Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (7 page)

His moment came three years later, in 1803, when sectarian rioting broke out: ‘The people of Kabul’, wrote the Shah, ‘remembered the gentleness and generosity of my brother Zaman’s governance; and they compared it to the insolence of the usurper and his ruffianly troops. They had had enough, and had recourse to the pretext of religious differences in order to obtain some change. The quarrel between Sunni and Shia blazed again, and soon there were riots in the streets of Kabul.’
23

The fighting was between the Shia Qizilbash and their Sunni Afghan neighbours. According to a Sunni source,

a Qizilbash rogue seduced a young Sunni boy who lived in Kabul into going home with him. He invited some other pederasts to take part in this loathsome business and they performed a number of obscene acts on the helpless lad. At the end of several days, during which they plied him with drugs and alcohol, they threw him out into the street. The boy went home and told his father what had happened. His father, in turn, demanded justice . . . The boy’s family assembled at the Pul-i-Khishti Mosque on Friday, with their heads and feet bared, and their pockets turned inside out. They stood the boy beneath the pulpit and called on the chief preacher to redress the wrong. The preacher then declared a war against the Qizilbash.
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Most serious Afghan feuds tend to involve close blood-relations, and the ‘usurper’ in this case was Shah Shuja’s estranged half-brother, Shah Mahmoud. When he refused to punish the overmighty Qizilbash who made up both his bodyguard and administrative elite, outraged Sunni tribesmen poured into Kabul from the surrounding hills and besieged the walled Qizilbash compound. In the chaos, Shah Shuja arrived from Peshawar as a champion of Sunni orthodoxy, freed one brother – Shah Zaman – from imprisonment, then locked up the other – Shah Mahmoud – in his stead. He forgave all who had rebelled against Shah Zaman, with the single exception of the clan of the Shinwari chieftain responsible for blinding his brother: ‘The officers arrested the culprit, and his supporters, and razed his fort to the ground. They looted everything and dragged the man to Shuja’s court. Then for his sins, they filled his mouth with gunpowder, and blew him up. They threw his men in prison, and brutally tortured them until they became an example for any who claimed they were so fearless they were capable of resisting the exquisite pain of the torturer.’
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Finally, according to Mohammad Khan Durrani, they strapped the offender’s wife and children to Shuja’s artillery and blew them from the mouths of the cannon.
26

Amid all this civil and fratricidal war, Durrani Afghanistan quickly fractured into anarchy. It was during this period that the country accelerated its transformation from the sophisticated centre of learning and the arts, which led some of the Great Mughals to regard it as a far more elegantly cultured place than India, into the broken, war-torn backwater it was to become for so much of its modern history. Already Shah Shuja’s kingdom was only a shadow of that once ruled by his father. The great colleges, like that of Gauhar Shad in Herat, had long shrunk in size and reputation for learning; the poets and artists, the calligraphers and miniaturists, the architects and tile makers for which Khurasan was famous under the Timurids, continued their migration south-eastwards to Lahore, Multan and the cities of Hindustan, and westwards to Persia. Afghans still regarded themselves as sophisticates, and Mirza ‘Ata, the most articulate Afghan writer of the period, sounds like Babur when he talks proudly of Afghanistan as ‘so much more refined than wretched Sindh where white bread and educated talk are unknown’. Elsewhere he talks of his country as ‘a land where forty-four different types of grapes grow, and other fruits as well – apples, pomegranates, pears, rhubarb, mulberries, sweet watermelon and musk-melon, apricots, peaches, etc – and ice-water, that cannot be found in all the plains of India. The Indians know neither how to dress nor how to eat – God save me from the fire of their dal and their miserable chapattis!’
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Yet the reality was that the great days of high Timurid culture and elegant Persianate refinement were fast disappearing. Virtually no miniature painting survives from Afghanistan during this period, in striking contrast to the Punjab where Pahari artists were then producing some of the greatest masterpieces of all Indian art. A once great city like Herat was now sunk in squalor and filth. Ravaged by repeated outbreaks of cholera, Herat had shrunk within living memory from a population of 100,000 to less than 40,000.
28
The Durrani state, with its severe institutional weakness, was on the verge of collapse and Shuja’s authority rarely extended further than a day’s march beyond wherever his small army of supporters happened to be camped. This chaos and instability created increasing difficulties for the
kafilas
–
the great caravans heading to and from the cities of Central Asia – which in the absence of central authority could be taxed, tolled or looted by any tribal leader at will. This in turn severely threatened the political economy of Afghanistan by clogging the arteries through which passed the financial lifeblood of the Afghan state.

