The Dark Defile (9 page)

Dost Mohammed also received short shrift. He had written personally to Lord Auckland seeking British assistance over Peshawar—even offering to rule jointly over Peshawar with his untrustworthy half brother Sultan Mohammed Khan—but the governor-general told him bluntly that Peshawar was to remain in Sikh hands. If he wished British support, he had to promise to make no agreement with any other foreign powers without consulting the British. One of his chiefs commented that the British “asked much from Dost Mohammed, but granted nothing in return,” while another observed that the emir “had often written to the British Government about his affairs, and that in reply they answered him about their own.”

Even Burnes’s good friend Nawab Jubbar Khan complained to him that the British appeared to value their offers “at a very high rate, since we expected, in return, that the Afghans would desist from all intercourse with Persia, Russia, Turkestan.” “Were the Afghans … to make all these powers hostile, and receive no protection against the enmity raised for their adhering to the British?” he asked. Burnes’s mission was falling apart, which, given his masters’ “do-nothing” policy, as he called it, was always likely to be the case. The months he had spent in Kabul had done little except to convince Dost Mohammed that the British were not willing to be his friends and were very probably his enemies.

Yet despite all the frustrations, Burnes’s fascination with the region and its people was deepening. He still found time to explore Kabul, examining Afghan claims to be able to turn base metal into gold, admiring sword blades so sharp that they could sever a silken handkerchief thrown into the air and observing the women, of whom he wrote: “Their ghost-like figures when they walk abroad make one melancholy; but if all be true of them that is reported, they make ample amends when within doors for all such sombre exhibitions in public.” Masson would later accuse him of blatant philandering in Kabul, relating how a courtier of Dost Mohammed suggested that “I should follow the example of my illustrious superiors and fill my house with black-eyed damsels.” “Illustrious superiors” clearly meant Burnes, though Mohan Lal later refuted the accusations against him.

Not long after their arrival, Burnes and his companions had made an expedition into foothills of the Kohistan mountains north of Kabul, where Burnes contrasted the beauty of the landscape with the “turbulent and vindictive” people, the Tajiks, who inhabited it, their lives governed by endless blood feuds so that it was “rare to see a man go to bathe, hunt or even ride out without a part of his clan attending him as a guard.” On his return to Kabul, Burnes had been surprised to find an emissary from Murad Beg of Kunduz waiting for him. The psychopathic ruler, having learned of the presence of the British delegation in Kabul, had a favor to ask. His younger brother’s eyesight was fading, and he wished to send him to Kabul to be treated by the British. Recognizing an opportunity to make an ally of the powerful Kunduz chieftain, Burnes replied that he would not dream of requiring a sick man to travel through the Hindu Kush to Kabul, but would send his colleagues, Dr. Lord and Mr. Wood, to offer what assistance they could.

In early November 1837 the two men set out on what would be an epic journey through snowstorms so bad that some of their attendants “went raving mad.” Though Lord and Wood were unable to help Murad Beg’s brother, they managed to establish friendly relations with the chief and learned much about Uzbek customs, such as their “truly enormous” eating habits: Two Uzbeks could easily down an entire sheep as well as rice and bread, “afterwards cramming in water-melons, musk-melons or other fruit.” They also observed their passion for horse racing, claiming that the first prize for one race was a girl, the second prize fifty sheep, the third prize a boy and the booby prize a watermelon.

However, by the spring of 1838 there was clearly no reason for Burnes to remain in Kabul any longer. All his appeals on behalf of Dost Mohammed had failed, and the Afghan leader wrote bitterly to Burnes,
“I expected very much from your government, and hoped for the protection and enlargement of Afghanistan. Now I am disappointed.”
On 21 April Dost Mohammed sent publicly for the first time for Vickovich, who made him lavish promises. On 26 April, as Burnes took his leave from Dost Mohammed—who embraced him, wished him long life and presented him with three horses—it seemed that the Russians had won.

The cynical Masson, who had decided to leave Kabul with Burnes, later wrote, “Thus closed a mission, one of the more extraordinary ever sent forth by a government, whether as to the singular manner in which it was conducted or as to its results.” He added with an unfair swipe at Burnes, “The government had furnished no instructions, apparently confiding in the discretion of a man who had none.”

