by Sarah Chayes
The abrupt tacking back and forth between these two policies—the “occasional fits and changes” that occurred every time one party lost an election and the other gained power—made the British rather difficult for their Afghan interlocutors to read. This I gathered from my first good primary source for the period: more memoirs, dictated by the late nineteenth-century Afghan amir quoted above: Abd ar-Rahman Khan. He was to play a decisive role in the events, and in the tracing of the famous Durand Line.
Regarding the reliability of British promises, this Amir Abd ar-Rahman once remarked acidly to a British viceroy of India: “I am sorry that I am not a prophet, neither am I inspired to know whether at some future time, if I am in trouble, a Liberal or Conservative Government will be in power.” Abd ar-Rahman found it a brilliant feature of the British constitution that it always provided for “one party or another to put the blame upon when mistakes are made.”3
The first really appalling mistake the British made in Afghanistan was to interfere directly in the old rivalry between the Popalzai and Barakzai tribes—the same two tribes that vied for power at the founding jirga, the same tribes whose rivalry I would bear witness to so many years later.
When Dost Muhammad, the first Barakzai to displace the founding Popalzai dynasty on the Afghan throne, agreed to meet a Russian envoy in Kabul in 1838, Britain decided to remove and replace him. Though Afghanistan was nominally independent, the overwhelming firepower of neighboring British India made such a decision seem feasible to politicians and bureaucrats in London and the Indian capital of Calcutta. To take Dost Muhammad’s place, the British chose an aging and repudiated member of the Popalzai house, an exiled grandson of Afghan founding father Ahmad Shah. The British decided to put him back on the throne he had occupied some three decades earlier. But doing so, and maintaining him there, required the deployment of a garrison in Kabul. This debauched amir emphatically did not qualify as a locally acceptable ruler. He was seen by Afghans as despicably beholden to the English, and their move to install him as a poorly disguised effort to take over the country.
Underestimating Afghan hostility, the British underestimated the type of investment that would be required to control Afghanistan through their puppet amir. This mistake has been repeated by powerful foreign meddlers in small countries, right down to the United States in the twenty-first century—before my eyes in Iraq, for example.
The British army that escorted the new amir into Afghanistan reached Kabul fantastically encumbered: more servants rode with it than soldiers; the camel train stretched for miles. One account describes a pack of foxhounds among the baggage, and saddlebags straining with angular bulges from crates and crates of cigars.4 This supporting force was stationed on the outskirts of Kabul, billeted in absurdly exposed barracks: a mile from town, dominated by hills and separated from its own food storehouse.
It did not take long for the disgruntled Afghans, bitterly resentful of the puppet amir and his vast foreign army, to begin exploiting the British position. By late fall 1841, two British envoys lay hacked to pieces in the Kabul bazaar and the hills about the garrison bristled with Afghan fighters and their long rifles, picking off Redcoats who risked a sortie. Without reinforcements from a British contingent based in Kandahar, the Kabul garrison had no hope. A surrender was negotiated with Dost Muhammad’s son, who was leading the revolt. It stipulated the total withdrawal of foreign troops from Kabul. The Army of the Indus, the fighting force of the richest and most powerful empire on earth, picked its freezing and starving way up through the hills toward the breathtaking passes on the road that led eastward to Jalalabad and India beyond. There, in those passes, the troop was cut to pieces, despite the treaty. Only a single British fighting man survived, and a few hundred camp followers who were taken prisoner. The force of mighty Britain had been annihilated by a bunch of Afghan villagers.
This exchange was dubbed the first Anglo-Afghan war. It was to burn a sizzling scar into the flesh of British history. Like the story of the founding jirga, the tale of it has become a legend for Afghans, to whom it serves as a kind of second founding myth. For the British, it became a painful object lesson in how, in global politics as well as the Bible, pride goeth before a fall. Coming a decade before a bitter and savagely bloody mutiny and uprising in India, the slaughter in the Afghan highlands marked the beginning of Britain’s inexorable retreat from empire, which culminated a century later in independence movements across the globe.
