1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  In 1797, the Durrani menace resurfaced. Zaman Shah, the grandson of Ahmed Shah Abdali, the Afghan raider and the Sikhs were fighting again. In the region between Sutlej and Jamuna Rivers, sensing a power vaccum, since their Ruler was busy fighting the Durrani menace, a British national, George Thomas, suddenly surfaced and started fighting the Sikhs. The British always relied upon trickery and deception, just like a predatory animal such as a coyote, and attacked the region in its hour of vurnability. George Thomas attacked Jind near Hansi with 5000 men, mostly mussalmans and 36 pieces of cannon. The British also played the religious card, cashing upon the sectarian religious conflict between Islam and Sikhs since their leader Teg Bahadur was executed by the Muslim Ruler Aurangzeb, Bibi Sahib Kaur, the sister of the Raja (Ruler) of Patiala, who was away fighting the Durani’s, had utter disdain and contempt for the British menace and came out instead and provided protection to her populace. She put on the fighting gear and entered the field of battle and put up the fight. Thomas was defeated in engagement with Jind chief near Sufidom in Cis-Sutlej region. The British had nothing to lose while the Sikhs had their survival at stake. The Sikh Towns and Villages were being sacked, their harvests destroyed and their population was in peril. The British tried to destroy by deception the Sikh strength while pretending to be neutral. In that atmosphere of utter chaos and anarchy, it was hard to determine who had the title to what. This state of affairs prevailed between the years 1802 to 1808 and in 1808, the British just walked into Delhi, the seat of the Mughal Authority, after every one was spent up fighting. The British then struck up a hypocritical strategic friendship with the Sikhs, who ruled territories west of Delhi and the British desperately needed the passage to march to Afghanistan. After the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1839, that friendship was sorely tested as the British attacked Punjab as well at a considerable cost as narrated in Punjab Wars.

  The British fought two major conflicts in their drive towards the west in their quest for a British Empire. One was the campaign in Afghanistan and the other with the Sikhs. Both those conflicts shaped the contours of that region, as well as, the future fate of the Empire. The current conflict in Afghanistan is a throw back from those times and the final outcome may be any one’s guess.

  The Afghan War:

  In their campaign of hubris, the British suffered a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and it destroyed their reputation as a superior power. Out of a force of fifteen thousand people, there was just a single survival of the much vaunted British assault force and paved the way for further defeats in the future.

  The British stock in trade for its expansion in India was treachery, bribery and bad faith. So far, it had not had any success in the battlefield for territorial gains and the advances made thus far were by trickery, treachery and unholy alliances which were thrown to the winds as soon as the political balance of power shifted in their favor. Britain tried to duplicate that strategy in Afghanistan but paid dearly. The specter of Russia meddling in the British sphere of influence in Central Asia was just a feigned hypocrisy. Was Central Asia Britain’s sphere of influence? Real reason for its foray into Afghanistan was to check mate Ranjit Singh, the lion of Punjab and to seal its hold in India for a long time to come. Through out, the British targeted Middle East, Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan as their strategic spheres of influence. The British protectorate in Afghanistan was therefore critical, as it was the gate way to Middle East as well as to India. At the same time, William Hay Macnaughten was working in secret to annex Afghanistan in the Political Department of the British East India Company in Calcutta. At the behest of Auckland, who was the governor in Calcutta, one Alexander Burns showed up in Kabul to make deals with Dost Mohammed, the Ruler, who had earlier lost the city of Peshawar to the Sikhs. But, first, the British decided to make Burns, who was a dreg of the society, into a knight. In Calcutta, they gave him the title of Sir. It is hard to say whether other Lords and Sirs in Calcutta, were real or made up, to craft an image of British imperial grandeur. Burns mission was to cook up treaties and agreements with Dost Mohummed, while the real mission was to bribe and debauch Dost Muhammed’s sirdars (generals) so that they would defect. Plassey all over again, and more need for Indian gold to bribe the Afghanistan Generals. Britain never sent any gold from England for those expansionary forays. In the meantime, Auckland and the Sikh monarch Ranjit Singh cut their own deals in the winter before and then in 1839 Ranjit Singh suddenly died and there was no need to check mate the Lion of Punjab. Britain however soon learnt that Afghanistan and Punjab were no Plassey.

