Return of a King The Battle For Afghanistan (Dalrymple, William)

immediately after the death of the Prophet between those who recognised the authority of the Medinian Caliphs and those who followed the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali (Shi’at Ali means ‘the Party of Ali’ in Arabic). Though most Shi’ites live in Iran, there have always been a few in Afghanistan and India. shir maheh An Afghan freshwater river fish not dissimilar in taste to trout. sipahee The original Persian word for soldier, which was turned by British tongues into ‘sepoy’ and came to mean specifically an Indian soldier in the service of the East India Company. surwan A camel driver. syce A groom. talib A religious student. takht A seat or throne. thannah A police post or police station presided over by a thanadar. toman A Persian unit of currency. At the time of the First Afghan War five tomans were worth around £1. tykhana A cool underground room or network of cool rooms. ‘ulema In Arabic, this means ‘the ones possessing knowledge’, hence ‘the community of learned men’. In effect it means the Islamic clergy, the body of men with sufficient knowledge of the Quran, the Sunna and the Sharia to make decisions on matters of religion. The word ulema is an Arabic plural; the singular is alim, a learned man. vakil Representative, headman or ambassador. In modern usage the word usually means lawyer. waqf An inalienable religious endowment in Islamic law, usually a religious building or a plot of land reserved for Muslim religious or charitable purposes. wazir A councillor of the state, a minister. Yaghistan Pashtun notion of their territories as a ‘land of freedom and rebellion’.

zenana A harem, or women’s quarters. zikr A trance or ecstasy in a Sufi ceremony.

Shah Shuja, grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali and the head of the Sadozai clan, ruled the remains of his grandfather’s empire from 1803: ‘Our intention,’ he wrote, ‘was that from the moment of mounting the throne, we would so rule our subjects with justice and mercy, that they should live in happiness within the shade of our protecting wings.’ Within six years he had been defeated by his Barakzai enemies and had had to flee into exile in India.

Dost Mohammad was his father’s eighteenth son by a low-status wife. His rise to power was brought about by his own ruthlessness, efficiency and cunning. Dost Mohammad slowly increased his hold on power, until in 1835 he declared a jihad against the Sikhs and had himself formally anointed as Amir.

Akbar Khan, the most intelligent and effective of the sons of Dost Mohammad.

A family from Kafirstan (left); a Kharoti Ghilzai (right).

Pashtun horse traders Three courtly Afghan horsemen, as drawn by the artists of the Elphinstone Mission in 1809. ‘The Chaous Baushee in his dress of office’ ‘A Dooraunee Gentleman’

‘The Umla Baushi in his dress of office’

Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler and great enemy of Dost Mohammad who created a powerful kingdom in the Punjab. Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of the Punjab’, and his nobles. Two infantrymen from Ranjit Singh’s state of the art Fauj-i-Khas regiment, trained for him by ex- Napoleonic veterans.

Sikh horsemen. Sir Claude Wade, a Bengal-born Persian scholar, was one of the original spymasters in the Great Game – that grand contest of imperial competition, espionage and conquest that engaged Britain and Russia until the collapse of their respective Asian empires, and whose opening moves were being played out at this period.

Major Eldred Pottinger, nephew of Wade’s great rival Sir Henry Pottinger, was in Herat disguised as a Muslim horse trader when the Qajar Persian army attacked it. MacNeill, the Russophobe British ambassador in Teheran whose cable, ‘The Russians have formally opened their diplomatic intercourse with Kabul’ convinced the British that Dost Mohammad needed to be replaced. ‘Lord Auckland should now take a decided course,’ he advised, ‘and declare that he who is not with us is against us ... We must secure Afghanistan.’ Edward Law, 1st Earl of Ellenborough, was the first to turn anxiety about Russia into public policy. ‘Our policy in Asia must follow one course only,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘to limit the power of Russia.’

Mohan Lal Kashmiri, Alexander Burnes’s brilliant Indian assistant and intelligence chief, understood Afghanistan better than any of the British. As long as they followed his advice, all went well. Henry Rawlinson ran into Vitkevitch’s Cossacks by chance in the half-light of dawn while lost on the Persian-Afghan frontier. His record-breaking ride from Mashhad to Teheran brought news of the secret Russian mission to Afghanistan. He later become political agent in Kandahar during the British occupation. The Scottish agent of the Great Game, Alexander Burnes, in the field in Afghan dress. He always complained that this famous image did not look in the least like him.