The first Anglo-Afghan war has also sent a chilling warning to all other Western powers that have considered following Britain’s footsteps into Afghanistan. It is from this story more than any other that the legend of Afghan invincibility was born.
The Barakzai amir whom the British had tried to remove in the first place, Dost Muhammad, returned to Afghanistan. And the British—displaying as much facility for shifting alliances as the Afghans themselves—entered into an agreement with him. Under its terms, he would let the British viceroy in India run his foreign policy in return for a yearly subsidy.
A rough peace was thus achieved for some decades. During this time, the frontiers of Afghanistan were never clearly defined. To the south and east, they faded into a kind of tribal belt—which even Afghanistan’s rulers called a yaghestan—separating their kingdom from the principalities to its south, which were tributaries of British-held India. To the north and west, Afghan lands were subject to repeated attacks from expanding Russia, which had swallowed vast tracts of steppe country, snapped up ancient silk road capitals, and was nipping at the fringes of Afghanistan.
The peace with India was broken, inevitably, by a second Anglo-Afghan war. It erupted in 1878, again because the reigning amir had had the temerity to receive a Russian delegation. Britain had failed in its promise to defend Afghanistan from its giant northern neighbor, and the amir felt he had to open talks with the Russians. A three-pronged British invasion to punish him achieved an easy initial military victory, and the masters of India, for a second time, installed a puppet on the Afghan throne.
Even more openly than before, the British action aimed to move the border of India upward to the line running between Kandahar and Kabul. The Tory hawks were in power, and they wanted to advance toward advancing Russia.
And so the British forced upon their new pet amir the Treaty of Gandomak. This was the first legal document to officially sign away swathes of land the Afghans had considered theirs for time out of mind. Quetta and Peshawar, those key outposts on the two roads piercing Afghanistan, went to the British—along with tens of thousands of Pashtun tribesmen who, ethnically anyway, belonged with their brethren in Afghanistan.
“Though England does not want any piece of Afghanistan,” Amir Abd ar-Rahman noted wryly in his autobiography, “still she never loses a chance of getting one!”5
Having signed this humiliating treaty, and after widespread Afghan mutinies against its terms and vicious retaliation by the British, the puppet amir resigned. Suddenly, Afghanistan had transformed itself back into Yaghestan. There was no interlocutor, no ruler, no one for the British to treat with. Tribesmen withdrew their recognition of the Treaty of Gandomak and their nominal submission to the British Crown, bestowing their loyalty on one or another scion of the ruling Barakzai house. “You broke it; you own it,” the Afghan tribes might as well have been chanting to the muscle-bound British. There was no way for Britain to control the country in this condition except by moving in en masse and colonizing it. And this they were not going to do.6 Afghanistan defeated the British, as it would the Soviets a hundred years later, by dissolving.7
Enter, at this juncture, Abd ar-Rahman Khan, the amir quoted above, who, apart from graciously leaving behind his astute autobiographies, one in Persian and another in English, was perhaps the most brilliant statesman ever to rule Afghanistan. He had spent the previous decade in exile as the guest of the Russians. At this propitious moment, they propelled him back across the border to his homeland. But Abd Ar-Rahman Khan would disappoint any i
n Moscow who may have hoped they had bought his allegiance by financing his exile. More than any other ruler, he would come to personify Afghanistan’s fierce and cleverly preserved independence from both of her powerful neighbors.
British policy at this point called for a partition of the country, with one amir in Kabul and another in Kandahar. In fact, some British experts thought Kabul was a military irrelevance anyway, and Kandahar was the key defensive position.8 Many Tories urged the course of annexing Kandahar outright, adding it to the Indian dominions, and leaving Kabul to a “friendly” amir. But at that moment, though there were many fractious rivals, there was no obvious candidate for the position.
This is why Abd Ar-Rahman’s sudden appearance was so well timed. Though somewhat uneasy about his links to Russia, the stymied British were relieved to offer him Kabul. Kandahar they planned to hold apart.
