The Dark Defile Page 14

  Claude Wade thought similarly: “There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against I think in our endeavour to re-establish the Afghan monarchy than the overweening confidence with which Europeans are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of their own institutions and the anxiety that they display to introduce them in new and untried soils … The people of these countries are far from ripe for the introduction of our highly refined system of government or of society and we are liable to meet with more opposition in the attempt to disturb what we find existing than from the exercise of our physical force.”

  Auckland was more charitable toward Stoddart and Pottinger, acknowledging that it was “extremely difficult to fix our relations with a government so loose and suspicious as that of Herat upon a satisfactory and secure footing.” Writing to Macnaghten in December 1839, Auckland set out what he believed the real priorities to be: “I only want to know of Shah Shuja that he is becoming an Afghan king and drawing his subjects about him, that his Afghan levies are making progress towards efficiency, that his contingent is in a condition to give him support.” In other words, the most important thing was for Shah Shuja to gain respect by consolidating his position within Afghanistan, and there could be no question of dispatching yet more troops from India for the further aggrandizement of the erstwhile pensioner king. Apart from anything else, Auckland was already concerned at the costs thus far of Britain’s Afghan adventure.

  In early 1840, however, following news of the expedition against Khiva, London began to share Macnaghten’s reservations about Russian intentions. Palmerston, feeling he had been deceived by Russian protestations of goodwill the previous year, thought like Sir John Hobhouse that action against them in Central Asia might be necessary and approved a letter sent by Hobhouse and the Secret Committee to Auckland in late February 1840, promising that “should you be called upon to extend your direct influence, whether to Herat or to the north of the Hindu Kush, we shall support you with an entire confidence in the judgement which has hitherto characterised all your proceedings.”

  Nevertheless, the optimistic Auckland still believed that in only a few more months Shah Shuja would be firmly in control of the administration of his kingdom and that he would be able to withdraw the bulk of the remaining troops from Afghanistan by October, leaving Shah Shuja as a bulwark against the Russians. In March 1840 he again came under pressure from Macnaghten when reports arrived that the Russian force advancing on Khiva was much larger than the British had anticipated, but he held firm, stating that “we must mainly look to the exertion of our power in Europe for the purpose of checking, beyond the limits of Afghanistan, the unjustifiable advances of Russian aggression.” His caution was vindicated when in the late spring of 1840 news arrived that the Russians’ Khivan expedition had failed, turning back starved and frozen in subzero temperatures when only halfway toward its objective. By the time the expedition returned to Orenburg it had lost a fifth of the five thousand men who had set out. Indeed, Khiva would soon cease to be an issue between Britain and Russia. That summer, the British officer Richmond Shakespear negotiated with the Khivans the release of four hundred Russian slaves and provided Russia, with whom Palmerston was now taking a hard line, with a face-saving way of abandoning its Khivan ambitions at least for the present.18

  Gradually, however, Auckland’s hopes of an early withdrawal from Afghanistan faltered. In May Hobhouse, after studying a report by Macnaghten on the attitudes of the Afghan chiefs, wrote from London to tell him bleakly, “If what he says is strictly true I see no chance of your being ever able to withdraw your troops from Kabul and Shah Shuja appears to entertain no such wish or expectation. Yet a permanent or even a prolonged occupation of that country is not and was not contemplated by any of us.”

  The truth was that Shah Shuja was already showing himself a poor ruler compared with Dost Mohammed. The latter had consciously made himself approachable to his people. After becoming emir he had “protested to his friends that he would not become a king after the manner of the Sadozais, to be secluded in his harem and to take no cognizance of public affairs … and that all classes of people should have access to him.” Even Hindus had been unafraid to approach him in the street, and according to Mohan Lal “any man seeking for justice” could “stop him on the road by holding his hand and garment and may abuse him for not relieving his grievances” and the emir would continue to listen to him “without disturbance or anger.” His reputation for fair dealing had been so widespread that a common saying had been “Is Dost Mohammed dead, that there is no justice?” Though the emir had remained almost pathologically suspicious and wary of his courtiers, he had been careful to treat them as equals and had done away with the elaborate court ceremonial of the Sadozais. To many looking back on his reign, he seemed to have established a degree of political stability so that travelers to Kabul had been able to speak of it as “abad wa fariman” (flourishing and plentiful).

