Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Burnes first stopped in the town of Ludhiana to see two former Afghan kings, Shah Shuja and Shah Zeman.2 Both were grandsons of Ahmad Shah Baba. They were brothers. Both had briefly held the throne of Afghanistan. The man who dethroned Shah Zeman poked his eyes out to make sure he would cause no further trouble. The man who did this was Shah Shuja, the brother with whom Shah Zeman now lived in melancholy companionship.

  Burnes is always generous about the Afghans: clearly he liked and admired them, and he tries to say nice things about these two. Both had a kingly dignity, he declares. Yet the scene he describes feels very dark. The blind brother seems intolerably gloomy. Shah Shuja comes across as a whiner and a fop. He greets Burnes wearing a pink gauze tunic and a velvet cap from which hang emeralds and tassels. A fat, sour man, he complains to Burnes about his many misfortunes. When he lost his throne, he fled to the court of the Sikh king Ranjit Singh, lord of Peshawar, seeking refuge. He was hoping to pay for that refuge with the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which he had stolen from the treasury before taking flight. But Ranjit Singh simply took his diamond and put him in a dungeon.

  The renegade king tunneled his way into the sewer system and escaped the city. During his brief reign, he had curried favor with the British and in fact had signed a treaty ceding control of his foreign policy to the British. This was a canny move, as it turned out, for it gave the British a reason to think he might be useful to them one day. The British gave him an estate and a stipend sufficient for him and his harem of several hundred women (and his brother). Shah Shuja wasn’t happy, however. He wanted a kingdom. When Burnes told him that he still had many friends in Sind, Shuja dismissed the reassurance. “Oh! Friends like that are worse than enemies. They do nothing to help me.”3 Burnes reluctantly concluded that Shah Shuja didn’t have the temperament or judgment to rule a country.

  After leaving the Afghan brothers, Burnes visited the court of Ranjit Singh. He found this place brimming with luxury and pomp. Ranjit Singh was a military leader, a drunkard, a drug addict, a sensualist, and a religious devout. He read to Burnes from the Sikh scriptures, the Granth, which was wrapped in ten layers of cloth, each a different color. The outermost cloth was yellow because, at Ranjit’s court, each day had its own color and that day’s color was yellow. Everyone Burnes saw was wearing yellow garments, yellow turbans. All the flowers displayed around the room were yellow. Canaries released in the garden gave the foliage twinkles of yellow. After he had finished reading from his scriptures, Ranjit Singh proudly displayed the Koh-i-Noor diamond. It was, wrote Burnes, “about half the size of an egg.”4

  From Ranjit’s court, Burnes and his group struck north and west to Peshawar, a city inhabited entirely by Pushtoons.5 Although ruled by Ranjit Singh, it was governed by Dost Mohammed’s brother Sultan Mohammed. The Pushtoon lord came to the city gates to meet Burnes, cutting a fine figure in his fur-lined coat ornamented with peacock down.

  Braced for his first encounter with Afghan savages, Burnes was surprised to find the First Man of Peshawar a civilized and educated gentleman. That night, Burnes and his friends dined with the Durrani chieftain, feasting on milk-fed lamb simmered in sweet-and-sour stew, on baked rice dishes garnished with orange peels, and on sweetmeats followed by fresh fruits and sherbets. Burnes described the Afghans as sociable, well informed, noisily good-humored, and refreshingly free of prejudice. Nothing he told them about Europe put them off. “Every country has its customs,” they shrugged.6 The lord of Peshawar moved about his city freely, Burnes noted, without guards, attended only by his relatives and servants, who addressed him as a social equal.

  From Peshawar, the expedition continued up the Kabul River. At the end of April 1831, they reached Dost Mohammed’s capital, a burg so boisterously busy, said Burnes, that on the streets in the afternoons two men walking side by side could not hear each other well enough to carry on a normal conversation. The Kabul River dividing the city was lined with shade trees of every description. Countless orchards filled the air with the aroma of fruit tree blossoms: mulberries, apricots, pear, and quince. Kabul was a wide-open town—except for liquor. Dost Mohammed, once an enthusiastic drinker, had reformed, and in his zeal he had outlawed alcoholic beverages entirely. Armenians and Jews, who had been the city’s main brewers and distillers, were leaving now because the new laws robbed them of their livelihood.

