So much was attempted by Abdur Rahman that he well may be forgiven for leaving to his successor execution of detail. Within a few months of his accession the strength of the army in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and beyond the Hindu Kush consisted of 58,740 men with 182 guns.
| Regulars. | |||
| Cavalry. | Infantry. | Artillery. | Guns. |
| 9750 | 30,890 | 1600 | 182 |
| Irregulars. | ||
| Tribal foot. | Tribal horse. | Total. |
| 9000 | 7500 | 58,740 |
Weak in artillery—there being few trained gunners—the cannon, partly of English, partly of native manufacture and of various ages and patterns, were the time-honoured relics of Dost Mahommed and Shir Ali. The infantry rifles of the regulars also were of different makes, varying from the old two-grooved Brunswick to the Martini-Henry. The tribal forces were largely armed with matchlocks. Assisted by the subsidies which he received from the Government of India, Abdur Rahman swept away the rubbish and collected an immense stock of modern ordnance supplies. Over and above the quantity held against the immediate mobilisation of the standing forces, by importation and manufacture he piled up a vast reserve of rifles, field-pieces and guns of large calibre with their requisite ammunition, doubtless very varied in their character and including every sort of pattern from Krupp field-pieces to Maxim, Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss quick-firers. For this purpose he erected in Kabul itself the necessary works, imparting to the position of Afghanistan by these means and for the first time in its history some element of security, and creating an army which required only to be supervised with the same watchfulness by his successor to attain ultimately as near to perfection as any purely native organisation can arrive. Ordnance factories—with a weekly output of two guns, one hundred and seventy-five rifles and a varying quantity of small arms ammunition—workshops, and an arsenal existing to-day in Kabul prove the inflexible determination of his plans. In furtherance of them, it was his idea to fashion an army which, apportioned between regulars and tribal levies, would number 1,000,000 men. There was to be a permanent regular force of 300,000 men, with an established ammunition reserve of 500 rounds to each field-piece and 5000 rounds to every rifle. Moreover, many months before his death the ordnance supplies, amassed in Kabul, sufficed for a very large proportion of such a force, at the same time exceeding the amount necessary for the requirements of the existing field and garrison forces. Had Abdur Rahman only survived a few years longer, it is indisputable that a force of a million fighting men, more or less trained but at least efficiently armed, would have been secured, although it may be doubted whether, save under the press of dire necessity, he would have ventured to issue weapons to them or to place more than a quarter of this number actually in the field.
At his demise the numbers of the forces available were considerably below the million standard. At that time the peace strength of the regular army was estimated at 150,000 men, distributed between the military centres of Herat, Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jelalabad, Asmai, the region of the Upper Oxus, and in detachments on frontier duty along the Russo-Afghan, Perso-Afghan and Indo-Afghan boundaries. This force was composed as follows:
| Numbers. | Average. | Total. | ||
| 80 Regiments of Infantry | 700 | 56,000 | ||
| 40 Regiments of Cavalry | 400 | 16,000 | ||
| 100 Batteries | { | 6 guns | } | 10,000 |
| 100 men | ||||
| Royal Bodyguard: | ||||
| 4 Regiments of Infantry | 1,000 | 4,000 | ||
| 3 Regiments of Cavalry | 800 | 2,400 | ||
| Supplementary: | ||||
| Police | 30,000 | |||
| Permanent Tribal Auxiliaries: | ||||
| Unmounted | 20,000 | } | 30,000 | |
| Mounted | 10,000 | |||
The many flaws in the system which Abdur Rahman had created were emphasised at his death, in part by the indifference of Habib Ullah to matters military, but in the main by organic difficulties emanating from reactionary influences in the environment of the throne. Broadly speaking, the army and administration of Afghanistan were too centralised to be continuous unless the reins of government had passed into the hands of a man as fearless and able as Abdur Rahman was. Habib Ullah is a man of different mould; and as a consequence on the death of Abdur Rahman the absolutism of his rule suffered material contraction.
It is to be regretted that the late Amir, while evolving out of a heterogeneous collection of warring tribes a settled and independent country, failed to bequeath to his son any portion of his own singular abilities. As a consequence, the order of government in Kabul is neither so unquestioned nor substantial as it was, for the men whose services assisted Abdur Rahman to effect his life’s work have dropped out—from death or through inability to serve Habib Ullah. Faults, inherent in the character of the Afghans and particularly prominent in the present Amir, have thus measured the success which befel Abdur Rahman by the span of that ruler’s life, until it is really but little more than the shell of the former edifice which now remains.
