Afghanistan was an ideal testing ground for Britain’s imperial will. Dost Muhammad was acting in what Burnes thought to be an obstructive and wayward manner by refusing to accept British terms and flirting with Russia. Revealingly, one apologist for the war against him represented the invasion of Afghanistan as a masterstroke equal to that which had overthrown Tipu Sultan forty years before. Dost Muhammad was just another refractory Indian prince. ‘Every man at all acquainted with the Oriental mind’ knew that the Amir of Kabul had had his head turned by Russians, as Tipu’s had been by the French, and in this giddy state might even launch an attack on India. Moreover, appeasing barbarians on its frontiers had accelerated the decline of the Roman empire.33 Britain had already amply proved itself to be the paramount power within India by the force of arms; the time had come to show that it was an Asian power to be reckoned with.
The decision to invade Afghanistan was taken in May 1838 by Auckland against a background of ‘universal panic’, prompted by reports of the intrigues of Russian agents in Persia and Kabul and fears that Herat would be captured. While no one seriously expected a Russian army to approach India’s frontiers in the near future, there were very real fears that unless the government acted resolutely, Kabul and Persia would be detached from Britain’s orbit. Auckland was swayed by a coterie of experts, most notably William Macnaghten, the secretary of the Indian government’s secret department. He was a deskbound official with an over-developed sense of his own omniscience and an undeserved reputation for being a diplomatic genius. He proposed that an Anglo-Punjabi army occupy Afghanistan, dethrone Dost Muhammad and replace him with the pro-British Shah Shuja, an exiled pretender then living in India. Details of this plan reached London at the end of October, and were warmly endorsed by the Cabinet and the Duke of Wellington.34
The following month, the Russian government finally gave way to British pressure. It repudiated Simonich (his efforts had come to nothing in any case), recalled him and promised to work alongside Britain to promote stability in Persia. Vitkievitch was also summoned back to St Petersburg, where official disapproval drove him to kill himself in May 1839. Having given Britain a nasty shock, the Russians were prepared to back off, and get down to what really mattered, negotiations over the future of the Turkish empire. The disappearance of what had been a largely illusory threat did not change the plans for the march to Kabul. Britain still needed to affirm its power in the traditional way and, with Shah Shuja installed in Kabul, a hitherto wobbly state would be transformed into a firm and submissive ally of the Company. Furthermore, the downfall of Dost Muhammad would serve as a warning to other rulers in the region.
III
Macnaghten’s policy was a gamble. It was condemned by Montstuart Elphinstone and Metcalfe, both now retired, and the Tory press in Britain, which considered it a pointless and dangerous adventure. Neither Auckland nor his advisers had considered the reactions of the Afghans to the advance of an infidel army into their country to evict a popular ruler and replace him with a prince whom few of them knew and fewer cared for. Their mood was discovered by General Nott when two ‘fine-looking fellows’ entered his tent during the first stage of the advance to Kabul. When he explained to them that the army had come to make Shah Shuja their amir, one remarked: ‘We prefer Dost Muhammad.’ ‘He has a right to the throne,’ Nott retorted. The Afghan stepped forward, placed his hand on the general’s shoulder, and asked, ‘What right have you to go to Benares and Delhi? Why, the same right that our Dost Muhammad has to Kabul, and he will keep it.’35 Their preference was understandable. Burnes had written of Shah Shuja: ‘His manners and address are highly polished; but his judgement does not rise above mediocrity.’36 Captain Henry Fane, a staff officer attached to the Kabul army, was impressed by his handsome features, but disturbed to hear that he had a reputation for cutting and running in a crisis.37 Once in his capital, Shah Shuja did little to endear himself to his new subjects. One of his favourite pastimes was to sit in his palace and peer through a telescope at the wives and daughters of the Kabulis as they took the air on the flat roofs of their houses. Those who excited him were summoned to his presence.38
Macnaghten imagined that by throwing large sums of money at the Afghans he could win them over to Shah Shuja.39 It was a policy which had worked, up to a point, with the Indian princes, but it failed in Afghanistan where religious and national passions were deeper and fiercer. The strength of these feelings was revealed to Macnaghten a fortnight before he entered Kabul when Jubba Khan, Dost Muhammad’s brother, came to the British camp seeking terms. The amir was offered exile in India and a jagir of £10,000 a year. Jubba Khan responded with a speech of defiance:
