The Dark Defile (40 page)

Authors: Diana Preston

BOOK: The Dark Defile

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During the rising Dost Mohammed had again wisely resisted calls from the more hotheaded of his advisers to retake Peshawar. Perhaps as a consequence of his forbearance, the British did not intervene when, in 1863, he finally conquered Herat. He did not live long to enjoy his success, however, dying only a few weeks later. Throughout his reign Dost Mohammed had proved a pragmatic, capable ruler. Astute in his assessment of both the powers on his borders and of his Afghan subjects and their intricate tribal politics, he knew how far he could go in imposing his rule on the latter and in unifying his country. He also knew the importance of religion and used its power to good effect against his infidel opponents. Dost Mohammed had been eager to court the British as his allies and turned to others only when rejected by them. After the war he sensibly held back from attempting to profit from British preoccupation with either the Sikh wars or rebellion in India.

After a familiar fratricidal succession struggle, one of Dost Mohammed’s younger sons, Sher Ali, emerged as the new emir. (Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammed’s favorite son, had died in 1845 at the age of twenty-nine.)

THE IMPROVED RELATIONS between Britain and Russia continued during the 1840s, but by 1854 differences between the two over the “Eastern question”—the potential breakup of the Ottoman Turkish Empire—led to the Crimean War, in which Britain, allied with the Ottoman Turks and the French, fought Russia. The 1856 Treaty of Paris concluding the conflict ended for the present Russian ambitions to extend southwest. In the east, under Nicholas I, who died in March 1855, and his son and successor, Alexander II, Russia had continued after the end of the First Afghan War to expand into Central Asia, pushing a line of fortresses through the Kazakh steppes and establishing a presence on the Aral Sea. In 1869 Bokhara was compelled to accept czarist suzerainty, and Russian power reached the banks of the Amu Darya, or Oxus, River. Although the British had refused to commit themselves to aid Afghanistan in fighting the Russians if they crossed the Amu Darya, in 1874 British policy changed with the election of a Tory prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who advocated a forward, interventionist policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In 1875, in a remarkable coup, Disraeli succeeded in buying the virtually bankrupt Khedive of Egypt’s 40-percent stake in the company owning the Suez Canal, opened in 1869. In doing so, he did much to safeguard a new and quicker route from Britain to India, increasing the importance as a coaling station of the port of Aden (Yemen) seized by Lord Auckland during the period of the Afghan War. In 1876 Disraeli’s government sanctioned the British occupation, annexation and fortification of Quetta and the surrounding area.

When Sher Ali acquiesced in 1878 in the arrival of an uninvited Russian diplomatic mission in Kabul, the British demanded that he should receive one from them as well. Sher Ali asked them to delay because he was in mourning for his eldest son, but the British claimed that this and what they considered subsequent unsatisfactory responses to their diplomatic initiatives were provocatory, and in that year dispatched three invading columns numbering some forty-five thousand men into Afghanistan, opening the Second Anglo-Afghan War forty years after the first began. In London George Lawrence, the veteran of the first war, inveighed against this second intervention: “
I regret to think that the lapse of years has apparently had the effect … that a reaction has set in, and that a new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting by the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us … in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country.
”

Kandahar soon fell to the southernmost of the invasion columns. Other British forces had advanced through the Khyber Pass when Sher Ali died as he was trying to cross the border into Russian territory to secure a meeting with the czar himself. The emir was succeeded by his son Yakub Khan. He agreed to meet the British at Gandamack, where in 1842 the Forty-fourth Foot had stood and died. Eventually he agreed to allow Britain to direct Afghan foreign policy and to control the main passes into Afghanistan from British India, as well as to accept a British mission in Kabul. In return, he was to receive a subsidy and the usual vague promises of British support against (other) foreign intervention.

