“The Afghan settlement is a very good settlement as far as it goes, but it is not immaculate—it is not complete. To yield us its full measure of defence, the Treaty must be supplemented by all legitimate precautions and supports. Persia must be detached from Russia coûte que coûte. Russia herself must not be left in any uncertainty as to our intentions. She must be made to understand ... that she will not be permitted unopposed to establish herself in strength ... even at Abiverd, nor to commence intrigues against the British power in India. She might indeed be warned that, if necessary, we were prepared in self-defence to support the Turcomans—with whom she has no legitimate quarrel—with arms or money, or even to turn the tables on her by encouraging the efforts of the Uzbegs to recover their liberty.... It would be almost fatuity at such a moment to withdraw our garrison from Candahar.... Yacub Khan must be made to see that it is as much for his interest as our own to hold an efficient body of troops in such a position that, on the approach of danger ... they might, with military alacrity, occupy Herat as an auxiliary garrison.”
And what is implied in detaching Persia from Russia he explains in another part of his Essay.
“If Russia, as there is strong reason to believe, is now pushing on to Merv or Sarakhs ... with the ultimate hope of occupying Herat, then it might very possibly be a sound policy to extend to Persia the provisions of the Asia Minor Protectorate, or even to support her actively in vindicating her rights upon the frontier of Khorassán.”
From all which it would appear that our “Scientific Frontier” is simply good for nothing until it has been supplemented by an offensive and defensive alliance with the barbarian enemies of Russia all over the world. In order to ensure the safety of India, we must protect not only our own “Scientific Frontier,” but we must guarantee the Sultan all his Asiatic possessions; we must be ready at any moment to fight for the “integrity and independence” of Persia; we must be prepared to march our troops to Herat, and to show a front against the Russians on the Oxus; we must provide the Tekeh-Turcomans with arms and money, and assist the Uzbegs in their attempts to recover their liberty. Such are the “legitimate precautions and supports” which are requisite to render the new frontier immaculate and complete. But if with a “Scientific Frontier” we remain liable to such tremendous demands as these, it passes imagination to conjecture in what respect we could have been worse off when our frontier was “haphazard.”
The Circumstances of the Peace.
I shall next endeavour to show the circumstances which compelled the Indian Government to acquiesce in a peace which thus left the avowed object of the war unfulfilled. The preparations for the invasion of Afghanistan were on a scale corresponding to the magnitude of the enterprise as explained by the “official” correspondent of the Times. Troops were set in motion for the North-West frontier from garrisons in the extreme south of India. Men were sent from England to man heavy gun batteries. In addition to the troops under General Roberts, no less than three columns were formed to invade Afghanistan viâ Sukkur and the Bolan, and the same number to advance through the Khyber. The force which marched to Kandahar was supplied with four heavy gun batteries, and a fifth was sent up subsequently, although, except upon the supposition that permanent entrenched camps were to be formed in Afghanistan, these heavy guns were simply an encumbrance and a source of danger. But the campaign had barely commenced before the Government became aware that it had utterly miscalculated its cost and difficulty. It is easy enough for an army to enter Afghanistan; it is next to impossible for it to subsist when it has got there. It is easy enough to scatter the Afghans when collected in battle array; it is next to impossible to subjugate them because they never are so collected. From these causes our raid into Afghanistan was but little removed from an ignominious failure. If we had not made peace we should have been compelled to evacuate the country from the enormous costliness of retaining troops in it. Under such circumstances, a peace was needed too urgently to allow the Government to stand out for any extraordinary concessions. They took what they could get, which proved to be, as we have seen, the right to place garrisons in the two valleys of Kurram and Peshin. But having gone to war in search of a “Scientific Frontier,” no alternative was left to them except to frankly confess that they had not found it; or to affirm that these two valleys constituted it.
We come now to the causes of our failure. These are all-important, and ought to dissipate for ever the fear of an invasion of India by Russia or any other Power. The plan of the campaign required that Afghanistan should be invaded from three points; but the most important operation was understood to be the advance of General Stewart upon Kandahar. As soon as hostilities appeared inevitable, a small force under General Biddulph had been sent forward to secure Quetta against a sudden attack. General Stewart followed later on, and the two columns numbered upon paper about 20,000 men, with 60 guns. Meanwhile, a third column was ordered to assemble at Sukkur in support, and placed under the command of General Primrose. These extensive preparations were supposed to indicate the determination of the Indian Government to push on as far as Herat. The distance which had to be traversed between Sukkur and Kandahar is, roughly speaking, about four hundred miles, but the country presents extraordinary difficulties. From Sukkur to Jacobabad extends a level tract which, during the rains, is flooded to a depth of seven feet. Between Jacobabad and Dadur—a town situated at the entrance of the Bolan Pass—extends the Sinde desert. Any large force marching across this desert would have to take with them, not only food and forage, but water, for only at intervals of fifteen or twenty miles is the parched and barren soil pierced by a few brackish springs, which just suffice for the needs of the hamlets which have sprung up around them. For six months of the year this desert is literally impassable. A hot wind sweeps across it, which is fatal to man and beast. Only once did the Indian Government venture to send troops across it after this “blast of death” (as the natives call it) had begun to blow. This was in the last Afghan war. Some hundreds of native troops were sent as an escort in charge of supplies, and in four days one hundred Sepoys perished, three hundred camp followers, and (I think) nine officers out of fourteen. Beyond Dadur is the Bolan Pass. This Pass is about eighty miles in length; regular road there is none; what purports to be a road is merely the bed of a stream, which, during