by Max Boot
Most of the British troops were soon sent back to India. The rest remained “to hedge in the throne with a quickset of British bayonets.” The danger seemed so minimal that the married officers sent for their families and settled down to the serious business of life—cricket, fishing, hunting, ice skating. But all the while resentment was building among the Afghans who did not appreciate the feringees who romanced their women, traduced their mores, and imposed an unpopular king on them.72
Out of their own ignorance the British inadvertently provided the spark that set this powder keg on fire. Rulers in Kabul had traditionally paid generous “tributes” to the Pashtun tribes to keep traffic flowing through the passes of the Hindu Kush. In October 1841, however, William Macnaghten, the senior British diplomat, decided as a cost-saving measure to slash in half the annual subsidy paid to the Ghilzai tribal confederation. At the same time, also in the interest of parsimony, he decided to send another British brigade back to India. The Ghilzais instantly rose up and closed the Khyber Pass, thereby cutting off Afghanistan from India.
Major General Sir Robert Sale, whose 2,000-strong brigade was being sent home, found himself having to live up to his nickname “Fighting Bob” by fighting for every inch of ground against “ambuscades and plunderers.”73 Sale’s brigade reached the relative safety of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan only on November 15, 1841, after suffering more than 300 casualties.74 The wounded included Sale himself; a jezail bullet had struck his ankle. Once inside Jalalabad, his brigade was surrounded by “a fanatical and infuriated people” (to use Sale’s own words). Sale was unable to leave or help the rest of the British forces in the country, even as he received “melancholy intelligence” of “the basest treachery” transpiring in the capital.75
Back in Kabul, on November 2, 1841, a mob gathered in front of the residency occupied by Sir Alexander Burnes, the second-ranking British diplomat and a well-known explorer. He tried to reason with the enraged Afghans, then to bribe them. Neither worked. He and his brother were cut to pieces along with their entire retinue.76 There were still 4,500 Anglo-Indian troops on the outskirts of the city, and prompt action on their part might have quelled the disturbance. But their commander was anything but energetic. Sir William Elphinstone had seen no action since Waterloo. He looked it too. Fifty-nine years old, he was crippled by gout and exceedingly feeble. Lady Sale complained that “Elphinstone vacillates on every point.”77 Because he was “paralyzed by this sudden outbreak,”78 it spread with disturbing rapidity.
The day after Burnes was murdered, the British commissariat was besieged and a relief force repelled by “concealed marksmen.”79 In the following days, as the troops became “grievously indignant at the imbecility of their leaders,”80 the siege of the British cantonment grew ever tighter. By the end of November, as the rolls of sick and wounded were growing and provisions were running out, the British declared a willingness to pay handsomely for the privilege of a “safe retreat out of the country.”81 In one of their parlays on December 23, the Dost’s son, Muhammad Akbar Khan, tried to seize William Macnaghten, the chief British diplomat. Macnaghten resisted and was shot down with a ceremonial pistol that he had once presented to his host. Soon the rest of the British force would suffer a similar fate.
All the problems encountered by the Kabul garrison at the beginning of their march—bitter cold, lack of supplies, enemy attacks, disorganization—grew worse over the next few days. By January 9, 1842, more than half the force was “frost-bitten or wounded.” That day Akbar Khan offered to take into protective custody the married officers and their wives—a proposal that was eagerly accepted. General Elphinstone and a number of other officers also wound up as captives after venturing out to negotiate with Akbar Khan. In all more than a hundred Britons, including Lady Sale and her married daughter, became hostages. Their capture caused a frenzy in Britain because it tapped into primordial fears of the fate that “civilized” women could expect to suffer at the hands of “savages”; as the historian Linda Colley reminds us, tales of “white slavery” and the harem were never far from European minds in this period when “captivity narratives” of Europeans held by non-Europeans (especially in North Africa, India, and North America) were a popular form of literature.82 But in fact the captives were the lucky ones. Most of them survived. There was no salvation for the “monstrous, unmanageable, jumbling mass,” to cite Lieutenant Eyre’s words, that they left behind.
