Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  His son Yaqub succeeded him, and his actions strongly suggest that the fix was already in. Yaqub ordered Afghan troops to stand down and let the British march into the country peacefully. He himself went south to meet them in a little town called Gundamak. There, Amir Yaqub Khan and the British high command worked out a treaty of “friendship.” The Gundamak Treaty gave the British a big swath of southern and southeastern Afghanistan and accepted a permanent British mission in Kabul. Everything the British had demanded of Sher Ali, they got from his son Yaqub.

  A British “diplomatic” mission made its way to Kabul, headed by an envoy named Neville Chamberlain. Yes, he was an ancestor of that later Neville Chamberlain who, as prime minister of Great Britain in the 1930s, signed the infamous Munich Pact with Hitler. Accompanying this earlier Chamberlain was Britain’s political plenipotentiary, a gentleman named Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, who was part French, part Irish, a smidgen Italian, and all patriotic British subject. He had a full beard and a scholarly look, but he also had a pompous bearing reminiscent of his namesake, the fallen president of France. Cavagnari had carried out numerous missions on the frontier, felt he had the savvy to “handle” Pushtoons, and boasted that he understood them. Pushtoons could be controlled, he told his associates, if one met them with courtesy but firm resolve. When they got pugnacious, one had to exhibit unflinching military courage because that’s what impressed Pushtoons. Cavagnari felt he possessed the requisite courage.

  When John Lawrence, another officer with frontier experience, heard about Cavagnari’s mission and his self-congratulating bombast, he said, “They will all be murdered—every single one of them.”5

  Cavagnari and his team entered Kabul on elephants with gilded howdahs (the sedan that fits onto the back of an elephant). They waved to the crowds lining the streets as if they were entering the city to applause. The crowds didn’t wave back. The amir made a proclamation designed to palliate his people and inspire a festive mood. He promised to celebrate the arrival of these honored British guests by reducing taxes and paying his soldiers all the back pay they were owed. The population continued to glower. They’d believe it when they saw it.

  The British delegation took up residence in a compound at the foot of Bala Hissar. Like the cantonments that had proved so indefensible forty years ago, this compound was flanked by high hills from which an enemy could shoot right down into the yard, but Cavagnari and his team didn’t worry. They believed they would not need to defend their compound because this time the Afghans had invited them into the city.

  Certainly, if the king was any measure, the Afghans were happy to host the British. Amir Yaqub Khan could not have been more hospitable. He invited the diplomats and high officers of the British mission to feast at Bala Hissar day after day, and, when they weren’t being entertained at the palace, they were invited to the compounds of other Afghan aristocrats linked to the amir, his relatives, and his courtiers. One of Cavagnari’s team wrote home dazzled: the amir insisted on feeding British troops at his own government’s expense, he reported. The amir even sent grooms to tend to the Englishmen’s horses. He was such a good chap, really! “But the people are rather fanatical,” he added, sounding a note of caution, “not yet accustomed to our presence.”6

  Meanwhile a dispute had arisen between the king and his army. He owed his troops money and could not pay them, despite his promise. He explained that funds were short just now; they needed to be patient. But the soldiers saw money flowing like water to entertain the British and began to murmur discontented words. Soon, it wasn’t just the soldiers. Common citizens were turning out on the streets to curse the king and his guests. Cavagnari didn’t worry, because he knew all about Pushtoons. “Dogs that bark don’t bite,” said he.7

  Cavagnari did notice that Amir Yaqub Khan’s authority seemed weak among his people, and this worried him a little. On the plus side, however, he could promise his superiors in Calcutta that this king would stick to his agreements—as if commanding the obedience of a king had some value, even if the king could not command the obedience of his people.

  On September 2nd of that year, 1879, Cavagnari wrote to the government of India to say, “All is well with the Kabul embassy.”8 It was an eerie echo of the letter Macnaghten had written to a friend in India thirty-eight years earlier to declare that all is quiet in Afghanistan “from Dan to Beersheba.” Just months after writing those words, Macnaghten was dead; Cavagnari was dead one day after writing this letter.

