If you hailed from one of the five or six nations that were playing the colony game in earnest, the Age of Imperialism was perfectly justifiable. Notwithstanding Dickensian horrors under Queen Victoria and feudal exploitation presided over by the tsars, a zeitgeist had grown around the idea that it was the natural right of some nations to rule over the peoples of others. At the places where the borders of their empires were blurry, or the tribes especially quarrelsome – as was the case in Afghanistan – the tactics were a grand adventure, the strategies a great game.
If you happened to be from one of the contested territories – Afghanistan, say – you probably didn't see things quite so romantically, but you likely did have a sense of the epic. And since moonbats gravitate toward all things epic, I'd like to invite you to join me on a stiff-upper-lipped excursion into the riotous world of 19th century Afghanistan, where the locals are once again resisting the domination of meddlesome foreigners. Meet me, if you will, at the eastern mouth of the Khyber Pass...
Historiorant: This diary was first posted on March 18, 2007, as part of a much longer series on Afghanistan's history. Then as now, opinions on what to do vis-à-vis American forces in that boneyard of empires were varied and numerous, so historiokossians should be aware that some of tonight's adventures may wind up rehashing episodes that other writers have already exposed. Here's the DKos search page for keywords "Afghanistan, history" – and be sure'n check out gjohnsit's 2-part History Repeating series: The 1st and 2nd Anglo-Afghan Wars.
Sensing a burden to be taken up long before Kipling identified it, nationalist types in England and Russia marched from their respective smokestacks and serfdom to explore and exploit a world that was still quite large – a world still full of exotic locales and fiercely non-submissive natives. Armed with self-referential philosophies regarding racial superiority and an overwhelming sense of civilizational smugness (and ever ready to take matters over to the corner of the schoolyard), their manipulations had, by 1838, placed Afghan leader Dost Muhammad in the unenviable position of leading a country surrounded by enemies and threatened by no fewer than three foreign armies.
A Little Stage-Setting
At the end of the previous episode, the story was cliffhanging – the Iranians, with Russian support, were marching on Herat in the west; the Brits were threatening Kandahar to the south; and the Sikhs had promised to help the British install a puppet in Kabul by invading in the north. Here's a map:
Heavy-handed armies have been invading Afghanistan since the dawn of history, but ever has their grip proven ephemeral: Even the Mongols of medieval times couldn't hold the country forever; nor could the home-grown expansionist rulers of the 15th, 16th, and17th centuries. By the outbreak of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1839, dozens of successive layers of would-be conquerors had been outlasted, their remnants now assimilated into dozens of linguistically-linked but factiously territorial tribes. The State Department's Countrystudy summarizes rather nicely:
By the time of Ahmad Shah's ascendancy (1747), the Pashtuns included many groups whose origins were obscure; most were believed to have descended from ancient Aryan tribes, but some, such as the Ghilzai, may have once been Turks (see Ethnic Groups, ch. 2). They had in common, however, their Pashtu language. To the east, the Waziris and their close relatives, the Mahsuds, had lived in the hills of the central Suleiman Range since the fourteenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century and the final Turkish-Mongol invasions, tribes such as the Shinwaris, Yusufzais, and Mohmands had moved from the upper Kabul River Valley into the valleys and plains west, north, and northeast of Peshawar. The Afridis had long been established in the hills and mountain ranges south of the Khyber Pass. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Durranis had blanketed the area west and north of Qandahar.
For the more visually-inclined, here's another map:
In 1838, however, threats to Afghan sovereignty were not coming from within, but from the competing interests of London and St. Petersburg. The Russians had swallowed up the Caucasus, Kirghiz and Turkmen lands, were exerting undue influence over the Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara, and were even now supporting the Iranian army marching toward Herat. The Brits had taken the Punjab, Sindh, and Kashmir, and had an on-paper alliance with the Sikhs, who were expanding at Afghan expense in the north.
