diplomacy was insufficient, and they too swept aside the obstacles to their forward march with considerable violence. By 1801 they were on their way to taking over the whole of northern India, and they had reached the border with Afghanistan. They soon began to nibble away at the Afghan border territories; particularly painful for the Afghans was the loss of Peshawar, which the British first handed to their Sikh ally Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) and then took for themselves when they annexed the Sikh territories in 1849.
Hitherto the British had worried about a possible French invasion backed by the Persians. With the final defeat of Napoleon, they concluded that the main threat to their expanding Indian empire now came from the Russians. They argued among themselves about whether this threat was best countered by bribing the Afghan rulers to keep the Russians at bay or by imposing their own representative in Kabul, by force if necessary, and exercising a direct control, as they had done in India.
The war party prevailed on two occasions. Before the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42) the British manufactured the evidence they needed to justify their overthrow of the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohamed, doctoring and publishing the reports they received from their agents in Kabul to represent him as determinedly anti- British.16 They launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) with a brutality almost as cynical, though this time without resorting to forgery. The murders of their representatives in Kabul, Alexander Burnes in 1841 and Louis Cavagnari in 1879, were both the consequence of British bullying and the final British excuse for war.
The British advance was opposed not only by the Afghan army, which they could deal with, but also by a widespread insurgency, which they had not expected and to which they could find no satisfactory answer. They suffered some spectacular reverses: the destruction in 1842 of an entire army and the defeat of part of the Kandahar garrison at Maiwand in June 1880. Both wars nevertheless technically ended in a British military victory followed by a salutary revenge. In the autumn of 1842 a British ‘Army of Retribution’ hanged the city’s notables in the centre of Kabul and burned the seventeenth-century bazaar, ‘one of the great crossroads of Central Asia where one could buy silk and paper from China in the north; spices, pearls and exotic wood from India in the east; glass, pottery, silver and wine from Persia and Turkey in the west, and slaves bought from both directions… flames were said to have still filled the sky two days later when the troops left’.17 Among the other villages and towns they also destroyed with fire and the sword were the beautiful village of Istalif, famous for its pottery, and the provincial capital of Charikar, where a company of Gurkhas had been wiped out the previous year. A British officer who was there wrote to his mother, ‘I returned home to breakfast disgusted with myself, the world, and above all, with my cruel profession. In fact we are nothing but licensed assassins.’18 The devastation of Kabul in 1879 was less extensive, though the British did dismantle part of the city’s Bala Hissar fortress and hanged forty-nine Afghans on a gallows set up in the ruins of Cavagnari’s residence for their alleged part in his murder.19
But these were pyrrhic triumphs, and the British eventually realised that they could not achieve their original ambition of adding Afghanistan to the Indian empire. Nor could they sustain their own candidate in Kabul: they had to accept the reinstatement of Dost Mohamed after the First Anglo-Afghan War and the installation of the untried and possibly pro-Russian Abdur Rahman after the Second. At a high cost in blood and treasure, the British did achieve their most important objective: to keep Afghanistan out of the orbit of Russia and within that of India. By means of bribes, threats, and guarantees of support against their neighbours, they were able to persuade Afghanistan’s rulers to remain—reluctantly perhaps—on their side. They remained responsible for Afghanistan’s foreign policy for eight decades, until the agreement which ended the brief Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919.
This relative success did not relieve the British of their exaggerated fear of the Russian threat. Charles Marvin, a correspondent from the
Herat became their key strategic concern. Controlled sometimes by the Persians, at others by the Afghans, Herat was, in the eyes of British officials, ‘the Gateway to India’, through which Alexander, Genghis Khan and the first Mogul emperor Babur had all passed on their way south. The British feared the Russians might be next. Twice the British and the Russians came close to war over the control of Herat. In 1837 the Russians supported a Persian move on the city. The siege lasted for four months and was conducted, according to a contemporary historian, ‘in a spirit of unsparing hatred and savage inhumanity’.21 It was lifted when British forces were deployed in the Persian Gulf to intimidate the Shah.
In 1885 a crisis over the remote oasis of Pandjeh, which lies on the Amu Darya river between Merv and Herat, also nearly led to a war. The Afghans maintained that Pandjeh—which was called Kushka by the Russians and is now Serhetabat in Turkestan—belonged to them. The Russians nevertheless took Pandjeh, with considerable loss of Afghan life. The British warned that any further advance towards Herat would mean war. On British advice, the Afghan defenders of Herat demolished several of the glorious buildings of the fifteenth century in order to provide a clear field of fire. In the event the Russians never attacked and the crisis fizzled out, thanks primarily to the good sense of Abdur Rahman.
Anglo-Russian rivalry in the high mountains to the east of Afghanistan continued into the 1890s, with armed skirmishes continuing there between the Russians and the Afghans as late as 1894.22 But as tensions in Europe grew with the rise of Germany, both sides decided it made more sense to curb their territorial ambitions in Asia. An Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission agreed that the frontier between Afghanistan and the Russian empire should lie along the Amu Darya. As a buffer between India and Russia the British insisted in 1891 that Abdur Rahman should accept sovereignty over the Wakhan Corridor, a thin sliver of land—in places less than ten miles wide—high up on the borders of China, Afghanistan, and the Russian empire. Both these borders were strategically important during the Soviet war.
But the boundary which carried the most burdensome implications for Afghanistan’s future international and strategic position was the Durand Line, the artificial frontier drawn in 1893 by a senior British official of the Indian government. This drove straight through the middle of the Pushtun tribal areas in the borderland between the Punjab and southern Afghanistan. Successive Afghan governments resented the loss of territories, including Peshawar, which they regarded as rightfully theirs: Afghanistan was the only country to vote against the admission of Pakistan to the United Nations when it became independent in 1947. Prime Minister, later President, Daud backed the cause of ‘Pushtunistan’, which called for the recovery of the Pushtun lands on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line. The Pakistanis retaliated by doing all they could to destabilise and control their smaller neighbour. The hostility between the two countries was to have a most negative effect on Afghanistan’s affairs into the twenty-first century.
The local people took no notice of the Durand Line except when they were compelled: they feuded, smuggled, traded, and fought indifferently on both sides of the border. The British attempted to control the border in the 1920s and the 1930s by a policy of ‘butcher and bolt’, with punitive raids against errant tribesmen, including the destruction of their villages from the air. Soviet attempts to seal the border during the war of 1979–89 were almost a total failure.
In August 1907 Russia and Britain reached an agreement to regulate their affairs in Persia, Afghanistan, and
