nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47Shah Shuja‘ al-Mulk.
By 1839 the former
Saddozai king was
elderly and had been
in Indian exile for
thirty years. Despite
representing a
dynasty which was
discredited in the
eyes of most Afghans,
British officials were
convinced he had
popular support and
restoring him to power
would be easy. They
could not have been
more wrong.
rejected as far too costly. The threat of a British-sponsored attack by Shah
Kamran, however, did force Mizrab Khan, wali of Maimana, to tender his
submission to Shah Shuja‘. The Mir Wali too opened negotiations with
the king. A few weeks after his defeat, he and Murad Beg arrived in Kabul
to formally pledge their allegiance to the king and undertook to deny
sanctuary to Dost Muhammad Khan or any other Muhammadzai.
The desertion of Shah Shuja‘ al-Mulk’s levies at Saighan was a blow to
British expectations that the king would quickly raise an ‘Afghan National
Army’, which would allow all foreign forces to be withdrawn within a
year of the occupation. By the autumn of 1840 any such hopes had been
scuppered and General Cotton told Macnaghten that the recent defec-
tions ‘proved incontestably that there is no Afghan army’, and he urged
Macnaghten to recommend that the Governor General send reinforce-
ments, for without them ‘we cannot hold the country’. 6 An additional
2,000 troops were ordered to prepare to march to Kabul and two more
Indian regiments sent to Kandahar. Despite this, Auckland still planned
to withdraw all but one or two regiments by the spring of 1841.