Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (22 page)

Lord Auckland was however quickly persuaded by Macnaghten to oppose any sort of pact with the Amir. ‘Nothing but the offence and jealousy of other powers would be the result of an ostensible alliance with Dost Mohammad,’ Auckland wrote in a memorandum soon after receiving the Amir’s letter.
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He did not write back for several months, and then his reply was friendly but hardly encouraging. He said he was pleased that Dost Mohammad wanted good relations with the Company, but regretted he could not intervene in the dispute between him and Ranjit Singh, and hoped that the two would sort out their differences. He also said he wished for ‘Afghanistan to be a flourishing and united nation’ benefiting from ‘a more extended commerce’. He then concluded, in words that his actions would soon disprove, ‘My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British government to interfere in the affairs of other independent nations, and indeed it does not immediately occur to me how the interference of my government could be exercised for your benefit.’
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The root of the impasse lay in departmental politics and jealousies. All Auckland’s information on Afghanistan came through Macnaghten and Wade, neither of whom had ever visited the country. The advice of Burnes, whose despatches from Kabul gave a more accurate assessment of the real balance of power in the country, could only reach the Governor General heavily filtered through the double distorting lens of Macnaghten’s summaries and Wade’s patronising commentaries, both of which tended to undermine all that Burnes was suggesting. Dost Mohammad’s ‘tenure of power has actually been very insecure’, wrote Wade witheringly in a covering letter appended to one of Burnes’s first despatches from Kabul in which he had praised the strength and stability of the Amir’s rule. ‘Popular commotions have occasionally broken out which he has found it difficult to suppress . . . My own sources of information lead me to believe that the authority of the Ameer is by no means popular with his subjects . . . The greater part of his Troops are disaffected & insubordinate and, though well equipped with arms, are generally very deficient in the qualities which constitute good soldiers.’
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In this way, Wade and Macnaghten kept assuring Lord Auckland that Burnes was simply wrong in his assessment of Dost Mohammad: the Amir, they insisted, was an unpopular and illegitimate usurper, with only the most tenuous hold on power. Contrary to what was said in Burnes’s despatches, they maintained that Dost Mohammad was actually the least powerful of the various rulers of Afghanistan, with less influence than his half-brothers in Kandahar or ‘the most respectable ruler’ Kamran Shah Sadozai, Shah Shuja’s ineffectual cousin in Herat. In reality, none of this had ever been the case and was now less true than ever – Dost Mohammad had established his suzerainty from the Hindu Kush to the Khyber, had got his half-brothers in Kandahar to accept his leadership after saving them from Shah Shuja’s siege and, to crown it all, had now been declared the Amir and the leader of the Afghan jihad. Burnes was right: Dost Mohammad was the dominant power in Afghanistan and potentially a powerful pro-British ally to the Company’s north, if only Calcutta could change its course and embrace him.

Burnes was on the spot, and clearly in a better position to weigh up the relative strengths of the different powers than any other British official, but Macnaghten had never liked the ambitious young Scot whom he believed to be naive, inexperienced and over-promoted. He therefore encouraged Auckland to trust instead the veteran spymaster of Ludhiana. ‘Where there is a difference of opinion between them,’ wrote Macnaghten to Auckland, ‘I should be disposed to concur with Capt Wade, whose arguments and conclusions rest on recorded facts, whereas those of Capt Burnes seem for the most part to be formed from the opinion of others, or from the impression made on his mind by circumstances which have come within his observation but which may in reality not be so unusual as to justify inferences which he has derived from them.’
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Meanwhile, Wade, as before, was encouraging Auckland to bring Shah Shuja back into play. ‘Less violence would be done to the prejudices of the people, and to the safety and well being of our relations with other powers, by facilitating the restoration of Shah Shuja than by forcing the Afghans to submit to the sovereignty of the Ameer,’ he advised. ‘After the late encounter with the Sikhs, the disputes of parties at Kabul ran so high that had the Shah appeared in the country, he might, I am informed, have become master of Kabul and Kandahar in two months.’
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In addition to these distortions, neither Wade nor Macnaghten seemed to have briefed Lord Auckland on how recently Ranjit Singh had occupied Peshawar, or how central its importance was to the Afghans, who still regarded it as their second capital. As a result, Auckland took the factually inaccurate position that the town was unequivocally a Sikh possession, and that Dost Mohammad was being unreasonable and aggressive in wanting it back. For this reason he continued to discourage Burnes from altering in any way the status quo.

