• Forum
• SITREP

• Military

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space
• Public Eye

Further Reading

Historical Setting

Afghanistan's history, its internal political development, its foreign relations, and its very existence as an independent state have been largely determined by its location at the crossroads of Central, West, and South Asia. Waves of migrating peoples poured through the region in ancient times, leaving a human residue to form a mosaic of ethnic and linguistic groups. In modern times, as well as in antiquity, great armies passed through the region, establishing at least temporary local control and often dominating Iran and northern India as well.

Although it was the scene of great empires and flourishing trade for over two millennia, Afghanistan did not become a truly independent nation until the twentieth century. For centuries a zone of conflict among strong neighboring powers, the area's heterogeneous groups were not bound into a single political entity until the reign of the brilliant Ahmad Shah Durrani, who in 1747 founded the monarchy that ruled the country until 1973. After his death, the absence of a strong successor possessed of military and political skills resulted in the temporary disintegration of the kingdom he had created, a frequent pattern in the society's history.

Just as it was the arena of conflict between the Mughal Empire of India and the Safavi Empire of Iran in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Afghanistan in the nineteenth century lay between the expanding might of the Russian and British empires. It was in the context of this confrontation that Afghanistan in its contemporary form came into existence during the reigns of Dost Mohammad Khan and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan.

Historical patterns of the past several centuries remained relevant to the nation's situation in the mid 1980s. First, because of Afghanistan's strategic location geopolitically, great rival powers have tended to view the control of Afghanistan by a major opponent as unacceptable. Sometimes the Afghans have been able to use this circumstance to their benefit, but more often they have suffered grievously in the great power struggles. Great powers have considered Afghanistan's internal politics more as a reflection of international rivalry than as events in themselves.

A second pattern has been the inability of central governments to establish effective and permanent control over the numerous peoples of the society. Only in response to foreign invasions or as part of a conquering army outside the country have the many diverse groups found common cause. In the mare remote areas tribal warriors particularly the Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group have successfully resisted foreign domination for centuries. Neither the heirs of Alexander the Great nor those of Genghis Khan, Timur, or Ahmad Shah were able to subdue the tribes permanently.

A third enduring pattern in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the gradual extension of Russian control into Central Asia. The strategies used by the tsar's generals to subdue the khans north of the Amu Darya may have been instructive to Soviet commanders who moved across the river in 1979. The Afghans, like the Turks and Iranians, historically have had both a fear of the Soviet Union and a desire to benefit from relations with their northern neighbor.

Finally, one cannot examine Afghan history without noting the key role of Islam. Even Genghis Khan was unable to uproot Islam, and within two generations his heirs had become Muslims. Religious leaders have always played a political role and, as in many other nations, religion has served as a means of political expression. An important, if often unacknowledged, event in Afghan history that played a role in the politics of Afghanistan's neighbors and the entire region up to the present was the rise in the tenth century of a strong Sunni dynasty the Ghaznavids whose power prevented the eastward spread of Shiism from Iran and thereby assured that the majority of Muslims in Afghanistan and South Asia would become Sunnis.

Historians have had difficulty understanding Auckland's wrong headed policy, but a twentieth century analyst of the First Anglo Afghan War, J. Norris, suggests that the global great power situation must also be taken into consideration in assessing British policy at this point. The determination to avoid war with Russia in Europe and to coax the tsar into a joint great power strategy with respect to the faltering Ottoman Empire (the "Eastern question") made it necessary to tread very lightly in Central Asia, where British interests were to be protected as far as possible without directly engaging the Russians. The Russians, meanwhile, having suffered a disappointment in their support of the Iranian siege of Herat, continued to be as suspicious of the British as the British were of them.

The First Anglo Afghan War

To justify his plan, Auckland ordered a manifesto issued on October 1, 1838, at Simla that set forth the reasons for British intervention in Afghanistan. The Simla Manifesto stated that the welfare of India required that the British have on their western frontier a trustworthy ally. The British pretense that their troops were merely supporting the tiny force of Shuja in retaking what was once his throne fooled no one. Although the Simla Manifesto asserted that British troops would be withdrawn as soon as Shuja was installed in Kabul, Shuja's rule depended entirely on British arms to suppress rebellion and on British funds to pay tribal chiefs for their support. Like other interventions in modern times, the British denied that they were invading Afghanistan but claimed they were merely supporting its legitimate government (Shuia) "against foreign interference and factious opposition."

