In Persia, the British first tried to bribe the shah to declare war on the Russians. When he wisely declined to do so, they attempted to cajole and bully him not to accept overtures from the French. In 1809 the choleric and undiplomatic Sir Harford “Baghdad” Jones—so-called because of his years of service there—arrived at the Persian court, reopened negotiations and when the Persian vizier annoyed him, called him an idiot; then, Jones reported, “[I] pushed him with a slight degree of violence against the wall … kicked over the candles on the floor, left the room in darkness, and rode home without any one of the Persians daring to impede my passage.” Despite such unorthodox diplomacy and just possibly because of an enormous diamond Sir Harford had presented as a gift from King George III, in March 1809 the shah reluctantly agreed to a treaty with Britain. The Persians would not allow any European army to advance through their territory toward India and undertook to help the British defend India against the Afghans or any other power that invaded. In return, if any European power invaded Persia, the British promised to provide either soldiers or financial subsidies of the type they were deploying so successfully with more impecunious European countries in their war with Napoleon.
THE SUSPICIOUS AND independent-minded emirs who controlled Sind at first rebuffed British overtures with “imperious superiority.” However, they were eventually induced to accept a treaty under which they promised not “to allow the tribe of the French” to settle in their lands. Negotiations with the ruler of the Punjab,6 the one-eyed warrior Ranjit Singh, proved more complex. The “Lion of Lahore” had become the leader of his people in 1799 while still in his teens after successfully rallying the fractious Sikh brotherhoods, the misls, against an invading Afghan army that seemed about to overrun the Punjab. In 1801 he was proclaimed maharaja of the Punjab in his capital at Lahore, where his subjects showered him with silver and gold. By the time of the British mission his armies were second in size only to the company’s on the Indian subcontinent.
The pockmarked and physically puny Ranjit Singh was as decisive in his private as in his public life. A great womanizer who maintained in his harem a regiment of women dressed in highly titillating costumes of his own devising, he nevertheless stabbed his mother with his sword for adulterous behavior, claiming “it was better that she should have died early than live a long life of guilt and shame.” He was also a drinker of awesome proportions, consuming a regular mixture of opium, alcohol, meat juice and powdered pearls. He had ambitions to extend his kingdom southward across the Sutlej River, perhaps even to Delhi, where a weak Mogul emperor still nominally ruled, though at the pleasure of the British. Charles Metcalfe, a twenty-three-year-old company officer, was the Briton dispatched in 1808 to convince the Sikh leader of the threat of an invasion of India from the north and to warn him that if he tried to push his borders too far south the company’s armies would confront him.
The Sikh maharaja suspected the British of using the threat of a foreign invasion to mask their own plans for expansion at his expense. Ranjit Singh was, however, a realist. Looking at a map of the Indian subcontinent on which British territories were marked in red, he prophesied that soon it would all be red. Recognizing that his armies were unlikely to defeat the company’s, he renounced his ambitions for southern expansion and in 1809 signed the Treaty of Lahore with Britain, under which both sides swore “perpetual friendship.” Ranjit Singh would keep his side of the bargain; nearly thirty years later, the British commitment to protect the Sikh alliance would be a major factor in the outbreak of the First Afghan War.
The British administration in Calcutta selected another young officer—the twenty-nine-year-old Scot, Mountstuart Elphinstone—as its envoy to Afghanistan. He was the first Briton to penetrate that remote region since a company official had traveled through it in disguise twenty-five years earlier on his way to Russia. The British therefore knew little of Afghanistan’s topography beyond that it was large, mountainous and landlocked. The country, of a similar size to the modern U.S. state of Texas, in fact consisted of several distinct zones. In the southwest an arid desert plateau around the Helmand River stretched toward Persia. In the northwest, plains ran across the Oxus River toward the khanates of Khiva and Bokhara. There were mountains in the center and the northeast including the six-hundred-mile-long Hindu Kush as well as mountains along the southeastern frontier with Baluchistan and with Ranjit Singh’s territories. The few narrow passes leading through these mountains had often provided a route for the invasion of India. Abul Fazl, friend and chronicler of Akbar, the greatest of the Moguls, called Kabul, the region’s major city with the great Khyber Pass to its east, “the gate of Hindustan.”
One of the first known invaders, Darius of Persia, led his army of Immortals down through the thirty-mile-long Khyber, whose bleak gray sides rising to five hundred feet overshadow a road in places just a few feet wide. Nearly two centuries later, in early 327 B.C., this inhospitable stone corridor resonated to the hoof beats of Alexander the Great’s increasingly exhausted and fractious forces on the latest stage of their long march of conquest from Macedonia. The soon-to-be-defeated armies and war elephants of the Indian king Porus waited on the banks of the Jhelum River, a tributary of the Indus, in armor of silver and gold. Elphinstone, a classics scholar like most of the officers who would venture into Afghanistan, for lack of more recent guides used the classical accounts of Alexander’s expeditions for geographic reference.
