ahead.
The Afghan empire had once been powerful beyond legend, wealthy beyond words. As Harlan wrote: ‘During the rule of the antient regime the kings possessed countless treasures and jewels and gold, supplying the expenses of licentiousness and luxury from previously accumulated hereditary wealth. Vast sums were disbursed in the capital cities of Kandahar, Cabul and Peshour.’ This was the empire forged in the mid-eighteenth century by the Afghan conqueror Ahmad Shah Abdali, founder of the Durrani dynasty, who had extended his rule from Kabul to Peshawar and Lahore, and finally to Delhi, Kashmir and Sind. He had crossed the Hindu Kush, subduing the Hazara tribes en route, and then vanquished the Uzbeks of Balkh and Kunduz, taking his realm to the border of modern Afghanistan. The death of Ahmad Shah in 1773 started the steady, bloody disintegration of his empire, and by the 1820s it had fragmented, shot through with fantastically complex internecine feuds, like veins through marble. For as long as anyone could remember a brutal civil war had raged in Afghanistan, punctuated by occasional interludes of tranquillity. Like the Wars of the Roses, two great families, rival clans within the Durrani elite, battled for supremacy: the Saddozai, of which Shah Shujah was the leading claimant, and the Barakzai, whose paramount chief, Dost Mohammed Khan, now ruled in Kabul. The Saddozai princes fought each other while resisting the growing power of the Barakzai clan, whose scions fought bitterly among themselves for supremacy.
The period immediately before Harlan set out for Afghanistan had seen some particularly Byzantine plotting and fratricidal violence. In 1783, Zaman Shah, Ahmad Shah’s grandson (a Saddozai), ascended the throne with the support of Painda Khan (a Barakzai), who became his vizier. Nervous of Painda Khan’s growing power and aware that he was plotting a coup, Zaman Shah first dismissed, then executed him. The Barakzai vizier, however, had left behind no fewer than twenty-three sons, each anxious to avenge him and take power himself. The eldest of these, Fatah Khan, immediately set about provoking a rebellion: Zaman Shah was ousted in favour of his half-brother Shah Mahmud, and then blinded by having his eyeballs pierced with a lancet, the traditional fate of a deposed Afghan king. Shah Mahmud held on for just three years before he was deposed by another Saddozai, Zaman Shah’s brother Shah Shujah al-Moolk.
Shah Shujah was in Peshawar, opening presents from Mountstuart Elphinstone, when he learned that Shah Mahmud was up in arms once more, with the backing of the troublesome Fatah Khan. After six years as king, Shujah was himself ousted and set off on the wandering path that would eventually lead him to Ludhiana. Shah Mahmud was reinstalled, but not for long. In 1818, history repeating itself, he became deeply suspicious of his Barakzai vizier, and Fatah Khan was put to death with an imaginative cruelty spectacular even by the exacting standards of the time. His eyes were removed with a dagger, and the top of his head was peeled off (‘an operation similar to the African mode of scalping’, observed Shah Shujah in his memoirs) before a slow public dismemberment. The blind vizier was led to a large tent erected for the purpose outside the western city of Herat, surrounded by his mortal enemies, and systematically murdered: ears, nose, hands and beard were cut off, and then his feet, before his throat was finally cut.
This lingering death drove Fatah Khan’s many surviving brothers to a peak of vengeful fury (and temporary unity), and after a series of battles Mahmud, the Saddozai king, was beaten back to Herat. The Barakzai brothers set about dividing up the country among themselves: four of them held Peshawar, another five ruled over Kandahar, while Dost Mohammed Khan, the ablest of them all, established himself as chief of Ghazni and gradually set about extending his rule over Kabul. Having divided up the country as completely as their brother had once been dismembered, the remaining brothers naturally now fell to fighting each other.
The Barakzais were a polygamous recipe for friction, sharing a single father but divided by multiple mothers: siblings sharing both mother and father tended to be allies, while half-brothers were more often at loggerheads. The bewildering confusion of plot and counterplot, blood feud coagulating on blood feud, brother against brother, king against vizier, had reduced what is now Afghanistan to a Hobbesian war of all against all, riven with feuds between interrelated warlords. As one commentator said: ‘Sovereignty was an exceedingly uncertain commodity. One moment the Amir of Kabul might be a potent monarch, in the next he might be an object of ridicule, an outcast whose life would be very precarious, if indeed it existed at all.’
Elphinstone and others had painted what they knew of Afghanistan’s turbulent history in the most lurid colours, and Harlan marvelled at the duplicity of the various contenders, the bewildering rise and fall of the claimants. ‘Prince after prince in confused succession mounted the tottering throne,’ he wrote. ‘The prize was literally handed about like a shuttlecock. The king who in the battle may have dispatched a favourite son in the command of his army would probably before night find himself flying from his own troops.’
Yet by 1826 a vague pattern of power had emerged from the bloody morass, with the rise of Dost Mohammed Khan as amir of Kabul, the nearest thing to an Afghan monarch. He was owed at least nominal allegiance by his restive brothers, and ruled by a volatile combination of dictatorship and oligarchy. As Harlan observed: ‘In the course of civil war distant provinces threw off their allegiance or were seized by neighbouring powers. The dominion of Cabulistan became contracted and reduced. The government was seized by an usurping dynasty and the royal family banished.’ Whatever Shah Shujah, lurking in Ludhiana, may have told Harlan about the man currently in power in Kabul, Dost Mohammed Khan was proving a tenacious and increasingly popular ruler. Even today, Afghans use the phrase: ‘Is Dost Mohammed dead, that there is no justice?’ He would not be easy to unseat. Shah Shujah and Dost Mohammed Khan, the old Saddozai pretender and the young Barakzai prince, would represent the opposing political poles of Harlan’s life for the next two decades.
The chronic instability of Afghanistan had infected the surrounding regions. Harlan estimated that his six-hundred-mile route to Peshawar led through at least ‘four independent principalities, divided into many subordinate chieftainships, some as fiefs and others as tributaries to the above mentioned principalities’. None of these was remotely predictable, and any or all might be hostile. The region was also infested with bandits, and Harlan had to restrain his natural inclination to wander off alone in search of plants. The most immediate menace, however, came from his own troops; he had not been out of Ludhiana more than a few days before the first threat to his life.
From among his Indian domestics Harlan had appointed a quartermaster, whose task was to travel ahead of the main body of troops to select that night’s campground and obtain supplies. Although Harlan chose the man he believed to be the most honest of his staff, he rapidly came to suspect that the quartermaster was buying cheap food and retaining a profit. ‘More than human patience and foresight are necessary for one to guard against the chicanery, deceit and falsehood of domestics in India,’ Harlan wrote in exasperation, a familiar complaint among colonists. Once Harlan had established his guilt, the quartermaster was promptly demoted. This should have been a routine matter, but it swiftly erupted into Harlan’s first major crisis when the former quartermaster appeared at his tent, determined on revenge and carrying a loaded and cocked musket. As Harlan emerged, the man aimed the weapon at his head. Harlan reacted instinctively. ‘To knock up the fellow’s musket and throw myself upon him and seize him by the throat was the act of a moment. He fell back and prostrate from the force with which I projected myself against him. The musket changed hands and he was now the victim with the weapon at his breast! He had not a word to utter or a struggle of resistance.’
By disarming the mutineer, Harlan subdued a potentially wider revolt. ‘Had this fellow’s insolence been suffered with impunity, I should have been utterly at the mercy of my servants,’ he wrote. The rest of the entourage, expressing elaborate
