Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (23 page)

The dinner between the two great rivals – the first such meeting in the history of the Great Game – took place on Christmas Day 1837. The two agents turned ambassadors got on well and found much in common, though we know frustratingly little of the detail of what they wore or ate or spoke about, or how much Vitkevitch revealed of his troubled background. Burnes merely records that the Pole was:

a gentlemanly, agreeable man, about thirty years of age, and spoke French, Persian and Turkish fluently, and wore a uniform of an officer of Cossacks which was a novelty in Kabul. He had been to Bokhara, and we had therefore a common subject to converse upon, without touching on politics. I found him intelligent and well informed on the subject of Northern Asia. He very frankly said it was not the custom of Russia to publish to the world the result of its researches in foreign countries, as was the case in France or England.

Burnes then added: ‘I never again saw Mr Vitkevitch, although we exchanged sundry messages of “high consideration”, for I regret to say I found it impossible to follow the dictates of my personal feelings of friendship towards him, as the public service required the strictest watch.’
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This was no understatement: Burnes had already begun to intercept his dining companion’s letters back to Teheran and St Petersburg, and vice versa.

In the weeks that followed, Burnes put a brave face on his increasingly uncomfortable situation. He was well aware how close he was to having his mission unravel, especially as there was still no sign that Lord Auckland had grasped the seriousness of what was happening in Kabul, or that he had taken in how close he was to losing both Persia and Afghanistan to the Russians. As it was, Burnes was having difficulty in keeping up with the presents that Vitkevitch was showering on the Amir: ‘Captain Vitkevitch informs the Ameer that the value of the rarities sent to him by the Emperor amounts to 60,000 Rs,’ he wrote on 18 February 1838. ‘The opposing faction have not failed to contrast this with the few trifles which I have presented to him, and to adduce it as a proof of the indifference of a nation famed, and above all in Afghanistan, for its liberality . . . Under all these circumstances it may be naturally expected how anxiously I look for the commands of Government to guide me.’
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But with letters taking three to four weeks to reach India, and Calcutta failing to reply to his missives, and with the news from Herat becoming ever grimmer, Burnes decided to seize the initiative. That same month he promised Rs 300,000 to the Kandahar Barakzais to help them defend themselves against the Persians if Herat fell and the Shah’s army marched into Afghanistan.

He also decided to breach protocol and, bypassing Wade and Macnaghten, wrote an impassioned letter directly to Lord Auckland pleading with him to understand what was at stake and telling him clearly that a deal was still easily within his grasp, one which without effort or expense could achieve all British aims, and which at one stroke would head off the designs of Russia and Persia. He blamed the Sikhs for their aggression in taking Peshawar and building the fort at Jamrud, and reiterated how much Dost Mohammad still longed for a British alliance, despite suffering multiple rebuffs. He also pointed to the Sikh seizure of Peshawar as the reason why Dost Mohammad had been forced to look elsewhere for allies. Most of all, he emphasised the immediate danger represented by Vitkevitch, and stressed that the unresolved state of Peshawar ‘while it hangs over, brings intrigues to our door, and if not checked may shortly bring enemies instead of messengers’. He concluded that ‘much more vigorous proceedings than the Government might wish or contemplate are necessary to counteract Russian and Persian intrigue in this quarter, than have been hitherto exhibited. It is indubitably true that we have an old and faithful ally in Maharaja Ranjit Singh but such an alliance will not keep these powers at a distance, or secure to us what is the end of all alliances, peace and prosperity in our country and on our frontiers.’
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Burnes did still have one trump card: Dost Mohammad had made it very clear that he would have preferred an alliance with Britain to one with Russia, and had gone out of his way to demonstrate this. Vitkevitch was being kept virtually under house arrest in the haveli of Dost Mohammad’s Minister, Mirza Sami Khan, a much less grand lodging than that given to Burnes, and had still not yet been received by Dost Mohammad; all communication between the two still took place through the Minister. Vitkevitch was also kept under constant surveillance, and wrote to Simonitch that Dost Mohammad was behaving ‘very coldly to me’. As Burnes wrote to a confidant,