Their end came in the “dark precipitous defile[s]” of the Hindu Kush. Afghan riflemen were arrayed all along the heights. From there, a British officer wrote, they “poured down an incessant fire on our column.” Three thousand were said to have died in the Khurd–Kabul Pass alone. Another “fearful . . . slaughter” ensued in the Jugdulluk Pass. The tribesmen had barricaded the only exit and made “busy with their cruel knives and their unerring jezails.”
The only Briton to survive the entire march was an assistant surgeon. Wounded and mounted on a dying pony, Dr. William Brydon reached Jalalabad on the afternoon of January 13, 1842—a scene memorialized in a famous Victorian painting, The Remnants of an Army. A few Indian soldiers and camp followers would arrive later, and 105 British prisoners would be rescued eventually. But most of the rest of the force that had left Kabul seven days earlier—16,000 people (including more than 700 Europeans)—had been wiped out. This “stupendous act of fatuity,” as it was dubbed by a nineteenth-century writer, was the greatest single setback suffered by any army fighting guerrillas in the nineteenth century.83
THIS CATASTROPHE DID much to engender Afghanistan’s reputation as the “graveyard of empires.” Yet Afghanistan is far from unconquerable. It was overrun by invaders from Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC to Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century AD and Babur (founder of the Mogul Empire) in the sixteenth century.
In 1842 the British, who still held Kandahar and Jalalabad, set out to retrieve their position by sending the so-called Army of Retribution, eventually numbering fourteen thousand men, marching through the Khyber Pass to erase “the most unmitigated discredit to the British name throughout Asia.”84 Its commander, Major General Sir George Pollock, figured out the importance of placing pickets on the hills along his line of march to prevent them from being used by enemy snipers.85 On September 13, 1842, the British decisively defeated Akbar Khan’s forces. Two days later they reoccupied Kabul. The Afghans holding Lady Sale and the other British hostages released their prisoners unharmed. At least a dozen of them—“seized,” as one of them put it, “with a scribbling mania”—subsequently published accounts of their captivity, none more famous than Lady Sale’s best seller, A Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan.86 Thus ended a “hostage crisis” that, Linda Colley argues, captured British attention every bit as much as the Iran Hostage Crisis was to transfix Americans in 1979–80—and for much the same reason: both crises revealed the unexpected vulnerability of a great power and occasioned fears, in both cases premature, about its imminent decline.87 There was an important difference, however: the American public was to be denied the catharsis of retribution that the British now undertook in Afghanistan.
To impress on the Afghans that “their atrocious conduct . . . has not been suffered to pass with impunity,”88 Pollock ordered Kabul’s Great Bazaar to be dynamited. Meanwhile the “infuriated” British troops and camp followers, “incensed to madness,”89 rampaged through the city streets, burning houses, looting shops, murdering people. Less than a month after his arrival, having demonstrated to his own satisfaction the “invincibility” of “British arms,”90 Pollock marched back to India. Putting the best face on Britain’s lack of ability to administer Afghanistan, the governor-general of India proclaimed that he would “leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a Government amidst the anarchy, which is the consequence of their crimes.”91
By this time Shah Shuja had been assassinated, allowing Dost Muhammad to reclaim his throne. Following his death in 1863, his son, Sher Ali, sparked a virtual repeat o
f the 1838 crisis by receiving a Russian envoy but refusing to receive a British representative. In 1878 another British army marched into Afghanistan, this one armed with Martini-Henry breach-loading rifles and eventually two Gatling guns, thus giving it far more firepower than its predecessors had possessed. Sher Ali abdicated, and his son and successor signed a treaty ceding to Britain control of Afghanistan’s foreign policy. A British “resident” arrived to oversee these arrangements in 1879, but, like his predecessor in 1841, he was murdered by an Afghan mob. So yet another British army, this one under the diminutive, red-faced lieutenant general Frederick Roberts (popularly known as “Bobs”), occupied Kabul and toppled yet another Afghan monarch before marching out once again in 1880 to avoid a costly occupation. Even this victorious campaign cost the British nearly ten thousand fatalities, mostly from disease. They also suffered another notable defeat, this time at the Battle of Maiwand outside Kandahar, where nearly a thousand soldiers out of a force of approximately twenty-five hundred men were killed by a much larger Afghan contingent that was equipped with modern artillery.92
Afghanistan maintained nominal independence but became a virtual British protectorate with the Raj in control of its foreign policy. So it remained until 1919. That year another uprising, a monthlong affair known as the Third Afghan War,93 was easily quelled but prompted the British to let the Afghans go entirely their own way. For the preceding half century, however, the British had managed to achieve their essential objective of keeping Russian influence out of Afghanistan. Like the Romans after Beth-horon, they had shown an impressive ability to bounce back from disaster. That type of resiliency is essential to any nation involved in counterinsurgency warfare, which is inevitably prolonged and grueling.
