The Dark Defile

by Diana Preston

  He was received by the elderly Persian shah, who greeted him with the strange question demanded by court etiquette, “Dumagh i shooma chak ust?” (Are your brains clear?) before interrogating him closely. He was interested to know whether Burnes had taken notes to which he truthfully replied, “Yes, I have measured the roads … and sounded the rivers.” The shah also inquired into such minutiae as whether the journey had been expensive and whether Burnes had sampled horseflesh while among Uzbeks. Having satisfied the shah’s curiosity, Burnes finally headed south to the Persian Gulf, where he took a ship for Bombay.

  Burnes’s reports on all he had seen—in particular on the potential for British trade as a source both of profit and of influence to counter Russian ambitions and on the potential for military advances by the Russians toward Kabul—so impressed the governor-general that he sent him to London to tell his story to the government in person. When he arrived there in October 1833, a gratified Burnes found himself lionized by every society hostess anxious to secure “Bokhara Burnes,” as he had become known, for her parties. He met the prime minister, was presented to the king and began preparing his journals for publication. However, if he expected promotion to some exalted position, he was mistaken; some, like Lord Ellenborough at the Board of Control, thought him cocksure and “immensely vain.” Though promoted to the rank of captain, the young man who had “beheld the scenes of Alexander’s wars, of the rude and savage inroads of Genghis and Timur” and “marched on the very line of route by which Alexander had pursued Darius,” after turning down a subordinate post in the British mission at Tehran, accepted a posting back to the relatively junior position he had occupied before his travels up the Indus as assistant to the company’s resident in Kutch. However, events would shortly thrust him forward again.

  Chapter Three

  Everything tends to show the gigantic scale upon which Russia’s projects of aggrandisement are formed, and how necessary it is for other nations to keep vigilant watch, and have their horses always saddled.

  —LORD PALMERSTON, SEPTEMBER 1834

  Alexander Burnes soon learned that he had underestimated Shah Shuja. While the Scotsman had still been traveling, the exiled Afghan king, whom he had thought too uncharismatic and lethargic to inspire his countrymen’s support, had begun a bid to retake his throne. Encouraged by rumors that the Persians were planning to attack the western Afghan city of Herat and knowing this would distract Dost Mohammed, Shah Shuja had approached Ranjit Singh. Though by no means natural allies, each could offer something the other wanted. They negotiated a treaty under which Shah Shuja agreed to let the Sikh ruler have Peshawar and some surrounding territory—if he could take it from Dost Mohammed’s half brother Sultan Mohammed Khan—while Ranjit Singh would help Shah Shuja oust Dost Mohammed himself from Kabul. During the negotiations Shah Shuja refused a request that he return to India the gates of the Hindu temple at Somnath removed to Ghazni eight hundred years previously by the emperor Mahmud. Conscious that he was under British protection, Shah Shuja also tested the British reaction to his plans. Governor-General Bentinck responded blandly that the British government “religiously abstains from intermeddling with the affairs of its neighbours,” but he did not attempt to dissuade him from his expedition and later granted Shah Shuja four months’ advance on his pension to help him recruit an army.

  In February 1833 Shah Shuja left Ludhiana with three thousand soldiers, crossed the Indus and advanced into Sind, where he defeated its rulers in battle, forcing them to acknowledge his supremacy and pay him a huge sum in tribute. Fortified financially and politically, Shah Shuja and his army, which had grown to twenty-four thousand, advanced through the Bolan Pass toward the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

  As increasingly urgent demands for help from Kandahar’s rulers, his unreliable half brothers, reached Dost Mohammed, he debated what to do. Recalling Burnes’s protestations of British goodwill, he wrote to the governor-general seeking an alliance but was gently rebuffed and decided to lead his armies to the relief of Kandahar. Arriving in the summer of 1834, he fell on his rival’s besieging forces. According to some accounts, at the height of the battle, Shah Shuja, who had been viewing the fighting from a distance, lost heart and fled on elephant back, sparking panic among his men, who began streaming from the field. Whatever the case, Dost Mohammed was victorious. He was probably not surprised when among the captured baggage his men found letters written by the British political officer Claude Wade urging the Afghan tribal leaders, including Dost Mohammed’s own chiefs, to support Shah Shuja.

