The Dark Defile

by Diana Preston

  In India Lord Ellenborough planned great celebrations. He issued a proclamation effectively damning Auckland’s policies and praising his own and—to emphasize further the contrasting success of himself and his predecessor—dated it 1 October, the day of Auckland’s Simla Manifesto announcing the British invasion of Afghanistan four years earlier. Ellenborough also issued a note to the princes of India glorifying the return to India of the gates of Somnath, “so long the memorial of your humiliation.” The gates were eventually discovered to be not the originals but later replicas of those plundered from India, and they were ignominiously dumped in a warehouse in Agra.

  The governor-general traveled from Simla to greet the returning British troops in December 1842 as they crossed the Sutlej River over a bridge of boats. At Ferozepore—where in 1838 the Army of the Indus had paraded before Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh—Ellenborough had ordered the erection of a ceremonial bamboo arch flanked by an honor guard of gorgeously caparisoned elephants, through which the troops—many openly amused at the extravagance of it all—marched. Spectators might have been forgiven for believing they were witnessing the celebration of a great victory rather than an epilogue to failure, as the Reverend Gleig observed: “the end of a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, and brought to a close, after suffering and disaster, without much of glory attaching either to the government which directed, or the great body of the troops which waged it.”

  *Mohan Lal later became a vocal critic of the errors made by the British administration in India during the Afghan campaign. His frankness won him few favors in India, but the home government in Britain rewarded his services with a handsome pension of one thousand pounds a year. He died in Delhi in 1877 at the age of sixty-five.

  Epilogue

  Remember the rights of the savage as we call him … remember the happiness of his humble home … the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own.

  —WILLIAM GLADSTONE, PRIME MINISTER OF BRITAIN, 1879

  Now was the time for analysis and blame-sharing. Sir Jasper Nicolls, commander in chief in India, wrote to Ellenborough, succinctly listing eight reasons for the campaign’s failure.

  1st:

  Making war with a peace establishment.

  2nd:

  Making war without a safe base of operations.

  3rd:

  Carrying our native army … into a strange and cold climate, where they and we were foreigners, and both considered as infidels.

  4th:

  Invading a poor country, and one unequal to supply our wants, especially our large establishment of cattle.

  5th:

  Giving undue power to political agents.

  6th:

  Want of forethought and undue confidence in the Afghans on the part of Sir William Macnaghten.

  7th:

  Placing our magazines, even our treasure, in indefensible places.

  8th:

  Great military neglect and mismanagement after the outbreak.

  His reasons, all valid, contain a mix of the political and the military, the strategic and the tactical. There is no doubt that the military disaster on the scale that occurred on the retreat from Kabul could have been avoided by better leadership of the army in Kabul.

  Back in Britain, politicians and others concentrated on the political and moral aspects, both more subjective and more difficult to analyze. Sir John Kaye, the historian who collected many of the primary documents and indeed published in full those that had been expurgated or omitted from the government’s publication justifying the war in 1839, saw the hand of God in the outcome: “The calamity of 1842 was retribution sufficient … to stamp in indelible characters upon the page of history, the great truth that the policy which was pursued in Afghanistan was unjust, and that, therefore, it was signally disastrous. It was … an unrighteous usurpation, and the curse of God was on it from the first. Our successes at the outset were a part of the curse. They lapped us in false security, and deluded us to our overthrow. This is the great lesson … ‘The Lord God of recompenses shall surely requite.’ ”

  Henry Lushington, another commentator, wrote in a book-long analysis of the conflict in 1844: “We entered Afghanistan to effect a change of dynasty—we withdrew from it professing our readiness to acknowledge any government which the Afghans may themselves think fit to establish. We entered it above all to establish a government friendly to ourselves. Are the Afghans our friends now?… Except for the anarchy we have left in the place of order, the hatred in the place of kindness, all is as it was before … The received code of international morality is not even in the nineteenth century very strict. One principle however seems to be admitted in the theory, if not the practice of civilised men, that an aggressive war—a war undertaken against unoffending parties with a view to our own benefit only—is unjust, and conversely that a war to be just must partake the character of a defensive war. It may be defensive in various ways … either preventing an injury which it is attempted to inflict, or of exacting reparation for one inflicted, and taking the necessary security against its future infliction but in one way or other defensive it must be.” He could find no justification for the campaign being a defensive war since “the Afghans had not injured us either nationally or individually.” He believed that individuals could not place the blame for the war solely on the government: “The crime … is one of which the responsibility is shared by every Englishman. It is no new thing to say that a nation and especially a free nation is generally accountable for the conduct of its government.”

  Lushington placed particular emphasis on the impact of misjudgment. “The great error of Sir William Macnaghten,” he wrote, “appears to us to have been the attempt to bestow too soon and without sufficient means of coercing those who had hitherto lived at the expense of their weaker neighbours, the unappreciated blessings of an organised and powerful government upon the people of Afghanistan … We have received a severe lesson which we may make a useful one if we choose to learn from it well, if not we shall perpetrate injustices again and again.”

