Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (37 page)

Yet in that first winter of the occupation there were few signs that Harlan was anything more than an embittered old Afghan hand who had seen his moment of greatness pass. Instead, to the surprise of many, the nobles of Kabul were not unwelcoming. The Rev. G. R. Gleig was not alone in imagining that the Afghans showed ‘a good deal of personal liking’ for individual British officers, though he quoted one chief who told him: ‘We wish that you had come among us as friends, and not as enemies, for you are fine fellows one by one, though as a body we hate you.’
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It helped that Dost Mohammad had ruled with an iron rod and imposed unusually heavy taxes on his people, as well as confiscating many estates to help finance his projects of jihad. This made the beginning of Shah Shuja’s rule seem relatively mild, and initially many Kabulis and most of the Durrani elite appear to have been willing to give their restored ruler the benefit of the doubt. As Mirza ‘Ata put it, ‘In the first months of their occupation of Kabul, the English brought most of the chiefs and the city and its environs into submission and obedience: the very few who disobeyed were imprisoned and their forts and property confiscated by the Company government.’
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Moreover, Macnaghten wisely opted for a generous political settlement. Prominent Durrani nobles in the south were bought off, while the Ghilzai chiefs in the east were heavily subsidised, as were the ‘ulema. It was a massive drain on the Indian exchequer, and it quickly became clear that occupying Afghanistan was not going to be cheap; but the strategy succeeded in keeping the peace for the first autumn and winter of Shah Shuja’s reign.
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As a result Auckland was able with some satisfaction to report to London, ‘The country is said to be quiet, the roads to be safe, commerce to be reviving, and the monarchy and change of government are still popular . . . Col. Roberts writes, “I have got acquainted with many of the chiefs. They are in general very desirous to be intimate with the
Sahib Loge
, and when I return to Kabul my house shall be open to them. They are happy to dine with us and to see us at their homes.”’
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This bright mood was only slightly dimmed by widespread scepticism as to whether the returning Barakzais would really accept Shuja’s olive branch and end the feud with the Sadozais that had now been carefully nourished for two generations. ‘Many of the Sadozai nobles found Shuja’s policy of reconciliation unpalatable,’ reported Mohammad Husain Herati. ‘They grumbled to each other while travelling or at court, saying: “Now that this clan of Barakzais is so highly respected, restored to all their old privileges and positions, it will not be long before the evil flames of discord rise high. How do these English, with all their claims to science and rationality and political experience, think it will all end, fostering the enemies of their friend? It will end in grief and regrets!”’ A traveller who had just arrived from Peshawar related that:

General Avitabile, the Sikh’s governor of that city, on enquiring about the state of affairs in Kabul, and on being told that all groups, including the Barakzais, were equally favoured, turned to his entourage and sighed: ‘God help that Shah Shuja and forgive him!’ Those present were surprised at the expression, normally used for the dead, and asked: ‘Is the King not still alive?’ Avitabile answered: ‘Anyone who gives room to his deadly enemies, and trustingly embraces them, will not last long. For as Firdawsi put it:

You killed a father and sowed the seeds of revenge,

When will he whose father was killed have peace?

You killed a snake and are raising its young,

What foolishness is this?

