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Whig party. But both parties seemed equally anxious to place party interests before the interests of Indian administration.

But the appointment of Lord Auckland as GovernorGeneral of India had a deeper significance. It meant that the foreign policy of India must shape itself to the foreign policy of England. The Liberal party in England had come triumphantly into office in 1830, and held office-excepting a brief interruption during the winter of 1834-35-for eleven years. The strongest man in the Liberal Government during these years was the Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston. And the strongest ambition of Lord Palmerston was to check Russia in the East. In 1838 he supported and strengthened the Turkish Government. In 1840 he made a convention with three European Powers for armed interference in support of Turkey. In 1841 he placed Egypt once more under the power of Turkey. It was easy to foresee that Lord Auckland was appointed to India to carry out this Imperial policy of England against Russia.

The East India Company has often been blamed for their wars of annexation and of conquest. But the crime of the first Afghan War cannot be laid at their door. It was undertaken without their sanction and without their approval. As early as 1835, Henry St. George Tucker, then Chairman of the Court of Directors, had induced the Board of Control to accept the principle, that England's diplomatic transactions with Persia, for the prevention of the advance of Russia, was a European question and not an Indian question. It was arranged, with that "melancholy meanness" which has so often characterised England's financial transactions with India, that India should pay £12,000 per annum for the Persian Mission, but that all power over the English envoy at Teheran and the politics of Persia should be vested in the Crown Ministers. It was not anticipated, when the Russo-Persian question was declared to be a European

question, that Indian blood and Indian treasure were to be lavished on its solution.

Dr. MacNeill was appointed ambassador to the King of Persia, and placed himself in direct communication with the Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston. In February 1837 he complained to Lord Palmerston that the agent from Kandahar had visited the Russian Minister, and had not visited the British Ambassador.1 And in the same month he addressed another letter to Lord Palmerston, in which he justified the possible invasion of Herat by the King of Persia.

"Putting aside the claims of Persia to the sovereignty of Herat, and regarding the question as one between two independent sovereigns, I am inclined to believe that the Government of Herat will be found to have been the aggressor.

"Persia has committed no act of hostility against the Afghans, but on the death of the late Shah, the Government of Herat made predatory incursions into the Persian territories, in concert with the Turcomans and Hazarehs, and captured the subjects of Persia for the purpose of selling them as slaves.

"Under these circumstances, there cannot, I think, be a doubt that the Shah is fully justified in making war on Prince Kamran." 2

The expected invasion of Herat by Persia took place. Dost Muhammad, the ruler of Afghanistan, gave his support to the King of Persia. He had also endeavoured to recover Peshawar from Ranjit Singh of the Punjab, and had received a Russian mission at Kabul. These were the ostensible grounds on which Lord Auckland, now Governor-General of India, declared war with Afghanistan.

The reader seeks in vain in Lord Auckland's declaration any adequate cause for plunging India into a need1 Letter dated Teheran, February 20, 1837. 2 Letter dated Teheran, February 24, 1837.

• Declaration on the part of the Right Honourable the GovernorGeneral of India, dated October 1, 1838.

less war. If an endeavour had been made to recover Peshawar from Ranjit Singh, the endeavour had failed, and Ranjit Singh was quite competent to defend his own. And if Dost Muhammad had supported Persia in the invasion of Herat, that invasion was "fully justified" by the conduct of the Governor of Herat, according to Dr. MacNeill's letter of 1837, quoted above. The real cause of the war was to dethrone a strong, able, and friendly ruler like Dost Muhammad, and to place on the Afghan throne a creature of the British Power. Lord Palmerston was fighting England's great rival in the East, and Lord Auckland consented to pay the cost from the taxes of India. "It was no doubt very convenient," wrote St. George Tucker, "for Her Majesty's Government to cast the burden of an enterprise, directed against Russia, on the finances of India, instead of sending the fleet into the Baltic or the Black Sea; but we are bound to resist the attempt to alienate and misapply the resources of India." 1