  A report produced while the war was still in progress by one of the committees of the East India Company, which, as Hobhouse had confessed, had been largely ignored in the conduct of the war, stated, “This war of robbery is waged by the English government through the intervention of the government of India without the knowledge of England or of Parliament … and therefore evading the check placed by the constitution on the exercise of the prerogative of the crown in declaring war. It presents, therefore, a new crime in the annals of nations—a secret war. It had been made by a people without their knowledge, against another people who had committed no offence. Effects …: loss of England’s character for fair dealing; loss of her character of success; the Mussulman population is rendered hostile.” The Times in May 1842 commented, “This nation spent £15 million on a less than profitable effort after self-aggrandisement in Afghanistan, and spends £30,000 a year on a system of education satisfactory to nobody.” However, calls for a full parliamentary inquiry into the background to the war and into the doctoring of the government papers, led by, among others, a newly elected Tory member of Parliament named Benjamin Disraeli, came to nothing.

  Outside Britain there was general satisfaction at Britain’s unexpected reverses in Afghanistan. In the United States the Afghan War took up numerous column inches in the nation’s newspapers, large and small. Outrage at the “odium” and “wickedness” of the British intervention and admiration for the “indomitable love of independence” of the Afghans were almost universal. Atrocities committed by the British as they sought retribution were equally condemned. Afghanistan became somewhat of an issue in the 1842 congressional elections with British attitudes and actions being seen as emblematic of behavior America should avoid. The U.S. administration, however, made no protest to Britain. It was more concerned with
negotiating a major treaty with Britain—the Webster-Ashburton Treaty—regulating outstanding issues between the two countries, including the definition of parts of the border between the United States and Canada, and securing favorable trading rights under British aegis in Asia, and in particular China, following Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars and the secession to them of Hong Kong.

  WITH THE BENEFIT of hindsight, among the more important lessons the British should have learned from the First Afghan War were many that resonate today. Their leaders were not honest with themselves or their public about their motivation, providing partial and misleading information to both Parliament and public. In their own minds they exaggerated the threats to their position in India and exaggerated the power of their available troops to cope with the demands an Afghan campaign would make on them.

  The British entered Afghanistan without clear objectives or a defined exit strategy or timetable. In what could be termed regime change, they endeavored to impose on the country a ruler unpopular with his people. The Duke of Wellington correctly prophesied that Britain’s difficulties would begin when its military success ended. These successes led them into an open-ended commitment to a ruler whom they had not chosen well and, when they realized this, hesitated to replace or “guide” sufficiently. They alienated an increasingly hostile population excited into jihad against the infidel British by Islamic clerics and their followers, the ghazis, ready to martyr themselves.

  British intelligence was poor. Although they saw Russia as their main rival in Central Asia, there was no Russian speaker anywhere in their administration in India. Their knowledge of the terrain was sketchy, and they were ignorant until too late of the tribal nature of the politics of the country which barely merited that name, being split up between semiautonomous tribes, people looking very different from each other and speaking mutually incomprehensible languages. They did not understand that these tribes united only rarely and that when they did so it was against a foreign invader such as themselves.

  Many senior British officers’ only experience of action had been in the defeat of Napoleon’s vast armies on the plains of Europe a quarter of a century before. When, beaten in conventional warfare, the Afghans changed their tactics into those of the guerrilla fighter, these same British officers found it difficult to react to an enemy who picked off their soldiers, highly visible in their red coats, from vantage points high above the passes, their long-barreled jezails accurate at far greater range than the British Brown Besses. The British learned that it was both difficult to recruit and train Afghan troops to support Shah Shuja and when they did so found their loyalty and performance in battle was unreliable, one officer complaining, “They would never be fit for anything.”

  In general, British troops struggled to distinguish between hostile and peaceful Afghans, both in Kabul and in the countryside, even when, as was not always the case, they tried hard to make such distinctions. As a consequence innocent civilians were punished and killed, and even more of the population were turned into ready recruits for the enemy. The British and the Afghans alike had problems in understanding each other’s cultures and characters. The British stereotyped the Afghans as cunning, corrupt and deceitful and thus found it difficult to believe in the motives of those who were in fact well disposed toward them. The Afghans accepted British protestations of their reputation for straight dealing at face value and were thus the more let down when the British proved duplicitous and Machiavellian.26 The Afghan propensity for assassination as well as the taking and subsequent trading between themselves of hostages initially appalled the British, but later they at times found themselves complicit in plans for targeted assassination as the easiest way to rid themselves of troublesome opponents. The attitudes and ambitions of Persia and the passage of forces and weapons across the Helmand River as well as the porous, imprecise border complicated British policies.

