It had never been possible for the British to dictate their own terms to Afghanistan as they did to Persia after the Russian retreat, for the Afghans are made of sterner stuff. Neither the Uzbegs of Bokhara to the north nor the Punjabis of India to the south have shown much love for the Afghans. As for the Persians, the Afghans could doubtless do what they pleased with them. But with the dispatch of the East Persia Cordon to Meshed and Merv, Said Mir Alim of Bokhara and Habibullah of Afghanistan reached an understanding respecting a “Central Asian Federation” which should be “independent of Russian domination.”
PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI
Until the Ottoman General Election in November, 1919, an Orthodox priest at Kiskin, near Angora; after the General Election, “acting metropolitan” of the Turkish Orthodox Church.
MELETIOS IV
Oecumenical Patriarch from February, 1922, to July, 1923.
The meaning of Bokhara to British India has already been indicated. British command of the Caspian now isolated the Trans-Caspian Railway from Soviet Russia, and with Bokhara detached from Russia and brought within the British Indian orbit, the only remaining Russian railway to the back of India, i. e., the Moscow-Orenburg-Tashkent line, would stop at Samarkand as far as its military usefulness to any future Russia was concerned. The Russian spurs to Termez and Kushklinsky Post on the northern frontier of Afghanistan which had been nightmares in British India, would lose their meaning. Any future Russian move against British India would be countered at Bokhara which lies at a sufficient distance to prevent the unsettling effect of Anglo-Russian trouble from making itself felt in India.
But on Feb. 20, 1919, Habibullah was assassinated. Nasrullah seized the throne but, convicted in open durbar of murdering the Amir, he was unseated in favor of the Amir’s third son, Amanullah. Nasrullah’s strong nationalist following rushed pell-mell into an invasion of British India, but was thrown back by the Indian Army. The East Persia Cordon was hurriedly withdrawn to Quetta and the announcement of the Anglo-Persian Agreement’s signature at Teheran was followed three weeks later by a Bokharan revolution in which the Young Uzbeg party dethroned Said Mir Alim and set up its Parliament. Possibly the Young Uzbegs feared a similar British coup at Bokhara City.