Fighting the Afghans in the 19th Century

British Intervention in Afghanistan, Victorian style - plus ça change? One of the abiding historical ideas  of the nineteenth century is that of Pax Britannica. The ‘long peace’ from 1815 to 1914, with the one interruption of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s, encapsulates the essence of Britain’s relationship with the major continental European powers. But, in fact, for people outside Europe the period witnessed an unremitting series of British military and naval interventions touching every part of the globe. For the most part, British generals and naval commanders ensured that these interventions were successful, or at least appeared victorious. The British experience in Afghanistan was an exception. Here, the first intervention of 1838-42 required considerable stage management to appear     to have been even remotely successful, while the intervention in 1878-81 proved expensive even if ultimately it achieved its purpose. On both occasions military defeats were avenged, but the management of Afghan politics remained far more intractable.

In 1837, the Commander-in-Chief of the Bengal army, Sir Henry Fane, provided an official analysis arguing that the existing western and north-western frontier of British India was perfectly secure. Part of it, from the sea to Firuzpur on the Sutlej river, was ‘covered’ by the Thar or Great Indian Desert. At the other end stood the equally impenetrable Himalayas. The only exposed stretch was about 120 miles from Firuzpur to the Sutlej’s upper reaches. Although scarcely a decade of the nineteenth century had passed without some frontier campaign affecting the borderlands of British India, good frontier garrisons, improving lines of communication to the main bases of British India and friendly relations with the Punjab, across the Sutlej, ensured that this border was secure. Yet, within a year, this impression had been shattered.

British intervention in Afghanistan stemmed from growing British concerns about Russian ambitions in central Asia. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Russians had rapidly expanded their central Asian empire. By the 1830s they had conquered Ural’sk and Turgay and parts of Akmolinsk. Before 1878, they had encroached as far south as Turkestan, acquiring Samarkand, Bukhara and Semirech’ye. The  threat of Russian influence in central Asia and the effect this might bring to bear on Indian political opinion were of major concern to the British. Britain had effectively sealed India from any seaboard penetration by foreign rivals, but could the north-western boundary be vulnerable to  actions that might encourage Indian princes to challenge British rule?  Most policy-makers recognised that, whatever was being achieved through commercial and institutional development and through humanitarian, educational and religious ‘improvement’, British rule ultimately depended on military force. Disaffection against British rule flourished below the surface sovereignty of the Raj. The government in India decided that any exertion of Russian political influence in Afghanistan posed an indirect threat to the integrity of the Anglo-Indian state.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, Indian rulers’ compliance with British rule, and their reduction from rulers to subject aristocrats, had required coercion and usually war to effect. Yet, repeatedly, the British assumed that they could simply reshuffle Asiatic potentates. They approached Afghan affairs in a state of relative ignorance.  Their first semi-official contact with its main eastern cities came only in the 1830s;  earlier nineteenth-century diplomatic interest had focused on Persian relations with the country's western frontier area. In 1838, as it became clear that the incumbent emir of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammed, was toying with the notion of an alignment with Russia, the British decided that he should be replaced. They had in mind an ageing former Afghan emir Shah Shuja, who had spent some thirty years in exile in India. The Afghan empire had been forged from minor overlordships during the eighteenth century. The economy was poorly developed and involved  relatively limited trading; Afghan leaders frequently depended on military raids on neighbouring lands, notably north-western India, to acquire ready cash through systematic plunder.  By the early nineteenth-century an intense contest for power developed between two rival clans – the Suddozyes and the Barukzyes – of the Dourani tribe of the founding emir, Ahmed Shah. Dozens of offspring of two antagonistic clan leaders provided numerous claimants to supreme power.  Shah Shuja had already tried his hand by invading his country in 1834, but had been defeated in battle near Kandahar by Dost Mohammed.  Nothing daunted, the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, felt that the regime in Kabul could be readily changed.

The British also mistakenly assumed that a local ally would assist in any military action that might result from their intervention. During the summer of 1838 it was expected that the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, would provide the bulk of the force entering Afghanistan, but Ranjit refused to participate. Instead of having to furnish a contingent of 5,000 troops to supplement a Sikh army, the British found themselves having to commit 14,000 men from British India itself. Instead of crossing the Sutlej river and then passing through the Punjab and marching to Kabul from Peshawar via the Khyber Pass, the British were forced to take a wholly circuitous route to Kandahar.

