Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (15 page)

Macnaghten, the man behind this new covert operation, was a bookish orientalist and former judge from Ulster who had been promoted from his court room to run the Company’s bureaucracy. Originally a protégé of Henry Russell, the smooth and ambitious Resident at Hyderabad, he was widely respected for his intelligence, but many disliked his pompous, preening vanity while others questioned whether this ‘man of the desk’ was at all suited to his new job as private secretary and chief adviser to the Governor General.
k
Macnaghten, by contrast, had absolutely no doubts about his own abilities, and instead rather fancied his facility for political intrigue. He also believed he knew Afghanistan far better than he actually did, although he had never been anywhere near the region and all he knew came from his reading of Wade’s despatches. Like Wade, Macnaghten may also have been slightly jealous of Burnes’s rapid rise: as a born bureaucrat who always wished to maintain the existing protocol, he disapproved of the way Burnes had managed to reach the ear of the Governor General and the Cabinet in London without going through the usual channels. He had also known Wade for many years, liked him, trusted his judgement and approved of the more conventional way he worked and thought.

So was born a dangerously contradictory and two-faced British policy towards Afghanistan, with Burnes making friendly overtures to Dost Mohammad and the Barakzais, even as another arm of the government was secretly backing an uprising against them. As time would show, this approach was not just duplicitous: it was a recipe for diplomatic disaster that would soon blow up in the faces of everyone involved.

On 28 January 1833, ten years after his previous attempt, having armed his men with the new weapons from Delhi, Shah Shuja rode out from Ludhiana at the head of a small force of Rohilla cavalry. He was confident of the success of what would be his third attempt at recovering the throne of Khurasan. ‘I never hesitated to take upon myself difficulties and hardships to regain my kingdom,’ he wrote in his memoirs.

A treasury of pain has been the reward;

but the key to that treasury lies with the Almighty:

As long as there is life and a horse, ride it, O Shuja,

Never lose hope to give a horse the reins.

If a hundred times your heart breaks,

Still carry on, O Shuja!

Ride with God’s grace and greatness,

For nothing is impossible to God.
83

To lead and train his troops, Shuja hired the services of a dogged old Anglo-Indian mercenary named William Campbell. Their first destination was again the financial centre of Shikarpur on the borders of the Punjab and Sindh. The British had advanced Shuja only a fraction of the money he needed to wage war and this time he was determined to be as ruthless as necessary to make sure he would not fail. He showed his intentions as soon as he left British territory by ambushing a caravan of merchants heading to Sindh and seized the goods and baggage camels.
84
With money to hand out, his followers quickly began to increase.

Wade, following at a distance, sent back optimistic reports of the Shah’s progress. Shuja had now gathered 3,000 men ‘of respectable appearance’, he wrote, as well as ‘four pieces of horse artillery, and a treasury with Rs 2 Lakh in it’. There was little doubt, he believed, that this time the Shah would succeed, and, without naming names, went on to ridicule Burnes’s ideas about the popularity of the Barakzais. ‘The Europeans who have lately travelled in Afghanistan have generally formed an idea that the Afghans are indifferent if not opposed to the restoration of their ancient King,’ he observed. ‘It ought to be borne in mind that these travellers have in every case been the guests and intimates of that very reigning family [the Barakzais] who would have an interest in impressing them with an opinion favourable to their own reputation.’
85

By mid-May, Shuja had crossed the Indus and entered Shikarpur without opposition. He then taxed the town’s bankers, filled his coffers with their coin and began drilling his troops. Six months later, on 9 January 1834, Campbell’s troops saw off an attack by a force of Baluchi tribesmen sent by the Amirs of Sindh to arrest Shuja. ‘A party of Baluch danced with their swords as they came into the fight,’ recorded Mirza ‘Ata, who was an eyewitness.

They harvested with their blades many heads of the royal army, shouting their war-cries till they too were killed. Bravo for their bravery – but alas for their total ignorance of tactics! They dismounted from their horses in the midst of battle and charged on foot uphill, brandishing their swords and yelling like demons, only to be mown down by enemy gunfire before reaching the top. Thus died many Baluch great and small; and the harvest of their lives was scattered to the winds of non-existence . . .

On hearing of their defeat, Shuja gave the order that no one should be allowed to cross the river, and that all boats were to be seized. Thus trapped between fire and water the Baluch panicked – and those not daring to return to face their commander preferred to throw themselves in to the river: many were the sights of drowning Baluch begging the ferrymen and sailors to save them, and others holding onto horses’ tails until both horse and man were swept away.
86

For Shuja, success now bred success. A month later, when he finally set off northwards, his army had grown to 30,000 men and the Shah was in good spirits. ‘Thinking about the huge numbers of my army,’ he explained in his memoirs, ‘it occurred to me to ask what ruler has ever had such a sea of men under his banners, and if so how will anyone be able to stand up to him?’
87
To the Amirs of Sindh who were still trying to raise a new army to oppose him, he sent a challenge which reflected his bullish confidence. ‘Execrable dogs!’ he wrote. ‘God willing, I will give you such a lesson that you shall be an example to the whole world. The only way to treat a rabid dog is to put a rope around his neck. If you are coming to attack us, by all means come. I do not fear you. God is the disposer of events. The country shall belong to the conqueror.’
88