Afghanistan was still capable of supplying the whole region with three lucrative products – fruit, furs and horses. The looms of Kashmir still produced the finest shawls in Asia, and its crocuses the best saffron. Multan was famed for its gaudy chintzes. In good years there were also taxes to be collected from the kafila merchants travelling the Afghan trade routes bringing silk, camels and spices from Central Asia to India, and carrying back cotton, indigo, tea, tobacco, hashish and opium. But during the political unrest of Zaman’s and Shuja’s reigns, fewer and fewer kafilabashis
were willing to take the risk of travelling through the dangerous Afghan passes.
29
In contrast to the confidence of previous generations, more and more Afghans were beginning to see their own country as an impoverished dead-end, ‘a land that produced little but men and stones’, as one of Shah Shuja’s successors later put it.
30

With little money coming in through taxes or customs, Shuja’s only real assets were the loyalty of his blind brother, Shah Zaman, and the advice of his capable wife, Wa’fa Begum, who some believed to be the real power behind the throne. There was also the additional asset of the family’s fast-diminishing treasure chest of Mughal jewels.

An alliance with the East India Company was therefore of the greatest importance for Shah Shuja, who hoped to use it to gain the resources with which he could unite his fracturing empire. In the long term, the British would indeed succeed in uniting the Afghans under a single ruler, but in a rather different way to that planned by Shuja.

By the end of October 1808, Elphinstone and his ambassadorial caravan were heading through the Shekhawati towards Bikaner, out of the Company’s dominions and into the wind-blown wastes of the Thar Desert – virgin territory for the British.

Soon the Embassy’s two-mile-long procession of horses, camels and elephants found itself in ‘sand-hills, rising one after another, like waves of the sea, and marked on the surface by the wind, like drifted snow . . . Off the road our horses sunk into the sand above the knees.’
31
Two weeks’ hard trudge brought them through ‘a tract of more than ordinary desolation, until we discovered the walls and towers of Bikaner, a great and magnificent city in the midst of a wilderness’.
32

Beyond Bikaner lay the borders of Shuja’s remaining Durrani dominions, and before long Elphinstone’s party encountered their first Afghans – ‘A party of one hundred and fifty soldiers on camels’, lolloping through the empty desert towards them. ‘There were two men on each camel, and each had a long and glittering matchlock.’
33
Soon after passing the Durrani stronghold of Dera Ismail Khan, Elphinstone received a welcoming letter and a dress of honour from Shuja, who sent a hundred cavalrymen, all ‘dressed like Persians, with coloured clothes, boots, and low sheepskin caps’. By late February 1809 the Embassy had passed Kohat. In the distance rose the white snow peaks of Spin Garh; on the lower hills were the fortresses around which Elphinstone could see ‘many marauders . . . but our baggage was too well guarded to allow of their attacking it’, forcing the predatory tribesmen to sit watching, ‘looking wistfully at the camels passing’.

Here the valleys were as benign and inviting as the hills were wild. The Embassy passed along straight avenues of poplar and mulberry, criss-crossed by streams and bridged with arches of thin Mughal brickwork shaded with tamarisks. Occasionally they saw a hunting party, where the men had hawks on their fists and pointers at their heels, or groups of fowlers out to catch quails or partridges. Soon the British emissaries found themselves passing walled gardens full of familiar plants: ‘wild raspberry and blackberry bushes . . . plum and peach trees, weeping willows and plane trees in leaf’. Even the birds brought back memories of home: ‘some of the gentlemen thought they saw and heard thrushes and blackbirds’.
34

