Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (75 page)

The last glimpse we have of the Sadozai princes is the memoir of Robert Warburton, the son of the happy marriage between a British officer and Shah Jahan Begum, the niece of Dost Mohammad, who grew up in Ludhiana among the Afghan exile community.

Whatever may have been their public failings, I was not old enough to judge in those days, but the kindness of some of them to me, carried over a series of years, was always of the same uniform character. I was not debarred from going inside their
harem-sarais
, and my knowledge of Persian permitted me to converse with the wives of all the Shahzadas . . . There were two brothers, Shahzada Shahpur and Shahzada Nadir, the youngest sons of the unfortunate Shah Shujah-ul-Mulk, who particularly took my fancy. For resignation in the midst of their troubles, for gentleness to all who were brought into contact with them, and for a lofty regard for the feelings and wishes of others, I have seldom seen finer types of the true gentleman than these two brothers. The elder was in receipt of a pension of Rs 500 and the younger of Rs 100 a month from the Indian government – small sums indeed with which to bring up their families and support the number of ancient servitors who had been driven out of house and home at Kabul and had followed the fortunes of this royal family into the heat and plains of India.
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There were few happy endings either for the Afghan victors of the war. Nawab Zaman Khan Barakzai was quickly marginalised by Dost Mohammad and never again received any major government posts.
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Aminullah Khan Logari was judged to have become too ambitious and disruptive, and was imprisoned for life shortly after the end of the war, because of his predilection, according to Fayz Mohammad, ‘for inciting peaceful people to engage in mischief’.
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Mackenzie was later told by Aminullah’s brother, who ended up a refugee in Ludhiana, that Dost Mohammad, ‘having married a daughter of Aminullah, had then murdered him with his own hands, smothering him with a pillow’.
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Wazir Akbar Khan enjoyed a year of power after the British left, but on the return of his father in 1843 was sent off to be governor of Jalalabad and Laghman. His durbar soon came to be seen as a centre of opposition to Dost Mohammad. When Akbar Khan was poisoned in 1847 it was widely rumoured that it was on his father’s orders.
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Just before he died, Akbar wrote a last letter to Mackenzie, ‘affectionately reproaching him for his neglect of the duties of friendship in not giving him news of his welfare’. Mackenzie was forbidden by the government from answering the letter ‘as it was from an enemy’.
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Mackenzie did however answer a letter from Mohammad Shah Khan Ghilzai, who, having become too powerful for the liking of Dost Mohammad, had fallen from favour and been ruined soon after the death of his son-in-law. Forced to flee into exile among the Kafirstanis of Nuristan, he wrote to Mackenzie in Ludhiana to remind him ‘of their former friendship and to ask if it continued’.

The letter was brought by a Sayad, to whom he had given a token whereby he might judge of Mackenzie’s disposition towards him. The Sayad began: ‘Mohammad Shah Khan says to you, “when you were in peril of life by the fort of Mahmud Khan [after the murder of Macnaghten] how did I act?”’ Mackenzie answered: ‘When the sword was raised to strike me, he put his arm round my neck and took the cut on his own shoulder.’ Then the Sayad knew he might deliver the letter. Mackenzie replied that he ‘would always acknowledge him as a friend’.
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The only man who clearly gained from the First Anglo-Afghan War was the very man whom the war was designed to depose. In April 1843, after staying as the guest of the Sikh Khalsa in Lahore, Dost Mohammad rode to Peshawar and mounted the switchbacks of the Khyber. At Ali Masjid he was greeted by Akbar Khan and escorted by him back to Kabul. ‘The residents of that city lined the route,’ wrote Fayz Mohammad. ‘Old and young alike cheered his arrival and the eyes of his supporters were dazzled and their breasts swelled with pride at the sight of him. With joy increasing, they sang his praises, and together they entered Kabul in a state of complete euphoria. For seven days and nights there were joyous celebrations. The nights were brightened with lights and the days with the sounds of people reciting ghazals [love lyrics] and singing. Joy and festivity rang out and everywhere there was gladness and cheer.’
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Intelligence reports collated by the British from their spies and sympathisers in Afghanistan maintained in 1843 that ‘the authority of the Ameer and his family is merely nominal and nothing whatever will be collected from the Kohistanis, the Ghilzais, the people of Koonur or the Khyburees. Dost Mohammad spends his time and his money in vainly endeavouring to raise disciplined battalions and in a silly emulation of the state of the princes of India.’
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As before, however, British intelligence had underestimated Dost Mohammad. Slowly, the Amir increased his power and expanded his dominions in eastern Afghanistan, so laying the foundations for his subsequent achievement, of conquering first Bamiyan and Badakhshan, then Khulm and the whole of northern Afghanistan. By the early 1850s he had subdued the Ghilzai tribes around Ghazni and in 1855 ousted his half-brothers from control of Kandahar. By the time of his death in 1863, having remained completely true to his treaties with the British, he had increased his tax revenues from 2.5 to 7 million rupees and was ruling over almost all of the modern state of Afghanistan. It was the limits of Dost Mohammad’s conquests that came to form the frontiers of modern Afghanistan – containing Herat, but shorn of Peshawar – still a source of disgruntlement to Afghan and especially Pashtun nationalists.