  By contrast, Shah Shuja’s stiff haughty manners and cold demeanor toward his own people, noticed and criticized by British army officers during the advance of the Army of the Indus, had become yet more pronounced since his return to Kabul. One officer observed, “Our friend Shah Shuja, I am sorry to say, does not take well with his Afghan subjects … and he will I fear be to the Indian Government a very expensive bird to keep on his perch.” Shah Shuja expected his nobles to stand for hours on end, hands folded and at a respectful distance waiting to see whether he would deign to notice them. Often they had to retire without having been allowed to address one word to him. As a result, within the first weeks he had already alienated a number of important tribal leaders who had initially been in favor of his return. In particular he had offended some of the influential Kizzilbashi community within Kabul. Many of them had initially readily agreed to serve Shah Shuja in their traditional roles as tax gatherers, clerks and suppliers of stores but were soon complaining that the new king treated them with less respect than Dost Mohammed had done.

  Corruption was rife among Shah Shuja’s family and followers. Several of his sons, whom he had appointed to key positions, abused them. One of these, Sufter Khan, who was made governor of the province of Kandahar, increased his salary by terror and extortion and spent the proceeds on homosexual orgies. A letter by his medical attendant published in the Bombay Times of 21 October 1840 alleged that he enticed British soldiers to his palace, where he drugged and sexually abused them.

  As well as members of his family, Shah Shuja selected other corrupt favorites as ministers. Burnes wrote that “bad ministers are in every government solid grounds for unpopularity” and lamented, “I doubt if ever a King had a worse set than Shah Shuja.” One of the most detested was the elderly Mullah Shakur, who had accompanied Shah Shuja from Ludhiana and whom he had appointed his chief minister. Mullah Shakur, whose cropped ears were a sign that in earlier years he had displeased his master, allowed his officials to exact higher taxes from Kabul’s merchants than agreed by the British. Those who complained were beaten or imprisoned, while in the countryside, Mullah Shakur dispatched royal tax gatherers to live off the local people until their extortionate demands were met.

  Resentful of outside interference, Mullah Shakur spread rumors that Britain would never allow Shah Shuja full power to reign and was intent on attacking Islam. By late 1840 Macnaghten would demand his replacement by a pro-British minister, but by then much damage had been done, especially by Mullah Shakur’s highlighting of Shah Shuja’s reliance on the British, which ran directly counter to what Auckland wanted. People joked that coins struck in Shah Shuja’s name depicted him as “the apple of the eye of the British.” Surgeon Atkinson understood the problem exactly, writing that “the power which raised him to the throne is the principal drawback on his popularity. It is difficult for the people rightly to comprehend the policy which influenced that measure. They can see nothing in our advance to Kabul but a scheme of conquest, and no denial can convince them that we are not now the masters and the cont
rollers of the country.” When Burnes learned that the king’s name had been omitted from the Friday prayers in one of the mosques, he sent Mohan Lal to find out why. The mullah told Lal that Shah Shuja was not the true king according to Muslim law because he ruled only by the grace of foreign troops.

  A further and very real source of grievance against the king and the British occupiers was that the presence of large numbers of foreign troops had immediately sent up the prices of the daily necessities of life. In particular, the purchase by the army commissariat of large amounts of grain had soon pushed the price beyond what ordinary people could afford. Mohan Lal wrote that before long, “the cry of starvation was universal, and there were very many hardly able to procure a piece of bread even by begging in the streets.” People recalled how in the days of Dost Mohammed, price levels had been controlled. Nawab Jubbar Khan had ordered a butcher convicted of charging more than he should to be nailed by his ear to his butcher’s block so that “he was forced to stand there for a whole day, passing a stream of blood from his ear; and the meat was next morning so cheap as to be within the reach of all classes.” Shah Shuja himself took no such measures, although on one occasion Burnes on his own initiative ordered the distribution of a thousand loaves to a hungry crowd milling outside his house and pleading for help.

