provinces. Fatteh Khan, however, excited the king's jealously
by his powerful position, and provoked the malignity of the
king's son, Kamran, by a gross outrage on the Saddozai family.
He was accordingly seized, blinded and afterwards murdered with
prolonged torture, the brutal Kamran striking the first blow.
The Barakzai brothers united to avenge Fatteh Khan. The
Saddozais were driven from Kabul, Ghazni and Kandahar, and
with difficulty reached Herat (1818). Herat remained thus
till Kamran's death (1842), and after that was held by his
able and wicked minister Yar Mahommed. The rest of the
country was divided among the Barakzais---Dost Mahommed, the
ablest, getting Kabul. Peshawar and the right bank of the
Indus fell to the Sikhs after their victory at Nowshera in
1823. The last Afghan hold of the Punjab had been lost
long before.--Kashmir in 1819; Sind had cast off all
allegiance since 1808; the Turkestan provinces had been
practically independent since the death of Timur Shah.
The First Afghan War, 1838-42.---In 1809, in consequence
of the intrigues Of Napoleon in Persia, the Hon. Mountstuart
Elphinstone had been sent as envoy to Shah Shuja, then in
power, and had been well received by him at Peshawar. This
was the first time the Afghans made any acquaintance with
Englishmen. Lieut. Alex. Burnes (afterwards Sir Alex.
Burnes) visited Kabul on his way to Bokhara in 1832. In 1837
the Persian siege of Herat and the proceedings of Russia created
uneasiness, and Burnes was sent by the governor-general as
resident to the amir's court at Kabul. But the terms which
the Dost sought were not conceded by the government, and
the rash resolution was taken of re-establishing Shah Shuja,
long a refugee in British territory. Ranjit Singh, king
of the Punjab, bound himself to co-operate, but eventually
declined to let the expedition cross his territories.
The war began in March 1838, when the ``Army of the Indus,''
amounting to 21,000 men, assembled in Upper Sind and advanced
through the Bolan Pass under the command of Sir John Keane.
There was hardship, but scarcely any opposition. Kohandil
Khan of Kandahar fled to Persia. That city was occupied in
April 1839, and Shah Shuja was crowned in his grandfather's
mosque. Ghazni was reached 21st July; a gate of the city was
blown open by the engineers (the match was fired by Lieut.,
afterwards Sir Henry, Durand), and the place was taken by
storm. Dost Mahommed, finding his troops deserting, passed
the Hindu Kush, and Shah Shuja entered the capital (August
7). The war was thought at an end, and Sir John Keane (made a
peer) returned to India with a considerable part of the force,
leaving behind 8000 men, besides the Shah's force, with Sir
W. Macnaghten as envoy, and Sir A. Burnes as his colleague.
During the two following years Shah Shuja and his allies remained
in possession of Kabul and Kandahar. The British outposts
extended to Saighan, in the Oxus basin, and to Mullah Khan,
in the plain of Seistan. Dost Mahommed surrendered (November
5, 1840) and was sent to India, where he was honourably
treated. From the beginning, insurrection against the new
government had been rife. The political authorities were
overconfident, and neglected warnings. On the 2nd of November
1841 the revolt broke out violently at Kabul, with the massacre
of Burnes and other officers. The position of the British
camp, its communications with the citadel and the location
of the stores were the worst possible; and the general
(Elphinstone) was shattered in constitution. Disaster after
disaster occurred, not without misconduct. At a conference
(December 23) with the Dost's son, Akbar Khan, who had taken
the lead of the Afghans, Sir W. Macnaghten was murdered by
that chief's own hand. On the 6th of January 1842, after a
convention to evacuate the country had been signed, the British
garrison, still numbering 4500 soldiers (of whom 690 were
Europeans), with some 12,000 followers, marched out of the
camp. The winter was severe, the troops demoralised, the march
a mass of confusion and massacre, and the force was finally
overwhelmed in the Jagdalak pass between Kabul and Jalalabad.
On the 13th the last survivors mustered at Gandamak only twenty
muskets. Of those who left Kabul, only Dr Brydon reached
Jalalabad, wounded and half dead. Ninety-five prisoners
were afterwards recovered. The garrison of Ghazni had
already been forced to surrender (December 10). But General
Nott held Kandahar with a stern hand, and General Sale,
who had reached Jalalabad from Kabul at the beginning of
the outbreak, maintained that important point gallantly.
To avenge these disasters and recover the prisoners
preparations were made in India on a fitting scale; but
it was the 16th of April 1842 before General Pollock could
relieve Jalalabad, after forcing the Khyber Pass. After a
long halt there he advanced (August 20), and gaining rapid
successes, occupied Kabul (September 15), where Nott,
after retaking and dismantling Ghazni, joined him two days
later. The prisoners were happily recovered from Bamian.
The citadel and central bazaar of Kabul were destroyed,
and the army finally evacuated Afghanistan, December 1842.