  However, Dost Mohammed had more pressing matters to deal with than British double-talk. Returning to Kabul, he learned that Peshawar had fallen to Ranjit Singh. Deploying his favored weapons of “cunning and conciliation,” as Burnes had called them, the Lion of Lahore had gulled Peshawar’s Sultan Mohammed Khan into believing he might assist him in dethroning his half brother Dost Mohammed. In May 1834 one of Ranjit Singh’s most senior commanders, Hari Singh, had arrived outside Peshawar with nine thousand Sikh troops. The purpose of his visit was supposedly diplomatic, but there was nothing diplomatic about the way he occupied the city and ejected Sultan Mohammed Khan, who fled with his forces to Jalalabad. For a while he contemplated trying to capture Kabul from his half brother but learning of Dost Mohammed’s victory at Kandahar instead sought his protection.

  Although he had never ruled the city of Peshawar and its surrounding territory, to Dost Mohammed its loss to the infidel Sikhs was a shameful blow to Afghan and Islamic prestige. He declared himself Amir-al-Mominin (Commander of the Faithful), and began striking coins bearing the words Amir Dost Mohammed, by the grace of God, ghazi (holy warrior). He also displayed to the populace, as a sign of his commitment to the cause, a cloak believed to have belonged to the prophet Mohammed.11 Before long he had amassed a large army to engage in jihad, holy war, against the Sikhs. The American adventurer Josiah Harlan described how Dost Mohammed appeared “with fifty thousand belligerent candidates for martyrdom and immortality. Savages from the remotest recesses of the mountainous districts, who were dignified with the profession of the Mohammedan faith, many of them giants in form and strength, promiscuously armed with sword and shield, bows and arrows, matchlocks, rifles, spears and blunderbusses … prepared to slay, plunder and destroy for the sake of God and the prophet, the unenlightened infidels of the Punjab.”

  The thirty-three-year-old Harlan, born in Pennsylvania, had originally come to India as a supercargo on a merchant ship before finding employment—despite a lack of relevant academic qualifications—with the East India Company as a surgeon and then transferring to the company’s artillery and serving in Burma. At this time he was in Ranjit Singh’s service with the Sikh rank of general. He cultivated a dashing, buccaneering appearance. Dr. Richard Kennedy, a British army surgeon who encountered him later in Kabul, described “a tall manly figure, with a large head and gaunt face … dressed in a light, shining, pea-green satin jacket, maroon-coloured silk small-clothes, buff boots, a silver-lace girdle fastened with a large, square buckle bigger than a soldier’s breast-plate, and on his head a white cat-skin foraging cap with a glittering gold band and tassels.” But Kennedy also deduced that “though he dressed like a mountebank,” Harlan was no fool. He had a vast amount of local knowledge and great shrewdness.

  While Josiah Harlan observed events from the Sikh side, a British agent calling himself Charles Masson was accompanying Dost Mohammed. Masson was another of the eccentrics and mavericks who, like Harlan, flitted in and out of the Great Game. He had first come to the attention of the British authorities at Bushire on the Persian Gulf in 1830 when he had claimed to be an American archaeologist born in Kentucky with important political information to impart about Russian ambitions in Central Asia. His assertion that he was American was, like his supposed name, false. He was, in fact, an English deserter named James Lewis who in 1827 had assumed an American identity to avoid detection. An educated man with a passion for archaeology and coi
n collecting, he had embarked on an extraordinary odyssey through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan, where he had met and been impressed by Dost Mohammed.12 Journeying onward to Kandahar, he had been repeatedly robbed and at one stage stripped completely naked, surviving only through the kindness of a stranger who gave him a sheepskin coat.

  Deciding enough was enough, he had traveled through Sind and west to Bushire. Luckily for him, the East India Company’s resident official at this Persian port readily believed his story and dispatched him to the British mission to the shah’s court. Not only was his identity again accepted without question, but the British envoy offered to fund his archaeological studies in Afghanistan in return for intelligence on what was happening there. Masson had returned to Kabul in June 1832, only a few days after Burnes and his party had passed through on their way to Bokhara.