Setting off in December 1838, the main British force from Firuzpur covered 1,000 miles in 135 days. There were no battles on the journey to Kandahar but the troops fought against harsh desert conditions, rugged mountain passes, food shortages, heat and deliberately contaminated water, under the constant threat of raids by mounted tribesmen. One officer described ‘the heat, the dust, the desert wind, the myriads of flies and the stench of the dying and dead camels’. The camp ‘smelled like a charnel-house’ and no one could take three steps within the camp ‘without seeing a dead or dying man or animal’.

Once they reached Kandahar the British force, together with Shuja’s levies and perhaps 38,000 servants and camp followers, spent two months recouping while reinforcements were rallied. Shuja was installed as emir. The next stage was the 310-mile march from Kandahar to Kabul. On this route the only formal fighting of the eight-month campaign occurred at the fortified town of Ghazni. It lasted little over an hour. The British, who had brought no heavy guns on their march across the central valley of east Afghanistan,  had to force their way into Ghazni by making a daring attack at dawn. They blew up one of the town’s gates with 300lbs of gunpowder and sent in an assault party of European light infantry. The party only just got the necessary support in time. As was so often the case in ‘colonial’ campaigning, the success of the operation depended on speed, daring, improvisation and high risk by a select minority among the forces available.

By the end of 1839 the British had secured their political objectives; Shah Shuja was installed and Dost Mohammed had fled. Most of the expeditionary forces had been withdrawn, but a significant British presence remained. However, the challenge of creating and maintaining a stable regime proved increasingly difficult. Autonomous tribal chiefs would not accept Shah Shuja’s authority. The enthusiasm of British advisors for administrative and political reform led to changes in revenue-raising and in the privileges and powers given to local chiefs in Kabul, which provoked opposition. By May 1841, the British had deployed 16,000 troops within Afghanistan and on the immediate approach routes, with a further 9,000 on the route from Karachi to Quetta. Animosity intensified as local chiefs resented British raids upon individual valleys, involving the destruction of crops and attacks upon small forts. They also resented the widespread deployment of Hindu troops in a Muslim country, especially as eighteenth-century Afghans had been the arbiters of Hindostan’s fate. A further contention was the sharp increase in the prices of vital commodities caused by the presence of a large foreign army and its demand for goods. Reforms in the organisation of the Afghan army drastically reduced the annual payments made to the Ghilzai tribes who controlled the Jalalabad-Kabul route. The Ghilzai  responded by attacking a large caravan as it proceeded from Jalalabad up to Kabul in October 1841.

This attack occurred just as the British were planning a major withdrawal. During the autumn, Brigadier Sir Robert Sale, the commander of the frontal assault on Ghazni two years earlier, led a contingent from Kabul and pushed his way – often against opposition – to Jalalabad, to open up the direct line for that withdrawal. But in early November 1841, the British lost control of events in Kabul. A mob attacked and murdered the British Resident, Sir Alexander Burnes. Tribal levies seized the commissariat fort. While the British hesitated in their response, numbers of tribal chiefs joined the rebellion. The ousted emir, Dost Mohammed’s son Mohammed Akbar, arrived in the capital, assuming leadership of factions of the rebellion. The retiring British Envoy Sir William Macnaughten tried to negotiate a settlement with him, only to be murdered and dismembered on December 23rd. Against this increasingly turbulent background, Major-General William Elphinstone, the British commander, came to an agreement with eighteen prominent Afghan chiefs that they would guarantee a safe evacuation for the British garrison. On January 6th 1842, the British force of 4,500 soldiers, mostly Indian sepoys, and perhaps as many as 12,000 dependants, servants and camp followers, left Kabul. By this time Sale had established a defensive position at Jalalabad en route back into the Punjab.