  The trouble began when an Afghan general told some surly soldiers to go talk to Cavagnari about their back pay: “He has plenty of money.” The troops made their way to the British residency. When the gates were not opened to them, they broke them open and stormed inside. There, they began grabbing horses, saddles, anything they could get their hands on. If they weren’t going to get cash, they were determined to take what they were owed in kind. By this time, thousands of Kabul commoners had joined the troops in the looting. Their hostility to the British had come to a boil and they wanted to make a statement.

  Somehow, Cavagnari got a message off to the king, informing him of the emergency and demanding he do something. Yaqub, up there in his palace, tore at his hair and wept. He told the messenger to go back and tell Cavagnari he was trying, he was trying; but what could a man do?

  Knowing that no help would be coming, Cavagnari climbed onto the roof of the residency to make a personal appeal to the crowd. He was determined to display the cool courage that Pushtoons supposedly found so impressive. No one was impressed. Cavagnari then ordered his troops to fire. Big mistake. The mob surrounding the residency had the British trapped inside with no way to get out and nowhere to hide. That small contingent of British diplomats and troops fought desperately but uselessly. Within a few hours the Afghans overwhelmed and killed them all.

  The British fought with astonishing courage, right to the end, according to British historian Maud Diver and others, although—since no one got out—I’m not sure how this fact came to be known. When news of the massacre reached the palace, Amir Yaqub’s mullah reported feeling a chill in the air, as if a shadow had fallen over the city. “I knew then that the British were coming.”9

  And of course they were. The three armies checked by the Afghans earlier had entered the country, thanks to Amir Yaqub’s submissive capitulation, and one of them marched quickly to Kabul, led by the wiry Irishman Frederick Roberts, a man of resolute chin, huge whiskers, and stern eyes. Roberts was a no-nonsense military martinet who demanded absolute discipline from his men and demanded no less of himself, for which reason he commanded the passionate loyalty of his troops, who knew him affectionately as “Bobs.”

  Then again, Bobs’s reputation may have risen in retrospect from the heroic stature he gained in the eyes of his countrymen during this, the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Considerable numbers of tribal warriors had gathered around Kabul by the time Roberts arrived, but he broke through them, entered the city, and swiftly took control.

  An awkward problem then arose. What to do with the king? Could he be allowed to keep the throne? Credible rumors said he had been making secret deals with the Afghan chieftains even while professing loyalty to the British. He might even have conspired in the murder of Cavagnari. Was it enough to slap his hand and say, “Bad puppet!” What good was such a bad puppet to anyone?

  Yaqub himself resolved the awkwardness. He came to Roberts and begged to be relieved of his royal duties. “You have seen my people—who could rule over them? I would rather cut grass in the British camp than to be Amir of Afghanistan.”10 He was excused, therefore, and sent to India to live on a British pension, a standard fate, it seems, for ex-kings of Afghanistan. The Union Jack was hoisted over Bala Hissar, for, until another puppet could be found, the British would have to rule Afghanistan directly.

  Now the punishments began. The residents of Kabul had lashed out against the British, so all of them were fined. The officials of Yaqub’s government had, at the very least, failed to protect
their guests, so they were put in prison. Suspected troublemakers throughout the city were rounded up and hanged until corpses swinging from public gallows could be seen in every part of the capital. British troops fanned into the countryside and destroyed forts and burned down villages to force the surrender of tribal chieftains suspected of conspiring with or at least supporting the rebels.

