Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (2 page)

Wazir Fatteh Khan (1778–1818):
Fatteh was the eldest of Payindah Khan’s children. After the execution of his father he managed to flee to Iran. In the following years he revenged himself on the Sadozais, first by engineering the blinding and overthrow of Shah Zaman by his half-brother Shah Mahmoud, then by defeating Shah Shuja at the Battle of Nimla in 1809. He ruled as the powerful Wazir to Shah Mahmoud until he assisted in the rape of the Sadozai harem in Herat in 1817, after which he was blinded, scalped, tortured and executed by Shah Mahmoud in 1818. The brutal killing reopened the feud between the Barakzais and the Sadozais which was to divide the region until the expulsion of the last Sadozai from Afghanistan in 1842.

Dost Mohammad Khan (1792–1863):
Dost Mohammad was the eighteenth son of Payindah Khan by a low-status Qizilbash wife. His rise to power was initially brought about by his eldest brother Wazir Fatteh Khan and then, after the latter’s death, by his own ruthlessness, efficiency and cunning. Between 1818 and his accession in 1826, Dost Mohammad slowly increased his hold on power, and in 1835 he declared a jihad against the Sikhs and had himself formally declared as Amir. He was greatly admired by Alexander Burnes, who wrote despatches praising his justice and popularity, but despite Burnes’s efforts, Calcutta continued to see him as an enemy of British interests. After he received the Russian envoy, Ivan Vitkevitch, in 1838, Lord Auckland decided to replace him with his Sadozai arch-rival, Shah Shuja. After the British took Kabul, he spent eighteen months on the run, before surrendering to Sir William Macnaghten on 4 November 1840. He was sent off to exile in India. He was released following the assassination of Shah Shuja and the subsequent British withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1842, and was allowed to return to Kabul. Over the next twenty-one years of his reign he succeeded in enlarging his dominions to the current borders of the country. He died in 1863 shortly after conquering Herat.

Nawab Jabar Khan (1782–1854):
The notably Anglophile seventh son of Payindah Khan and close ally of his younger brother, Dost Mohammad Khan. Despite his interest in western ways and personal fondness for many of the British officials, he remained loyal to Dost Mohammad and was prominent in the resistance against the British following their invasion in 1839.

Wa’fa Begum (d. 1838):
Daughter of Payindah Khan and half-sister of Fatteh Khan and Dost Mohammad. Wa’fa married Shah Shuja early in his first reign, soon after 1803, when Shuja was attempting to soothe the blood feud between the Barakzais and the Sadozais. Praised by the British for her ‘coolness and intrepidity’ she managed to get her husband released from imprisonment in Kashmir in 1813 by offering Ranjit Singh the Koh-i-Nur, and according to some sources helped Shuja escape a second time, from Lahore in 1815. On her arrival in Ludhiana she managed to persuade the British to give her asylum, thus providing the Sadozais with the base from which they would eventually return to their throne. She died in 1838 and some attributed the failure of Shuja’s policies after that to the absence of her wise advice.

Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan (1816–47):
Dost Mohammad’s fourth and most capable son, born of a Popalzai wife. Akbar was a sophisticated and complex character, who was regarded in Kabul as the most dashing of the resistance leaders. The
Akbarnama
even includes a detailed description of the pleasures of his wedding bed. He first came to notice when he helped defeat the Sikh general Hari Singh at the Battle of Jamrud in 1837 and according to some sources personally killed and decapitated the Sikh leader. After his father surrendered to the British in 1840, and on his own release from the pit of Bukhara, he stayed at large in the Hindu Kush aiming to lead the resistance against the British. His arrival in Kabul on 25 November 1841 transformed the uprising and it was he who led the negotiations for a British withdrawal. On 23 December 1841, during a parley by the banks of the Kabul river, he personally killed the British envoy, Sir William Macnaghten. He subsequently led the siege of Jalalabad, and commanded the Afghan forces which tried to stop Pollock retaking Kabul on 13 September 1842. After the British withdrew he retook the capital and remained the most powerful figure until the return of his father, Dost Mohammad, in April 1843. He died four years later, some said poisoned by Dost Mohammad who had come to regard him as a potential threat to his rule.

