Elphinstone nearly four decades before, only this time sheltered behind thick walls to defend himself against the Afghan rabble. The news of the army’s plight sped to Calcutta where Lytton, contemplating the hopelessness of the Afghan adventure, threw up his hands in despair and demanded ‘a way out of that rat-trap’. The Viceroy was only too delighted to negotiate the evacuation of Roberts’ troops with almost any Afghan potentate, although he refused to deal with the deposed and truculent Yakub Khan. At last an agreement was hammered out to hand over the throne to Abdur Rahman Khan, a nephew of Sher Ali. His mission accomplished, Roberts gathered his army together and departed Kabul, having been spared Elphinstone’s ghastly ordeal. The Government of India’s Afghan policy was back to its normal shambolic state and apart from having won control of the Khyber Pass and several other, less significant territorial gains, the Second Afghan War drew to an inglorious conclusion.

Within a few years, however, the forward policy once again began to gather momentum. Robin Hodson, formerly with the Khyber Agency, notes that the British presence was spread considerably throughout the tribal territories. ‘The permanent occupation of Quetta, in what was to become Baluchistan, was recognised, and the boundary extended to the foot of the Khojak range, halfway to Kandahar,’ he writes. ‘In the north, our jurisdiction was extended to the Peiwar Kotal at the head of the Kurram valley, and to Landi Khana at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass.’10 In 1891 the Samana range was occupied to bring the Orakzai tribe under control, and a year later the Kurram valley was placed in British hands. ‘The Forward Policy had become a reality that advocated a firm occupation of this mountainous country to ensure the tranquillity of the settled districts down to the Indus,’ Hodson explains. Never again would a viceroy have to lament, as did Lytton in 1877, that the country within a day’s ride of Peshawar ‘is an absolute terra incognita