The British had shown another important attribute for this type of conflict: the willingness to settle for minimalist rather than maximalist goals. Too often counterinsurgents facing a growing nationalist revolt—whether the Ottomans in Greece or the British themselves in the American Revolution—lost everything by not being willing to compromise. The Ottomans might have maintained some degree of sovereignty over Greece, just as the British might have done with their North American colonies, if they had been willing to grant more local autonomy early on; later, as losses piled up and the war became emotional on both sides, such compromises became harder to contemplate. In Afghanistan, by contrast, the British won just enough control to minimize any danger of Russian meddling, without assuming so much authority that they would spark another major uprising. This was similar in an informal way to the legal arrangements emerging at the same time to turn settler colonies such as New Zealand and Canada into self-governing states that retained an association with the British Empire. Few other imperialists—not even the British themselves on other occasions—showed such prudence and pragmatism in the face of nationalist demands. And, as the retreat from Kabul in 1842 demonstrated, the price of imperial hubris could be steep.
25.
NORTHWEST FRONTIER
Britain and the Pashtuns, 1897–1947
MORE TROUBLESOME TO the British than the Afghans would be the Pashtun tribesmen living on the Raj’s side of the Durand Line, which was drawn in 1896 to demarcate the border between Afghanistan and India. Britain took responsibility for this region after annexing the Punjab in 1849, but over the course of the next century it could never entirely subdue its fiercely independent and famously quarrelsome tribesmen. In a description published in 1815 and still applicable today, the British colonial official Monstuart Elphinstone, a cousin of the doomed General Elphinstone, wrote of the Pashtuns, “Their vices are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity, and obstinacy; on the other hand, they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent.”94 The similarities with the tribes of the Caucasus are not coincidental: one group of Muslim mountaineers is apt to resemble another.
The British made a distinction between the peoples of the lowlands, who could be controlled, and those of the hills, who could not. The former were incorporated into the Northwest Frontier Province, the latter remained in “tribal areas”—a division that still persists in Pakistan. The tribal “agencies,” somewhat similar to American Indian reservations, were governed by jirgas (councils of elders) administering their traditional honor code, the Pashtunwali. Ordinary law enforcement, to the extent that it existed, was undertaken by the tribal police, the Khassadars. If the tribes raided settled areas, they were liable to face a punitive expedition from locally raised militias such as the Chitral Scouts and Khyber Rifles, which were commanded by British officers on loan from the Indian Army and performed much the same role as the tribal auxilia that had secured the frontiers of the Roman Empire. If the scouts got into trouble, they could send messenger pigeons to summon help from the Indian Army and later from the Royal Air Force.95 Only in the direst emergencies were British regulars called in. Political officers worked hard to avoid such contingencies, like their Roman forerunners, by a combination of suasion and subsidies—much to the consternation of warriors on both sides itching for action.
One of the most effective political officers was Colonel Sir Robert Warburton, who became known as the “king of the Khyber.” Like George Crook, he showed considerable sympathy for the people he was sent to administer and occasionally to fight. In his case, however, there was a direct family connection that was entirely lacking in the U.S. Army: despite centuries of warfare against, and interaction with, American Indians, not a single prominent army officer of the nineteenth century could claim to be descended from his foes. (William Tecumseh Sherman’s father admired the famous Indian chief, which accounted for his son’s middle name, but there was no familial connection.) Warburton, on the other hand, was the offspring of a marriage between a British officer and an Afghan woman, said to be one of Dost Muhammad’s nieces, during the First Afghan War. He was born in an Afghan fort while his father was a hostage of Akbar Khan. Although educated in England, he became fluent in all the local languages after he first arrived as a colonial administrator in Peshawar in 1870.
