years later, in 1878, the Great Game was played again.
In 1879, the Amir of Afghanistan, Sher Ali, accepted a Russian presence within Kabul, which alarmed Britain enough to demand their own, to the point that the British army escorted one to the Afghan border. When Sher Ali refused them entry it gave Britain the pretext it needed to mount an invasion.
Advancing in three columns, the British took Jalalabad and Kandahar. The third column, under the command of General Frederick Roberts, took Kabul – by which time Sher Ali had fled. He died soon afterwards, to be succeeded by his son, Yakub Khan.
In May 1879, Yakub Khan and the British signed the Treaty of Gandamak in which, in return for British subsidies, Afghanistan handed over the control of its foreign affairs to Britain and allowed a British envoy to reside in Kabul.
In July, that British envoy, Pierre Louis Cavagnari, arrived, and the Second Anglo-Afghan War was over. Or so the British thought. (Pictured below is Cavagnari, second from left, sitting with the Amir, Yakub Khan, centre.)
Yakub Khan, Amir of Afghanistan, February to October 1879, and Louis Cavagnari (1841–1879)
However, in September, Cavagnari and his fellow Britons were killed. On hearing the news General Roberts, stationed in Simla and preparing to go on holiday, gathered a force and hastened back to Kabul. Yakub Khan rushed out personally to meet him, denying any involvement in Cavagnari’s murder and beseeching Roberts not to attack his capital. Roberts, who found the Amir’s subservience embarrassing, brushed him aside and pushed on.
Once in Kabul, Roberts subdued the locals, rounded up the suspected conspirators, had them executed, and set up fort in a walled part of the city called Sherpur. Remembering the mistakes of the previous war, Roberts built up its defences and fortified it. His precaution was justified as, in December, the local Afghans besieged the fort. The British garrison held out and eventually the Afghans faded away.
Meanwhile, over 300 miles away, outside Kandahar, on 27 July 1880, the British fought a battle against an Afghan force near a village called Maiwand. The British suffered a humiliating defeat (pictured below), with 969 British and Indian soldiers killed and almost 200 wounded. Today some Afghans still raise a toast to the victors of Maiwand. Chased back to Kandahar, the British survivors came under a sustained siege.
Battle of Maiwand: Saving the Guns by Richard Caton Woodville
Roberts, still in Kabul, was ordered to relieve the Kandahar garrison. Thus, setting out on 9 August 1880, with 10,000 soldiers and 8,000 camp followers, and accompanied by almost 10,000 mules, ponies and donkeys, Roberts began the march from Kabul to Kandahar. The convoy covered 334 miles within 22 days, and captured the British imagination, making Roberts a national hero. When the Afghans besieging Kandahar learnt of Roberts’ imminent arrival they turned and fled. Roberts himself fell ill, and much to his chagrin, had to be transported in a doolie (a kind of litter), although as they entered the city on 31 August, Roberts insisted, for the sake of dignity, on riding in on horseback.
A special medal was struck, the Kabul to Kandahar Star (pictured), known informally as the Roberts Star, celebrating Roberts’ achievement.
Kabul to Kandahar Star
Roberts then defeated Yakub Khan in the Battle of Kandahar on 1 September 1880, and having settled the more compliant Abdur Rahman, grandson of Dost Mohammad, on the Afghan throne, proceeded to pull out of Afghanistan. Abdur Rahman would remain in power until his death in 1901, while the treaty signed at Gandamak remained in place for forty years. But ultimately, in a repeat of the First Anglo-Afghan War a generation earlier, Britain had won a war but achieved very little.
A third Anglo-Afghan War erupted in 1919. Afghanistan had remained neutral during the First World War but Amanullah Khan’s position as ruler was threatened by civil unrest. As a means of diverting attention from internal dissension and believing the British too exhausted after the exertions of war to resist, Amanullah announced his intention to free his country from the Treaty of Gandamak and invade British India.
On 2 May 1919 Afghan forces crossed the border into India and occupied the strategically important town of Bagh as a prelude to further attack. But within a week British and Indian troops had forced the invaders out. The British pushed on into Afghanistan and fought a number of skirmishes along the way. The use of the RAF proved decisive and bombs dropped on the presidential palace in Kabul devastated Afghan morale and Amanullah’s will to resist.
An armistice signed on 8 August 1919 resulted in the Treaty of Rawalpindi in which Britain agreed to annul the Treaty of Gandamak and play no further role in shaping Afghanistan’s foreign policy. Although Afghanistan had never been part of the British Empire, it now saw itself as entirely free of Britain’s interference, and, to celebrate, 19 August was declared Afghan Independence Day, an occasion still celebrated today.
As king, Mohammad Zahir Shah (pictured below) ruled Afghanistan for forty years, coming to the throne as a 19-year-old in 1933. But in July 1973, while in Italy undergoing eye surgery, his cousin and former prime minister Mohammad Daoud Khan, whom Zahir had sacked in 1963, staged a coup, abolished the Afghan monarchy and established a republican government with himself as its first president.
Zahir Shah, king of Afghanistan, 1933–1973
Daoud set about implementing reform – the emancipation of women and the suppression of Islamic fundamentalism. The Islamists migrated across the border into Pakistan, where the Pakistani secret service trained them to fight. Among them were two men who were to play a large role in the Afghan civil war twenty years later: Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Both were members of the Mujahideen. Massoud exploited the discontent caused by Daoud’s reforms and staged an uprising. It failed and Daoud used the attempted coup as a pretext for enforcing greater repression of Islamic fundamentalists. Massoud and Hekmatyar fell out and although nominally fighting for the same cause became and were to remain bitter enemies.
Daoud had been accepting shipments of arms from the Soviet Union but following a falling out with the Afghan communist party – the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) – he expelled the Soviet advisers sent by Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, and looked elsewhere for assistance.
The Soviet Union feared that Afghanistan was about to ally itself to the West. The final, irrevocable split with the Soviet Union came in April 1977 during Daoud’s state visit to Moscow. When Brezhnev objected to the encroachment of American and NATO influence within Afghanistan, Daoud reacted angrily, ‘We will never allow you to dictate to us how to run our country and who we employ in Afghanistan . . . Afghanistan will remain poor if necessary but free in its acts and decisions.’ As he left he had to be reminded to shake Brezhnev’s hand. A year later Daoud would regret his show of defiance.