Nawab Mohammad Zaman Khan Barakzai:
Zaman Khan was a nephew and close adviser of Dost Mohammad Khan, for whom he had served as Governor of Jalalabad between 1809 and 1834. He fled Kabul with Dost Mohammad in 1839, but Mohan Lal Kashmiri facilitated his return from exile and had him received into the court of Shah Shuja in 1840. At the outbreak of hostilities he initially showed signs of siding with the British, but was soon persuaded to take on the leadership of the uprising. Despite being known as the ‘rich nomad’ and regarded as a country bumpkin, he was crowned Amir in early November. He was sidelined by his cousin Akbar Khan after the latter’s arrival at the end of November 1841, and by February 1842 had entered an alliance with Shah Shuja, for whom he agreed to act as wazir. The alliance broke down owing to his rivalry with Naib Aminullah Khan Logari, and it was owing to Shuja’s perceived favouritism of Logari’s son Nasrullah over Zaman Khan’s son,
Shuja ud-Daula Barakzai
, that the latter assassinated the Shah, his own godfather.

Other Leaders of the Resistance

Naib Aminullah Khan Logari:
Aminullah Khan was a Yusufzai Pathan of relatively humble origins – his father had been assistant to the Governor of Kashmir at the time of Timur Shah – and he had risen through his intelligence and loyalty to the Sadozais. By 1839 he was a very old man, but still powerful, commanding substantial funds and large tracts of strategically important land in addition to his own private militia. Despite being a committed pro-Sadozai loyalist, he strongly objected to the presence of the infidel British in his lands and when he was insulted by a junior British officer, Captain Trevor, and lost his lands for refusing to pay increased taxes to the Crown, he became the leading centre of the resistance along with Abdullah Khan Achakzai. After the slaughter of the British in the Khord Kabul he rejoined the service of Shah Shuja, and only went across to the Barakzais after Shuja’s death. On the return of Dost Mohammad in 1843 he was imprisoned ‘for inciting peaceful people to engage in mischief’ and died in the dungeons of the Bala Hisar.

Abdullah Khan Achakzai (d. 1841):
Abdullah Khan 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 in the early days of the Durrani Empire, and the Achakzais had never shown much enthusiasm for the Barakzais. But like his friend Naib Aminullah Khan Logari, Abdullah Khan strongly objected to the presence of British troops in Afghanistan and after he had his mistress seduced by Alexander Burnes, and was mocked when he tried to retrieve her, he became one of the two principal leaders of the resistance. He was appointed the Commander-in-Chief of rebel forces at the outbreak of hostilities in November 1841, and was the main military mind behind the British defeat until his death in battle on the Bibi Mahru heights on 23 November. An assassin subsequently claimed he had shot him in the back to win the bounty offered by Mohan Lal Kashmiri for the death of the rebel leaders.

Mohammad Shah Khan Ghilzai:
Mohammad Shah
was
the
powerful chief of the Babrak Khel Ghilzai of Laghmanat, and the father-in-law of Wazir Akbar Khan. On the return of Shah Shuja in 1839 he was persuaded to join the court and appointed to the honorary position of the King’s Chief Executioner. He joined the resistance after Sir William Macnaghten cut the Ghilzais’ subsidies in October 1841: every king had paid the Ghilzais
rahdari
(road-keeping) to maintain the road and protect the armies and traders en route to India, but Macnaghten informed the Ghilzai chiefs that he was abrogating this agreement. After the return of Akbar Khan in 1841 it was Mohammad Shah Ghilzai who supervised the slaughter of the British during the retreat. Like the other leaders of the rebellion he found himself sidelined after the return of Dost Mohammad Khan in 1843, and he died in exile among the Kafirs of Nuristan.