  Burnes dined with Dost Mohammed in an immaculate apartment furnished only with a gorgeous carpet.7 The men sat on the floor and ate with their hands. Burnes found the amir of Afghanistan solemn but impressive. He plied the Englishman with intelligent questions. How many kings in Europe? How did they coexist? How did the British collect revenue? What were British conscription policies? The amir heard they had filled their Indian armies with foot soldiers drafted from the native population. Did they have similar designs on Kabul? How did the British manage to produce such cheap goods? Burnes told him about steam engines, which interested the amir greatly.

  Dost Mohammed seemed to like Burnes, and why wouldn’t he? Burnes was an intense, brilliant, and charming young man, fluent in both Hindi and Persian. He not only spoke the local languages but could read the Arabic script in which Sufi poetry was written. His visit with Dost Mohammed laid the basis for a likely friendship between his country and Afghanistan; at least that was how Dost Mohammed interpreted it.

  Burnes went on to publish a book about his great adventures, which became a best seller in London and made him the toast of the town. The young man became a coveted dinner guest at all the best houses. An adoring public dubbed him “Bukhara Burnes” because of his penchant for wearing turbans and other Oriental garb. They also called him the Iskandar of the East. Iskandar was the Persian pronunciation of Alexander, the great Greek conqueror. British accounts marveled that Burnes had made his way to remote regions so few had seen.

  Actually, of course, lots of people had seen those places and saw them every day: they lived there. To them, the exotic element was Alexander Burnes. Nor did they think of themselves as particularly “remote.” Those cities of the north—Balkh, Bukhara, Samarqand, Tashkent, and others—were entrepôts on the old Silk Road, which had long been the busiest highway of human commerce in the world, a network of roads and routes that connected China to Europe and both to India. People who lived in or around these cities traveled to India routinely on trading expeditions; and, of course, because people here were all Muslims, not a few had gone as far west as Mecca. In short, these were not unsophisticated primitives. Few, however, had been as far west as Europe—now there was a remote and exotic place, if ever there was one!

  DOST MOHAMMED DID BATTLE WITH RANJIT SINGH SEVERAL TIMES, trying to regain Peshawar. He didn’t lose those battles, but he didn’t win them either. Peshawar remained in Sikh hands. Finally, Dost Mohammed decided that he needed help, and so he cast about for some alliance that would tip the scales.

  He had two options, both of them attractive, both of them problematic. One was the British Raj, which dominated the subcontinent now. The source of British dominance wasn’t clear to Afghans. The British homeland was far away, and they hadn’t stormed in with a huge army. No, they had sent only a few military men, mostly officers, and had hired local folks to serve as troops. In fact, the British had two such armies in India. One took its orders from the British monarch, and its soldiers were called Queen’s Company (because incredibly enough, Britain was ruled by a woman!). The other took its orders from the East India Company, which had pioneered English penetration of the subcontinent. Those soldiers were commonly called John Company. The two armies followed different masters yet somehow worked together. The British armies were about 90 percent Indian, yet Britain dominated India. This was certainly a new kind of force, and no one knew quite what to make of it, except that it was formidable.

  The other option was Russia, whose king was called a czar. Like the British monarch, he ruled from a capital thousands of miles away, and it was a testament to his might that he could send his armies so far and make hi
s power felt at such a distance. His troops had crossed the Caucuses, had taken Azerbaijan, had crossed the Caspian Sea and reached the shores of the Aral Sea. The czar’s troops were close and getting closer. In fact, the Russians had even helped the Persian shah attack the Afghan-held city of Herat. The attack failed, but it showed that the Russians too were a force to reckon with.

  Soliciting Russian help, however, was a little like asking a dragon for help building a bonfire. The czar’s forces might offer too much help, as it were. Then again, asking the British for help posed similar risks. A third possibility existed: to play one power against the other, using each to keep the other out of Afghan territory. But, in that case, who would help Amir Dost Mohammed Khan recover Peshawar? How would he reconstruct the whole of Ahmad Shah’s empire?

  He inclined toward the British. Both of the new powers possessed menacing might, and both showed aggressive tendencies, but the amir felt that on balance the British were less expansionist, and, besides, Alexander Burnes, that young Scotsman who had come to Kabul in 1831, had left such a favorable impression.