Auckland also began to take on Wade’s view that it was in the interests of the Sikhs, and therefore of the British, for Afghanistan to remain fragmented, rather than to help Dost Mohammad consolidate his rule and accept him as an ally. ‘A very powerful Mahomedan State on our Frontier might prove to be a source of constant excitement or even serious danger,’ he told London. ‘Chiefships, balancing each other, and disposed by their position and circumstances to court our friendship, are surely far more safe and preferable neighbours.’ Nor did Lord Auckland believe, contrary to all the evidence, that Herat was in danger from the Persians or that the Barakzais were likely to make an alliance with the Shah of Persia. ‘These Afghans have no natural sympathy with the Persian Government and will retain no close connection with it if left secure in their remaining possessions,’ he wrote.
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It was a comprehensive misreading of the situation: by underrating Dost Mohammad’s power, Auckland and his hawkish advisers misunderstood both the reality of his steadily growing hold on Afghanistan south of the Hindu Kush and the balance of power between the Sikhs and the Afghans. They also underestimated how cleverly Count Simonitch, exceeding his instructions from Moscow, was manoeuvring to bring the entire region within the Russian-led, anti-British coalition that the Russian envoy hoped would soon encompass not just Persia and Afghanistan but also Bukhara and Khiva.
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These errors would lead in turn to more serious misjudgements.

To add to Burnes’s problems, Lord Auckland felt no sense of urgency. He was much more concerned with the trials of his viceregal camping trip and the famine in Hindustan, whose victims were now floating down the Ganges past his boat every morning. Only Burnes in Kabul was beginning to see that Auckland was in danger of sleep-walking into a major diplomatic disaster. He was acutely aware that if the British did not act quickly to secure the friendship of the Barakzais, then the Persians and the Russians would do so instead. In that case Afghanistan would be lost to British influence and handed over on a plate to its rivals. He therefore received with growing incredulity the Governor General’s successive letters ordering him not to promise anything to Dost Mohammad and refusing to act as intermediary on Peshawar.

In an effort to change Auckland’s mind, Burnes sent a long report on ‘the Political State of Kabul’ to Calcutta towards the end of November. In this he argued persuasively for the consolidation and extension of Dost Mohammad’s power as the surest means of shutting out the Russians from Afghanistan. Again he emphasised that it was not necessary to choose between the Company’s long-standing alliance with Ranjit Singh and the one he proposed with Dost Mohammad: with a little imagination and quick action on Peshawar it would be possible for the British to befriend both parties. He could not have known that in Calcutta around the same time Macnaghten was writing to Wade and strongly backing the latter’s opposing policy: one that advocated an exclusively pro-Sikh position, leaving Ranjit Singh in possession of Peshawar, and planning north of it a divided Afghanistan, with a weak Shah Shuja reinstalled in Kabul in the Amir’s place.
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Moreover, Auckland was now becoming increasingly entrenched in his oddly rabid hostility towards Dost Mohammad who, he wrote to London, ‘ought to be satisfied that he is allowed to remain at peace and is saved from actual invasion. But he is reckless and intriguing, and will be difficult to keep quiet . . . It is a fine imbroglio of diplomacy and intrigue . . .’
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As the Afghan winter brought in the first snows in early December, some bad news arrived in Kabul, which made Burnes more anxious still.

The Persian army was now reported to be moving in its full strength to invest the mighty Timurid walls of Herat. This had been expected: the Persians had long-standing claims to western Afghanistan, had occupied Herat in 1805 and had plotted another attack in 1832. This latest Persian attack had been several years in the planning, and did not in fact need any Russian pressure or encouragement. But the size of the army sent to take the capital of western Afghanistan – over 30,000 strong – and the presence in the Persian camp of a large number of Russian military advisers, mercenaries and deserters working for the Persians still came as a shock to Burnes.