These proposals are so insulting that I will not even mention them to my brother; for what less could have been offered had you already vanquished him in the field? We have hitherto heard that the English were a just and equitable nation; but on what plea can you found the right of dethroning a monarch and placing on the throne yonder deposed puppet whom I spit at [Shah Shuja was standing nearby]. You have taken our stronghold of Ghazni; you may also, perhaps, overcome the army which my brother had raised to defend himself; but the eyes of all Asia are upon you. . . . May Allah defend the right.40
This made the listeners uneasy, and one, Lieutenant Mackinnon, thought Jubba Khan’s arguments were unanswerable. Like many other officers he was learning to respect adversaries who, though cruel, were also frank, manly and brave. Afghan defiance remained strong. Refusing payment to allow British forces to retire down the Khyber Pass early in 1842, Afridi elders told a British officer: ‘They would not barter their religion for gold, nor incur odium and contempt of their brother Mussulmans by allowing troops to pass.’41 It proved hard to find Afghans to fight for Shah Shuja and those who did deserted to Dost Muhammad at the first opportunity. Macnaghten had to hire mercenaries, which was not easy; Gurkhas were uncomfortable about the prospect of service in Afghanistan.42 There were lapses of enthusiasm for Shah Shuja among Indian Muslim troops, reluctant to fight against their co-religionists. During one engagement in November 1840, two squadrons of the 2nd Bengal Cavalry refused to charge and held back while their five British officers galloped into a body of Afghan horse.43
At the beginning of the campaign some officers had expected a walkover, although a few fire-eaters hoped that they might eventually test their mettle against the Russians.44 The Bengal contingent converged on Firozpur during November, often marching by night to avoid the heat. Cantonments were set up and at the end of the month the troops paraded for Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh. Gifts and compliments were exchanged and the prince kissed a portrait of Queen Victoria, which everyone thought a gallant gesture. During the subsequent junkettings, General Sir John Fane and the maharaja stumbled over the pile of cannonballs, which Hindu sepoys took to be a bad omen. Sir William Kaye, the official historian of the war, took it to be a good one, reminding his readers that, within ten years, the Sikhs would fall before the fire of British cannon.
The plan of operations was simple. Kabul would be approached by a dog-leg route which would take the Bengali units along southern banks of the Sutlej and Indus to Sukkur, where they met the Bombay contingent which had been carried up river. The combined forces were over 12,000 strong and accompanied by 38,000 camp followers, including sepoys’ families, hucksters selling opium, rum and tobacco, prostitutes, officers’ servants (some had at least a dozen) and baggage-train attendants. Added to this human mass were pack animals: elephants, bullocks and 38,000 camels, the mainstay of the army’s transport system. This ponderous caravan crossed the Indus by a 300-yard-long pontoon bridge, and then headed north for the second stage of the advance. This took it across the Kachchhi desert to the Bolan Pass and Quetta, from where it moved to Kandahar before turning north-east for Kabul. Ahead of the columns rode Burnes with a clutch of political officers whose job it was to induce the Sind and Baluchi amirs to allow the Army of the Indus a free passage and, in the case of the former, to extract £250
,000 from them as a contribution to Shah Shuja’s war chest. In some quarters it was hoped that the ‘politicals’ would fail and the Sindians would block the army’s passage, which would mean a windfall of prize money if the rich city of Hyderabad were stormed.45
The Sindian amirs caved in. ‘All I have is theirs [the British], and I am your slave,’ the Nawab of Bahawalpur told General Sir Henry Fane, the commander-in-chief. Somewhat embarrassed, Fane changed the subject to the weather, remarking how chilly it was. The nawab agreed, adding ‘but at the present moment, I feel neither cold nor damp, whilst basking in the sunshine of your presence’.46 Not everyone was so accommodating. Once the army left Shikarpur and approached the Bolan Pass, it was under constant pressure from Baluchi and later Afghan tribesmen, who ambushed isolated detachments and stole whatever they could get their hands on. Baluchi horsemen were particularly adept at hijacking strings of baggage camels. A blood-soaked rag was thrust in the face of a bull camel which, incensed, would rush off in pursuit of its tormentor, dragging along its companions.47 Stragglers were murdered and their bodies hideously disfigured by the Afghans. An officer of the 3rd Bengal NI (Native Infantry) came across the corpses of a pair of camp followers near Kandahar; one of the woman’s breasts had been cut off and placed in her husband’s mouth while his penis had been removed and laid in her mouth.48 When they were caught, robbers were shot out of hand. Once, soon after an affray in which a young officer of the 16th Lancers had been killed while on a fishing trip, Shah Shuja intervened to release four suspect thieves who were about to be hanged as an example. He claimed them as his subjects and was backed by Macnaghten, which added to the tension which was growing between army officers and the ‘politicals’, who hindered operations by their willingness to go to any length to appease the Afghans.
