History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. 2 (of 3) Third Edition

[August-December: 1839.]

Dawn of the Restoration—Difficulties of our Position—Proposed Withdrawal of the Army—Arrival of Colonel Wade—His Operations—Lord on the Hindoo-Koosh—Evils of our Policy—Defective Agency—Moollah Shikore—Our Political Agents—Operations in the Khybur Pass—The Fall of Khelat.

Restored to the home of his fathers, Shah Soojah was not contented. Even during the excitement of the march to Caubul he had complained of the narrow kingdom to which he was about to return; and now, as he looked out from the windows of his palace over the fair expanse of country beneath him, he sighed to think that the empire of Ahmed Shah had been so grievously curtailed.

Very different, indeed, was the Douranee Empire, over which the sceptre of Shah Soojah was now waved, from that which his father had handed down to Zemaun Shah and his brothers, to be sacrificed by their weakness and disunion. The kingdom, which had once extended from Balkh to Shikarpoor, and from Herat to Cashmere, had now shrunk and collapsed. On every side its integrity had been invaded. Cashmere and Mooltan had fallen to the Sikhs; Peshawur had been wrested from the Afghans by the same unscrupulous neighbour; the independence of Herat had been guaranteed to a branch of the Royal family; the Beloochees had asserted pretensions unknown in the times of Ahmed Shah; the petty Princes on the northern hill-frontier no longer acknowledged their allegiance to Caubul. In whatsoever direction he turned his eyes, he beheld the mutilations to which the old Douranee Empire had been subjected; and yearned to recover some of the provinces which had been severed from the domain of his fathers.

But the kingdom to which he had been restored was more extensive than he could govern. There were many difficult questions to be solved, at this time; the first and the most important of which related to the continuance of his connexion with his Feringhee allies. The British Government had now done all that it had undertaken to do. It had escorted Shah Soojah to his palace gates, and seated him upon the throne of his fathers. In accordance with Lord Auckland’s manifesto, the time had now arrived for the withdrawal of the British army. But it was obvious that the British army could not yet be withdrawn. The Shah had no hold upon the affections of his people. He might sit in the Balla Hissar, but he could not govern the Afghans. Such, at least, was the conviction which by this time had forced itself upon Macnaghten’s mind. If the British Minister had ever contemplated the early abandonment of the restored King, the idea had now passed away. The Shah himself felt no confidence in his own strength. He did not believe that the power of Dost Mahomed was irretrievably broken, but still saw him, in imagination, flitting about the regions of the Hindoo-Koosh, raising the Oosbeg tribes, and pouring down for the recovery of Caubul.

There were objections, many, and weighty, to the continued occupation of Afghanistan by British troops—objections of one kind, which the Shah acknowledged and appreciated; and objections of another, which every statesman and soldier in India must have recognised with painful distinctness. But the experiment of leaving Shah Soojah to himself was too dangerous to be lightly tried. The Shah would fain have rid himself of British interference and control, if he could have maintained himself without British support; and the British Government would fain have withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, if it could have relied upon the power of the Shah to maintain himself. But to leave the restored Suddozye to be dethroned and expelled, after the homeward march of the troops that had restored him, would have been to court an enormous failure, which would have overwhelmed our government with disgrace. Neither was the restoration sufficiently popular in itself, nor was there sufficient stability in the character of the King to warrant so hazardous an experiment. If the policy of the Afghan invasion had not been based upon error, the experiment would not have been a hazardous one. But the very acknowledgment of the Shah’s inability to maintain himself after the departure of the British army, was a crushing commentary on the assertions put forth in the great October manifesto. The truth was not to be disguised. The “adoration” which had greeted the Shah on his return to his long-lost dominions, was found to be a delusion and a sham. The palace of his fathers had received him again; but it was necessary still to hedge in the throne with a quickset of British bayonets.

So thought Lord Auckland. He had given his mind long and painfully to the subject, and had written an elaborate minute, reviewing all the circumstances of our position in Afghanistan after the entry of the Shah into the country. Macnaghten had been settled little more than a month in Caubul when a copy of this minute, dated Simlah, August 20, was put into his hands. There was nothing unintelligible in it. Ably written, clearly worded, it enunciated, in unmistakeable paragraphs, the views of the Governor-General, and left Macnaghten, even had he been disposed to follow an opposite course, which he was not, no alternative but to retain a portion of the troops, and himself to abide at Caubul as controller of the Shah. Lord Auckland saw plainly the advantages of withdrawing the Army of the Indus. India could ill afford the abstraction of so large a body of disciplined troops, and it was probable that their services might be required in less remote regions; but he could not purchase the advantages of their withdrawal at the price of the failure of the Afghan expedition.