Mir Masjidi
(d. 1841)
and Mir Haji:
These
brothers were two powerful and respected hereditary Naqsbandi sheikhs from Kohistan. Mir Haji was also the hereditary Imam of the Pul-i-Khishti Friday Mosque, the leader of the Kabul ‘ulema and the chief pirzada of the great Kabul Sufi shrine of Ashiqan wa Arifan. Having been promised large bribes by Wade in 1839, both brothers led their Tajik tribesmen against Dost Mohammad and so played a crucial role in the accession of Shah Shuja; but a year later, when none of the promised money had been paid, they rose in turn against Shuja and his British backers. Having made his protest, Mir Masjidi was about to give himself up when, contrary to all understandings, the British attacked his fort and massacred his family; his lands were then shared among his enemies. Following this both brothers became implacable enemies of the British and led the Tajik Kohistanis against the Anglo-Sadozai regime, first from the Nijrow Valley and then in Charikar and Kabul. Mir Masjidi was killed on the heights of Bibi Mahru on 23 November, but Mir Haji lived on to incite the people of Kabul against Shah Shuja, and it was his call for jihad against the British in Jalalabad that finally lured Shah Shuja out of the Bala Hisar to his death on 5 April 1842.

THE BRITISH

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859):
Elphinstone was a scholarly Lowland Scot who was chosen by Lord Minto to lead the first British Embassy to Afghanistan in 1809. Despite never venturing further than Shah Shuja’s fortress in Peshawar, he subsequently published an extraordinary and highly influential book about Afghanistan,
An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul
,
which became the main source of English-language knowledge about the region for several generations.

Major-General William Elphinstone (1782–1842):
William Elphinstone
was an elderly cousin of Mountstuart who, before being appointed as Commander-in-Chief at Kabul at the age of fifty-eight, had last seen action when he commanded the 33rd Foot at Waterloo. After years on half-pay he had returned to active service only in 1837, at the age of fifty-five, in order to pay off his growing debts. To his friends such as Lord Auckland, Elphinstone was a man of great personal charm, but he had no liking or feeling for India or the Indian troops he had to lead, and he described his sepoys as ‘negroes’. He arrived in Afghanistan suffering from severe gout and his condition got rapidly worse. General Nott described him as ‘incompetent’, an assessment that was rapidly proved all too accurate by his failure to act at the start of the uprising and his subsequent retreat into depressive indecision. He was wounded in the retreat from Kabul and after lingering for three months died of a combination of wounds, depression and dysentery at Tezin on 23 April 1842.

Sir William Hay Macnaghten (1793–1841):
Macnaghten
was a bookish scholar, linguist and former judge from Ulster who had been promoted from his court room to run the Company’s bureaucracy: ‘
our
Lord Palmerston’, Emily Eden called him, ‘a dry sensible man, who wears an enormous pair of blue spectacles’. He was widely respected for his intelligence, but many disliked his pomposity while others questioned whether this ‘man of the desk’ was at all suited to his new job as chief adviser to the Governor General. It was Macnaghten who taught Lord Auckland to look upon Dost Mohammad as an enemy of British interests, and in collaboration with Claude Wade pushed for regime change in Kabul by aiding Shah Shuja to regain his throne.
Having designed the policy of the invasion, Macnaghten asked to be sent out to Kabul to implement it, but his administration was not a success and he soon found himself sending
delusionally optimistic despatches to Lord Auckland about the ‘perfect tranquillity’ of Afghanistan in the face of the anxious reports his officials were sending in from across the country. He failed to spur his generals into effective action during the rebellion of November 1841 and was killed by Akbar Khan during negotiations outside the cantonment on 23 December 1841.

Major Claude Wade (1794–1861):
Wade was a Bengal-born Persian scholar who, during his period as British agent in Ludhiana, transformed the position from just running relations with Ranjit Singh’s Sikh court to controlling a network of  ‘intelligencers’ across the Himalayas and Central Asia. In this way Wade effectively turned himself into the first spymaster of the Great Game. It was Wade who first suggested using Shah Shuja to bring about regime change in Afghanistan, and partly out of a sense of competition with Alexander Burnes, who favoured an alliance with Dost Mohammad, pushed forward the policy of restoring the Sadozais to the throne. During the invasion of 1839 he was meant to lead a mixed force of Company troops and Ranjit Singh’s Punjabi Muslims up the Khyber, but he failed to gather more than a handful of Punjabis. He nevertheless forced the Khyber on 23 July. On the death of Ranjit Singh, he fell out with the Khalsa, and the Sikhs asked Auckland to have him replaced. He finished his career in the less sensitive posting of Resident in Indore, before retiring to the Isle of Wight in 1844.