Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Macnaghten headed up the mission as Her Majesty’s envoy in Kabul, and he agreed to act as the king’s chief advisor. He got his staff busy establishing an administrative system, recruiting an army, and building a police force.

  Alexander Burnes was the number-two man in the mission. It was his job, as a political agent, to sniff out plots and snuff out conspiracies. Dost Mohammed had a firebrand son Akbar hiding in the north somewhere. The British built a garrison at the mouth of the pass into Bamiyan valley to keep Akbar and his forces from coming south. They erected garrisons in Kandahar and several other cities too. They got the country locked up so tight that, aside from crime, they had nothing much to worry about.

  Apparently they didn’t feel Dost Mohammed’s sister posed much of a danger, even though, after her brother went into exile, she went roaming north, traveling from village to village on foot, calling upon men to fight the British in defense of Islam. The villagers felt honor bound to lavish hospitality on this highborn guest, but she threatened to refuse all food and drink unless the villagers pledged to take up arms. Everywhere she went, therefore, men vowed to join the jihad to avoid dishonor.3

  Afghanistan had been almost laughably easy to conquer, but the British didn’t rely on force alone to keep the country in hand. Money had defanged the Dost (or so they believed), so they used money to secure the passes between Peshawar and Kabul. That is, they paid handsome subsidies to the Ghilzai Pushtoons living along that stretch of road. There was some pretense that the Ghilzais would supply troops in exchange for the subsidies, but really they just took the cash and kept quiet. That was good enough, for as long as the locals made no trouble, traffic could flow freely between Kabul and British India, allowing Calcutta to absorb this wild frontier area into the realm it governed.

  Within a few months, the British officers and their Indian subordinates sent for their families, concubines, and servants. A tidy little British community sprang up in Kabul. The amenities of British colonial life were transported over the Hindu Kush mountains: fine furniture, good glassware, musical instruments suitable for playing Western-style music, wines, liquors, and liqueurs, as well as cigars. The officers could enjoy a “chota peg,” a small whiskey, before dinner and afterward a good smoke.4

  The British lived in a large complex, which they called a cantonment. It stretched for almost a mile along the Kohistan Road. It had living quarters and offices as well as barracks surrounding a large yard. A wall surrounded the whole complex, but it didn’t provide much protection because cantonments were situated on a plain flanked by high hills. Some British officers lived outside the residency, in compounds of their own, elsewhere in the city. Alexander Burnes, for example, had a house near Shor Bazaar.

  Within their compounds and in cantonments, the British created a simulacrum of their life at home: they had balls and tea parties and played cricket matches and polo, and some of the women even organized amateur theatricals. From the slopes above, Afghans looked down into cantonments and tried to puzzle out what these people were doing, these Farangis who had come among them and with whom so few Afghans ever had any actual truck.

  UNFORTUNATELY, THE BRITISH NEVER MANAGED TO ESTABLISH REAL order. Kandahar remained unruly. The roads between the cities remained unsafe. One day, a Mrs. Smith traveling toward the Bolan Pass with a guard was attacked and killed by unknown Baluchi tribesmen. One day, Lieutenant Jenkins and several dozen of his men were killed in an ambush in Khurd Kabul Pass, close to the capital itself. One day, Captain Sturt was stabbed in the face right inside the city, by a youngster who was never caught.5

  In fact, episodes of lawlessness were increasing at the very time that Macnaghten wrote to Calcutta to say that Afghanistan enjoyed “profound tranquility.” Alexander Burnes encouraged him to send such reports, because as soon as Afghanistan was stabilized Macnaghten would move to a new post in India, and Burnes would replace him as envoy, a tremendous honor for a man so young.