He would stay in the region for nearly thirty years, the last eighteen as the political officer for the Khyber, negotiating with tribesmen who were (and are) suspicious of all outsiders. “It took me years to get through this thick crust of mistrust, but what was the after-result?” he wrote in his memoirs. “For upwards of fifteen years I went unarmed amongst these people. My camp, wherever it happened to be pitched, was always guarded and protected by them. The deadliest enemies of the Khyber Range, with a long record of blood-feuds, dropped those feuds for the time being when in my camp.”96
Warburton retired in May 1897. Within months the frontier was aflame with a great uprising that he and many others were convinced could have been averted if he had still been on the job. The call to jihad was spread by religious leaders such as Sadhullah of Swat, whom the British called the “mad mullah.” (To the British it was obvious that anyone who opposed them must be mad.) Numerous forts were attacked and the Khyber Pass closed. But fortunately for the British, the Pashtun tribes were just as decentralized as the American Indians and did not coordinate their attacks, making their revolt easier to quell.
One of the expeditions sent to “thoroughly chastise the tribesmen” was the Malakand Field Force, named after the Malakand Pass, the entrance to the Swat Valley. It was commanded by the wonderfully named Major General Sir Bindon Blood and accompanied by Winston Churchill, a young cavalry officer moonlighting as a newspaper correspondent. In his first book Churchill recounted the difficulties encountered by the troops in dealing with “a roadless, broken, and undeveloped country; an absence of any strategic points; [and] a well-armed enemy with great mobility and modern rifles, who adopts guerilla tactics.” He found “that the troops can march anywhere, and do anything, except catch the enemy; and that all their movements must be attended with loss.”
The solution hit upon by the British was the same as that employed
by the Americans against the Indians and by the Russians against the Chechens. Churchill recounted how in the Tirah Valley the troops “destroyed all the villages in the center of the valley, some twelve to fourteen in number, and blew up with dynamite upwards of thirty towers and forts. The whole valley was filled with the smoke, which curled upwards in dense and numerous columns, and hung like a cloud over the scene of destruction.”
When British troops did manage to catch tribesmen in the open, they wreaked devastation with their Lee-Metford rifles and exploding bullets. “No quarter was asked or given,” Churchill wrote, “and every tribesman caught, was speared or cut down at once. Their bodies lay thickly strewn about the fields. . . . It was a terrible lesson, and one which the inhabitants of Swat and Bajaur will never forget.”97
It was also a lesson that Churchill did not forget; his willingness to wage total war in World War II, including the bombing of German and Japanese cities, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, could be traced, at least in small part, to his exposure to this hard way of imperial warfare, far removed from the rules of chivalry that were supposed to govern European combat. His description of flames and destruction in the Swat Valley even anticipated future accounts of the bombing of Hamburg or Tokyo. But just as Anglo-American bombing did not break German or Japanese morale, so too the British reprisals on the Northwest Frontier did not have their intended effect. The “cruel misery” inflicted by British troops reaped what no less a personage than Field Marshal Lord Roberts described as “a rich harvest of hatred and revenge” and led to future uprisings.98
As late as the 1930s, the Indian Army officer and future novelist John Masters was describing the difficulties of dealing with the Pashtuns’ “pinpricking hit-and-run tactics” notwithstanding the considerable advances in British armaments since the days of the Malakand Field Force. “We had light automatic guns, howitzers, armored cars, tanks, and aircraft. The Pathan had none of these things . . . ,” Masters wrote in his finely wrought memoir, Bugles and a Tiger. “And when he stayed and defended something, whether a gun or a village, we trapped him and pulverized him. When he flitted and sniped, rushed and ran away, we felt as if we were using a crowbar to swat wasps.”