When Your Allies Leave You Hanging
Vexing British designs in northern India was the fact that the Sikhs were thriving under the rule of one of their all-time greatest leaders. Sikh-friendly websites that provide biographies of Ranjit Singh – like the ones
here and
here - tend to be of the "extremely glowing" variety, and not undeservedly. The "Lion of the Punjab," took the title Maharaja in 1801, wore it until his death 38 years later, and looked out for the interests of his subjects the whole time. He expanded Sikh holdings without insisting on the religious conversion of new subjects, severely curtailed (or abolished, depending on who you read) the death penalty, and hired European mercenaries to train his army into a force strong enough to ensure that Punjab would be the last province on the subcontinent to fall to the British. The story goes that when
Lord Governor Auckland asked one of Ranjit Singh's emissaries which of the leader's eyes was missing, the man replied:
"The Maharaja is like the Sun. The Sun has only one eye. The splendour and the luminosity of his single eye is so much that I have never dared to look at the other eye!"
Needless to say, such a leader was not about to roll over and play toady for the British. Recognizing that the Sikhs would gain nothing but a Victorian puppet on their western flank for helping Auckland depose Dost Muhammad, Ranjit Singh elected to not show up to the war the Brits were throwing. In October, 1838, the Lord Governor set in motion the sequence of events that came to be known as "Auckland's Folly" (a/k/a the First Anglo-Afghan War) with the Simla Manifesto, which stated Her Majesty's right to a secure western flank and served as a pretext for military support of whoever the Brits chose as an ally in Kabul. This they did in the form of Shuja Shah, the Sadozai and former king that Dost Mohammad had usurped (as well as a confirmed British tool), but to Ranjit Singh's thinking, it didn't really matter – neither Afghan leader was going to be looking out for Sikh interests. So it was that the 21,000-man "Army of the Indus" sent to re-install him in March, 1839, was forced to invade from the south – the mostly-Indian army wasn't allowed to cross Sikh territory – and though it suffered some losses to sickness, ignorance of the terrain, and snipers, it did shock and awe the leadership in Kabul:
(for a little historio-fun, play around with the proper nouns in the paragraph below – as Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. – u.m.)
Dost Mohammad at first offered terms; as these were rejected and his supporters melted away he abandoned Kabul and sought asylum at Bokhara. The Saddozai dynasty was restored to Kabul without a struggle. Even so it seemed advisable to the British that their forces should remain until the situation had completely stabilised: they settled in to all appearances as an occupying force. Families were sent for, political officers appointed to the regions outside Kabul. Far from appearing ready to depart now that their mission had been accomplished, it seemed rather that the country had been annexed under guise of Shah Shuja's restoration. This Afghan view received support from MacNaghten's (the Queen's envoy to Shuja's court) attempts to persuade Shuja to rule according to British concepts.
British Library
Though they'd taken Ghazni in spectacular fashion (see pic below), and had gone on to intimidate Dost Muhammad into stepping down, the fact is that the surge was ill-planned and logistically nightmarish. Each British soldier was permitted to bring along up to four servants (officers got twelve), and by the time all the other camp-followers and support personnel were added in, non-combatants outnumbered the 20,000+ combat troops nearly two-to-one. Never an army that packed light, it took the British 30,000 camels to haul all their crap into Kabul.
The occupiers fell into fighting amongst themselves, a trend which continued even after Dost Muhammad surrendered in November, 1840. To the chagrin of Shuja Shah (who wanted his ex-usuper's head on a pole), Dost Muhammad was taken as a prisoner back to India, and while they shaky British-Afghan alliance was preoccupied with its navel-gazing and infighting, a strongman named Yar Muhammad murdered the leader of Herat and defiantly announced the defection of his region to the Shah of Persia. Auckland, watching from a distance and seeing things disintegrating rapidly, dispatched the elderly, infirm General William Elphinstone to deal with the insurgency. The old man quickly bungled the redeployment by scattering his forces and encamping them on tenuous ground.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
– R. Kipling
The uprising began in earnest in November, 1841, when the sirdars (tribal leaders) unified behind the leadership of Dost Muhammad's son, Akbar Khan, and revolted in the face of a reduction in the amount of protection money the government in India was paying for their good behavior. On November 2, they murdered envoy/diplomat/spy Alexander Burnes in what would today be called a "home invasion," and in late December, did the same to baronet and governor of Bombay Sir William Hay Macnaghten, as he arrived at Akbar Khan's court to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. British command of the situation now fell to General Elphinstone, which meant that the redcoats were essentially leaderless.