In the summer
of 1879 the British mission led by Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an Italian father and Irish mother, headed into Kabul with a military escort of seventy-five men. At the same time, the nearest major British force was pulling back from the Khyber Pass in an attempt to escape an outbreak of cholera. Transmitting his message for part of its journey by a newly established telegraph line, Cavagnari reported his entrance to the city on 24 July: WE RECEIVED THE MOST BRILLIANT RECEPTION. WE PROCEEDED ON ELEPHANTS WITH A LARGE ESCORT OF CAVALRY. OUTSIDE THE CITY TWO BATTERIES OF ARTILLERY, NINE REGIMENTS OF INFANTRY WERE DRAWN UP … THEIR BANDS PLAYING THE BRITISH NATIONAL ANTHEM. LARGE CROWD ASSEMBLED AND WAS ORDERLY AND RESPECTFUL. EMIR ENQUIRED AFTER VICEROY’S HEALTH AND QUEEN AND ROYAL FAMILY. EMIR’S DEMEANOUR WAS MOST FRIENDLY. Later Cavagnari telegraphed, NOTWITHSTANDING ALL PEOPLE SAY AGAINST HIM, I PERSONALLY BELIEVE YAKUB KHAN WILL TURN OUT TO BE A VERY GOOD ALLY AND THAT WE SHALL BE ABLE TO KEEP HIM TO HIS ENGAGEMENTS. On 2 September his dispatch, tinted
couleur de rose
in a way reminiscent of Macnaghten, was ALL WELL IN THE KABUL EMBASSY.

Early the next day Afghan soldiers, incensed at being paid neither by the emir nor by the British, and at rumors circulated by the Kabul mullahs that the British were intent on religious conversion, attacked Cavagnari’s residence. Before midafternoon, despite desperate sorties, the residency was ablaze and all the Europeans were dead. The Afghans gave the surviving Indian troops a chance to surrender, which they refused. Instead, they made one last sally, and within five minutes they too were all killed. The only survivor was an Indian subofficer who had been away from the mission on detached duty and escaped to bring news of the massacre to the British forces.

Immediately British troops under General Frederick Roberts—the son of Abraham Roberts who had resigned as commander of Shah Shuja’s contingent after quarreling with Macnaghten—marched on Kabul. Although outnumbered five to one, his force led by Highlanders and Gurkhas defeated an Afghan army and occupied the city on 12 October 1879. Yakub Khan abdicated at once and, like previous unsuccessful Afghan rulers, was sent into exile in India. Several of those who had paraded Cavagnari’s head through the streets were publicly executed in the burned rubble of Cavagnari’s residency. Buildings within the Balla Hissar were demolished, and probably accidentally—rumors said the cause was an artillery officer’s pipe—a main ammunition dump within the Balla Hissar exploded, causing many casualties.

All the while, mullahs were preaching jihad against the British. Posters appeared overnight on city walls signed by “the Leader of the Mujhaddin.” In December sentries posted on top of the partially destroyed Balla Hissar saw three Afghan tribal armies approaching the city. Roberts forced them into retreat, showing a decisiveness that had been sorely lacking in Kabul four decades earlier.
³¹

The next spring in Kabul, British officers debated whom to install as emir. Their choice eventually fell on Abdur-ur-Rahman, a grandson of Dost Mohammed. In London the opposition leader, William Gladstone, became prime minister in April 1880 after defeating Disraeli. His response to a report by a British journalist of atrocities committed by the country’s troops in Kohst, near the site of the future Tora Bora cave complex, was to inveigh against the results of Disraeli’s policies: “
Remember the rights of the savage as we call him … remember the happiness of his humble home … the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own.
”

General Roberts wrote, “
[I] dreaded that a change of government might mean a reversal of the policy which I believed to be the best for the security of our position in India.
” Not long thereafter, the British indeed suffered a major setback, but not as a result of government policy. Nor was it at Kabul, but in the south on the Helmand River not far from Kandahar, on high ground near a village near Maiwand. A British force of some 2,500 men was defeated on 27 July 1880 in open battle by a much larger Afghan army, including many white-clothed
ghazis
. The Afghans broke the much-vaunted red British squares—just as they had done at Bemaru in late 1841—and drove their soldiers back to Kandahar with nearly one thousand killed.
³²According to Afghan folklore, at the height of the battle a young Pushtun woman urged on the troops, waving her veil as a standard. “
Young love, if you are martyred in the battle of Maiwand, I will make a coffin for you from the tresses of my hair. [If you do not fall] by God someone is saving you as a token of shame.
” The Pushtun woman’s story and slogan are reportedly still being used by the Taliban to encourage their fighters.

