Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (14 page)

Like Ranjit Singh, Burnes clearly had immense charm. It was this which, time after time, managed to disarm the most hostile situations.

The normally suspicious Ranjit wrote to the Governor General on the day of Burnes’s departure to say how much he had enjoyed meeting this ‘nightingale of the garden of eloquence, this bird of the winged words of sweet discourse’. After the Governor General had authorised Burnes to continue his journey into Afghanistan, the Afghans were no less delighted by him: the first chieftain he came across as he set foot on the Afghan bank of the Indus told him that he and his friends could ‘feel as secure as eggs under a hen’. Burnes duly repaid the affection. ‘I thought Peshawar a delightful place,’ he wrote to his mother in Montrose a month later, ‘until I came to Kabul: truly this is paradise . . . I tell them about steam ships, armies, ships, medicine, and all the wonders of Europe; and, in return, they enlighten me regarding the customs of their country, its history, state factions, trade &c . . .’
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He felt a genuine fondness for the people, who ‘are kind-hearted and hospitable; they have no prejudices against a Christian, and none against our nation. When they ask me if I like pork, I of course shudder and say it is only outcastes that commit such outrages. God forgive me! For I am very fond of bacon, and my mouth waters as I write the word.’

Burnes liked Kabul, liked its people, enjoyed its poetry and landscapes, and he admired its rulers. He went on to describe his warm reception by his Barakzai host, Dost Mohammad Khan, ‘the most rising man in the Kabul dominions’, and faithfully recounted the sparkling intelligence of his conversation, as well as the beauties of the gardens and fruit trees of his palace, the Bala Hisar.
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If Burnes had charmed Dost Mohammad and his Afghans, they, in turn, had charmed him.

One man who remained stolidly immune to Burnes’s attractions was Shah Shuja’s keeper, the Ludhiana spymaster Claude Wade. Wade was never happy with anyone who stepped on his territory, which he tended to guard as jealously as any Afghan mastiff protecting its patch. He was certainly not going to put up with some social-climbing twenty-something overtaking him as the Governor General’s preferred adviser on Afghanistan. While Ellenborough’s Memorandum potentially gave Wade increased power, supplementing the resources the Company would be prepared to pour into Himalayan intelligence gathering, and increasing the number of operatives Wade could employ, it had also authorised an operation directly into Wade’s territory over which he had no control, and which had emerged from Pottinger’s competing Bhuj Agency and was run out of the rival Bombay Presidency. Wade quickly came to see Burnes as a major threat to his position, and as the number and quality of Burnes’s reports from Kabul began to increase, Wade began annotating them with sarcastic and patronising comments as they passed through Ludhiana, gleefully pointing out any errors he spotted.
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Aware that he was now suddenly the desk-bound Afghan expert who had never actually been to Afghanistan, Wade grew still more irritated with his dashing younger rival when Burnes began to come to very different conclusions about British interests in the region to those canvassed by Wade’s Agency. Wade had always seen the relationship with Ranjit Singh as the Company’s primary alliance in north India, and strongly believed that the Sikhs were by far the most powerful military force in the region. Indeed having spent much time in the Sikh court throughout the 1820s, Wade was close to becoming a partisan to their cause, something his superiors were aware – and indeed wary – of. He was much less interested in Afghanistan, disliked what he had heard of Dost Mohammad and mentally had his Ludhiana friend and neighbour, Shah Shuja, lined up as Britain’s potential puppet in Kabul, if the need should arise.

Wade’s views had, however, not kept up with the changing reality. Since Shuja’s last failed attempt to recapture his throne, Shah Mahmoud had died and Afghanistan had fallen almost completely under the sway of the Barakzai brothers; only in Herat did Shah Mahmoud’s son, Prince Kamran, hold out as a last bastion of Sadozai rule. Despite this, Wade continued to look on the Barakzais as Shuja saw them: as ambitious and unprincipled usurpers.