  Claude Wade, in his headquarters in Ludhiana, had learned of Masson’s existence and ordered his agent in Kabul, Seyyid Keramat Ali, to watch him. The behavior of the gray-eyed, red-haired, shabbily dressed Masson as he poked about old ruins was, as the agent reported to Wade, decidedly odd. Around this time Dr. Gerard and Mohan Lal, returning to India after parting from Burnes, also encountered Masson. From them Wade discovered how well connected Masson had become in Kabul. Dost Mohammed’s favorite son, Akbar Khan, had become his patron, and many leading Afghans, including Dost Mohammed himself, were his friends.

  However much Masson deceived his fellow countrymen, Josiah Harlan, a real American, knew he was a fraud. Harlan had earlier encountered Masson in the Punjab and warned Dr. Gerard that he was an imposter. Gerard duly told Wade, who soon identified Masson as the army deserter James Lewis. Unmasking and punishing him if he returned to British jurisdiction was one option, but instead Wade decided to use Masson to replace Seyyid Keramat Ali, whose activities were beginning to excite suspicion in Kabul. In April 1834 Wade had therefore written to the governor-general arguing that though desertion was a heinous crime, Masson should be pardoned if he agreed to spy for the British. Within weeks Wade received permission to recruit Masson. The latter’s feelings at being essentially blackmailed were equivocal, but he recognized that he had no choice.

  Thus “Charles Masson,” as he continued to call himself, was with Dost Mohammed as he prepared to confront the army that Ranjit Singh had assembled to defend Peshawar. Even more fearsome than Dost Mohammed’s and certainly better disciplined, it consisted of sixty thousand troops under the maharaja’s own command, twenty thousand men commanded by French mercenary officers and a battery of twenty-four cannon under the American Alexander Gardner. Dost Mohammed doubted his ability to win and, at Masson’s suggestion, asked the British to intervene. His enduring hope that the British would help him against Ranjit Singh despite so much evidence—both overt and covert—to the contrary would be one of the most striking contributors to Dost Mohammed’s behavior. In March 1835 he received his reply: The British would not interfere over Peshawar. Dost Mohammed was left feeling like a “fly facing an elephant.”

  However, the Afghan leader still hoped to find a diplomatic solution, and Ranjit Singh exploited those hopes to trick him. The agent of his deceit was Josiah Harlan, who arrived in Dost Mohammed’s camp in the Khyber Pass ostensibly to initiate diplomatic discussions but with the secret purpose of trying to bribe the Afghan chiefs to desert Dost Mohammed’s army. He later boasted of how he “divided his [Dost Mohammed’s] brothers against him exciting their jealousy … and stirred up the feudal lords of his durbar, with the prospect of pecuniary advantages.” In particular, he induced Dost Mohammed’s half brother Sultan Mohammed Khan, the former ruler of Peshawar, to defect and ride with his followers under cover of darkness for the Sikh camp.

  The result was everything Harlan had hoped. The desertion of such a large body of soldiers threw Dost Mohammed’s camp “into inextricable confusion, which terminated in the clandestine rout of his forces, without beat of drum, or sound of bugle or the trumpet’s blast, in the quiet stillness of midnight. At daybreak no vestige of the Afghan camp was seen where, six hours before, 50,000 men and 10,000 horses with all the busy host of attendants were rife with the tumult of wild commotion,” he wrote. Even if Harlan exaggerated, which he almost certainly did, Dost Mohammed could only retreat to Kabul, where for the moment he turned his back on the world to contemplate the deceit of his close family members and to study the Koran.

  Claude Wade, meanwhile, following events from Ludhiana, was growing increasingly convinced that it was in the British interest for Shah Shuja, not Dost Mohammed, to occupy the throne in Kabul. After years of living under British protection and at British expense, Shah Shuja would be more malleable in British hands. Also, to Wade, Shah Shuja’s weaknesses were an asset. The younger, more able, more vigorous and charismatic Dost Mohammed was far more capable of stamping his authority on Afghanistan’s disparate tribal elements and creating a strong, united country. Once he had done so, he might be tempted to play politics with Britain’s enemies. Far better, felt Wade, that Shah Shuja should preside as a bland figurehead king of a weak Afghanistan whose feudal chiefs, preoccupied with their own affairs and rivalries, would be easier for Britain to manipulate.

