Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (19 page)

The decision to send Burnes back to Kabul had been taken by the new Governor General, Lord Auckland, who had been alarmed by MacNeill’s reports of the Russians’ growing activity in Persia and their purported ambitions towards Herat and the rest of Afghanistan. Auckland had only just arrived in Calcutta and knew very little about the region, but he had met Burnes at a houseparty at Bowood during the latter’s triumphant book tour two years earlier and assumed he was a safe pair of hands. So Burnes was sent off up the Indus for the second time, this time with instructions to make a more comprehensive study of the river, laying down buoys and erecting navigational landmarks. He was then to head on to Kabul, instructed to gather intelligence on ‘the recently created ties between the rulers of the Afghan principalities and Persia’, on the attitude of the Afghan population towards Russia and on Russian activity in the region and ‘the measures taken by Russia for the increase of her trade in Central Asia’ – a very similar remit to that Nesselrode had given Vitkevitch.
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Auckland’s protocol-obsessed Political Secretary, William Macnaghten, meanwhile, had ordered that given the dubious nature of Kabul’s Barakzai rulers, who in the official view of Calcutta had usurped the throne of Afghanistan’s true monarch, Shah Shuja, a ‘strict economy’ was to be observed, and Burnes’s mission was to travel with far less pomp and many fewer presents than that of Elphinstone: Burnes in fact had only a single pistol and one telescope to give to Dost Mohammad.
In the light of lingering Afghan memories of the lavishness of the gifts given by the last Embassy to Shah Shuja, these instructions did not bode well for the success of Burnes’s mission. Nor did the news of a pitched battle between the Sikhs and the Afghans which had erupted even as Burnes was heading towards the new Khyber frontier separating the two.

The Battle of Jamrud on 30 April 1837 was the climax of three years’ growing hostility between the Afghans and the Sikhs over Ranjit Singh’s occupation of Peshawar. As soon as he had dealt with Shah Shuja’s invasion of 1834, Dost Mohammad had turned his attention to trying to liberate the Afghan winter capital from Sikh control. Whether out of piety or strategy, or a mixture of the two, in February 1835 he had himself awarded the Islamic title of Amir al-Muminin, the Commander of the Faithful, by the ‘ulema [clergy]
of Kabul: the most senior Sunni cleric in Kabul, the Mir Waiz, had led him to the Id Gah on the edge of the town and placed barley shoots in his turban, an echo of the ceremony by which a sufi saint had consecrated Shah Shuja’s grandfather, Ahmad Shah Abdali, in June 1747.
l
As the
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
noted,

Calling the men of the surrounding region into Kabul, Dost Mohammad declared a jihad [holy war] and announced that the Punjab, Peshawar, and the other regions would be regained.

The religious scholars who called for jihad as an obligation to God, and who considered killing and being killed on the path of religion the catalyst of a better age, and the way to obtain life itself, gathered in joy and declared that: ‘The command to jihad is dependent on the existence of an amir and the establishment of an Amirate. Whoever should turn away from his command or prohibition, it would be like disobedience to the order of God and the Prophet. For others, it is absolutely essential that they render him obedience and punish those who disobey.’ Thanks to this declaration . . . Dost Mohammad began laying the foundations of his Amirate. In a short time, he had put everything in order, ascended the throne, and had the coinage and the
khutbah
[the Friday sermon]
issued
in his name. The following verse was inscribed on the coinage:

Amir Dost Mohammad resolved to wage jihad,

And to mint coins – May God grant him victory.