  Changes of government in Britain changed policy in Afghanistan. Politicians—even those who favored the intervention—were concerned about cost as timescales extended, preferring to take the short rather than the long-term view. In Kabul, too, British civilian officials and military commanders bickered about the division of responsibilities between them. Civilian officials such as Macnaghten, whose careers depended on the success of the mission, created a conspiracy of optimism.27 Generals protested in vain against withdrawal of forces to a level that led to an overstretching of resources and a consequent inability to control more than a few strategic outposts outside Kabul, rather than the whole countryside. Sometimes even these outposts were overrun.

  The British found it easier to purchase acquiescence to their own and Shah Shuja’s activities than to win over Afghan hearts and minds. Therefore, perhaps the biggest British miscalculation was—in response to cost-cutting pressures from home—unilaterally to reduce some of the subsidies paid to Afghan tribal chiefs. Their economy measure was immediately followed by an Afghan rising.

  The long time taken for communications between London and the governor-general’s administration in Calcutta and then from Calcutta to those in command in the field in Afghanistan inevitably hampered effective decision making—a problem exacerbated by the fact that the British did not choose their senior officials and generals well. On the military side the deficiencies of Elphinstone and Shelton are so obvious as to require no recapitulation. Among the civilians, the supreme command lay with Lord Auckland, as governor-general. Two phrases used by the Roman historian Tacitus in his assessment of Galba—one of the unsuccessful Roman emperors in the year of the four emperors, A.D. 69—could have been used of Auckland: magis extra vitia quam cum virtutibus (a man rather without vices than possessing virtues) and capax imperii nisi imperasset (considered capable of exercising power if he had not been called upon to do so).

  Auckland, a pleasant character, had proved a good administrator in less demanding posts in the government in London. However, even if the post of governor-general was slightly less powerful than that of Roman emperor, he was insufficiently strong a character or leader when placed in supreme command of policy in India, thousands of miles and many weeks in terms of communication away from London, to withstand either the conspiracy of optimism generated by Macnaghten from Kabul or pressures from home both to economize and to expedite success and withdrawal. It was not that he was a complete failure—he did restrain some of Macnaghten’s plans for operations beyond Afghan borders—but that he was not equipped temperamentally or intellectually to dominate the situation. He preferred to acquiesce in his subordinates’ plans to continue existing policies when they began to go awry, rather than ordering either a halt or a thorough review.28

  Chief among Auckland’s subordinates was Macnaghten. Though an undoubtedly clever man, he was out of both his milieu and his depth in Afghanistan. Nearly all his career had been spent in the secretariat in Calcutta, and he had little experience of independent command. His ingrained optimism led him throughout to minimize or ignore difficulties. He underestimated the military capabilities of the Afghans and overestimated those of the British and Indian troops, leaving him both to accept troop reductions and deployments when he should not have and to propose grandiose operations beyond Shah Shuja’s borders—for example, against Herat—which were entirely unfeasible. Though he understood the importance of making it appear to the Afghan population that Shah Shuja was a true king and thus ensured that his troops led the army on its marches and made the first ceremonial entries into cities, in promoting the invasion and Shah Shuja himself, he was far too optimistic in his assessment of Shah Shuja’s abilities and of the ease with which the diverse and stubborn Afghans could be induced to accept as a ruler a man they considered to have an aura of ill fortune.

  As for Alexander Burnes, as well as courage, he had needed great self-confidence, resourcefulness and strength of judgment to succeed in his youthful journeys in Central Asia. Such qualities rarely go hand in hand with humility. What is more, Burnes seems to have allowed all the praise
and attention he had received in London to turn his head to the extent that in his subsequent career he found it easier to antagonize less celebrated but more senior colleagues than to devote enough of his time and charm to convince them of the undoubted soundness of many of his views, particularly those in regard to Dost Mohammed. Thwarted, and urged on by his unrequited ambition, he preferred, to the detriment of his historical reputation, to acquiesce, albeit sulkily, in policies that he believed wrong. He did so in the hope of obtaining, by his temporary passivity, high office in which he would remedy others’ deficient policies, thus fulfilling his youthful promise—something fate never allowed him the opportunity to do.

  DESPITE ALL THE soul-searching about British actions at home and abroad, not long after the last British regiments had returned to India down through the Khyber Pass, the British in India returned to their expansionist policies. Their confidence restored by the success of the army of retribution and at the urging of Governor-General Lord Ellenborough, they moved west into Sind, where the emirs, emboldened by British defeats in Afghanistan, had increased tolls on the Indus and then indulged in what the British saw as a variety of provocations. The last straw had been an assault in February 1843 on a British mission led by Colonel James Outram. This in the government’s view justified them in “introducing to a brigand infested land, the firm but just administration of the East India Company.”