Peshawar was at that time ‘large, very populous and opulent’. It was the winter capital of Durrani Afghanistan as well as being a major centre of Pashtun culture.
35
Within the last century it had been the base of the two greatest Pashtun poets, both of whom Elphinstone had read. Rehman Baba was the great Sufi poet of the Pashtun language, the Rumi of the Frontier. ‘Sow flowers, so your surroundings become a garden,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet. We are all one body, Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.’ But it was the more worldly Khushal Khan Khattak who appealed to Elphinstone’s Enlightenment heart. Khushal was a tribal leader who had revolted against the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and eluded his armies as they chased him through the passes of the Hindu Kush. In his diary, Elphinstone compared him to William Wallace, the medieval Scottish freedom fighter: ‘Sometimes succeeding in destroying royal armies, sometimes wandering almost alone through the mountains’. But, unlike Wallace, Khushal Khan was also a fine poet:

Fair and rosy are the girls of Adam Khel . . .

Slender of belly, their breasts full and firm,

Like the hawk has been my flight upon the mountains,

And many a pretty partridge has been my prey.

Love’s affairs are like fire, O Khushal,

Though the flame be hidden, the smoke is seen.
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Or, more succinctly:

There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach

But alas! I cannot swim.
37

The Embassy marched into Peshawar six months after leaving Delhi, and was lodged in a large courtyard house off the main bazaar. Just as Elphinstone’s Scottish Enlightenment education determined the way he responded to Afghan poetry, so when the time finally came for his first audience with Shah Shuja, the Ambassador’s reading guided the way he perceived the Durrani monarch. On his way towards Peshawar, Elphinstone had been immersed in Tacitus’ account of the German tribes confronting the Roman Empire, and in his diary he transposed the action to his current situation: he imagined the Afghans to be like the wild Germanic tribes, while the ‘decadent Persians’ were the soft and dissolute Romans. Yet when he was finally led in to see the Shah, Elphinstone was astonished by how different the cultured Shuja was from his expectations of a rough barbarian chief from the mountains: ‘The King of Kabul was a handsome man,’ wrote Elphinstone,

of an olive complexion, with a thick black beard. The expression of his countenance was dignified and pleasing, his voice clear, his address princely. We thought at first that he had on an armour of jewels; but, on close inspection, we found this to be a mistake, and his real dress to consist of a green tunic, with large flowers in gold and precious stones, over which were a large breastplate of diamonds, shaped like two flattened
fleur de lis
,
an ornament of the same kind on each thigh, large emerald bracelets on the arms and many other jewels in different places. In one of the bracelets was the Koh-i-Nur . . . It will scarcely be believed of an Eastern monarch, how much he had the manners of a gentleman, or how well he preserved his dignity, while he seemed only anxious to please.
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Yet the best, and certainly the fullest, record of this first meeting of the Afghans and the British was written not by Elphinstone, but by a junior member of his staff. William Fraser was a young Persian scholar from Inverness and the letter he wrote back to his parents in the Highlands, wide-eyed with wonder at the reception given by the Shah, provides the sharpest-focused and most palpable image that survives of Shuja at the peak of his power. Fraser described the magnificent procession that escorted the British officers in their frogged and braided pigeon-tailcoats through the streets of Peshawar. They passed crowds of Afghan men in flowing mantles and caps of black sheepskin, while some of their women, unlike the unveiled peasants of the country, wore full-length white burkhas, a novel sight for the British.

The British were summoned through the outer courts of Peshawar’s great fortress named, like that in Kabul, the Bala Hisar. They were marched past the King’s elephants and pet tiger, ‘which was by far the finest object of what might be called the palace yard’, and found themselves in the main courtyard in front of the hall of audience. In the middle, three fountains on different levels were playing, ‘throwing up the liquid in a thin mist to a considerable height’. At the furthest end was a building two storeys high painted with figures of cypresses, the upper being open and supported on pillars, and having a domed pavilion in the centre. Under the gilt dome, on an elevated polygonal throne, sat the Shah: ‘Two attendants holding in their hands the universal ensign of royalty in Asiatic monarchies, chowries [horse-hair fly-whisks], immediately determined the situation to be the same as that which the imagination pictures in reading fairy tales, or the Arabian Nights,’ wrote Fraser. ‘When we first entered, we made the obeisance required by taking off our hats three times and uniting the hands together, as you would to hold water, held them opposite the bottom of the face and muttered something supposed to be a prayer. We concluded by making the motion of stroking our beards.’