afghanistan
Rawlinson was convinced Russia did not intend to halt its military
advances on the Amu Darya, but planned to secure political dominance in
Persia and occupy Herat and Balkh as a precursor to an invasion of India.
As was the case in the 1830s, Rawlinson identified Herat as the key to the
defence of India and argued Britain must prevent the Russian occupation
of that city at all costs, whether directly or by using Persia as a proxy. He
recommended reviving the moribund Anglo-Persian alliance and pressur-
ing Russia to formally agree a demarcation of Afghanistan’s northern and
northwestern frontier, a ‘scientific frontier’ that if violated would mean
Britain would go to war with Russia in Asia and Europe. ‘On no account’,
Rawlinson declared, must Russia be permitted to challenge the ‘national
dependency’ of the Uzbek amirates of the wilayat of Balkh on the Amir
of Afghanistan, and he criticized Lawrence for failing to provide financial
and military aid to Sher ‘Ali Khan. ‘Interference in Afghanistan,’ Rawlinson
declared, ‘has now become our duty.’ 13 This ‘interference’ included negoti-
ating a new treaty with Sher ‘Ali Khan, which bound him to British interests
and allowed Britain to control the country’s foreign policy. A precondition
of this new treaty, however, was that the Amir had to agree to the presence
of a permanent British Resident in Kabul to both advise the Amir and keep
an eye on Russian activities in Afghanistan and beyond the Amu Darya.
Lord Mayo, however, was not prepared to adopt such radical policies,
although his successors would embrace Rawlinson’s recommendations
wholeheartedly. Instead Mayo’s approach to the negotiations with Sher ‘Ali
Khan was to tread a fine line between pursuing neither ‘extreme lines of
absolute inaction’ nor ‘the worse alternative of meddling and interfering by
subsidies and emissaries’. The ‘safe course’, he noted, lay in ‘watchfulness,
and friendly intercourse’. 14
As for Sher ‘Ali Khan, he accepted the invitation in the hope that his
visit would bring him urgently needed financial and military assistance that
would keep him in power, for though he had secured Kabul, the Afzalids
were still at large in Samarkand and posed a serious threat to his control
of what Rawlinson termed ‘Afghan Turkistan’. Indeed, even as he made
his way to India, Sardar Muhammad Ishaq Khan, Amir ‘Azam Khan’s son,
backed by a force of Bukharan levies, had occupied Aqcha and, though
he was eventually defeated, the Umballa Conference took place against
a background of fear about the renewal of the civil war, possibly with
Russian assistance. Sher ‘Ali Khan was therefore equally anxious to secure
a new treaty with Britain to replace what he termed the ‘dry friendship’ of
the earlier ones, for in his view they were very one-sided arrangements. 15
The 1855 and 1857 treaties, after all, required the Amir to be the ‘friend of
nandana
(Nandana)
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