Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (38 page)

Among those taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by Kabul was Alexander Burnes himself, who had now moved into his old lodgings in the centre of town. These he did up in some style, and, by purchasing Russian mirrors in the bazaar and scraping the quicksilver off the back, fitted his house with the first glass windows in Kabul. Given that Macnaghten in Jalalabad was daily taking over more of the duties of government, Burnes found himself with time on his hands. ‘I am now a highly paid idler,’ he wrote to one friend.

I give paper opinions, but never work them out . . . These are my watchwords: Be silent. Pocket your pay. Do nothing but what you are ordered, and you will give high satisfaction . . . I lead, however, a very pleasant life; and if rotundity and heartiness be proofs of health, I have them. Breakfast I have long made a public meal. Covers are laid for eight, and half a dozen officers drop in, as they feel disposed, to discuss a rare Scotch breakfast of smoked fish, salmon gills, devils and jellies, and puff away at their cigars until ten . . . Once in every week I give a party of eight, and as the good River Indus is a channel for luxuries as well as of commerce, I can place before my friends at one third in excess of the Bombay price, champagne, hock, Madeira, sherry, port, claret, not forgetting the hermetically sealed salmon and hotch potch, all the way fra Aberdeen. And deuced good it is . . .
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If Afghan gossip was anything to go by, ‘devils and jellies’ were by no means the limit of his pleasures. The ever-loyal Mohan Lal explicitly states that Burnes brought his own troops of Kashmiri women who were ‘in his service’ and that he did not intrigue with the women of Afghanistan; but Kabul gossip maintained otherwise.
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‘Burnes was especially shameless,’ believed Mirza ‘Ata. ‘In his private quarters, he would take a bath with his Afghan mistress in the hot water of lust and pleasure, as the two rubbed each other down with flannels of giddy joy and the talc of intimacy. Two memsahibs, also his lovers, would join them.’
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Such rumours quickly began to sour the initially good relations between the people of Kabul and the occupying army. Kabul already had a discreet red-light district in the quarter occupied by Indian musicians and dancers close to the walls of the Bala Hisar. But there were not nearly enough Indian
rundis
around to cope with the demand created by the garrison of 4,500 sepoys and 15,500 camp followers, and a growing number of Afghan women seem to have made themselves available for a short but profitable ride into the cantonment. Indeed this became so common that the British began to compose rhymes about the easy availability of Afghan women:

A Kabul wife under burkha cover,

Was never known without a lover.
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Mohammad Husain Herati wrote:

It was reported to His Majesty by well-wishers that there was a thriving market in female prostitutes who were publicly, day and night, carried on horseback into the English camp. These prostitutes wore fine clothes and jewellery and make-up, fearlessly came in and out unchallenged, so that one could not tell if they were of noble lineage or common sluts – all this undermined public morality and the very basis of the state. It was the hypocrites of the Barakzai faction who first showed the way to this corruption and then blamed His Majesty, hoping thereby to arouse the moral indignation of simple people. His Majesty raised the matter with Macnaghten, who had little experience of the treachery and baseness of these people and only answered: ‘If we stop the soldiers having sex, the poor boys will fall quite ill!’ His Majesty answered: ‘That may well be true; however, in this kingdom at least, it would be better to discipline the soldiers and to respect the outward appearance of morality!’
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Fayz Mohammad
wrote in the later
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
that this growing slight to Afghan honour was the biggest cause of the alienation of the Afghans from their new government.

The Shah’s well-wishers, who were adherents of the Shar’ia of the Prophet and knew that this disgraceful business ripped the veil of religious honour . . . complained to the Shah who told Macnaghten, ‘Better that you should stop the traffic in this market’s goods by punishment. Otherwise, this tree of wickedness is going to bear unwholesome fruit.’ But Sir William Macnaghten did not heed the Shah’s words and soon forgot all about them . . . Until then it was still not generally known that when it came to affairs of state and matters affecting the army the Shah had no influence. Now the Barakzais went about revealing the way things really stood saying, ‘The Shah is Shah in name only and has no hand in state matters.’ Moreover, for their own purposes, they would play up the role of the English. Dangerously flirting with the fire of sedition they even mocked their neighbours, ‘Even your women’, they said, ‘do not belong to you.’
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In March 1840, Shah Shuja returned to Kabul from his winter quarters, and the court reassembled amid the pavilions of the Bala Hisar. With Dost Mohammad now immured within a Bukhara dungeon, Shah Shuja and his backers had a real opportunity to consolidate their joint rule. Instead the spring thaw saw the two rival administrations, British and Sadozai, beginning to compete with each other for control of the country. At the same time a growing realisation began to spread that it was Macnaghten, not Shuja, who was really running the new regime.