Weird Historical Sidenote: Elphinstone was described by a contemporary, William Nott, as being "the most incompetent soldier who ever became general." The guy was so old that he'd been a regimental commander at Waterloo, for action at which he'd received the C.B. citation that made his career.
The perception that the British were wimps was given fresh impetus when the dragging of Macnaghten's body through the streets of Kabul resulted in not even a flaccid attempt at reprisal; the perception was hammered home once and for all on January 1st, when Elphinstone decided discretion was the better part of valor and cut a deal with Akbar Khan to protect a British withdrawal to Jalalabad, 90 miles away. Surrendering much of his cannon and many of his troops' newest muskets, he left the injured, ill, and some good-faith hostages in Akbar Khan's hands, then led a slow, sloppy retreat out of Kabul on January 6.
As soon as the last of the 16,000 or so troops was out of the city, Akbar Khan slaughtered many of the hostages, then set out in pursuit of the army. Over the next few days, his guerilla forces sniped at the retreating foreigners with weapons that had been British until only a few days before, supplementing these with locally-crafted, tripod-mounted flintlocks called jezails. Kipling spoke bitterly of the lethality of these crude-operating, beautifully-constructed Central Asian Saturday Night Specials:
A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
3000 people from the British column had frozen to death, been killed by Afghan fire, or had committed suicide by the time they'd gotten ten miles behind them. Ostensibly to save the lives of their men, Elphinstone and his equally-chickenhawky second, Brigadier Shelton, surrendered themselves to Akbar Khan, as did the wives of several important officers. Surrendering sepoy troops and their wives were slaughtered (they promised no ransom) and the remainder of the panicked, routed force dwindled rapidly as it fought a running, over-the-shoulder battle through two feet of snow. It's still a matter of debate as to whether or not Akbar Khan ordered the massacre, simply stood by while it happened, or completely lost control of his troops – no matter the reason, very few of the invaders would survive the coming foodless days or the shelterless, freezing nights.
On January 12, what remained of the column found its forward advance blocked by hostile tribesmen in the Jugdulluk Pass, and the new commander, Brigadier Anquetil, paid a heavy price to dislodge them. On the 13th, the remnants of the army gathered for its final stand on a small hill near the town of Gandamak; present at that morning's roll call were 20 officers armed with pistols and a few as-yet-unbroken swords, and about 45 enlisted men with a dozen or so operable muskets between them. Determined to play the role of Spartans, an Afghan demand of surrender was met with a sergeant's bellow, "Not bloody likely!," and at the end of the day, only 2 men of the original 16,000 were alive – one captured by the hostiles, the other taken in by a shepherd after the battle (there were a few other survivors, taken as prisoners and hostages earlier in the short campaign). The one that got away, surgeon William Bryan, was later given a scrawny horse, which he rode the final 35 miles to Jalalabad – where, no doubt, everyone remarked on how lucky he was that the sword stroke that had sheared off part of his skull hadn't killed him.
The Army of Retribution
Without the Life Guard to prop him up (Elphinstone died a hostage in January, 1842), Shuja Shah's days were numbered; his second reign came to an end with his assassination in April of the same year. Akbar Khan now assumed control. Lord Governor Auckland, when he heard of the fate of the army, literally had a stroke, then set about organizing a reprisal. In the fall of 1842, he dispatched a massive "Army of Retribution" to Kabul under the command of Sir George Pollock, William Nott, and Robert Sale – who wound up personally rescuing his imprisoned wife when this latest troop surge roared into the city. The vengeful Englishmen burned the Grand Bazaar to ground before releasing the Afghan capitol back into the hands of Dost Muhammad, now freed from prison so as to depose his own son. This he did at the end of 1842, likely poisoning the lad as an obvious and alarming threat to his own safety.
Taking a sort of Prime Directive pledge to nevermore meddle in Afghan affairs, the British left Dost Muhammad in charge and hightailed it back to India – there to lick their wounds and deal with the inevitable long-term fallout of imperialistic disaster. Ephilstone's retreat had, after all, clearly shown the world that British armies were not invincible, that at least some of their officers were cowards, and – most importantly, from the perspective of the Sepoys that would famously mutiny at the end of the next decade – that not all resistance was futile.
