afghanistanAs a devotee of the shrine of Shah-i Mardan, the move to Takhtapul meant
Afzal Khan was able to pay a daily pilgrimage to Mazar-i Sharif and even-
tually this town became the administrative capital of the province. The
peri-urban areas around Takhtapul, Balkh and Mazar soon became home
to thousands of Pushtun migrants and colonists from the south as well as
retired soldiers, who were gifted land in the fertile plains that, more often
than not, had been confiscated from local Uzbeks.
The Anglo-Afghan Treaties and the frontiers of Greater Afghanistan
Britain had little interest in Dost Muhammad Khan’s invasion of Balkh
and the Mir Wali’s appeal to British officials to ask them to intervene to
prevent the annexation fell on deaf ears. In Britain’s view, the conquest of
Balkh was an internal matter and, anyway, Britain had its hands full with
the pacification of the Punjab and had no wish to antagonize the Amir.
Britain’s main concern north of the Hindu Kush was the resumption of
Russian military expansion into the Central Asian Khanates. A year before
Wazir Akbar Khan’s invasion of Balkh, Russian forces had occupied Aralsk
on the Syr Darya, then in March 1854 Britain went to war with Russia in
the Crimea to prevent the Black Sea becoming a Russian lake. The Crimean
War did not have any direct impact on Afghanistan and the Central Asian
situation, but Dost Muhammad Khan did attempt to exploit the conflict to
his advantage. When the Mir Wali crossed the Amu Darya in the winter
of 1854 at the head of a largely Bukharan army, the Amir appealed to the
Governor General for military and financial assistance, claiming that Persia
and Russia were behind the invasion.
The Crimean War also resurrected the moribund debate about the
Russian threat to India and Afghanistan’s strategic position in the wake
of the fall of the Sikh Empire. Herbert Edwardes, Deputy Resident of the
Punjab, argued that Britain should formally recognize Dost Muhammad
Khan as Amir and negotiate a treaty of friendship between the two powers,
thus tying him to Britain’s strategic interests and turning Afghanistan into
the new buffer state to replace the Sikh kingdom. In Edwardes’s view, Dost
Muhammad Khan’s annexation of Balkh was a positive step for ‘the more
the Affghans take the less there will be for either Russia or Persia’.
His view eventually prevailed in Calcutta despite opposition from
his immediate superior, Henry Lawrence. Lord Dalhousie, the Governor
General from 1848 to 1856, wrote to the Amir suggesting a meeting to
discuss putting Anglo-Afghan relations on a formal footing and in February
1855 Dost Muhammad Khan sent his son Haidar Khan to Peshawar to meet