Return of a King Page 3

  The Sadozais

  The Barakzais

  Acknowledgements

  There may be easier places to research a history book than Afghanistan and Pakistan, but few which provide more unexpected diversion in the course of hunting down texts, letters and manuscripts. On the way, I have amassed a huge debt to a number of friends who kept me safe and sane while gathering the raw material for this book.

  In Afghanistan: Rory Stewart put me up in his Kabul fort where I was beautifully looked after by everyone at Turquoise Mountain – Shoshana Coburn Clark, Thalia Kennedy and Will and Lucy Beharel. Siri Trang Khalsa took me on a weekend trip to explore Istalif and Charikar; she also linked me up with Watan in Kandahar. Mitch Crites provided reassuring company and sage advice about what was and wasn’t possible, as did Paul Smith at the British Council.

  It is not every day you find a Chief of Secret Police who has closely read your work, and I am grateful to Amrullah Saleh of the NSD, President Karzai’s then security chief, both for his fearsome critique of The Last Mughal (in his view Zafar, a despicable weakling, lacked patriotic zeal and deserved no sympathy) and more particularly for connecting me with Anwar Khan Jagdalak, under whose protection I was able to trace the route of the retreat. Anwar Khan put his own life at risk to show me his home village – I remain forever in his debt.

  I also remain hugely indebted to Najibulla Razaq who came with me to Jagdalak, Jalalabad and Herat. He was a fund of calm guidance when confronted with unexpected Afghan situations. I’ll never forget how on my first trip, when we touched down together at Herat, we found that the old 1950s airport terminal was locked, as the man who had the key to the building had gone off for noon prayers. This followed a check-in at which I had been given a boarding pass marked ‘Kabul – Riyadh’ and when I pointed out that I was going to Herat, the airline official had replied that it didn’t matter, ‘they’ll let you on the plane anyway’. When an old tractor arrived and dumped our bags at the edge of the apron, in the absence of trolleys, Najibulla quickly found two little boys with wheelbarrows who carried our bags to the line of shrapnel-marked cars which acted as the Herat taxi fleet. Najibulla was also an excellent guide to the Herat Museum of the Jihad: a collection of objects left behind by the various foreigners who have foolishly tried to conquer Afghanistan, ranging from British cannon from the First Afghan War through to Russian tanks, jets and helicopter gunships. It won’t be long, one can be certain, before a few shot-up American Humvees and British Land-Rovers are added to the collection.

  Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Special Representative, took me on his farewell picnic to the Panjshir, where under the willows by the side of a river, we had an oddly English lunch in the drizzle, with rugs and cucumber sandwiches and plastic cups of Chardonnay. If you ignored his ever-alert phalanx of bodyguards, their walkie-talkies crackling and assault rifles primed, as well as the litter of wrecked Soviet APCs and downed helicopter gunships, it could almost have been the Cotswolds. There Sherard briefed me on the political situation and its parallels with the First Afghan War. He also passed on detailed security advice and provided me with a tiny high-tech satellite tracking gizmo in case I got kidnapped on my way to Gandamak: if I pressed a panic button it would reveal my location and record a few seconds of audio in which I was supposed to identify my would-be captors. I took it with me, and was glad to be able to return it unused.

  Brigadier General Simon Levey gave me a very helpful satellite map of the route of the retreat. Jayant Prasad and Gautam Mukhopadhaya were both wonderfully hospitable at the Indian Embassy. Saad Mohseni and Thomas Ruttig both provided useful advice and contacts across Afghanistan. I owe a lot to other friends made in Kabul including Jon Lee Anderson, Jon Boone, Hayat Ullah Habibi, Eckart Schiewek and Summer Coish.

  Dr Ashraf Ghani, an erudite historian as well as former Finance Minister, gave me invaluable help with Persian and Afghan sources, while Jawan Shir Rasikh took me to the Kabul book bazaar at Jowy Sheer where we found many of them. Andy Miller of UNESCO helped get me access to the Bala Hisar and helped steer us both clear of Soviet era minefields as we explored it. Sayed Makdoum Rahin and Dr Omar Sultan got me into the Kabul archives and Ghulam Sakhi Munir helped me once inside. The fabulous Philip Marquis of the French Archaeological Mission DAFA provided access to his brilliant library as well as Gallic good cheer, Camembert and the best claret in Afghanistan.

