Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (76 page)

Symbolically, the breakfast ended in absurdity and chaos: as some of the guests including the King of Saxony crossed the lake in boats punted by the Duke’s watermen for the purpose of inspecting the Devonshire giraffes, the giraffes decided to wade across the water in the opposite direction, before running amok on the lawns of Chiswick House and stampeding the Tsar’s party who were waiting on the other bank. The giraffes were eventually led away by the groundsmen in their state liveries, but from this point a long chain of accidents, gaffes and diplomatic misunderstandings would lead inexorably to Russia and Britain going to war against each other in the Crimea nine years later in 1853.

This time, Anglo-Russian rivalry would lead to 800,000 deaths.

At the end of
Kim
, Kipling has his eponymous hero say, ‘When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished. Not before.’

In the 1980s it was the Russians’ withdrawal from their failed occupation of Afghanistan that triggered the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Less than twenty years later, in 2001, British and American troops arrived in Afghanistan where they proceeded to begin losing what was, in Britain’s case, its fourth war in that country. As before, in the end, despite all the billions of dollars handed out, the training of an entire army of Afghan troops and the infinitely superior weaponry of the occupiers, the Afghan resistance succeeded again in first surrounding then propelling the hated Kafirs into a humiliating exit. In both cases the occupying troops lost the will to continue fighting at such cost and with so little gain.

For all the differences, there are of course striking parallels between the twenty-first-century occupation of Afghanistan and that of 1839–42. There is a real continuity in the impact of political geography on the evolution of both conflicts. The significance of Kabul’s location is one issue – adjacent to both the Tajik population of Kohistan, on one side, and the eastern Ghilzais on the other. Then there is the tribal issue, as another Popalzai ruler lacking a real power base, Hamid Karzai – astonishingly, from the same sub-tribe as Shah Shuja – faces the brunt of concerted guerrilla attacks led by the eastern Ghilzai who today make up the footsoldiers of the Taliban. They are directed by another Ghilzai tribal leader from the Hotak ruling clan, in this case Mullah Omar.
pp
153

On my extended visits to Afghanistan to research this book in 2009 and 2010, I set myself two goals. Firstly I wanted to try to find the elusive Afghan sourcestelling of the war which I was certain had to exist and which I have in due course used to write this book. Secondly, I was keen to see as many of the places and landscapes associated with the First Afghan War as was possible in a situation where ISAF’s
qq
hold on Afghanistan was already visibly shrinking every day. By 2010, the Taliban had a strong presence in over 70 per cent of the country and Karzai’s government had firm control of only twenty-nine out of 121 key strategic districts. That 70 per cent included most of the route of the British retreat of January 1842 which I knew I would have to travel if I was to have an idea of the geography I was going to write about. I particularly wanted to try to get to Gandamak and see the site of the British last stand.

The route of the 1842 retreat backs on to the mountain range that leads to Tora Bora and the Pakistan border, the Ghilzai heartlands that have always been – along with Quetta – the Taliban’s main recruiting ground. I had been advised not to attempt to visit the area without local protection, so eventually set off in the company of a regional tribal leader who was also a minister in Karzai’s government: a mountain of a man named Anwar Khan Jagdalak, a former village wrestling champion and later captain of the Afghan Olympic wrestling team, who had made his name as a Jami’at-Islami Mujehedin commander in the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s.

It was Jagdalak’s Ghilzai ancestors who inflicted some of the worst casualties on the British army of 1842, something he proudly repeated several times as we drove through the same passes. ‘They forced us to pick up guns to defend our honour,’ he said. ‘So we killed every last one of those bastards.’ None of this, incidentally, has stopped Jagdalak from sending his family away from Kabul to the greater safety of Northolt in north London.

On the day we were to drive to Gandamak, I had been told to report at seven in the morning to Jagdalak’s Ministry in the heart of the administrative district now named Wazir Akbar Khan. Threading my way through a slalom of checkpoints and razor wire surrounding the Ministry, I arrived to find Jagdalak being hustled into a convoy of heavily armoured SUVs by his ever-present phalanx of bodyguards, walkie-talkies crackling and assault rifles primed.

Jagdalak drove himself, while pick-ups full of heavily armed Afghan bodyguards followed behind. As we headed through the capital, evidence of the failure of the current occupation lay all around us. Kabul remains one of the poorest and scrappiest capital cities in the world. Despite the US pouring in around $80 billion into Afghanistan, almost all that money has disappeared into defence and security and the roads of Kabul were still more rutted than those in the most negelected provincial towns of Pakistan. There was no street lighting and apparently no rubbish collection. According to Jagdalak, that was only the tip of the iceberg. Despite all the efforts of a dozen countries and a thousand agencies over more than a decade since 2001, the country is still a mess: a quarter of all teachers in Afghanistan are illiterate. In many areas, governance is almost non-existent: half the governors do not have an office, even fewer have electricity. Civil servants lack the most basic education and skills.

We bumped through the potholed roads of Kabul, past the blast walls of the US Embassy and the NATO barracks that has been built on the very site of the British cantonment of 170 years ago, past Butkhak, then headed down the zigzagging road into the line of bleak mountain passes – first the Khord Kabul, then the Tezin – that link Kabul with the Khyber Pass.