They were unappeasable. When the army entered Kandahar in April 1839, Shah Shuja was greeted with icy indifference by its inhabitants, a fact which Macnaghten glossed over in his despatches. Opposition was fiercest in Gilzai country between Kandahar and Kabul, where the army learned to respect Afghan snipers, armed with long-barrelled jezails, smoothbores with a range of 400 yards, well over twice that of the standard British and Company musket. Antique weapons, bows and matchlocks, were used by the defenders of the fortress at Ghazni. Resembling some awesome creation of Viollet le Duc, this great fort fell to a mediaeval device, a petard made up of sacks of gunpowder which were laid at its main gateway. There was no alternative, since the army’s siege guns had been left behind, and Macnaghten was in a hurry to get to Kabul. The storming party of British troops rushed the breech as if they were drunk, according to one eyewitness, even though they had had no liquor for two days. ‘Knocking over defenders like bricks’, the soldiers surged into the town in search of plunder.49 Close behind came Henry Fane, who recalled:
Such a scene of plunder and confusion I never saw: one blackguard of ours had a cooking pot wrapped up in a cashmere shawl; a second was busily employed in ripping up a woman’s quilt, and sticking the silk into his pocket or inexpressibles [trousers]; while three or four others had seated themselves on the steps with a huge pot of tamarind paste, of which I took my share.50
There was not much left to be distributed in prize money; when it was shared out just over ten years later other ranks got five shillings (25p) each.51 Order was soon restored by Colonel Sir Robert (‘Fighting Bob’) Sale and Shah Shuja gave a demonstration of his style of royal justice by ordering the summary execution of a number of captured ghazis, Muslim holy warriors of suicidal fearlessness.
On 7 August the Army of the Indus entered Kabul. Dost Muhammad had fled northwards across the Hindu Kush to Bukhara and Shah Shuja was enthroned as his successor. The new state was precarious, resting almost entirely on a network of British political officers, garrisons and hand-outs to malevolently neutral tribal chiefs. But Macnaghten, chief political officer, the power behind the throne and soon to be a baronet, was highly optimistic about the new state’s chances of survival. Resistance from the top had been ended in November 1840 when Dost Muhammad surrendered to Macnaghten after a brief uprising. He was sent into exile in India. Opposition from below flickered on with ambushes and raids, which the new régime dismissed as tribal brigandage, just as in the 1980s the Russians referred to all Afghan partisans as ‘bandits’. The Russians, as did the British before them, discovered that well-trained troops backed by modern artillery could defeat the rebels whenever they stood their ground and offered battle. Such victories were Pyrrhic; within a month of the British having beaten a force of Gilzais near Qalat in May 1840 the tribesmen were back to their old tricks, interrupting communications between Kandahar and Kabul.52 Nonetheless, during 1840 and the first nine months of 1841, British garrisons and punitive columns were able to keep the lid down on tribal insurgency, but only just.