Ironically it was the Amir who was the ultimate beneficiary of the administrative reforms enacted by Macnaghten to strengthen the rule of Shah Shuja, which reduced the power of the Durrani tribal chiefs and created a more professional army and a working tax structure.
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Indeed this was only one of a number of ways in which British colonialism played a strong formative role in shaping and creating the Afghan state which now came much more clearly into being than it had done before the occupation. Yet the more coherent Afghanistan now ruled by Dost Mohammad was also a more impoverished and isolated country than it had ever been before in its history. No longer was it the rich and cultured crossroads of the Silk Route, nor were the great days of high Timurid Persianate culture ever to return. For the first time in its history, under the Barakzais Afghanistan would become to some extent a backwater.

The last town to fall to the Amir was Herat, which he had just finished besieging when he died. There Dost Mohammad was laid to rest in the most beautiful Sufi shrine in Afghanistan, the Gazur Gah. In stark contrast to his rival Shah Shuja, whose probable tomb is to be found unmarked in the basement of the mausoleum of his father, Timur Shah, Dost Mohammad lies beneath a large and beautifully carved marble monument in the place of honour beside the region’s most revered Sufi saint and poet Khwaja ‘Abd Allah Ansari. Dost Mohammad’s descendants continued to rule a united Afghanistan until the revolutions of the 1970s.

Today Herat is the most peaceful and prosperous town in Afghanistan, and the Gazur Gah is still a popular place of pilgrimage. Robert Byron wrote in the 1930s that ‘everyone goes to the Gazur Gah. Babur went. Humayun went. Shah Abbas improved the water supply. It is still the Heratis’ favourite resort.’ It remains so eighty years later. The shrine lies on the edge of the hills that surround the city. A tall arched Timurid gateway leads into a cool and peaceful courtyard full of superbly calligraphed tombs and memorial stones. House martins swoop through the pine trees and ilexes. Old men lie asleep in the shade, using their white turbans as pillows. Others gently finger their rosaries as the pigeons coo around them.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the return of the Taliban has meant in many places the banning of gentle, heterodox Sufi devotions: the shrines have been closed or blown up, and the instruments of the musicians broken. Yet here at the Gazur Gah, the Sufis survive intact. When I was there in 2009 a group of devotees began to chant the zikr immediately behind Dost Mohammad’s tomb, kneeling in a circle, and as a long-haired cantor sang one of Khwaja sahib’s poems in a high tenor voice, his followers clapped and chanted
:
‘Haq! haq!’
–
‘Truth! Truth!’ On they chanted, faster and faster, pitch rising, until finally reaching their mystical climax, and falling backwards on to the carpets and bolsters with long ecstatic sighs. Dost Mohammad could have no more honoured resting place.