  Between Calcutta and Afghanistan, lay formidable barriers. The British hegemony ended at the eastern bank of the Sutlej River in Punjab and beyond lay the formidable Sikh ruler, Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Besides the British, waiting in the wings at Ludhiana, on the Eastern bank of Sutlej River, was the deposed ruler Shah Shuja of Afghanistan. Britain entered into a tripartite treaty with Maharaja Ranjit Singh and Shah Shuja, whom Britain had sheltered on the eastern bank of the Sutlej River in Punjab so that they could use him at a future date. They had nothing to lose. Britain wanted a regime change in Afghanistan, echoes of today, as they wanted to plant a puppet in place of Dost Muhammed Khan, who was no friend of the British. The invasion of Afghanistan was not Ranjit Singh’s venture either and Shah Shuja could not raise a force to fight successfully with the forces of Dost Muhammad. The tripartite treaty therefore became a far more extensive operation than Britain had envisioned. Until that time, Britain either bribed its way to victory or let others do the fighting on its behalf. Ranjit Singh was a reluctant partner; he had no desire to do the fighting on Britain’s behalf and even kept total control on every pass into Afghanistan. Britain therefore could not use the shorter route to Afghanistan through Punjab. The governor-general Lord Auckland met Ranjitt Singh on equal terms at Ferozpore on November 30, to placate his feelings but to no avail. The main conquering army of Auckland therefore had to take the southern, treacherous route and was forced to march through the Sind dessert and Baluchistan. The geo-political trials and tribulations of that region are not any different today, than they were in those days.

  To confuse the forces of Dost Mohammed, the British raiders dispatched a small diversionary force led by Colonel Wade and Shahzada Timur through Khyber Pass, which was the northern route, inaccessible to the British. To make matters worse, a Russian agent Vickovich showed up in the court of Dost Muhammed, ringing alarm bells in the British camp and the Persians caught wind of the British moves and they went ahead and besieged Herat in 1837. To safeguard the southern route, the British also started developing strategic interests in Sind, to neutralize Ranjit Singh’s total strangle hold on the northern passage to Afghanistan and his sphere of influence in the north. Sind and Punjab are contiguous states, same rivers and same valleys, highways and byways except that Punjab is some five hundred miles in the north and Sind same distance in the south. Britain desperately needed the free passage to Afghanistan to safeguard its iron clad hold on India, which was providing her with immense riches and wealth. They wanted to set up a buffer state to thwart any Russian designs on India and also to destabilize Ranjit Singh. Britain did not want to make Ranjit Singh the sheet anchor of its expansion policy to the west. It was also known that Uzbekistan was bubbling oil out of the ground, so was Persia and the Middle East. Strangely, one English spy, named Eldred Pottinger, disguised as a Muslim holy man, the usual British strategy of trickery and deception, suddenly appeared in Herat, to neutralize the Persian and Russian interests. The geo political games and the politics of oil do not seem to be recent developments. Next to gold, oil is the other currency to measure the wealth of nations and the politics of oil have been played out long before the recent times.

  The Kabul monarchy was also helpless and mortified to find Ranjit Singh in possession of Peshawar; gateway to the Khyber Pass and Peshawar was the jugular vein of the Mohammad tribes and it was also a menace to the Kabul monarchs. Does Mohammed thus found himself threatened
not by one foe, but by the British, by Shah Shuja the British lackie and also by Ranjit Singh and he therefore gave the coming battle the color of Jihad, and sought help from the surrounding Muslim territories. So, various denominations of mussalmans from Hindu Kush, Kohistan and rugged Ghilzayes, Oozbegs, sleek Kuzzilbashes, horsemen and footmen all came rushing in to the aid of Dost Mohammed. The troops assembled by Dost Mohammed totaled over 40,000 and he had probably forty guns with enough ammunition. He had enough cash to pay the troops and other mercenaries who came to his aid. He paid the troops in advance to ensure their loyalty and he had enough grain and supplies to outlast any campaign of siege.

  Having cut various deals, the British agents in Calcutta also put together an Indian army and started marching towards Afghanistan with ten thousand strong force of the Bengal army. They also called forces from their Bombay Presidency. They also told Shah Shujah, the former ruler of Afghanistan, who was camping on the eastern Banks of the Sutlej river, to bring his followers if he wanted any share of the spoils and he was able to marshal together a similar force to the British. For the southern route, which passed through the Sind desert, a big outlay in camels was necessary to ferry the troops and supplies and the British corralled in excess of twenty five thousand camels in Bengal before the march started. It was an army of wives and mistresses, their eau de cologne and perfumes, an army of servants and maids, their cricket bats and polo mallets and camel full of cigars and body oils. unaware of the dangers ahead. There was a sense of adventure and holiday. They thought it was a trip to Shangri-La but soon became a grave yard for all except one, who survived heroically to tell the tale.

