Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (101 page)

Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of the Punjab’, and his nobles.

Two infantrymen from Ranjit Singh’s state of the art Fauj-i-Khas regiment, trained for him by ex-Napoleonic veterans.

Sikh horsemen.

Sir Claude Wade, a Bengal-born Persian scholar, was one of the original spymasters in the Great Game – that grand contest of imperial competition, espionage and conquest that engaged Britain and Russia until the collapse of their respective Asian empires, and whose opening moves were being played out at this period.

Major Eldred Pottinger, nephew of Wade’s great rival Sir Henry Pottinger, was in Herat disguised as a Muslim horse trader when the Qajar Persian army attacked it.

MacNeill, the Russophobe British ambassador in Teheran whose cable, ‘The Russians have formally opened their diplomatic intercourse with Kabul’ convinced the British that Dost Mohammad needed to be replaced. ‘Lord Auckland should now take a decided course,’ he advised, ‘and declare that he who is not with us is against us ... We must secure Afghanistan.’

Edward Law,
1
st Earl of Ellenborough, was the first to turn anxiety about Russia into public policy. ‘Our policy in Asia must follow one course only,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘to limit the power of Russia.’

Mohan Lal Kashmiri, Alexander Burnes’s brilliant Indian assistant and intelligence chief, understood Afghanistan better than any of the British. As long as they followed his advice, all went well.

Henry Rawlinson ran into Vitkevitch’s Cossacks by chance in the half-light of dawn while lost on the Persian-Afghan frontier. His record-breaking ride from Mashhad to Teheran brought news of the secret Russian mission to Afghanistan. He later become political agent in Kandahar during the British occupation.

The Scottish agent of the Great Game, Alexander Burnes, in the field in Afghan dress. He always complained that this famous image did not look in the least like him.

Ivan Vitkevitch was a young Polish nobleman who, while in exile on the Cossack steppe, became fascinated with the Turkic culture of what is now Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. He was the perfect intelligence agent to take on Burnes, and after much shadowing of each other’s footsteps, the pair finally met for Christmas dinner in Kabul in
1838
.

Alexander Burnes, the dashing Scottish intelligence officer sent out to gather information on the non-existent Russian threat to British interests in the east. When the book he wrote about his travels became a huge success, the Russians, who read it in French translation, were prompted to embark on intelligence gathering of their own, sending Vitkevitch first to Bukhara then Kabul. Hawkish paranoia in London thus ended up bringing into being the very threat it had most feared – and so was born the Great Game.