This ill-planned and hazardous enterprise was fraught with the
elements of inevitable failute. A ruler imposed upon a free
people by foreign arms is always unpopular; he is unable to
stand alone; and his foreign auxiliaries soon find themselves
obliged to choose between remaining to uphold his power, or
retiring with the probability that it will fall after their
departure. The leading chiefs of Afghanistan perceived that the
maintenance of Shah Shuja's rule by British troops would soon
be fatal to their own power and position in the country, and
probably to their national independence. They were insatiable
in their demands for office and emolument, and when they
discovered that the shah, acting by the advice of the British
envoy, was levying from among their tribesmen regiments to be
directly under his control, they took care that the plan should
fail. Without a regular revenue no effective administration
could be organized; but the attempt to raise taxes showed that
it might raise the people, so that for both men and money the
shah's government was still obliged to rely principally upon
British aid. All these circumstances combined to render the
new regime weak and unpopular, since there was no force at
the ruler's command except foreign troops to put down disorder
or to protect those who submitted, while the discontented
nobles fomented disaffection and the inbred hatred of strangers
in race and religion among the general Afghan population.
British and Russian Relalions.--It has been said that
the declared object of this policy had been to maintain
the independence and integrity of Afghanistan, to secure
the friendly alliance of its ruler, and thus to interpose a
great barrier of mountainous country between the expanding
power of Russia in Central Asia and the British dominion in
India. After 1849, when the annexation of the Punjab had
carried the Indian northwestern frontier up to the skirts
of the Afghan highlands, the corresponding advance of
the Russians south-eastward along the Oxus river became
of closer interest to the British, particularly when, in
1856, the Persians again attempted to take possession of
Herat. Dost Mahommed now became the British ally, but on his
death in 1863 the kingdom fell back into civil war, until his
son, Shere Ali, had won his way to undisputed rulership in
1868. In the same year Bokhara became a dependency of Russia.
To the British government an attitude of non-intervention
in Afghan affairs appeared in this situation to be no longer
possible. The meeting between the amir Shere Ali and the
viceroy of India (Lord Mayo) at Umballa in 1869 drew nearer the
relations between the two governments; the amir consolidated
and began to centralize his power; and the establishment of a
strong, friendly and united Afghanistan became again the keynote
of British policy beyond the north-western frontier of India.
When, therefore, the conquest of Khiva in 1873 by the Russians,
and their gradual approach towards the amir's northern border,
had seriously alarmed Shere Ali, he applied for support to
the British; and his disappointment at his failure to obtain
distinct pledges of material assistance, and at Great Britain's
refusal to endorse all his claims in a dispute with Persia
over Seistan, so far estranged him from the British connexion
that he began to entertain amicable overtures from the Russian
authorities at Tashkend. In 1869 the Russian government
had assured Lord Clarendon that they regarded Afghanistan as
completely outside the sphere of their influence; and in 1872 the
boundary line of Afghanistan on the north-west had been settled
between England and Russia so far eastward as Lake Victoria.
Nevertheless the correspondence between Kabul and Tashkend
continued, and as the Russians were now extending their dominion
over all the region beyond Afghanistan on the north-west, the
British government determined, in 1876, once more to undertake
active measures for securing their political ascendancy in that
country. But the amir, whose feelings of resentment had by no
means abated, was now leaning toward Russia, though he mainly
desired to hold the balance between two equally formidable
rivals. The result of overtures made to him from India was
that in 1877, when Lord Lytton, acting under direct instructions
from Her Majesty's ministry, proposed to Shere Ali a treaty of
alliance, Shere Ali showed himself very little disposed to
welcome the offer; and upon his refusal to admit a British
agent into Afghanistan the negotiations finally broke down.
Second Afghan War, 1878-80.--In the course of the following
year (1878) the Russian government, to counteract the
interference of England with their advance upon Constantinople,
sent an envoy to Kabul empowered to make a treaty with the
amir. It was immediately notified to him from India that a
British mission would be deputed to his capital, but he demurred
to receiving it; and when the British envoy was turned back
on the Afchan frontier hostilities were proclaimed by the
viceroy in November 1878, and the second Afghan War began.
Sir Donald Stewart's force, marching up through Baluchistan by
the Bolan Pass, entered Kandahar with little or no resistance;
while another army passed through the Khyber Pass and took up
positions at Jalalabad and other places on the direct road to
Kabul. Another force under Sir Frederick Roberts marched up
to the high passes leading out of Kurram into the interior of
Afghanistan, defeated the amir's troops at the Peiwar Kotal,
and seized the Shutargardan Pass which commands a direct route
to Kabul through the Logar valley. The amir Shere Ali fled
from his capital into the northern province, where he died at
Mazar-i-Sharif in February 1879. In the course of the next
six months there was much desultory skirmishing between the
tribes and the British troops, who defeated various attempts
to dislodge them from the positions that had been taken up; but
the sphere of British military operations was not materially
extended. It was seen that the farther they advanced the
more difficult would become their eventual retirement;
and the problem was to find a successor to Shere Ali who
could and would make terms with the British government.
In the meantime Yakub Khan, one of Shere Ali's sons, had announced
to Major Cavagnari, the political agent at the headquarters