In his autobiography, Abd ar-Rahman has this to say about the shattered land he was poised to take in hand: “The weakness of the kingdom of Afghanistan was so great that whenever the King went a few miles out of his capital, he used to find some one else King on his return.”9 The shrewd amir responded to the British offer of Kabul by playing hard to get. His aim was to consolidate some local support before accepting anointment from the foreigners, and at the same time to make himself desirable to them so as to improve—however slightly—his bargaining position. Though too weak in guns, treasure, and political legitimacy to reject the partition of Afghanistan at that point, he hoped to be able to reverse it one day. For, he wrote, “The kingdom of Kabul, without Kandahar, was like a head without a nose.”10
The art of patience. This was what Abd ar-Rahman Khan mastered with such genius: the ability to assess lucidly his own frailties and flex with them, while waiting till the course of events helped overcome them. “A great ruler and a great man,” concluded Sir H. Mortimer Durand, the envoy who finally did negotiate the Indo-Afghan border with him a decade later.11 Durand’s superior, the viceroy of India, called Abd ar-Rahman “a strange, strong creature.”12
Looking thoughtfully at the camera, he sat for a photograph in the 1870s, his feet in tall leather riding boots resting on a curved footstool, a walking stick in his hands, his face displaying “more roundness of contour than is customary,” as another British officer put it, “while a certain heaviness of limb gave little indication of his well-known active habits.”13
Amir Abd ar-Rahman deeply impressed Sir Mortimer Durand, who sat opposite him for the historic boundary parlays. Though “not altogether easy to deal with,” he had a head for business, Durand said; he spoke with a directness unusual to the region, and conducted negotiations in all their details himself, dispensing with interpreters—even making Durand address Afghan tribal elders in his imperfect Persian, rather than through an intermediary. He was dignified but not ostentatious, resolute, true to his word, and forward thinking. Durand’s description of his boisterous sense of humor brings the amir right to life: “He had a way of making a joke and looking at you with eyes and mouth open, to see if you had caught it, and then going into a roar of laughter, which was very infectious.”14
To the British peer, “there was something which went to one’s heart about the man, standing there between England and Russia, playing his lone hand.”15
One of the best examples of Abd ar-Rahman’s flair for turning weaknesses to advantage in this nerve-racking game came immediately after his inauguration as amir of Kabul, in 1880. He allowed the British to administer a thrashing to the scion of another noble house, his main rival for control of Afghanistan. The rival, Ayyub Khan, was popular, and it would not have been good policy, imagewise, for Abd ar-Rahman to take him on himself. Doing it for him, the British put Abd ar-Rahman on the road to reuniting Afghanistan—including coveted Kandahar—under his own rule.
For Kandahar is where the action took place.
Afghanistan was still Yaghestan at this point. Britain’s puppet amir had resigned after signing the hated Treaty of Gandomak, the provinces were in open revolt; the British had only just selected Abd ar-Rahman from among a handful of potential claimants to the throne in Kabul. A few weeks before his inauguration, in July 1880, Ayyub Khan, based in Herat, marched toward Kandahar to attack a small British garrison that was holding the city for the crown. By rejecting British interference and ejecting Abd ar-Rahman as its apparent instrument, this amir determined to take the political as well as the military offensive.
Browsing in the stacks on the fifth floor of my university library, in the section marked “Ind” for India, I fell upon an old collection of letters—binding cracked, chips of pages sifting to the floor—written by British officers who were part of the Kandahar garrison. The letters provide a priceless picture of the events that the correspondents’ well-trained powers of observation, together with their epistolary habits, enliven so vividly that reading their letters feels like watching a film.
The Kandahar these British officers depict, a little before the turn of the twentieth century, is rather different from the one I came to know. For starters, the place is positively lush. The officers describe mango and coconut groves, no less, where today trees of any kind stick up wan and lonely like spindly aberrations. “On three sides of our city we have smiling villages, clustering orchards, gardens, vineyards, cornfields, and groves of palm.”16 Apparently, the savage drought that accompanied Taliban rule in the 1990s was only a sort of meteorological exclamation point, punctuating a long, gradual drying out of Kandahar’s oasis.
