But the Russians did not give up. Military defeat following the Anglo-French invasion of the Crimea (1853–6) had clipped their wings in Europe, so they turned their energies to the east and the south. In 1854 the Faculty of Oriental Languages was set up at St Petersburg University, marking the beginning of a distinguished tradition of Oriental studies in Russia. Rumours and agents’ reports now told of British plans to advance from Persia or through Afghanistan to the Caspian Sea and beyond. In 1857 Prince Baryatinski, commanding the Russian forces in the Caucasus, warned that ‘the British are preparing in detail for war, and will attack from two directions: from the Persian Gulf in the south and from the east through Afghanistan… The appearance of the British flag on the Caspian Sea would be a mortal blow not only to our influence in the east, not only to our external trade, but to the political independence of the empire.’ Schemes were once again bandied around among Russian officials for an incursion into India; they were not taken up.12 A more sober paper, ‘On the Possibility of Unfriendly Clashes between Russia and England in Central Asia’, by two senior staff officers, sensibly concluded that the British would hardly risk their armies so far from the oceans they commanded. They might, however, seek to inflict political damage through ‘secret intrigues in our Muslim provinces and among the Caucasian mountaineers’ and interfere in the affairs of ‘our neighbouring regions’. The authors went on to reject categorically any idea of an Indian campaign: the flanking route through Herat was too difficult to supply and the direct route through Afghanistan could too easily be fortified against an invading Russian army. For the time being the Russian attitude should be purely defensive. These conclusions, which were in part conditioned by the need not to provoke Britain without good cause in the aftermath of defeat in the Crimean War, were strongly endorsed by the Foreign Minister, Gorchakov.13
A defensive policy did not exclude—indeed, in the eyes of some soldiers and policymakers it explicitly justified—a further move south for the protection of trade and the exclusion of the British. After 1857 the Russians, and in particular the well-informed Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry, stepped up their collection of intelligence on the region through agents, scientific expeditions, and diplomatic missions. One of the most important was led by Nikolai Ignatiev, an ambitious young officer who had been military attaché in London. On his return, he became head of the Asiatic Department. He was on good terms with the hawkish War Minister, Dmitri Milyutin, and like him he believed that Foreign Minister Gorchakov was insufficiently robust in his promotion of Russian interests. His influence in favour of an active Russian policy in the east was to grow substantially over the decades.14
In the light of all this new intelligence, one confidential analysis after another argued that the British were aiming at establishing control over Central Asia and driving out the Russian trade; and that it was essential for the Russians to pre-empt them. Whether the British ever had any such intention is not so important. The belief affected and distorted policymaking in St Petersburg and Orenburg, just as policy-making in London and Delhi was affected and distorted by the belief that the Russians intended to come through Afghanistan into India. Paranoia affected judgement in all four cities.
And so the Russians concluded that their interests in Central Asia could not be finally secured by diplomacy alone. In the years that followed they annexed or took into their protection all the independent states of Central Asia, city by city: Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873 and the remaining lands east of the Caspian Sea in 1881–5.
The Russian colonial regime which was then installed was, in the view of one recent British historian, less burdensome than the British regime in India: the Russian were more corrupt and less efficient; the British taxed more heavily and were more prone to impose their will through violence.15 The most notorious event in the Russian record in Central Asia—General Skobelev’s massacre of the garrison and people of Geok Tepe in 1881—pales by comparison with the slaughter inflicted by the British in India after the Rising (or Mutiny) in 1857.
Things changed after the First World War. The British began to prepare—reluctantly—to depart from India, and to leave workable institutions behind them. It was a comparatively peaceful withdrawal, though the British cannot escape responsibility for the horrors of Partition in 1947. In Central Asia the Soviets, according to their very different lights, also tried to create modern social and economic institutions. But hundreds of thousands of people died and many more fled the forcible imposition of a ruthless new regime and a collectivised agriculture. In 1991, four decades after the British, the Russians abandoned their empire as they too ran out of imperial steam.
