The Dark Defile (2 page)

Nicholas sought to impose Russian customs and language throughout his empire, in the process ruthlessly crushing nationalist risings such as those in Poland in 1830. He pushed outward the empire’s boundaries in the south and east at the expense of the rulers of Ottoman Turkey and Persia. In the 150 years since the accession of Czar Peter the Great in 1689, the Russian empire’s population had grown from 15 to 58 million, and its borders had advanced five hundred miles toward Constantinople and one thousand miles toward Tehran and Afghanistan.

It was this expansionary vision that Britain feared. Just as Britain had the world’s most powerful navy, Russia in the nineteenth century had by far the largest army—well over half a million men. Most were conscripts. Although only 1 or 2 percent of eligible Russian males were conscripted annually, to be among them was a personal tragedy since service was for a period of twenty-five years. Britain, together with France, had for some time been struggling to prevent Russia from exploiting what seemed to be the inevitable breakup of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which Czar Nicholas proclaimed “the sick man of Europe.” A particular British concern was to keep Russia from securing access for its navy from the Black Sea through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to the Mediterranean. From the difficulties in restraining Russia in its southern expansion, fears had grown in Britain—albeit based on sparse evidence—that to the southeast Russia might have ambitions beyond Central Asia, extending even to India.

Britain, at the time of the Afghan intervention, was a constitutional monarchy and well on the way to becoming the world’s predominant commercial as well as naval power. Its share of the world’s manufacturing output was on the rise from 9.5 percent in 1830 to its peak of some 20 percent in 1860.

Queen Victoria had come to the British throne in 1837 at the age of eighteen. “Poor little Queen,” Thomas Carlyle wrote, “she is at an age at which a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself; yet a task is laid upon her from which an archangel might shrink.” Great Britain’s population was some 18 million, excluding 8 million people in British-ruled Ireland. Britain’s other overseas possessions covered some 2 million square miles with a population of well over 100 million. They spread from Canada, where in 1837 a crisis had been precipitated by Canadian troops sinking a U.S. warship transporting supplies across the Niagara River to Canadian insurgents, to Jamaica, Africa’s Gold Coast and its southern tip, the Cape Colony, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya, the recently founded Singapore and Australia. In Britain, which had abolished slavery in 1834, only one in seven men had the vote, and no women were considered wise or strong enough to do so. Nevertheless, political life was lively, focusing not only on the wisdom of the Afghan intervention but also on further extensions of the franchise and the improvement of the lot of working people, both of which would give rise to considerable agitation, sometimes violent, by the Chartists and others over the next few years.

With a population of 2 million, London was the world’s largest city and its financial center. Britain derived much of its commercial advantage from its mastery of the new coal-driven steam technology, which it used to power its burgeoning manufacturing industry and was developing to propel the railways and steamships that would export its manufactured products. These included the cotton goods that made up half the country’s total exports. In 1814 Britain had exported 1 million yards of cotton cloth to India. By 1830 the figure had reached 51 million yards and would rise to 995 million yards in 1860, exemplifying the importance of India as a market as well as one of the main sources of raw cotton, the other being the southern United States.

Conditions both in the mines and in the factories producing Britain’s new wealth were poor. In the mines, near-naked women and children pulled heavy wagons loaded with coal through the mineshafts. In the mills, children as young as eight or nine worked twelve-hour days, dodging beneath the whirring looms and other machinery, to clear blockages at great risk to their lives. In Manchester, the great “Cottonopolis,” the average age of death of laborers and their families was seventeen, compared to thirty-eight for those in the countryside. As the First Afghan War ended, Friedrich Engels, the son of a German cotton mill owner, visited Manchester and the branch of the family firm there. Here, and in the other mills of the city, he experienced the appalling conditions and raged against the “brutally selfish” policy of mill owners holding wages down to enhance their own profits, writing that the only way the embittered masses could achieve justice was by violence. In 1848 he and Karl Marx would publish the
Communist Manifesto
.

