The ghosts of Afghanistan

Return of a King
The Battle for Afghanistan
William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury India, 2012

'Now the small, sweet-smelling Istalif irises were pushing their way
through the frozen ground, the frosted rime on the trunks of the
deodars was running to snowmelt...' Thus begins William Dalyrmple's
story of the First Anglo-Afghan War, making the reader almost forget
that he is describing a country which is now mainly known for
terrorism and misery. The 500 pages of the book at first seem
daunting. But they make for a fast read: this book is impossible to
put down.

It's hard not to find parallels between the state of modern-day
Afghanistan and the lessons learned by a superpower in that country
over 170 years ago. (Dalyrmple: "It is still not too late to learn
some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842.") Afghanistan,
for long a place "in between", has defied the reason and understanding
of power-hungry strategists, and this book vividly shows why that is.


Written in matchless prose, Return of a King is not simply the story
of Shah Shuja, the forlorn "king" of Afghanistan; it is also a
fascinating account of the inner workings of the East India Company,
the people who staffed its diplomatic, military and official corps,
and local Indians, especially those related to the Sikh throne in
Punjab.

The dramatic tale begins with the first diplomatic mission of the
British East India Company to the court of Shah Shuja in 1809, the
Sadozai King of Afghanistan, heir to the vast but unwieldy empire of
Ahmed Shah Durrani. This diplomatic visit was prompted by the declared
intention of Napoleon to invade India and the dreaded southward march
of the Czarist armies in support of Napoleon's naval troops from the
south. India- soon to be declared the "jewel in the Crown" of
Britain-was gravely threatened at the moment that it began to pay huge
dividends to the East India Company. The British alliance with Shah
Shuja, however, proved abortive as he soon lost his lands to his
half-brother Shah Mahmoud and the rival Barakzai clan.


Left to the life of a fugitive, Shah Shuja initially found refuge in
the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the powerful 'Lion of the Punjab'
who had his eyes on the famous Koh-i-Noor, then the largest diamond in
the world. Tired of Ranjit Singh's continuous spying and control of
his retinue, Shah Shuja escaped through the sewers of Lahore to find
refuge in the recently established British Residency at Ludhiana in
1816. It is here that the so-called 'Great Game' between Britain and
Russia, a "process of imperial competition [which] would turn into
something far more serious than any game and lead to deaths, wards,
invasions and colonisation on a massive scale," began in earnest.

The British were fearful that the visit of the Russian envoy, Yan
Vitievick, to Afghanistan was the precursor of a full-scale Russian
invasion which would soon threaten India. Dalrymple clearly rejects
this imagined threat and asserts that the Afghan King, Dost Mohammad,
was more interested in recovering his lost province of Peshawar than
anything else. Dalyrmple points out that it was possible to "resolve
the conflict by bringing the Sikhs, the Afghans and the Company
together in an alliance that would keep the Russian and Persian
machinations at bay," but it was not to be.


It is here that Dalyrmple weaves a compelling story of the role of
certain individuals in devising the Great Game. He shows how the
Afghan specialist Alexander Burns tried to make the weak Governor
General Lord Auckland see the sense in allaying with Dost Mohammad,
but was ignored because Auckland had fallen prey to "a group of bright
but inexperienced and hawkishly Russophobic advisers led by William
Macnaghten." Thus began Auckland's ill-advised adventure to invade
Afghanistan and restore Shah Shuja to the throne.

The invasion began in 1839 with the Army of the Indus, a motley of
58,000 British and Indian sepoy troops and staff, 30,000 camels (300
laden with wine), and a pack of foxhounds. The British occupied
Kandahar and Kabul with relative ease and by the autumn of 1839 had
managed to restore Shah Shuja as a British puppet in Kabul. Here an
Afghan chieftain said to the English: "You have brought an army into
the country. But how do you propose to take it out again?" This
question haunted the British then just as it haunts American troops
today.


With the occupation firmly entrenched, both British and Indian troops
indulged in the most disgusting debauchery. Dalyrmple quotes a local
Afghan source as noting: "The English drank the wine of shameless
immodesty, forgetting that any act has its consequences and rewards."
Burnes, now sidelined, was exemplary in his bad behaviour and even
began to prey on the slave girls of Afghan nobles in public.

The Afghans rose in revolt on November 2, 1841, and the British led by
their ineffectual commander, General Elphinstone (who Dalyrmple holds
"almost singlehandedly responsible" for the crisis), made a hasty and
confused retreat which led to the annihilation of almost all the
16,000 troops and staff. The brilliant soldier and spy Alexander
Burnes also met a gory death: "The trunk of Burnes' headless body was
left in the street to be eaten by the dogs of the city. For nearly a
week, no one even thought to try and save anything of his mangled
remains.'

The unfortunate tale did not end here. The new Governor General, Lord
Ellenborough, was bent on "saving face" and so sent an "Army of
Retribution" under General Pollack to avenge the slain British troops.
This army was ruthless in its revenge. A young Nevile Chamberlain
noted that at Istalif, "no males above 14 years were spared... the
scene of plunder was dreadful... My eyes were shocked at the sight of
a poor woman lying dead and a little infant of three or four months by
her side, both its little thighs pierced and mangled by a musket
ball." However, the end result of all this savagery was that the
British had to, at last, accept Dost Mohammad as the King of
Afghanistan (as Shah Shuja had been poisoned) and beat a humiliating
retreat east of the Khyber Pass.

Dalrymple ends this sorry tale by aptly quoting the Chaplain to the
British troops. Reverend GR Gleig succinctly noted that it was "a war
begun for not wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of
rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and
disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which
directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit,
political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual
evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

Return of a King is William Dalrymple's best book. Masterfully
written, it makes us feel for the doomed Shah Shuja, overwhelms us
with the barrage of questions asked by Ranjit Singh, exasperates us
with the Russophobia of Auckland and Macnaghten, impresses us with the
intellect of a man like Burnes, then shocks us by his depravity, and
ultimately makes us marvel at this expensive and utterly unnecessary
war. Dalrymple brings to life with vivid details his protagonists, so
that by the end the reader feels he has known these people for years.

This reassessment of the First Afghan War, the first in decades, is
singular in its usage of a wide range of primary sources. While
utilising the usual British sources, Dalrymple also locates Russian,
and most importantly, contemporary Afghan sources which give the
narrative a fuller flavour and many dimensions. The discovery of eight
Afghan sources on the war give the Afghan side of the story a voice
for the first time in the English language, and the book is worth
reading just for their sake.

This book is also important because it traces the process of state
formation in Afghanistan. Dalrymple rightly describes the war as a
"Waterloo, Trafalgar and Battle of Britain", for it altered this land
from the dwelling place of some warring tribes and the Persian outpost
of Khurasan to a pre-modern nation state. To date, every Afghan knows
the details of the war and how they repelled the onslaught of the
greatest empire of the time.

Ultimately, as any good work of history, this book has lessons for the
present and perhaps is prescient about the future. Just recently we
heard the re-echo of British Ambassador John MacNeill's words from
1838, "...he who is not with us is against us..." and even today the
site of the British Cantonment in Kabul is where the US Embassy and
NATO barracks stand-so the similarities are not coincidental. While
the reason to go into Afghanistan in 1839 might have been imagined,
the threat in 2001 was real; let us hope, for the sake of all of us,
that the ends will be different too.

The writer is the Chairperson of the Department of History at Forman
Christian College, Lahore\
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