Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (6 page)

So Napoleon now hatched plans to attack India through Persia and Afghanistan. A treaty with the Persian Ambassador had already been concluded: ‘Should it be the intention of HM the Emperor of the French to send an army by land to attack the English possessions in India,’ it stated, ‘HM the Emperor of Persia, as his good and faithful ally, will grant him passage.’

At Tilsit, the secret clauses spelled out the plan in full: Napoleon would emulate Alexander the Great and march 50,000 French troops of the Grande Armée across Persia to invade India, while Russia would head south through Afghanistan. General Gardane was despatched to Persia to liaise with the Shah and find out which ports could provide anchorage, water and supplies for 20,000 men, and to draw up maps of possible invasion routes.
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Meanwhile, General Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Ambassador to St Petersburg, was instructed to take the idea forward with the Russians. ‘The more fanciful it sounds,’ wrote the Emperor, ‘the more the attempt to do it (and what can France and Russia not do?) would frighten the English; striking terror into English India, spreading confusion in London; and, to be sure, forty thousand Frenchmen to whom Persia will have granted passage by way of Constantinople, joining forty thousand Russians who arrive by way of the Caucasus, would be enough to terrify Asia, and make its conquest.’
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But the British were not caught unawares. The secret service had hidden one of their informers, a disillusioned Russian aristocrat, beneath the barge, his ankles dangling in the river. Braving the cold, he was able to hear every word and sent an immediate express, containing the outlines of the plan, to London. It took British intelligence only a further six weeks to obtain the exact wording of the secret clauses, and these were promptly forwarded to India. With them went instructions for the Governor General, Lord Minto, to warn all the countries lying between India and Persia of the dangers in which they stood, and to negotiate alliances with them to oppose any French or Franco-Russian expedition against India. The different embassies were also instructed to collect strategic information and intelligence, so filling in the blank spaces on British maps of these regions. Meanwhile, reinforcements would be held in readiness in England for despatch to India should there be signs of an expedition being ready to sail from the French ports.
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Lord Minto did not regard Napoleon’s plan as fanciful. A French invasion of India through Persia was not ‘beyond the scope of that energy and perseverance which distinguish the present ruler of France’, he wrote as he finalised plans to counter the ‘very active French diplomacy in Persia, which is seeking with great diligence the means of extending its intrigues to the Durbars of Hindustan’.
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In the end Minto opted for four separate embassies, each of which would be sent with lavish presents in order to warn and win over the powers that stood in the way of Napoleon’s armies. One was sent to Teheran in an effort to impress upon Fatteh Ali Shah Qajar of Persia the perfidiousness of his new French ally. Another was despatched to Lahore to make an alliance with Ranjit Singh and the Sikhs. A third was despatched to the Amirs of Sindh. The job of wooing Shah Shuja and his Afghans fell to a rising young star in the Company’s service, Mountstuart Elphinstone.

Elphinstone was a Lowland Scot, who in his youth had been a notable Francophile. He had grown up alongside French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle, of which his father was governor, and there he had learned their revolutionary songs and had grown his curly golden hair down his back in the Jacobin style to show his sympathy with their ideals.
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Sent off to India at the unusually young age of fourteen to keep him out of trouble, he had learned good Persian, Sanskrit and Hindustani, and soon turned into an ambitious diplomat and a voracious historian and scholar.

As Elphinstone made his way to his first posting in Pune, one elephant was reserved entirely for his books, including volumes of the Persian poets, Homer, Horace, Herodotus, Theocritus, Sappho, Plato,
Beowulf
, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Dryden, Bacon, Boswell and Thomas Jefferson.
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Since then Elphinstone had fought alongside Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, in his central Indian Maratha wars and had long since given up his more egalitarian ideals. ‘As the court of Kabul was known to be haughty, and supposed to entertain a mean opinion of European nations,’ he wrote, ‘it was determined that the mission should be in a style of great magnificence.’