In April Shuja marched his troops through the Bolan Pass, and as agreed Ranjit Singh moved north-west from Lahore, the armies of the Sikh Khalsa providing a diversion by crossing the Indus at Attock and taking Peshawar. The troops of the Barakzais, divided between the two fronts, could offer effective opposition to neither invading army. Everything for once was going to plan. Shuja now wrote to Wade in triumph, barely able to conceal his excitement. He ridiculed the Amirs of Sindh, ‘these short-sighted people who forget that I am under special protection of God’, and expressed optimism that victory over the Barakzais was near: ‘By the divine favor, victory will continue to open her gate for me.’
89

Only in May 1834, when Shuja’s troops finally marched into the Kandahar oasis, did his run of luck begin to fail. The Barakzais had had time to prepare for his arrival and, by the time Shuja marched up to the city walls, supplies had been laid in and the city’s defences were ready to withstand a lengthy siege. Moreover, Shuja’s troops had little experience in siege warfare, and insufficient training, artillery and equipment to carry out an escalade on the city walls. ‘The besieging forces had attacked the city unsuccessfully with heavy losses,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata.

Now they tried to scale the Fort walls at night with scaling ladders. These they carried in furtive silence in the dark to below the walls, and waited for sleep to disarm the watchers within. Then they planned to erect the ladders and storm the unsuspecting citadel. Sleep however attacked the royal besiegers first . . . At sunrise the King, impatient of news of the attack, and hearing no uproar from within the fort, had the reveille cannon fired. The besiegers suddenly awoke from their sleep, saw that the sun was rising and that the guards on the Fort walls were already awake and raising the alarm – but from fear of His Majesty, the besiegers went ahead and raised their ladders and swarmed up them, only to be met by a barrage of fire, to be thrown off the ladder of life into the ditch of death.
90

After two months, the siege had become a stalemate, with both sides holding firm in their positions. It was at this point that news arrived that Dost Mohammad was approaching with 20,000 Barakzai troops from Kabul to aid his besieged half-brothers within the walls. Although Shuja had great numerical advantage – some estimates talk of his army having now swelled to 80,000 – he was anxious that Dost Mohammad might cut off the water supply to his troops, so he fell back from his safely entrenched position in front of the city walls to a well-watered belt of gardens along the Arghandab River to the north-east. Hearing this, Dost Mohammad rode ahead on his own to investigate. ‘When the Dost got wind of this retreat, he thanked his good fortune and disguised himself to go and check on the truth of the rumour,’ recorded Mirza ‘Ata.

He rode out to see the royal soldiers all resting flat out in the shade, thinking the Kabul army to be still many miles distant. The Dost then took just 3,000 of the best of his troops, rushed them forward, and quickly attacked the royal troops scattered amid the gardens before they had realised what was happening. In the heat of battle, Shaikh Shah Aghasi who at Dost Mohammad’s bidding had come over to the King’s side a few days earlier, threw off the mask of deceit, shouting ‘The King has run away, the King has run away.’ He then used the ensuing confusion to attack the royal army from within. Shuja’s troops were amazed to hear the cry of defeat and to see the Shaikh busy plundering. Smoke from the guns and cannon was rolling up into the sky, as Campbell and his platoon staunchly defended their position. But the young men of Kabul were fearless . . . and rushed the gun-emplacement, wounding and capturing Campbell and taking all the artillery. Shuja’s army now panicked. Soon everyone had fled and the royal army was dispersed, wandering lost in the hills and plains. The Shah, contemplating this total defeat, had no choice but to flee too.
91

Yet again, Shuja was forced to retreat. Among the captured baggage lying strewn in the gardens of Kandahar were letters of support from Wade, proving British complicity in the failed coup. Wade tried to put a good face on it all, saying that it was a result no one could have anticipated; but it now looked more and more as if Burnes had been right about the popularity and efficiency of the Barakzais, and that Wade had all along been backing a serial loser in Shah Shuja.

The secret report drawn up at the Governor General’s request to analyse the policy failure in Afghanistan summed up the position with devastating brevity. ‘Shah Shuja has been engaged in a series of unfortunate attempts to regain his throne,’ it stated, listing Shuja’s four great defeats: the first army ambushed at the Mughal gardens of Nimla, the second frozen in the snows of Kashmir, the third blown up in Peshawar by its own exploding ammunition and now the fourth taken by surprise in the gardens of Kandahar. ‘He has shown great activity and enterprise in preparing and conducting his expeditions, and great fortitude in defeat, but his personal courage has always failed at the crisis of his affairs and to this defect his misfortunes are attributed.’
92

Even Wade was now prepared to admit that his protégé looked like a spent force. But in a private conversation with the American mercenary Josiah Harlan he nevertheless foresaw there was one thing that could yet bring his friend back into play. ‘There is now no possible chance for Shuja’s restoration,’ he said, ‘unless an ostensible demonstration of Russian diplomacy should transpire at Kabul.’
93

If the Russians were to make a direct move on Afghanistan with Barakzai assistance, then Shuja might yet find himself indispensable to British ambitions.

3

The Great Game Begins

The low, barren desert hills on the disputed borderlands between Persia and Afghanistan are no place to get lost at night. Even today it is wild, arid, remote country, haunted only by soaring hawks, packs of winter-wolves and opium smugglers working the old caravan routes. Figures move small and slow through the immensity of the sun-blasted landscape. Two hundred years ago it was an area travellers tried to avoid even during the day, its valleys and passes the refuge of brigands who took full advantage of the debatable lands between the region’s warring principalities to pursue their trade.