nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47Two more officers, both as junior as Burnes, were commissioned to draft
a series of policy reports and recommendations on Afghanistan, Herat
and the Khanates of Central Asia. Lieutenant Arthur Conolly was chosen
because he had recently travelled overland to India through Persia,
Herat and Kandahar, while his colleague Charles Trevelyan, Assistant
Commissioner of Delhi, had no Central Asian experience and had only
been in India a couple of years. 11 The task of fleshing out Ellenborough’s
policy was therefore entrusted to three men at the beginning of their
Indian careers, individuals who, at best, had only a superficial knowledge
of Afghanistan and Central Asia.
In drawing up their reports and recommendations, Conolly and
Trevelyan appear to have overlooked the work of earlier explorers who
had travelled more extensively in the region, such as William Moorcroft
and George Trebeck. 12 In 1825 Moorcroft and his party had been the first
modern British explorers to reach Bukhara, but they all died of fever in the
plains of Balkh before they could return to India. Three years later Edward
Stirling, a civil servant from Agra, travelled along the qafila route from
Herat to Balkh via Maimana and Sar-i Pul, from where he headed south
to Bamiyan and Kabul. Sir John McNeill, the British envoy in Tehran, even
asked Stirling to make notes about potential Russian invasion routes only
for him to encounter ‘the greatest apathy’ about his travels on his return
to India. 13 By 1830 Stirling was living in Agra and could have provided
a wealth of information for Conolly and Trevelyan, but he was never
consulted. As for Moorcroft’s correspondence with the Indian government,
it was on file in the Calcutta archives.
Conolly and Trevelyan completed their reports in March 1831 and
concluded that Russia indeed posed a military threat to India by seeking
to occupy the strategic city-state of Khiva. Herat was identified as another
key city, since it straddled both the northern invasion route from Khiva
and the western one via Mashhad. They concurred with Evans’s assump-
tion that Persia was incapable of defending itself against Russia or acting as
an Indian buffer state. Their solution was to ‘reunify’ Afghanistan, which,
they argued, would aid commercial activity by the reduction of customs
duties and improved security on the caravan route. Conolly, who had not
visited Kabul, mistakenly believed Shah Kamran of Herat to be this unify-
ing figure, and argued he would soon regain control of Kandahar and Kabul
and make peace with the Sikhs.
The report concluded that in ‘consolidating the Afghan empire for
our own interests we shall at the same time establish a lasting claim upon
the gratitude of that people’, a ‘singularly lofty, and dismally and naively