Pathan pancake hat and dun-coloured saggy pyjamas, or shalwar kamiz, over which I wore the regulation foreign correspondent’s sleeveless jacket with many unnecessary pockets. I had already grown something that might pass for a beard.
At dawn the next day, a trio of armed Mujahideen knocked at the door of my hotel room and led me to a waiting Jeep. For the next twelve hours we drove up the Khyber Pass, and then onto rocky tracks which wound deep into the mountains, until we finally arrived at the camp of the Mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. I was too callow to know it at the time, but black-bearded Hekmatyar was the most fundamentalist of the Mujahideen leaders, a man as ruthless as he was ambitious, whose brutal shelling of Kabul in the civil war that followed killed thousands of civilians and devastated the city. The entrance to his camp was marked by a lone sentry and a large, dead vulture, impaled on a post, the first victim I had seen of the Afghan war.
Over the ensuing weeks I was swept away by my own Afghan adventure. The Mujahideen fighters looked after me as one might a vulnerable and rather dim younger brother, and I filed breathless despatches for my newspaper, with rather too much emphasis on the first person. I thought myself very dashing indeed.
Returning to Peshawar after my first stint ‘inside’, I went to the American Club, the social hub of the Western crowd. The place was often frequented by journalists, young ones like myself but also scarred veterans, along with arms dealers, aid workers and monosyllabic Americans who were probably spies or mercenaries. Almost everyone had stories of night skirmishes and narrow escapes, the self-inflating chaff of the war zone. We were all living out our romantic fantasies in a land that invited and nourished them.
During the day we lounged around the pool, and relaxed by swimming, planning and Kipling. The works of Rudyard Kipling were required reading, for Britain’s bard of imperialism captured the wildness and wonder of the North-West Frontier like no other writer, before or since. It was in Peshawar, fresh from my first foray into Afghanistan, that I first read ‘The Man who Would be King’, Kipling’s timeless short story which John Huston would adapt into a film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Written in 1888, when Kipling was just twenty-three and working as a journalist for the Allahabad Pioneer, ‘The Man who Would be King’ tells the tale of a bearded adventurer, Daniel Dravot, who penetrates the remotest mountains of Afghanistan in the middle years of Victoria’s reign, disguised as a Muslim holy man. Following the trail of Alexander the Great deep into the Hindu Kush, he trains a tribal army and is crowned king by the local tribesmen. Adopting the symbols of Freemasonry, he proclaims his own fake religion and is exalted as a living god until, like all who aspire to deity, he crashes to earth. It is thrilling stuff, a story of freelance imperialism in which a white man becomes a powerful potentate in a distant land, but also a cautionary tale of colonial hubris, ending in disaster. The narrator is a newspaperman, who hears the story from the adventurer’s dying partner. ‘The Man who Would be King’ made a profound and lasting impression on me.
Over the next few years I made several more reporting trips to Afghanistan, and twice visited Kabul, but after the Soviets retreated the West swiftly lost interest. The defeat of the Soviet army by the Afghan Mujahideen contributed to the collapse of Communism, but as Afghanistan fractured into civil war, the country was left to slide towards fundamentalism, eventually producing Islam’s most mutant form, the extremist, terrorist Taliban. Long before the rule of the Mullahs the news story had moved on – and so had I, to New York, then Paris, and finally to Washington. I returned to Britain just a few days before 11 September 2001.
In the wake of that atrocity, as America declared war on terrorism and the Taliban, I found myself writing about Afghanistan again, trawling through the histories to piece together a narrative of that broken land for my newspaper. While American ‘daisy cutter’ bombs were blasting al Qaeda fighters out of the caves of Tora Bora and special forces were hunting through the same Afghan hills I had known a decade earlier, I was combing the stacks of the British Library.
There was one name that caught my attention, deep in the footnotes of the books about nineteenth-century Afghanistan: Josiah Harlan, the first American ever to enter that country. A Pennsylvania-born Quaker and Freemason, Harlan had slipped into Kabul disguised ‘as a dervish’ in 1824, long before the British got there. He was said to have trained an army for the amir of Kabul, crossed the Hindu Kush, and proclaimed himself a prince in the mountains. His story sounded impossibly romantic, deeply implausible, yet strangely familiar.
I was not the first to notice the similarity between this life and Kipling’s short story. The US State Department précis on Afghanistan notes that ‘Josiah Harlan, an adventurer from Pennsylvania who was an adviser in Afghan politics in the 1830s, reputedly inspired Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Man who Would be King”.’ Harlan’s reputation would certainly have been known in Allahabad when Kipling was working there: the novelist adapted the American Freemason and former soldier into an English Freemason and former soldier, but the parallels between the real Josiah Harlan and the fictional Daniel Dravot, Kipling’s self-made King of Kafiristan, are too close to be coincidental.
There were tantalisingly few details about the life of the American, and the principal contemporary sources, almost all British, were conspicuously hostile. The first official British history of the First Afghan War (1839–42) dismissed him as ‘clever and unscrupulous … an American adventurer, now a doctor and now a general, who was ready to take any kind of service with any one disposed to pay him’. Harlan published only one book in his lifetime, a polemical anti-British tract. In 1939, more than sixty years after his death, a researcher pulled together some fragments of his unpublished work, but concluded that the bulk of Harlan’s writings – journals, letters and an entire manuscript recording his adventures – had all been destroyed in a house fire in 1929.
Harlan, it seemed, was doomed to remain a fleeting and enigmatic presence in history, a figure in fiction, but not in fact. Yet as American soldiers poured into Afghanistan at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this unwritten half-life seemed uncannily contemporary. Harlan had taken the pioneer spirit to a completely different frontier. Here was a wild west figure in the far wilder East, who had achieved the unique feat of voyaging over the sea to a ‘terra incognita’ and proclaiming himself a king. Yet in his own country he was entirely unknown.
I extended my search: to the Punjab, where Harlan had lived in the 1820s; to his birthplace in Pennsylvania; to San Francisco, where he died; and back to Kabul. Gradually his life began to take shape: in the official records of Maharajah Ranjit Singh of Lahore, in the memoirs and diaries of contemporary travellers and soldiers, and in the intelligence archives of imperial India. In a tiny museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania, I finally discovered Harlan’s lost voice: in an old box, buried and forgotten among the files, was a tattered manuscript handwritten in curling copperplate, a large section of Harlan’s missing autobiography, unnoticed and unread since his death, along with letters, poems and drawings.
In 1842, Harlan boasted to a newspaper reporter that he had once been the Prince of Ghor or Ghoree, a realm high in the Hindu Kush, under a secret treaty with its ruler. ‘He transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute for ever,’ Harlan was quoted as saying. ‘The absolute and complete possession of his government was legally conveyed according to official form, by a treaty which I have still preserved.’ This contract was assumed to be lost. Some claimed it had never existed. But there, yellow with age at the bottom of the box, was a document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.
Josiah