The city itself resembled Ahmad Shah Durrani’s eighteenth-century capital more closely than it does today. Great battlements, thirty feet high and studded with sixty-two towers, surrounded it. The British officers, with an eye toward defense, found this wall “poor and weak,” since it was made only of leprous dry brick and rubble with no stone revetments, and the gates were of “rotten timber,” which would have been vulnerable to a medieval battering ram.17 Swilling down double rations of beer in the heat, the British toiled during that spring of 1880 to reinforce the defenses.
These walls are all gone now, and as the city has grown up around it, the area they once bounded has shrunk in relative size to a mere neighborhood of Kandahar. It is now the teeming and lively bazaar where my red pickup truck can scarcely squeeze by the vegetable carts and rickshaws and loaded donkeys. Still, the traces of the old walls linger in the names of certain street corners: Herat Gate, where no sign of a gate remains, just the mouth of a narrow street lined with cloth merchants’ stalls; Kabul Gate, on the other side of the bazaar; or Shkarpur Gate, facing the old road south toward India, where caravans bearing precious goods for Safavi Persia used to pull to a halt, camels roaring throaty indignation.
Like the U.S. military base today, out at the airport, the British cantonment was well outside the nineteenth-century town, to the west, right about where the younger Karzai brother’s house now stands. Kandaharis call the neighborhood Shahr-i Naw, New Town.
As the dates on the officers’ letters enter the month of June 1880, foreboding starts seeping in. The writers know Ayyub Khan, in Herat, is gathering a force to march against them, and they feel undermanned and vulnerable. “We are beyond all question too small a garrison for the size of the defenses,” one comments.18 Meanwhile, rumors about the impending clash fan skittishness among the Kandaharis. The officers describe the “consternation” of friendly Afghan merchants, and families packing their things and fleeing the city. The Kandaharis’ fear is contagious. It darkens the mood of the bluff British officers.
On July 2, a foot and horse contingent is sent out to try to block Ayyub’s force before it reaches Kandahar from Herat. The British plan to meet up with a friendly Afghan commander a little way outside Kandahar and, together with his men, take on the hostile Ayyub.
In those days, the British imperial army was not even half British; the small force included such units as the Third Bombay Light Cavalry and the Sind Horse. For little more than 700 Englishmen, there were close to 2,0
00 Indian troops.19 One of their commanders admires them for almost two pages: “splendid-looking specimens of the race from which they came; long-limbed, lean and sinewy…and a muscle well developed by constant lance and sword exercise.”20 The officer appraises their mounts and horse-manship with a practiced eye, and points out some of the advantages of their equipment over that designed in London:
[The] cumbersome sabers, that won’t cut and cannot point, with their heavy steel scabbards, are not to be compared with the native tulwar, whose keen, razor-like edge enables its owner to lop off a head or a limb as easily as cutting a cabbage. Our English regulation scabbards…are heavy, difficult to clean, glisten in the sun and moonlight…while they make such a rattle that a secret reconnaissance with them is impossible.21
Reading these comments, I thought of the complaints of British soldiers in Kosovo in 1999, about their shoddy standard-issue rifle. Or the American troops in Iraq, driving Humvees with cloth doors. I wondered why such enormously rich nations, which pour money into their defense budgets, can never seem to fit out their soldiers in the field properly.
Along with the cavalry and foot soldiers, the retinue included bullocks and pack mules, camels howling over the high-pitched curses of their Indian drivers, wood-wheeled artillery pieces lurching over the uneven ground, a field hospital, a quartermaster, and cooking gear. This crowd advanced at about two miles an hour, never fully taming its own chaos, while the cavalry units grew daily more restive. One officer vowed he would take three days’ fighting over twenty-four hours’ marching any time.22
The first clash took place on the Helmand River, a mighty waterway that is to this day the throbbing artery of southern Afghanistan.