The British had not yet become unequivocally committed to free trade because they were not yet convinced—although they soon would be—that they were unequivocally best placed to exploit it. Indeed, a leading politician maintained that he had no intention of making war in Afghanistan to promote the study among its inhabitants of Adam Smith, the first proponent of laissez-faire economics. However, during the Afghan War the British would also be involved in the First Opium War, aimed at forcing the Chinese to open their ports more fully to the import of opium, one of the most profitable products of their Indian possessions. The war at its end resulted in the secession by the Chinese of Hong Kong to the British.

British troops thus first entered Afghanistan at a time of worldwide commercial and territorial expansion and of intense international rivalry. This first war of Queen Victoria’s reign proved more perilous than either the politicians who ordered the invasion or the generals who conducted it ever conceived as they set out. The outcome still affects us today.

Chapter One

When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished, not before.

—RUDYARD KIPLING,
KIM

Britain had been worried about the intentions of other powers toward India long before British troops marched into Afghanistan. Until Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, France seemed as great a threat as Russia. When in 1807 Napoleon and Czar Nicholas agreed to the Peace of Tilsit, there appeared a real risk of a joint Russo-Franco invasion of India. Both countries were also intriguing with Persia. Britain responded with a diplomatic offensive aimed at creating a series of buffer states through alliances with the rulers of lands lying in the path of a possible invasion of India. In 1807 the government instructed Lord Minto, governor-general of India, to seek the cooperation of the rulers of the territories across the Indus River: Afghanistan; the Punjab, ruled by the martial Sikhs; and Sind, which, controlling the delta of the Indus River, dominated access to the Arabian Sea. The British also dispatched an envoy to Persia, with which they had had a sometimes difficult trading and diplomatic relationship, to attempt to contain or neutralize Persian ambitions. With these missions began the so-called Great Game, the contest for control of Central Asia, which would extend from Persia to Tibet and last a century until an agreement between Britain and Russia, temporarily at least, defined their respective spheres of interest.
⁴

In Persia, the British first tried to bribe the shah to declare war on the Russians. When he wisely declined to do so, they attempted to cajole and bully him not to accept overtures from the French. In 1809 the choleric and undiplomatic Sir Harford “Baghdad” Jones—so-called because of his years of service there—arrived at the Persian court, reopened negotiations and when the Persian vizier annoyed him, called him an idiot; then, Jones reported,
“[I] pushed him with a slight degree of violence against the wall … kicked over the candles on the floor, left the room in darkness, and rode home without any one of the Persians daring to impede my passage.”
Despite such unorthodox diplomacy and just possibly because of an enormous diamond Sir Harford had presented as a gift from King George III, in March 1809 the shah reluctantly agreed to a treaty with Britain. The Persians would not allow any European army to advance through their territory toward India and undertook to help the British defend India against the Afghans or any other power that invaded. In return, if any European power invaded Persia, the British promised to provide either soldiers or financial subsidies of the type they were deploying so successfully with more impecunious European countries in their war with Napoleon.

THE SUSPICIOUS AND independent-minded emirs who controlled Sind at first rebuffed British overtures with
“imperious superiority.”
However, they were eventually induced to accept a treaty under which they promised not
“to allow the tribe of the French”
to settle in their lands. Negotiations with the ruler of the Punjab,
⁶
the one-eyed warrior Ranjit Singh, proved more complex. The “Lion of Lahore” had become the leader of his people in 1799 while still in his teens after successfully rallying the fractious Sikh brotherhoods, the
misls
, against an invading Afghan army that seemed about to overrun the Punjab. In 1801 he was proclaimed maharaja of the Punjab in his capital at Lahore, where his subjects showered him with silver and gold. By the time of the British mission his armies were second in size only to the company’s on the Indian subcontinent.

