Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (65 page)

From this it would appear that your intention is to separate yourself from the race of Islam. My respected friend, this is the word of God that has now come to pass. The wise and holy men of this land have during the last four happy months had wonderful dreams and seen visions showing that our Holy Prophet and the Four Friends [the first four Caliphs, or Charyar] have girded up their loins and buckled on their swords in the cause of Islam. The whole of Islam is united with one heart, and we have engaged in a war against the Infidel. The race of unbelievers have been overcome and altogether destroyed. This is not a matter of Man’s judgement, but for that of God. You should be keeping your eye steadily fixed on the interests of your religion . . . Judge for yourself whether it is better that you and I should live and be respected among Mussulmans, or that we should pass our lives among Kafirs? If you desire the good of Islam consider my own house and wealth as your own, but if you continue to prefer the company of Kafirs we cannot have relations. Let me hear from you quickly.
42

The appeal struck all the right chords: Akbar Khan’s army quickly swelled as news of his growing prestige as a successful wager of the jihad spread through the mountains. Mirza ‘Ata was among his many cheerleaders:

Sardar Muhammad Akbar Khan the Ghazi set about besieging the English garrison and had criers go around the countryside calling out ‘Whoever is a true Muslim must obey the verse of the Qur’an: “Fight in God’s way with your wealth and your own selves, that is best for you, if you but knew.”’ He encouraged everyone to join the struggle against the Christians. As a result of this proclamation, 2,000 enthusiastic young fighters joined his forces. When this young hero was released from detention in Bukhara and came to Kabul, he had no state or wealth. Now his treasury overflowed with plunder taken from the English, and his armouries with their muskets and powder-stores. Thousands of brave warriors followed his victorious stirrups. His plan was to capture English officers alive and to take over their treasury as he had done already in Kabul, so that he could ensure the release of his father Amir Dost Mohammad Khan from captivity in India. For two months he remained outside Jalalabad besieging the garrison and digging trenches and breastworks.
43

By the end of March, the besiegers had successfully inched forward and brought their siege engines and stockades to within eighty yards of the city walls. No food at all was now entering the city and supplies were growing daily more depleted. All Akbar Khan lacked was good artillery to effect a breach. But in Sale he had a far more spirited opponent than any he had faced in Kabul. Every camp servant within the walls was now armed, and even the syces and camel men had been issued with home-made pikes so that they could help man the walls, especially when the garrison made sorties. If the defenders were short of ammunition they would hold up a life-size dummy with a cocked hat above the parapet to attract fire, then in the evening, when the besiegers had retired to their camp, they would go outside and collect all the spent bullets, which were then run into moulds for the use of the garrison. ‘We all slept at our posts,’ wrote Seaton. ‘The officers merely unbuckled their swords, and perhaps changed their boots. None of us wore any uniform – these were carefully put away; but we wore clothes made of camel-hair cloth. The digging, felling, moisture, dust and mud could not hurt them and dirt did not show . . . It was not long before Akbar seemed to be awakening to the fact that his only chance of success was to starve us out.’
44

It was therefore a major blow to the siege when, on 1 April, the defenders augmented their food supplies by successfully stealing those of their besiegers. Towards the end of March, Akbar Khan had decided to try to deprive the garrison of what little fodder remained by driving his flocks of sheep, under cavalry escort, over the meadows of the foraging grounds in an attempt to remove all remaining grass. With the siege daily tightening its grip, the shepherds grew so confident that, on 31 March, they brought their flocks to within 400 yards of the crest of the glacis. At sunset, the hungry defenders were forced ‘to watch these perambulating chops and legs of mutton vanish in the distance’. But the following day, Sale was ready for them.

The cavalry had been ordered to mount at dawn, and were silently waiting along with 650 infantry, some volunteer pikemen and a diversionary force of Broadfoot’s sappers. As soon as the sheep came within range, the sappers were sent out by the north gate and began firing at the enemy breastworks to draw the attention of the besiegers. Meanwhile, the south gate was quietly thrown open and the cavalry dashed out. The Afghan shepherds and their escort both fled, and the troopers quickly rounded up the sheep and drove them into the city over the drawbridge. The entire manoeuvre took no more than ten minutes. By the time the Afghan cavalry had appeared both sheep and soldiers were safely back within the walls. ‘We were all in the highest spirits,’ wrote Seaton in his diary that night after a celebratory dinner of roast lamb. ‘When the enemy danced with rage, they were saluted with shouts of laughter and “Baa-Baa!” from along the walls. We took four hundred and eighty one sheep and a few goats, which gave sixteen days’ meat for the garrison, at three-quarters ration . . . On the 3rd a spy came in and told us that when Akbar learned that we had captured his sheep, he burst into such a transport of fury, that his people were afraid to go near him.’
45

Shortly after this, Akbar suffered a more serious reverse. He had spent the day leading an attack on the city, and in the evening had retired to the camp to welcome a new group of Khajrani tribal levies who had just appeared to offer their services. After welcoming the new arrivals, according to the reports forwarded to the British by a sympathetic Afghan chieftain,

Sardar Akbar Khan who had not eaten during the day stood up and moved a few paces to one side to eat his dinner which had been brought to him, and to look on while the Khajranis made their approach to attack the defences of Jalalabad. While standing he received a serious wound from a double barrelled gun which struck him on the fleshy part of the arm and passed through his breast. Two men were seized and charged with having done this act. One of them had previously been Shah [Shuja’s] Pishkhidmat [table servant]. They pleaded that the gun had gone off by accident. The Sirdar is confined to his seat and no one but [his father-in-law] Mohammad Shah Khan Ghilzai is allowed to go near him; his troops are much dispirited.
46

