Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (8 page)

One-half of the armed troops who were lined either side of the avenue were then ordered to withdraw, and they went out at a trot, their breastplates and dented pauldrons clanking against each other, ‘making as much rattle with their armour and clatter on the pavement as they could’. When they had retired a court official stood before Elphinstone, ‘and called out in a loud voice looking up to the King, this is Mr Alfinistan Bahadur Furingee, the Ambassador, God bless him; then Astarji Bahadur [Mr Strachey] and so successively down the line, but had increasing difficulty managing our uncouth names, such as Cunninghame, McCartney, Fitzgerald, and by the time he had passed nearly through, blundered out any sound that struck him.’

When their names had been gone through, the diplomats stood for a minute in perfect silence and stillness, until Shah Shuja ‘in a very loud and audible voice’ uttered from aloft ‘Khush Amuded’ – you are welcome. Shuja then left his high gilt throne in the front of the building and, helped down by two eunuchs, walked to a low
takht
[throne dais] in the corner of the hall. When he was seated, the diplomats advanced up the cypress avenue, and into the arcaded hall of audience. ‘On entering we ranged ourselves along the side of the apartment, where the floor was covered with the richest carpets. The silence was first broken, by the King’s asking if His British Majesty, the Padshah o Ungraiseestan, and his Nation were all well and that the British and his nation had always been on the best terms, and trusted would always remain so. To which Elphinstone replied, “If it pleases God”.

‘The Governor General’s letter was then delivered to Shuja . . . Elphinstone explained the causes and objects of his mission, to which the Shah was pleased to give the most gracious replies and flattering assurances.’ The British visitors were invested in robes of honour, after which they rose and rode home in them.

Late that night, Fraser sat up and wrote to his parents about the impression Shuja had made on him: ‘I was particularly struck with the dignity of his appearance,’ he scribbled, ‘and the romantic Oriental awe which his situation, person and Majesty impressed on me.’ He went on:

The king sat with his legs doubled under, but in an erect posture, not reclining, each hand resting on the upper part of the thigh, the elbows sticking out. This is the posture which fierce independent fellows assume generally when sitting in a chair leaning forward dogmatically and brow-beating the rest of the company, such as I have seen [Charles James] Fox assume in the House of Commons when preparing to rise and thunder his invective against corrupt ministers. The spot we stood upon is the same which his subjects first humble themselves in the presence; where his public demands are executed and where justice receives his sanction; but where perhaps tyranny obtains more speedy obedience . . . My eyes rested at the ground by my feet: it was stained with blood.

When the Shah came down from the throne to move to the hall of audience, Fraser judged him to be about five feet six inches tall, and described his colour as ‘very fair, but dead, without any ruddiness. His beard was thick jet black and shortened a little by the scissors. His eyebrows were high but unarched, and had a slope obliquely upwards, but turned again a little at the corners . . . The eyelashes and the edges of his eyelids were blackened with antimony, and his eyebrows and beard were also blackened by art.’ His voice, he added, was ‘loud and sonorous’.

His dress was superb, the crown very peculiar and ornamented with jewels. I believe it was hexagonal, and at each corner rose a rich plume of black heron’s feather . . . a badge of sovereignty and a mark of God’s chosen upon earth. The frame of the crown must have been of black velvet, but the feathers and gold so completely covered the ground that I could not accurately discover every precious stone that had a place, but emeralds, rubies and pearls were the most prevalent, and of extraordinary size and beauty.
39

Negotiations between Shuja and the British about their alliance continued for several weeks.

Shuja was keen for an alliance with the Company, and was especially anxious for British assistance in protecting his lands which had been promised by Napoleon to the Persians. But he was distracted by the bad news arriving in Peshawar from all sides. For all the magnificence of his court, the Shah’s hold on the throne was far more tenuous than the British had realised. As Elphinstone and Fraser both soon came to suspect, Shah Shuja’s obsession with the theatre of his court was to some extent a front to disguise the extreme weakness of his position.