The Russians took their cue from the British setback, and began extending their influence steadily southeastward. By 1847, the tsar had enveloped the Aral Sea; just over 20 years later, Russia had annexed Tashkent and Samarkand, and in 1868 concluded a treaty with the ruler of Bukhara that put that land firmly under the bear's paw. It also meant that the tsar controlled the entire north bank of the Amu Darya, the river known as "Oxus" back when Alexander crossed it.
That First Time Was Only Practice
The British were busily ignoring the source of their ignominy while the Ruskies made their Central Asian inroads; for the next 12 years, Dost Muhammad was more or less unmolested as he sought to put Afghanistan back in order (he did pop up in 1848-49, making an unsuccessful stab at Peshawar while the British and the Army of the Punjab were engaged in the Second Anglo Sikh War). By 1854, the British were ready to speak with him again, and the following year completed the Treaty of Peshawar, in which they promised to be friends to each others' friends and enemies to each others' enemies. When Dost Muhammad was faced with yet another Iranian invasion – they captured Herat in 1856 – the treaty was amended to allow a British military mission in Kandahar, but not Kabul. It took until 1863 for Dost Muhammad to recapture Herat, but he didn't get long to savor the victory, dying only months later. He'd named his third son, Sher Ali, as his successor, which didn't sit well with some of Dost's other sons, particularly Mohammad Afzal, who took Kabul and refused to give it up. It wasn't until 1868 – the year a transcontinental railroad was completed on the other side of the planet – that Sher Ali muscled his way in. Beaten-but-not-defeated, Mohammad Afzal's son, Abdur Rahman, retreated to Russian territory north of the Amu Darya, and there bided his time for what turned out to be 11 long years of exile.
The nature of the English presence on the subcontinent had changed in the intervening time, and Sher Ali quickly found that his erstwhile allies would only go so far in backing him. They had learned, it seemed, from the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857; political and strategic decisions were now made with long-term colonial security (not short-term imperialist gains) in mind. India was in the hands of the British government now – no longer was the British East India Company playing the role of the Halliburton – and those British governments tended to regard Afghanistan more as a buffer state than as a potential conqueree. Sher Ali, when appealing for aid in the face of Russian machinations on the northern frontier, found no help outside of a British willingness to send money with which he could buy the arms they conveniently wanted to sell him.
Russia raised the stakes in 1878, when the tsar dispatched an uninvited diplomatic envoy to Kabul. Though he blustered about keeping them out, the Russians pushed past Sher Ali's pickets, entering the capitol on July 22. Pissed off that the British had not come to his aid, Sher Ali tried to tell them "no," too, when they demanded in August that he receive an envoy. Like the Russians before them, the Brits ignored his protestations and sent the well-armed "diplomats" anyway. When the delegation was turned back at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, Lord Lytton, the Queen's Viceroy, had the pretext he needed, and ordered his generals to invade Afghanistan with 40,000 men at three separate points.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War
There's a lesson repeated over and over again in Afghanistan – one which would-be conquerors never seem to grok from their forerunner's failed attempts at conquest. The country is relatively easy to overrun, but it's impossible to hold. You'll wind up backed into the cities, ceding the countryside to the insurgents, and eventually you'll lose the battle of tenacities. There may be very few places on Earth that could be rightfully deemed "unconquerable," but Afghanistan is certainly one of them.
The British were able to capture the important cities – Jalalabad fell in December, 1878, and Khandahar the following month. Sher Ali was hung out to dry by the Russians – even a personal appeal to the tsar was of no avail – and died upon his return to Mazar-e-Sharif in February, 1879. By then, the British were in firm control of much of his country. To save the rest of it, Sher Ali's son and successor, Yaqub, signed the Treaty of Gandamak, which made territorial and foreign policy-controlling concessions to the British in exchange for cash payments and a vague promise that maybe the Queen might possibly think about potentially assisting Afghanistan, in the event that she was attacked by some as-yet-unnamed foreign enemy.