The cause of dissension was not a personality clash: Macnaghten remained as enamoured of the Shah as he had ever been. ‘My longer experience of His Majesty’s character more thoroughly convinces me that there is not an abler or a better man than himself in all his dominions,’ he wrote to Auckland on his return from Jalalabad.

His Majesty sits in durbar every morning except Thursday for about two hours and listens with the greatest patience to the representations of his chiefs. One day is set apart for hearing the complaints of all those who may allege that they have not received redress from the authorities to whom their cases had been referred. Though stern in the execution of justice, as was exemplified only the other day in the case of the murderer for whose pardon much influence was exerted, yet His Majesty is merciful and kind hearted in the extreme, and if the personal qualities of a monarch could ensure popularity, Shah Shoojah could not fail to obtain it.
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There were however several issues of policy, as well as the simple realities of divided power which were now slowly coming to divide the Shah from his British backers. As Mohan Lal put it, ‘we neither took the reins of power in our own hands, nor did we give them in full measure into the hands of Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. Inwardly or secretly we interfered in all transactions, contrary to the terms of our engagement with the Shah; yet outwardly we wore the mask of neutrality.’ This annoyed Shuja and disappointed the people. ‘The Shah became jealous of our power, and of the influence which he thought we were daily gaining for our own benefit, contrary to treaty, and to suspect that all the people looked upon us as sovereigns of the land.’
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The first point of dissension was a growing disagreement over the army. Already aware of the massive cost of defending Afghanistan, and of the way it was beginning to turn a small profit in the East India Company’s account into a large loss, Auckland was under strict instructions from London to train up in Afghanistan an efficient Afghan national army for Shah Shuja. This would allow the Company to pull back its troops to India while leaving Shuja secure and able to defend himself. ‘I have earnestly impressed it upon Macnaghten that every exertion must be made to consolidate the power of Shah Shooja,’ wrote the Governor General, ‘to give efficiency to his army and popularity to his government [as] our regular troops cannot remain there beyond the present season . . .’
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Auckland was equally frank with the Shah: ‘I have been ready, so long as any have seemed to threaten mischief, to allow British troops to remain in Afghanistan, but your Majesty is well aware of my desire to withdraw them as soon as it may be safely done, and your Majesty’s army shall be organised as to enable you fully to rely upon them for the maintenance of the legitimate Afghan monarchy.’
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This may have seemed a good plan in Simla, but in Kabul Shuja was all too aware that Macnaghten’s strategy of diverting resources from the old tribal cavalry levies towards a professional standing infantry army removed his principal means of extending patronage to the chiefs. As far as the nobles were concerned, the Shah was duty-bound to give out money, land and estates to them in return for which they would provide cavalry. The system was certainly corrupt: ‘ghost-payrolling’ allowed the tribal leaders to claim financial allowances for much larger numbers of men than they actually raised. But it was nevertheless the glue that cemented the local and regional tribal leaders’ loyalty to the regime at the centre. By aiming to create a modern, drilled force at the expense of the chieftains, Macnaghten was taking away Shah Shuja’s only real opportunity to reward his nobility for their support and undermining the power and wealth of his most important followers.