One reason why Burnes knew so much about what was happening in Herat was that a young British officer and player of the Great Game happened to be in the city at that moment, disguised first as a Muslim horse trader then as a sayyid [divine]. Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger was the nephew of the spymaster of Bhuj, and Burnes’s former boss, Sir Henry Pottinger. His presence in Herat was probably more than fortuitous, and provided a stream of much-needed information for the British during the siege. In British accounts, ‘the Hero of Herat’ (as Pottinger was dubbed in Maud Diver’s jingoistic Victorian novel) is usually credited with steeling the resolve of the Heratis to defend their city and more or less keeping the Persians at bay single-handedly. This is not, however, a version of events which is supported by any of the many Persian or Afghan chronicles. Here the siege is seen as a titanic struggle between the two peoples, one Sunni, one Shia; and the fortitude of the Herati defenders, subject to the most horrific privations, was depicted as an epic of Afghan bravery and resistance. Indeed two of the most important Afghan historians living at the time devote almost as many pages to the siege of Herat as they do to the British invasion which followed it. Both were seen as equally formidable threats to the independence of Khurasan.

According to these Afghan sources, as soon as news arrived that the Persian army was heading towards Herat, Shah Kamran ordered grain and forage to be brought in, and the fruit trees in the gardens outside the walls to be cut down. Levies were summoned from the Sadozais’ Uzbek and Hazara tribal allies, and the city’s massive earthen walls were repaired and reinforced. So were those of the Ikhtiyar al-Din, the vast citadel of Herat that occupied an area that was equivalent to two-thirds of the city itself.
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By 13 November, the advance guard of the Persian army had arrived outside the border fortress of Ghorian. The Herati chronicler Riyazi in the ‘
Ayn al-Waqayi
recorded how the Persians captured the mighty castle in less than twelve hours with the aid of their British-trained artillery: ‘so many cannon were fired at the Qala’-i Ghorian that three of its sides completely collapsed’. In this way, wrote Fayz Mohammad, ‘the touch-paper of war was lit and preparations were made in the army of Iran for a major assault on Herat’.

A few days later, the first divisions of the enormous 30,000-strong Persian army marched along the valley of the Hari Rud towards the walls of Herat, easily driving off the squadrons of cavalry sent out against them. ‘A skirmish was fought and many men died,’ wrote Fayz Mohammad, ‘but when the vast numbers of the main Iranian army hove into view, the Heratis were unable to continue the fight and retired into the city . . . Seeing no hope of resisting the Iranians in the open field, Kamran devoted all his efforts to defence works. The Shah’s forces, like the waves of the sea, lapped against and enveloped the four sides of the city.’
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On the morning of Tuesday 19 December, two days after this unwelcome news had reached Kabul, Burnes and his assistants were looking out of their Bala Hisar residence, waiting for a messenger to bring in the latest despatches from India. Burnes had been hoping that Auckland would change his position on Afghanistan after he had read his long report, and he desperately wanted to be able to give Dost Mohammad some good news. The influence of his enemy, the newly arrived Persian envoy, was growing daily stronger since the news of the encirclement of Herat, and he knew he badly needed to boost British popularity and prestige. Only an undertaking by the British to mediate the return of Peshawar was likely to do that.

Instead, a message came from Dost Mohammad asking to see him. In formal durbar, the Amir gave him the worst news imaginable: a Russian agent, sent by the Tsar to open diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, had just arrived in Ghazni and was expected in Kabul within the week. The agent’s name, Burnes learned, was Lieutenant Ivan Vitkevitch.
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‘We are in a mess here,’ wrote Burnes to his brother-in-law, Major Holland, shortly afterwards. ‘Herat is besieged and may fall, and the Emperor of Russia has sent an Envoy to Kabul to offer Dost Mohammad Khan money to fight Ranjit Singh!! I could not believe my eyes or ears, but Captain Vitkevitch, for that is the agent’s name, arrived here with a blazing letter, three feet long, and sent immediately to pay his respects to myself. I of course received him and asked him to dinner.’
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