In the summer of 1844, soon after Dost Mohammad had returned to reclaim his throne and began the rebuilding and unification of his wrecked and plundered kingdom, on the other side of the world Tsar Nicholas of Russia invited himself to stay with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Windsor Castle.

With the Tsar came his Foreign Minister Count Nesselrode, the man who had despatched Vitkevitch on his mission to Dost Mohammad in 1837. If it was Anglo-Russian rivalry and suspicion which had ultimately caused the catastrophe of the Afghan War, here surely was the best possible chance to lay the ghosts of that conflict peacefully to rest.

The Tsar, who had been travelling with his courtiers incognito under the name Count Orlov in order to avoid possible assassination attempts by Polish terrorists, arrived at Woolwich docks unannounced on a Dutch steamer on 1 June. After a night at the Russian Embassy at Ashburnham House in Westminster he made his way to Windsor by train.

Victoria, who was then twenty-five years old and heavily pregnant, had half expected some sort of Tartar savage, and there was much apprehension when, on the Tsar’s arrival, their visitor sent to the stable for some straw to stuff the leather sack which served as the mattress for the military campbed on which he always slept. In the end, however, the Queen was most taken by her visitor. ‘He is certainly a
very striking
man,’ she wrote to her uncle on 4 June,

still very handsome. His profile is
beautiful
, and his manners
most
dignified and graceful; extremely civil – quite alarmingly so, as he is so full of attentions and
politesses
. But the expression of the
eyes
is
formidable
, and unlike anything I ever saw before. He gives me and Albert the impression of a man who is
not
happy, and on whom the weight of his immense power and position weighs heavily and painfully; he seldom smiles, and when he does the expression is
not
a happy one. He is, however, very easy to get on with.
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At the end of the visit, Prince Albert took the Tsar to the villa at Chiswick House – a piece of the Palladian Veneto strangely marooned on the banks of the Thames amid the countryside and market gardens just to the west of London. Here the Duke of Devonshire, the lynchpin of the Whig establishment, was to host a grand ceremonial breakfast in his honour which would be attended by all the country’s most powerful politicians and the entire diplomatic corps. The real business of the visit would take place in this unlikely spot, just beyond the fashionable riverside promenade of Chiswick Mall.

On 8 June, a bright summer day, the royal cavalcade entered the gates of Chiswick House at five minutes to two, preceded by outriders in state liveries, while the bands of the Coldstream Guards and Horse Guards played the Russian national anthem. The Imperial Standard was raised over the Summer Parlour and the Royal Standard over the Arcade, while a twenty-one-gun salute was fired from a battery erected within the grounds of the villa. The Tsar was then conducted, past the Duke’s four giraffes, to the summer parlour which had been specially decorated in the style of a medieval pavilion. During the levee, the Tsar talked mainly to the Duke of Wellington, but also chatted with Lord Melbourne and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. Count Nesselrode made straight for his former opposite number, Lord Palmerston, who in office had been known for his strong line against Russia, and the two remained locked in conversation for much of the afternoon.
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The visit was intended to cement relations between the two great powers, and to avoid the sort of misunderstandings and suspicions which had just caused so much unnecessary bloodshed in Central Asia. As the Tsar told Peel, ‘Through our friendly intercourse, I hope to annihilate the prejudices between our countries.’
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As an exercise in public relations, the Tsar’s visit was certainly a great success. London society women were especially charmed by his good looks and perfect manners. ‘He is still a great devotee to female beauty,’ noted Baron Stockmar, ‘and to his old English flames he showed the greatest attention.’ Yet unwittingly, for all the good intentions, the conversations at the Chiswick Breakfast sowed instead the seeds for future conflict.

The Tsar, who had little understanding of the influence of Parliament and the opposition parties on government, left England believing that the private conversations he had had with the Queen and her senior ministers, especially Sir Robert Peel and his Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen, could be interpreted as expressions of government policy. Specifically he believed that Britain would now join him to partition the Ottoman Empire. But the British saw the conversations merely as a private exchange of ideas and not some sort of binding gentlemen’s agreement as the Tsar believed.
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