afghanistanadministration would have been hard put to make the kind of demands
they made in respect of a British Resident. Nor would Lytton have been
able to claim Britain had no formal obligations to support the Amir, or
to dismiss so easily the undertakings made by his predecessors as purely
personal, temporary arrangements.
Unfortunately, historians still tend to follow the Imperial version of
the causes of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which places all the blame
on the Amir’s ‘intransigence’, in particular his correspondence with Russia
and his refusal to allow Pelly or Chamberlain to visit Kabul. This view
takes little consideration of the extreme difficulties the Amir was in at the
time, caught as he was between two rival superpowers, each of which had
designs on his country, and opposition to the Anglo-Afghan alliance from
his own extended family and Islamic radicals such as Mushk-i ‘Alam. It
was a delicate balancing act that would have taxed the ingenuity of a far
greater statesman than Sher ‘Ali Khan.
The real cause of the Second Anglo-Afghan War lay with the hard-
line, interventionist approach adopted by Forward Policy advocates such
as Rawlinson and Frere and the bull-in-a-china-shop diplomacy of Lytton
and Salisbury. Lytton’s arrogant refusal to heed the advice of experienced
officials who knew the Afghan situation far better than he did contributed
significantly to the ultimate breakdown in relations with Sher ‘Ali Khan.
However, Disraeli, Lytton and Salisbury were committed to an assertion
of Britain’s imperial rights over a ruler who, they were convinced, was not
merely fickle and devious, but a half-crazed savage.
In the end both Britain and Russia proved to be broken reeds as far as
Sher ‘Ali Khan was concerned and he found himself caught between the
devil and the deep blue sea. Punch, in a famous contemporary cartoon,
shows the Amir wringing his hands, with a drooling bear on one side of
him and a roaring lion on the other. The caption has the Amir crying, ‘Save
me from my friends!’ and underneath it is an ironic quotation from a leader
in The Times: ‘If at this moment it has been decided to invade the Ameer’s
territory, we are acting in pursuance of a policy which in its intention has
been uniformly friendly to Afghanistan.’ 52
The Amir’s visit to Umballa was the first state visit by a Durrani ruler
to British India and exposed him and his entourage to a world of mech-
anization and the Industrial Revolution. This encounter led Sher ‘Ali Khan
to take the first tentative steps to engage with modern technology. He
introduced Afghanistan’s first printing press, which published the country’s
first Persian newspaper, Shams al-Nahar, and printed Persian translations
of English works, mostly military manuals, as well as the country’s first