afghanistan
Ahmad Shah’s most notable military achievement was the defeat of the
Marathas at Panipat, but while this pushed them out of northern India,
Ahmad Shah’s campaigns did little to strengthen Muslim power in India as
Shah Wali Allah had hoped, but rather contributed to the rise of an even
more powerful and enduring non-Muslim power, the British East India
Company. Ahmad Shah came off second best in the war against another
‘infidel’ power, the Sikhs, and the Afghan-Sikh war, which began during
his reign, would rumble on for almost a century and eventually lead to the
loss of Multan, the Deras, Peshawar and the Khyber Pass.
The makeshift nature of Ahmad Shah’s civil administration created
an uneasy coalition of tribal, military and sectarian factions that were
thrown together by pragmatic necessity. This led to an innately unstable
government riven by factionalism and Ahmad Shah’s reign was plagued
by internal revolts. Less than thirty years after Ahmad Shah’s death, his
kingdom was torn apart by internecine and clan warfare. The claim that
Ahmad Shah ‘welded’ the Afghan tribes into a ‘cohesive and powerful
nation’, therefore, is yet one more myth surrounding his reign.
Nor was Ahmad Shah the model of chivalric virtue that some histor-
ians claim, regardless of whether one uses the yardstick of European
chivalric virtues or the Iranian values of jawanmardi. During the course
of his Indian campaigns, Ahmad Shah and his generals presided over the
massacre of thousands of civilians, including women and children, the
cold-blooded beheading of prisoners who had surrendered, and the dese-
cration and destruction of Hindu and Sikh holy places. His troops put
unarmed priests and pilgrims to the sword, committed mass rape, pillaged
town after town and enslaved thousands of women and children. Even
Muslims were not spared. Ahmad Shah also broke oaths of pardon and
safe conduct, and even had his nephew, whom he had brought up like his
own son, put to death. In the words of Louis Dupree, Ahmad Shah may
have ‘fused but left fission in his wake’. 31
nandana
(Nandana)
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