The real problem was that the British authorities in India had already decided their next course of action while Burnes was in Kabul, and nothing he could say or do could change it. When in the city he had written to a friend,
“I came to look after commerce, to superintend surveys and examine passes of mountains, and likewise certainly to see into affairs and judge of what was to be done hereafter; but the hereafter has already arrived.”
He had been overtaken by events.

Chapter Four

It is evident that Afghanistan must be ours or Russia’s.

—LORD PALMERSTON, OCTOBER 1838

As a disappointed Alexander Burnes made his way back to India, events in the western Afghan city of Herat were gathering momentum. Forty-five thousand people lived within its moated mud-walls. One British visitor wrote,
“If dirt killed people where would the Afghans be!… The residents cast out the refuse of their houses into the streets, and dead cats and dogs are commonly seen lying upon heaps of the vilest filth.”
The city was mercilessly governed by Shah Shuja’s short, stocky and pockmarked nephew Kamran, who had blinded Dost Mohammed’s elder brother Futteh Khan twenty years earlier. As a younger man, Kamran had been able to cut a sheep in half with a single slash of his saber, but he was now an aging alcoholic and the real power in Herat was his avaricious vizier Yar Mohammed, who patrolled the city accompanied by executioners bearing large knives and tiger-headed maces.

Herat occupied a strategic position at the confluence of the major routes into Central Asia from the west. The surrounding countryside, rich and fertile, was ideal for supplying a large army. However, Herat also derived its wealth from slave trading. Many of those sold in its market were Persians seized in border raids, and this had provided Persia, strongly encouraged by its Russian advisers, with a pretext for attacking a city that had once been part of the Persian Empire. Four years earlier, the elderly Persian shah, whom Burnes had met on his return from Bokhara, had died, to be succeeded by his ambitious grandson Mohammed Shah. In early 1836 the new shah had demanded hostages and tribute from Herat. Yar Mohammed had replied on behalf of Kamran: “
We gave no hostages during the reign of the late shah, and we will give none now. You demand a present; we are ready to give as large a present as we can afford. If the shah is not satisfied with this, and is determined to attack us, let him come.”

Yar Mohammed and Kamran next suggested to the Persians an alliance against both Dost Mohammed at Kabul and his half brothers at Kandahar. The shah’s lofty response was that he would take Kabul and Kandahar for himself without their help—and Herat too. He also increased his demands: Kamran was to renounce his titles, sermons were to be read in Herat’s mosques in the shah’s name, the usual way of signifying a change of ruler, and his likeness, not Kamran’s, was to be stamped on the city’s coinage. As the shah must have anticipated, Kamran could not accept these demands, and in the summer of 1837 Herat readied itself for the Persian onslaught.

Yet on 18 August someone else arrived in Herat in advance of the Persians: Eldred Pottinger, a twenty-six-year-old Northern Ireland–born subaltern in the East India Company’s Political Department and nephew of Henry Pottinger, British resident in Kutch, whose assistant Burnes had been. When his uncle had told him of Persia’s ambitions toward Herat, Pottinger had volunteered to go to the region to gather intelligence and had set out for Afghanistan on his unofficial mission in the guise of a horse dealer. His appearance in Herat at this time was fortuitous. Taking a risk, Pottinger threw off his disguise and made himself known to the notoriously suspicious and vindictive Yar Mohammed, who might well have regarded him as a spy. Luckily for Pottinger, the vizier decided there were advantages in the presence of a British officer at this critical juncture and made him his military adviser.

By late November
, with the air growing chill and a hard frost on the ground, thirty thousand Persian troops were encamped among the streams and orchards to the northwest of the city. Among them were Russian officers acting as military advisers and also a shadowy regiment of Russians claimed by one source to be deserters from the Russian army. On 23 November, two months after Burnes’s arrival in Kabul, the Persian army began to bombard Herat. However, as Pottinger recorded in his journal, Herat’s defenses were strong, and to his critical eyes the attackers poorly led. At least as many cannonballs sailed over Herat as hit its mud walls, and though the Persian mortars were more accurate, the shells they hurled into the city were “carved out of slate-rock and their chamber contain[ed] little more than a bursting charge.” When the Persians deployed their largest weapon, a massive 68-pounder gun, its carriage collapsed after it had fired only a few of its projectiles, rendering the weapon useless.