It is a suitably dramatic and violent landscape: faultlines of crushed and tortured strata groaned and twisted in the gunpowder-coloured rockwalls rising on either side of us. Above, the jagged mountain tops were veiled in an ominous cloud of mist. As we drove, Jagdalak complained bitterly of the western treatment of his government. ‘In the 1980s when we were killing Russians for them, the Americans called us freedom fighters,’ he muttered as we descended the first pass. ‘Now they just dismiss us as warlords.’ At Sarobi, where the mountains debouch into a high-altitude ochre desert dotted with encampments of Ghilzai nomads, we left the main road and headed into Taliban territory; a further five pick-up trucks full of Jagdalak’s old Mujehedin fighters, all brandishing rocket-propelled grenades and with faces wrapped in their turbans, appeared from a side road to escort us.

At the village of Jagdalak, on 12 January 1842, the last 200 frostbitten British soldiers found themselves surrounded by several thousand Ghilzai tribesmen; only a handful made it beyond the holly hedge. Our own welcome that April was, thankfully, somewhat warmer. It was my host’s first visit to his home since he became a minister, and the proud villagers took their old commander on a nostalgia trip through hills smelling of wild thyme and wormwood, and up through mountainsides carpeted with hollyhocks and mulberries and shaded by white poplars. Here, at the top of the surrounding peaks, near the watchtower where the naked and freezing sepoys had attempted to find shelter, lay the remains of Jagdalak’s old Mujehedin bunkers and entrenchments from which he had defied the Soviet army. Once the tour was completed, the villagers feasted us, Timurid style, in an apricot orchard at the bottom of the valley: we sat on carpets under a trellis of vine and pomegranate blossom, as course after course of kebabs and raisin pullao were laid in front of us.

During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the site of the holly barrier and other places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, we compared our respective family memories of that war. I talked about my great-great-uncle, Colin Mackenzie, who had been taken hostage nearby, and I asked if they saw any parallels with the current situation. ‘It is exactly the same,’ said Jagdalak. ‘Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, “We are your friends, we want to help.” But they are lying.’

‘Whoever comes to Afghanistan, even now, they will face the fate of Burnes, Macnaghten and Dr Brydon,’ agreed Mohammad Khan, our host in the village and the owner of the orchard where we were sitting. Everyone nodded sagely into their rice: the names of the fallen of 1842, long forgotten in their home country, were still common currency here.

‘Since the British went we’ve had the Russians,’ said one old man to my right. ‘We saw them off too, but not before they bombed many of the houses in the village.’ He pointed at a ridge full of ruined mudbrick houses on the hills behind us.

‘We are the roof of the world,’ said Khan. ‘From here you can control and watch everywhere.’

‘Afghanistan is like the crossroads for every nation that comes to power,’ agreed Jagdalak. ‘But we do not have the strength to control our own destiny. Our fate is determined by our neighbours.’

It was nearly 5 p.m. before the final flaps of naan bread were cleared away, by which time it became clear that it was now too late to head on to Gandamak. Instead we went that evening by the main highway direct to the relative safety of Jalalabad, where we discovered we’d had a narrow escape. It turned out that there had been a battle at Gandamak that very morning between government forces and a group of villagers supported by the Taliban. The sheer size and length of the feast and our own gluttony had saved us from walking straight into an ambush. The battle had taken place on exactly the site of the British last stand of 1842.

The following morning in Jalalabad we went to a jirga, or assembly, of Ghilzai tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come, under a flag of truce, to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I heard about Karzai’s government, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity had helped give an opening for the return of the once hated Taliban.

As Predator Drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the Ghilzai elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation and were allowed to plough up the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the Gandamak villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to destroy the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jagdalak, the villagers were waiting for them and had called in the local Taliban to assist. In the fighting that followed, nine policemen were killed, six vehicles were destroyed and ten police hostages taken.

After the jirga was over, two of the tribal elders of Gandamak came over and we chatted for a while over a pot of green tea.

‘Last month,’ said one, ‘some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, “Why do you hate us?” I replied, “Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.”’

‘What did he say to that?’

‘He turned to his friend and said, “If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?” In truth, all the Americans here know their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.’

‘These are the last days of the Americans,’ said the other elder. ‘Next it will be China.’

Author’s Note

In 1843, shortly after his return from the slaughterhouse of the First Anglo-Afghan War, the army chaplain in Jalalabad, the Rev. G. R. Gleig, wrote a memoir about the disastrous expedition of which he was one of the lucky survivors. It was, he wrote, ‘a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.’
1

William Barnes Wollen’s celebrated painting of the
Last Stand of the 44th Foot
– a group of ragged but doggedly determined soldiers on the hilltop of Gandamak standing encircled behind a thin line of bayonets, as the Pashtun tribesmen close in – became one of the era’s most famous images, along with
Remnants of an Army
,
Lady Butler’s oil of the alleged last survivor, Dr Brydon, arriving before the walls of Jalalabad on his collapsing nag.

It was just as the latest western invasion of Afghanistan was beginning to turn sour in the winter of 2006, that I had the idea of writing a new history of Britain’s first failed attempt at controlling Afghanistan. After an easy conquest and the successful installation of a pro-western puppet ruler, the regime was facing increasingly widespread resistance. History was beginning to repeat itself.