William Dalrymple’s history of the First Afghan War is as richly embroidered as a great novel
Rupert Edis
In April 1839 Britain invaded Afghanistan for the first time. When the British Army left in 1842, after first suffering and then avenging its worst military disaster of the 19th century, a contemporary wrote that it was “a war begun for no wise purpose… 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.”
Britain had first cast a fearful eye towards Afghanistan when Napoleon threatened to cross Persia and descend through the Khyber Pass on British India, where vast, tenuously held territories had recently been conquered by the East India Company. Then the rapidly lengthening shadow of Tsarist Russia on the map of Central Asia caused the same terror among policymakers in London and Calcutta.
In 1838, a cabal of hawkish political officers managed to persuade Lord Auckland, the dilettante governor-general of India, to invade Afghanistan to replace the popular ruler, Dost Mohammed, who was allegedly leaning towards the Russians, with the luckless then-exiled Shah Shuja – the king of the book’s title. This flew in the face of advice from Alexander Burnes, the young and celebrated player of the Great Game, who unlike the hawks had travelled extensively in Afghanistan and knew the political landscape at first hand.
As with subsequent Western invasions of Afghanistan, this was accomplished relatively easily. However, the occupying British and Indian troops soon stirred loathing with their public drinking and whoring. Shah Shuja, a dignified but ineffective character, steadily lost support by association with the alien infidels.
Politically sidelined, Burnes threw himself into philandering, which sparked the Kabul uprising and his own brutal murder after he purloined an Afghan noble’s favourite slave girl. Another disastrous error by Lord Auckland was appointing as Kabul’s military commander the aged and gout-struck General Elphinstone, a friend from grouse-shooting parties in Scotland. Instead of snuffing out trouble, Elphinstone dithered as the rebellion gathered pace, led by Dost Mohammed’s brilliant son, Akbar Khan. With the British cantonment under constant attack, Elphinstone agreed with Akbar Khan to evacuate his army back to India in January 1842.
The unwieldy host of 16,000 British soldiers, Indian sepoys, wives, children and camp followers was quickly overwhelmed by the terrible cold and deep snow. Over five nights without cover in temperatures far below zero, thousands froze to death. Contemporary sources describe soldiers with limbs “like charred logs of wood” from frostbite, in no state to fight, slaughtered in their hundreds by Pashtun tribesmen. Only the Army surgeon Dr Brydon made it to the Jalalabad garrison.
To restore British face, a so-called Army of Retribution, this time led properly, retook Kabul in September 1842. Its route back through the Via Dolorosa of the retreat was strewn with macabre reminders of the catastrophe – including a cave with a pile of human bones outside it, where some soldiers had tried to stay alive by devouring each other; and “60 skeletons scattered on the hill” of the last stand at Gandamak, “the officers plainly distinguishable by the long hair which remained attached to their skulls”.
This enraged army committed terrible atrocities, leaving Neville Chamberlain, a young officer who accompanied the army, “disgusted with myself, the world and above all my cruel profession”. The army then left, and Shah Shuja was soon murdered. Dost Mohammed quietly returned to the throne; and in due course he had his son Akbar Khan, whose popularity menaced his own, poisoned.
As well as going deep into dangerous parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to research his book, Dalrymple has uncovered some remarkable new Afghan and Indian sources. We see beyond stereotypes of treacherous Afghan “fanatics” to the complex and remarkable individuals some of them were. The young Akbar Khan was celebrated for his matinee-idol looks and dashing leadership, and emerges as a civilised appreciator of Hellenistic Gandharan sculpture and a magnanimous captor.
Dalrymple points out that Afghans regard their deliverance from the British in 1842 as “their Trafalgar, Waterloo and Battle of Britain rolled into one”, and the events remain keenly alive in the national memory.
Like Dalrymple’s heartbreaking, extraordinary White Mughals, this book is as taut and richly embroidered as a great novel. However, as in White Mughals, Dalrymple can get carried away with attempts to give unwonted contemporary or didactic relevance to his account. Britain’s First Afghan War does not have the “clear and relevant parallels” claimed for it “with the current deepening crisis” of the latest invasion of Afghanistan.
It is strongly arguable that the situation in Afghanistan is improving, not worsening, and writing that Afghanistan may end up as in 1842 “ruled by the same [Taliban] government which the war was originally fought to overthrow” is plain wrong. The West’s justified war aims in 2001 of toppling the Taliban and destroying al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been achieved, notwithstanding the colossal waste of men and material in muddled strategy since; and its armies are undefeated and undefeatable militarily, in spite of Dalrymple’s claim that “the Afghan resistance [has] succeeded again in… propelling the hated Kafirs into a humiliating exit”.
That President Karzai, the current “pro-Western puppet ruler” – who is stepping down after elections next year – is from the same Afghan sub-tribe as Shah Shuja is an interesting historical coincidence, no more.
Overwrought comparisons with the present aside, this book is a masterpiece of nuanced writing and research, and a thrilling account of a watershed Victorian conflict.
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
By: William Dalrymple
Price: £25; Pages: 609pp (Hardback)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing