The French, weakened in the Middle East, as were the British, by pressures to economize and demobilize, were similarly defied by Arab politicians, against whom they finally went to war in Syria. Russia, defeated in the war and crippled by revolutions and civil war, also faced Moslem revolts and independence movements in Central Asia, her domain in the Middle East. But both the French and Russians, instead of finding common cause with Britain, intrigued to undermine her position in the Middle East, thus confusing the issue by making it plausible to suppose that they were causing (rather than merely adding to) Britain’s difficulties.
In retrospect, one sees Britain undergoing a time of troubles everywhere in the Middle East between 1919 and 1921; but it was not experienced that way, at least not in the beginning. Rioting in Egypt in 1919, for example, was seen as an Egyptian law and order problem that was then brought under control; it was not seen as a prelude to the riots that broke out in Palestine in the spring of the next year or to the revolt that spread in Iraq as spring gave way to summer. So the chapters that follow tell of the successive Middle Eastern challenges to Britain—and to the French, to whom Britain had yielded Syria—roughly in the order that they occurred, and as though they amounted merely to one separate set of difficulties after another.
Though they were not perceived at the time as coming together to constitute one large overall event, the individual intrigues and revolts against British rule were believed by a great many British officials to be instigated by a single group of conspirators; and presently it will be seen who these were believed to be. Whether the disorders and uprisings in the Middle East were indeed planned and coordinated or, on the contrary, sporadic, was a principal question confronting the Lloyd George government as the extent of the challenge to British rule in the Middle East emerged in 1919 and 1920 and stood revealed to a disenchanted British public, press, and Parliament by 1921.
44
EGYPT: THE WINTER OF 1918–1919
The first postwar challenge to Britain’s Middle Eastern position was in Egypt, the Arabic-speaking country that she had ruled “temporarily” for decades, and whose British administrators had persuaded themselves at the outset that the Arabic-speaking peoples preferred British rule to any other. But Britain had repeatedly promised Egypt her independence and it was not unreasonable for Egyptian politicians to have believed the pledges, and thus to suppose that once the war was brought to a successful conclusion, Britain might agree to some sort of timetable leading to eventual Egyptian independence.* At least one group of local politicians proposed to take Britain at her word. On 13 November 1918, two weeks after the Ottoman surrender aboard the Agamemnon, a delegation of out-of-office Egyptian political figures was granted an interview with Sir Reginald Wingate, the British High Commissioner in Cairo. The delegation had been formed and was led by Saad Zaghlul, a lawyer of about sixty, a former judge, administrator, Minister of Education, and Minister of Justice, and a leader of the Legislative Assembly, which the British had prorogued indefinitely at the beginning of the war. Zaghlul explained to Wingate that he had requested the interview in the expectation that martial law and the protectorate would soon be abolished, now that the war was over. Indicating that he expected Britain to keep her promise to grant Egypt independence, Zaghlul asked that Egypt should be heard by the Allies during their peace negotiations. He also asked to go to London to negotiate the promised changes in Egypt’s political status.
Neither negotiations nor independence were what British officials had in mind at the time. A guide to their thinking was provided by a British official’s account, some time later, of the meeting with Zaghlul. “On Nov. 13 he paid a visit to the High Commissioner and expressed the desire to go to London to put forward a programme of complete autonomy, a proposal which was rejected as calculated to serve no good object.”2
Receiving no encouragement from Wingate, Zaghlul began that same day to try to force the issue. Perhaps acting with the secret support of the new Egyptian Sultan, Ahmed Fuad,* he set out to organize a delegation that could win broad support from the groups and classes within Egypt whose interests he aspired to represent; which, in turn, drove rival political figures to form and head delegations of their own. On 17 November 1918 Wingate cabled the Foreign Secretary that Egyptian politicians were calling for a “programme of complete autonomy” that he had warned them against agitation; but that the Sultan and his ministers did not feel strong enough to oppose nationalist demands.3 Indeed the Sultan’s ministers, not wanting to be viewed as Britain’s nominees, claimed that they would refuse to lead a delegation abroad unless Zaghlul and his colleagues were also allowed to proceed to Europe. In the event, Britain did not allow any delegation to go either to London or to Paris during 1918.
In January 1919, as the opening date of the Peace Conference approached, Zaghlul and his Wafd (“Delegation”) Party stepped up their activities. They were indignant to learn, on 12 January, that a delegation from Syria would be allowed to attend the Peace Conference. At a so-called General Congress of the Wafd held the next day in the home of one of its members, Zaghlul claimed the same right for Egypt, and spoke in favor of independence. Thereafter the British administration prevented Zaghlul from speaking in public; whereupon the Sultan’s ministers resigned rather than lead a delegation to Europe while Zaghlul was being silenced. The British military authorities then arrested Zaghlul and three of his principal colleagues, and, on 9 March, deported them to Malta.
A wave of demonstrations and strikes swept the country. The British authorities were taken by surprise. The cables sent from Cairo to London at the time suggest that the Residency had little understanding of what had been happening in Egypt during the wartime years.4 It was unaware of the implications of the profound social and economic changes brought about by the war: the new classes and ambitions that had emerged, the new interests, the new resentments, and the new sources of discord and disaffection.
The Residency did know, though, that there were many Egyptians who would have been happy to see Britain lose the war against Turkey. Wingate, Clayton, and their associates, in arguing unsuccessfully that Britain ought to annex Egypt and rule the country directly, had pointed out some of the dangers that might arise if such people took control of Egypt’s destinies. Lieutenant-Commander Hogarth of the Arab Bureau, in a memorandum of 22 July 1917 supporting Clayton’s annexation proposal, had claimed that Egypt “is at present potentially an enemy country” and that the danger could be averted only by Britain’s taking responsibility for the reorganization of Egyptian society.5
Within the murky world of Egyptian politics, the new Sultan, the Sultan’s ministers, and such opposition leaders as Zaghlul, all were maneuvering, sometimes for and sometimes against one another, under the cover of their respective nationalist proposals, to win the support of the various disaffected groups within the Egyptian economy and Egyptian society. Yet of these currents, undermining the structure of the protectorate and threatening one day to sweep it away, the British authorities evinced little awareness. Zaghlul was seen as a mere disgruntled office-seeker, using his political demands as leverage to obtain a government job. According to the Residency in 1917, “He is now getting old and probably desires an income.”6 Yet within a week of his arrest and deportation, demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, and other towns spread to the Delta, led to violence, and were followed by massive strikes. Railroad lines were torn up in key places, in accord, ironically, with a British wartime plan to disrupt the country in the event of an Ottoman invasion. Transport workers struck. On 16 March 1919, a week after Zaghlul’s deportation, Cairo’s railroad and telegraph communications with both the Delta and Upper Egypt were cut, while foreign colonies were besieged. The flames of disorder raged out of control.
Widespread attacks on British military personnel culminated on 18 March in the murder of eight of them—two officers, five soldiers, and an inspector of prisons—on a train from Aswan to Cairo. The High Commissioner’s administration reported that it retain
ed “no means of regaining control in Upper Egypt, from whence there is practically no news.”7 According to a recent account, the upheaval “seemed likely for a moment to lead to a revolt on a scale unparalleled in the Eastern Empire since the Indian Mutiny.”8 These fears were exaggerated—but they were sincerely felt and widely held.
What the High Commissioner’s office in the Residency found so shocking in the rebellion was its “Bolshevik tendency,” and also that the “present movement in Egypt is national in the full sense of the word. It has now the sympathy of all classes and creeds…”9 Copts demonstrated alongside Moslems. Theological students demonstrated alongside students from the secular schools. Women, albeit only from the upper classes, demonstrated alongside men.10 What especially unnerved the British authorities was the involvement of the peasantry in the countryside—the placid masses on whose inertia they had counted. Unnerving, too, was the subsequent discovery that the uprising was organized. Suddenly the British were faced with a local politician who appeared to have a national following—which surprised them and may have surprised him, too.
General Allenby, who was quickly sent out to deal with the situation, arrived in Cairo on 25 March and declared his intention of putting an end to the disturbances. On 7 April he announced Zaghlul’s release. British troops gradually restored order in the spring and summer of 1919, but strikes and demonstrations continued.
At the end of 1919 London sent out a Commission of Inquiry under Lord Milner, which concluded that the British protectorate had indeed to be abolished and replaced by some new relationship, the nature of which Britain attempted to negotiate throughout 1920, 1921, and 1922.
The process proved to be frustrating, and deporting Zaghlul again proved to be of little help. The principal British fantasy about the Middle East—that it wanted to be governed by Britain, or with her assistance—ran up against a stone wall of reality. The Sultan and Egypt’s other leaders refused to accept mere autonomy or even nominal independence; they demanded full and complete independence, which Britain—dependent upon the Suez Canal—would not grant. Though British officials tried to reach some kind of agreement with Egypt’s leadership, they failed; and so in the years to come, Britain was obliged to maintain her armed presence and her hegemony in Egypt without the consent of the country’s politicians.
On the other side of the Middle East, however, in Afghanistan, a real question arose as to whether Britain could preserve her hegemony without the consent of local leaders.
45
AFGHANISTAN: THE SPRING OF 1919
Egypt, with its vital Suez Canal, was one of the key strategic positions on Britain’s road to India; Afghanistan, with its mountain passes leading into the Indian plains, was another. Over the course of a century British armies had repeatedly been bloodied in the course of their efforts to prevent hostile forces from controlling the fierce mountain kingdom. The issue was believed by British statesmen to have been resolved satisfactorily in 1907, when Russia agreed that the kingdom should become a British protectorate.
On 19 February 1919, however, the Emir of Afghanistan was assassinated; and after a short period in which rival claimants maneuvered for the succession, his third son, 26-year-old Amanullah Khan, wrote to the Governor-General of India announcing his accession to the “free and independent Government of Afghanistan.”1 By the terms of Britain’s agreement with Russia in 1907, Afghanistan was not, of course, fully free and independent, for Britain was entrusted with the conduct of her foreign relations. Yet on 19 April the new ruler went on to assert his complete independence in external as well as internal affairs.
Amanullah secretly planned an attack on British India—through the Khyber Pass—that was to coincide with an Indian nationalist uprising in Peshawar, the principal British garrison town near the frontier.2 Amanullah believed that a nationwide Indian uprising would then occur.
Amanullah’s army commander moved too soon, however, before the Peshawar uprising could be organized, and unwittingly alerted the British to their danger. On 3 May 1919 a detachment of Afghan troops crossed the frontier into British India at the top of the Khyber Pass. They seized control of a border village and a pumping station controlling the water supply to a nearby Indian military post. On 5 May the Governor-General of India telegraphed to London that it looked as though a war—the Third Afghan War—had started.
According to Amanullah, he had ordered his troops to the frontier in response to the British repression of disturbances in India. Referring to the Amritsar Massacre,* and to the policy for which it stood, Amanullah declared that in the name of Islam and of humanity, he regarded the peoples of India as justified in rising up against British rule, and that his own troops were at the frontier to keep disorder from spreading.
The British were unsure of his intentions. They were aware that during the war a German military mission had nearly persuaded the Afghan government to launch an invasion of India, and they believed that Enver’s old pan-Turkish colleagues, and also the new Bolshevik government in Russia, might influence the Afghan government in dangerous ways. Alarming information reaching the British authorities in May, at the time Amanullah’s troops crossed the border, indicated that the Afghans planned a simultaneous attack on three fronts, spearheaded by hordes of religious fanatics, responding to the proclamation of a Holy War, and supported by regular troops in coordination with frontier tribes;3 while, at the same time, British forces were to be immobilized by mass rioting within India.4
Believing that prompt action was necessary, British officers in the border region attacked Afghan positions. Inconclusive combat took place at scattered points along a wide front. For the British, the unreliability of their native contingents proved only one of several unsettling discoveries in a messy, unpopular, and unsatisfactory campaign. At a time when it could ill afford the money, the British Government of India was obliged to increase its budget by an enormous sum of 14,750,000 pounds to cover the costs of the one-month campaign.5
Although they succeeded in expelling the Afghan forces from India and, by the end of May, had gained the upper hand, the British forces were inadequate to the task of invading, subduing, and occupying the Afghan kingdom. What won the day for them was the use of airplanes, which the tribesmen, with their primitive weapons, were unable to combat. In particular, it was the bombing of Afghan cities by the Royal Air Force that unnerved Amanullah and led him to ask for peace. Nonetheless, the outcome of the war, from the Afghans’ point of view, was better than a draw. They had withdrawn from India but had regained their freedom within their own frontiers.
The Treaty of Rawalpindi, signed the morning of 8 August 1919, brought the Third Afghan War to an end. In the treaty Britain conceded the complete independence of Afghanistan, and relinquished control over Afghanistan’s foreign relations—a control that she had required in order to exclude hostile foreign powers, Russia chief among them, from the strategically important mountain kingdom. But soon after the conclusion of the Treaty of Rawalpindi, the Afghan government made use of its new independence by entering into a treaty with the Bolsheviks which, amongst other provisions, allowed the Russians to establish consulates within the kingdom. By 1921 the nervous British authorities were asking the Afghans to alter their agreement with the Bolsheviks, claiming that the Russians were setting up consulates at “places so remote from the sphere of Russia’s legitimate interests that it was obvious that the consulates could serve no purpose but that of facilitating hostile intrigue on the Indian frontier.”6
In 1921 the British entered into new negotiations with the Afghan regime. Urging liberal concessions, The Times correspondent wrote on 1 September 1921 that “the British Cabinet, despite the influence of Lord Curzon, whose great knowledge of the East is out of date,” should be convinced that Afghan nationalism and independence had to be recognized, and that if they were, the Kabul regime would show friendship toward Britain.
But years of British tutelage had fostered not friendship but resentment. During the 1921
negotiations the British delegation was able to produce proof that the Afghans had joined in a plot against Britain; for British Intelligence had deciphered the Soviet code and had learned of plans for joint Afghan and Russian military action against the British Empire.7 Despite liberal concessions by the British delegation, the Kabul regime continued to afford facilities to Bolshevik representatives and it was soon discovered that Russian agents were successfully intriguing with the warlike frontier tribes.8
Of course it could be argued that Afghanistan had always posed difficult problems and that the setback to British influence there was an isolated, exceptional event. But British policy in Arabia, too, was in tatters—and Arabia had seemed open to British influence and was ruled by monarchs who professed friendship for Britain. In the spring of 1919, while waging the Third Afghan War, Britain suddenly faced a losing situation in Arabia; and while there was no apparent connection between the two, or between either of the two and the situation in Egypt, the coincidence of difficulties on the western, eastern, and southern ends of Britain’s Middle Eastern empire suggested that Britain might have overextended her imperial commitments.
46
ARABIA: THE SPRING OF 1919
Of all the Middle Eastern lands, Arabia seemed to be Britain’s most natural preserve. Its long coastlines could be controlled easily by the Royal Navy. Two of its principal lords, Hussein in the west and Ibn Saud in the center and east, were British protégés supported by substantial regular subsidies from the British government. As of 1919 no rival European powers sought to intrude themselves into Arabian political affairs. The field had been left clear for Britain.
Yet the First World War was barely over before the Cabinet in London was forced to recognize that its policy in Arabia was in disarray. Its allies—Hussein, King of the Hejaz, and Ibn Saud, lord of Nejd—were at daggers drawn. Hussein complained that he was obliged to spend 12,000 pounds a month out of his British subsidy to defend against attacks from Ibn Saud, who himself received 5,000 pounds a month in subsidies.1 The British representative who relayed Hussein’s complaint characterized Britain’s financing of both Ibn Saud and Hussein—when they were fighting one another—as absurd.2 So was the bitter dispute that broke out within the British government over what to do about it—which paralyzed the process of making a decision, so that none was made. Instructions and ultimatums were drafted but not sent. Officials who made decisions were not told that other officials had cancelled those decisions. There were changes of mind from one day to the next.
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