  At least one British officer felt uneasy about this strategy. “It exasperates the Afghans and does not funk them,” mused Colonel Macgregor. “In fact, we are thoroughly hated and not enough feared.”11

  He was quite correct: the Afghans were more angry than intimidated. Clerics across the countryside, anyone with the slightest claim to religious authority, began to preach that Islam was under attack by infidels and that Afghans had a duty to rise up and defend the faith. One of them was an ancient mullah known as Mushk-i-Alam—“Perfume of the Universe”—who had fought the British in the First Anglo-Afghan War. He was there in the Hindu Kush passes when the British force and all its camp followers were wiped out, and he was not a young man even then. Now he was about ninety years old and could no longer walk, but his followers carried him from village to village in his bed, and everywhere they set him down he gave fiery speeches calling rural Afghans to action. “The Farangis eat pigs!” he thundered. Pigs’ flesh is utterly prohibited in Islam. For many Muslims, even the idea of touching it is repulsive. His listeners shuddered with disgust and went home to find their guns.

  That fine European-style army that Sher Ali had built, all those salaried fighting men in identical uniforms who were so good at marching in unison and pivoting on cue, proved useless. That force was vanquished quickly and it vanished. What the British faced now were the tribal guerillas: farmers and nomads for whom fighting was not a profession but a way of life. One such commander, Mohammed Jan, roamed the land with twenty thousand men.12 Villagers fed him and funneled information to him so he could attack the British whenever he had the advantage and slip away into the hills when he didn’t.

  And, although his was the biggest force, it was only one of many. The British routed these Afghan armies in almost every pitched engagement, but the routed forces melted away, leaving no one to sign a treaty with. Once, an officer named Massey was ambushed, and Roberts had to save him, whereupon Roberts was trapped too. He fought like a mad dog against the forces besieging him, knowing that reinforcements were on their way from Jalalabad. Once they arrived, the rebels would be sorry. The reinforcements did arrive on a cold night, only to find that the vast Afghan force had disappeared. The men had simply gone home. After one year of fighting and over a dozen major battlefield victories, the British had won jurisdiction of every patch of Afghan territory their guns could cover—but not one inch more.

  By January 1880, the government of India was wringing its hands. It wasn’t that the Afghans were unbeatable. The British were beating them regularly. It was rather that beating them didn’t stop them from continuing to fight. Britain could win battles but could not gain ground in a war that had turned into a money pit, swallowing up British India’s resources, with no end in sight. British officials in India began to discuss a new policy. How about giving Afghanistan back to the Mohammedzais but broken into many pieces, with each piece going to a different royal cousin? The British could then pull out and let Russia wade into the civil war they would leave behind.

  That summer, however, one of Sher Ali’s sons, a man named Ayub, erupted out of Herat with eight thousand soldiers. On July 27, 1880, he met the British at Maiwand, a plain just west of Kandahar, and eviscerated their army of twenty thousand. In Britain, Maiwand became a synonym for Afghan savagery. In the West more generally, it is known as the battle in which the fictional Dr. Watson was wounded, just before he started rooming with a detective named Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street.

  In Afghanistan, as you might expect, the battle of Maiwand became a thrilling symbol of national pride, famous for an apocryphal anecdote: in the heat of the bloodshed, the story goes, as the Afghan line was starting to give way, a seventeen-year-old woman named Malalai grabbed the bloodied banner of her people, raised it high, and shamed the men into rallying. Malalai was killed, but the charge she sparked succeeded, and Malalai became Afghanistan’s iconic heroine, its Joan of Arc. Later, the first girl’s school in Afghanistan was named after her.

  All this fanfare about Maiwand is curious, however, because the famous Lord Roberts (infamous among Afghans) hurried west from Kabul as soon as he heard about the battle, scattered Ayub’s army, and then took the crucial city of Kandahar. The battle of Maiwand may have been a decisive victory for the Afghans, but in military terms it was only one part of a larger engagement, which the Afghans decisively lost.

  Then again, both Maiwand and Kandahar were parts of an even larger drama, the Second Anglo-Afghan War, and it’s tough to say who won that one. Ayub earned the fervid admiration of Afghans for defeating the British at Maiwand but made no further mark in Afghan history, for, while he was basking in his glory, a cousin of his marched into Kabul. This cousin Abdu’Rahman, soon to be known as the Iron Amir, had gone into exile in the lands north of Afghanistan with his father in the 1860s, at the height of Sher Ali’s reign. Once the war started, he came back.