The British retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad degenerated into one of the most appalling reverses in the history of British imperial intervention. Within days the perishing cold, food and supply losses and ambushes by tribesmen commanding higher ground over the narrow rocky mountain passes had taken their toll on the convoy. Frostbite and snow blindness rendered fighting men incapable of using their weapons. Hunger gnawed hard at the whole contingent. By the fifth day the number of soldiers capable of action amounted to perhaps only a tenth of the original force of 4,500 troops. This rapidly diminishing band of combatants were ruthlessly attacked by the Afghans at the pass at Jagdullak on January 12th; those that made it through the ambush made a  miserable last stand at the Gundamuck Pass the following day. A few were taken prisoner, the remainder, including eighteen officers, were killed. Of the main force only one European survived the ordeal, escaping by the skin of his teeth. Surgeon William Brydon limped into Jalalabad on January 13th. Sale’s garrison sounded the advance by bugle throughout that night in the hope that other survivors would make it in; not one did. It is not known exactly how many died; but the greater part of the garrison force and their followers perished. Some survived by deserting or by being taken prisoner. But the total lost probably exceeded 12,000.

In spite of the terrible human disaster, the British retained some major military assets. A force of 7,500 troops remained at Kandahar (a number far exceeding the number of soldiers lost in the Kabul withdrawal). A substantial reinforcement reached Peshawar in the Sikh kingdom in early February 1842. Sale’s contingent held out at Jalalabad, surviving food shortages and Afghan attacks until the Peshawar relief force, having advanced up the Khyber Pass, reached the town on April 16th bringing to 15,000 the number of British troops there.

The defence of Jalalabad provided a heroic symbol of British resilience and resistance, a timely counter-point to the military ineptitude that had led to the destruction of the Kabul column. It also created the basis for a punitive expedition to be despatched to Afghanistan’s capital. Forces from Jalalabad spread out into neighbouring valleys to punish local tribes. The British destroyed forts, burned villages, and cut deep rings around trees (which were so necessary to provide shade in the cruelly hot summers), in order that they would wither and die. The vigour of the British reaction was justified by a generalised demonisation of the Afghan population. As one officer, Thomas Seaton, later wrote, ‘every crime, every sin of which human nature can be guilty . . . are as common and notorious as daylight, throughout Afghanistan’.

Strategically and politically, the British were committed to withdrawal from Afghanistan, but they now considered a variety of military measures to punish the Afghans. As the Duke of Wellington, a member of the Cabinet, wrote privately to the Governor General on March 30th, 1842: ‘it is impossible to impress upon you too strongly the notion of the Importance of the Restoration of our Reputation in the East’.

British prestige was reasserted in various ways. The Kandahar garrison force marched across the country to Kabul and the large contingent at Jalalabad advanced westwards to meet it there. The two armies reached the capital on September 16th-17th, 1842. They negotiated the release of ninety-five British prisoners and then ceremoniously blew up the four great squares or bazaars at the capital’s centre. The ritualistic destruction of prominent buildings became a recurrent practice of the British when they wished to assert their power, in the knowledge that they had little time to do so.

The Governor General, Lord Ellenborough, arranged massive ceremonial displays at Firuzpur to greet the forces on their return to British India in mid-December. Some 25,000 additional troops were assembled to form a welcoming line two-and-a-half miles long. Bands, banquets, balls and gun salutes all proclaimed victory and closure, not withdrawal and  failure. The gates of Somnauth, symbolically important gate-portals to a major tomb long ago stolen from India by Afghan invaders, were now solemnly returned by the British and carried in procession across north-central India. Many British commentators criticised this empty triumphalism, but it formed a key element of Ellenborough’s policy of rebuilding confidence in the Indian army.

Lastly, the British took advantage of political instability and tribal rivalry in the Sind to conquer and annex that area, to the south and south- east of Afghanistan, in early 1843. In deciding on the take-over in March 1843, Ellenborough noted, ‘we must redeem the character we have lost in India’ – both by acquisition and by the reformist energy to be applied to the new province’s governance. The emirs of the Sind paid a heavy price for British reversals in Afghanistan.

Following the withdrawal in 1842, British relations with the restored Afghan emir, Dost Mohammed, proved broadly satisfactory. The entire north-west region was transformed in any case by the British acquisition of the Punjab in the 1840s. British forces were able to control the Punjab during the traumatic Indian Mutiny of 1857. There were no threats from Afghanistan then, but in the 1870s concern at Russian expansionism revived and dissatisfaction with a new emir in Kabul intensified. A number of long- running disputes and tensions came to a head in 1878, exacerbated by an assertive and politically unsubtle Governor General, Lord Lytton. A brief war ensued resulting in British diplomatic gains, the occupation of the Kuram valley, on the borderlands between Punjab and mountainous Afghanistan, and the installation of a permanent British representative in Kabul.