Historiorant: Great pics, narratives, and all sorts of stuff on the Second Anglo-Afghan War available at angloafghanwar.co.uk. Their disclaimer says it all: "This project does not support the political ideals that ignited the Second Anglo-Afghan War, but has due respect for the individuals who had to endure its trials and tribulations whether they were British, Afghan or Indian, soldier or civilian."
The British officers in the cities settled in for a rather nice little occupation, complete with nightlife and all the comforts of England. Kabul, especially, was a pretty nice place in those days, filled with gardens and parks. Out in the countryside, however, things were getting ugly. In March, 1879, 46 riders of the 10th Hussar Regiment drowned in an attempt at a nighttime Ford o' Kabul River, a dangerous movement which was precipitated by pressure being put on them by rebellious tribes, and in early September, the British resident in Kabul, Sir Louis Cavagnari, was murdered only a couple of months after his arrival.
Laaaadies and Gentlemen! The Iiiiirrron Amirrrrrr!
Incensed at Yaqub's concessions, the sirdars united in revolt in late 1879, to which the British responded with a doubling-down on the occupation of the cities. Fighting continued for more than a year; in the end, about 2500 British and colonial troops were killed, with about 1500 Afghan KIA. Many of the narratives from veterans carry the same chilling tone as this one:
We advanced towards the top of the valley by the road and the enemy came down in swarms from the hills into the valley. The artillery opened fire on them at seventeen hundred yards, but in a very short time they were in the valley like a swarm of bees. All this time the artillery was firing, we were formed up in line waiting for the order to "Charge". It was a curious experience as we sat in our saddles waiting with those black beggars shooting at us and we could do nothing. My feelings were not much to boast of on that occasion I can tell you. I felt as though I had not an ounce of strength in my whole body. I was dead to the world as it were, I saw men and horses dropping on either side of me and the bullets whizzing past my head. The question you know was who was to be next.
The garrison at Kandahar found itself besieged in 1880, after the disastrous Battle of Maiwand, the aftermath of which is described in this letter, which was published in The Times on September 14, 1880:
Half a mile from Candahar we had to begin our fighting, and without supports or communications fought our way to Kokaran, some nine miles. Awful were the sights we met on the way – wounded men who had ridden a mass of blood all through that fearful night foully butchered on the road a few miles from home by the cowardly villagers who a few hours before were our sincere friends and providers; others, more lucky, straggling in by twos and threes, on camels, on ponies, on foot, dazed, footsore, dying of thirst, with a look of bewildered agony in their swollen faces and bloodshot eyes that I shall never, never forget; it was too horrible.
The war – not so much the morality of it, but the cost/benefit ratio – became an issue in parliamentary elections in March, 1880, which saw William Gladstone and his Liberals emerge victorious. Gladstone began looking for ways to extricate Britain before the occupation turned into another Aukland's Folly, while in Afghanistan itself, the puppet Yaqub wisely abdicated. This led the Russian Governor-General of Tashkent to ask Abdur Rahman if he thought the time might be ripe for invasion. Abdur Rahman concurred, and led his forces across the Amu Darya. The British, recognizing his potential for unifying the territory to an acceptable degree, entered into negotiations with him almost immediately, and at a durbar (Mughal Indian court) on July 22, Abdur Rahman was recognized as Amir of Afghanistan, beginning what was to be a 21-year reign of despotic order, religious fervor, and deft negotiations with the heavyweights on his borders.
In exchange for control of the buffer state and a promise of military assistance in the case of unprovoked aggression (so long as Afghanistan's foreign policy was aligned with England's), Abdur Rahman was given cash, weapons, and a more or less free hand with regards to domestic affairs. Since these mostly consisted of putting down rebellions, the British were more than happy to stand back and let "The Iron Amir" take care of things.