Shuja’s problems stemmed partly from his own declared intention to bring a new dignity to Afghan politics. In 1803, when he had first come to power and released Shah Zaman from imprisonment, he had disdained to exercise the customary punishment of blinding his defeated half-brother, Shah Mahmoud. ‘We find greater sweetness in forgiveness than in revenge,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘So following the Holy Quran’s recommendation of mercy, and the dictates of our own mild and forgiving nature, and recognising that humankind is a compound of mistakes and carelessness, we listened favourably to his excuses and granted him our royal pardon, trusting that such disloyal behaviour would not occur again.’
40

So it was that Mahmoud was put under house arrest in the palace at the top of the Bala Hisar. This policy backfired badly when in 1808 Shah Mahmoud managed to escape and join forces with Shuja’s greatest enemies, the rival Barakzai clan. The feud between the two clans, the Barakzais and the Sadozais, was already bitter and bloody, and was soon to cause a conflict that would ravage the whole country, dividing the tribes and providing a range of opportunities for the neighbouring powers to intervene. Before long it would become the central conflict of early nineteenth-century Afghanistan.

Payindah Khan, the patriarch of the Barakzais, had been wazir – prime minister – to Shuja’s father Timur Shah. He was the king-maker responsible for bringing Shah Zaman to power on Timur’s death in 1793. He had initially been a loyal wazir, but after six years the two had had an angry disagreement.
41
A few months later, the Shah discovered that his Wazir had been plotting a palace coup to protect the interests of the old nobility. Shah Zaman then made the mistake of murdering not just the Wazir to whom he owed his throne but all the ringleaders, most of whom were senior tribal elders. Shah Zaman compounded this by failing to secure any of the Wazir’s twenty-one sons. Far from neutralising the Barakzai threat, Shah Zaman had effectively kicked a hornet’s nest. By starting this blood feud between Afghanistan’s two leading families, he opened a fracture in the Afghan political class that would soon widen into the chasm of a civil war.

The eldest of the Wazir’s sons was Fatteh Khan, who took his father’s place as the head of the Barakzais. But it gradually became clear that the most determined and threatening of the Barakzai boys was a much younger brother by a Qizilbash wife, named Dost Mohammad Khan. Dost Mohammad was only seven years old and working as the Wazir’s cupbearer when he saw his father executed in court, and the horror of the event seems to have marked him for life.
42
He grew up to be the most dangerous of all the enemies of Shah Shuja and by 1809, at the age of seventeen, was already a ruthless fighter as well as a canny and calculating strategist.

When Shah Shuja first came to power in 1803, he had gone out of his way to try and end the blood feud with the Barakzais and bring them back into the fold. The Barakzai brothers were forgiven and welcomed to court, while to seal the new alliance Shuja married their sister, Wa’fa Begum. At first all seemed well; but the Barakzais were merely waiting for their opportunity to avenge their father, and as soon as Shah Mahmoud escaped from the Bala Hisar, Fatteh Khan and Dost Mohammad immediately rallied to his standard and joined the rebellion.

Shortly after Elphinstone’s Embassy arrived in Peshawar, Shah Mahmoud and the Barakzai rebels seized the southern Afghan capital of Kandahar. A month later, on 17 April 1809, just as Elphinstone and Shuja were finalising the wording of their treaty, the rebels captured Kabul itself. They then made preparations to attack Shah Shuja in Peshawar. The situation was made more critical by the fact that the bulk of Shuja’s army was away fighting another rebellion in Kashmir, and around the same time as the news came of the loss of Kabul, reports began to arrive that all was not well with the Kashmir campaign either: the two nobles put in charge of the attack had quarrelled, and one had gone over to the rebels.

With the King distracted, Elphinstone and his party were left to their own devices and began their intelligence gathering, questioning traders and scholars from different parts of Afghanistan, and asking about the geography and trade and tribal customs. Emissaries were sent out: one Mullah Najib, for example, was paid fifty rupees and despatched to gather information about the Siyah Posh of Kafirstan, said to be the descendants of Alexander the Great’s Greek legions. Elphinstone found Shah Shuja’s munshi, or secretary, an especially rich source of information: ‘a man of retired and studious habits, but really a man of genius, and of insatiable thirst for knowledge. Though well versed in metaphysics, and the moral sciences known in his country, his passion was for mathematics, and he was studying Sanskrit with a view to discovering the treasures of Hindoo learning.’ There were other thinkers and intellectuals in the court too, who between them were ‘in possession of the greatest part of the learning of the country . . . Moollas, some learned, some worldly, some Deists, some rigid Mahommedans and some overflowing with the mystical doctrines of the Soofees’.
43

