The Dark Defile (39 page)

Outside Britain
there was general satisfaction at Britain’s unexpected reverses in Afghanistan. In the United States the Afghan War took up numerous column inches in the nation’s newspapers, large and small. Outrage at the “odium” and “wickedness” of the British intervention and admiration for the “indomitable love of independence” of the Afghans were almost universal. Atrocities committed by the British as they sought retribution were equally condemned. Afghanistan became somewhat of an issue in the 1842 congressional elections with British attitudes and actions being seen as emblematic of behavior America should avoid. The U.S. administration, however, made no protest to Britain. It was more concerned with negotiating a major treaty with Britain—the Webster-Ashburton Treaty—regulating outstanding issues between the two countries, including the definition of parts of the border between the United States and Canada, and securing favorable trading rights under British aegis in Asia, and in particular China, following Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars and the secession to them of Hong Kong.

WITH THE BENEFIT of hindsight, among the more important lessons the British should have learned from the First Afghan War were many that resonate today. Their leaders were not honest with themselves or their public about their motivation, providing partial and misleading information to both Parliament and public. In their own minds they exaggerated the threats to their position in India and exaggerated the power of their available troops to cope with the demands an Afghan campaign would make on them.

The British entered Afghanistan without clear objectives or a defined exit strategy or timetable. In what could be termed
regime change
, they endeavored to impose on the country a ruler unpopular with his people. The Duke of Wellington correctly prophesied that Britain’s difficulties would begin when its military success ended. These successes led them into an open-ended commitment to a ruler whom they had not chosen well and, when they realized this, hesitated to replace or “guide” sufficiently. They alienated an increasingly hostile population excited into jihad against the infidel British by Islamic clerics and their followers, the
ghazis
, ready to martyr themselves.

British intelligence was poor. Although they saw Russia as their main rival in Central Asia, there was no Russian speaker anywhere in their administration in India. Their knowledge of the terrain was sketchy, and they were ignorant until too late of the tribal nature of the politics of the country which barely merited that name, being split up between semiautonomous tribes, people looking very different from each other and speaking mutually incomprehensible languages. They did not understand that these tribes united only rarely and that when they did so it was against a foreign invader such as themselves.

Many senior British officers’ only experience of action had been in the defeat of Napoleon’s vast armies on the plains of Europe a quarter of a century before. When, beaten in conventional warfare, the Afghans changed their tactics into those of the guerrilla fighter, these same British officers found it difficult to react to an enemy who picked off their soldiers, highly visible in their red coats, from vantage points high above the passes, their long-barreled jezails accurate at far greater range than the British Brown Besses. The British learned that it was both difficult to recruit and train Afghan troops to support Shah Shuja and when they did so found their loyalty and performance in battle was unreliable, one officer complaining, “
They would never be fit for anything.
”

In general, British troops struggled to distinguish between hostile and peaceful Afghans, both in Kabul and in the countryside, even when, as was not always the case, they tried hard to make such distinctions. As a consequence innocent civilians were punished and killed, and even more of the population were turned into ready recruits for the enemy. The British and the Afghans alike had problems in understanding each other’s cultures and characters. The British stereotyped the Afghans as cunning, corrupt and deceitful and thus found it difficult to believe in the motives of those who were in fact well disposed toward them. The Afghans accepted British protestations of their reputation for straight dealing at face value and were thus the more let down when the British proved duplicitous and Machiavellian.
²⁶
The Afghan propensity for assassination as well as the taking and subsequent trading between themselves of hostages initially appalled the British, but later they at times found themselves complicit in plans for targeted assassination as the easiest way to rid themselves of troublesome opponents. The attitudes and ambitions of Persia and the passage of forces and weapons across the Helmand River as well as the porous, imprecise border complicated British policies.