Imperial Britain Moves North
The British, deploying the same arguments as the Russians, and using the same tactics of armed force, diplomacy, guile, bribery, deceit, and treachery, were meanwhile continuing their advance towards the north. They too wished to promote their trade and the security of their imperial frontiers. They too concluded that mere diplomacy was insufficient, and they too swept aside the obstacles to their forward march with considerable violence. By 1801 they were on their way to taking over the whole of northern India, and they had reached the border with Afghanistan. They soon began to nibble away at the Afghan border territories; particularly painful for the Afghans was the loss of Peshawar, which the British first handed to their Sikh ally Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) and then took for themselves when they annexed the Sikh territories in 1849.
Hitherto the British had worried about a possible French invasion backed by the Persians. With the final defeat of Napoleon, they concluded that the main threat to their expanding Indian empire now came from the Russians. They argued among themselves about whether this threat was best countered by bribing the Afghan rulers to keep the Russians at bay or by imposing their own representative in Kabul, by force if necessary, and exercising a direct control, as they had done in India.
The war party prevailed on two occasions. Before the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42) the British manufactured the evidence they needed to justify their overthrow of the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohamed, doctoring and publishing the reports they received from their agents in Kabul to represent him as determinedly anti-British.16 They launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) with a brutality almost as cynical, though this time without resorting to forgery. The murders of their representatives in Kabul, Alexander Burnes in 1841 and Louis Cavagnari in 1879, were both the consequence of British bullying and the final British excuse for war.
The British advance was opposed not only by the Afghan army, which they could deal with, but also by a widespread insurgency, which they had not expected and to which they could find no satisfactory answer. They suffered some spectacular reverses: the destruction in 1842 of an entire army and the defeat of part of the Kandahar garrison at Maiwand in June 1880. Both wars nevertheless technically ended in a British military victory followed by a salutary revenge. In the autumn of 1842 a British ‘Army of Retribution’ hanged the city’s notables in the centre of Kabul and burned the seventeenth-century bazaar, ‘one of the great crossroads of Central Asia where one could buy silk and paper from China in the north; spices, pearls and exotic wood from India in the east; glass, pottery, silver and wine from Persia and Turkey in the west, and slaves bought from both directions… flames were said to have still filled the sky two days later when the troops left’.17 Among the other villages and towns they also destroyed with fire and the sword were the beautiful village of Istalif, famous for its pottery, and the provincial capital of Charikar, where a company of Gurkhas had been wiped out the previous year. A British officer who was there wrote to his mother, ‘I returned home to breakfast disgusted with myself, the world, and above all, with my cruel profession. In fact we are nothing but licensed assassins.’18 The devastation of Kabul in 1879 was less extensive, though the British did dismantle part of the city’s Bala Hissar fortress and hanged forty-nine Afghans on a gallows set up in the ruins of Ca
vagnari’s residence for their alleged part in his murder.19
But these were pyrrhic triumphs, and the British eventually realised that they could not achieve their original ambition of adding Afghanistan to the Indian empire. Nor could they sustain their own candidate in Kabul: they had to accept the reinstatement of Dost Mohamed after the First Anglo-Afghan War and the installation of the untried and possibly pro-Russian Abdur Rahman after the Second. At a high cost in blood and treasure, the British did achieve their most important objective: to keep Afghanistan out of the orbit of Russia and within that of India. By means of bribes, threats, and guarantees of support against their neighbours, they were able to persuade Afghanistan’s rulers to remain—reluctantly perhaps—on their side. They remained responsible for Afghanistan’s foreign policy for eight decades, until the agreement which ended the brief Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919.