Kandahar prepared for a siege. As soon as Roberts in Kabul heard the news from Maiwand, he hastily put together a force of ten thousand men. Leaving behind all wheeled artillery and heavy baggage for the sake of speed, he marched the troops over three hundred miles to Kandahar in just under three weeks in the blistering summer heat. The day after he arrived, he attacked the Afghan forces. With Gurkhas and Highlanders again to the fore, Roberts and his men routed their enemy, who fled, abandoning their camp.

In response to Prime Minister Gladstone’s command, before 1880 had ended the British army was withdrawing from Afghanistan. The only tangible benefits of their expenditure of many lives and much treasure were the installation of an emir more friendly on the surface to the British and the securing of the control of the key passes into Afghanistan from the south and east.

BRITAIN CONTINUED TO see Russia as a threat to its Indian empire. In 1885, the year Gladstone lost office, a crisis over the Panjdeh oases on the far northwestern border of Afghanistan almost led to war—so much so that the British stationery office, planning ahead, had already printed documents declaring war before both sides pulled back from the brink. In the aftermath, the British and Russians recognized the need to delineate the boundary between Afghanistan and the Russian-held or influenced territories. After some haggling a border was agreed. In the far northeast where the Russians had been pressing forward in the Wakhan, a thin sliver of land was handed to Afghanistan to prevent the Russian border anywhere abutting that of British India.

The British also persuaded the emir to agree to a boundary commission to fix the frontier between British India and Afghanistan. The task was given to Sir Mortimer Durand, the son of Henry Durand, the hero of Ghazni. The line he drew split in two many of the tribal areas such as Waziristan. Though the principles were agreed between the two sides centrally, the surveyors who went into the border areas to fix the boundaries on the ground met a great deal of hostility and often came under attack. This unrest built up over the next few years into a series of major conflicts with the frontier tribes, who besieged outlying British forts and attacked supply columns in Chitral, Tirah, Waziristan and the Swat Valley.

Winston Churchill
, on leave from his regiment to act as a war correspondent, observed through a German-manufactured telescope one initially unsuccessful British attack on a hilltop position in the Mamund Valley. As the soldiers rose from the shelter of the rocks behind which they had been firing, an officer spun around and fell, his face covered with blood. Two of the men ran to help him. “A soldier who had continued firing sprang into the air and falling began to bleed with strange and terrible rapidity from his mouth and chest. Another turned on his back, kicking and twisting.” Others began to pull the injured away, “dragging them roughly over the sharp rocks in spite of their screams and groans.” Another officer was immediately shot. Several Sikhs ran forward to help him. Suddenly, a mob of “howling” Afghans emerged over the crest of the hill thirty yards away and “charged sword in hand, hurling great stones.” Those carrying them dropped one officer and two wounded sepoys. “The officer’s body sprawled upon the ground. A tall man in dirty white linen pounced on him with a sword. It was a horrible sight.”

Churchill also described the problems of campaigning in the heat: “
September
in these valleys is as hot as it is easy to imagine … Slowly the hours pass away. The heat is intense. The air glitters over the scorched plain, as over the funnel of an engine the wind blows with a fierce warmth, and instead of bringing relief raises only whirling dust devils, which scatter the shelters and half-choke their occupants. The water is tepid and fails to quench the thirst. At last the shadows begin to lengthen as the sun sinks towards the western mountains. Everyone revives.”

The campaigns were conducted with no quarter given on either side to prisoners. Rudyard Kipling described the leveling effect of guerrilla warfare such as this.