Changes of government in Britain changed policy in Afghanistan. Politicians—even those who favored the intervention—were concerned about cost as timescales extended, preferring to take the short rather than the long-term view. In Kabul, too, British civilian officials and military commanders bickered about the division of responsibilities between them. Civilian officials such as Macnaghten, whose careers depended on the success of the mission, created a
conspiracy of optimism
.
²⁷
Generals protested in vain against withdrawal of forces to a level that led to an overstretching of resources and a consequent inability to control more than a few strategic outposts outside Kabul, rather than the whole countryside. Sometimes even these outposts were overrun.

The British found it easier to purchase acquiescence to their own and Shah Shuja’s activities than to win over Afghan hearts and minds. Therefore, perhaps the biggest British miscalculation was—in response to cost-cutting pressures from home—unilaterally to reduce some of the subsidies paid to Afghan tribal chiefs. Their economy measure was immediately followed by an Afghan rising.

The long time taken for communications between London and the governor-general’s administration in Calcutta and then from Calcutta to those in command in the field in Afghanistan inevitably hampered effective decision making—a problem exacerbated by the fact that the British did not choose their senior officials and generals well. On the military side the deficiencies of Elphinstone and Shelton are so obvious as to require no recapitulation. Among the civilians, the supreme command lay with Lord Auckland, as governor-general. Two phrases used by the Roman historian Tacitus in his assessment of Galba—one of the unsuccessful Roman emperors in the year of the four emperors, A.D. 69—could have been used of Auckland:
magis extra vitia quam cum virtutibus
(a man rather without vices than possessing virtues) and
capax imperii nisi imperasset
(considered capable of exercising power if he had not been called upon to do so).

Auckland, a pleasant character, had proved a good administrator in less demanding posts in the government in London. However, even if the post of governor-general was slightly less powerful than that of Roman emperor, he was insufficiently strong a character or leader when placed in supreme command of policy in India, thousands of miles and many weeks in terms of communication away from London, to withstand either the conspiracy of optimism generated by Macnaghten from Kabul or pressures from home both to economize and to expedite success and withdrawal. It was not that he was a complete failure—he did restrain some of Macnaghten’s plans for operations beyond Afghan borders—but that he was not equipped temperamentally or intellectually to dominate the situation. He preferred to acquiesce in his subordinates’ plans to continue existing policies when they began to go awry, rather than ordering either a halt or a thorough review.
²⁸

Chief among Auckland’s subordinates was Macnaghten. Though an undoubtedly clever man, he was out of both his milieu and his depth in Afghanistan. Nearly all his career had been spent in the secretariat in Calcutta, and he had little experience of independent command. His ingrained optimism led him throughout to minimize or ignore difficulties. He underestimated the military capabilities of the Afghans and overestimated those of the British and Indian troops, leaving him both to accept troop reductions and deployments when he should not have and to propose grandiose operations beyond Shah Shuja’s borders—for example, against Herat—which were entirely unfeasible. Though he understood the importance of making it appear to the Afghan population that Shah Shuja was a true king and thus ensured that his troops led the army on its marches and made the first ceremonial entries into cities, in promoting the invasion and Shah Shuja himself, he was far too optimistic in his assessment of Shah Shuja’s abilities and of the ease with which the diverse and stubborn Afghans could be induced to accept as a ruler a man they considered to have an aura of ill fortune.

As for Alexander Burnes, as well as courage, he had needed great self-confidence, resourcefulness and strength of judgment to succeed in his youthful journeys in Central Asia. Such qualities rarely go hand in hand with humility. What is more, Burnes seems to have allowed all the praise and attention he had received in London to turn his head to the extent that in his subsequent career he found it easier to antagonize less celebrated but more senior colleagues than to devote enough of his time and charm to convince them of the undoubted soundness of many of his views, particularly those in regard to Dost Mohammed. Thwarted, and urged on by his unrequited ambition, he preferred, to the detriment of his historical reputation, to acquiesce, albeit sulkily, in policies that he believed wrong. He did so in the hope of obtaining, by his temporary passivity, high office in which he would remedy others’ deficient policies, thus fulfilling his youthful promise—something fate never allowed him the opportunity to do.