  Although he shared much of Wade’s assessment of Dost Mohammed’s and Shah Shuja’s characters, Burnes’s views on the best course of action ran directly counter to Wade’s. Burnes thought Dost Mohammed’s competence and intelligence would make him a reliable ally. He firmly believed in a strong Afghanistan under Dost Mohammed and thought Ranjit Singh was growing far too powerful for the region’s stability and for Britain’s prospects of developing the Indus as a trade route for British goods. His ideal was political equilibrium between the Sikhs, the Afghans and the Sindis.

  However, changes in the political landscape at home in Britain made Wade’s views the more likely to prevail. In March 1835, just as Ranjit Singh and Dost Mohammed were confronting each other, the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel was replaced by a Whig government under Lord Melbourne. He selected his close friend Lord Palmerston as his foreign secretary, a position Palmerston had occupied and enjoyed previously. A believer that “the law of self-preservation is a fundamental principle of the law of nations” and for whose policies the term gunboat diplomacy would later be coined, Palmerston had begun his political career with the Tories but to the surprise—discomfort even—of some within the Whig party had switched his allegiance to them. While previously at the Foreign Office, Palmerston had often dismayed his officials by his forceful, impulsive independence. Melbourne also selected two others who would influence—through acts of either commission or omission—the coming Afghan drama. The fifty-one-year-old George Eden, Lord Auckland, was appointed governor-general in place of Lord William Bentinck, whose five-year tour of duty had ended. Auckland, a former First Lord of the Admiralty and a man with no experience of India and its affairs, was a pleasant, cautious and kindly man who meant it when he spoke of his desire of “doing good to his fellow creatures—of promoting education and knowledge … of extending the blessings of good government and happiness to millions in India.” Lord Ellenborough’s successor as president of the Board of Control responsible for Britain’s policy in India was Sir John Hobhouse.

  In the autumn of 1835, the bachelor Lord Auckland sailed for India with his two spinster sisters Emily and Fanny, who were to act as his hostesses, to be greeted on his arrival five months later by disquieting reports that the Persians, actively encouraged by the Russians, and in particular their ambassador in Tehran, Count Simonich, were preparing to seize the Afghan cities of Kandahar and Herat. John McNeill, secretary to the British envoy in Tehran, argued in a pamphlet on his return to London that an independent Persia was absolutely essential to India’s security. Otherwise, he predicted that (in what would become known as a domino effect) all other rulers between Persia and India would come under Russian influence, threatening India’s security. He also asserted that “the right of interference in the affairs of independent states is founded
on this single principle, that as self preservation is the first duty, so it supersedes all other obligations,” before concluding, “it is the ambition of Russia that forces upon us the necessity of endeavouring to preserve that which is obviously necessary to our own protection. If she will not give us security for the future she can have no right to complain if we should take all practicable measures to impede and obstruct the course she has so perseveringly pursued. If she attempts to justify her own aggressions, on what principle can she complain of measures of defence, however extensive?” His rhetoric, at the same time utterly Machiavellian and Palmerstonian and utterly modern, struck a chord in official circles, especially when reports soon followed from the British mission in Tehran emphasizing the extent of Russian influence in Persia and also reporting that Dost Mohammed was offering to help the Persians take Herat if they would partition its territory with him and help him against the Sikhs.

  These reports, seeming to confirm some of their worst fears, thoroughly alarmed the British. In June 1836 the Secret Committee of the East India Company dispatched a letter asking the newly arrived Governor-General Auckland to send an envoy to Afghanistan to assess whether the moment had come “to interfere decidedly in the affairs of Afghanistan” to halt Russian encroachment. The words to interfere meant only one thing: military intervention. When he received the letter some months later, Auckland was reluctant to take military action, even though he “would not under-rate the value of Afghanistan as an outwork to [Britain’s] Indian possessions.” He believed the most effective way to counter Russian influence was through expanding British trade on the Indus and beyond, and cultivating the friendship of the neighboring rulers. However, his three closest advisers all strongly favored an interventionist policy in Afghanistan and would over the critical months ahead manipulate a cautious and sometimes indecisive Auckland.