The Dark Defile (7 page)

Deciding enough was enough, he had traveled through Sind and west to Bushire. Luckily for him, the East India Company’s resident official at this Persian port readily believed his story and dispatched him to the British mission to the shah’s court. Not only was his identity again accepted without question, but the British envoy offered to fund his archaeological studies in Afghanistan in return for intelligence on what was happening there. Masson had returned to Kabul in June 1832, only a few days after Burnes and his party had passed through on their way to Bokhara.

Claude Wade, in his headquarters in Ludhiana, had learned of Masson’s existence and ordered his agent in Kabul, Seyyid Keramat Ali, to watch him. The behavior of the gray-eyed, red-haired, shabbily dressed Masson as he poked about old ruins was, as the agent reported to Wade, decidedly odd. Around this time Dr. Gerard and Mohan Lal, returning to India after parting from Burnes, also encountered Masson. From them Wade discovered how well connected Masson had become in Kabul. Dost Mohammed’s favorite son, Akbar Khan, had become his patron, and many leading Afghans, including Dost Mohammed himself, were his friends.

However much Masson deceived his fellow countrymen, Josiah Harlan, a real American, knew he was a fraud. Harlan had earlier encountered Masson in the Punjab and warned Dr. Gerard that he was an imposter. Gerard duly told Wade, who soon identified Masson as the army deserter James Lewis. Unmasking and punishing him if he returned to British jurisdiction was one option, but instead Wade decided to use Masson to replace Seyyid Keramat Ali, whose activities were beginning to excite suspicion in Kabul. In April 1834 Wade had therefore written to the governor-general arguing that though desertion was a heinous crime, Masson should be pardoned if he agreed to spy for the British. Within weeks Wade received permission to recruit Masson. The latter’s feelings at being essentially blackmailed were equivocal, but he recognized that he had no choice.

Thus
“Charles Masson,”
as he continued to call himself, was with Dost Mohammed as he prepared to confront the army that Ranjit Singh had assembled to defend Peshawar. Even more fearsome than Dost Mohammed’s and certainly better disciplined, it consisted of sixty thousand troops under the maharaja’s own command, twenty thousand men commanded by French mercenary officers and a battery of twenty-four cannon under the American Alexander Gardner. Dost Mohammed doubted his ability to win and, at Masson’s suggestion, asked the British to intervene. His enduring hope that the British would help him against Ranjit Singh despite so much evidence—both overt and covert—to the contrary would be one of the most striking contributors to Dost Mohammed’s behavior. In March 1835 he received his reply: The British would not interfere over Peshawar. Dost Mohammed was left feeling like a
“fly facing an elephant.”

However, the Afghan leader still hoped to find a diplomatic solution, and Ranjit Singh exploited those hopes to trick him. The agent of his deceit was Josiah Harlan, who arrived in Dost Mohammed’s camp in the Khyber Pass ostensibly to initiate diplomatic discussions but with the secret purpose of trying to bribe the Afghan chiefs to desert Dost Mohammed’s army. He later boasted of how he “divided his [Dost Mohammed’s] brothers against him exciting their jealousy … and stirred up the feudal lords of his durbar, with the prospect of pecuniary advantages.” In particular, he induced Dost Mohammed’s half brother Sultan Mohammed Khan, the former ruler of Peshawar, to defect and ride with his followers under cover of darkness for the Sikh camp.

The result was everything Harlan had hoped. The desertion of such a large body of soldiers threw Dost Mohammed’s camp
“into inextricable confusion, which terminated in the clandestine rout of his forces, without beat of drum, or sound of bugle or the trumpet’s blast, in the quiet stillness of midnight. At daybreak no vestige of the Afghan camp was seen where, six hours before, 50,000 men and 10,000 horses with all the busy host of attendants were rife with the tumult of wild commotion,”
he wrote. Even if Harlan exaggerated, which he almost certainly did, Dost Mohammed could only retreat to Kabul, where for the moment he turned his back on the world to contemplate the deceit of his close family members and to study the Koran.