Eventually the fruits of all the enmity will ripen. Soon you will hear that Shuja ul-Mulk has been murdered by these very same Barakzais!’
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There were other shadows too: one regiment returning to India had its rearguard ambushed and massacred as it descended the Khyber Pass, with the loss of 150 baggage camels; shortly afterwards the garrison of Ali Masjid had to be evacuated down to Peshawar.
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At the same time, a senior officer, Colonel Herring, was murdered by a party of Afghans while out walking in Wardak. He had disobeyed orders and strayed from the road to chat with some Afghans on a hill. They cut him to pieces. ‘It was our melancholy fate to discover his dead body,’ wrote Thomas Seaton. It was ‘an awful sight, hacked and mangled in the most frightful manner, with every vestige of clothing torn off, except the wristbands of his shirt. The body was nearly severed at the loins, and there was a dreadful gash across his chest and through the ribs. There were altogether sixteen or seventeen wounds, each sufficient to cause death.’
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Yet by and large the country was at peace. Once the Ghilzai chiefs had received their subsidies from Macnaghten, they fulfilled their part of the bargain. ‘The passage from Khyber to Kabul was infested with dacoits and robbers,’ recounted the
Tarikh-i-Sultani
.
‘They threatened all the wayfarers and travellers on that route. However, once the Ghilzai Khans took over the management of this route, these threats were removed and peace reigned for the rest of the winter.’
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More worrying was the arrival of intelligence from Nazir Khan Ullah in Bukhara that the Russians were now finishing their preparations to invade Khiva. ‘The Russians have collected a great number of camels, carriages and boats on the bank of the Caspian Sea,’ he wrote. ‘They have resolved to send their army and provision by way of the Caspian to the vicinity of Kir, a distance of three days’ journey from Khiva.’
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Still ignorant of Dost Mohammad’s detention in Bukhara, Macnaghten feared that the Russians could again be plotting with the Amir, planning to install him in Herat, which was now in ‘a comparatively defenceless state’.
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Only Burnes seems to have understood that the Russian move was simply a direct response to British aggression in Afghanistan. ‘Russia has put forth her force merely to counteract our policy,’ he wrote to his friend Captain G. L. Jacob. ‘By our advance on Kabul we thus hastened the great crisis.’ Even at this stage Burnes instinctively grasped how fleeting could be the hold of either Russia or Britain on such an independent people as the Afghans. ‘England and Russia will divide Asia between them,’ he wrote prophetically, ‘and the two empires will enlarge like the circles in the water until they are lost in nothing, and future generations will search for both in these regions as we now seek the remains of Alexander and his Greeks.’
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Such realism was in increasingly short supply during the winter of 1839–40. Already the idea of permanently annexing Afghanistan was being discreetly discussed; there was even talk of moving the summer capital of the Raj from the inaccessible Himalayan ridge of Simla to the rich gardens of the Kabul valley, just as the Mughals had once migrated each May from Delhi and Agra to Kashmir and the lovely Nimla Gardens near Jalalabad.
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Such over-confidence soon began to lead to a series of major strategic errors.

Firstly, rather than concentrating on consolidating Shah Shuja’s fragile rule in Afghanistan, and providing the resources needed to make the occupation viable and secure, Lord Auckland – like more recent invaders – instead took the premature view that the conquest was already complete and so allowed himself to be distracted by launching another war of aggression in a different theatre. ‘China promises to be amusing,’ wrote his sister Emily in a revealingly flippant letter around this time. ‘The Chinese are arming themselves and fitting up little innocent American ships, and collecting war junks; and it is my own belief that they are so conceited that they will contrive some odd way of blowing up all our 74s with blue and red fireworks, take all our sailors and soldiers prisoners, and teach them to cut ivory hollow balls.’
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By withdrawing a large part of the Bombay army from Afghanistan and diverting much-needed resources away from consolidating the occupation of Afghanistan to his new Opium War, Auckland ensured that Macnaghten would never have the troops or the money he would need to make Shah Shuja’s rule a success.

One direct result of the limited funds with which Shuja and Macnaghten were supposed to govern the country showed itself when Auckland turned down requests from the Commander-in-Chief for building both a new citadel in Kabul and a new fort at Kandahar, noting, ‘I would see more clearly than I do at present what is to be the ultimate form of Afghanistan before I would incur any very great expense in buildings even for this purpose.’
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This left the military in a dilemma. With winter now tightening its grip on the Kabul valley, some of the troops were billeted in the Bala Hisar while others were dotted around lodgings within the walled city and many more were shivering in tents in the camp out on the Kohistan Road. Moreover, Shuja was now pressuring Macnaghten to remove the troops that were in the easily defensible Bala Hisar, saying it would disgrace him in the eyes of Afghans if British soldiers were still there when his harem finally arrived from Ludhiana. As Auckland had forbidden the army from constructing a properly defensible new fort, the generals had little option but to build a lightly defended cantonment to shelter their troops as if they were in the peaceful rice paddies of Bengal rather than amid the hostile mountains of Afghanistan.

