nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47frontier, and a region which, in 1747, was mostly outside of Ahmad Shah’s
authority. In fact, Ahmad Shah and his successors had no specific name
for their kingdom, a lack of which was noted by the Elphinstone Mission
of 1808–9. In order to address this issue, Elphinstone arbitrarily referred
to the country as the ‘Kingdom of Cauboul’, for by this time Kabul, not
Kandahar, was the capital of the kingdom. However, he also used the term
‘Afghanistan’ for both the Pushtun tribal belt and the Durrani realms as a
whole. Subsequently the British imperial administration in India, following
Elphinstone’s precedent, used Afghanistan for the whole kingdom ruled
by the Durranis, even though after the Sikh and British conquest of the
Punjab more than half of the original Afghanistan lay on the Indian side
of the frontier.
Initially Ahmad Shah’s kingdom consisted of roughly three of
Afghanistan’s modern provinces: Kandahar, Farah and Helmand. The Sunni
Hazaras of Bala Murghab, Nasir Khan Baluch of Kalat and the Kakar tribe
that controlled the passes from Kalat to Kandahar also accepted Saddozai
suzerainty. Yet by the end of his reign the Durrani empire stretched from
beyond Mashhad to Delhi. So the frontiers of Ahmad Shah’s kingdom, both
at the start and at the end of his reign, bore no relationship to the present
boundaries of modern Afghanistan. As for the formal demarcation of the
modern international frontiers of Afghanistan, this process took place
more than a century after Ahmad Shah’s death.
This is not to belittle Ahmad Shah’s achievements, but rather to put
them into their proper historical context. Ahmad Shah took advantage of
the weakness of the Uzbek and Mughal empires and the chaos that ensued
following the assassination of Nadir Shah to reassert Saddozai independ-
ence. During the course of his reign, Ahmad Shah transformed his small
city-state into a major empire and laid the foundations of a monarchy
that endured for nearly two-and-a-half centuries. These are remarkable
achievements for a man who was not even 25 years old when he became
king, achievements that do not require an aura of romanticism and myth
to make them appear even greater.