Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (77 page)

In the course of the initial research I visited many of the places associated with the war. On my first day in Afghanistan I drove through the Shomali Plain to see the remains of Eldred Pottinger’s barracks at Charikar, which now lie a short distance from the US Air Force base at Bagram. In Herat I paid my respects at the grave of Dost Mohammad Khan, at the Sufi shrine of Gazur Gah. In Jalalabad I sat by the Kabul River and ate the same delicious
shir maheh
river fish, grilled on charcoal, which 170 years earlier had sustained the British troops besieged there and which had been particularly popular with ‘Fighting Bob’ Sale. On arrival in Kandahar, the car sent to pick me up from the airport received a sniper shot through its back window as it neared the perimeter; later I stood at one of Henry Rawlinson’s favourite spots, the shrine of Baba Wali on the edge of town, and saw an IED blow up a US patrol as it crossed the Arghandab River, then as now the frontier between the occupied zone and the area controlled by the Afghan resistance. In Kabul I managed to get permission to visit the Bala Hisar, once Shah Shuja’s citadel, now the headquarters of the Afghan Army’s intelligence corps, where reports from the front line are evaluated amid a litter of spiked British cannon from 1842 and upturned Soviet T-72 tanks from the 1980s.

The closer I looked, the more the west’s first disastrous entanglement in Afghanistan seemed to contain distinct echoes of the neo-colonial adventures of our own day. For the war of 1839 was waged on the basis of doctored intelligence about a virtually non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was exaggerated and manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically driven hawks to create a scare – in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion. As John MacNeill, the Russophobe British ambassador, wrote from Teheran in 1838: ‘we should declare that he who is not with us is against us . . . We must secure Afghanistan.’
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Thus was brought about an unnecessary, expensive and entirely avoidable war.

The parallels between the two invasions I came to realise were not just anecdotal, they were substantive. The same tribal rivalries and the same battles were continuing to be fought out in the same places 170 years later under the guise of new flags, new ideologies and new political puppeteers. The same cities were garrisoned by foreign troops speaking the same languages, and were being attacked from the same rings of hills and the same high passes.

In both cases, the invaders thought they could walk in, perform regime change, and be out in a couple of years. In both cases they were unable to prevent themselves getting sucked into a much wider conflict. Just as the British inability to cope with the rising of 1841 was a product not just of the leadership failures within the British camp, but also of the breakdown of the strategic relationship between Macnaghten and Shah Shuja, so the uneasy relationship of the ISAF leadership with President Karzai has been a crucial factor in the failure of the latest imbroglio. Here the US special envoy Richard Holbrooke to some extent played the role of Macnaghten. When I visited Kabul in 2010, the then British Special Representative, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, described Holbrooke as ‘a bull who brought his own china shop wherever he went’ – a description that would have served perfectly to sum up Macnaghten’s style 174 years previously. Sherard’s analysis of the failure of the current occupation in his memoirs,
Cables from Kabul
, reads astonishingly like an analysis of that of Auckland and Macnaghten: ‘Getting in without having any real idea of how to get out; almost wilful misdiagnosis of the nature of the challenges; continually changing objectives, and no coherent or consistent plan; mission creep on a heroic scale; disunity of political and military command, also on a heroic scale; diversion of attention and resources [to Iraq in the current case, to the Opium Wars then] at a critical stage of the adventure; poor choice of local allies; weak political leadership.’
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Then as now, the poverty of Afghanistan has meant that it has been impossible to tax the Afghans into financing their own occupation. Instead, the cost of policing such inaccessible territory has exhausted the occupier’s resources. Today the US is spending more than $100 billion a year in Afghanistan: it costs more to keep Marine battalions in two districts of Helmand than the US is providing to the entire nation of Egypt in military and development assistance. In both cases the decision to withdraw troops has turned on factors with little relevance to Afghanistan, namely the state of the economy and the vagaries of politics back home.