Abdur Rahman proved very capable at maintaining the status quo on his frontiers, even as he spent most of the 1880s personally crushing rebellions led by headstrong tribal chieftains. Later, he would turn his attention to consolidating the modern state of Afghanistan, while ridding it of its Shi'a elements – especially the Hazara tribesmen of the central Afghan mountain range, known as the Hazarajat – once and for all. These people he oppressed with enforced conversion to Sunni worship, discriminatory taxation, and, according to Wikipedia,
Abdur Rahman's brutal suppression compelled a large number of Hazaras to seek refuge in Iran, India, and Russia. Abdur Rahman could only succeed in subjugating Hazaras and conquering their land when he effectively utilized internal differences within the Hazara community, co-opting sold-out Hazara chiefs into his bureaucratic sales of the enslaved Hazara men, women and children in 1897, the Hazaras remained de facto slaves until King Amanullah declared Afghanistan's independence in 1919.
a more extensive discussion of Hazara suppression can be found here - u.m.)
Home-Grown Nation-Building
The Iron Amir broke Pashtun power by forcibly resettling them, and drove other tribes into lands vacated by refugees fleeing his religious persecutions. He later wrote that three goals motivated him: "subjugating the tribes, extending government control through a strong, visible army, and reinforcing the power of the ruler and the royal family." (source). To these ends, he established a strong central government, oversaw an efficient bureaucracy, and dispatched able provincial governors (who existed outside the sphere of tribal politics) to further erode the power of the local warlords. To hear Wikipedia tell it:
He had defeated all enterprises by rivals against his throne; he had broken down the power of local chiefs, and tamed the refractory tribes; so that his orders were irresistible throughout the whole dominion. His government was a military despotism resting upon a well-appointed army; it was administered through officials absolutely subservient to an inflexible will and controlled by a widespread system of espionage; while the exercise of his personal authority was too often stained by acts of unnecessary cruelty. He held open courts for the receipt of petitioners and the dispensation of justice; and in the disposal of business he was indefatigable. He succeeded in imposing an organized government upon the fiercest and most unruly population in Asia...
He also did much to improve internal infrastructure – importing European doctors, engineers, and machinery and stuff like that – but always chafed that his country's foreign policy was not his own. To wit, the Russian seizure of the Merv Oasis in 1885 wound up imposing a settlement upon Abdur Rahman that fixed Afghanistan's borders all the way up to the Amu Darya in one area, but at a cost of significant amounts of territory in another. Probably even more aggravating was having responsibility for defending the Wakhan Corridor (that little skinny part of northeastern Afghanistan that sticks out to border with China – the "stem" if you think the country looks like a "leaf") thrust upon him by the British. This made the unruly Kirgiz tribesmen who lived there Abdur Rahman's problem, but it turned out the Chinese could be every bit as surly – they didn't recognize the border until 1964.
Still, the most annoyingly boneheaded foreign idea Abdur Rahman was forced to accept had to be the 1893 Durand Line. This classic piece of imperialist cartography was the brainchild of Sir Mortimer Durand, Foreign Secretary of British India, and was ostensibly drawn up to settle once and for all matters concerning who controlled which sections of Pashtun lands. Countrystudy describes best what it really did:
The Durand Line cut through both tribes and villages and bore little relation to the realities of topography, demography, or even military strategy. The line laid the foundation, not for peace between the border regions, but for heated disagreement between the governments of Afghanistan and British India, and later, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When he died in 1901, there was no succession crisis – Abdur Rahman had, once again, been proactive. Long before, he'd selected and groomed one of his sons, Habibullah, as his crown prince, and had clipped the wings of any potential sibling rivals, often keeping them sequestered and firmly underfoot in Kabul.
Tomb of Abdur Rahman, Kabul
The Modern Age Dawns on His Majesty's Hinterlands
Habibullah was an able ruler in the sense of modernization-'round-the-turn-of-the-century, but he definitely didn't share his paw's prediction toward cracking the whip, and this cost the crown a little in the clout department. The influence of conservative clerics increased in the bordering-on-free-speech atmosphere Habibullah promoted (resulting in one of his advisors, Abdul Lateef, being stoned to death for apostasy), but so, too, did that of his reformer cousin, Mahmoud Beg Tarzi, a poet, traveler, and publisher who set up an anti-clerical nationalist newspaper in 1919 and went on to inspire the next few generations of Afghan activists. Habibullah's reign also saw the founding of a military academy and the dismantling of Abdur Rahman's dreaded secret police.