  The marching British army faced reverses, they faced a lot of casualties in the Sind Desert and many camels died. The Amir of Sind did not put up the fight and gave the British a safe passage, he was bribed and Ranjit Singh did not live to see the outcome either, he died on June 27, 1839 but left behind a fertile ground for the British to wreck their havoc.

  Dost Mohammed Khan did not put up the fight either; instead he marched off to wards Hindu Kush region with his son Akbar and loyal chiefs to wait for another day. Many other chiefs and sardars had defected, as Burns had done a good job of bribing the chiefs to smoothen the British onslaught. Shah Shuja marched into Bala Hisar, the Afghani palace, and issued the royal herald that anyone dared come towards the palace will be embowelled alive. He however offered to mediate on behalf of the British with the old regime and the rebellious Ghilzai tribes who controlled the egress routes from the various passes. The British did not take his offer and decided to settle down in Afghanistan and tried to spread anarchy. The British did not understand the local tribes, their culture and their history and paid dearly for that ignorance. As a primer on recent history, the five royal descendants of Dost Mohammed Khan, ruled Afghanistan in the twentieth century, three were assassinated. The last, King Zahir Shah went into exile while holidaying in Italy, when he was ousted in a coup lead by his cousin. Zahir Shah returned to Afghanistan as ‘the father of the nation” after the fall of the Taliban.

  The British assumed that they were the conquerors of Afghanistan but the events proved that they were very conceited, arrogant and presumptuous. They settled down to having a good time, the lush life style, the orchards and the gardens were very different from their stale beer and cold herrings. Their worst discomfort was shortage of cigars and wine. They found the local women very attractive and as the final act of hubris they did not mind their manners. Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king, in 300 B.C. took the native Bulkh princess Roxanne, as his wife. The hilly country side and the women of the region vied with each other for beauty. The mountain landscape was beautiful with profuse abundance of flowers, orchards, vineyards, fruits and innumerable brooks and the British got lost in that reverie. Finally, when the reality dawned upon them, they tried to do what they did in Bengal that was to renege on the deals they made and play very smart. They reneged on the deals with the Nawab and the tribal chiefs, reneged on the monies they had agreed to pay. Akbar Khan, the son of Dost Mohammed, raised his standard at Bamian and other chiefs stirred rebellion in Kabul and the British got scared and found them defenseless and vulnerable.

  In arrogance, Macnaughten decided to leave for India, when he found that the Ghilzai tribes had blocked the passes and he was trapped. The British forces tried to crush the tribal revolt but failed. Burns offered ever larger sums of money for safe release and begged for mercy. The local militia dragged Sir Burns, his brother and scores of his soldiers and hacked them to pieces. As was their habit, the British soldiers had made a triangular cantonment, surrounded by a wall and a shallow ditch and all the five thousand British soldiers, their families and the Indian soldiers were trapped inside and waited. McNaughton and his army chiefs had no answer against the descendants of Timur, they had the history of conquests to their credit; Babur, the desendant of Timur started the Mughal dynasty in India and they followed a code of honor, which the British violated. Macnaughten accompanied by several of his soldiers went to see Akbar Khan, the son of Dost Mohamme Khan and made a peace offering. He thought that he could trick them, McNaughton and his soldiers were hacked to pieces; his severed head paraded in the street of Kabul and his torso was hung in the Bazaar of Ali Mardan Khan. Only one left alive was Major General William Elphinston of Waterloo fame. He was the commander of the Kabul garrison and he surrendered to Akbar Ali Khan. The British forces were disarmed, their weapons and their treasury were taken over and they were allowed to leave. All fifteen thousand soldiers, their families departed in the middle of winter and they had to cross the snowy passes.

