The Dark Defile (20 page)

Meanwhile, as the emir left his erstwhile capital behind him, Atkinson noticed that he talked incessantly and seemed “exceedingly cheerful.” He even asked Atkinson, a skilled artist, to draw his likeness but returned to a pet subject: “You must make my beard black. It is now much shorter than it used to be for since my troubles began, no attention has been paid to it, and it has not been dyed.” Although Atkinson captured the vivid yellow of his turban, the emir complained that “his beard did not look black enough.”

At Peshawar, Dost Mohammed was joined by a huge number of family members—318 according to the meticulous records of the British officer in charge of them—including nine wives, thirteen sons, seven daughters, ten grandchildren and all their attendants and slaves. From there the party continued on the journey into protective custody in India, where, the following May in Calcutta, Dost Mohammed would be one of Auckland’s most honored guests at the birthday ball for Queen Victoria. However, though Dost Mohammed had formally ordered his eldest and favorite son, Akbar Khan, to surrender to the British, he had refused to obey—perhaps as his father had intended he should. He was still free somewhere beyond the Hindu Kush.

Chapter Ten

For God’s sake clear the passes quickly, that I may get away.

—MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM ELPHINSTONE, OCTOBER 1841

With Afghanistan apparently quiescent following Dost Mohammed’s surrender, Macnaghten planned to devote more time to improving the country’s internal government, especially the raising of revenue. “
We have hitherto been struggling for existence without any leisure to turn to the improvement of the administration,
” he wrote to the governor-general’s private secretary John Colvin in November 1840.

However
, his hope of leisure was illusory. In late 1840 the Douranee tribes around Kandahar rebelled. Under the Sadozais they had once enjoyed special privileges, but Dost Mohammed had squeezed them relentlessly for taxes. With the restoration of the Sadozai Shah Shuja they had expected better, and indeed he had promised it. However, despite Shah Shuja’s assurances, the Douranees found themselves still oppressed by the same tax gatherers as before.

The rebellion was also a sign of a wider dissatisfaction in Afghanistan with a “double” system of government, in which an Afghan king ruled but only nominally and at the pleasure of foreign and infidel invaders who held his reins. The tribal chiefs were particularly opposed to British meddling with the feudal arrangements for levying irregular cavalry. Under Afghan tradition the ruler gave the chiefs subsidies in return for which they promised to equip and train a certain number of cavalrymen to fight on his behalf. The chiefs made a good profit from the difference between what they received and their actual additional costs. However, Macnaghten, by nature a centralizer and a bureaucrat, was interfering in these arrangements.

He had several reasons for doing so, all seemingly sensible if the effects on the chiefs were ignored. He knew that before the British could safely withdraw from Afghanistan, Shah Shuja had to be provided with troops more immediately available and more reliable and effective than the feudal cavalry. In addition, Macnaghten wanted to save Shah Shuja money; paying for cavalry levies was expensive, and Shah Shuja could not afford it. Macnaghten complained that the king’s revenue was “
hardly enough for the maintenance of his personal state,
” and yet the Indian government was “perpetually writing … that this charge and that charge [was] to be defrayed out of his ‘Majesty’s resources!’ God help the poor man and his resources.” Reducing the feudal levies and the creation of new cavalry corps, paid for by and dependent on the British, were means of eroding the power of the chiefs, who derived status as well as money from the number of troops they provided, and of relieving the financial pressures on the king. All this, and the perceived British aim of eventually replacing the feudal cavalry, angered the chiefs.

Macnaghten, however, failed to appreciate the depths of the chiefs’ concern. When the Douranees rebelled, he dismissed them as “
perfect children
,” just as Burnes had done, and continued that they “should be treated as such. If we put one naughty boy in the corner, the rest will be terrified. We have taken their plaything, power, out of the hands of the Douranee chiefs, and they are pouting a good deal in consequence.”