As I pursued my research, it was fascinating to see how the same moral issues that are chewed over in the editorial columns today were discussed at equal length in the correspondence of the First Afghan War: what are the ethical responsibilities of an occupying power? Should you try to ‘promote the interests of humanity’, as one British official put it in 1840, and champion social and gender reform, banning traditions like the stoning to death of adulterous women; or should you just concentrate on ruling the country without rocking the boat? Do you intervene if your allies start boiling or roasting their enemies alive? Do you attempt to introduce western political systems? As the spymaster Sir Claude Wade warned on the eve of the 1839 invasion, ‘There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against, I think, than the overweening confidence with which we are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of our own institutions, and the anxiety that we display to introduce them in new and untried soils. Such interference will always lead to acrimonious disputes, if not to a violent reaction.’
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For the westerners in Afghanistan today, the disaster of the First Afghan War provides an uneasy precedent: it is no accident that the favourite watering hole of foreign correspondents in Kabul is called the Gandamak Lodge, or that one of the principal British bases in southern Afghanistan is named Camp Souter after the only survivor of the last stand of the 44th Foot.

For the Afghans themselves, in contrast, the British defeat of 1842 has become a symbol of liberation from foreign invasion, and of the determination of Afghans to refuse to be ruled ever again by any foreign power. The diplomatic quarter of Kabul is after all still named after Wazir Akbar Khan, who in nationalist Barakzai propaganda is now remembered as the leading Afghan freedom fighter of 1841–2.

We in the west may have forgotten the details of this history that did so much to mould the Afghans’ hatred of foreign rule, but the Afghans have not. In particular Shah Shuja remains a symbol of quisling treachery in Afghanistan: in 2001, the Taliban asked their young men, ‘Do you want to be remembered as a son of Shah Shuja or as a son of Dost Mohammad?’ As he rose to power, Mullah Omar deliberately modelled himself on Dost Mohammad, and like him removed the Holy Cloak of the Prophet Mohammad from its shrine in Kandahar and wrapped himself in it, declaring himself like his model Amir al-Muminin, the Leader of the Faithful, a deliberate and direct re-enactment of the events of First Afghan War, whose resonance was immediately understood by all Afghans.

History never repeats itself exactly, and it is true that there are some important differences between what is taking place in Afghanistan today and what took place during the 1840s. There is no unifying figure at the centre of the resistance, recognised by all Afghans as a symbol of legitimacy and justice: Mullah Omar is no Dost Mohammad or Wazir Akbar Khan, and the tribes have not united behind him as they did in 1842. There are big and important distinctions to be made between the conservative and defensive tribal uprising that brought Anglo-Sadozai rule to a close in the colonial period and the armed Ikhwanist revolutionaries of the Taliban who wish to reimpose an imported ultra-Wahhabi ideology on the diverse religious cultures of Afghanistan. Most importantly, Karzai has tried to establish a broad-based, democratically elected government which for all its many flaws and prodigious corruption is still much more representative and popular than the Sadozai regime of Shah Shuja ever was.

Nevertheless due to the continuities of the region’s topography, economy, religious aspirations and social fabric, the failures of 170 years ago do still hold important warnings for us today. It is still not too late to learn some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842. Otherwise, the west’s fourth war in the country looks certain to end with as few political gains as the first three, and like them to terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought to overthrow.

As George Lawrence wrote to the London
Times
just before Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War thirty years later, ‘a new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country . . . Although military disasters may be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be as politically useless . . . The disaster of the Retreat from Kabul should stand forever as a warning to the Statesmen of the future not to repeat the policies that bore such bitter fruit in 1839–42.’