Over the centuries other invasions followed Alexander’s. Among the most significant was the conquest of most of northern India in 1001 by Mahmud, the Muslim ruler of Ghazni in the southeast of Afghanistan. He established the first of the series of Islamic sultanates that would grow to dominate much of the area. Fortified by his religion and its iconoclastic beliefs, he plundered Hindu holy places, melting down the golden idols at the shrine of Mathura and despoiling the great Hindu temple of Somnath on the Indian Ocean coast in what is now Gujarat. Here he destroyed the phallic stone lingam—symbol of the god Shiva—dispatching fragments to be incorporated in the steps of mosques in Mecca and Medina as well as in Ghazni. He also bore off to Ghazni the temple’s massive ornate gates as a symbol of his triumph.
In 1398 Timur, or Tamburlaine as the West knows him from a corruption of “Timur the Lame,” invaded India, where he defeated the sultan of Delhi and sacked the city so thoroughly, before leaving with a mass of booty, that for two months “nothing stirred, not even a bird.” In the early sixteenth century, his descendant Babur floated down the Khyber River from Kabul, holding drinking and cannabis parties as he went, to found the Mogul empire using the cannons and muskets that he introduced to northwest India for the first time.
In 1739 the Persian Nadir Shah marched his armies through Kabul and down the Khyber Pass to sack Delhi and carry off treasures such as the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan’s jeweled peacock throne. A few years later, the Afghan king Ahmad Shah also sacked Delhi and removed most of the treasures that Nadir Shah had left behind. His successors, albeit less able and with a weaker grip on their dominions, had also shown an enduring interest in invading from the northwest. Having witnessed these incursions, by the early nineteenth century Britain determined to turn the Afghans from potential aggressors to partners in providing a line of defense for India against invaders, whether inspired by European geopolitics or more local ambitions.
In March 1809, with thick snow still blanketing the peaks of the surrounding mountains, Elphinstone and his party, which included 200 cavalrymen, 200 infantrymen and a string of 600 baggage camels, reached the Afghan king’s winter capital of Peshawar at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, then an Afghan possession. The Mogul emperor Akbar had given Peshawar its name, meaning “Advanced Post,” in the sixteenth century and saw it, as the British would, as key to the defense of his realm against invaders from the northwest. The arrival of this British delegation roused huge curiosity, and so many people pressed around that the king’s horsemen sent to escort the entourage through the city “charge
d the mob vigorously, and used their whips without compunction,” as Elphinstone recalled. He was particularly struck by a tall thin man—“with swelling muscles, a high nose, and an animated countenance,” wearing a white plumed conical red hat and mounted on a fine gray horse—who, brandishing a spear and shouting in a loud, deep voice, not only dispersed the mob but rode furiously “at grave people sitting on terraces.” His name, Elphinstone was told, was Russool the Mad.
The new arrivals were comfortably accommodated in a large airy house and offered refreshments of sugared almonds and sherbet. The king, Shah Shuja, sent dishes from the royal kitchens for their meals. However, a week passed, and Elphinstone had still not seen him because of elaborate court protocol that even the mild-mannered Elphinstone found “a little unreasonable.” He was told that “the ambassador to be introduced is brought into a court by two officers who hold him firmly by the arms. On coming in sight of the King, who appears at a high window, the ambassador is made to run forward for a certain distance, when he stops for a moment, and prays for the King. He is then made to run forward again, and prays once more; and after another run, the King calls out ‘Khellut’ (a dress) [meaning ‘give him a dress of honor’] which is followed by a Turkish word ‘Getsheen’ (begone) from an officer of state, and the unfortunate ambassador is made to run out of the court and sees no more of the King, unless he is summoned to a private audience to his Majesty’s closet.”
This ritual was, however, “adjusted”—Elphinstone did not say how—and at last amid a great din, which he described as sounding like a charge of cavalry, he was brought before the ruler. Shah Shuja was sitting “on a very large throne of gold or gilding” covered with pearl encrusted cloth. “His appearance was magnificent and royal: his crown and all his dress were one blaze of jewels,” and he was surrounded by eunuchs. He was “a handsome man, about thirty years of age, of an olive complexion, with a thick black beard. The expression of his countenance was dignified and pleasing, his voice clear and his address princely.”
At first sight a dazzled Elphinstone thought that the king “had on armour of jewels.” On closer inspection, he realized he was wearing “a green tunic, with large flowers in gold and precious stones, over which were a large breastplate of diamonds, shaped like two flattened fleur de lis, an ornament of the same kind on each thigh, large emerald bracelets on the arms … In one of the bracelets was the Koh-i-Nur, known to be one of the largest diamonds in the world.” Shah Shuja’s crown was nine inches high and “seemed to be radiated like ancient crowns, and behind the rays appeared peaks of purple velvet.”
Before long Elphinstone had become a frequent visitor to the king, afforded the honor of meeting him in private in his harem. Elphinstone’s mission was to persuade Shah Shuja to agree to an alliance to defend Afghanistan against invasion by France and Russia should they advance from the west through Persia. If pressed, he had permission to offer Shah Shuja arms and ordnance to defend his kingdom, though no troops. The two men got on well. On one occasion the king expressed his hope that Elphinstone would have a chance to see Kabul and all his territories, “which were now to be considered as our own.” His manners impressed the envoy, who wrote, “It will scarcely be believed of an eastern Monarch, how much he had the manners of a gentleman, or how well he preserved his dignity, while he seemed only anxious to please.” Courteous though he appeared, Shah Shuja had, however, little interest in either British fears or ambitions—his own position was far too precarious.