  The British took one look at Abdu’Rahman and saw the Mohammedzai of their dreams. Here was a man tough enough to control the Afghans but canny enough to do business with the British. He was one of the many grandsons of Dost Mohammed the Great, which meant his blood was royal and his claim to the throne as good as anyone’s. The British let him enter Kabul unopposed and sat down to cut a deal with him. When the smoke cleared, they were handing him the country.

  Of course, they had the usual conditions: he mustn’t let any Russians into Afghanistan, mustn’t deal with any foreign nations except through Britain, and so on. Abdu’Rahman signed off on all of it. He just wanted the British gone.

  He did have some conditions of his own, however. The most important one was this: the British were to give him a free hand to do exactly as he wished within his borders. They were not to interfere. The British said sure, why not, why should they care? The deal was cut, and, with a big sigh of relief, the British withdrew their troops. It’s hard to say, therefore, who won this war. Both sides got something; both paid dearly for what they got. In any case, the consolidation of Afghanistan into a country, the story the British had so rudely interrupted, could now resume.

  PART II: ONE COUNTRY, TWO WORLDS

  When Afghanistan acquired its modern name, it was not a country but a territory. Its borders were a matter of opinion. Its inhabitants were people of various ethnic groups divided into clans and tribes, sharing a religion, a culture, and a way of life, but little else. The king was merely the highest chieftain of a confederation, with little impact on his subjects’ daily lives. He ruled his nominal realm but did not really govern it.

  Rival chieftains were constantly battling for supremacy, but the outcome of these small wars didn’t matter much to most people: whoever won or lost, their lives would go on unchanged. When strong kings did emerge, they applied themselves to military campaigns to expand their territory, expansion being the main business of an Afghan king.

  The British were game changers. When they came into the picture, Afghans encountered a monolithic cultural Other. As individuals, the British and Afghans could interact amiably enough, but, as two cultures, they had no propensity to merge. When the British invaded the country, they remained as distinct from Afghans as oil poured into a jar of water. Afghan resistance to the British reflected not the political policy of the rulers but the visceral reaction of the Afghan masses to these aliens in their midst. Fighting the British made Afghans aware that they did in fact all have something in common: they were all not-British.

  By the time the British withdrew, the fundamental project of Afghan rulers had changed. From this time forth, they stopped trying to build far-flung empires and started trying to mark off what they definitely “owned�
� and eliminating would-be mini-sovereigns within their fence. Dost Mohammed and his sons made good progress toward this goal. By 1879, Afghanistan had definite borders and a single capital, the city of Kabul. No longer would Kandahar, Herat, or Mazar-i-Sharif serve as city-state seats of power for rivals to the Afghan throne.

  The coalescence of an Afghan state alarmed the British and helped push them into a second invasion, but, once again, by toppling the Afghan monarch in Kabul, the British managed only to unleash the unruly energy of Afghan tribal society. Again, therefore, the British were forced to pull out—not because they were defeated in battle but because they couldn’t govern the Afghans. And again, the British had stirred up a sense of shared identity among Afghans while reinforcing the centrifugal tendencies that kept them fragmented. When a new Afghan strongman took the throne, he understood that firming up the borders and restoring the primacy of Kabul would not be enough. He would have to create a government pervasive enough to enter and control the daily life of the entire population. But how could any king assert day-to-day authority over a people who honored only the dictates of religion, custom, culture, tribe, clan, village, and family? This was the problem that preoccupied Afghan rulers over the next half century, a quest that divided Afghanistan into two cultural worlds.

  9

  A Time of Blood and Iron

  THE BRITISH LEFT A VERY BIG MAN IN CHARGE. ABDU’RAHMAN WAS CAST in the same mold as the fiercest of the conquerors who had burst out of this region in centuries past and was probably the equal of Ahmad Shah Baba. In another era, he might have built another of those ramshackle empires that stretched from Iran to Delhi and that fragmented soon after his death.