Claude Wade, meanwhile, following events from Ludhiana, was growing increasingly convinced that it was in the British interest for Shah Shuja, not Dost Mohammed, to occupy the throne in Kabul. After years of living under British protection and at British expense, Shah Shuja would be more malleable in British hands. Also, to Wade, Shah Shuja’s weaknesses were an asset. The younger, more able, more vigorous and charismatic Dost Mohammed was far more capable of stamping his authority on Afghanistan’s disparate tribal elements and creating a strong, united country. Once he had done so, he might be tempted to play politics with Britain’s enemies. Far better, felt Wade, that Shah Shuja should preside as a bland figurehead king of a weak Afghanistan whose feudal chiefs, preoccupied with their own affairs and rivalries, would be easier for Britain to manipulate.

Although he shared much of Wade’s assessment of Dost Mohammed’s and Shah Shuja’s characters, Burnes’s views on the best course of action ran directly counter to Wade’s. Burnes thought Dost Mohammed’s competence and intelligence would make him a reliable ally. He firmly believed in a strong Afghanistan under Dost Mohammed and thought Ranjit Singh was growing far too powerful for the region’s stability and for Britain’s prospects of developing the Indus as a trade route for British goods. His ideal was political equilibrium between the Sikhs, the Afghans and the Sindis.

However, changes in the political landscape at home in Britain made Wade’s views the more likely to prevail. In March 1835, just as Ranjit Singh and Dost Mohammed were confronting each other, the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel was replaced by a Whig government under Lord Melbourne. He selected his close friend Lord Palmerston as his foreign secretary, a position Palmerston had occupied and enjoyed previously. A believer that
“the law of self-preservation is a fundamental principle of the law of nations”
and for whose policies the term
gunboat diplomacy
would later be coined, Palmerston had begun his political career with the Tories but to the surprise—discomfort even—of some within the Whig party had switched his allegiance to them. While previously at the Foreign Office, Palmerston had often dismayed his officials by his forceful, impulsive independence. Melbourne also selected two others who would influence—through acts of either commission or omission—the coming Afghan drama. The fifty-one-year-old George Eden, Lord Auckland, was appointed governor-general in place of Lord William Bentinck, whose five-year tour of duty had ended. Auckland, a former First Lord of the Admiralty and a man with no experience of India and its affairs, was a pleasant, cautious and kindly man who meant it when he spoke of his desire of
“doing good to his fellow creatures—of promoting education and knowledge … of extending the blessings of good government and happiness to millions in India.”
Lord Ellenborough’s successor as president of the Board of Control responsible for Britain’s policy in India was Sir John Hobhouse.

In the autumn of 1835, the bachelor Lord Auckland sailed for India with his two spinster sisters Emily and Fanny, who were to act as his hostesses, to be greeted on his arrival five months later by disquieting reports that the Persians, actively encouraged by the Russians, and in particular their ambassador in Tehran, Count Simonich, were preparing to seize the Afghan cities of Kandahar and Herat. John McNeill, secretary to the British envoy in Tehran, argued in a pamphlet on his return to London that an independent Persia was absolutely essential to India’s security. Otherwise, he predicted that (in what would become known as
a domino effect
) all other rulers between Persia and India would come under Russian influence, threatening India’s security. He also asserted that
“the right of interference in the affairs of independent states is founded on this single principle, that as self preservation is the first duty, so it supersedes all other obligations,”
before concluding, “it is the ambition of Russia that forces upon us the necessity of endeavouring to preserve that which is obviously necessary to our own protection. If she will not give us security for the future she can have no right to complain if we should take all practicable measures to impede and obstruct the course she has so perseveringly pursued. If she attempts to justify her own aggressions, on what principle can she complain of measures of defence, however extensive?” His rhetoric, at the same time utterly Machiavellian and Palmerstonian and utterly modern, struck a chord in official circles, especially when reports soon followed from the British mission in Tehran emphasizing the extent of Russian influence in Persia and also reporting that Dost Mohammed was offering to help the Persians take Herat if they would partition its territory with him and help him against the Sikhs.

These reports, seeming to confirm some of their worst fears, thoroughly alarmed the British. In June 1836 the Secret Committee of the East India Company dispatched a letter asking the newly arrived Governor-General Auckland to send an envoy to Afghanistan to assess whether the moment had come
“to interfere decidedly in the affairs of Afghanistan”
to halt Russian encroachment. The words
to interfere
meant only one thing: military intervention. When he received the letter some months later, Auckland was reluctant to take military action, even though he “would not under-rate the value of Afghanistan as an outwork to [Britain’s] Indian possessions.” He believed the most effective way to counter Russian influence was through expanding British trade on the Indus and beyond, and cultivating the friendship of the neighboring rulers. However, his three closest advisers all strongly favored an interventionist policy in Afghanistan and would over the critical months ahead manipulate a cautious and sometimes indecisive Auckland.