The first Embassy to Afghanistan by a western power left the Company’s Delhi Residency on 13 October 1808, with the Ambassador accompanied by 200 cavalry, 4,000 infantry, a dozen elephants and no fewer than 600 camels. It was dazzling, but it was also clear from this attempt to reach out to the Afghans that the British were not interested in cultivating Shah Shuja’s friendship for its own sake, but were concerned only to outflank their imperial rivals: the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

It was Shah Shuja’s grandfather, Ahmad Shah Abdali, who is usually considered to have founded the modern state of Afghanistan in 1747. His family came from Multan in the Punjab and had a long tradition of service to the Mughals. It was appropriate therefore that his power derived in part from the enormous treasure chest of Mughal gems plundered by the Persian marauder Nadir Shah from the Red Fort in Delhi sixty years earlier; these Ahmad Shah had seized within an hour of Nadir Shah’s assassination.
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Putting this wealth at the service of his cavalry, Ahmad Shah hardly ever lost a battle, but he was ultimately defeated by a foe more intractable than any army. He had had his face eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy or some form of cancer. At the height of his power, when after eight successive raids on the plains of north India he finally crushed the massed cavalry of the Marathas at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, Ahmad Shah’s disease had already consumed his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place. As his army grew to a horde of 120,000 and his Empire expanded, so did the tumour, ravaging his brain, spreading to his chest and throat, and incapacitating his limbs.
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He sought healing in Sufi shrines, but none of this brought him the cure he craved. In 1772, having despaired of recovery, he took to his bed and, as one Afghan writer put it, ‘the leaves and fruit of his date palm fell to the ground, and he returned whence he had come’.
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The great tragedy of his new Durrani Empire was that its founder died before he could fix the boundaries of his country, build a working administration or properly consolidate his new conquests.

Ahmad Shah’s diminutive son, Timur Shah, successfully maintained the heartlands of the Empire his father had bequeathed to him. He moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, to keep it out of the turbulent Pashtun heartlands, and looked to the Qizilbash – Shia colonists who first came to Afghanistan from Persia with the armies of Nadir Shah – for his royal guard. Like the Qizilbash, his own Sadozai dynasty were Persian-speaking and culturally Persianised and Timur Shah looked to his Timurid predecessors – ‘the Oriental Medici’ as Robert Byron dubbed them – for his cultural models. He prided himself on being a man of taste, and revived the formal gardens of the Bala Hisar fort in Kabul first constructed by Shah Jahan’s Governor of Kabul, Ali Mardan Khan. In this endeavour, he was inspired by the stories of his senior wife, a Mughal princess who had grown up in the Delhi Red Fort with its courtyards of fountains and shade-giving fruit trees.

Like his Mughal in-laws, he had a talent for dazzling display. ‘He modelled his government on that of the great rulers,’ records a later court history, the
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
. ‘He wore a diamond-studded brooch on his turban and a bejewelled sash over his shoulder. His overcoat was ornamented with precious stones, and he wore the Koh-i-Nur on his right forearm, and the Fakhraj ruby on his left. His Highness Timur Shah also mounted another encrusted brooch on his horse’s forehead. Because he was a man of short stature, a bejewelled stepstool was also made for him to mount his horse.’
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Though Timur Shah lost the Persian territories of his father’s empire, he fought hard to preserve the Afghan core: in 1778–9, he recovered the rebellious Punjabi city of Multan, his father’s birthplace, returning with the heads of several thousand Sikh rebels laden on camels. The heads were then put on display as trophies.
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Timur left twenty-four sons, and the succession struggle that followed his death – with all the competing claimants energetically capturing, murdering and maiming each other – began the process of undermining the authority of the Durrani monarchy; under Timur Shah’s eventual successor, Shah Zaman, the Empire disintegrated. In 1797, Shah Zaman, like his father and grandfather before him, decided to revive his fortunes and fill his treasuries by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hindustan – the time-honoured Afghan solution to cash crises. Encouraged by an invitation from Tipu Sultan, he descended the switchbacks of the Khyber Pass and moved into the old monsoon-weathered walls of the Mughal fort of Lahore to plan his raid on the rich plains of north India. By 1797, however, India was increasingly coming under the sway of a frighteningly alien intrusion into the region: the East India Company. Under its most aggressive Governor General, Lord Wellesley, the elder brother of the future Duke of Wellington, the Company was expanding rapidly out from its coastal factories to conquer much of the interior; Wellesley’s Indian campaigns would ultimately annex more territory than all of Napoleon’s conquests in Europe. India was no longer the source of easy plunder for the Afghans that it once was, and Wellesley was an especially cunning adversary.