  Then one day, Dost Mohammed’s charismatic son Akbar popped up in Bamiyan, alarmingly close to Kabul. Already, Afghans were calling him Wazir Akbar Khan. A wazir (vizier) is a king’s right-hand man, his chief executive officer and often the real power in a kingdom. Although only in his early twenties, Akbar had a formidable reputation already as a man of war. The best-known portrait of him shows a young man wearing chain mail and a sharply pointed iron helmet. His moon-like face has something cherubic about it, but his eyes belie the innocence. In battles against Ranjit Singh, he had proved himself a daring and bloody adversary. In Kohistan, just north of Kabul, a region already hot with rebellious clamor, disgruntled chieftains began flocking to his standard.

  General Willoughby Cotton had led British troops into Kabul, but, in early 1841, he had finished his term and returned to India, and a new man had taken his place. William Elphinstone hadn’t asked for the job and didn’t really want it. He had done some fine soldiering during the Napoleonic Wars—twenty-five years ago. Now he had gout, his shoulders hurt, and he was slow, but he accepted his commission like a good soldier.

  Meanwhile, Parliament had decided Afghanistan was costing too much, especially since the mission there was done. Why keep pouring rivers of money into a place that enjoyed “profound tranquility”? Why keep paying the Ghilzai tribes, for example? They made little trouble. They seemed rather docile, actually. Parliament therefore ordered that the subsidies to the Ghilzai be cut.

  The Ghilzai commenced to seethe. And with Wazir Akbar Khan on the scene, Kohistan was moving toward full rebellion. Even in Kabul Afghans were getting restive. In the rest of the country random violence turned endemic. And a dithering old man was in command of the British military forces. Was the mission in trouble?

  Macnaghten didn’t think so. In late August of that year, he wrote to an associate in India that “the country is perfectly quiet from Dan to Beersheba.” 6 On November 1, one of Burnes’s Afghan agents came to tell him the city was about to go up in flames, but Burnes declared that all would be well as soon as he took over from Macnaghten.7

  IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT BURNES REALLY DIDN’T KNOW TROUBLE WAS brewing. Perhaps he and his fellows failed to realize the gravity of their situation because the real trouble wasn’t random street crime or the chiefs of Kohistan. It had to do with women. Apparently, some members of the British community were “fraternizing” with Afghan women. Maybe “fraternize” isn’t the right word. The alleged relationships were not so sibling-like. Most of them might actually have been innocent. Possibly, most of the British men were behaving in ways that would have raised no objections in London. Perhaps it was just a case of courteous young gentlemen making the acquaintance of friendly young women. It’s just that much of what was courteous in London was offensive in Kabul. In Afghan society, there is no courteous way for a young man to lead a young woman to a corner of a room during a reception and engage her in genteel conversation, sometimes touching her shoulder or perhaps her arm to emphasize a point—with her father and brothers looking on.

  And it wasn’t all courteous. Among the lower ranks, rumor had it, some of the Tommys were taking “the Forward Policy” too literally. As British historian and diplomat Fraser-Tytler later put it: “Necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian.”8 One account written by a British soldier decades after the fact defended his comrades by pointing out that young men far from home and long separated from the company of women get lonely. “And,” this soldier went on to add, “the Afghan women were almost frighteningly willing.”9

  I don’t believe that, in 1841, respectable Afghan women in Kabul were “almost frighteningly willing.” It’s true that, in a private setting, Afghan women can tease aggressively and act flirtatiously—verbally—but in an all-Afghan social setting, everyone knows the parameters. They know what can’t be said or done, what lines cannot be crossed. Everyone knows but no one articulates it—or even could—because that’s how culture works. I’m guessing that, in Kabul in 1841, many social situations cropped up
in which the British inadvertently gave offense and the Afghans couldn’t believe the British didn’t know they were giving offense.

  Nor was all of it innocent. The Afghan chieftain Abdullah Khan once went to visit a British officer and caught a glimpse of a woman hiding in the next room—one of his own mistresses! She was visiting this British guy, apparently! He complained to Alexander Burnes, and Burnes said he’d look into it but never did. Maybe he was planning to, but events moved too fast.10

  On November 2, the day after Burnes said all would be well, a crowd of men surrounded his house to abuse him for British treatment of their womenfolk. Poor Burnes—he had real regard for Afghan culture: he liked Afghans, and his writings show it. He thought Afghans liked and accepted him because he spoke their language. But he also liked women, and, as a bold adventurer and a handsome wit whose accomplishments had made him the toast of London, he had good reason to believe that women found him irresistible. The day that crowd of angry Afghan men gathered around his house, he had a couple of local women inside with him. Strictly speaking, they were Kashmiris, not Afghans; but the crowd was not making fine distinctions that day.