General Nott, the commander in Kandahar, was given the job of disciplining the naughty children. On 3 January 1841 his men defeated fifteen hundred Douranee horsemen, who fled across the Helmand River. However, though the Douranee insurgents had been scattered, their rebellion was not over. Evidence soon emerged that their leader, Aktur Khan, was plotting with Herat’s vizier, Yar Mohammed, who had, indeed, helped incite their original rebellion. At the same time, Yar Mohammed was yet again courting the Persians, even though the British were still paying him hefty sums in return both for promises that Herat would not collude with other states and in the as-yet-unfulfilled hope of their being allowed to station a British garrison in the city. When Yar Mohammed demanded still more money, making it insultingly clear he would cooperate no further until it was paid, in February 1841 Major D’Arcy Todd, the political officer who had replaced Eldred Pottinger in Herat, decided unilaterally to withdraw the British mission. Hearing the news, Macnaghten, who continued to believe the British could never be truly secure in Afghanistan until they had annexed Herat, immediately sought permission to dispatch a force there, which would also hunt down Aktur Khan and his rebels. However, the normally acquiescent Lord Auckland castigated Todd for his actions and refused to sanction any campaign against Herat, again telling Macnaghten he “
must be strong in Afghanistan
” before any such venture could be contemplated.

Macnaghten regretfully abandoned the campaign against Herat but still had Aktur Khan to deal with. The Douranee leader was coaxed into making terms under which he agreed to disband his followers in return for a conditional pardon and some fiscal concessions, among them an end to the detested system of billeting tax collectors on communities until they paid what the collectors demanded. He also insisted on the replacement of Shah Shuja’s chief minister and tax gatherer, the corrupt, earless and avaricious Mullah Shakur, whom the British had long distrusted anyway.

The terms
notwithstanding, Macnaghten’s political officer at Kandahar, Major Henry Rawlinson, rightly anticipated that all that had been gained was “temporary tranquillity.” Indeed, Aktur Khan was soon gathering forces for a renewed struggle. When Rawlinson warned that however many times the British beat the Douranees, doing so would only aggravate the widespread national feeling against the British, Macnaghten reproved him for his “unwarrantably gloomy view,” warning against “idle statements” that might “cause much mischief” and complaining that “we have enough of difficulties and enough of croakers without adding to the number needlessly.” The Douranees were mere “ragamuffins,” and there was no national feeling against the occupying forces. He advised Rawlinson to view matters with a little more
couleur de rose
—one of his favorite expressions.

A rebellion by the Ghilzais of western Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 1841, provoked by the British appropriation and rebuilding of a fortress at Khelat-i-Ghilzai in their heartlands, did not alter Macnaghten’s views. Neither did a further Douranee rebellion at the end of which Aktur Khan was again put to flight. To Macnaghten, Douranee and Ghilzai discontent were minor flare-ups and not signs of more concerted resistance to come. On 20 August 1841, with both tribes apparently peaceable, he famously boasted in a letter to friends, “
The country is perfectly quiet from Dan to Beersheba.
” Elsewhere he wrote, “
All things considered, the perfect tranquillity of the country is to my mind perfectly miraculous. Already our presence has been infinitely beneficial in allying animosities and pointing out abuses … we are gradually placing matters on a firm and satisfactory basis.
”

Burnes, however, saw things differently. Though he maintained in correspondence that he got on well with Macnaghten, perhaps so as not to damage his prospects of succeeding him, he knew that the envoy continued to marginalize him. As he himself described, he was in the “
most nondescript of situations
”—“
a highly paid idler, having no less than 3,500 rupees a month as Resident at Kabul, and being, as the lawyers call it, only counsel, and that, too, a dumb one—by which I mean that I give paper opinions, but do not work them out.
” At least he was living well. At his weekly dinners he could offer his guests champagne, hock, Madeira, sherry, port, claret, sauternes, curacao and maraschino. He regularly dined on such delicacies as “
smoked fish, salmon grills, devils, and jellies
” and was putting on weight; “if rotundity and heartiness be proofs of health, I have them,” he wrote to a friend.

