Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (43 page)

It is one of expense, responsibility, and anxiety . . . There are not many officers to give me much advice, most of them like myself having only lately come into this country. The Political Agents, generally young officers, are frequently proposing schemes for the execution of which they are not responsible. A proposition was lately submitted to Govt. for an advance on Herat, a distance of 600 miles from Kabul through country abounding with difficulties, and where supplies requiring 4000 Camels have to be carried . . .

[Macnaghten] is cold and reserved, but I believe very clever . . . Shah Shuja I saw two days ago, a stout, careworn-looking man. He received me in a wretched garden, his house appeared bad and uncomfortable, as indeed are most here – no one except Sir W. M[acnaghten] possesses much more than a mud hut. The King leaves this on the 10th when I am expected to go too, which is rather annoying as I intended marching by myself and his
ragamuffin
retinue will be a great nuisance on the road.
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A week later Elphinstone finally arrived in Kabul, which depressed him even more than Jalalabad. ‘The City is extensive, very dirty & crowded,’ he observed. ‘The cantonment [meanwhile] is not very defensible without a number of men, as people can come in from without at many points. This, in the event of troops being required elsewhere, would be very inconvenient, & I am a good deal puzzled as to what is now the best thing to be done.’

Elphinstone was not the only one puzzled by what should be done in Afghanistan. Even Macnaghten, the most delusionally optimistic of the British, now recognised that despite the surrender of Dost Mohammad all was not well.

To the south-east, the Punjab was now declining into hostile anarchy: within two years three Sikh rulers had followed each other as leaders of the Khalsa. As a result, a leaderless military regime of evasive and uncertain sympathies now lay between the army of occupation in Afghanistan and its commissariat base in Ferozepur. ‘The Punjab remains so unsettled that all the spare troops are obliged to be kept on that frontier,’ wrote Emily in April 1841. ‘Runjeet’s death has been so like the death of Alexander, and of half the great conquerors of ancient history that we used to read about. His army was a very fine thing, and his kingdom a good kingdom while he was there to keep an eye on them, but the instant he died it all fell into confusion, and his soldiers have now murdered their French and English officers, and are marauding all over the country. It is not actually any business of ours, but interrupts our communications with Afghanistan . . .’
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This was an understatement. Not only did supply trains heading up the passes into Afghanistan often have to fight their way through ambushes and frequent attempts to hijack the baggage animals, there were a growing number of credible reports that senior Sikh sardars in Lahore and Rawalpindi were actively sheltering rebel Barakzai and Durrani chiefs and other Afghan rebel leaders, giving them a base in the Punjab and the hills around Peshawar from which they could strike back at British troops over the border in Afghanistan. The authorities in India thus found themselves in a difficult situation: the Sikh sardars were still nominal allies, but in reality many were doing all they could to undermine the British in Afghanistan. Before long, Auckland was beginning to flirt with the hawkish plans suggested by Colvin to annex the Punjab in order to close down the insurgents’ bases and ease the passage of supplies up to the front: ‘I am of the opinion that if Sikh authority should be further dissolved, its restoration is not to be regarded as a thing practicable,’ he wrote. ‘Things have not yet reached a crisis, but they appear to be fast approaching it.’
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Meanwhile, in the west of Afghanistan, there were anxieties that Teheran was busy stirring things up near the Persian border. D’Arcy Todd, the officer who taken on the difficult job of trying to win over the Wazir of Herat, Yar Mohammad Alikozai, had fulfilled Burnes’s prediction of the inevitable collapse of his mission by failing to stop the growing rapprochement between the Heratis and the Persians. The final straw was when Yar Mohammad had simply pocketed a large sum of money Todd had given him to finance an attack on the Persian-occupied border fortress of Ghorian. Increasingly convinced that Yar Mohammad was intending to ally himself with Persia and lead an Islamic coalition against Shah Shuja and his British backers, on 10 February 1841 Todd had left his post without official permission and marched back to Kandahar, effectively breaking off diplomatic relations. In due course, Yar Mohammad had Shuja’s cousin, Kamran Shah Sadozai, arrested and strangled, so taking over control of the city in name as well as in letter. He then promptly entered into an anti-British alliance with Mohammad Shah of Persia.
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Even more threatening was the situation to the south and west of Kandahar, where both the Durranis and the formidable Tokhi and Hotaki Ghilzais had risen up against the British in Helmand and Qalat. Although it was ostensibly the decision to tax the traditionally tax-exempt Tokhi tribe that sparked the rebellion, once again the rhetoric of the resistance concentrated on a specifically Islamic set of grievances with the rebels using the language of the jihad and referring to themselves as ‘the soldiers of Islam’.
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Unlike almost all the other British officers in Afghanistan, General Nott was proving a notably effective military commander against the rebels, and developed a quick-moving 5,000–strong anti-insurgency column which could be rapidly deployed in any direction; but as soon as he defeated an uprising in one place, another insurgency flared up elsewhere – thanks, he believed, to the ‘hatred in which we are held by the Dooranees as Infidels and Conquerers. Akhtar [Khan Durrani, the leading insurgent in Helmand] describes his party as an “assembly of Muslims and ‘ulama” and his cause as the “Glory of Islam”. He believes the “Feringees are bent on the destruction and expatriation of the whole Mahomedan population”.’
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Nott now had as his political assistant the able and clever Henry Rawlinson, the man who had first sighted Vitkevitch heading for the Afghan border four years earlier, and whose epic ride back to Teheran had set off the chain of events which had led to the war. Having recently won the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his explorations in Persia and for his work translating the ancient Persian cuneiform script of the trilingual inscriptions at Behistun, Rawlinson now found himself posted to Kandahar where his job increasingly revolved around translating the calls to holy war being issued almost daily by the ghazis of Kandahar and Helmand. ‘All holy men & true believers, the blessing of God be upon you,’ began one such document that Rawlinson had forwarded to Macnaghten.