IV
Even though the numbers of the army of occupation had been successively reduced, the costs of supporting Shah Shuja remained high. The bill for the Bengali contingent alone was £408,000 a year and additional military and administrative expenses, together with the gratuities scattered among tribal chiefs, made the total annual budget for Afghanistan just over £1 million. It was an increasingly irksome burden and threw into question the purpose behind supporting Shah Shuja indefinitely. Auckland was becoming increasingly nervous and, by June 1841, was wondering whether he had miscalculated the depth of Afghan ‘national spirit’.53 Macnaghten pooh-poohed references to nationalism and persisted, purblindly, in his belief that he and his colleagues were creating a permanent, popular and stable government. In London, the new Tory ministry of Sir Robert Peel was prepared to take him at his word, and during the autumn of 1841 was contemplating a partial evacuation of British and Indian troops, who would be replaced by Afghans under British officers. Macnaghten responded to this new spirit of economy by suggesting cuts in tribal subsidies, that Danegeld upon which the security of Shah Shuja and previous amirs had depended.
This arbitrary removal of traditional subsidies triggered an uprising among the Gilzais of the Khyber Pass at the beginning of October 1841, which became a signal for a national rebellion. This region was called by its peoples ‘yaghestan’, the land of rebellion. Like the rest of Afghanistan, it was a tribal society in which clans and extended families united in the pursuit of blood feuds or against intruders. Shah Shuja and his British puppet-masters fell into this last category, which explained the persistence of attacks on their forces and outposts for the past two and a half years. The initial disturbances in the region of Khurd Kabul, twenty miles east of Kabul, might have been contained if Sale’s brigade had been better prepared. Unable to force well-defended positions, faced with the first falls of winter snow and running low in ammunition, Sale was compelled to fall back to his base at Jalalabad, which he reached on 11 November.54 Four days later, he found himself cut off from Peshawar and began to prepare for a siege.
What amounted to the seizure of the Khyber Pass encouraged dissidents in Kabul under the leadership of Akbar Khan, Dost Muhammad’s son. On 2 November Burnes was assassinated by tribesmen. His death left the entire military and civil command in a state of paralysis from which it never recovered. The 4,500 British and Indian troops in Kabul were commanded by General Sir William Elphinstone, a 59-year-old who had last seen action at Waterloo and whose tendency to dither was made worse by bad health. His second-in-command, Colonel John Shelton of the 44th Regiment, was a gallant Peninsular war veteran whose stupidity and rudeness exasperated everyone. Neither had the ability or stomach to face up to the emergency and their hesitancy and blunders were a bonus for the Afghans, who gained and kept the initiative. Macnaghten’s intelligence system had broken down (Lady Sale thought it of little value) and he was at a loss as to what to do, not that he had much choice.55 Intermittent skirmishing with Kabulis and the tribesmen who were pouring into the city during November made it clear that the cantonment was indefensible. By 20 November Macnaghten realised that he could no longer restrain the
Afridis and the road to Kandahar had been blocked by large bodies of guerrillas. The garrison’s only hope lay in a negotiated withdrawal down the Khyber Pass. While Macnaghten, Elphinstone and Shelton bickered, morale plummeted, and afterwards there would be rumours of a collapse of discipline among both British and Indian troops, even cowardice.56
The final phase in the disintegration of Shah Shuja’s artificial state began with the murder of its architect, Macnaghten, during talks with Akbar Khan on 23 December. Experience had taught him no wisdom; in the last hours of his life he was contriving to buy himself and his colleagues out of the crisis by seducing Akbar Khan with a bribe. He was suddenly attacked and stabbed to death by some of Akbar Khan’s retainers, acting with their master’s approval. After Macnaghten’s death, Akbar Khan turned to a captured British officer with a triumphant jeer: ‘You’ll seize my country, will you? You’ll seize my country?’ On 6 January 1842, in keeping with the terms Akbar Khan had granted, the detritus of the army and its 12,000 camp followers began its evacuation. Within a week all but a few hundred had perished, killed either by tribesmen, hunger or cold or a combination of all three. Among the last to die were a handful of men from the 44th Regiment who clustered around Captain Souter, who had wrapped the regimental colours around himself to save them from capture. The embroidered silk may have marked him as a rich man, and so he was taken prisoner by the Afghans in the hope that he would be ransomed. His last stand at Gandamak was the subject of a stirring genre painting by W. B. Wollen, in which the dwindling but defiant band was made a symbol of the sort of against-the-odds courage which made the empire.
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