From the point of the view of the British, the First Anglo-Afghan War (often called "Auckland's Folly") was an unmitigated disaster, although it proved surprisingly easy to depose Dost Mohammad and enthrone Shuja. An army of British and Indian troops set out from the Punjab in December 1838 and by late March 1839 had reached Quetta. By the end of April the British had taken Qandahar without a battle. In July, after a two month delay in Qandahar, the British attacked the fortress of Ghazni, overlooking a plain that leads to India, and achieved a decisive victory over the troops of Dost Mohammad, which were led by one of his sons. The Afghans were amazed at the taking of fortified Ghazni, and Dost Mohammad found his support melting away. The Afghan ruler took his few loyal followers and fled across the passes to Barman, and ultimately to Bukhara, and in August 1839 Shuja was enthroned again in Kabul after a hiatus of almost 30 years. Some British troops returned to India, but it soon became clear that Shuja's rule could only be maintained by the presence of British forces. Garrisons were established in Jalalabad, Ghazni, Kalat iGhilzai (Qalat), Qandahar, and at the passes to Barman. After a winter in temporary quarters, the British thought to move their Kabul garrison to the great fort, Bala Hissar, overlooking the city, but Shuja, either on his own or under pressure, refused to sanction the move.

Omens of disaster for the British abounded. Opposition to the British imposed rule of Shuja began as soon as he assumed the throne, and the power of his government did not extend beyond the areas controlled by the force of British arms. The British cantonment in Kabul was eventually constructed on a virtually indefensible open plain northeast of the city, with the commissariat and munitions outside the low walls of the garrison. Early in 1841 a new commander, who was elderly, ill, and indecisive, joined the British troops in Afghanistan.

After several attacks on the British and their Afghan protégé, Dost Mohammad decided to surrender to the British and in late 1840 was allowed to go into exile in India. Sir William Macnaghten, one of the principal architects of the British invasion, wrote to Auckland two months later, urging good treatment for the deposed Afghan leader. With that fairness and clearsightedness that, in retrospect, was characteristic of British colonial officials, Macnaghten said:

His case has been compared to that of Shah Shoojah . . . but surely the cases are not parallel. The Shah [Shujal] had no claim on us. We had no hand in depriving him of his kingdom, whereas we ejected the Dost, who never offended us, in support of our policy, of which he was the victim.

Dual control (by Shuja and the British) was unworkable. Shuja did not succeed in garnering the support of the Afghan chiefs on his own, and the British could not or would not sustain their subsidies. When the cash payments to tribal chiefs were curtailed in 1841, there was a major revolt by the Ghilzai.

By October 1841 disaffected Afghan tribes were flocking to the support of Dost Mohammad's son, Muhammad Akbar, in Bamian. Burnes was murdered in November 1841, and a few days later the commissariat fell into the hands of the Afghans. Macnaghten, having tried first to bribe and then to negotiate with the tribal leaders, was killed at a meeting with the tribal chiefs in December. On January 1, 1842, the British in Kabul and a number of Afghan chiefs reached an agreement that provided for the safe exodus of the entire British garrison and its dependents from Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the British would not wait for an Afghan escort to be assembled, and the Ghilzai and allied tribes had not been among the 18 chiefs who had signed the agreement. On January 6 the precipitate retreat began and, as they struggled through the snowbound passes, the British were attacked by Ghilzai warriors. Although a Dr. W. Brydon is usually cited as the only survivor of the march to Jalalabad (out of more than 15,000 who undertook the retreat), in fact a few more survived as prisoners and hostages. Shuja remained in power only a few months and was assassinated in April 1842.

The destruction of the British garrison prompted brutal retaliation by the British against the Afghans and touched off yet another power struggle among potential rulers of Afghanistan. In the fall of 1842 British forces from Qandahar and Peshawar entered Kabul long enough to rescue the British prisoners and burn the great bazaar. All that remained of the British occupation of Afghanistan was a ruined market and thousands of dead. Although the foreign invasion did give the Afghan tribes a temporary sense of unity they had lacked before, the accompanying loss of life and property was followed by a bitterness and resentment of foreign influence that lasted well into the twentieth century and may have accounted for much of the backlash against the modernization attempts of later Afghan monarchs.