The siege of Herat by Persian troops was ultimately abandoned. The ostensible reason of Lord Auckland's interference with Afghan affairs thus ceased to exist. There was yet time to abandon the contemplated Afghan War. The Duke of Wellington, who was not a peace-atany-price man, was of opinion that the expedition should be abandoned. "I had understood," he wrote to St. George Tucker, "that the raising the siege of Herat was to be the signal for abandoning the expedition to the Indus. It will be very unfortunate if that intention should be altered. The consequence of crossing the Indus, to settle a government in Afghanistan, will be a perennial march into the country." 2

But Lord Auckland knew better. He wrote to the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors that: "Upon receiving an authentic report that the Shah of Persia had

1 Kaye's Life and Correspondence of Henry St. George Tucker, p. 511. • Letter dated December 12, 1838.

relinquished the siege of Herat, I publicly announced my resolution to persevere, notwithstanding that favourable circumstance, in carrying through the course of measures which had been perfected with a view to establish the tranquillity of the western frontier of India upon a stable basis, and to raise up a permanent barrier against schemes of aggression from that quarter." The experience of sixty years enables us to judge whether the Duke of Wellington or Lord Auckland was right; and whether, by interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, we "raise up a permanent barrier" against invasions, or simply demolish the existing barrier, and are led into "a perennial march into the country."

Sir

The war was carried on. The British troops marched through Sindh, because Ranjit Singh refused them permission to march through his territories in the Punjab. Kandahar was taken in April 1839; Ghazni was stormed in July; Kabul was reached in August. Dost Muhammad fled over the Oxus into Bokhara; Shah Shuja was placed on the throne. The elation in England was great; and the actors on the spot betrayed a vaingloriousness seldom manifested by British soldiers or statesmen. John Keane, after capturing Ghazni, wrote to Lord Auckland: "The army under my command have succeeded in performing one of the most brilliant acts it has ever been my lot to witness during my service of 45 years in the four quarters of the globe."1 Lord Auckland wrote to the Secret Committee of the Directors "of the flight of Sirdar Dost Muhammad Khan, and the triumphant entry of His Majesty, Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, into Kabul, amid the congratulations of his people."2 And His Majesty, Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, wrote to Queen Victoria, expressing "the fullest confidence in the kind consideration of my wishes which is felt by my Royal Sister." His wishes were to found an Order of the Durani Empire,

1 Letter dated July 24, 1839.
? Letter dated August 29, 1839.

and to confer the first class of the Order upon Lord Auckland, Sir John Keane, and a few others.1

2

It is not within the scope of the present work to narrate the history of the first Afghan War which is told in every school-book on Indian history, and has been fully and faithfully narrated by one of the most impartial of Anglo-Indian historians. Briefly, the Afghan people resented this foreign interference in their affairs. The new Amir, Shah Shuja, smarted under the control of the British envoy. The Mullas of Kabul refused to offer up prayers for him, and declared that he was not their independent king. Sardars and chiefs of tribes became openly hostile as the stream of gold from the Indian treasury was gradually reduced. On November 2, 1841, an insurrection broke out in Kabul, and Sir Alexander Burnes was killed. On December 23 the British envoy, Macnaghten, was killed in an open meeting by Akbar Khan, son of the exiled Dost Muhammad. In January 1842 the British army of four thousand, with twelve thousand camp-followers, began their retreat from Kabul. Fighting and negotiations continued during this disastrous retreat. Akbar Khan demanded more English hostages, including the wives and children of English officers, while his troops joined the Ghilzai mountaineers in pouring a murderous fire on the retreating army. The entire force and camp-followers, sixteen thousand men, perished under the Afghan fire, or died of wounds, cold, and hunger, in the Afghan snows. One solitary survivor, Dr. Brydon, escaped.

Lord Auckland was succeeded by Lord Ellenborough as Governor-General of India in 1842. In England the Liberal Government had fallen, and a Tory Government had succeeded. The new Ministers were not responsible

1 Papers relating to the war in Afghanistan, ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, January 21, 1840. Paper No. 24.

2 Sir John Kaye's History of the War in Afghanistan would have been better known to English readers, and appeared in popular editions, if it had not been the history of a blunder and a disaster.

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