Burnes, coming to it with fresh eyes, saw things differently. On his way through Ludhiana to see the Governor General, in between saying goodbye to Ranjit Singh and setting off for Afghanistan, he had come to pay court to Shah Shuja and had been unimpressed. Despite Shuja telling Burnes that ‘had I but my kingdom, how glad I should be to see an Englishman at Kabul, and open the road between Europe and India’, Burnes remained unconvinced. ‘I do not believe that the Shah possesses sufficient energy to seat himself on the throne of Kabul,’ he wrote in a despatch, ‘and that if he did regain it, he has not the tact to discharge the duties of so difficult a situation.’ Later he expanded on the same theme: ‘The fitness of Shuja ul Mulk for the station of sovereign seems ever to have been doubtful,’ he argued in his bestselling
Travels into Bokhara
,
which collated his reports into a travel narrative.

His manners and address are certainly highly polished; but his judgement does not rise above mediocrity. Had the case been otherwise, we should not now see him an exile from his country and his throne, without a hope of regaining them, after an absence of twenty years; and before he had attained the fiftieth year of age . . . The total overthrow of the dynasty is attributed to misplaced pride and arrogance of the last kings, who now receive no sympathy from the Afghans for their overthow. Shuja, indeed, might have regained his power, but for his rash attempts to exercise the authority of king before he was firmly fixed in it. The Afghans cannot control their feelings of jealousy towards men in power: for the last thirty years, who has died a natural death? To be happy under government they must either be ruled by a vigorous despot, or formed into many small republics.
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A vigorous despot was, however, exactly what Burnes had found in Kabul. Burnes had met all the Barakzai brothers on his travels, but there was no question in his mind who was the most impressive. Dost Mohammad Khan was now the sole ruler of Kabul and Ghazni, and well on his way to being acknowledged as the head of the clan despite his youth and his elder brothers’ jealousy of his rise. Burnes was unequivocal in his admiration: ‘The reputation of Dost Mohammad Khan is made known to a traveller long before he enters his country,’ he wrote in his
Travels
,

and no one better merits the high character which he has obtained. He is unremitting in his attention to business, and attends daily at the court house . . . This sort of decision is exceedingly popular with the people. Trade has received the greatest encouragement from him . . . and the justice of this chief affords a constant theme of praise to all classes: the peasant rejoices at the absence of tyranny; the citizen at the safety of his home; the merchant at the equity of the decisions and the protection of his property, and the soldiers at the regular manner in which their arrears are discharged. A man in power can have no higher praise. Dost Mohammad Khan has not attained his fortieth year; his mother was a Persian [Qizilbash], and he has been trained up with people of that nation, which has sharpened his understanding, and given him advantages over all his brothers. One is struck with the intelligence, knowledge and curiosity which he displays, as well as his accomplished manners and his address. He is doubtless the most powerful chief in Afghanistan, and may yet raise himself by his abilities to a much greater rank in his native country.
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Burnes wrote that he had heard that in his youth Dost Mohammad had been wild and dissolute, but had become a reformed man now he had gained power. He had given up wine, taught himself to read and write, and affected piety and a simplicity of manner and dress. He was available to all, and anyone could come and ask for justice. Nor was it just that Burnes thought Dost Mohammad was personally impressive. He also saw him clearly as Britain’s best bet for attaining influence in Afghanistan. As far as he was concerned the Sadozais had had their day, and as Dost Mohammad was so well disposed towards the British it would be possible to form an alliance with ‘no great expenditure of public funds’.
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This was a radically different strategy to the one Wade had been suggesting to Calcutta, and it left Wade with two options: either to accept the opinion of the younger man who had spent little time in the region, but unlike him had now seen Kabul for himself; or to stand on his authority as the regional expert of twenty years and to continue to back Shah Shuja as Britain’s best asset. He chose the latter course. ‘The people are tired of wars and factions,’ he wrote in May 1832, while Burnes was still in Kabul. ‘They look for the reestablishment of their former [Sadozai] government as the only chance which presents itself of ensuring tranquillity.’
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This was at variance with everything Burnes was reporting from the ground; but Wade made his case in exactly the way he knew would win the argument in Calcutta. He waited for Burnes to head on north from Kabul, where he was to reconnoitre the unmapped routes over the Hindu Kush, and then he made his move.