Yet, by apparently bowing to British pressure, the emir’s regime succeeded only in enflaming tribal  resentment. Dissident Afghan soldiers burned the British residency in September 1879, killing all its occupants including the British envoy, Sir Louis Cavagnari, By this time, enough British troops were available nearby for a prompt British reaction to be launched.

Within a little over a month of this attack, Major General Frederick Roberts (later Lord Roberts) marched into Kabul. The British plan was clearly laid out by Lord Lytton to Roberts. Lytton realised that immediate retribution was necessary in order to achieve results before British political attitudes softened towards Afghanistan. He wanted ‘a prompt and impressive example’ to be given to the Afghans. As the whole Afghan population had participated in ‘a great national crime’, Lytton stressed that ‘any Afghan brought to death by the avenging arm of the British power, I shall regard as one scoundrel the less in a den of scoundrelism’. While British public opinion would require some judicial procedure, the viceroy felt it need be only ‘of the roughest and readiest kind’. Roberts could inflict retribution, not justice, on reaching Kabul. During the next four weeks the British executed about 100 Afghans with little regard as to whether or not they had been directly involved in the assault on the residency. One senior officer noticed that ‘we are thoroughly hated and not enough feared’. To sustain a large military presence during the winter Roberts sent out large parties of soldiers to seek food from the surrounding countryside. When they met resistance a predictable downward spiral of skirmishing, plundering foodstuff, and burning villages set in. Tribal levies attacked the British position outside Kabul in late December. By early 1880 the British had committed large numbers of troops from Peshawar to Kabul in order to secure a line of communication and base there for reinforcement and control.

The British found themselves in the midst of turbulent inter-tribal, inter-clan, and intra-family rivalries. In one regional contest for power around Kandahar, a British force of 2,600 troops met defeat at Maiwand in July 1880. In a humiliating rout,  43 per cent of the British force was killed or wounded, an extraordinarily high level of casualties. This was a classic instance of a relatively small British force being exposed to superior enemy troop numbers and artillery fire. As so often, the British self-image of succeeding against overwhelming odds proved irresponsible. When their opponents were as well armed as the Afghans, then the British could not make significant headway against superior numbers. Instead, as at Maiwand, they marched into defeat.

But the British had sufficient manpower available to summon up a tremendous recuperative response. Roberts led 10,000 troops some 300 miles from Kabul to Kandahar and, immediately on arrival there, attacked the Afghan army outside Kandahar on September 1st, 1880. Roberts overcame the errors made at Maiwand. He had as many guns as his opponent and almost as many soldiers. He drove his enemy back by stages in a well fought flanking movement. His forces captured all the Afghan guns. This defeat broke the Afghan army apart. Regular troops within it returned to the northwest of the country and their original base at Herat. The tribesman returned to the widely scattered valleys. Although defeated in the field and dispersed, these dissident tribesmen were not necessarily crushed. Some military experts, including Roberts, argued that the longer term security for a pro-British regime required a British occupation of Kandahar. The Cabinet rejected that proposal and arguments for the break-up of Afghanistan. Following a number of major clashes between competing princes in 1881, a new regime was secured by the end of the year and the British were able to withdraw from the country. But at its height this intervention absorbed perhaps 48,000 troops, if those in the border towns of British India and along the lines of communication are included, and cost nearly 10,000 lives, the majority succumbing to disease.

An obvious question arises as to the extent to which the British adapted to the experience of mountain warfare. In 1841-42, the British had been hard hit by Afghan troops well positioned on hilly ridges. In 1878-79 Roberts had ensured the deployment of highly mobile troops to clamber up mountain ridges in order to outgun Afghan implacements. Also, the geographical route westwards from the Khyber pass and Jalalabad to Kabul, through which the British forces moved, and which was most open to mountain ambush, was fully guarded and controlled in 1879-81. Once in the main cities of Kabul and Kandahar, the British were reasonably secure, in that the Afghans had no heavy siege guns available to deploy against well fortified positions. The British made numerous efforts to control areas immediately around the main cities. Beyond those confined areas, the Afghan style of fighting created problems for the invaders. Protecting their own villages and valleys remained their priority. Yet the British could only penetrate those deep and divided valleys with difficulty and by dispersing their own forces. Roberts insisted that infantry battalions provide sixty mounted infantrymen each to help with mobility. But the capacity to move quickly and widely remained handicapped by problems of transport.