I have to inform you that the Mussulmans & ‘ulema have assembled 5,000 Matchlock-men, Infantry, and 2000 Horsemen fully armed & equipped, and by the blessing of God we will uphold the Glory of Islam – but we must work together & make our arrangements in concert. On receipt of this letter you must collect your own forces & those of the other Ghazis & come & join us. The illustrious Wazir [Yar Mohammad] has written to us from Herat, and please God by the time our forces can unite & march, the Wazir will have reached Girishk & captured it. In raising your followers, do not be idle and place a perfect reliance on our holy cause & march at once to attack the English.
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As more and more of these documents began to accumulate from his informers, Rawlinson started to realise for the first time the full scale of the resistance the occupation was now facing. ‘I shall be most thankful when you re-enter this town with the 43rd Regiment,’ he wrote anxiously to Nott, ‘for it is anything but pleasant to see the spirit of opposition to the government showing itself through all the districts, and to feel that, happen what may, there is no possibility of employing force in support of royal authority [until you return].’ A day later he was writing to Nott with even greater urgency: ‘I regret to say that affairs to the westward are assuming so alarming an appearance, that I begin to fear that the immediate employment of regular troops will be found necessary in support of the authority of the Govt.’
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Yet Macnaghten’s response when he read Rawlinson’s anxious despatches was as patronising as it was wrong-headed. He accused Rawlinson of ‘taking an unwarrantably gloomy view of our position, and entertaining and disseminating rumours favourable to that view. We have enough of difficulties without adding to the number needlessly . . . I know [such rumours] to be utterly false as regards this part of the country, and have no reason to believe them to be true as regards your portion of the Kingdom.’
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In a later letter, he again took issue with Rawlinson’s assessment that an uprising was imminent. ‘I do not concur with you as to the difficulty of our position,’ he wrote.