  The Ghilzais tribe had a score to settle too and they fired on the fleeing soldiers. The weather did not help either, the fleeing soldiers abandoned the tents, baggage and ammunition; every man was unto himself and they panicked. Those who did not freeze to death were picked up by the snipers. A week later on January 13, 1842 a lone figure was spotted in Jalalabad on a limply horse. His name was Dr. William Brydon, an assistant British army surgeon, and he was the sole survivor of the much-vaunted British assault force, Brydon survived because he deserted the assault force and took a separate route to safety out of Afghanistan. Shah Shuja did not live to enjoy the victory either. He was cut down by his own kith. He paid the price of age-old Muslim succession fights.

  The Afghan regime got a fresh lease of life with the defeat of the British which also paved the way for Dost Mohammed to return to Kabul. The Afghan regime saw a changed landscape with the death of Ranjit Singh, its strongest foe on the eastern border. In 1838, Dost Muhammad was out gunned, out manned and out maneuvered by Ranjit Singh’s forces and Dost Mohammed was free to cut new deals with the British. For Dost Mohammed dealing with the British was a different game. It was not the measure of each other‘s strength, but the skill in cunningness and craftiness and each was adept at it. The British forces also were smarting over the humiliating defeat and wasted no time to plan another attack and avenge the crushing defeat. For any successful campaign, the British needed the safe passage through the northern route, so they invoked the treaty obligation which Ranjit Singh had agreed with the British prior to the Anglo- Afghan war. Ranjit Singh, unfortunately, left behind a very trying situation. The Sikh Durbar (parliament) had to yield to the British demand because of the tripartite treaty. The Anglo-Afghan war therefore weakened the Khalsa (Ranjit Singh’s regime). The real basis of the alliance was strategic self-interest and Britain gained from that alliance. Ranjit Singh, on the other hand was out smarted by the British.

  Josiah Harlan, a Quaker from Pennsylvania, witnessed the Afghanistan war. He was in the employment of Ranjit Singh, after offending Ranjit Singh, Harlan took up employment with Dost Mohammed Khan in Afghanistan and commanded his army. Harlan left Afghanistan after Dost Mohammed decided to flee instead of putting up a fight. Eventually, Harlan reached back in United States and in 1842 published “A Memoir of India and Avghanistaun”. In which he denounced the British adventure in Afghanis
tan, but that is another story.

  The English looked to nothing but their own interests and bid their time the fear of Russian invasion obsessed Britain and the British were determined to control Afghanistan and keep Russia as far away from India as possible. After all, Britain was raking in by some reckoning, as much as £ fifty million annually from India (see next chapter, ‘the Century of Miracles ) and they wanted a true barrier to protect the Indian Empire which had given Britain a true standing in the world and uplifted its population from poverty and impoverishment. They wanted Afghanistan a buffer state. Russians ridiculed the British perpetual sate of terror on the Indian frontier. For Britain, it was the survival of the Empire. The existence of the Empire depended on India; India was the ‘be all and end all’ of the British Empire.

  So, Britain signed a treaty with Dost Muhammad in 1857, promised him subsidies and India bankrolled the money. This treaty could not be timelier. Britain had nothing else to offer Dost Mohammed, it was just a Treaty of Friendship, but for Britain, it was God sent. This treaty coincided with the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Dost Mohammed fulfilled his part of the bargain; Dost’s militia, the fierce frontier Pashtuns, enlisted in the British militia, marched to Delhi and helped crush the Indian mutiny and saved the British Empire., Dost Muhammad died in 1863 and so did the Anglo- Afghan detente..

  The Second Afghan War:

  The First Afghan War was an unfinished business for Britain. Besides Britain itched for taking revenge for the humiliating defeat. The Afghans were a fiercely independent people and they found the presence of British-Indian forces at their doorstep a threat to their sovereignty. After the annexation of Punjab, (The Punjab War follows next), the British forces set up their garrison at Peshawar, the gateway to Khyber Pass and the road to Afghanistan and Central Asia. Britain wanted to use Afghanistan as a guardian outpost for the defense of their possession in India. Perfect recipe for conflict and India was going to pay for it once again in blood and money. It was very easy for Britain to jump to rabid over estimation of Russia’s threat as it cost them nothing. Britain was suffering from paranoia. May be Whitehall would have been more thoughtful if it were going to spill its own blood and use her own money. To provoke the conflict with Afghanistan, the British proposed to send a resident at Kabul, Dost Mohammed’s successor, Sher Ali, baulked. The British tactics were no secret by then. The British Residents were always spies and political agents, whose main aim was to spread anarchy and collect intelligence for future attacks. They did that for about a hundred years and many local rulers died at a very critical juncture