  Also, the new British viceroy in India, Lord Auckland, had sent a letter to Dost Mohammed assuring him quite directly, “My friend . . . it is not the practice of her majesty’s government to interfere with the affairs of other sovereign nations.”8 Of course, he had said this in response to a guarded inquiry about getting British help for undermining Ranjit Singh, but if noninterference was really Britain’s policy, they might be the safest ally for Afghanistan after all.

  Then one day, in 1837, Dost Mohammed received good news: Lord Auckland was sending a trade mission to Kabul headed up by none other than—Alexander Burnes! The king welcomed the delegation and lavished upon his guests the sumptuous hospitality that Afghans consider their highest claim to fame. Officially, Burnes was here to (again) explore commercial opportunities on behalf of the East India Company. Actually, he had come with no authority to negotiate agreements of any kind. Just before he left India, Lord Auckland had specified that Burnes’s mission was to spend as much time as possible in the palace and find out all he could about Russian influence at the Afghan court but avoid offering any hint of British aid for any of the amir’s schemes or even discussing what the amir wanted. Mr. Burnes had come to Kabul purely as a spy.

  His mission was limited in this way because Auckland was listening to another advisor, an older, higher ranking foreign policy expert named William Hay Macnaghten. Macnaghten was a British version of those American anti-Communist witch-hunters of the 1950s: everywhere Macnaghten looked he saw—the Bear. Britain was, of course, confronting “the Russian Bear” on a long front stretching from central Asia to eastern Europe, and, as an expert on central Asian affairs, Macnaghten believed the menace was centered in central Asia. He also knew what the Russians wanted—they wanted India!

  A strong alliance with a friendly Dost Mohammed might have been one good way to block Russian expansion, but Macnaghten and Lord Auckland didn’t trust “the Dost,” as they called him. The Dost was too strong to be trusted. Strength gives a man ideas.

  During those fine banquets at the Afghan court and the quiet conversations afterward, Burnes avoided all discussion of Peshawar, military aid, treaty alliances, and closer ties. Dost Mohammed began to realize that Burnes was going to return to India without having made him a single promise.

  JUST ABOUT THEN, A STRANGER BY THE NAME OF IVAN VICTOROVICH Vitkevich pulled into town. He said he was the envoy of the Russian czar and he wanted to have a chat with the amir. To this day, no one is sure who or what he really was. The czar’s foreign minister later said he barely knew the fellow. The czar denied that Vitkevich spoke for him. Maybe they had reasons of state for such denials. Maybe Vitkevich was a spy; or maybe he really was an adventurer, a freelance diplomat fishing for an agreement with Dost Mohammed that would please the czar and win him a job in Moscow.

  In any case, Vitkevich met with Dost Mohammed and suggested that he might form a relationship with the Russian monarch. He wasn’t suggesting a marriage—both kings would be free to see other people. It would be a friendship. By no means did Vitkevich suggest a joint Russo-Afghan invasion of India; he just thought a few Russian diplomats might take up residence in Kabul . . . and a few military people might come along to protect the diplomats . . .

  Dost Mohammed made no secret of his meeting with Vitkevich. He wanted Auckland to know about it. He reported selected details of his conversation with the Russian to Burnes. To Dost Mohammed, the whole point of meeting with Vitkevich was to worry the British and push them into making a move. The amir was feeding scraps to a bear in hopes of making a lion jealous—because he couldn’t let go of lovely Peshawar.

  NEWS OF THE MEETING CAUSED AN UPROAR IN INDIA. MACNAGHTEN fumed. The Dost was proving just as treacherous as he had predicted. Lord Auckland composed a huffy letter. “Sir, . . .” he warned the amir. “You must desist from all correspondence with Persia and Russia. You must never receive agents from them . . . without our sanction.”9 This hardly seemed like the same Lord Auckland who, just two years earlier, had written to tell the amir, “It is not the practice of the British government to interfere with the affairs of other sovereign nations.”

  Even then, Dost Mohammed tried not to alienate the British. He was still hoping for an alliance. Instead of reminding Lord Auckland that he was a sovereign king, he said he wanted Lord Auckland to put his terms in writing, especially with regards to Peshawar.