The most senior member of this trio was the forty-three-year-old Chief Secretary William Hay Macnaghten, an ambitious, scholarly arch-bureaucrat and old India hand who had served Bentinck. Auckland’s sister Emily wryly nicknamed him “
our
Lord Palmerston,” describing him as
“a dry, sensible man, who wears an enormous pair of blue spectacles and speaks Persian, Arabic and Hindustani rather more fluently than English but for familiar conversation rather prefers Sanskrit.”
Macnaghten had been born in Calcutta and, after receiving his education in England, spent five years in undemanding posts as a junior officer in the East India Company’s army before joining the administration, where he had made his mark in codifying laws before moving into more general policy work. An officer who had worked with Macnaghten described him as
“dry as dry, like an old nut and so reserved as to be rude.”
The other two advisers were Henry Torrens, Auckland’s assistant secretary, and John Colvin, his private secretary.

DOST MOHAMMED WAS hoping that the new governor-general would prove more sympathetic to him than had Bentinck, whom he blamed for the loss of Peshawar. In the spring of 1836 he had written to Auckland congratulating him on his appointment, saying,
“The field of my hopes, (which had before been chilled by the cold blast of the times) has, by the happy tidings of your Lordship’s arrival, become the envy of the garden of Paradise.”
He also asked Auckland’s advice on dealing with the “reckless and misguided Sikhs” and concluded, “[I hope] your Lordship will consider me and our country as your own”—an offer he did not intend to be construed as one day it would be.

Auckland took several months to reply. When he did, his friendly but unhelpful letter assured Dost Mohammed that the British desired a thriving and united Afghanistan and hoped the Sikhs and Afghans could bury their differences; and then stated that the British would like Dost Mohammed’s help to exploit the navigation of the Indus for the commercial benefit of both countries, to which end Auckland would
“depute some gentleman”
to go to Kabul. The letter concluded with a statement that must have struck Dost Mohammed as deliberately obtuse if not downright hypocritical: “My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British Government to interfere with the affairs of other independent states; and indeed it does not immediately occur to me how the interference of my government could be exercised for your benefit [with the Sikhs].”

The envoy whom Auckland decided to send to Kabul to fulfill his promise to Dost Mohammed—which chimed with the desire of the Secret Committee, when it eventually became known to him, that someone should be sent—was Alexander Burnes, whom he had met in London but who had since returned to Kutch. Auckland told Dost Mohammed that Burnes’s orders were to explore “the best means of promoting the interests of commerce, and facilitating the intercourse of traders between India and Afghanistan.” His real mission, however, was to persuade Dost Mohammed both to be reconciled with Ranjit Singh and to keep the Russians and Persians out of his territories.

In November 1836 Burnes left Bombay. This time his companions were Lieutenant Robert Leech of the Bombay Engineers, a stout, good-natured man who would use the journey to produce one of the first detailed maps of the Khyber Pass, and Lieutenant John Wood of the Indian navy. Burnes would later be joined by his former traveling companion Mohan Lal and by Dr. Percival Lord. As before, Burnes found much to interest him on the journey. Sailing up the Indus, he decided that having tasted frog, horse, shark and camel, he might as well sample crocodile, but he found the flesh tasteless and dry. By June 1837 he had reached Dera Ismael on the Indus, where, resisting such diversions as almond-eyed dancing girls adorned with necklaces of cloves, he settled down to pen a letter to Dost Mohammed “enlarging on the advantages of peace.”

Despite dangers including the “smart shock of an earthquake,” Burnes and his companions were, by comparison with his previous journeys, clearly traveling in some comfort. After pitching camp by a “crystal rivulet” flowing through some once celebrated Mogul gardens, they charged their glasses with burgundy and toasted the beauty of their surroundings. All the time, however, Burnes was making detailed observations of the flow of the Indus, the depth of the fords, the strength of any fortifications they passed and evidence of mineral deposits like coal.