The Shah allowed Elphinstone and his party to use the royal pleasure gardens, and having risen early to pursue their researches, they would break for the afternoon in the Shah Zeman Bagh, where the fruit trees were so thickly planted ‘that the sun could not penetrate them at noon, which afforded a cool retreat . . . after luncheon we retired to one of the pavilions which was spread with carpets. Here we spent our time reading the numerous Persian verses written on the walls: most of them alluded to the instability of fortune, some very applicable to the King’s condition.’
44

Here Elphinstone sat scribbling in his diary, trying to make sense of the Afghan character in all its rich contradictions. ‘Their vices’, he wrote, ‘are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity, and obstinacy; on the other hand, they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious, and prudent.’
45
He was astute enough to note that success in battle in Afghanistan was rarely decided by straightforward military victory so much as by successfully negotiating a path through the shifting patterns of tribal allegiances. ‘The victory is usually decided by some chief going over to the enemy,’ wrote Elphinstone, ‘on which the greater part of the army either follows his example or else takes flight.’
46
c

Shuja was now negotiating for the survival of his regime. William Fraser’s letters home written from Peshawar show how quickly the initial optimism of the Embassy began to give way to anxiety. ‘The reports afloat today are very bad for our poor friend Shuja ul-Mulk,’ wrote Fraser on 22 April. ‘Kabul and Ghazni are both said to be taken by the rebels, and the Kashmerian army is supposed to be defeated. These are the rumours of the town, but generally credited and I fear, too true. So this man is no longer really King, and must fly, at least for a time, or stake the whole on one battle.’
47

The British were beginning to understand that Afghanistan was no easy place to rule. In the last two millennia there had been only very brief moments of strong central control when the different tribes had acknowledged the authority of a single ruler, and still briefer moments of anything approaching a unified political system. It was in many ways less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted. The tribes’ traditions were egalitarian and independent, and they had only ever submitted to authority on their own terms. Financial rewards might bring about co-operation, but rarely ensured loyalty: the individual Afghan soldier owed his allegiance first to the local chieftain who raised and paid him, not to the Durrani shahs in faraway Kabul or Peshawar.

Yet even the tribal leaders had frequently been unable to guarantee obedience, for tribal authority was itself so elusive and diffuse. As the saying went: Behind every hillock there sits an emperor –
pusht-e har teppe, yek padishah neshast
(or alternatively: Every man is a khan –
har saray khan deh
).
48
In such a world, the state never had a monopoly on power, but was just one among a number of competing claimants on allegiance. ‘An Afghan Amir sleeps upon an ant heap,’ went the proverb.
49
Elphinstone grasped this as he watched Shah Shuja’s rule disintegrate around him. ‘The internal government of the tribes answers its ends so well’, he wrote, ‘that the utmost disorders of the royal government never derange its operations, nor disturb the lives of its people.’
50
No wonder that Afghans proudly thought of their mountains as Yaghistan – the Land of Rebellion.
51

Many of the tribes had lived for centuries by offering neighbouring empires their services in return for the political equivalent of protection money: even at the height of the Mughal Empire, for example, the emperors far away in Delhi and Agra had realised that it was hopeless even to think of attempting to tax the Afghan tribes. Instead the only way to keep open communication with the Mughals’ Central Asian homelands was for them to pay the tribes massive annual subsidies: during Aurangzeb’s rule 600,000 rupees a year was paid by the Mughal exchequer to Afghan tribal leaders to secure their loyalty, Rs 125,000 going to the Afridi tribe alone. Yet, even so, Mughal control of Afghanistan was intermittent at best, and even the victorious Nadir Shah, fresh from looting Delhi in 1739, paid the chiefs huge sums for providing him with safe passage through the Khyber, in both directions.
52
d
There were other options: the Afghans could be lured into accepting the authority of a leader if he tempted them with a four-fifths share of the plunder and spoils of conquest, as Ahmad Shah Abdali and Timur Shah had both done.
53
But without a ruler with a full treasure chest, or the lure of plunder to cement the country’s different interest groups, Afghanistan almost always tended to fragment: its few moments of coherence were built on the successes of its armies, never of its administration.