  In writing? The British high command in India huddled to consider this. Why was the Dost rolling over, as it seemed. What trick did he have up his sleeve? Macnaghten thought Dost Mohammed was already in the czar’s pocket and thus would have to be ousted. Britain had an excellent replacement monarch living on a British pension in India: Shah Shuja. If it came down to legitimacy, well, Shah Shuja had a right to the Afghan throne. He was an actual grandson of Emperor Ahmad Shah Baba. He had even clocked some previous time on the Afghan throne. He had been king from 1803 to 1809, in the heart of that bloody period when kings were toppling kings and men were murdering monarchs and brothers were blinding brothers. He was part of that melee.

  Dost Mohammed himself tipped the scales. When he heard nothing back from the British, he met with Vitkevich again. Well, that did it! Auckland decided to go with what he called the Forward Policy. Instead of just sitting back and waiting to see what happened, he would move into Afghanistan and make things happen. He issued the Simla Manifesto, a public statement announcing that “every consideration of policy and justice” led the governor general to “espousing the cause of Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk” and aiding “the restoration of the Shah to the throne of his ancestors . . . [by which] it may reasonably be hoped that the general freedom and security of commerce [and] the union and prosperity of the Afghan people” would be promoted.”10 The Simla Manifesto made a claim that would become grindingly familiar over the next 170 years: the British were not out to conquer Afghans but to see “the independence and integrity of Afghanistan established.” Once this job was done, the British would withdraw.

  5

  Auckland’s Folly

  IN THE LAST MONTHS OF 1838, LORD AUCKLAND ASSEMBLED THE ARMY of the Indus, a force of 31,800 total, counting Sikh troops contributed by Ranjit Singh.1 By December it reached Quetta. In March 1839, it took Kandahar without a battle. By summer, it was moving east, on the road to Kabul. Only the city of Ghazni stood in its way, and Afghans considered this city impregnable because of its imposing walls. They thought the British would never get past Ghazni.

  The British appeared at the foot of those walls one hot July day and demanded the city’s surrender. The Afghans refused. A few nights later, under cover of darkness, British cannons boomed, solders yelled, and bullets zinged—but it was all a ruse. When the Afghans rushed to the point of attack, they left the other side of their city undefended. Artilleryman Henry Durand sneaked to the foot of those walls, dug some holes, packed them with explosives, and down came the gates. Ghazni was in Br
itish hands.

  The fall of Ghazni stunned Afghans. Dost Mohammed abandoned his capital and fled north to seek refuge with his relative the amir of Bukhara. But his relative was secretly on the British payroll and put Dost Mohammed in prison. Hundreds of miles south, the British marched into Kabul unopposed. They installed Shah Shuja in Bala Hissar, the formidable fortress-palace perched high above Kabul on a flank of Lions-Gate Mountain, overlooking the Kabul River and the neighborhood known as Shor Bazaar.

  The Dost soon broke out of prison and gathered an army of Uzbeks. The British rushed to meet him, but he beat them soundly in the mountains of Kohistan, just north of Kabul. For the next week or two, the Dost and his men harassed the British troops guerilla style, driving them back toward the city. Then, just when the British cause seemed lost, a strange thing happened. Dost Mohammed rode into their camp with just one aide and surrendered to Macnaghten. No one knows why, but you can be sure of one thing: this cagey man had a plan. In any case, he retired to India—to live in the very residence just vacated by Shah Shuja—on a British pension!

  THE BRITISH HAD PROMISED TO WITHDRAW THEIR TROOPS AS SOON AS Shah Shuja got his throne back, but they decided to postpone the withdrawal. For one thing, Shah Shuja wasn’t acting like a real king yet. He spent a lot of time with his harem, which had grown to more than eight hundred women.2 Also, disturbances were still breaking out here and there. It wasn’t really rebellion at first, just crime, but lots of crime. Most of it was petty, but still, it disrupted daily life. It wasn’t unexpected, though, since Kabul was brimming with badmashes, “bad seeds”—thugs and gangsters. Some of the thugs were probably working for the ousted Mohammedzais, Dost Mohammed’s clan, which gave the crime a political cast; some might even have been agents of the czar. In sum, the British brass decided it was best to stick around for a bit and help Shah Shuja settle in.