This relative success did not relieve the British of their exaggerated fear of the Russian threat. Charles Marvin, a correspondent from the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, interviewed many senior Russian generals and officials in the late 1880s. He complained that ‘Most of the English writers on Central Asia are personally unacquainted with Russia, and have no knowledge of the Russian language… they know nothing of the Russian aspect of the problem, except what they derive from the exaggerated and distorted intelligence appearing in the newspapers.’ The language used by some British politicians was as intemperate, and as lacking in a sense of the logistical realities, as any used by the Russian hotheads. Concerned that the Russians might seize Constantinople in the course of their war against the Turks, Disraeli (1804–81) wrote to Queen Victoria on 22 June 1877 that ‘in such a case Russia must be attacked from Asia, that troops should be sent to the Persian Gulf, and that the Empress of India should order her armies to clear Central Asia of the Muscovites, and drive them into the Caspian. We have a good instrument in Lord Lytton [1831–91; Viceroy of India, 1876–80], and indeed he was placed there with that view.’20 But the more sensible British officials realised that it would be hard for a modern army to maintain itself through the treacherous mountain passes and deserts of Central Asia. A more realistic danger was that foreign meddling could spark off an uncontrollable revolt among the Indians themselves: the British still remembered the Indian Rising of 1857 and its bloody suppression.
Herat became their key strategic concern. Controlled sometimes by the Persians, at others by the Afghans, Herat was, in the eyes of British officials, ‘the Gateway to India’, through which Alexander, Genghis Khan and the first Mogul emperor Babur had all passed on their way south. The British feared the Russians might be next. Twice the British and the Russians came close to war over the control of Herat. In 1837 the Russians supported a Persian move on the city. The siege lasted for four months and was conducted, according to a contemporary historian, ‘in a spirit of unsparing hatred and savage inhumanity’.21 It was lifted when British forces were deployed in the Persian Gulf to intimidate the Shah.
In 1885 a crisis over the remote oasis of Pandjeh, which lies on the Amu Darya river between Merv and Herat, also nearly led to a war. The Afghans maintained that Pandjeh—which was called Kushka by the Russians and is now Serhetabat in Turkestan—belonged to them. The Russians nevertheless took Pandjeh, with considerable loss of Afghan life. The British warned that any further advance towards Herat would mean war. On British advice, the Afghan defenders of Herat demolished several of the glorious buildings of the fifteenth century in order to provide a clear field of fire. In the event the Russians never attacked and the crisis fizzled out, thanks primarily to the good sense of Abdur Rahman.
Anglo-Russian rivalry in the high mountains to the east of Afghanistan continued into the 1890s, with armed skirmishes continuing there between the Russians and the Afghans as late as 1894.22 But as tensions in Europe grew with the rise of Germany, both sides decided it made more sense to curb their territorial ambitions in Asia. An Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission agreed that the frontier between Afghanistan and the Russian empire should lie along the Amu Darya. As a buffer between India and Russia the British insisted in 1891 that Abdur Rahman should accept sovereignty over the Wakhan Corridor, a thin sliver of land—in places less than ten miles wide—high up on the borders of China, Afghanistan, and the Russian empire. Both these borders were strategically important during the Soviet war.
But the boundary which carried the most burdensome implications for Afghanistan’s future international and strategic position was the Durand Line, the artificial frontier drawn in 1893 by a senior British official of the Indian government. This drove straight through the middle of the Pushtun tribal areas in the borderland between the Punjab and southern Afghanistan. Successive Afghan governments resented the loss of territories, including Peshawar, which they regarded as rightfully theirs: Afghanistan was the only country to vote against the admission of Pakistan to the United Nations when it became independent in 1947. Prime Minister, later President, Daud backed the cause of ‘Pushtunistan’, which called for the recovery of the Pushtun lands on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line. The Pakistanis retaliated by doing all they could to destabilise and control their smaller neighbour. The hostility between the two countries was to have a most negative effect on Afghanistan’s affairs into the twenty-first century.
The local people took no notice of the Durand Line except when they were compelled: they feuded, smuggled, traded, and fought indifferently on both sides of the border. The British attempted to control the border in the 1920s and the 1930s by a policy of ‘butcher and bolt’, with punitive raids against errant tribesmen, including the destruction of their villages from the air. Soviet attempts to seal the border during the war of 1979–89 were almost a total failure.