The Amir came over to me sharp, and offered to do as I liked – kick him [Vitkevitch] out or anything. I said not to do any such thing, but to give me the letters the agent has brought, all of which he surrendered sharp. I sent an express at once to my Lord Auckland with a confidential letter to the Governor General himself bidding him to look at what his predecessors had brought upon him, and telling him that after this, I know not what might happen, and it was now a neck and neck course between the Russian and us.
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The astonishingly undiplomatic orders that Burnes eventually received from Lord Auckland in answer to his repeated pleas were written on 21 January and arrived in Kabul exactly a month later. At one stroke Auckland undid all of Burnes’s work and hopes. In the covering letter, Macnaghten dismissed his anxieties, explaining that he did not believe that Herat was in any real danger from either Persia or Russia, and that, bafflingly, ‘His Lordship attaches little immediate importance to the mission of the Russian agent.’ He was also told that he had no authority to offer any money or an alliance to the Kandahar Barakzais, and his initiative to try and buy their support was disowned and countermanded.

In particular Auckland continued to show a complete lack of interest in the idea of an alliance with Kabul, as he made very clear in the letter he addressed to Dost Mohammad. Auckland told the Amir he must forget Peshawar and ‘relinquish the idea of governing that territory’. He must also ‘desist from all intercourse with Persia, Russia and Turkistan’. All the British would do in return, ‘which is all I think that can in justice be granted’, would be to persuade the Sikhs not to invade Kabul and so save the Amir ‘from a ruinous war’. Ranjit Singh for his part ‘through the generosity of his nature has acceded to my wish for the cessation of strife, if you should behave in a less mistaken manner to him. It becomes you earnestly to think on the mode in which you may effect reconciliation with that powerful prince, to whom my nation is united by the direct bonds of friendship, and to abandon hopes which cannot be realised.’

Finally there was a warning: if Dost Mohammad should continue to consort with Persia and Russia, the Indian government would support Sikh expansion into Afghanistan and ‘Captain Burnes . . . will retire from Kabul where his further stay cannot be advantageous’.
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There was not the slightest hint of compromise to meet Dost Mohammad’s entirely legitimate anxieties and aspirations. Instead Auckland had actually hardened his position against the Amir, who was now being told he could not correspond with Persia and Russia except with British permission, that he must surrender all claims to Peshawar and Kashmir and, most unpalatable of all, beg Ranjit Singh for forgiveness.

It was difficult to see how Burnes could salvage anything from this suicidal set of instructions, especially when Russia was prepared to offer so much: not only friendship and protection, but two million roubles in hard cash to raise an army against the Sikhs – everything Dost Mohammad wished for. In an apparent fit of absent-mindedness, Auckland had in a single stroke handed over to the Russians a great swathe of territory from Persia through Central Asia to Afghanistan – something Vitkevitch realised as soon as he came to hear of the letters’ contents. ‘The British’, he wrote, ‘are losing for a long time any hope of re-establishing their influence in this area.’
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Burnes was devastated. All his views had been ignored, and all his work destroyed. As Masson later reported, for a while Burnes ‘abandoned himself to despair. He bound his head with wet towels and handkerchiefs, and took to the smelling bottle. It was humiliating to witness such an exhibition, and the ridicule to which it gave rise.’
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But over the weeks which followed Burnes recovered and fought a brave rearguard action, pushing at the boundaries of his instructions to see if there was a loophole with which he could keep Vitkevitch at bay.

He worked with the more pro-British nobles to see if Dost Mohammad could be persuaded to accept merely a promise of British protection. He also seems to have thrown money around, in an attempt to gather support, something that is mentioned in all the Afghan sources. ‘Burnes started meeting secretly with the great nobles and chiefs of Kabul,’ remembered Mirza ‘Ata, ‘all of whom had one great love, a love of money and the clink-clink of gold coins – so he soon perverted them and bought their support with bribes.’
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But the conclusion was still inevitable. Intermediaries, including Nawab Jabar Khan, Dost Mohammad’s Anglophile brother who had sent his son to be educated by Wade in Ludhiana, attempted to bring the two sides together, but the insulting and patronising tone of Auckland’s letter, as much as its actual contents, had made a compromise impossible. As the Amir observed, the one thing he could never abandon was his
izzat
– his honour. ‘It was Auckland who had abandoned the Afghans,’ he told Burnes, ‘and not he who had deserted the British.’
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Events at Herat strengthened Russia’s hand, even as the British were undermining their own position. The siege of the town was tightening its grip. Eldred Pottinger wrote to Burnes reporting that:

The country is utterly and totally ruined for the next year, there is neither seed to sow or cattle to sow it if there were. I really fear that the unfortunate Shiahs [within the town] will be sold into slavery in a mass . . . In the city there is great distress as few calculated the siege lasting more than a few weeks . . . Sheep have become almost unknown in the city and the supply of water being stopped, the public reservoirs and cisterns have become nearly too foul to use.
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Moreover, Count Simonitch had now arrived in the Shah’s camp and was playing an increasingly active role in directing the siege operations. As MacNeill reported, ‘The evidence of concert between Persia and Russia, for purposes injurious to British interests, is unequivocal and the magnitude of the evil with which we are threatened is, in my estimation, immense.’
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In a sign of the way the winds were blowing, on 20 March Dost Mohammad’s Minister, Mirza Sami Khan, invited Vitkevitch as his guest of honour to celebrate Nauroz, the Persian New Year. Burnes was pointedly not invited until the party had already begun and then refused to go; but he asked his Indian assistant, Mohan Lal Kashmiri, to go in his stead.

Mohan Lal had now been Burnes’s invaluable munshi (or secretary) and adviser for seven years, since the two had first met in Delhi in 1831, when Mohan Lal was only twenty. His father had been a munshi on the Elphinstone mission twenty years earlier, and on his return had chosen to make Mohan Lal one of the first boys in north India to be educated according to the English curriculum in the new Delhi College. Clever, ambitious and fluent in English, Urdu, Kashmiri and Persian, Mohan Lal had accompanied Burnes on his trip to Bukhara, after which he worked for some time as an ‘intelligencer’ for Wade in Kandahar, corresponding frequently with Masson, his counterpart in Kabul. Burnes relied on and trusted Mohan Lal completely, not least as he had shown himself willing to pay the ultimate price for his loyalty and friendship to Burnes: in December 1834 his own Kashmiri Pundit community had formally outcaste him as a result of his open expressions of religious scepticism and frequent caste violations. He was now forbidden ‘to drink out of the same cup with them . . . They discarded me from their society . . . so I am now left without friends and without a place to reside in my native city of Delhi.’
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Mohan Lal later wrote in English a remarkable book of his travels and a scholarly two-volume biography of Dost Mohammad. In the latter he gives his own account of his meeting with Vitkevitch at Mirza Sami Khan’s Nauroz party. On arrival he found that the Minister and Vitkevitch:

sat a little higher than the others, on the ‘nihali’ [dais], and the former, to show his civility . . . placed me by the side of the Russian envoy. While the music was going on, the minister was conversing on politics, sometimes with M Vitkevitch and sometimes with me, inquiring about the number of English troops stationed at Ludhiana, the distance between the divisions at Kurnal, Meerut and Kanpur; and whether the Mahomedans were the major part of the army or the Rajputs; and what were the feelings of the natives of India towards the decayed household of the great Timur [the Mughals]. Understanding the manner in which the inquiries were made, I came to the conclusion that every question was put to me according to arrangements made previous to my joining the party . . .

The conversation then moved on to the flourishing trade between Russia and Kashmir, which Vitkevitch said he hoped to help the Afghans reclaim from the Sikhs. Vitkevitch claimed he was ‘authorized to say to Maharajah Ranjit Singh that if that chieftain did not act in a friendly manner to the Afghans, Russia will send money easily . . . to Kabul to raise troops to fight the Sikhs for the recovery of his country . . .’ He added that ‘fifty thousand men of Russian regiments were in readiness to land at Astarabad . . . who would then march towards the Punjab; that such movements would rouse all the discontented chiefs of India to rebel; and that the English, who are not soldiers, but merely mercantile adventurers, would not dare to assist Ranjit Singh, knowing that the Afghans are succoured by the warlike nation of Russia’.
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