It also saw a further firming up of modern Afghanistan's borders. The border with Iran was established by treaty with the Shah in 1904, replacing an unintelligible line scribbled up by a British commission back in 1872. When the "Great Game" came to a conclusion in 1907 with the signing of the WWI-ensuring Anglo-Russian Convention (Entente), the two news best-buddies proclaimed spheres of influence and issued what amounted to mutual declarations of respect for Afghan neutrality.
That neutrality came in handy in later on, when the Ottoman Turks were desperately screaming jihad in an effort to bring allies to their doomed banner during the First World War. Habibullah remained officially neutral, though he did receive a Turco-German delegation in 1915. After waffling for a good long while, he finally accepted a payoff of cash and arms with which to attack the British, but then he turned around and offered to defend India from Central Powers attack (and maybe even some of the unruly tribesmen on the Indian border) if they'd release their grip on Afghan foreign policy. Things never got beyond the talking stage, and his countrymen remained somewhat-grudgingly neutral for the remainder of the war.
Habibullah met his demise while on a hunting trip on February 20, 1919. His assassin was possibly a family member who thought the king too cozy with the British, but regardless of the reasons behind it, the untimely royal death left the nation without a designated leader. Fortunately, Habibullah had chosen wisely in leaving his third son, Amanullah, in charge of Kabul (where was located the treasury and the army leadership), and he quickly consolidated power and gained the allegiance of most of the tribal leaders. By May, he was ready to strike.
The Anglo-Afghan War III: Independence or Else!
Amanullah struck India in two major thrusts, and enjoyed great initial success when Pashtuns on both sides of the border flocked to his aid. War-weary as the were, the British weren't surprised for long, and retaliated with the first of many aerial bombardments the country would be doomed to endure in the 20th century. In response to the attack on Kabul, Amanullah wrote,
"It is a matter of great regret that the throwing of bombs by zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act and the bombardment of places of worship and sacred spots was considered a most abominable operation. While we now see with our own eyes that such operations were a habit which is prevalent among all civilized people of the west."
Wikipedia
With no means of countering the devastating new British capabilities, the aerial attacks pushed Amanullah to the bargaining table; the British, still reeling from the unthinkable devastation of the Great War, were only too happy to join him. At Rawalpindi, they essentially dictated the terms of an agreement that recognized Afghan self-determination in foreign affairs, promised never to extend British-Indian rule beyond the Khyber Pass, and ended subsidy payments to the Afghan crown. The signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi is now celebrated on August 19th, as Afghanistan's Independence Day.
Historiorant:
I don't know what President Obama will say on Tuesday night, but I do hope it's informed by an honest assessment of the history of Afghanistan, and not merely on some Rumsfeldian hangover-vision of American Exceptionalism. There should be no disgrace in withdrawing from Afghanistan as quickly as possible – nations with far more stomach than ours for the brutality of empire have dashed themselves against the rocks of that country, and have failed to make their rule last. History shows that the Afghanis will be unable to resist an invasion, and will initially cede cities and territories in a confused-looking withdrawal, but that resistance in the countryside will grow with each passing year of occupation. In the end, the invader will find himself isolated in fortified positions, surrounded and unable to control territory at which he does not literally have a rifle pointed.
This is a generational thing, and our generation missed its chance to achieve the objective of "finding and punishing those responsible" for the 9/11 attacks at the outset of this war. Perhaps Osama bin Landen can still be captured or killed – maybe by an outright swarming, searching, and perhaps destruction of Waziristan by a US-led coalition of troops, or maybe even by luck with a Predator drone – but the damage of his survival is already done. Like the Sepoys of 1857 looking back on the disastrous retreat from Kabul, the myth of invincibility has been broken, it's now clear that formerly-well-regarded leadership can lack even basic competence, and resistance by indigenous peoples has been shown to be not always futile.
The previous administration's bungling of the early phases of the First Afghan-American War is now an issue for historians to debate (I know where I stand), but President Obama should not crucify himself, or the soldiers under his command, upon a cross made of Mr. Bush's ineptitude.
The un-updated sequel to the original version of this diary can be found here, for those so inclined: History for Kossacks: Kings of 20th Century Afghanistan