Ivan Vitkevitch was a young Polish nobleman who, while in exile on the Cossack steppe, became fascinated with the Turkic culture of what is now Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. He was the perfect intelligence agent to take on Burnes, and after much shadowing of each other’s footsteps, the pair finally met for Christmas dinner in Kabul in 1838.

Alexander Burnes, the dashing Scottish intelligence officer sent out to gather information on the non- existent Russian threat to British interests in the east. When the book he wrote about his travels became a huge success, the Russians, who read it in French translation, were prompted to embark on intelligence gathering of their own, sending Vitkevitch first to Bukhara then Kabul. Hawkish paranoia in London thus ended up bringing into being the very threat it had most feared – and so was born the Great Game.

Sir William Hay Macnaghten, seen here with his famous blue-tinted spectacles. A bookish former judge from Ulster who had been promoted from his court room to run the Company’s bureaucracy, he became Lord Auckland’s Russophobe, protocol-obsessed Political Secretary. His jealousy of the fast- promoted Burnes led him to support the idea of replacing Dost Mohammad Khan with Shah Shuja, an idea Burnes strongly opposed. The two men, who never got on, became the dysfunctional centre of the British administration in Afghanistan.

George Eden, Lord Auckland, the British Governor General, a clever but complacent man with little knowledge of the region. Emily Eden, one of Lord Auckland’s unmarried sisters and the writer of some of the Raj’s most witty and waspish letters.

Reliant on the Russophobic filtering of intelligence by Wade and Macnaghten, Lord Auckland failed to heed the more accurate message from Burnes on the ground, and became convinced of Dost Mohammad’s anti-British position. ‘Poor, dear peaceful George has gone to war,’ wrote his sister Emily. ‘Rather an inconsistency in his character.’ In July 1838, Macnaghten visited Shah Shuja and his court in Ludhiana and curtly informed him that after thirty years in exile he was to be replaced on his throne in Kabul with the help of the British.

Shah Shuja’s court in exile. From left to right: Prince Timur, Shah Shuja, Prince Safdarjang and Mullah Shakur Ishaqzai. Two sepoys of the Bengal Native Infantry.

A Bajaur jezailchi. Kabul infantry.

Skinner’s Horse riding out to war. The British-Indian Army of the Indus make their way east...

‘Scenes from the line of march of a Bengal Regiment.’ This Victorian precursor of the strip cartoon probably shows the Army of the Indus heading through Sindh and approaching Afghanistan.

Entrance to the Bolan Pass, from Dadur. In spring 1839 a 12,000-strong British-Indian force, the Army of the Indus under Sir John Keane, forced the Bolan Pass and captured Kandahar. The invasion aimed to replace Dost Mohammad with Shah Shuja, who was considered to be more pro-British.

As they navigated the narrow passes of Baluchistan, the Army of the Indus was vulnerable to ambush by the Baluchis, who hid in the ravines; skirmishes and sniping attacks were common. ‘It was the mouth of hell,’ remembered the sepoy Sita Ram. ‘The Baluchis now began to harass us by night attacks and drove off long strings of our camels. They murdered everyone whenever they had the opportunity and rolled large boulders down the mountain sides.’

‘The Storming of Ghuznee.’ After forcing the Bolan Pass and capturing Kandahar, the Army of the Indus advanced on the formidable fortified walls of Ghazni, protected by thick, sixty-foot-high walls, a major problem for the British who had left their heavy artillery in Kandahar. Mohan Lal Kashmiri, Burnes’s invaluable intelligence chief, discovered that one of the gates was not bricked up and could be stormed if taken by surprise. In April 1839, the Army of the Indus captured the city of Kandahar without a fight. Here Shah Shuja held a durbar within sight of the dome of the tomb of his grandfather, Ahmad Shah Abdali.

‘The Durbar-Khaneh of Shah Shoojah-ool-Moolk at Kabul.’ After the seizure of Ghazni, Dost Mohammad fled Kabul and Shuja was re-installed as Shah in August 1839. This Mughal-style reception hall in the Bala Hisar was where he would hold his durbars, and where he irritated his nobles and his British officers by making them stand for hours. As the British officer-turned-artist, Lockyer Willis Hart, noted: ‘This form and ceremony, so hateful to the Affghans, was the King’s foible, and sometimes carried to an absurd extent.’