  Jolyon Leslie was generous with his learning and experience and helped me get into Timur’s tomb and the citadel in Herat, both of which he has beautifully restored for the Aga Khan, marshalling for the purpose more workmen than usually toil in biblical epics into moving quantities of soil and so revealing the fabulous Timurid tile decoration which had lain hidden for centuries. During this restoration Jolyon had to remove dead Soviet cannon and anti-aircraft emplacements, as well as a massive Soviet booby trap left as a farewell present to Herat: a network of live shells connected to an old tank battery at the top of a thirteenth-century hexagonal tower: bastions first built to defend Herat from the Mongol hordes were still being used to defend the Russians from the Mujehedin little more than two decades ago.

  The warm and fearless Nancy Hatch Dupree walked me around the site of the Kabul cantonments and the hill of Bibi Mahru and helped in a thousand other ways. At the age of eighty-four she continues to commute between her homes in Kabul and Peshawar, sometimes driving herself down the Khyber Pass, sometimes by Red Cross flights: ‘I am their only frequent flyer,’ she told me when I bumped into her in Kabul airport recently. One of my fondest memories of my first research trip to Kabul was taking Nancy out to dinner at the Gandamak Lodge. In the middle of the entrée bursts of automatic gunfire were let off immediately outside whereupon all the hardened hacks abandoned their meals and dived under the tables. Only Nancy continued unfazed, announcing from her seat, ‘I think I’ll just finish my chips.’

  I was looked after in Kandahar by Hazrat Nur Karzai, guided (over the telephone) by Alex Strick von Linschoten and (in the flesh) by Habib Zahori, and generously given shelter and guarded by Mark Acton, William Jeaves and Dave Brown of Watan Risk Management at their Watan Villa: who would guess that a house full of ex-Scots Guardsmen living in such tense conditions could remain teetotal for weeks at time? But I am very grateful: Kandahar is no place to visit without a little assistance.

  In Pakistan: Mohsin and Zahra Hamid had me to stay while I researched in Lahore and provided diverting entertainment and delicious Punjabi khana in the evenings. I should especially thank Mohsin’s father for giving over his study for my camp bed. While in Lahore Fakir Aijazuddin, Ali Sethi, Sohaib Husayn Sherzai and Mr Abbas of the Punjab Archives were generous with advice and getting me access to documents and new Persian and Urdu sources. Farrukh Hussein helped me find Mubarak Haveli and told me about the taikhana through which his ancestor had helped Shah Shuja escape from his house arrest.

  In India: my neighbour Jean-Marie Lafont instructed me on Sikh history and the role of the French generals of the Fauj-i-Khas; Michael Axworthy tutored me on the Qajars; and James Astill shared invaluable Afghan contacts. The great Professor B. N. Goswamy in Chandigarh found some remarkable images and went out of his way to send me .jpgs and help get permissions. Reza Hosseini with huge generosity told me about his important find in the National Archives, a Persian manuscript copy of the Muharaba Kabul wa Qandahar, and even more sweetly brought me a copy of the Kanpur published edition of 1851. Lucy Davison of Banyan ably organised logistics for a research trip following the route of Shah Shuja’s disastrous 1816 attempt to invade Kashmir over the high passes of the Pir Panjal range.

  In the UK: David Loyn, James Ferguson, Phil Goodwin and my cousin Anthony Fitzherbert all gave advice on how to find my way around modern Afghanistan. Charles Allen, John Keay, Ben Macintyre, Bill Woodburn and Saul David were invaluable in sharing their knowledge of Afghanistan’s past history and enabled me to track down new sources. Farrukh Husain of Silk Road Books sent me parcel after parcel of Victorian accounts of the war. Peter and Kath Hopkirk, whose epic work on the Great Game first introduced me – and many of my generation – to the First Afghan War, helped with Alexander Burnes, as did his engaging new biographer, Craig Murray, whose forthcoming work looks set to be an important re-evaluation of this most intriguing figure. Sarah Wallington and Maryam Philpott tracked down invaluable sources in the British Library while Pip Dodd in the National Army Museum, Sue Stronge at the V&A and John Falconer in the British Library went out of their way to give me access to their artworks. I have the happiest memories of an afternoon with Elizabeth Errington going over the pick of Charles Masson’s lovingly boxed and minutely catalogued Afghan finds in the store rooms of the British Museum.

  In Moscow Dr Alexander Morrison and Olga Berard successfully hunted down the lost intelligence reports of Ivan Vitkevitch for me. A number of scholars helped me tackle the Persian and Urdu sources: Bruce Wannell came to stay in a tent in my Delhi garden for several weeks to work with me on the Waqi’at-i-Shah Shuja, the Muharaba-i Kabul y Qandahar, and the Naway Ma’arek. Aliyah Naqvi took a break from her dissertation on the court of Akbar to help me with a different Akbar and helped tackle Maulana Hamid Kashmiri’s Akbarnama. Tommy Wide worked on the Jangnama and the ‘Ayn al-Waqayi, as well as helping double-check the identities of the different Sadozai graves in and around Timur’s Tomb. Danish Husain and his mother, Professor Syeda Bilqis Fatema Husaini, worked together on the Tarikh-i-Sultani and the Letters of Aminullah Khan Logari. I am especially grateful to Robert McChesney for generously sending me his translation of the Siraj ul-Tawarikh.

  Several friends were good enough to read through portions of the book and offer useful critiques, among them Chris Bayly, Ayesha Jalal, Ben Hopkins, Robert Nichols, Alexander Morrison, Ashra
f Ghani, Anthony Fitzherbert, Chiki Sarkar and Nandini Mehta – the brilliant dream team at Penguin India – Akash Kapur, Fleur Xavier, David Garner, Monisha Rajesh, James Caro, Jawan Shir Rasikh, Maya Jasanoff, Jolyon Leslie, Gianni Dubbini, Sylvie Dominique, Pip Dodd, Tommy Wide, Nile Green, Christine Noelle, Michael Semple and Shah Mahmoud Hanifi. Jonathan Lee put in weeks of work minutely annotating an early draft of this manuscript and helped me understand much about the complicated dynamics of the uprising that I had managed to miss. One of the most interesting and useful few days I had in the preparation of this book was spent visiting him in New Zealand and walking along stormy winter beaches north of Auckland as he explained the complexities of Afghan tribal history.

  I have been lucky as ever to have as my agent the incomparable David Godwin, and my brilliant primary publishers at Bloomsbury: Michael Fishwick, Alexandra Pringle, Nigel Newton, Richard Charkin, Phillip Beresford, Katie Bond, Laura Brooke, Trâm-Anh Doan, David Mann, Paul Nash, Amanda Shipp, Anna Simpson, Alexa von Hirschberg, Xa Shaw Stewart and Diya Hazra, who have all thrown themselves into this project with huge energy and enthusiasm; thanks too to Peter James, Catherine Best, Martin Bryant and Christopher Phipps; at Knopf, Sonny Mehta, Diana Coglianese and Erinn B. Hartman; Vera Michalski at Buchet Chastel and in Italy the incomparable Roberto Calasso at Adelphi. I am also very grateful for all that Richard Foreman has done for my books since The Last Mughal.

  A writer relies more than anything else on the love and tolerance of his family. Olive, Ibby, Sam and Adam have all been complete sweethearts as their increasingly obsessed husband and father roved the Hindu Kush then returned only to sit banging away on his laptop at the end of the garden, mentally removed from family life and dwelling instead amid the troubles and traumas of 1840s Afghanistan: apologies, and thank you.

  This book is dedicated to the last of our children still based full-time in Delhi, my beloved youngest, Adam.

  William Dalrymple

  Delhi – Kabul – Chiswick,

  December 2009 – September 2012

  1

  No Easy Place to Rule

  The year 1809 opened auspiciously for Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. It was now March, the very beginning of that brief Afghan spring, and the pulse was slowly returning to the veins of the icy landscape long clotted with drifts of waist-high snow. Now the small, sweet-smelling Istalif irises were pushing their way through the frozen ground, the frosted rime on the trunks of the deodars was running to snowmelt, and the Ghilzai nomads were unlatching their fat-tailed sheep from the winter pens, breaking down their goat-hair tents and readying the flocks for the first of the spring migrations to the new grass of the high pastures. It was just then, at that moment of thaw and sap, that Shah Shuja received two pieces of good news – something of a rarity in his troubled reign.1

  The first concerned the recovery of some lost family property. The largest diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Nur, or Mountain of Light, had been missing for more than a decade, but such was the turbulence of the times that no attempt had been made to find it. Shah Zaman, Shuja’s elder brother and predecessor on the throne of Afghanistan, was said to have hidden the gem shortly before being captured and blinded by his enemies. A huge Indian ruby known as the Fakhraj, the family’s other most precious gem, had also disappeared at the same time.

  So Shah Shuja summoned his blind brother and questioned him on the whereabouts of their father’s most famous jewels: was it really true that he knew where they were hidden? Shah Zaman revealed that nine years earlier he had hidden the Fakhraj under a rock in a stream near the Khyber Pass, shortly before being taken prisoner. Later, he had slipped the Koh-i-Nur into a crack in the wall of the fortress cell where he was first seized and bound. A court historian later recorded, ‘Shah Shuja immediately dispatched a few of his most trustworthy men to find these two gems and advised them that they should leave no stone unturned in their efforts. They found the Koh-i-Nur with a Shinwari sheikh who in his ignorance was using it as a paperweight for his official papers. As for the Fakhraj, they found it with a Talib, a student, who had uncovered it when he went to a stream to wash his clothes. They impounded both gems and brought them back in the king’s service.’2

  The second piece of news, about the arrival of an embassy from a previously hostile neighbour, was potentially of more practical use to the Shah. At the age of only twenty-four, Shuja was now in the seventh year of his reign. By temperament a reader and a thinker, more interested in poetry and scholarship than in warfare or campaigning, it was his fate to have inherited, while still an adolescent, the far-flung Durrani Empire. That Empire, founded by his grandfather Ahmad Shah Abdali, had been built out of the collapse of three other Asian empires: the Uzbeks to the north, the Mughals to the south and to the west the Safavids of Persia. It had originally extended from Nishapur in modern Iran through Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the Punjab and Sindh to Kashmir and the threshold of Mughal Delhi. But now, only thirty years after his grandfather’s death, the Durrani Empire was itself already well on its way to disintegration.

  There was, in fact, nothing very surprising about this. Considering its very ancient history, Afghanistan – or Khurasan, as the Afghans have called the lands of this region for the two last millennia – had had but a few hours of political or administrative unity.3 Far more often it had been ‘the places in between’ – the fractured and disputed stretch of mountains, floodplains and deserts separating its more orderly neighbours. At other times its provinces formed the warring extremities of rival, clashing empires. Only very rarely did its parts happen to come together to attain any sort of coherent state in its own right.

  Everything had always conspired against its rise: the geography and topography and especially the great stony skeleton of the Hindu Kush, the black rubble of its scalloped and riven slopes standing out against the ice-etched, snow-topped ranges which divided up the country like the bones of a massive rocky ribcage.

  Then there were the different tribal, ethnic and linguistic fissures fragmenting Afghan society: the rivalry between the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and the Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns; the schism between Sunni and Shia; the endemic factionalism within clans and tribes, and especially the blood feuds within closely related lineages. These blood feuds rolled malevolently down from generation to generation, symbols of the impotence of state-run systems of justice. In many places blood feuds became almost a national pastime – the Afghan equivalent of county cricket in the English shires – and the killings they engendered were often on a spectacular scale. Under the guise of reconciliation, one of Shah Shuja’s chiefs invited some sixty of his feuding cousins ‘to dine with him’, wrote one observer, ‘having previously laid bags of gunpowder under the apartment. During the meal, having gone out on some pretext, he blew them all up.’ A country like this could be governed only with skill, strategy and a full treasure chest.

  So when at the beginning of 1809 messengers arrived from the Punjab bearing news of an East India Company embassy heading north from Delhi seeking an urgent alliance with him, Shah Shuja had good reason to be pleased. In the past the Company had been a major problem for the Durranis, for its well-disciplined sepoy armies had made impossible the lucrative raids down on to the plains of Hindustan which for centuries had been a principal source of Afghan income. Now it seemed that the Company wished to woo the Afghans; the Shah’s newswriters wrote to him that the Embassy had already crossed the Indus, en route to his winter capital of Peshawar. This not only offered some respite from the usual round of sieges, arrests and punitive expeditions, it potentially provided Shuja with a powerful ally – something he badly needed. There had never been a British embassy to Afghanistan before, and the two peoples were almost unknown to each other, so the Embassy had the additional benefit of novelty. ‘We appointed servants of the royal court known for their refinement and good manners to go to meet them,’ wrote Shah Shuja in his memoirs, ‘and ordered them to take charge of hospitality, and to treat them judiciously, with caution and politeness.’4