On the contrary, I think our prospects are most cheering, and with the materials we have there ought to be little or no difficulty . . . The people of this country are very credulous. They believe anything invented to our prejudice, but they will soon learn that we are not the cannibals we are painted . . . Certainly our troops can be no great favourites in a town where they have turned out half the inhabitants for their own accommodation, but I will venture to say there is not a country town in England where soldiers are quartered in which similar excesses have not happened . . .

These people are perfect children and they should be treated as such. If we put one naughty boy in the corner the rest will be terrified. We have taken their plaything, power, out of the hands of the Dooranee Chiefs and they are panting in consequence. They did not know how to use it. In their hands it was useless and ever hurtful to their master and we are obliged to transfer it to scholars of our own. They instigate the Moollas, and the Moollas preach to the people, but this will be very temporary.
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It was the same in Kohistan, to the north of Kabul. In the summer of 1841 Eldred Pottinger, the former ‘Hero of Herat’, arrived in Charikar with a garrison of Gurkhas to find the British position every bit as indefensible as the Kabul cantonment: the Gurkhas had to camp in tents while their badly located, mud-walled and still gateless barracks was overlooked and dominated by a second much stronger fortress a short distance from it on slightly higher ground. Moreover they had no artillery; yet all around were widespread signs of growing unrest. When one of Pottinger’s assistants was taken aside by a fakir to whom he had given alms, and warned that a massacre of their troops was being openly discussed in the bazaar, ‘recommending me strongly to spend the winter in Kabul’, Pottinger became convinced that another major uprising was about to break out.
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But Macnaghten refused either to listen to his worries or to send him the reinforcements or the artillery that he believed would be necessary if he were to hold his position. So Pottinger spent weeks collecting more intelligence and then forwarded a second, more detailed assessment to Macnaghten. The Kohistan chiefs, he wrote, had initially supported Shah Shuja, but found that the strictness of the Anglo-Sadozai administration ‘was inimical to their interests and power insomuch that it had given them a master who was able to compel obedience instead of one who was obliged to overlook their excesses’. In addition there were other reasons for revolt: ‘Hatred of foreign domination, fanaticism, the licentiousness of our troops, and particularly the impunity with which women could be seduced and carried off in a country celebrated for the extreme jealousy of the natives . . .’ He went on:

The enemies of the British are increasing in their endeavours to blacken our character, prejudice the populace against us and encourage outlaws. During July and August, while the crops were on the ground, burning of stacks and cutting the banks of the irrigating canals were of frequent occurrence and constant inroads were made by parties of outlaws, without the royal authorities being able to arrest them, even though it was evident that many of the people were cognizant of their comings and goings . . . Nearly every hour brings rumours of the formation of an extensive conspiracy . . . and I feel it my duty to recommend that hostages be demanded from the Kohistan Chiefs.
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The reality was that resistance was growing everywhere against the British, and only in Kabul itself was there still some support for the Anglo-Sadozai regime. Even there the popularity of Shuja was crumbling. According to Maulana Kashmiri:

The people were oppressed by the violence of the Firangi

They were afflicted by the arrogance of the Firangi

No vestige of honour remained in the city

Law and order had no standing

The Khans were so disgraced

Like earth they mixed with water

When in this way Kabul was terror-struck

With different calamities, stained red and beaten

In every home, they remembered the true justice of the Amir

Night and day they longed for the Amir
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Most British officials now recognised that the Anglo-Sadozai regime was failing – certainly few took so dismissive and over-confident an attitude as Macnaghten – but they differed from each other as to the solution needed to turn the situation around. In London, John Cam Hobhouse, the President of the Board of Control, who in his youth had been Lord Byron’s close friend and travelling companion, argued that what was really needed was radically to increase troop numbers. Either Afghanistan should be relinquished completely, or it should be held in strength. He argued that the number of troops on the ground should be enormously increased from the skeletal garrison to which they had been reduced after the surrender of Dost Mohammad Khan. Expenditure and investment in the country should rise, he wrote, and there should be greater control over the Afghan government. The basic fact that ‘the British are masters of the country’ should be recognised, and Shuja should be made to obey all the orders given to him. Retreat should be out of the question.
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