  And all the time, there was the specter of Dost Mohammed’s return. By early 1840 he was in Bokhara, having decided to throw himself on the unreliable mercy of its emir, Nasrullah Khan—the sinister young man whom eight years earlier Burnes had observed leaving the mosque in Bokhara. It was a dangerous move, and Dost Mohammed had only turned for help to wealthy Bokhara in desperation. However, he was no more deceived by Nasrullah’s true character than Burnes had been. When the emir urged him to bring his entire family with him to Bokhara, Dost Mohammed thanked him gracefully. However, he wrote secretly to Jubbar Khan, in whose charge he had left them, that he would rather see his family dead than sent to Bokhara and asked him instead to give them into the keeping of the British. Nasrullah, who had hoped to seize the family’s jewels, was enraged when they failed to arrive, and flung Dost Mohammed into jail. Also detained in Bokhara at that time was Colonel Charles Stoddart, sent in late 1838 by John McNeill to negotiate a treaty of friendship with Nasrullah.

  As 1840 wore on, the situation in Afghanistan worsened with a rash of uprisings and attacks. Baluchi tribesmen ambushed British troops on the road from Quetta to Kandahar, killing 148 men, while the western Ghilzais, who inhabited the country between Kandahar and Ghazni and had rebelled the previous autumn, again rose up, cutting the fragile communication lines. When Nott sent a force against them from Kandahar, the Ghilzais were only beaten off with difficulty. Later, after some negotiations, Macnaghten agreed to pay the chiefs an annual stipend in return for guarantees of their future good behavior. But most alarming of all was the news in the summer of 1840 that Dost Mohammed had left Bokhara and was raising a force ready to invade Afghanistan. This was what Macnaghten had feared, noting that “the Afghans are gunpowder, and the Dost is a lighted match.”

  Chapter Nine

  It requires the most cautious steering to refrain, on the one side from alarming popular prejudices, and on the other from leaving the Government in the same imbecile state in which we found it.

  —SIR WILLIAM MACNAGHTEN, 1840

  Accounts of dost Mohammed’s escape vary. Some suggest that the emir of Bokhara, bowing to pressure from other local rulers who believed Dost Mohammed the only leader capable of organizing resistance to the infidel British, allowed him to escape. However, Nasrullah was not a man given to rational decisions nor to being told what to do by other people. More likely, Dost Mohammed engineered his escape after first negotiating the release of Akbar Khan and another of his sons who had gone with him to Bokhara.

  Whatever really happened, as Surgeon Atkinson noted, news of Dost Mohammed’s escape “produced a deep sensation throughout Afghanistan, revived the spirit of the rebellious, and gave a new stimulus to our military operations against the anticipated movements of the restless Emir,” who now declared “his object to be a holy war, a crusade against the infidels,” and began recruiting troops paid for by taxes and customs dues that he began levying on caravans heading north from Kabul. Macnaghten and Burnes learned what had occurred on 17 July. Though most of Dost Mohammed’s extensive family was by now in their custody, they never expected this to inhibit the emir since the British were known for their scrupulous treatment of such “guests.” By contrast, it was common practice among the Afghans to punish a rebellious chief by giving any of his wives who were taken prisoner to mule drivers of the lowest and most despised tribe, the Hazaras.19

  On 6 August the first reports reached Kabul of serious disturbances to the north beyond Bamiyan, and the following day came news that Baluchi tribes commanded by Nussar Khan had besieged the fortress of Khelat in the southwest recently annexed to Shah Shuja’s kingdom. The young political officer William Loveday, who had donated his silk bedspread as a shroud for the dead khan, had surrendered the fort and was taken prisoner, beaten and abused as his captors paraded him near naked and in chains through the villages. Several months later British troops, pursuing Baluchi marauders, would discover his still-warm, naked and emaciated body chained to a camel pannier, “his head cut off, and his servant sitting crying at his feet.” By his side were two letters: one to his sister, bidding her adieu, and the other to a friend, which his captor had not given him time to complete before decapitating him.

