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CHAPTER I.
[August-December: 1839.]
Dawn of the Restoration—Difficulties of our Position—Proposed Withdrawal of the Army—Arrival of Colonel Wade—His Operations—Lord on the Hindoo-Koosh—Evils of our Policy—Defective Agency—Moollah Shikore—Our Political Agents—Operations in the Khybur Pass—The Fall of Khelat.
Restored to the home of his fathers, Shah Soojah was not contented. Even during the excitement of the march to Caubul he had complained of the narrow kingdom to which he was about to return; and now, as he looked out from the windows of his palace over the fair expanse of country beneath him, he sighed to think that the empire of Ahmed Shah had been so grievously curtailed.
Very different, indeed, was the Douranee Empire, over which the sceptre of Shah Soojah was now waved, from that which his father had handed down to Zemaun Shah and his brothers, to be sacrificed by their weakness and disunion. The kingdom, which had once extended from Balkh to Shikarpoor, and from Herat to Cashmere, had now shrunk and collapsed. On every side its integrity had been invaded. Cashmere and Mooltan had fallen to the Sikhs; Peshawur had been wrested from the Afghans by the same unscrupulous neighbour; the independence of Herat had been guaranteed to a branch of the Royal family; the Beloochees had asserted pretensions unknown in the times of Ahmed Shah; the petty Princes on the northern hill-frontier no longer acknowledged their allegiance to Caubul. In whatsoever direction he turned his eyes, he beheld the mutilations to which the old Douranee Empire had been subjected; and yearned to recover some of the provinces which had been severed from the domain of his fathers.
But the kingdom to which he had been restored was more extensive than he could govern. There were many difficult questions to be solved, at this time; the first and the most important of which related to the continuance of his connexion with his Feringhee allies. The British Government had now done all that it had undertaken to do. It had escorted Shah Soojah to his palace gates, and seated him upon the throne of his fathers. In accordance with Lord Auckland’s manifesto, the time had now arrived for the withdrawal of the British army. But it was obvious that the British army could not yet be withdrawn. The Shah had no hold upon the affections of his people. He might sit in the Balla Hissar, but he could not govern the Afghans. Such, at least, was the conviction which by this time had forced itself upon Macnaghten’s mind. If the British Minister had ever contemplated the early abandonment of the restored King, the idea had now passed away. The Shah himself felt no confidence in his own strength. He did not believe that the power of Dost Mahomed was irretrievably broken, but still saw him, in imagination, flitting about the regions of the Hindoo-Koosh, raising the Oosbeg tribes, and pouring down for the recovery of Caubul.
There were objections, many, and weighty, to the continued occupation of Afghanistan by British troops—objections of one kind, which the Shah acknowledged and appreciated; and objections of another, which every statesman and soldier in India must have recognised with painful distinctness. But the experiment of leaving Shah Soojah to himself was too dangerous to be lightly tried. The Shah would fain have rid himself of British interference and control, if he could have maintained himself without British support; and the British Government would fain have withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, if it could have relied upon the power of the Shah to maintain himself. But to leave the restored Suddozye to be dethroned and expelled, after the homeward march of the troops that had restored him, would have been to court an enormous failure, which would have overwhelmed our government with disgrace. Neither was the restoration sufficiently popular in itself, nor was there sufficient stability in the character of the King to warrant so hazardous an experiment. If the policy of the Afghan invasion had not been based upon error, the experiment would not have been a hazardous one. But the very acknowledgment of the Shah’s inability to maintain himself after the departure of the British army, was a crushing commentary on the assertions put forth in the great October manifesto. The truth was not to be disguised. The “adoration” which had greeted the Shah on his return to his long-lost dominions, was found to be a delusion and a sham. The palace of his fathers had received him again; but it was necessary still to hedge in the throne with a quickset of British bayonets.
So thought Lord Auckland. He had given his mind long and painfully to the subject, and had written an elaborate minute, reviewing all the circumstances of our position in Afghanistan after the entry of the Shah into the country. Macnaghten had been settled little more than a month in Caubul when a copy of this minute, dated Simlah, August 20, was put into his hands. There was nothing unintelligible in it. Ably written, clearly worded, it enunciated, in unmistakeable paragraphs, the views of the Governor-General, and left Macnaghten, even had he been disposed to follow an opposite course, which he was not, no alternative but to retain a portion of the troops, and himself to abide at Caubul as controller of the Shah. Lord Auckland saw plainly the advantages of withdrawing the Army of the Indus. India could ill afford the abstraction of so large a body of disciplined troops, and it was probable that their services might be required in less remote regions; but he could not purchase the advantages of their withdrawal at the price of the failure of the Afghan expedition.