The Rest Is History - 88. The First Anglo-Afghan War

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

“A war begun for no wise purpose.” This description of the First Anglo-Afghan War, fought in the early-mid 19th Century, could stand as an epitaph for most conflicts in the region since. William Dalrymple has written extensively about the history of Afghanistan and he joins Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland to take a deep dive into this ‘graveyard of empires’. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. A war began for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated. That was not a newspaper report on this week's calamitous American evacuation of Kabul,

but the report on an earlier Western engagement in Afghanistan. The first Anglo-Afghan war, and it was the words of the Reverend George Gleig, who wrote the first account of that war in 1843. And Dominic, some eerie parallels there, aren't there? Yeah, it's hard to resist the parallels. So that's one of the most famous military disasters in British history. It's our first great encounter with Afghanistan. Some listeners will know it as the stuff of the very first Flashman book. That's how I first encountered it. And I think other listeners, Tom, may know the painting. I don't know if you know the painting.

I bet you do. By Elizabeth Butler called Remnants of an Army, where the last guy, the one survivor. Dr. Bryden. Dr. William Bryden. He's sort of on his horse or mule or whatever it is in the past. And he's the only one survivor. Dr. Bryden. Dr. William Bryden. He's sort of on his horse or mule or whatever it is in the past. And he's the sort of, he's the only one left. You know, nearly 20,000 men have been,

women and children have been killed. Him and Flashman, of course. What's Flashman, of course. Flashman is the other survivor. But of course, this is the, this is the image of Afghanistan that is so current in the newspapers at the moment, the graveyard of empires. So the British tried and failed, supposedly, this is the claim, the British

tried and failed, the Soviet Union tried and failed, and now the United States has tried and failed as well. Okay, well, I think there is really only one person to get on to talk to us about the first Afghan war. And that is Willie Dalrymple, who was an earlier guest talking about his book, The Anarchy on the East India Company, which in a way is a kind of the prequel to the events we're going to discuss today. He comes with a slight health warning,

though, doesn't he, Tom? Because he is the holder of the Rest Is History all-time record for speaking uninterrupted. He is. Without interventions from us, which I think, so I think he spoke for basically an hour and we said hello and goodbye. Well, somebody commented on Twitter that he was like Fenton, the notorious dog that went chasing deer in Richmond Park.

And there was the hapless man running after him shouting Fenton, Fenton. And that's what we were like. So it's very exciting to have Willie back on the show. about this, The Return of a King, which is part of the Company Quartet, this collection of four volumes about the East India Company in India, which is available now. So I hope I've made my dues there. So Fenton. You can shout Fenton at any point if you want me to stand to leash. Okay, I'm going to throw you a stick here. The first Afghan war, how does it begin? So this is rather a long story. So one evening in 1837, a man who you're, I'm sure, very familiar with,

George Rawlinson, who's famous for translating the Behistun inscription, who's this orientalist who'd been based in Persia as part of the East India Company mission to try and get cozy with Persia and to turn them against Russia, who were East India Company's great rivals. And in the background to this is that over the previous hundred years, at the same time as the East India Company was expanding out of Calcutta to take over all of India and then marching towards the Himalayas, same time as this is happening, in Russia, the Russians are moving south at a rate of 100 miles every decade. And by the 1840s have reached what was called the Orenburg Line, which is just north of the great caravan cities of Kiva, Bokhara, Tashkent, which, as we know now, will fall to Russia in the 1880s and 1890s and in a later phase of the period. But at this point in 1840, the East India Company has now occupied

all of India, South Sutledge, the Russians are at the Orenberg Line and everyone is eyeing the territory, the shrinking space in between these two expanding empires. And so what George Rawlinson sees one early dawn in 1837 is very important. He's writing from Beh behist where he's been literally in the middle of translating this inscription been uh built a scaffold to take all the cuneiform down and so this is the inscription left by darius the great back in the late 6th century bc and this is kind of the rosetta stone of uh of the persian because it also has aramaic and that allowed uh the translation to uh to be made and roland has Aramaic and it allowed the translation to be made.

And Rawlinson, who's literally been working on this the previous six months in all his spare time, has now been summoned back to work, so to speak, from this Orientalist sabbatical on the Bayeuston inscription and is riding towards the Persian border city of Meshet where the new Shah is about to try and invade the principality just over the border of his territory, which is Herat, previously a great center of Persianate culture for many centuries, but now independent of the Qajar kings of

Persia. And there are Russian military advisors working for Persians and the East India Company are very unhappy about this. So Rawlinson's been sent off to observe the start of this campaign. And he's been riding from Western Persia because a war is breaking out. The normal post-horse system isn't working in the Karabakhs' right. And he can't get his mount exchanged. So he's exhausted, his horse is exhausted. And at some point, just as he's heading towards Meshed, he actually falls asleep in the saddle.

It's a long time since I've ridden seriously and I don't know how long he'll probably stay asleep in a saddle without falling off. But when the moment comes that he does sort of nearly slip off the saddle in his sleep and wakes up, he realises that his horse has wandered off the road and he's lost in these very dangerous borderlands. Now, even today, this is a place where opium smugglers work the heroin trade between Iran and Afghanistan. It's a place that has always been what we call in Scotland debatable land.

It's the border of the territory that you just do not want to get lost in at any time, particularly in a war, particularly at this moment. So Rollins is quite frightened and he wanders around in the dark, not quite sure what to do. He's not on a road, doesn't know where he is. And then dawn breaks over the Koh-i-Shah Jahan mountain and he begins to orientate himself. You can see a valley. He's heading towards it when he sees a cloud of dust coming towards him. And he knows what it is. There's clearly a large body of men heading towards him on horseback. So he does what any of us would do in this situation. He dismounts. He ties up his horse in a little overhang of rock and goes belly down to see what's coming.

So it's kind of like we have the Wild West. This is the Wild East. This is the Wild East. And of course, because this has to be a movie at some point, Rawlinson is, as well as a prize-winning Persianate orientalist, he's also a secret service agent working for British intelligence, inevitably speaking. And he's in touch with the British spymaster Claude Wade, who's based on the Afghan border, and also Pottinger, who's based in Gujarat. These are the two East India Company spymasters collating information in Central Asia and Afghanistan. The whole ring of spies, of carpet sellers and so on.

The great game. The great game. This is the very, this in a sense is where it begins. It's almost the moment it begins. There's a few spy networks, but there's actually been no action until this moment. And Rawlinson looks up and he sees these horsemen resolve in front of his eyes into the thing that every East India company intelligence officer had been predicting but has never had the evidence for. It is a party of Cossacks in full uniform with a Russian flag flying, heading over the border from Persia into Afghanistan and there's a considerable number of them and Rawlinson then follows them rather bravely and having sort of shadowed them less successfully than he realizes he actually stumbles across them making a samovar of tea in a gully somewhere, just as dawn is coming up.

And in charge is a multilingual, his direct parallel on the Russian side, who is a man called Ivan Vickovich. Now, he doesn't know this, but Vickovich is in fact a Polish Catholic who'd been sent off into exile by the Russians for writing anti-Russian messages on his blackboard in Poland in age 14. He's only one of his school friends to survive the exile where they've been put into hard labour on the steppe and he's learnt Kazakh and all sorts of Persian and Arabic, exactly like Wallis and Herz, And these two men meet each other brewing up tea in the borderlands of Persia and Afghanistan. And they both pretend

not to be what they are. They're both playing around. I think they end up speaking in French to each other, but they try, Rawlinson tries Chagatay Turkish. As you do. As well as Persian and everything else. And Rawlinson, sorry, Mikvich has all these like and realizes in a sense who he's speaking to, although he doesn't know the name of the man. And anyway,

Rawlinson then turns his horse around. He goes straight back to Tehran, although he's been on the road already for whatever it is, a week. And a camel messenger is sent off to the Gulf. Steamships cross to Egypt. The Telegraph, which has got as far, I think, as Sue is at this point,

taps out the first Morse code, which crosses to Downing Street. And some chap runs up the steps of the Foreign Office and says the Russians have gone into Afghanistan. And so, Willie, tell us a bit about Afghanistan at this point. So this is a sort of borderland, right? I mean, there are local rulers, but it's a pretty wild place. Am I right? various points in its history, Afghanistan has been the center of many great empires. The Kushans, for example, ruled an empire which straddled most of the Stans, Afghanistan, and northern India. It's not true that Afghanistan has always been this sort of graveyard of empires. The Mughals had it as a very successful summer capital. When we think of Mughal summer capital, we tend to

think of Kashmir, because it's within India, and it's part of the same world. But in actual fact, Shah Jahan and Jahangir went as often to Kabul and played in the gardens there as they did to Kashmir. But the last great moment of Central Asian culture has been 200 years earlier with Herat in the 16th century, which Robert Byron described as the Oriental Medici. You have some of the greatest miniature painters. You have some great universities of the Islamic world there. But the whole place has been losing its centrality as a center of culture for a while. There's a revival under a man called Ahmad Shah Durrani, who was one of the generals of Nadia Shah.

And when Nadia Shah is assassinated, Ahmad Shah Durrani takes the Koh-i-Noor and basically uses it as the capital to found a new state, Afghanistan. And he creates an empire in the 1740s, which is only a century before the moment we're talking about, which gobbles up a chunk of Safavid Persia, a chunk of the Uzbek Empire, and a chunk of Mughal India, and creates for the first time an empire centered on Kabul, full of Afghans and the English, although the word Afghanistan is never used.

The kingdom of Kabul is the political phrase. It is. People do talk about for the first time Afghans. And so this is the beginning, in a sense, of the modern Afghan state. And its borders are more or less those of Afghanistan by default, because the Persians are where Persia is. Mobile India has now sort of ended with the Sikh Empire and the Punjab and the Uzbeks have steadied at the oxen. So you have this space in between, of course, the title of Rory Stewart's book, which becomes Afghanistan. And so are they consciously playing, I mean, are they consciously playing off the Russians and the British? Because they're conscious of these two empires either side. And half the story of it, which again, you know, has echoes today, is that the British fear of Russia creates the very nightmare that they fear. Because what happens is that following the sighting of Vitkovich by Rawlinson, this meeting in the desert, spies are sent off into Central Asia.

One of these is Alexander Burns, who's also a great showman and a travel writer. And Alexander Burns has this wonderful moment when he travels up the Indus on a raft. And they have to have an excuse to get permission to go up the Indus. So what they know is that Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of Lahore, loves horses. They decide to present him with four enormous English cart horses. And then just to add to the whole thing,

they decide they're going to take an old carriage that used to belong to the Lord Mayor of London. And they stuff it full of geographers from the Admiralty who are busy taking soundings of the depth of the Indus and the flow charts and all the rest of it. So this really quite professional spying expedition is heading up the Indus on a raft, being popped at shots being popped at it by local

tribesmen, with Burns sitting beside the Lord Mayor of London's coach and four English dray horses who've been rather out of place. How has this not been made into a film? Wonderful. And Burns, to fast forward,

not only presents a whole body of espionage material to his paymaster, because he is a spy, but he also, as his cover, is the great geographer. And he writes a three volume account of his travels to Bacara, which becomes a bestseller. He's received by Queen Victoria, who thinks he's very charming. He gets not only the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society in London, but he also gets its French equivalent. His book is translated into French and, of course, the Russians read it. And the Russians who do not have spies in Bukharov then send Vikovich to spy it out. And Vikovich successfully rolls up Alexander Byrne's espionage network uh that he's set up uh in

bucaro i mean so it's actually no more than a couple of carpet dealers but already everyone knows they're working british but basically the key is don't write a book the keys don't tell everyone what you're doing i mean it's mad anyway um so so the british managed to create a paranoia in the Russians. I mean, there is a very generalised fear that the Russians definitely are moving south. But no, the Russians do not specifically have their eyes on Afghanistan. And certainly up to this point, other than a brief moment when, again, another wonderful rough story. of Tilsit, when Alexander the Tsar of Russia and Napoleon meet on a barge and plan to abate India together in 1810? 1812 is the retreat. So 1809, 1812, War and Peace opens with Before

Tilsit. That's book one of War and Peace. Today we always read it as War and Peace, but it's actually three volumes, Before Tilted. And the story goes again allegedly but I don't know whether it's true that there is a British spy under the raft. I hope it's true. Peter Hopkirk has this in his book, other people have scribbled it but I certainly want to believe it. And definitely there are plans that Napoleon hatches very far-fetched and bonkers to invade India but that's the only time that russia has actually thought of invading india uh and that was alongside napoleon in this brief moment of of russian french union and uh so nonetheless in london particularly

under somebody called lord ellenborough who is the sort of um i don't know who the equivalent in politics is today maybe michael gove on one of his more Islamist brats. He says, we are in great danger from the Russian bear. And when the news comes that Vicovich has crossed into Russia, Burns is sent on a mission to Kabul to try and pull Das Mohammed into the British sphere. So who's Das Mohammed? Let me interrupt you. Das Mohamed is the man who has just overthrown Ahmad Shah Durrani's grandson, who is called Shah Shuja. Now, Shah Shuja goes off into exile in British India, where he's been kept in reserve

as a British puppet that the British can put back if they want to. Das Mohamed, his enemy, is now running Afghanistan. And is it true, Willie, can I interrupt you they want to. Dost Muhammad, his enemy, is now running Afghanistan. And is it true, Willie, can I interrupt you? Is it true, I read, that Dost Muhammad had 16 wives, 27 sons and 25 daughters? It certainly could be true because he himself is definitely the 18th son of his father. Wow, that's a big family gathering. And as you can imagine, to get to be the ruling heir when you have 17 elder brothers. Yeah, you've got to be.

No uncertain ruthlessness. Anyway, Das Mohammed actually has no ill feeling towards the British at all or any particular fondness for the Russians. And Burns says very clearly that there's absolutely no need to topple Das Mohammed. We can pull him into our net and into our alliances very easily. But by this time,

Burns is the most hated man in India because he has just come, got all the glory, met Queen Victoria, got the two gold medals. And all his superiors who've been working on the Afghan frontier absolutely hate him. They are green with jealousy at the success of this glamorous young man. And there's also quite a lot of stories that he's been sleeping with the women of Kabul and all this sort of stuff.

So the two spy chiefs, Pottinger and Waite, do their best to rubbish everything that Burns is sending from Kabul. And in the end, a very bad decision that Dost Muhammad needs to be removed. He doesn't. And at this point, the East India Company doesn't even have a border with Afghanistan. They have to go through the Sikh Punjab. Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, has an incredibly wonderful army trained up by ex-Napoleonic generals. He has fantastic cannon, which anyone who's in London can see

because they're now lined up on the lawns of Chelsea Hospital. If you go into Chelsea, you can see all these fantastic state-of-the-art Sikh cannon with all Ranjit Singh's insignia on them. And the army sets off. 20,000 men leave

Ferozpur in the Punjab. And with them are this fantastic camp followers. One general has 26 camels to carry his kit and a bar. There are

five camels dedicated only to bringing the army's supply of cheroots. One camel carries nothing. Five camels with cheroots? Is that possible? And one camel is entirely carrying eau de cologne for the officers. Makes you proud

to be British. Best of all, they've also, of course, brought their foxhounds. Of course. And the ridiculous army marches off through the Punjab, which is perfectly because it's fertile and lovely, but then into the Baluchi desert

in the middle of summer. They're meant to leave in winter and they've all left in winter outfits. But because Rajat Singh has been frantically dragging his feet on giving them permission, quite rightly, to cross the Punjab, because he knows that the minute they put the East India Company north

and south of him, he's dead. So they end up crossing the Baluchi desert in the middle of high summer, temperatures reaching 50 degrees, and they drop like flies. Half the foxhounds die. There are all sorts of...

Somehow, Lady Sail, who's with the army, manages to get her grand piano through. How many camels have been employed by Lady Sail to get it up? Anyway. So this ridiculous... So why is Lady Sail going?

Willie, why is Lady Sail going? They have the odicoloneologne, they have the shoes. The one thing they don't have is a mat. Right. Why is she going? Tom, that's a good question. Why does Lady Sail go and why does she take... I mean, that's mad to take.

That's just deluded to take a piano with you. Well, you have to ask Lady Sail. But she's going along just for the fun of it. She takes the grand piano because she wants to play it. Lady Sail is going for the fun of it, for the fun of it. She takes the grand piano because she wants to play it. Lady Sale is going for the fun of it, for the excitement of it. No, no, she's married to Fighting Bob Sale, who is the... OK, right, right. So she's a military wife.

So there's not... I think, actually, in fairness, Lady Sale follows several months later. She's not actually on the advance guard. OK, OK. Nonetheless, she does bring a grand piano. OK. I suppose it's like taking an iphone or something isn't it um anyway they say they have they have they have you know 260 camels of kit uh 50 uh 30 camels carrying shrews but they don't have a map and they belatedly uh try and buy um off the french napoleonic general working for and it's in a vehicle uh i think avatar bel Avatar Bale, one of the Napoleonic generals,

sells them his sketch notes and sketch maps of Afghanistan that he's made on his journey from France. And the Eastern Company pays something colossal, like I think £25,000, which in 1842 is more or less like sort of a million pounds for these sketch maps done on horseback by a guy without surveying equipment. And so they get very lost. And there's a lot of, you know, which way is Afghanistan? And massive death of sepoys who haven't been given any water, massive casualties. But against all likelihood, they arrive the other side of the desert, another side of the mountains at Kandahar.

And they take Kandahar the same night, although they haven't got artillery because they've left them behind. And the march from this point is exactly like the Taliban this week. Everyone just runs off and leaves. And they take Kabul without firing a shot. It's a direct parallel and this happens over and over again in Afghanistan the Afghans do not like to fight pitch battles uh they're much too kind for that they let you take their cities and then

it all begins with guerrilla activity and this is exactly what happened but one winter the British do amateur theatricals in Kabul uh they go duck shooting and ice skating and they play cricket don't they they They play cricket. There's lots of cricket. And there's lots of hunting of the foxhounds. Foxhounds who've survived the march are taken out to hunt jackals. And presumably the piano comes in very useful over there. In the meantime, the man put in charge of this, a guy called Mac Norton,

who is an orientalist who goes, at one point, certainly, he's on the top of an elephant as he's entering Kabul, translating the Arabian Nights from Arabic. And Mac Norton, who has blue-tinted spectacles, also, like everybody else, hates Alexander Burns. So Burns has got nothing to do, totally sidelined. He holds a Burns night. He is a cousin of Alexander Burns, and Burns got nothing to do, totally sidelined. He holds a Burns night. He is a cousin of Alexander Burns and he's a cousin of Robbie Burns, although his name is spelled slightly differently. And there's reels and there's haggises in Kabul. But with nothing

better to do, he gets back again and he starts seducing the wives of the Afghan warlords. And this, of course, is a very bad thing to do if you are in Afghanistan, do not sleep with any warlords' wives. And this is literally what precipitates the rebellion. He takes the mistress of one of the tribal leaders called Abdullah Khan al-Chakzai. And according to one of the Afghan epic poems, which my friend Bruce Wannell translated to me about this, there's a passage where Abdullah Khan Achaikzai summons his tribesmen and says, the English

have ridden the donkey of their desires into the field of stupidity. This is possibly my favorite line in the whole book. We must all avoid riding the donkey of our desires into fields of stupidity well i think i think that's a perfect note on which to quickly take a break and now having ridden the donkey of stupidity into the field or whatever it is um we'll have a break and when we come back we will ride the donkey of stupidity even further to ultimate disaster.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes,

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. From Cleopatra to Camilla Parker Bowles, and from Madame de Pompadour to Lola Montes, the other woman has been a staple of gossip throughout history. But who will make our list of the top ten mistresses of all time? Some of them are famed for their beauty, some for their political acumen, and some for their prowess in selling oranges.

Glamour, sophistication, intelligence, savoir-faire. Join us for an evening rich in all these qualities and more. Dominic and myself will be at the Rest Is History Live at the London Podcast Festival, Friday, September 10th at 7pm. Tickets cost £12.50 and can be bought at kingsplace.co.uk. Kingsplace.co.uk. See you there. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We have been riding the donkey of desire into the fields of stupidity. And what's going to happen next? I foresee disaster ahead. William Dalrymple, am I right? You are exactly right, Dominic Thabrook. That is exactly what happened. So the Afghan tribes rise up and quite a lot of the tribes had been very happy to support Shah Shujan, were pleased to see him back, but none of them

like this British occupation force. And the East India Company army has behaved as it would have done in Bengal. They've laid out, first of all, their tents, then afterwards the tents are replaced by wooden and then a few brick structures or stone structures on the plains outside Kabul, as if it was the plains of Bengal. Apparently, omitting to notice that every single one of these these tents is overlooked by mountains immediately on top and perfect sniper territory. And they're too busy fox hunting and doing Scots reels and all the rest of it. So that when the uprising breaks out, very quickly the insurgents steal some East India Company

cannon, pull it onto the hills around the camp and start bombarding it. And it's a completely indefensible position. And then, as chance would have it, because this uprising was not particularly planned, it was started by Abdul Khandullah khan atchak's eye because uh his girlfriend had run off to alexander burns's house um winter uh the first winter snows begin to fall the passes block up and there's clearly no help coming from calcutta or from the punjab just a quick question

about the army uh will, that occurs to me. You describe them as East India Company cannon. So is this definitely an East India Company expedition rather than a British national expedition? So when we were talking about the anarchy, and particularly battles like Plassey on the last time I came to the show, it's a very black and white thing because the company had 200,000 sepoids,

which were the force which invaded the whole of India. But in this case, there are now a mixture of regiments of the line, in other words, regular British army, fighting alongside East India Company sepoids. So the great mass of troops are East India Company sepoids, but I think there are at least two regiments of regular British Army so this is reflecting the position of the East India Company which by the 1840s has become much more

of what I suppose today we would call a public-private punch what started off as the ultimate libertarian trading company with no government links at all, other than a charter to start it, has now become 50% owned by the British government

and by 1840 has actually been forbidden to, has lost its monopoly on trade. And so it's looking much more like a semi-governmental organization than the early days of Clive and Hastings. Right. But still, the fact remains, almost all the troops are Indian sepoys born in India. There's some Nepalese and some Gurkhas.

And then there's a regiment of Skinner's Horse, for example, which is led by Anglo-Indians, the Skinner family. But there are several regiments in the line. And there's a snobbery of hierarchy. And the regiments in the line of British Army consider themselves superior to the East India Company. The East India Company, however, speak Urdu and Hindi and feel that they're much superior to British Army

who don't know what's going on locally. So there's lots of rivalry going on. And that is reflected in the response to the uprising because the Elphinstone, William Elphinstone, who is the very dim cousin of the brilliant Mount Stewart Elphinstone, who is a gouty veteran of Waterloo

who hasn't seen action since 1815. We're now talking 1842, January. And his deputy, who's a man called Shelton, and he are on non-speaks, they are massive divisions, and it's a complete fiasco. Not only are the company defeated in battle on

a few occasions, they do ride out and try and take on the insurgents in the hills around the country. They are running out of food. Lady Sale has now had to burn her grand piano for firewood because they've run out of eating material um they've eaten the foxhounds by the stage oh that's very bad form but the cricket bats are all right please tell me the cricket bats are okay i i think the cricket

bats i suspect would also have been uh also but you know things are getting bad. Firm primary source evidence for that. Anyway, there's obviously no option but to retreat. And it's now January 1842. And the Afghans seem to be dragging their feet a little during negotiations. And people are mystified

by this because they think they probably want to get rid of us as much as we want to get out of here. And it drags on for two or three weeks. Finally, the moment comes in January when they set off into the snow. And everyone knows this is not looking good. The passes are anyway almost entirely blocked. No one

moves armies around Central Asia in the middle of winter because you can freeze in seconds outside your tent. And what of course has happened is the Afghans prepared a whole series of barricades and ambushes, and they're just waiting for them. And within a few hours of setting off from the cantum, not only have attacks begun on the column, but the cantum has been burnt down and looted, rather like some of the scenes seen in Kabul this weekend of looting.

The people run, oh no, exactly what happened to Bamiyan when he was deserted a month ago. Exactly what happened at Bagram Air Base when the Americans left it two months ago. The locals just ran in and looted it. It's exactly what happens in the British cantoomment in January 1842. So the first night, the British are stuck in the snow, having snipers firing at them, and they can see behind them the flames of the cantoomment, the light, the cantoomment, flickering fires, and they know there's no retreat, they can't go back, but it's five days

march to Jalanabad. And what I remember from Flashman is that Elphinstone gets shot in the buttocks, doesn't he? Well, that's so much with Flashman. There's an awful lot which is historically accurate but a certain amount of license... Right, okay, so that didn't happen. That's terrible. The one fact I remember isn't true.

Elphinstone is definitely wounded but in the sources I've read, buttocks are not. Okay. Explicitly. But yes, Elphi Bay, as he's called, is wounded, has a stroke, I think, probably in the middle of all this horror. And day by day, the number of survivors goes down from 20,000 to 10,000 to 5,000 to 2,000

there's a terrible moment at a place called Jigdalik where the holly hedge is erected in their path and the cavalry so far have been marching out fairly easily, can't get over this and they're shot down and people are crawling over it

and several hundred die on this hedge, unable to cross this barrier that's erected in their way. And finally, there's a bunch of lancers making the last stretch, and the 51st Foot, who form themselves into a square on the hill of Gundamuk, fight until their ammunition is exhausted,

and then form a bayonet line. There's a very famous painting of this, isn't there, Willie? Famous painting, exactly. And they fight until their last bullet. They form a bayonet wall. But the Afghans realise there's no need to charge bayonets. They just pull back. And one of the features of the war is that the Afghans have this very old-fashioned mughal jazail which is a a hunting

rifle that shah jahan could be seen using to hunt deer and it's a big heavy unwieldy thing but it's it has a very long barrel and is accurate over a distance of about half a mile while the brown best musket fires only 300 yards so they realize there there's no need to take these guys on shoulder to shoulder. They just pull back and shoot from a distance. And every last man is killed, except for one guy who has wrapped himself in the colours. And he's taken hostage because they think he must be worth something because he's got such fancy coloured clothes on. And that is a guy called Thomas Souter. And the first British camp in Helmand was called Camp Souter after his memory.

Anyway, this leaves some Lancers who are cut down one by one by the last of the cavalry until only Dr. Brydon is left on his nag. And the reason Dr. Brydon survives is he has a copy of Blackwoods magazine. He's a reader. He would definitely have subscribed to The Rest is History if he was around today. He has a copy of Blackwoods magazine in his forage cap, so that when these two

Afghan horsemen come, one of them shoots a pistol which misfires, and then he hacks at him with a sword, but it goes into Blackwood's magazine, which is sitting in his hat because he seemingly wanted to read in the evening and doesn't pierce his skull.

And he alone of the British troops makes it through to Jalalabad. Did Blackwood's use that as a kind of advertising slogan? Should have done. Read Blackwoods, it'll keep you alive. It's the kind of thing the TLS would do, or London Review of Books or something. Contrary to the myth, he's not

the only survivor, he's not even the only white survivor, several other troops straggle in after him. Bizarrely, a Greek shopkeeper who'd been running this sort of kebab shop at the cantonment has hidden in a cave and comes in with a bottle of uzu a week later. And there's a whole bunch of Nepali Gurkhas

who have just gone up some valleys and are completely happy with the temperature and are completely used to surviving. And so the Gurkhas sort of reappear about a week later in perfect order with their medal shining and all the rest of it. And then some of the Hindu sepoys turn up a year and a half later at the Kumella in Hardwa, having walked all the way home. So he's not, in fact, the only survivor.

So two people, what their fate is. So Lady Sale. Lady Sale, along with all the other ladies, or several of the other ladies, not all of them, many are killed. But Lady Sale, along with several others, have taken hostage. And then there's protracted hostage negotiations.

And basically, at the end of the day, there's a swap. Dost Muhammad, who had been captured, or rather given himself up, had been kept in the British hill station of Missouri in the Himalayas. Dost Muhammad is brought back. And the man negotiating is Dost Muhammad's son, Akbar Khan,

who is a young, handsome sort of movie hero type who's led this resistance and planned the holly hedge at Djigdalik and all the rest. And Joss Muhammad is brought home. He makes an agreement with the British that he will not allow the Russians in. And otherwise, he's allowed to come back unmolested.

And you end up, and Lady Sale and the others are swapped for him. And they haven't been molested. There are several other they've been looked after well have they or have they fared in captivity very well including my direct forebear uh colin mckenzie who's one who's dressed up in afghan dress making a great sort of uh he has lots of self-portraits painted when government, which was in power before all this, coming back into power.

And because no one can threaten it anymore because of the enormous prestige it's won, defeating imperial power, Dost Muhammad then stays in power for the rest of his life and he has a very grand tomb which i've seen in the ghazagar in herat one of the most beautiful sufi shrines uh in afghanistan and and willie what what about um shah shuja so shah shuja who's the hero of my book return of a king the king in question question is Shah Shuja. Shah Shuja is a very attractive character. He is a poet. He keeps his nerve when the uprising breaks out in Kabul and when the British flee and desert him.

He's holed up in the Balahisar, having defended it very admirably. He's an extremely brave man. His flaw is he's too grand. having defended it very admirably. He's an extremely brave man. He's persistent. His flaw is he's too grand. He makes everybody stand in his dhurbars, which was the Mughal style, and his mother is Mughal, but it's not the manner the Afghans used to. They're used to sitting down on the carpet

all together in a tribal jirga. And this egalitarian mode is what makes Das Mohammed so successful. He doesn't playground. He entertains and charms all his tribesmen. And this is one of the many parallels, if we can move on to parallels, with the present.

But just before that, what happens to Shishuja? Shishuja survives all this. The British cut up, the deals are done, and Shah Shuja in the end is killed by a godson who wants to get in with Dos Mohamed. But for that, he may well have survived the whole thing uh but but he he has slighted a godson who feels he hasn't been given promotion or something and

so there's a small petty internal feud does so it's it's rudeness that does it and sorry i interrupted you when you were talking about the parallels because that is a great parallel isn't it because um there is a huge premium in Afghanistan still on basic climate. And this was one of the great qualities of Hamid Karzai, who would make every Afghan, particularly any tribal elder, who'd come in from the countryside, he would give them time, he would talk to them, he would... So he was the first president of...

He was the first president of the United States. Scored in what, 2002? In 2002. But the important point, as far as, again, this war is concerned, that we're talking about, is he is the direct descendant of Shah Shuja. He is the head of the Pupulzai tribe. We basically put the same guy in twice. Karzai is a slightly nicer version of Shah Shuja.

And Karzai did actually an incredible job charming everyone. And his replacement, Ashraf Ghani, who incidentally is a good friend, was very kind to me, was the man that helped me find a lot of the sources for the book when he was head of the history department and chancellor of Kabul University. Ashraf was incredibly rude to people. was very grand he had worked for the World Bank taught at Columbia he didn't have time for fools he was a very successful university professor and World Bank technocrat

but would give tribal leaders who'd walked 20 days across Afghanistan to see him 10 minutes he'd literally say you've got 10 minutes another story I've heard which is interesting is that he also put his feet up in front of tribal elders. Now, in India still today, I've always been taught that you must never point your feet at someone. If you're sitting cross-legged, it's hugely rude in that culture to point your feet or to put your feet up.

Ashraf Ghani had a sort of poof in front of his armchair, and he to put your feet up. Ashraf Ghani had a sort of puff in front of his armchair and he just put his feet up like you would at home. But this went down apparently very badly and serially offended a whole series of tribal elders who invited him to his inner sanctum. And Karzai never did this. And a weird story with this is that Karzai read my book, Return of a King, and he had always been haunted

by the fact that Shalshuja was his forebear, and that Shalshuja had died regarded as a traitor by many of the Afghans. And he was particularly worried because the tribe which brought down Shalshuja,

who were the leaders of the guy who's, sorry, the tribesmen of the man whose mistress, Alexander Burns, seduced Abdullah Khan Achaikzade, were the Gilzai tribe. And so beneath what we perceive very easily today as a simple battle of Democrats and Westernized Afghans against Islamist tribal barbarians actually masks a old tribal fault line, is the Barakzais and Popozais, who are the landowners, against the Gilzai, who are the herdsmen and the day labourers on the Popozais land. And Mullah Omar is a descendant of the resistance leader of

1842. So, Willie, the implication of all that well, that would for some listeners, they will say that that creates a sense of inevitability, that the patterns of history are merely repeating themselves. Is that too simplistic, though? Or do you think there is a kind of truth to that?

In this case, we did literally put the same guy on the throne twice. We put the head of the Popozai tribe, and he was brought down by the Gilzai. Was that simple? And let's say the weird story that follows is that Karzai read Return of the King very closely. He was given it by someone as he was on his way to Washington to meet Obama. And none of us knew any about this until WikiLeaks, because it turned out that Hillary Clinton was very upset, because when he came out of the place, having read this book, he altered his policy and began to be publicly much more hostile to the americans while taking their help while taking their military he saw it as vital that he didn't look like shah suja and appear to be the puppet of the americans and so publicly started making very rude remarks about americans you know creating casualties by uh inadequate

intelligence bombing the wrong villages all this sort of stuff. And he was very frosty to Obama. And WikiLeaks revealed these letters, emails from Hillary Clinton, which were, we now know, taken by the Russians and handed to WikiLeaks. What is this bloody book that Karzai is reading? Ever since he picked it up he's become completely intransigent and won't talk to us and is incredibly rude and this was all on the on when wikileaks came out this is all on the front page of the new york

time uh and at this point i then got invited to um to to brief the book more and more but the best bit was when Khazai then called me to one Ramadan to his palace, now occupied by the Taliban. I saw a picture on the Internet this morning of the Taliban flag flying over the Ard, the the old citadel in the center of Kabul. But we basically did a deal. And Khazai said, if you come to me during Ramadan, which is the kind of big fasting and the holiday in the Islamic world, come to me during Ramadan and we will talk every evening after Iftar, after breaking the fast. We will have fruit together and I will ask you about shashuja and in return you can have an interview. So I got six hours of interview with Kaza, which went into a york times profile uh which is online if anyone wants to read it uh and in return kaza i got to ask all the questions about shashuja uh from these sources which ashraf ghani had given me so it's all it's a rare case of a history book in a small way genuinely uh altering uh the course of uh of policy day um in the end of, genuinely altering the course of policy.

In the end, of course, it didn't make any difference because, as we now know, the wider lineaments of history repeating overtook all this. And we're now back exactly where we were at the end of the 1842 First Anglo-Afghan War with the same ruler in charge. Well, that's the question, isn't it? Isn't it, Willie? Do you think, looking back now after 20 years, I mean, I know this is a massive question and we're reaching the end of the podcast anyway, but do you think the Taliban's victory was inevitable?

No, I don't think it was inevitable. I think Karzai showed that with the right politeness and kindness and by distancing himself from his Western host, he could mask the fact that he was kept in power by a Western puppet master and make a regime which was acceptable to the Afghan. But it was touch and go. And when someone less dexterous, Ashraf Ghani, took over and was rude to people and diminished the popularity of the regime and alienated one by one tribal leaders from across the country. Ashraf actually had a temper. He used to throw things at people. I heard a story, for example, one press conference where he threw an ashtray at a female journalist.

That sort of thing just doesn't play. Because really, I mean, the general sense that historians have is the interplay of great tectonic plates grinding against each other, vast impersonal forces. But in 1842, it's Burns seducing the wrong woman. And you're saying that now it's a guy throwing ashtrays at people. I think we know in our own time. Are those tiny kind of trigger points that affect? I think from our own experience in our own time, there are tiny things, these great forces of history, these great Tolstoyan moments, these great Tolstoyan forces which form the economy and shape the destiny of nations do exist. But equally, tiny little accidents can alter things. For example, in our own time, if Boris Johnson had had, you know, he famously wrote the two articles pro-Brexit and against Brexit. If he had actually decided to back camera and not taken the path of going for Brexit,

would we be where we are now with Europe? Quite possibly not. One man's decision at a crucial moment can alter things. In the context of Afghanistan, though, you say that this is a society where politeness is very important and knowing the rules of courtesy are very important do you think it's a problem and you know for the west right the way from from from the 1840s that we tend not to know these rules it certainly is a problem um and you know as as I said, there are a huge array of possibilities every day in all our lives. If we were to turn right rather than to turn left at a given moment, how history would be different. But, yes, I think I don't think that it was impossible that a pro-Western regime could have survived in Afghanistan because the Taliban

were very unpopular. They were an extremely brutal regime. This regime now, though, is regarded as incredibly corrupt. And it's rather like the Islamic revolution in Iran in the 70s. There is a huge number of people who feel that a small elite have gobbled up corruptly huge sums of money. There are stories circulating in Kabul now that Ashraf Ghani's car was stuffed with cash and they couldn't get it all in the plane he escaped in and a lot of the money was left on the

runway in Kabul. Three or four people have told me the story. I have no idea whether it's true or not. But the fact that enough people believe these stories creates an atmosphere where the regime that has just ended was seen to be corrupt, greedy.

Ghani's nephew left in a Learjet with an Instagram post saying, trying to leave as bad as I can. That sort of thing creates massive upset with poor people who have not got their hands in the money pot, who are not

eating the honey. And I think many people will be waiting to see whether this regime is better for them. Many women will have their lives destroyed. There will be huge cruelty. There will be terrible... I mean, I

personally think it's a catastrophe. And I have many, many friends whose lives have been hobbled and restricted and whose lives may well be in danger. I got an email from Karzai's office this morning saying he's okay and that he's... It read rather like, in fact, a kind of carry on up the Kaiba email saying, there was some moments of tension, but all is now restored. Right, well, hope for the best. What a somber note on which to end. Incredible sang-froid.

But many people's lives will be deeply damaged by this. Whether this regime manages to solidify itself and hold together like Das Mohammed managed after the catastrophe of 1842 when he came back into power remains to be seen. Already, certainly, the Taliban have proved to be far more disciplined and less fractured than we all thought they were. The idea was that this was a bunch of disparate hooligans and fundamentalists in the hills, incapable really of co-hearing and mounting a coordinated campaign. But that was clearly very wrong. It's been an extraordinary military success. So a bit like the way that the various tribes in 1842 got together to absolutely seal the doom of the British retreat. Exactly that. Although again, you know, there were all sorts of tensions

and tribal rivalries within the resistance. But they held together. Yeah. OK, well, that's an incredibly sombre note on which to end. And again, absolute tour de force

of historical explication. Yeah, thank you, Willie. Thank you. You retain your record. Yeah, you definitely retain your record. Could I, there's just one thing, one other note on which I'd like to end,

which is, it's not to do with Afghanistan, but it is to do with Iraq, where Western forces also intervened and left a kind of a lot of damage. And it's a walk that I'm doing on the 23rd and 24th. So that's next Monday, if you're listening to this, as it comes out. And next Tuesday, walking 50 miles in 24 hours. 23rd and 24th so that's uh next monday if you're listening to this as it comes out and next tuesday walking um 50 miles in 24 hours and that is partly in aid of yezidi refugees um

religious minority in iraq who still can't go back to their homes who are suffering terribly intense so any um any sponsorship you could give me on that would be hugely appreciated and you can get the link on my it's my pinned tweet at holland underscore tom so many thanks for that thank you willie for allowing me to do that thank you dominic another appeal at this point um rory stewart's turquoise mountain foundation has issued an appeal for afghans who are in difficulty at the moment in afghanistan rory stewart's um uh twitter site is easy to find there aren't any other rory stewart's um and at his pinned tweet at the top of his thing but a very very well yeah yeah thank you willie that was absolutely fascinating so that ends our afghan duo and

we will see you all next week for more the Rest is History. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.