The Russians advanced steadily southward toward Afghanistan in the three decades after the First Anglo Afghan War, and historians of the period generally agree that the Russians were motivated, at least in part, by British intervention in Afghanistan. In 1842 the Russian border was on the other side of the Aral Sea from Afghanistan, but five years later the tsar's outposts moved to the lower reaches of the Syr Darya. By 1865 Tashkent had been formally annexed, as was Samarkand three years later. A treaty with the ruler of Bukhara virtually stripped him of his independence, and by 1869 Russian control ran as far as the northern bank of the Amu Darya. As the Russians overran much of Central Asia north of the river, the British advanced toward Afghanistan as well, absorbing territories that had once been part of Ahmad Shah Durrani's empire: Sind in 1843, Kashmir in 1846, the Punjab in 1849, Baluchistan in 1859, and the North West Frontier in 1895.

The Second Anglo Afghan War

After months of chaos in Kabul, Mohammad Akbar secured local control, and in April 1843 his father, Dost Mohammad, returned to the throne of Afghanistan. In the following decade, Dost Mohammad concentrated his efforts on reconquering Mazar e Sharif, Konduz, Badakhshan, and Qandahar. During the Second Anglo Sikh War, in 1848 49, Dost Mohammad's last effort to take Peshawar failed.

In 1854 the British were interested in resuming relations with Dost Mohammad, whom they had more or less ignored since 1842. In the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Crimean War, British officials in India, though they had no immediate concerns for Russian involvement, thought to make Afghanistan a barrier to Russian penetration across the Amu Darya. Dost Mohammad agreed, apparently perceiving the utility of British backing against the Russians and even the Iranians, to whom the independent rulers of Herat always turned for support against re absorption into the Afghan kingdom. In 1855 the Treaty of Peshawar reopened diplomatic relations, proclaimed respect for each sides' territorial integrity, and committed each to be the friends of each other's friends and the enemies of each other's enemies.

In October 1856, the Iranians seized Herat, and the British, whose policy it was to maintain the independence of this city. declared war against Iran. After three months the Iranians withdrew from Herat and committed themselves never again to interfere there or elsewhere in Afghanistan. This brief war convinced the British that they should bolster the strength of Dost Mohammad in an attempt to enable him to meet future challenges by the Iranians. In 185,7 an addendum was signed to the 1855 treaty that permitted a British military mission to go to Qandahar (but not to Kabul) and to provide a subsidy during conflict with the Iranians. Fraser Tytler notes that as Dost Mohammad signed the document he proclaimed, "I have now made an alliance with the British Government and come what may I will keep it till death." Even during the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India, when British forces in the Punjab were thinned dramatically, Dost Mohammad refused to take advantage of British vulnerability to retake the Pashtun areas under British control.

The British governor general of India at the time of the 1857 agreement with Afghanistan stated in a memorandum that the British would never again intervene in Afghan internal affairs or send an army across its borders unless Herat was besieged, and then only with Afghan consent. He went so far as to argue in favor of the Afghan absorption of Herat. In 1863 Dost Mohammad retook Herat with British acquiescence. A few months later Dost Mohammad died and, although his third son, Sher Ali, was his proclaimed successor, he did not succeed in taking Kabul from his brother, Muhammad Afzal (whose troops were led by his son, Abdur Rahman) until 1868. Abdur Rahman retreated across the Amu Darya and bided his time.

The disaster of the First Anglo Afghan War continued to haunt the British for decades, and the 70 years following the defeat of 1842 were a period of extraordinary vacillation in British policy toward Afghanistan. Not only were political perspectives different in Delhi and London, but there were also changes in government between what writer John C. Griffiths calls "half hearted Imperialists and ill informed Liberals." The former favored what was called the Forward Policy, which held that the defense of India required pushing its frontiers to the natural barrier of the Hindu Kush so that Afghanistan (or at least parts of it, such as Herat) would be brought entirely under British control. The Liberal policy rested on the assumption that the Forward Policy was immoral and impractical. Many of its adherents believed that the Indus River formed the natural border of India and that Afghanistan should be maintained as a buffer state between the British and Russian empires.