  From his second-story window, Burnes tried to placate the crowd. He offered them money to go away, but this only sparked the rumor that Mr. Burnes had gold in the house. Some pushing and shoving broke out. Burnes’s bodyguards fired a few shots into the air, which only turned the crowd into a mob and the protest into a riot. When the melee ended, “Bukhara Burnes,” “the Iskandar of the East,” lay dead.11

  News of the murder reached British cantonments and sowed panic. Suddenly, the high officials decided they had better look for the quickest way out of this country. While Macnaghten was trying to bribe various tribal chieftains into helping the British, the insurgency roared into a blaze. Two British outposts near Kabul fell bloodily. Macnaghten decided he’d better strike the best deal he could get: time was of the essence now. He reached out to the man he took to be the leader of all the Afghans, Wazir Akbar Khan, son of the ousted king.

  Akbar wasn’t the leader Macnaghten needed. The leader he needed did not exist, not at that moment. In ousting Dost Mohammed, the British had uncapped the chaos that the great amir had brought to heel. Many chiefs had leaderly prestige but none had undisputed top standing. There was no one, therefore, with whom the British could strike a deal. Akbar may have been the most prominent Afghan leader, but his prestige was tied to his prowess as a warrior. The moment the two sides pulled back from violence, the source of his authority would start to fade, reducing his ability to strike a deal. A similar dynamic applied to all the chiefs, for all were now in competition for top standing, and, under the circumstances, intransigence toward the British added to a man’s power; striking deals with the British weakened him. Anyone the British tried to negotiate with became the man who wasn’t worth negotiating with.

  Wazir Akbar Khan finally offered Macnaghten terms. He would guarantee the British community’s safety if they would pay him a subsidy, let him be the power behind the throne, and leave the country by the following summer. Akbar was promising something he couldn’t deliver and he probably knew it: he was a Durrani Pushtoon; the tribes controlling the passes out of the country were the Durranis’ longtime rivals, the Ghilzais. He couldn’t tell them what to do or not to do. Macnaghten should have known this, but he was so grateful to get a promise of any kind, he seized upon the deal and arranged to meet with the Afghan leaders two days before Christmas to work out details.

  Unfortunately, in the weeks before the meeting, the British made two mistakes. First, Macnaghten wrote to General Nott in Kandahar, urging him to bring his large force to Kabul as soon as possible. Macnaghten wrote that he would keep the Afghans talking until Nott arrived. Maybe then, together, they could crush the rebels. Somehow, this letter fell into Afghan hands.

  Second, Macnaghten’s son-in-law John Connolly wrote a secret letter suggesting that 10,000 rupees be offered for the head of each rebel chief—and this letter also fell into Afghan hands.12 Ironically, this letter not only outraged the chiefs on the list but also those who were not, because their exclusion implied they were less formidable.

  Meanwhile, Akbar Khan double-crossed Macnaghten. He showed the terms of his deal to his fellow rebel leaders to prove that the British had tried to buy him off and would try to buy off others, whereupon several other chiefs revealed that they too had been tendered similar offers.

  On December 23, 1841, a group of British officials met with a group of Afghan chieftains in the middle of a large open field, a site that neither side could fire upon from their strongholds. Considering all the secrets, double-dealing, and hostility the two sides brought to the meeting, it’s no surprise that the negotiations broke down and the two sides fell to fighting. Someone—perhaps Akbar Khan—killed Macnaghten. Later, the rabble that stormed the field cut off his head and displayed it on a pole near the river.