THE PRECEDING THIRTY years of Afghan history read like a particularly bloody revenge tragedy. Although travelers through Afghanistan would frequently pay tribute to the kindness, generosity, honor and bravery of those they met, blood feuds were common and disputes almost invariably settled by violence. A British soldier later killed during the First Afghan War observed, “They know no law but force and the sword; and every man among them is armed from head to foot—a state which they never quit by day or night, so insecure is life and property among them and so little dare they trust each other!”
Afghan society was feudal. In return for their lands, tribesmen paid their chief tribute in goods and money and when so ordered fought for their chief, who in turn was obliged to provide troops to the king when he needed to raise an army. However, the nature of “kingship” differed from Western tradition. Instead of being a united kingdom under a strong ruler, Afghanistan was—even when at its most unified—a loose grouping of semiautonomous tribes, some speaking different languages and looking physically different from their neighbors. Chiefs and elders ruled these tribes, and their support for the king in Kabul ebbed and flowed, depending on circumstances—something the British and, indeed, others would never quite fully understand. In each tribe the gathering of elders—the jirgha—played almost as important a role as the titular ruler. While Elphinstone admired the Afghans’ independent spirit and belief that “all Afghans are equal,” he deplored some of the consequences. “I once strongly urged on a very intelligent old man … the superiority of a quiet and secure life under a powerful monarch, to the discord, the alarms and the blood which they owed to their present system,” to which the old man warmly replied, “We are content with discord, we are content with bloodshed, but we will never be content with a master.”
For a brief period in the mid-eighteenth century, Shah Shuja’s grandfather, Ahmad Shah, had melded an empire that included Kashmir, the Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan, and controlled the trade routes between Persia, Central Asia and India. Today Afghans regard him as one of the founding fathers of their state. The title Durr-i-Dauran (Pearl of the Age) was conferred on him, and the tribe to which his family clan—the Sadozai—belonged took the name Douranee (Pearl of Pearls). However, even before Ahmad Shah’s death, the Douranee empire was fragmenting, and during the reign of his lackluster son the process accelerated. A particular obstacle to stability was “the dire results of polygamy.” Afghan chiefs had many wives and so many children they often lost count of the number. Thus in each generation there were large numbers of brothers and half brothers who might sometimes combine in pursuit of a common goal, but who were just as likely to battle savagely among themselves on the slightest of pretexts.
Shah Shuja himself had many half brothers and one full brother, Zaman Shah, who between 1793 and 1801 ruled Afghanistan. However, in an unfortunate series of events that had all the usual complicated elements of blood feud and internecine rivalry, a half brother had ousted Zaman Shah. The cycle had begun in 1799 when Zaman Shah executed the leader of the powerful Barakzai family clan of the Douranee tribe for plotting against him. The dead chief left twenty-two sons, of whom the eldest, Futteh Khan, swore revenge. He persuaded Zaman Shah’s half brother Mahmud, governor of the western city of Herat, to revolt. Together they toppled Zaman Shah and had him blinded, ordering his eyeballs to be pierced with the tip of a dagger—a traditional method of neutralizing rivals. Mahmud then ascended the throne with the powerful Futteh Khan by his side as his vizier.
When Shah Shuja learned what had happened to his full brother, he determined on revenge and proclaimed himself king, briefly seizing Kabul until forced to flee. In 1803 he tried again, this time successfully defeating and capturing his rival, Mahmud. He ordered him to be blinded but then rescinded the command—a rare humane gesture that proved to be a mistake. Futteh Khan escaped and by the time of Elphinstone’s visit to Peshawar had raised a rebellion against Shah Shuja with the aim of restoring Mahmud to the throne.
Despite his initial welcoming of Elphinstone, Shah Shuja soon advised him to leave unless the British would agree to assist him against his enemies, just as they wished for his help against the French, Russians and Persians. Elphinstone had no authority to agree to such a thing, and in any case Shah Shuja and his advisers suspected the motives of the British and doubted whether they were half as powerful as they claimed. In a letter Elphinstone described a conversation with a court mullah: “Our reputation was very high for good faith and for magnanimous conduct to c
ornered princes,” the mullah said, “but he frankly owned that we had the character of being very designing, and that most people thought it necessary to be very vigilant in all transactions with us.”
However, while Elphinstone was still in Peshawar, news came that Shah Shuja’s enemies had captured the southern city of Kandahar and that the armies he had sent to Kashmir to impose his authority there had been destroyed. In need of friends—even “very designing” ones—Shah Shuja agreed to conclude a treaty with the British that rejoiced that “the veil of separation” between the two countries had been lifted. Under the treaty he promised to prevent Britain’s enemies entering his lands, while the British promised to reimburse any costs he incurred in so doing. What Elphinstone could not have known was that by this time, as a result of Baghdad Jones’s efforts, the Persian shah had also signed a friendship treaty with the British.
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