Pottinger also found much to criticize in Yar Mohammed’s tactics. To encourage defenders to sally out under cover of darkness to attack outposts and destroy siege works, the vizier offered a reward for every Persian head brought into the city. “Barbarous, disgusting and inhuman,” wrote the young officer. Sometimes bounty hunters tried to trick Yar Mohammed. Pottinger noted how one man presented a pair of bleeding ears, for which he duly received payment, then a little while later another man appeared with a head, for which he claimed a reward. Unfortunately for him, one of the vizier’s attendants spotted that the mutilated head was earless and also, on closer inspection, that it was not Persian at all but belonged to a defender killed the previous night.

Both sides indulged in tit-for-tat brutality. When the Persian shah learned that Kamran and his vizier had sold all their Persian prisoners as slaves, he ordered the abdomens of all his Herati captives to be slit open and their heads forced into the gaping cavity until they suffocated. As for Herat’s citizens, their plight worsened as famine and disease took hold. They also had to endure Yar Mohammed’s sadistic attempts to extort money to pay his soldiers. The tortured corpses of those too stubborn to reveal where they kept their wealth, and of those who had none to offer but who had not been believed, were flung over the city walls. Sometimes the Russians in the Persian camp fired rockets “whose fiery flight as they passed over the city struck terror into the hearts of the people who clustered on the roofs of their houses praying and crying by turns.”

During pauses in the sometimes desultory fighting, Yar Mohammed employed Pottinger as a go-between. Riding into the Persian camp, Pottinger was greeted by shouts of “Bravo! Bravo!” and loud protestations that the British had always been “friends of the King-of-Kings.” In the camp he met another British officer, Captain Charles Stoddart, aide to John McNeill, now British envoy to the Persian court, who himself arrived at the camp from Tehran in early April 1838. McNeill hoped to convince the shah that he was violating Persia’s treaty obligations to Britain and must lift the siege. At the very least he wished to mediate between the Persians and Heratis. However, in the midst of the diplomatic toing and froing, the Russian minister to the Persian court, Count Simonich, also appeared, offering the Persians rather more than the British did—funds and further military advice to pursue their conquests. By early June, after being repeatedly snubbed by the shah, McNeill decided he had no option but to break off relations with the Persian court and on 7 June departed, taking Stoddart with him. With Herat’s fall to the Persians seeming increasingly likely, some of the Afghan chiefs began to talk of saving the city from the Persians by offering to become vassals of Russia, and it took much of Pottinger’s energy to dissuade Yar Mohammed from such a course.

Meanwhile, with the strong possibility that Herat would fall and that the Persians, with Russian backing, would fulfill their threats to move on Kandahar and even on Kabul itself, British policy toward Afghanistan had been crystallizing. On 12 May Auckland had written from India to Sir John Hobhouse, president of the Board of Control in London, defining the options as he saw them. Britain could simply “
leave Afghanistan to its fate
” and concentrate on defending the Indus Valley, though that would encourage the Russians and Persians to “intrigue upon our frontiers.” Alternatively, Britain could “attempt to save Afghanistan” by supporting the current rulers of both Kabul and Kandahar in an extension of a divide-and-rule policy of the type previously favored by Wade, except that might put Britain’s treasured alliance with the Sikhs at risk because of the Afghan leaders’ ingrained hostility toward them. Auckland’s third option, running contrary to all the advice he had received and was to receive from Burnes, was to encourage Ranjit Singh—though regarded by most Afghans as their greatest foe—to invade Afghanistan and impose the elderly and unpopular Shah Shuja on the people as king instead of Dost Mohammed. This was a course mooted by Wade in one of his letters forwarding those of Burnes’s favoring Dost Mohammed, and this was the solution Auckland considered the “most expedient” and decided to adopt, driven as he was by his desire above all to preserve the Sikh alliance.

Chief Secretary William Macnaghten and the more junior Henry Torrens and John Colvin had no doubt influenced Auckland’s decision. The governor-general and these three of his advisers were at this time at Simla escaping the summer heat in the northwestern foothills of the Himalayas near Ludhiana. Pleasant though Simla was, it was far from the rest of Auckland’s staff in Calcutta. The nineteenth-century historian Sir John Kaye likened Simla to a cross between a sanatorium and a lunatic asylum “
where our Governors-General, surrounded by irresponsible advisers, settle the destinies of empires without the aid of their legitimate fellow-counsellors … [Simla] has been the cradle of more political insanity than any place within the limits of Hindustan.
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