The Kabul Bazaar during the British occupation. The women of Kabul were to prove irresistible to the occupying British troops – with disastrous results.

‘The retinue of Shah Shooja-ool-Moolk’. This image includes Mohammad Shah Ghilzai, Akbar Khan’s father-in-law (on the left) who was bought over by the Anglo-Sadozai regime and was awarded with the fearsome ceremonial title of Chief Executioner. He would become one of the leading rebels and more than anyone else was responsible for the 1842 massacre of the retreating British garrison in the high Ghilzai passes. Rattray’s sketch of the rows of tents during the early days of the occupation before the building of the cantonments. The rock of the Bala Hisar rises to the rear left of the picture.

Amir Dost Mohammad surrenders to the British envoy Sir William Hay Macnaghten in November 1840. Macnaghten and his aides were out riding in the valley of Qila-Qazi near Kabul when the surrender occurred.

Afghan insurgents prepare an attack on the British cantonments outside Kabul. This image shows how the elegant colonial cantonments, with the Mission Compound on the left, were surrounded by hills on all sides and almost impossible to defend. Afghan foot soldiers of the insurrection against the British occupation fire their accurate long- barrelled jezails down onto the indefensible British position in the cantonment.

The elderly and ineffective gout-riddled British military commander in Afghanistan, General William Elphinstone, collapsed into nervous indecision at the outbreak of the uprising. Major-General Sir Robert Henry Sale, known to his men as ‘Fighting Bob’ for always throwing himself into the fiercest combat. Lady Sale, turbaned in captivity. Alexandrina Sturt (née Sale), taken hostage by Akbar Khan after the massacre in the Khord Kabul Pass.

Captain Colin Mackenzie commanded the defence of the commissariat fort against the Afghan insurgents. Both he and Lawrence became celebrities on their return and enjoyed posing in Afghan costume. The interior of the fort where the British hostages were kept.

Captain Skinner, here a hostage prior to the British withdrawal, would be killed in action at the Jagdalak Pass during the Retreat of 1842. Eyre, the artist, in self-portrait. George Lawrence

The last survivors of the 44th Foot were exposed and surrounded at dawn as they stood at the top of the hill of Gandamak. Overwhelmingly outnumbered, the troops made their last stand. They formed a square, and defended themselves, ‘driving the Affghans several times down the hill’ until they had exhausted the last of their rounds, and then fought on with their bayonets. Then, one by one, they were slaughtered. The British Garrison at Jalalabad, from the top turret of which an eagle-eyed staff officer was able to spot Dr Brydon’s approach and send out rescuers.

Lady Butler’s famous oil, The Remnants of an Army, which depicts Dr Brydon’s exhausted arrival at the walls of Jalalabad on his collapsing nag. General William Nott, one of the most senior Company generals in India, was a brilliant strategist and ever-loyal to his sepoys – ‘the fine manly soldiers’ to whom he was fiercely attached. He was to prove much the most effective of the British military commanders. In August 1842 he marched across Afghanistan, defeating all the forces sent against him, and arrived in Kabul on 17 September, two days after Pollock had retaken the city.

The meticulous but merciless Major-General George Pollock, commander of the Army of Retribution which laid waste to south-eastern Afghanistan and burned Kabul to the ground. The Army of Retribution arrived in Kabul in September 1842. After releasing the British hostages, they destroyed the great Char Chatta covered bazaar. A new mosque built in celebration of the British

defeat was also razed to the ground, and fires started across the city. ‘The cry arose that Cabul was given up to plunder...’ Dost Mohammad (seated, to the left of the ring of dancers) is received in Lahore, on his way back to Kabul. He was restored to the throne in 1842 following the final British withdrawal and the treacherous assassination of Shah Shuja by his own godson. He would reign until his death in 1863.

A Note on the Author William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, The Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughals and, most recently, Nine Lives. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d’Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone Crossword Award and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.

By the Same Author In Xanadu City of Djinns From the Holy Mountain The Age of Kali White Mughals The Last Mughal Nine Lives

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