  At around this time, intelligence arrived that to the west in Herat Yar Mohammed was planning to profit from the situation by attacking Kandahar, while to the southeast in the Sikh domains Ranjit Singh’s successors were obstructing the movement of British supplies intended for Afghanistan and plotting with Ghilzai chiefs, who had taken refuge with them, and with the Sindi rulers against the British. Macnaghten complained to a colleague, “Herat on the one side and the Sikhs on the other are terrible thorns—and I do not anticipate that we shall ever have fair play from either until we find ground and opportunity for coercing them into good behaviour.” Under pressure from all directions, he urged Auckland to restore Peshawar and the lands up to the Indus to Afghan rule—the very thing for which Dost Mohammed had asked and been refused on the grounds that it would alienate the now dead Ranjit Singh, and which, had it been granted, would have saved many thousands of lives.

  At this critical time Macnaghten also dispatched a long note to Auckland’s aide Henry Torrens in Calcutta, setting out the manifold problems that had confronted the British since arriving in Kabul, perhaps with the intention of fending off criticisms of his management of affairs thus far. “The Afghans are a nation of bigots,” he asserted. “Besides an intolerance of our creed [religion] there is an intolerance of our customs, and it behoves us therefore to be very wary in our attempts at innovation: nor ought it ever to be forgotten that a system, though excellent in itself, may not be good as applied to this country, nor though good, may it be such as to admit the due appreciation of its advantages. It requires the most cautious steering to refrain, on the one side from alarming popular prejudices, and on the other from leaving the Government in the same imbecile state in which we found it.”

  Macnaghten railed that “our enemies try to impress the people with a belief that we are the rulers of the country” and suggested it was difficult for Shah Shuja—though “there is not an abler or better man than himself in all his dominions”—to live up to his subjects’ expectations since, impoverished by the campaign to restore him, he lacked “the means either of rewarding his friends or conciliating his enemies.” Just as Western officials would do in regard to President Hamid Karzai more than 160 years later, he urged a publicly deferential approach toward Shah Shuja so that he should not appear to be just a puppet of the British, though adding that in private “I have never ceased to urge upon his Majesty the great importance of selecting a competent minister, of reforming his army, and of reducing his expendi
ture within the limits of his income.”

  However, before Torrens had time to receive and digest Macnaghten’s note, the local situation had deteriorated yet further. In early September, according to Atkinson, “information reached Kabul that the whole country between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus River had risen in favour of Dost Mohammed who, with his eldest son Akbar Khan, was advancing with a force of horsemen supplied by Uzbek tribal leaders towards Bamiyan.” The emir’s approach frightened a detachment of Shah Shuja’s levies into falling back from their remote northern outpost to Bamiyan, whence, on 7 September, Cotton hastily dispatched reinforcements under Colonel William Dennie, who had distinguished himself at the assault on Ghazni. Five days later, a depressed and anxious Macnaghten wrote to Auckland reporting Cotton’s view that unless the British army was instantly strengthened, “we cannot hold the country”—a view with which he strongly agreed. The menace of Dost Mohammed seemed only too real. Atkinson wrote that “so completely had the enemy closed up every source of intelligence and so difficult was it to collect the least exact information of his whereabouts at the time that Dost Mohammed actually slept about three miles from our camp at Bamiyan on the night of 17 September, and the first knowledge our troops had of his proximity was furnished next morning, by some hundreds of Uzbeks on the heights and others descending into the valley.”