A Peace to End all Peace (53 page)

Egypt, with its vital Suez Canal, was one of the key strategic positions on Britain’s road to India; Afghanistan, with its mountain passes leading into the Indian plains, was another. Over the course of a century British armies had repeatedly been bloodied in the course of their efforts to prevent hostile forces from controlling the fierce mountain kingdom. The issue was believed by British statesmen to have been resolved satisfactorily in 1907, when Russia agreed that the kingdom should become a British protectorate.

On 19 February 1919, however, the Emir of Afghanistan was assassinated; and after a short period in which rival claimants maneuvered for the succession, his third son, 26-year-old Amanullah Khan, wrote to the Governor-General of India announcing his accession to the “free and independent Government of Afghanistan.”
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By the terms of Britain’s agreement with Russia in 1907, Afghanistan was not, of course, fully free and independent, for Britain was entrusted with the conduct of her foreign relations. Yet on 19 April the new ruler went on to assert his complete independence in external as well as internal affairs.

Amanullah secretly planned an attack on British India—through the Khyber Pass—that was to coincide with an Indian nationalist uprising in Peshawar, the principal British garrison town near the frontier.
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Amanullah believed that a nationwide Indian uprising would then occur.

Amanullah’s army commander moved too soon, however, before the Peshawar uprising could be organized, and unwittingly alerted the British to their danger. On 3 May 1919 a detachment of Afghan troops crossed the frontier into British India at the top of the Khyber Pass. They seized control of a border village and a pumping station controlling the water supply to a nearby Indian military post. On 5 May the Governor-General of India telegraphed to London that it looked as though a war—the Third Afghan War—had started.

According to Amanullah, he had ordered his troops to the frontier in response to the British repression of disturbances in India. Referring to the Amritsar Massacre,
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and to the policy for which it stood, Amanullah declared that in the name of Islam and of humanity, he regarded the peoples of India as justified in rising up against British rule, and that his own troops were at the frontier to keep disorder from spreading.

The British were unsure of his intentions. They were aware that during the war a German military mission had nearly persuaded the Afghan government to launch an invasion of India, and they believed that Enver’s old pan-Turkish colleagues, and also the new Bolshevik government in Russia, might influence the Afghan government in dangerous ways. Alarming information reaching the British authorities in May, at the time Amanullah’s troops crossed the border, indicated that the Afghans planned a simultaneous attack on three fronts, spearheaded by hordes of religious fanatics, responding to the proclamation of a Holy War, and supported by regular troops in coordination with frontier tribes;
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while, at the same time, British forces were to be immobilized by mass rioting within India.
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Believing that prompt action was necessary, British officers in the border region attacked Afghan positions. Inconclusive combat took place at scattered points along a wide front. For the British, the unreliability of their native contingents proved only one of several unsettling discoveries in a messy, unpopular, and unsatisfactory campaign. At a time when it could ill afford the money, the British Government of India was obliged to increase its budget by an enormous sum of 14,750,000 pounds to cover the costs of the one-month campaign.
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Although they succeeded in expelling the Afghan forces from India and, by the end of May, had gained the upper hand, the British forces were inadequate to the task of invading, subduing, and occupying the Afghan kingdom. What won the day for them was the use of airplanes, which the tribesmen, with their primitive weapons, were unable to combat. In particular, it was the bombing of Afghan cities by the Royal Air Force that unnerved Amanullah and led him to ask for peace. Nonetheless, the outcome of the war, from the Afghans’ point of view, was better than a draw. They had withdrawn from India but had regained their freedom within their own frontiers.

The Treaty of Rawalpindi, signed the morning of 8 August 1919, brought the Third Afghan War to an end. In the treaty Britain conceded the complete independence of Afghanistan, and relinquished control over Afghanistan’s foreign relations—a control that she had required in order to exclude hostile foreign powers, Russia chief among them, from the strategically important mountain kingdom. But soon after the conclusion of the Treaty of Rawalpindi, the Afghan government made use of its new independence by entering into a treaty with the Bolsheviks which, amongst other provisions, allowed the Russians to establish consulates within the kingdom. By 1921 the nervous British authorities were asking the Afghans to alter their agreement with the Bolsheviks, claiming that the Russians were setting up consulates at “places so remote from the sphere of Russia’s legitimate interests that it was obvious that the consulates could serve no purpose but that of facilitating hostile intrigue on the Indian frontier.”
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In 1921 the British entered into new negotiations with the Afghan regime. Urging liberal concessions,
The Times
correspondent wrote on 1 September 1921 that “the British Cabinet, despite the influence of Lord Curzon, whose great knowledge of the East is out of date,” should be convinced that Afghan nationalism and independence had to be recognized, and that if they were, the Kabul regime would show friendship toward Britain.

But years of British tutelage had fostered not friendship but resentment. During the 1921 negotiations the British delegation was able to produce proof that the Afghans had joined in a plot against Britain; for British Intelligence had deciphered the Soviet code and had learned of plans for joint Afghan and Russian military action against the British Empire.
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Despite liberal concessions by the British delegation, the Kabul regime continued to afford facilities to Bolshevik representatives and it was soon discovered that Russian agents were successfully intriguing with the warlike frontier tribes.
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Of course it could be argued that Afghanistan had always posed difficult problems and that the setback to British influence there was an isolated, exceptional event. But British policy in Arabia, too, was in tatters—and Arabia had seemed open to British influence and was ruled by monarchs who professed friendship for Britain. In the spring of 1919, while waging the Third Afghan War, Britain suddenly faced a losing situation in Arabia; and while there was no apparent connection between the two, or between either of the two and the situation in Egypt, the coincidence of difficulties on the western, eastern, and southern ends of Britain’s Middle Eastern empire suggested that Britain might have overextended her imperial commitments.