In the years immediately following the First Anglo Afghan War, and especially after the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India, Liberal governments in London tended toward the buffer state approach. By the time Sher Ali had established control in Kabul in 1868, he found the British ready to provide arms and funds in support of his regime, but nothing more. Fraser Tytler reports that Sher Ali declared, "As long as I am alive, or as long as my governments exists, the foundation of friendship and goodwill between this and the powerful British Government will not be weakened." From this high point, relations between the Afghan ruler and the British steadily deteriorated over the next 10 years. Despite the good feeling between Sher Ali and the British in 1869, the sensitivities engendered by the First Anglo Afghan War made it impossible for Sher Ali to accept a British envoy in Kabul, and there is no doubt that misperceptions colored the unfortunate sequence of events that led to the Second Anglo Afghan War. In 1873 relations between Sher Ali and the British viceroy began to become strained. The Afghan ruler was worried about the southern movement of Russia, which in 1873 had taken over the lands of the khan (ruler) of Khiva. Sher Ali sent an envoy to ask the British for advice and support. In 1872, however, the British had signed an agreement with the Russians in which the latter agreed to respect the northern boundaries of Afghanistan and to view the territories of the Afghan amir as outside their sphere of influence. With this agreement in mind, and still following a noninterventionist policy as far as Afghanistan was concerned, the British refused to give any assurances to the disappointed Sher Ali.

In 1874 Benjamin Disraeli became prime minister of Britain, and in 1876 a new viceroy was dispatched to Delhi with orders to reinstate the Forward Policy. Sher Ali rejected a second British demand for a British mission in Kabul, arguing that if he agreed the Russians might demand the same right. The Afghan ruler had received intimidating letters from the Russians, but the British offered little in return for the concessions they demanded. Sher Ali, still sensitive to the probable reaction in Afghanistan to the posting of British officers in Kabul or Herat, continued to refuse to permit such a mission.

After tension between Russia and Britain in Europe ended with the June 1878 Congress of Berlin, Russia turned its attention to Central Asia. In the summer of 1878 Russia sent an uninvited diplomatic mission to Kabul, setting in motion the train of events that led to the Second Anglo Afghan War. Sher Ali tried to keep the Russian mission out but failed. The Russian envoys arrived in Kabul on July 22, 1878, and on August 14 the British demanded that Sher Ali accept a British mission. Sher Ali had not responded by August 17 when his son and heir died, throwing the court into mourning.

When no reply was received, the British dispatched a small military force, which was refused permission to cross the Khyber Pass by Afghan authorities. The British presumably considered this an insult, but more likely it was viewed at the highest levels as a fine pretext for implementing the Forward Policy and taking over most of Afghanistan. The British delivered an ultimatum to Sher Ali, demanding an explanation of his actions. The Afghan response was viewed by the British as unsatisfactory, and on November 21, 1978, British troops entered Afghanistan at three points. Sher Ali, having turned in desperation to the Russians, received no assistance from them. Appointing his son, Yaqub, regent, Sher Ali left to seek the assistance of the tsar. Advised by the Russians to abandon this effort and to return to his country, Sher Ali returned to Mazare Sharif, where he died in February 1879.

With British forces occupying much of the country, Yaqub signed the Treaty of Gandamak in May 1879 to prevent British invasion of the rest of Afghanistan. According to this agreement and in return for an annual subsidy and loose assurance of assistance in case of foreign aggression, Yaqub agreed to British control of Afghan foreign affairs, British representatives in Kabul and other locations, extension of British control to the Khyber and Michni passes, and the cession of various frontier areas to the British.

An Afghan uprising against the British was, unlike that of the First Anglo Afghan War, foiled in October 1879. Yaqub abdicated because, as Fraser Tytler suggests, he did not wish to share the fate of Shuja following the first war.

Despite the success of the military venture; by March 1880 even the proponents of the Forward Policy were aware that defeating the Afghan tribes did not mean controlling them. Although British policymakers had briefly thought simply to dismember Afghanistan a few months earlier, they now feared they were heading for the same disasters that befell their predecessors at the time of the First Anglo Afghan War. Fraser Tytler summarizes the position of the viceroy:

He could hardly have based his policy on the assumption that after overrunning the country and thereby once more inflaming the hatred of every patriotic Afghan against us, we should by some magic discover among the Afghan chiefs a leader who would be acceptable both to ourselves and to the Afghan people . . . And yet this is what he did . . . The amazing thing is that while his assumption was wholly' unwarranted his gamble was successful. While the British and Indian Governments were arguing over the dismembered corpse of the Afghan Kingdom, the one man who could fulfil the requirements of a desperately difficult situation was moving southwards into Afghanistan.

Just as the British interventionists were reaching this conclusion, the Liberal Party won an electoral victory in March 1880. This assured the end of the Forward Policy, which had been a major campaign issue.