Afghan sources all assume that the shooting was an attempted assassination. Mirza ‘Ata reported rumours that the British were behind it. ‘General Sale was using all means to oust the Sardar from his position, to no effect,’ he wrote. ‘So at last he managed to have one of the Sardar’s trusted personal attendants offered two lakh (200,000 Rupees) to murder him. The wretch sold his faith and honour and accepted the money, and waited for an opportunity to shoot the Sardar. Even though the shot wounded Akbar Khan in the shoulder, God was protecting the Ghazi, and he did not die.’
47

Most observers, however, blamed the Sadozais. According to Fayz Mohammad,

some of those present immediately grabbed the ingrate responsible and after dressing Akbar’s wound they brought the servant
before the wounded Sardar who reproached him and demanded an explanation. The man expressed repentance, kissed the ground, and produced a letter from Shah Shuja offering Rs 50,000 for the assassination. He revealed that the Shah and the English had given him 25,000 rupees up front, and the promise of another 25,000 after the job was done. The Sardar kept Shah Shuja’s letter and, since the man had spoken truthfully, forgave him. But the ghazis summoned him and another man who was a co-conspirator and killed them both.
48

This seems to have been the case: according to the report that reached the hostages from their jailers, the would-be assassin was ‘roasted alive for his crime’.
49

Akbar was not the only one under pressure as March turned to April. In Kabul, Shuja’s new alliance was now under threat as his two newly co-opted allies, Aminullah Khan Logari and Nawab Zaman Khan, both began jostling for power and control over the city’s resources. By mid-March their household troops had fought a pitched battle in the streets over the right to collect revenues from Customs House and the city mint.
50

More threateningly, Shuja’s credentials as a Muslim leader were now being questioned thanks to the success of Akbar Khan’s overtly Islamic call to arms. ‘Akbar Khan sent letters to the people of the surrounding regions,’ wrote Fayz Mohammad,

and incited them with the message, ‘If the Shah is dealing honestly with the people of Islam, has no love for the English, and is discharging the duties of state and religion in your best interests, you should call for him to proclaim jihad so that united we may all attack the English and rid the country of their existence.’ The Sardar kept repeating to the people the call for jihad until scholars and their students, at his instructions, placed Qur’ans kept at the tombs of saints on their heads and went among the people, village by village and hamlet by hamlet, and got prayer leaders and muezzins to begin to exhort their people to jihad. In large groups and small, people gathered at the gates of the Shah’s palace and clamoured for him to proclaim a holy struggle. They cried out, ‘Let us drive the English out of the country!’
51

This put the Shah in an extremely awkward position. Publicly, he had been forced to disown his British patrons and had declared in durbar that he would work to annihilate the infidel.
52
Privately, he still felt beholden to the British and believed he needed their help to defeat the Barakzais; for this reason he sent a stream of letters to MacGregor begging him to send British troops to Kabul as soon as possible, and asking with increasing desperation when he might expect them. As Mohammad Husain Herati put it,

His Majesty temporized, promising to send messengers to persuade the English to leave voluntarily but in reality to seek to reassure them of his continuing loyalty: first his private secretary Inayatullah Khan Bamizai, then his personal servant Din Muhammad Khan were sent. On the third occasion His Majesty wrote secretly: ‘How are we to escape the pressure of these scheming dishonest Barakzais and the turbulent folk of Kabul?’ MacGregor wrote back that His Majesty should hold out in Kabul for another two weeks, as reinforcements were on their way from Peshawar. His Majesty invented one excuse after another, and so hung on for a whole two months but still no help came.
53

Given his past, Shuja’s lingering pro-British sympathies were still widely suspected in Kabul, and many of the chiefs correctly believed that he was dissimulating. ‘Because of his stalling,’ recorded the
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
, ‘the Barakzai began to say publicly, “Shah Shuja is an English-lover. Don’t be misled by his words, which contradict his deeds. If this is not true, why hasn’t he started for Jalalabad and why haven’t the English left yet, in conformity with the documents he sent them?”’
54
As March progressed, and stories of Akbar’s bravery in Jalalabad began to circulate in Kabul, more and more of Shuja’s supporters, including his principal ally and Naib, Aminullah Khan Logari, urged him to show his commitment to the cause by marching immediately on Jalalabad, or at the very least to send one of his sons in his place.
55

Placed in an impossible dilemma, and not wishing to give the British reasons to distrust him, Shuja bribed several of the chiefs to go ahead without him. On 2 March, Prince Timur was ordered off to Jalalabad, but never got any further than Butkhak at the mouth of the Khord Kabul.
56
On the 18th, Aminullah Khan and the Barakzais came to the Bala Hisar and at durbar publicly called upon the Shah to come out of his fortress and lead 8,000 men to join Akbar Khan in his fight against the infidels.
57
Maulana Hamid Kashmiri has the Barakzais compare Shuja’s duplicitous diplomacy to Akbar Khan’s fearless waging of war:

One day, a group of chiefs and generals

Gained access to the Shah’s audience chamber

They said to him: ‘O Renowned Padshah!

What will you do? Tell us!

You hold your position of royal command

Because we are firm in our pledge of service

We believed you would defend the country

That you would command and protect the rule of law

So tell us what grievous wrong has Akbar committed?

That you have girded your loins for his destruction?

Except that he made you King in this land

And rendered the forces of evil crippled and helpless

Instead of raising him high

You seek to throw him low

You have delegated the task of killing him

To certain men and faithless vermin