In the light of all this new intelligence, one confidential analysis after another argued that the British were aiming at establishing control over Central Asia and driving out the Russian trade; and that it was essential for the Russians to pre-empt them. Whether the British ever had any such intention is not so important. The belief affected and distorted policymaking in St Petersburg and Orenburg, just as policy-making in London and Delhi was affected and distorted by the belief that the Russians intended to come through Afghanistan into India. Paranoia affected judgement in all four cities.
And so the Russians concluded that their interests in Central Asia could not be finally secured by diplomacy alone. In the years that followed they annexed or took into their protection all the independent states of Central Asia, city by city: Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873 and the remaining lands east of the Caspian Sea in 1881–5.
The Russian colonial regime which was then installed was, in the view of one recent British historian, less burdensome than the British regime in India: the Russian were more corrupt and less efficient; the British taxed more heavily and were more prone to impose their will through violence.15 The most notorious event in the Russian record in Central Asia—General Skobelev’s massacre of the garrison and people of Geok Tepe in 1881—pales by comparison with the slaughter inflicted by the British in India after the Rising (or Mutiny) in 1857.
Things changed after the First World War. The British began to prepare—reluctantly—to depart from India, and to leave workable institutions behind them. It was a comparatively peaceful withdrawal, though the British cannot escape responsibility for the horrors of Partition in 1947. In Central Asia the Soviets, according to their very different lights, also tried to create modern social and economic institutions. But hundreds of thousands of people died and many more fled the forcible imposition of a ruthless new regime and a collectivised agriculture. In 1991, four decades after the British, the Russians abandoned their empire as they too ran out of imperial steam.
Imperial Britain Moves North
The British, deploying the same arguments as the Russians, and using the same tactics of armed force, diplomacy, guile, bribery, deceit, and treachery, were meanwhile continuing their advance towards the north. They too wished to promote their trade and the security of their imperial frontiers. They too concluded that mere diplomacy was insufficient, and they too swept aside the obstacles to their forward march with considerable violence. By 1801 they were on their way to taking over the whole of northern India, and they had reached the border with Afghanistan. They soon began to nibble away at the Afghan border territories; particularly painful for the Afghans was the loss of Peshawar, which the British first handed to their Sikh ally Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) and then took for themselves when they annexed the Sikh territories in 1849.
Hitherto the British had worried about a possible French invasion backed by the Persians. With the final defeat of Napoleon, they concluded that the main threat to their expanding Indian empire now came from the Russians. They argued among themselves about whether this threat was best countered by bribing the Afghan rulers to keep the Russians at bay or by imposing their own representative in Kabul, by force if necessary, and exercising a direct control, as they had done in India.
The war party prevailed on two occasions. Before the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42) the British manufactured the evidence they needed to justify their overthrow of the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohamed, doctoring and publishing the reports they received from their agents in Kabul to represent him as determinedly anti-British.16 They launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) with a brutality almost as cynical, though this time without resorting to forgery. The murders of their representatives in Kabul, Alexander Burnes in 1841 and Louis Cavagnari in 1879, were both the consequence of British bullying and the final British excuse for war.
The British advance was opposed not only by the Afghan army, which they could deal with, but also by a widespread insurgency, which they had not expected and to which they could find no satisfactory answer. They suffered some spectacular reverses: the destruction in 1842 of an entire army and the defeat of part of the Kandahar garrison at Maiwand in June 1880. Both wars nevertheless technically ended in a British military victory followed by a salutary revenge. In the autumn of 1842 a British ‘Army of Retribution’ hanged the city’s notables in the centre of Kabul and burned the seventeenth-century bazaar, ‘one of the great crossroads of Central Asia where one could buy silk and paper from China in the north; spices, pearls and exotic wood from India in the east; glass, pottery, silver and wine from Persia and Turkey in the west, and slaves bought from both directions… flames were said to have still filled the sky two days later when the troops left’.17 Among the other villages and towns they also destroyed with fire and the sword were the beautiful village of Istalif, famous for its pottery, and the provincial capital of Charikar, where a company of Gurkhas had been wiped out the previous year. A British officer who was there wrote to his mother, ‘I returned home to breakfast disgusted with myself, the world, and above all, with my cruel profession. In fact we are nothing but licensed assassins.’18 The devastation of Kabul in 1879 was less extensive, though the British did dismantle part of the city’s Bala Hissar fortress and hanged forty-nine Afghans on a gallows set up in the ruins of Cavagnari’s residence for their alleged part in his murder.19
But these were pyrrhic triumphs, and the British eventually realised that they could not achieve their original ambition of adding Afghanistan to the Indian empire. Nor could they sustain their own candidate in Kabuclass="underline" they had to accept the reinstatement of Dost Mohamed after the First Anglo-Afghan War and the installation of the untried and possibly pro-Russian Abdur Rahman after the Second. At a high cost in blood and treasure, the British did achieve their most important objective: to keep Afghanistan out of the orbit of Russia and within that of India. By means of bribes, threats, and guarantees of support against their neighbours, they were able to persuade Afghanistan’s rulers to remain—reluctantly perhaps—on their side. They remained responsible for Afghanistan’s foreign policy for eight decades, until the agreement which ended the brief Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919.
This relative success did not relieve the British of their exaggerated fear of the Russian threat. Charles Marvin, a correspondent from the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, interviewed many senior Russian generals and officials in the late 1880s. He complained that ‘Most of the English writers on Central Asia are personally unacquainted with Russia, and have no knowledge of the Russian language… they know nothing of the Russian aspect of the problem, except what they derive from the exaggerated and distorted intelligence appearing in the newspapers.’ The language used by some British politicians was as intemperate, and as lacking in a sense of the logistical realities, as any used by the Russian hotheads. Concerned that the Russians might seize Constantinople in the course of their war against the Turks, Disraeli (1804–81) wrote to Queen Victoria on 22 June 1877 that ‘in such a case Russia must be attacked from Asia, that troops should be sent to the Persian Gulf, and that the Empress of India should order her armies to clear Central Asia of the Muscovites, and drive them into the Caspian. We have a good instrument in Lord Lytton [1831–91; Viceroy of India, 1876–80], and indeed he was placed there with that view.’20 But the more sensible British officials realised that it would be hard for a modern army to maintain itself through the treacherous mountain passes and deserts of Central Asia. A more realistic danger was that foreign meddling could spark off an uncontrollable revolt among the Indians themselves: the British still remembered the Indian Rising of 1857 and its bloody suppression.