He decided to thwart Shah Zaman, not through direct force of arms, but through diplomatic stratagem. In 1798, he sent a diplomatic mission to Persia, offering arms and training, and encouraged the Persians to attack Shah Zaman’s undefended rear. Shah Zaman was forced to retreat in 1799, and in the process left Lahore under the governorship of a capable and ambitious young Sikh. Rajah Ranjit Singh had helped Shah Zaman save some cannon lost in the mud of the River Jhelum during the chaos of the Afghan retreat, and by charming the Shah, and impressing him with his efficiency, he was given charge of much of the Punjab, although he was only nineteen years old.
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In the years that followed, as Shah Zaman marched and counter-marched trying to maintain his fracturing empire, it was Ranjit Singh who would slowly prise the lucrative eastern provinces of the Durrani Empire from his former overlord and take his place as the dominant power in the Punjab.

‘The Afghans of Khurasan have an age-old reputation,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad, one of the most perceptive writers of Shah Shuja’s age, ‘that wherever the lamp of power burns brightly, there like moths they swarm; and wherever the tablecloth of plenty is spread, there like flies they gather.’
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The reverse was also true. As Zaman retreated, thwarted from plundering India and hemmed in by the Sikhs, British and Persians, his authority waned and one by one his nobles, his extended family and finally even his half-brothers rebelled against him.

The end of Shah Zaman’s rule came during the icy winter of 1800, when the Kabulis finally refused to open the city gates to their luckless king. Instead, one cold winter’s night, with the falling snow soft on his lashes, he took shelter from the gathering blizzard in a fortress between Jalalabad and the Khyber. That night, he was imprisoned by his Shinwari hosts, who locked the gates, murdered his bodyguard and later blinded him with a hot needle: ‘The point’, wrote Mirza ‘Ata, ‘quickly spilled the wine of his sight from the cup of his eyes.’
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The proud and bookish Prince Shuja was only fourteen years old when his elder brother was blinded and deposed. Shuja was Shah Zaman’s ‘constant companion at all times’ and, in the coup d’état that followed, troops were sent out to arrest him. But he eluded the search parties and with a few companions wandered on unmarked tracks from the poplars and holly oaks of the valleys to the crystalline snows of the high passes, cresting the kerfs and shelves of the mountains, sleeping rough and biding his time. He was an intelligent, gentle and literate teenager, who abhorred the violence spiralling around him, and in adversity sought solace in poetry. ‘Lose no hope when faced with hardships,’ he wrote at this time, while moving from mountain village to mountain village, protected by loyal tribesmen. ‘Black clouds soon give way to clear rain.’
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Like Babur, the first Mughal Emperor, Shah Shuja crafted a beautifully written autobiography where he talks of his days as a homeless wanderer on the snow-slopes of the Safed Koh, padding around the silent shores of high-altitude lakes of turquoise and jade, waiting and planning for the right moment to recover his birthright. ‘At this time,’ he wrote, ‘fate afflicted us with much suffering. But we prayed for strength, as the gift of victory and of kingship lies only with God. By His grace, our intention was that from the moment of mounting the throne, we would so rule our subjects with justice and mercy, that they should live in happiness within the shade of our protecting wings. For the purpose of kingship is to watch over the people, and to free the weak from oppression.’
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