the rainy weather, is filled from bank to bank with a volume of rushing water. Neither food nor forage is obtainable in the Pass, and even the camels, when starting from Dadur, had to carry a seven days’ supply of food for themselves. Between Quetta and Kandahar the country is open, but neither is food procurable for a large force, nor forage for the horses and camels. From first to last General Stewart’s troops were almost wholly fed from India. The winter, luckily, was one of unprecedented mildness. But for this, in place of a march upon Kandahar, a terrible catastrophe could hardly have been averted. In ordinary seasons the snows fall heavily in and around Quetta early in November, and the cold is intense. The Bolan Pass is swept from end to end by hurricanes of wind and rain and snow. At the very time when these storms usually occur we had a dozen regiments and batteries straggling along the whole length of the Bolan Pass. Last year, however, there was neither snow nor hurricane, and our troops got through the Pass in safety. There was no opposition offered to our advance on Kandahar, but, from the want of food and the hardships which had to be endured, no less than twenty thousand camels perished upon the march. This mortality decided the campaign. When General Stewart reached Kandahar the situation was as follows:—The magazines at Quetta were nearly empty. Four months’ food was collected at Sukkur, but awaited carriage for its transport to Quetta. The third column under General Primrose was assembling on the Indus, and needed ten thousand camels to enable it to advance. To supply all these wants there were at Sukkur about 1600 camels. In order to lessen the pressure on the Commissariat, General Stewart divided his forces, despatching one column to hunt for supplies in the direction of Giriskh, and sending another with the same object to Khelat-i-Ghilzie. These movements caused the death from cold and hunger of a large additional number of camels, and demonstrated that there was not food in that part of Afghanistan sufficient for a force so large as that collected at Kandahar. Sinde, meanwhile, had been swept so bare of camels that it was impossible to collect a sufficient number for the carriage of food to Quetta before the hot weather had set in, and the march across the desert was barred by “the blast of death.” Immediate action was necessary if General Stewart’s troops were not to starve; and eight thousand men returned to India, reducing the garrison left at Kandahar to four thousand. This number, it was trusted, the Commissariat would be able to feed during the hot weather. But even this small force was so scantily supplied with carriage that it could not have moved, in a body, for fifty miles in any direction. It was, so to speak, nailed to the spot on which it was encamped. This want of food, far more than the physical difficulties of the country, is and always will be the insuperable obstacle to carrying on extensive military operations in Afghanistan. The people obtain no more from the soil than just suffices for their own wants; and for days together an invading army has to pass over huge wastes with hardly a trace of human habitation, and consequently destitute of food.
Not a little amusing was the revulsion of feeling caused throughout India by the lame and impotent conclusion of the advance on Kandahar. It was a demonstration of the impossibility of an invasion which convinced those who were most reluctant to be convinced. If when we had all India from which to draw our supplies, and with no enemy to oppose us, our utmost efforts had merely sufficed to place four thousand men in Kandahar, and leave them there, isolated and defenceless, it was chimerical to suppose that the Russians could march for double that distance an army capable of attempting the conquest of India. “Kandahar,” writes a military correspondent to the Pioneer—the official journal of India—“is acknowledged to be a mistake, and it is hoped that a British army will never again be dispatched in that direction; it is a mere waste of men, money, and means, and an unsuitable line for either attack or defence.”
And the Pioneer, the very purpose of whose existence is to preach the infallibility of the Indian Government, thus endorses the remarks of its correspondent: “The theories about Kandahar are by this time exploded; indeed, there are many critics who have refused to adopt them from the very beginning; believing against General Hamley, that the main road into Afghanistan, whether we march as defenders of the Kabul Ameer or as avengers, must lie past Peshawur and Jelalabad.”
The failure on the Kandahar side placed the Indian Government in an extremely difficult position. An advance on Herat was plainly out of the question; even one on Ghuznee was beyond the power of General Stewart and his troops. Elsewhere the aspect of affairs was hardly less cheering. The expedition in the Kurram Valley had resulted in the somewhat ignominious retreat out of Khost. We had about 15,000 men holding the line from the Khyber to Jelalabad; but in effecting this, 14,000 camels had perished, and several of the regiments had been more than decimated from sickness and exposure. We had not subjugated a rood of territory on which our troops were not actually encamped. The main strength of the Ameer’s army was untouched, while all along our Trans-Indus frontier the hill tribes were in a state of dangerous unrest. The hot weather was coming on apace, when cholera and typhoid fever would be added to the number of our enemies. Thirty thousand troops had been set in motion, the garrisons in the interior of India dangerously weakened; three millions of money expended; and this was all that had been achieved. If now Yakoub Khan refused to come to terms, what was to be done? General Brown might be ordered to force his way from Jelalabad to Kabul, but what was he to do when he got there? The cost in money would be certainly heavy—the cost in men, not improbably, heavy also. And if, on our arrival at his capital, Yakoub Khan retired to either Balkh or Herat, we were powerless to follow him. Yakoub Khan, in fact, had the game in his hands. We had shot our bolt and failed. He had simply to decline to make peace, and keep out of our reach. We should then have been compelled either to evacuate the country, or to occupy it with the certainty that a little later on we should be compelled to withdraw, when the drain on the finances of India became too heavy to endure. Sir Henry Rawlinson rightly says, that a very small force can march from one end of Afghanistan to another; but a very large force is requisite permanently to hold it. The tribal divisions which hinder unity of resistance hinder also the achievement of any decisive victory. Each tribe is an independent centre of life, which requires a separate operation for its extinction.