DESPITE ALL THE soul-searching about British actions at home and abroad, not long after the last British regiments had returned to India down through the Khyber Pass, the British in India returned to their expansionist policies. Their confidence restored by the success of the army of retribution and at the urging of Governor-General Lord Ellenborough, they moved west into Sind, where the emirs, emboldened by British defeats in Afghanistan, had increased tolls on the Indus and then indulged in what the British saw as a variety of provocations. The last straw had been an assault in February 1843 on a British mission led by Colonel James Outram. This in the government’s view justified them in “
introducing to a brigand infested land, the firm but just administration of the East India Company.
”

Lord Ellenborough dispatched an expeditionary force of 2,500 men led by General Sir Charles Napier, who pronounced before departing, “We have no right to seize Sind yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it will be.” Known to his troops variously as “Old Fagin” or “the Devil’s Brother” because of his wild unkempt appearance and large hooked nose, Napier was as good as his word, swiftly defeating the emirs, after which the British soon annexed Sind.
²⁹
The Indus was now open to British navigation and commerce. Karachi, never relinquished by the British, began its rise from a fishing port with three thousand inhabitants to Pakistan’s leading commercial center and port with a population of around 15 million today.

The next people to suffer the advance of the British were their old allies the Sikhs. Their lands had fallen into near anarchy as contenders strove to replace Ranjit Singh, one of whom unwisely led a plundering raid into British territory. The British invaded in November 1845 and defeated the Sikhs in bloody battles in which General “Fighting Bob” Sale and Major Broadfoot were both killed.
³⁰
The British withdrew, although imposing restrictions on Sikh power and stationing garrisons at strategic points in their territories. They also took control of Kashmir, seized earlier by Ranjit Singh from the Afghans, and shortly afterward ceded the territory, whose inhabitants were mostly Muslims, to one of their vassal rulers, the Hindu maharaja of Jammu, in return for a substantial payment. This action would have unforeseen consequences at the partition of India at its independence in 1947. The rulers of the princely states were allowed to opt to join either India or Pakistan. The maharaja of Jammu, as a Hindu, opted for India for not only Jammu but also Kashmir, whose Muslim majority would have preferred to join Pakistan. This led to a Pakistani invasion of part of Kashmir and to an unresolved border dispute bedevilling the relationship between India and Pakistan that continues to the present.

In 1848 the Sikhs rebelled against the British restrictions. The British defeated them once more in a series of hard-fought battles and in March 1849 annexed the Sikh territories. During the Sikh wars Dost Mohammed had occupied Peshawar, abandoned by the Sikhs as they focused all their efforts on confronting the British. However, after the Sikh defeat he relinquished the city to the British, effectively giving up his claim to the area.

In 1856 the Persians again occupied Herat. In a three-month war, a British maritime expeditionary force operating in the Persian Gulf and led by Colonel James Outram coerced the Persians into relinquishing Herat once more and promising to abandon any interference in Afghanistan.

A year later part of the East India Company’s Bengal army mutinied, precipitating what has come to be seen as the first major Indian struggle for independence from the British. Some historians see Britain’s retreat from Kabul as a factor in the rebellion, showing as it did that the East India Company’s forces could be defeated. The conflict was bloody, and atrocities were committed on both sides, in one of which Lady Sale’s daughter Alexandrina and her new husband were ambushed and decapitated. Eventually the British, with the assistance of a considerable body of Indian troops—in particular newly recruited Sikhs—as well as Gurkhas, put the rising down. Among the veterans of the Afghan War who played leading roles in the suppression were Henry Havelock, James Outram and Vincent Eyre. Dr. Brydon survived another siege—that of the British residency in Lucknow—although badly wounded. In the reorganization that followed the end of the fighting, the East India Company’s authority and army were transferred to the British Crown.