It is unclear who took the decision to build the cantonment in a fertile plain, bounded on every side by irrigation ditches and walled gardens and overlooked by the fortifications of several Afghan nobles. As one observer put it, ‘it must always remain a wonder that any government, any officer, or set of officers, who had either science or experience in the field, should in a half-conquered country fix their forces in so extraordinary and injudicious a position.’ Even Gleig – no tactical genius – could see immediately that it was a far from defensible spot. It was, he wrote, a very surprising place to find a fortification:

There were forts and towers so planted that one or more overlooked each of the circular bastions by which the British lines were protected . . . Moreover, as if to convince the people that by their conquerors they were neither feared nor suspected, the principal magazine or store, both of provisions and ammunition, was not brought within the entrenched camp. On the contrary, an old fort, quite indefensible, and detached from both the cantonment and the Bala Hisar, was filled with stores, on the safety of which the very existence of the army depended; and a hundred sepoys, commanded by a subaltern officer, were considered adequate to protect them. A camp which is itself commanded by heights, and overlooked by towers, cannot command anything, and is wholly worthless for the preservation of order in a city from which it is cut off by a river.
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But it was not simply that the worst possible site had been chosen – the cantonment was also built to the worst possible design. It was obvious to Gleig that something was badly wrong with the layout of the hurriedly planned barracks, whose perimeter wall, nearly two miles long, was far too extended to be effectively manned by the garrison, and whose only defences were a low, easily escaladed rampart and a narrow ditch.
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Yet remarkably, distracted by their jackal hunting and theatrical debuts, few of the officers made the same simple deduction. Captain James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse, the young Anglo-Indian who had been put in charge of the commissariat, did point out that the stores should be brought within the cantonment perimeter wall, but received the unhelpful answer from Sir Willoughby Cotton ‘that no such place could be given to him, as they were far too busy in erecting barracks for the men to think of commissariat stores’. One other man who questioned the design was Colonel Abraham Roberts, the Commander of Shah Shuja’s Contingent. As the cantonment began to come up he realised not only that the position would be wholly untenable, but that the design of the barracks’ wallwalks, without loopholes or machicolations, made it more or less impossible to defend in the event of an attack. He wrote a letter pointing this out to Lieutenant John Sturt, of the Bengal Engineers, who was designing the cantonment, but received a curt reply that nothing could be done. ‘Your recommendation has come too late,’ wrote Sturt, ‘for I have already laid the foundations of one half. I know little about what is convenient or not – I submitted a plan to Sir W. Macnaghten; whether it went further than his military councils I cannot say, but as I heard no more about it I took silence for consent and worked away. Now the most must be made of it; it is useless questioning its expediency.’
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To make matters worse, the Afghans’ sense of honour was now beginning to be seriously offended by the growing number of affairs taking place between British officers and Afghan women. The most prominent was probably the marriage between Captain Robert Warburton and the beautiful Shah Jahan Begum, a niece of Dost Mohammad, to which both Burnes and Lieutenant Sturt were witnesses.
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Equally sensitive was between Lieutenant Lynch, the Political Agent at Qalat, and the beautiful sister of Walu Khan Shamalzai, the local Ghilzai chieftain.But the most visible activity was certainly in Kabul where a flourishing prostitution racket quickly sprang up to service the needs of all the single soldiers lodged around the town.
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‘The English drank the wine of shameless immodesty,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata, ‘forgetting that any act has its consequences and rewards – so that after a while, the spring garden of the King’s regime was blighted by the autumn of these ugly events . . . The nobles complained to each other, “Day by day, we are exposed, because of the English, to deceit and lies and shame. Soon the women of Kabul will give birth to half-caste monkeys – it’s a disgrace!” But nothing was done.’
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