Despite the central strategic significance of this region, good writing on Afghan history is surprisingly thin on the ground, and what there is invariably uses printed accounts in English or the much mined India Office Archives in London. While the story of the First Anglo-Afghan War has been told many times, in forms ranging from great Victorian three-volume histories to the antics of Flashman, there is still virtually no published material about the war, even in the most specialist academic publications, which utilises contemporary Afghan sources from the early nineteenth century, and which presents Afghan accounts of being invaded and occupied, or makes use of the records of the anti-colonial Afghan resistance.
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The First Anglo-Afghan War is a uniquely well-documented conflict and in the writing of it I have made use of a variety of new sources from all sides of the battle lines. Hundreds of tattered letters and blood-stained diaries belonging to the British participants in the war have appeared from trunks in Home Counties attics over the last few years and I have accessed this new material in various family collections, the National Army Museum in Chelsea and the British Library.

Here in Delhi, for the last four years I have been trawling through the voluminous records of the 1839–42 occupation in the Indian National Archives which contains almost all the correspondence, memoranda and hand-written annotations on the subject generated by Lord Auckland’s administration in Calcutta as well as that of his army. Among the highlights I found there are some previously unpublished private letters of one of the principal British actors in the story, Alexander Burnes; an inquiry into British army atrocities which reads like a Victorian version of Wikileaks; and some very moving court-martial records of sepoys who had been enslaved, had managed to escape and had then faced charges of desertion when they eventually succeeded in returning to their regiments.

The Indian National Archives also contained the previously unused and untranslated Persian-language account of the war by a returned Persian secretary who was attached to one of the British officials involved in the war, Munshi Abdul Karim’s
Muharaba Kabul wa Kandahar
. Munshi Abdul Karim says he embarked on the project of writing the history in the early 1850s ‘hoping to drive away the loneliness of old age, and to instruct my children and grandchildren in the many curiosities of the world’, but adds, in what could be taken as a coded call for an uprising against the Company in India, that ‘the events now seem particularly relevant to Hindustan’.
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Such an uprising did indeed follow in 1857, and first broke out in regiments where the sepoys had been deserted by their British officers during the 1842 retreat from Kabul.

In the Punjab Archives in Lahore, Pakistan, I mined the almost unused records of Sir Claude Wade, the first Great Game spymaster, under whose care the North West Frontier Agency was created in 1835. Here can be found all the reports of Wade’s network of ‘intelligencers’ scattered around the Punjab, the Himalayas and over the Hindu Kush as far as Bukhara. The Punjab Archives also contained all the correspondence relating to Shah Shuja’s exile in Ludhiana and his various attempts to return to the throne of Kabul.

Among the Russian sources, I managed to get access to the printed records of Wade’s Tsarist counterpart, Count Perovsky, and his protégé Ivan Vitkevitch. Vitkevitch’s papers have always been assumed to have been destroyed in his St Petersburg hotel room just before he blew his brains out, but it turns out that there still survive some of his intelligence reports, including his writings about Burnes and his unravelling of the entire British spy network in Bukhara. These reports appear here in English for the first time.

The real breakthrough, however, was finding the astonishingly rich seam of Afghan sources for the period that turned up in Kabul. In 2009, while staying at Rory Stewart’s mud fort near the ruins of the burned-out Curzon-era British Embassy, I began working in the Afghan National Archives. The archives, which are located in a surprisingly undamaged and rather beautiful Ottoman-style nineteenth-century palace in the centre of Kabul, turned out to have disappointingly little material from the era of Shah Shuja and Dost Mohammad. But it was while digging in the stacks there that I befriended Jawan Shir Rasikh, a young Afghan historian and Fulbright scholar. One lunchtime, Jawan Shir took me to a second-hand book dealer who occupied an unpromising-looking stall at Jowy Sheer in the old city. The dealer, it turned out, had bought up many of the private libraries of Afghan noble families as they emigrated during the 1970s and 1980s, and in less than an hour I managed to acquire eight previously unused contemporary Persian-language sources for the First Afghan War, all of them written in Afghanistan during or in the aftermath of the British defeat, but in several cases printed on Persian presses in India for domestic Indian consumption in the run-up to the great uprising of 1857.