After his enthronement, Amir Dost Mohammad decided to fulfil the jihad. He left Kabul for Peshawar with an army made up of 60,000 men – royal horse and foot as well as irregular tribal forces.
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The declaration of jihad against the Sikhs brought with it a useful legitimisation of Dost Mohammad’s seizure of power. He had never dared to claim the Sadozai title of shah, and up to this point his only legitimacy lay in the reality of his power and his reputation for justice. But he could now justify his rule by appeal to a higher Qur’anic authority, and the fulfilment of his duty as a good Muslim to wage holy war against the infidel and so – in theory – usher in a millennial Islamic Golden Age of purity and godliness. At the same time Dost Mohammad used the leadership of the jihad as a way to claim leadership of all the Afghan peoples, writing to the Governor General, ‘these people are tribes of my nation, and their protection & support is an obligation as well as a duty . . . Reflect & consider if the Afghans can quietly submit to be injured and oppressed without resisting? As long as I retain life in my body, I can neither separate myself from my nation nor the nation from me.’
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Dost Mohammad made a first abortive attempt on Peshawar later that month, gathering a motley horde of jihadis – ‘savages from the remotest mountains’, according to Josiah Harlan, ‘many of them giants in form and strength, promiscuously armed with sword and shield, bows and arrows, matchlocks, rifles, spears and blunderbusses, prepared to slay, plunder and destroy, for the sake of God and the Prophet, the unenlightened infidels of the Punjab’. In the event, the rabble were no match for the beautifully drilled and disciplined troops of the Khalsa and succeeded in doing little except provoking a massacre of the Muslim citizens of Peshawar by an angry Sikh soldiery. But the raid also allowed Dost Mohammad quietly to annex the Afghan provinces of Wardak and Ghazni which separated Kabul from the Khyber and the Sikh border; he had now increased his revenues five times over since first seizing control over the country immediately around Kabul eleven years earlier, and had become unquestionably the most powerful ruler in the country.

At the end of February 1837, the Amir opened hostilities against the Sikhs for the second time. ‘Your occupation of Jamrud on the frontier of the valley of Khyber, which is in the possession of the Khyberis, my subjects, has greatly angered these people who will of course do what they can to prevent it,’ he wrote to Ranjit Singh’s General, Hari Singh, the leader of the Sikh forces in Peshawar. ‘My son Mohammad Akbar Khan will also do everything in his power to assist them . . . If you will exert yourself with the Maharaja to restore Peshawar to me, I will not fail to send him horses & other presents from the produce of this country. In the event of you effecting this object, I will agree to whatever you propose. If not, you know my response.’
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The Sikhs ignored the warning. Two months later, soon after Ranjit Singh had withdrawn his elite European-trained force, the Fauj-i-Khas, so that they could be guards of honour at a royal wedding in Lahore, 20,000 Afghan cavalry descended the Khyber, and on 30 April succeeded in surrounding Hari Singh near the walls of the new fort at Jamrud. According to the
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
, ‘In the heat of the furious combat, Akbar Khan encountered Hari Singh. Without recognising each other, they exchanged blows and after much thrusting and parrying, Akbar Khan won out, knocking Hari Singh to the ground, and killing him. With their commander dead and the army of Islam rolling towards them like a tide in flood, the Sikhs abandoned the field. They were pursued by the sardars as far as Jamrud Fort where they barricaded themselves inside.’
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The Fauj-i-Khas quickly turned around and a fortnight later drove off the besieging Afghans; but it was a huge boost to the prestige of Dost Mohammad and the first great victory of Akbar Khan, demonstrating how far he had inherited his father’s military talents. From this point he would increasingly become the most formidable Afghan commander.

Burnes was halfway up the Indus when he heard of the battle. For a time, it was unclear whether the hostilities would block his route into Afghanistan and bring about the cancellation of his mission. Either way, he realised the fighting would put the British in the awkward position of trying to remain allies of both sides in a war. But by the time Burnes had reached Peshawar and saw the difficulties the Sikhs were having holding the province and that they had found it ‘impossible to keep the country in order’, he became convinced that the occupation was proving so troublesome and expensive for the Sikhs that it left him ample room to negotiate a solution. In a letter to John MacNeill in Teheran, he mulled over the idea of an agreement whereby Peshawar could remain under Ranjit Singh’s nominal control until his death, when it would revert to the Afghans.
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Certainly it was with the confident hope that his mission could bring about some sort of compromise between the Sikhs and the Afghans that Burnes headed up the Khyber Pass on 30 August, passing through the no man’s land separating the two warring parties. ‘We took our departure from Peshawar,’ he wrote later,