The pockmarked and physically puny Ranjit Singh was as decisive in his private as in his public life. A great womanizer who maintained in his harem a regiment of women dressed in highly titillating costumes of his own devising, he nevertheless stabbed his mother with his sword for adulterous behavior, claiming
“it was better that she should have died early than live a long life of guilt and shame.”
He was also a drinker of awesome proportions, consuming a regular mixture of opium, alcohol, meat juice and powdered pearls. He had ambitions to extend his kingdom southward across the Sutlej River, perhaps even to Delhi, where a weak Mogul emperor still nominally ruled, though at the pleasure of the British. Charles Metcalfe, a twenty-three-year-old company officer, was the Briton dispatched in 1808 to convince the Sikh leader of the threat of an invasion of India from the north and to warn him that if he tried to push his borders too far south the company’s armies would confront him.

The Sikh maharaja suspected the British of using the threat of a foreign invasion to mask their own plans for expansion at his expense. Ranjit Singh was, however, a realist. Looking at a map of the Indian subcontinent on which British territories were marked in red, he prophesied that soon it would all be red. Recognizing that his armies were unlikely to defeat the company’s, he renounced his ambitions for southern expansion and in 1809 signed the Treaty of Lahore with Britain, under which both sides swore “perpetual friendship.” Ranjit Singh would keep his side of the bargain; nearly thirty years later, the British commitment to protect the Sikh alliance would be a major factor in the outbreak of the First Afghan War.

The British administration in Calcutta selected another young officer—the twenty-nine-year-old Scot, Mountstuart Elphinstone—as its envoy to Afghanistan. He was the first Briton to penetrate that remote region since a company official had traveled through it in disguise twenty-five years earlier on his way to Russia. The British therefore knew little of Afghanistan’s topography beyond that it was large, mountainous and landlocked. The country, of a similar size to the modern U.S. state of Texas, in fact consisted of several distinct zones. In the southwest an arid desert plateau around the Helmand River stretched toward Persia. In the northwest, plains ran across the Oxus River toward the khanates of Khiva and Bokhara. There were mountains in the center and the northeast including the six-hundred-mile-long Hindu Kush as well as mountains along the southeastern frontier with Baluchistan and with Ranjit Singh’s territories. The few narrow passes leading through these mountains had often provided a route for the invasion of India. Abul Fazl, friend and chronicler of Akbar, the greatest of the Moguls, called Kabul, the region’s major city with the great Khyber Pass to its east, “the gate of Hindustan.”

One of the first known invaders, Darius of Persia, led his army of Immortals down through the thirty-mile-long Khyber, whose bleak gray sides rising to five hundred feet overshadow a road in places just a few feet wide. Nearly two centuries later, in early 327 B.C., this inhospitable stone corridor resonated to the hoof beats of Alexander the Great’s increasingly exhausted and fractious forces on the latest stage of their long march of conquest from Macedonia. The soon-to-be-defeated armies and war elephants of the Indian king Porus waited on the banks of the Jhelum River, a tributary of the Indus, in armor of silver and gold. Elphinstone, a classics scholar like most of the officers who would venture into Afghanistan, for lack of more recent guides used the classical accounts of Alexander’s expeditions for geographic reference.

Over the centuries other invasions followed Alexander’s. Among the most significant was the conquest of most of northern India in 1001 by Mahmud, the Muslim ruler of Ghazni in the southeast of Afghanistan. He established the first of the series of Islamic sultanates that would grow to dominate much of the area. Fortified by his religion and its iconoclastic beliefs, he plundered Hindu holy places, melting down the golden idols at the shrine of Mathura and despoiling the great Hindu temple of Somnath on the Indian Ocean coast in what is now Gujarat. Here he destroyed the phallic stone lingam—symbol of the god Shiva—dispatching fragments to be incorporated in the steps of mosques in Mecca and Medina as well as in Ghazni. He also bore off to Ghazni the temple’s massive ornate gates as a symbol of his triumph.

In 1398 Timur, or Tamburlaine as the West knows him from a corruption of “Timur the Lame,” invaded India, where he defeated the sultan of Delhi and sacked the city so thoroughly, before leaving with a mass of booty, that for two months
“nothing stirred, not even a bird.”
In the early sixteenth century, his descendant Babur floated down the Khyber River from Kabul, holding drinking and cannabis parties as he went, to found the Mogul empire using the cannons and muskets that he introduced to northwest India for the first time.