  Both top British leaders were now dead, which left General Elphinstone in charge. The terrible events had discombobulated the old man. Outside the cantonment, Kabul had dissolved into a massive, formless, leaderless insurrection. What was left of the British leadership huddled in their enormous compound to hatch a plan. One option would have been to leave the cantonment, fight their way across the city, and gain the security of Bala Hissar, the fortress-palace on the heights. But there was no telling if the gates would be opened to them. Their puppet Shah Shuja held the fortress, and, in these last few weeks, having read the writing on the wall, he had recast himself as an Afghan patriot opposed to the British.

  So the British chose plan B—the insane one: they decided to abandon Kabul and march out of the country over the Hindu Kush on foot in January. They left on the 6th of the month, a long column of 4,500 active troops and about 12,000 wives, retainers, servants, camp followers, and whatnot—Kabul’s entire British-Indian community.13 They had about sixty miles to go, not counting the twists and turns of the road, if road is the right word for the dangerous path through canyons so narrow one of them is called the Silk Gorge because the space between the steep canyon walls feels as slender as one silk thread. Snow was already beginning to fall. In the next few days, most of the marchers were felled by the weather. The rest were cut to pieces by Ghilzai tribal warriors in the passes. A few were taken as hostages and eventually released, but of the group that left Kabul on that terrible day, only one European made it to Jalalabad to tell the world what had happened: a surgeon named Dr. Brydon.

  FOR NINE MONTHS THE BRITISH LICKED THEIR WOUNDS AND PONDERED their setback. During that time, some nameless nobody assassinated Shah Shuja. One of his many sons briefly claimed the throne but found the seat too hot and fled to India. The late Shah Shuja’s bodyguard dug up another youngster of the king’s clan and slapped the crown on him. This puppy invited the British to come back, assuring them they were welcome in Afghanistan any time. That fall, two British armies converged on Kabul, led respectively by General Pollock and General Nott, both determined to leave “some lasting mark of retribution” on the city.

  After careful consideration, the generals ordered their chief engineer, a man named Abbott, to destroy Kabul’s famous Grand Bazaar, the city’s commercial heart. They told him to burn it down in such a way that the fire wouldn’t spread to adjacent neighborhoods and damage sections of the city inhabited by the king and other British clients. But they gave Abbott only a few days to complete the work, and, in that amount of time, Abbott saw no feasible way to do the job except with gunpowder and matches. Not only did the whole bazaar burn down and the fire spread, but British soldiers ran amok through the city, smashing what they could, whereupon random Afghan citizens jumped in and began to loot and pillage, using the chaos as cover to enrich themselves or expiate old grudges. “In the mad excitement of the hour, friend and foe were stricken down by the same unsparing hand,” said British historian John Kaye, writing less than a decade later. But he goes on to note:

  When we consider the amount of tempt
ation and provocation, when we remember that the comrades of our soldiers and the brethren of our camp followers had been foully murdered by the thousands in the passes of Afghanistan, that everywhere tokens of our humiliation and the treachery and cruelty of the enemy, rose up before our people, stinging them past all endurance and exasperating them beyond all control, we wonder less that when the guilty city lay at their feet they should not wholly have reined in their passions than that, at such an hour, they should have given them so little head.14

  The fire consumed much of Kabul, killed an unknown number of people, and left many more homeless. Then the British flag over Bala Hissar palace was lowered, and on the 11th of October, 1842, the British began their final withdrawal from Afghanistan, taking with them the remnants of the royal family they had installed: the sons and relatives of Shah Shuja, including the brother he had blinded, the onetime king Shah Zeman.

  Pollock and Nott enjoyed a hero’s welcome back in India: guns were fired and parades were organized to fete them. Lord Auckland had been replaced by this time, and the new governor general issued a new proclamation from Simla, which began with an artful use of the passive voice to explain what had happened:

  The government of India directed its army to pass the Indus in order to expel from Afghanistan a chief believed to be hostile to British interests and to replace upon his throne a sovereign represented to be friendly to those interests and popular with his former subjects.15