Nevertheless, Macnaghten insisted on driving the reforms through, maintaining that the benefits and savings would outweigh the risks involved. Payments to the chiefs duly fell by a quarter, from 1.3 million rupees in 1839 to one million two years later, with the bulk of the cuts falling on the eastern Ghilzai tribes who controlled and policed the vital passes between Kabul and the Khyber. To make matters worse, the chiefs had naturally hoped that the wealthy Firangis would actually increase their allowances rather than reduce them. These high expectations increased their feeling of betrayal, especially when they saw that the recruits to the new Uzbek Janbaz and the Hazara Hazirbash regiments were, as Mohan Lal put it, not from the nobility but ‘low and petty persons’. When the chiefs complained of this, Captain R. S. Trevor, the young, tactless and unpopular Burnes protégé to whom Macnaghten had delegated the reforms, bluntly wrote that ‘in the course of two years all the chiefs of the military class should be dismissed from his [the Shah’s] service, and what support they may receive till that time they should consider as charity’. This was a very serious matter. By appearing to threaten the entire traditional order and to take away the income of the Afghan tribal leaders, Macnaghten succeeded in alienating many of the Shah’s natural supporters who, until that point, had been quite happy to see the return of the Sadozais. It was certainly not a policy designed to endear Shah Shuja’s rule to those who could do most to disrupt it.
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Two strongly Royalist nobles were especially furious about the way the British were eroding what they regarded as their traditional rights. The two men were from different backgrounds. Abdullah Khan Achakzai was a young warrior-aristocrat from one of the most powerful and distinguished families in the region. His grandfather had been a rival of Dost Mohammad’s grandfather for the post of wazir in the early days of the Durrani Empire under Ahmad Shah Abdali, and Achakzais had never shown much enthusiasm for the Barakzais. But from his impregnable fortress Qila Abdullah, south of Kandahar, Achakzai controlled a great swathe of territory, and Dost Mohammad had always been careful to win his support. In comparison to Achakzai, the elderly Aminullah Khan Logari was almost a self-made man: his father had been a senior administrator under the governor of Kashmir at the time of Timur Shah, and it was through his intelligence and loyalty to the Sadozais under Shah Zaman, Shah Mahmoud and finally Shah Shuja that he had first come to control large areas of the strategically important areas of Logar, to the south of Kabul, and Kohistan to its north, as well as the vital Khord Kabul Pass, which dominated the routes into Kabul from the south. He was now a very old man, but still powerful, commanding substantial funds in addition to his own private militia.

Both men were committed pro-Sadozai loyalists who would naturally have preferred the government of Shah Shuja to that of Dost Mohammad, but they strongly objected to the presence of the infidel British in their land, and were determined that no Kafir innovations would deprive them of their right to serve their monarch or to pay their many followers. When they went to complain about the reductions in their salaries to Captain Trevor, according to Mohan Lal, Trevor insulted them and threw them out.
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For men of such rank and status to have to subject themselves to such treatment from a junior figure was unacceptable to both nobles’ sense of honour. They complained to the Shah, who said he sympathised and sent them on to Macnaghten. Macnaghten refused to help them. Shortly afterwards, Aminullah ‘was requested either to give up the chiefship’ of his district ‘or to increase the sum of revenue paid by him’.
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Aminullah refused and shortly afterwards control over his district was taken from him.
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From that moment onwards, Abdullah Khan Achakzai and Aminullah Khan Logari became the two most active centres of opposition to the British in Kabul, waiting and plotting for the moment when they could take their revenge.

Shuja himself had other reasons to be wary of Macnaghten’s new Afghan national army. In particular he was unclear if a British-trained, British-officered army would ever actually be obedient to him. As he pointed out to Auckland, already the Shah Shuja Contingent seemed to show little inclination to do as he said. ‘I am not personally acquainted with many of the officers in the force,’ he wrote. ‘Nor do I know the duties they perform. They do not even seem to know that they are my soldiers. I am desirous that the officers as well as the Battalions which you have kindly placed at my service should know that they are in my employ, so that the natives of this country should consider those attached to me to be my servants.’ The Shah added: ‘It is about 29 years since this country has been deprived of the Royal Authority. This has caused insurrection and every family to be the master of itself . . . I therefore wish that all the officers and Battalions should be entirely under my orders which will create a good feeling between them and the natives of this country, and put off all ill doubts from their minds.’
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