The Soviet Union Becomes Afghanistan’s Best Friend
In August 1907 Russia and Britain reached an agreement to regulate their affairs in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The Russians took advantage of this more relaxed state of affairs to improve their knowledge of the country. General Andrei Snesarev, a professor at the Academy of the General Staff, spent much of his life studying and travelling in Central Asia, and ruminating on the significance of Afghanistan in the wider geopolitics of the area. He concluded that Afghanistan was a military nightmare for a foreign invader, that it could not justify the resources needed to dominate it, but that it was indeed, as some of his British predecessors had believed, the gateway to India. His book about the geographical, ethnic, cultural, and military aspects of Afghanistan was published in 1921. It rapidly faded from the public consciousness after he was arrested in 1930, sentenced to be shot, released, and then died at home in 1937. But it was republished after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and Snesarev has since become something of a cult figure among Russians interested in the country.
As soon as the British relinquished their control of Afghan foreign policy, Amanullah signed a Treaty of Friendship with the infant Soviet Union in 1921, under which the Russians agreed to give Afghanistan financial support, to build a telegraph line between Moscow and Kabul, and to supply military specialists, weapons, and aircraft. A Non-Aggression Treaty followed in 1926. In 1928 the first regular air route was opened between Moscow and Kabul, and Soviet consulates were set up in Herat and Mazar-i Sharif.
By the 1930s the Soviet Union was Afghanistan’s most important commercial and political partner. There were occasional irritations. Fugitives from the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics regularly sought refuge in Afghanistan, followed by detachments of the Red Army in hot pursuit. In the spring of 1929 the Russians invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to restore Amanullah Khan to his tottering throne. Stalin sent about a thousand men, disguised in Afghan uniform and commanded by the former Soviet military attaché in Kabul, General Vitali Primakov (1897–1937), who was himself disguised as a Turkish officer. The Russians captured Mazar-i Sharif, Balkh and other places after heavy fighting. But they rapidly lost the sympathy of the local people and Stalin recalled the
force when he heard that Amanullah had fled into exile. In 1937 Primakov was shot, yet another victim of Stalin’s purges. But on the whole Russia’s relations with Afghanistan flourished well enough.
In the years immediately before the Second World War, the Germans tried with some success to increase their influence in Afghanistan through economic assistance and military training—the Presidential Guard was still wearing German helmets at the time of the Soviet invasion. During the war itself, Zahir Shah steered a skilful path between the British and the Russians, who found themselves cooperating with one another to frustrate German intrigues. In 1943 Zahir Shah expelled German agents operating in Afghanistan who had been identified by the intelligence agencies of the two wartime allies.23
Zahir Shah and his prime minister, Daud, were equally skilful at playing off East and West against one another as the Cold War developed. In 1953 John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, came up with the idea of a ‘Northern Tier’ of Muslim states in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, which would act as a barrier to Soviet Communism. He tried but failed to get Afghanistan to join the Baghdad Pact when it was set up in 1955. President Eisenhower visited Kabul in 1959. The Americans constructed the concrete highway which linked Herat to Kabul via Kandahar, and promoted a number of educational and economic schemes, including a major irrigation project in Helmand province. The Americans’ interest in Afghanistan waned in the 1960s as they were increasingly distracted by their growing involvement in Vietnam.
Even so, the Americans did not give up. The Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (1923–), visited Kabul in 1974 and 1976, and with the rapid decline of British influence after 1945, it was fear of American rather than British meddling that became endemic in Soviet thinking about Afghanistan. Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1970), the First Party Secretary of the Soviet Union, visited Kabul in 1955 and concluded that the Americans were doing all they could to draw Afghanistan into the American camp, because they intended to set up military bases there.24 Such beliefs played a part in the Soviet government’s decision to intervene in Afghanistan in 1979.
Afgantsy Page 3