Wade was assisted by events in western Afghanistan, where the last bastion of Sadozai rule in Herat was about to be besieged by the Persians. Since the British had failed to come to the assistance of the Persians in the 1826–7 Russo-Persian War, the Persians had concluded that it was wiser to hug their Russian enemy close than entertain any further flirtations with the British who had proved unwilling to risk outright war with Russia in their support. Now the Persians were planning a campaign to retake Herat, and the hawks in Calcutta strongly suspected that this was really a Russian initiative in Persian disguise, part of an old Tsarist plan to set up a forward base in Afghanistan: an article inserted into a treaty signed five years earlier had given St Petersburg the right to set up a consulate in Herat if the Persians were ever to capture it. These fears were in reality erroneous – in 1832 the Russians were actually trying to dissuade the Persian Crown Prince Abbas Mirza from going ahead with the attack. Nevertheless, Wade now played on these fears, writing to the Governor General that ‘the opinion that Russia is connected with these events has gained an ascendency in the minds of men . . .’
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He was emphatic: if something was not done and Shuja not replaced on his old throne as shah, Russia would gain control of Herat and use it as the ideal forward base for an invasion of India.

Along with his letter, Wade sent the Governor General an illuminated Persian manuscript from Shah Shuja, in which he formally asked for British assistance in what he described as a bid to outflank the Russian interference in Afghanistan. He had buried his former differences with his old enemy Ranjit Singh, he wrote, and he now wanted to return to Afghanistan and lead the resistance to the new joint Russo-Persian threat. While Ranjit Singh would create a diversion by attacking Peshawar, he would take his force by a southern route and lay siege to Kandahar. ‘The conquest of my country is an affair of easy attainment,’ he wrote. ‘With six lakh rupees, I am confident that I shall be able to establish my authority in Afghanistan . . . The people of Afghanistan are anxious for my arrival, and would flock to my standard, and acknowledge no other Chief . . . The Barakzais are not the people around whom the Afghans will rally . . . If I can raise a loan even of two or three lakh rupees, I entertain every expectation that with the favour of God, my object will be accomplished.’
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On 1 December 1832, William Fraser, who had recently been appointed the Resident in Delhi, began to receive reports from his informers in the city that there were Afghans in the bazaars buying up very large quantities of arms and ammunition. It was unclear whether these sales were legitimate, or what they were for, so Fraser had the dealers arrested and their purchases impounded. He then wrote to Calcutta to ask what should be done with the men.
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An answer arrived at Fraser’s Residency direct from the office of the Governor General Lord Bentinck. The dealers, it explained, were as they had claimed agents of Shah Shuja. They had been sent to Delhi to buy muskets, uniforms, ammunition, flints, buttons and cartridge pouches for his long-planned reconquest of his kingdom – all with the Governor General’s covert assent and assistance. Shah Shuja was preparing for a military expedition to Afghanistan with the direct, if secret, sanction of Bentinck himself.

As late as 1828, the Governor General had refused pleas from Shah Shuja even to be granted an interview. Now the Persian threat to Herat, and Ellenborough’s determination to resist the Russians, had changed political calculations. Bentinck now ruled that, while the British official position would remain one of studied neutrality, Shah Shuja would be allowed discreet help to mount his expedition, including a four-month advance on his pension – a total of 16,000 rupees.
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The very same month, while Dost Mohammad Khan was receiving friendly messages from Bentinck thanking him for his hospitality to Burnes and expressing his ‘deep desire that friendship and union should be established between this Government and yourself’, Bentinck’s new Private Secretary, William Macnaghten, was secretly instructing Fraser not only to release Shuja’s arms dealers from jail, but also to waive all duty for their purchases at the Delhi Customs, so facilitating a Sadozai counter-revolution against the Barakzai government.
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