The Second Afghan war heightened notions of military commitment and of the existence of  martial races both among the British  (the Highlanders) and among the peoples of British India (the Sikhs and the Gurkhas). Roberts wanted to ensure that the relief force leaving Kabul for Kandahar in August 1880 would be highly committed as well as experienced. Recognising that soldiers who had been on active service for about two years might have become jaded, Roberts consulted his battalion commanders as to the battle readiness of their men. Only three reported that their troops might not bear the exertions of the campaign. To boost morale in what Roberts hoped would be a swift campaign, he  promised soldiers that they would be allowed back to India immediately fighting ended. Those not up to forced marches were removed. Equipment was kept to a minimum. Roberts noted that the troops needed all their experience in loading and tending the baggage animals since Afghan drivers and support riders soon deserted the British in August 1880 on the march from Kabul to Kandahar.

Here then was a force whose individual strengths, weaknesses, and powers of endurance were well known to their commander and to each other. It possessed a great deal of experience and it travelled light. As usual in ‘colonial’ campaigning, the British deliberately mixed the units available, to ensure that the soldiers most likely to be fully committed to the cause would not all be concentrated together. Of a total of 9,713 troops (excluding officers), on the march to Kandahar, some 2,562 were British. Each of the three infantry brigades had four battalions of between 500-700 soldiers and each of those three infantry brigades contained one British and one Gurkha battalion. The other battalions in the army were virtually all Sikh or Punjabi. Thus both British and Gurkha forces were distributed in order to intensify competition between the different units and to give prominence within each brigade to the ‘martial races’.

The main battle of September 1st was hard fought, essentially consisting of the British driving one flank of the Afghan force from its defensive positions and circling around the main Afghan point of defence to take the army’s camp. The British, as usual, claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties, but the number of known Afghan dead (600), was not particularly high given the size of its army and the sheer weight of rifle and artillery rounds fired at them. At best the British killed one Afghan for every hundred shots fired and that assumed (wrongly) that none were killed by bayonets. The cavalry pursuit after the battle was not especially effective. It has been estimated that about a hundred Afghans were killed in a pursuit which took the cavalry around 15 miles from the field of battle itself. This suggests that there were relatively few wounded, since such soldiers would have lagged behind and been vulnerable in even a delayed cavalry chase. The battle did not therefore deliver a crushing military blow to the Afghans, but it brought about a powerful reversal which broke up the Afghan army and dispersed the tribal chiefs to their various homes.

In both campaigns, the leaders of British India treated Afghanistan as a pawn in a geographical contest to maintain Britain’s position in India and her prestige as a world power. Both ultimately rested on the need for quick, highly visible victories and speedy subsequent withdrawal. Both ended by demonising the Afghans and by demonstrating that, in reacting to fierce Afghan resistance to their forced presence, retribution readily took precedence over justice.

And they left Afghanistan much as they found it.  One hundred years ago the The Daily Mail Year Book  described a populace of four millions desperately short of food and oppressed  by ‘rapacious’ governors and nobles.  British India subsidised the Emir whose power depended on the armed forces he controlled, while claimants – including some of those most deeply involved in the events of 1880-81 – awaited opportunities for challenging for power from exile in India and Russia.

Further Reading

• J.A. Norris, The First Afghan War, 1838-1842 (Cambridge, 1967)
• Brian Robson, The Road to Kabul, The Second Afghan War, 1878-1881 (London, 1986)
• M.E. Yapp, Strategies of British India (Oxford, 1980)
• Major-General Sir Thomas Seaton, From Cadet to Colonel (London, 1866)
• Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Forty-one Years in India 2 volumes (London, 1897)
• William Trousdale (ed)  War in Afghanistan 1879-1880 : the personal diary of Major General Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor (Detroit, 1985)
• Brian Robson (ed), Roberts in India, The Military Papers of Field Marshal Lord Roberts, 1876-1893 (Stroud, 1993)

About the Author

Bruce Collins is a Professor at the University of Derby, and is writing a two-volume history of British military and naval power from 1775 to 1902.