Return of a king, p.27
Return of a King, page 27
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.’44 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’.45
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.’46u
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.47 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.’48 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.’49 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.50
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.51
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.’52
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.v 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.53 ‘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.’54
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 . . .55
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.56 ‘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.’57
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.58
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!’59
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.’60
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.61
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.’62
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 . . .’63 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.’64
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.65