and were driven by M Avitabile in his carriage to Jamrud, scene of the late battle between the Sikhs and the Afghans . . . We found the situation by no means agreeable. The deputation sent to escort us through the Khyber Pass had not yet arrived; and although some months had now elapsed since the battle, the effluvia from the dead bodies, both of men and horses was quite revolting. Some camel-keepers who had left the place the day of our arrival, escorted by a few soldiers, were attacked by the Afridi mountaineers, who came down upon them, drove off the camels, and beheaded two of the people, whose mangled trunks were brought into camp . . . [Halfway up the Khyber] by the road they showed us many small mounds, built to mark the spots where they had planted the heads of the Sikhs whom they had decapitated after the late victory: on some of these mounds locks of hair were yet to be seen.

As they passed from the territory of one tribe to another, ‘stopped at every by-road and defile as we came among the different subdivisions of the tribe’, the Embassy crossed slowly into Dost Mohammad’s area of control. A few days later, after passing the chinars and cypresses of Shah Jahan’s great Mughal garden at Nimla, site of Shah Shuja’s first defeat by Dost Mohammad in 1809, Burnes was met by two men who would both play important roles in his life.

The first to ride into his camp was the British deserter turned spy and archaeologist Charles Masson. Burnes recorded in his account his pleasure at meeting Masson, who had now earned some celebrity in India thanks to his pioneering work digging the Bactrian Greek and Kushan Buddhist sites around Kabul and Jalalabad; Burnes described Masson in his diary as ‘the well-known illustrator of Bactrian reliques’, and praised him for his ‘high literary attainments, long residence in this country, and accurate knowledge of people and events’.
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But Masson, who had for many years known Afghanistan intimately and who was a confidant of Dost Mohammad, was much less enamoured by his ambitious and self-promoting celebrity visitor. Like many others, he strongly resented Burnes’s fame as a traveller on the basis of his single journey to Bukhara, and was extremely dubious about both Burnes’s geographical knowledge and his diplomatic skills. ‘I must confess I augured very faintly on the success of his mission,’ he wrote later, ‘either from his manner or from his opinion “that the Afghans were to be treated as children”.’
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On one matter, however, the two agreed: the occupation of Peshawar was proving a financial disaster for the Sikhs, ‘unprofitable, and a constant source of alarm and inquietude to Ranjit Singh’, and the opportunity was now there to resolve the conflict by bringing the Sikhs, the Afghans and the Company together in an alliance that would keep Russian and Persian machinations at bay. ‘Afghan affairs were capable of settlement,’ Masson concluded, ‘and the settlement was in our power at that time.’
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The second man to enter Burnes’s camp was a much grander figure, and arrived that evening on elephant-back preceded by a ‘fine body of Afghan cavalry’. This was Dost Mohammad’s increasingly powerful fourth son, Mohammad Akbar Khan, whose path to fame had just begun when he had killed Hari Singh two months earlier. Akbar Khan was a strong, hard-bodied, hawk-faced young man. He resembled his father in his bravery, his charm, his ruthlessness and his sense of strategy, all qualities for which he was later celebrated as a heroic figure in Afghan song and epic poetry, where he appears as the Achilles, Roland and King Arthur of the Dari epic all rolled into one:
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When Akbar the Brave, Master of the Sword

Conquered and defeated the enemy forces

When he fought the fierce armies of the Punjab

He was but a youth, yet he had the mettle of a Sohrab

He became a legend potent and brave

As famed through the land as the mighty Rustam

When he reached the season of his manhood

He was tall and graceful as a young cypress

He mastered every science

And excelled in every art

His luminous countenance shone with a light divine

Worthy of crown and throne

All the world was drawn to his face

Every eye turned towards him
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