Burnes’s unwanted leisure had given him a more detached view than Macnaghten, and he realized that the country was not quiescent as the envoy claimed. He also thought the British were making mistakes in the internal running of Afghanistan, especially with regard to taxation and the administration of justice, both fundamental to achieving stability. Writing critically to an officer who had attacked a Ghilzai fort simply because its occupants had dared him to, he expressed his opposition to military adventurism: “
I am one of those altogether opposed to any further fighting in this country, and I consider we shall never settle Afghanistan at the point of the bayonet.
” When Burnes set such opinions down frankly, he annoyed Macnaghten, who warned Auckland that Burnes was painting a less favorable picture of the state of things in Afghanistan for only one reason: because “
when he succeeds me his failures would thus find excuse and his successes additional credit.
”

Having already read the government’s published selective and expurgated versions of the documents leading to war in Afghanistan and denounced the publication as “
pure trickery
,” Burnes was clearly worried that, whatever the outcome in Afghanistan and whatever his own career prospects, his personal views on what had happened might be “massaged” or suppressed. Indeed it had already happened. In the summer of 1841 he contemplated writing an account of the political events that had brought the British to Kabul. Even if he could not publish it in his lifetime, he could leave the manuscript to his executors “
and thus furnish food for reflection on the wisdom of the world when I am food for worms.
” Burnes did not write his account, but helped by his younger brother Charles, he transcribed every public document he had written about the Afghan invasion and occupation and sent the copies to his elder brother James, in Bombay.

In the autumn of 1841 Burnes learned that Macnaghten had finally got his reward for his endeavors in Afghanistan: the governorship of Bombay, one of the most prestigious appointments in British India. Other changes in the top command in Afghanistan had also been made. With Sir Willoughby Cotton anxious to retire and pleading ill health a few months earlier, Lord Auckland had offered the post of commander in chief to the fifty-nine-year-old lame, gout-ridden Major General William Elphinstone, suggesting he might find the bracing air of Kabul better for his health than the hot plains of India. Somewhat to Auckland’s surprise, he had accepted. The new commander in chief was a Queen’s officer and first cousin of Mountstuart Elphinstone, who had journeyed to Shah Shuja’s court at Peshawar more than thirty years earlier. John Colvin, Auckland’s private secretary, wrote confidently to Macnaghten that he was “
the best general we have to send you.
” Others who knew him better had a different opinion. John Luard, one of the staff officers in Calcutta who had served under Elphinstone when he commanded the sixteenth Lancers in the 1820s, wrote that he was then “
a very gentlemanly and agreeable person but from want of decision and never trusting in his own opinion unfit to command even a regiment.
” Now he was “feeble in health as well as in mind, wanting in resolution and confidence in himself, no experience of warfare … totally unfitted to the command of the force at Kabul.”

William Nott would have been a far better choice, but, as he himself knew, he had alienated too many people. He had never bothered to conceal his contempt for Shah Shuja, whom he thought “as great a scoundrel as ever lived,” while directing vitriol at Macnaghten and his “silly” political officers, who resembled “small birds [Nott had] seen frightened in a storm, ready to perch upon anything, and to fly into the arms of the first man they meet for protection … what will they do when
real
danger comes?” Of the envoy himself he wrote, “It would take many years to
undo
what that man, Macnaghten, has done … bringing into contempt everything connected with the name of Englishmen.”

At the time of his appointment Elphinstone was commanding a division of the Bengal army near Delhi. He had not seen action since the Battle of Waterloo, had been in India a mere two years and spoke not a word of Hindustani. One of the reasons for selecting Elphinstone was Auckland’s belief that his “
remarkably mild and conciliatory manners
” would help him work effectively with Macnaghten and his successors in the divided, ambiguous senior politico-military hierarchy. The very traits that made Elphinstone appear preferable to the tempersome Nott—amiability, courtliness and preference for consensus rather than confrontation—were not, of course, the qualities required in a crisis. However, a crisis was not what Auckland, lulled by Macnaghten’s
couleur de rose
assurances, anticipated. He wrote to Elphinstone, “
The part which we shall have to play will I trust be rather that of influence than of war … the duty of the officer in command in Afghanistan will be rather that of maintaining a strong attitude, and of directing the distribution of the troops and the measures necessary for their health and comfort, than of conducting active operations.
” He went on that Elphinstone should be cautious in deploying British troops and focus on building up Afghanistan’s own army so that the British army was not regarded “as its sole support and dependence.” It all must have seemed so much easier in Calcutta than Kabul.