Of all the Middle Eastern lands, Arabia seemed to be Britain’s most natural preserve. Its long coastlines could be controlled easily by the Royal Navy. Two of its principal lords, Hussein in the west and Ibn Saud in the center and east, were British protégés supported by substantial regular subsidies from the British government. As of 1919 no rival European powers sought to intrude themselves into Arabian political affairs. The field had been left clear for Britain.

Yet the First World War was barely over before the Cabinet in London was forced to recognize that its policy in Arabia was in disarray. Its allies—Hussein, King of the Hejaz, and Ibn Saud, lord of Nejd—were at daggers drawn. Hussein complained that he was obliged to spend 12,000 pounds a month out of his British subsidy to defend against attacks from Ibn Saud, who himself received 5,000 pounds a month in subsidies.
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The British representative who relayed Hussein’s complaint characterized Britain’s financing of both Ibn Saud and Hussein—when they were fighting one another—as absurd.
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So was the bitter dispute that broke out within the British government over what to do about it—which paralyzed the process of making a decision, so that none was made. Instructions and ultimatums were drafted but not sent. Officials who made decisions were not told that other officials had cancelled those decisions. There were changes of mind from one day to the next.

The dispute centered around possession of the small urban oasis centers of Khurma and Turaba, located at the frontier where Hussein’s hegemony left off and Ibn Saud’s began. The stakes were larger than they seemed, in part because possession of Khurma and Turaba brought with it tribal allegiances that also involved substantial areas of grazing land, but mostly because the quarrel was about religion. In early 1918 the
Arab Bulletin
had recorded Hussein’s complaints that his authority was being undermined by religious proselytizing conducted by Ibn Saud’s adherents; for the Saudi claims on Khurma and Turaba derived from religious conversion.

Ibn Saud was the hereditary champion of the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth-century religious leader whose alliance with the House of Saud in 1745 had been strengthened by frequent intermarriage between the two families. The Wahhabis (as their opponents called them) were severely puritanical reformers who were seen by their adversaries as fanatics. It was Ibn Saud’s genius to discern how their energies could be harnessed for political ends.

At the end of 1912 a movement of religious revival had begun that was to change the nature of Arabian politics in Ibn Saud’s favor. Tribesmen started selling their horses, camels, and other possessions in the market towns in order to settle in cooperative agricultural communities to live a strict Wahhabi religious life. The movement became known as the
Ikhwan
: the Brethren. Ibn Saud immediately put himself at the head of it,
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which gave him an army of true Bedouins—the greatest warriors in Arabia. In the Brethren, both the authority of each tribe’s sheikhs and the separation between tribes tended to diminish, while the authority of Ibn Saud grew.

It was the spread of this uncompromising puritanical faith into neighboring Hejaz that, in Hussein’s view, threatened to undermine his authority. Hussein was an orthodox Sunni; to him the Wahhabis were doctrinal and political enemies. He sent expedition after unsuccessful expedition against Khurma and Turaba to recall them from their Wahhabi ways. The final expedition was mounted in the spring of 1919, in the flush of Allied victory over the Ottoman Empire. Led by Hussein’s son Abdullah, the trained Hejazi army of 5,000 men brought along the modern equipment which the British had supplied during the war. On 21 May 1919 Abdullah’s troops occupied Turaba, whereupon Ibn Saud set out from Riyadh to attack them. But the pitched battle for which both sides had prepared never took place. A Brethren force of 1,100 camel-riders, who had gone ahead of Ibn Saud’s forces as scouts, came upon Abdullah’s camp on the night of 25 May. Armed only with swords, spears, and antique rifles, they swooped down upon the sleeping Hejazi army and destroyed it. Abdullah, in his nightshirt, escaped; but his troops did not.
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The defeat of Hussein’s forces was so complete that it brought Britain to his rescue. British airplanes were sent to the Hejaz; British warnings were sent to Ibn Saud.
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Ever the diplomat, Ibn Saud avoided confrontation, made a show of deferring to Britain’s desires, and claimed to be trying his best to restrain the hotheaded Brethren. Hussein provided a complete contrast, remaining obdurate; and it was only with difficulty that Britain forced him to accept a temporary armistice in August 1920. Thus it seemed that Cairo and London had backed the wrong side, especially as Ibn Saud went on to new victories, capturing the mountainous province of Asir in 1920, and overthrowing the rival Arabian House of Rashid at the end of 1921. Spearheaded by the Brethren, whose fighting men were estimated at 150,000,
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Ibn Saud’s forces went about rounding out their conquest of Arabia.

On 20 September 1920 a special Middle Eastern correspondent of
The Times
wrote that the Arab Bureau’s old proposal that Hussein become Caliph of Islam—inspired by Lord Kitchener’s suggestion in the autumn of 1914—was proving to be a disaster. He predicted that Ibn Saud would invade the Hejaz and capture it; in fact Ibn Saud did so, and drove Hussein into exile, four years later.

Against their will, the British were placed in an adversary position with respect to Ibn Saud by their need to shore up Hussein. British prestige was involved; as a Foreign Office official noted, “we shall look fools all over the East if our puppet is knocked off his perch as easily as this.”
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Yet the British could do little about it. As in Afghanistan, the physical character of the country was forbidding. Not even a demonstration use of force seemed practical; asked what targets along the Arabian coast the Royal Navy might bombard, officials along the Gulf coast replied that in fact there were none worth shelling.
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Thus on the southern as well as the western and eastern frontiers of their Middle Eastern empire, British officials in 1919 began to find themselves no longer in control of events for reasons that they could not immediately fathom; and no course of conduct was evident to them that could bring the local populations back into line.

But perhaps the most serious challenge they encountered was in Turkey—the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain supposedly had crushed in 1918.