It was the opinion of the Governor-General at this time, that although the British army could not with safety be wholly withdrawn, a force consisting of some five or six regiments of all arms would be sufficient to keep Shah Soojah upon his throne. The Bombay troops were to be withdrawn, en masse, by the Bolan Pass; and a portion of the Bengal army by the route of Jellalabad and the Khybur. The posts at which it was expedient to plant the remaining troops were, in the opinion of the Governor-General, the two chief cities of Caubul and Candahar; and the principal posts on the main roads to Hindostan—Ghuznee and Quettah, on the West, and Jellalabad and Ali-Musjid on the East. The orders which Sir John Keane had issued, before the Governor-General’s minute had reached Caubul, anticipated with much exactness the instructions of the Governor-General. A brigade under Colonel Sale was to remain in Afghanistan. Sir John Keane was to take the remainder of the Bengal troops back to India by the Khybur route; and General Willshire was to lead the Bombay column down by the western line of the Kojuck and the Bolan.

Such were the intentions both of the Supreme Government and the local authorities, when Prince Timour arrived at Caubul, accompanied by Captain Wade, and the little force that had made good his entry into Afghanistan by the eastern passes. It was on the 3rd of September that Cotton, Burnes, and other British officers, with a guard of honour, went out to receive the Prince. With befitting pomp, the procession made its way through the narrow streets of Caubul to the Balla Hissar; and there were those who said that the gaiety of the heir-apparent and his cortège fairly shone down the King’s.

Wade had done his duty well. The magnitude of the operations to the westward has somewhat overlaid the more modest pretensions of the march through the eastern passes; and it may be doubted whether the merit of the achievement has ever been fully acknowledged. Viewed as the contribution of the Sikh Government towards the conquest of Afghanistan, it is absolutely contemptible. Runjeet lay dying when the troops were assembling; and his death was announced before they commenced their march. He was the only man in the Sikh empire who was true at heart to his allies, and all genuine co-operation died out with the fires of his funeral pile. To Wade this was embarrassing in the extreme. But the greater the inefficiency of the Sikh demonstration, the greater the praise that is due to the English officer who triumphed over the difficulties thrown in his way by the infidelity of his allies.

Wade found himself at Peshawur with a motley assemblage of Hindoos, Sikhs, and Afghans, on the good faith of a considerable portion of whom it was impossible to rely. The Prince himself was soon found to be an absolute cypher. His most remarkable characteristic was, to speak paradoxically, that he had no character at all. He was a harmless, respectable personage, with an amount of apathy in his constitution which was sometimes advantageous to those in whose hands he placed himself; but which, at others, engendered an amount of impracticability that was very embarrassing and distressing. It was plain that, whatever was to be accomplished, must be accomplished by the energy of the British officers. Left to themselves, the Sikhs, aided by the Afghans who had joined the standard of the Prince, would never have forced the Khybur Pass. This formidable defile was supposed to be, if vigorously defended, impassable; and the long halt at Peshawur had given the Afreedis, if they were not inclined to sell the passage, abundant time to mature their defensive operations, and Akbar Khan, who was coming down from Caubul to oppose the march of Wade and the Sikh auxiliaries, every opportunity of perfecting his plans.

It was not until the 25th of July that Wade and Prince Timour found themselves before Ali-Musjid. The Afreedis, on that and the preceding day, had made some show of resistance; and our troops—the regulars under Captain Farmer, and the irregulars under Lieutenant Mackeson,[1]—had done good service; whilst Colonel Sheikh Bassawan, with the Sikh auxiliaries, had exhibited an amount of zeal which had won the confidence of the British officers. So closely now did Wade invest the place, so determined was the attitude he had assumed, and so successful was the play of his guns,[2] that on the night of the 26th the garrison evacuated the fortress; and on the following morning the allies took possession of Ali-Musjid in the name of the Shah. The Ameer’s son had not come down to its defence.

There was little more work for Wade and his auxiliaries. Akbar Khan, who had pitched his camp at Dakha—a place to the south of Jellalabad—had now broken it up and retired to join his father, who had by this time discovered that the greater danger was to be apprehended from the western line of attack, and had therefore recalled his son to the capital. The Shah-zadah and his party, therefore, advanced without further opposition. Opposite Dakha, on the other side of the Caubul river, was the fort of Lalpoorah, where dwelt Sadut Khan, chief of the Momund tribe. His conduct had evinced strong feelings of hostility to the Suddozye Princes. He was now, therefore, to be reduced, and his chiefship conferred on another. Throughout our entire connexion with Afghanistan, it was seldom our good fortune to select fitting objects whereon to lavish our bounty. It was generally, indeed, our lot to set up the wrong man. But the case of Tora-baz Khan, who was appointed to the chiefship of Lalpoorah, was one of the few fortunate exceptions to this calamitous rule. In this man we found a faithful ally; and when misfortunes overtook us, he was not unmindful of the benefits he had received at our hands.