nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47leaving thousands of dead and dying piled up against Sherpur’s walls.
Roberts had won the day, but it had been a close call. The following day
Gough’s relief force reached Kabul and the rebels dispersed. Roberts sent
the cavalry in pursuit with orders to show no quarter and any Afghan bear-
ing arms or suspected of being a rebel was shot or cut down in cold blood.
The defeat at Sherpur ended all but desultory resistance to the British
occupation. Unlike the First Afghan War, Roberts was decisive and ruthless.
His army was far better equipped and could communicate almost instantly
over long distances by telegraph and heliograph. Modern breach-loading
rifles had replaced the old muzzle-loading Brown Bess and were far more
accurate and outranged the Afghan jezails and muskets, still the primary
weapon of the Afghan tribes and even the army. Roberts also deployed
Gatling guns, an early form of machine gun. Furthermore, the Ghilzais of
Tezin and the Khurd Kabul played little or no part in the siege of Kabul
and the Royal Engineers had driven a new road over the Lataband Pass,
which bypassed the gorges and passes of the Haft Kotal and the country
of the Jabbar Khel.
After regaining control of the capital, Roberts lifted martial law and
proclaimed an amnesty for rebels, though he put a price on the heads of
the leaders of the uprising. Ya‘qub Khan’s mother was also imprisoned,
charged with encouraging and financing the uprising. Wali Muhammad
Khan was appointed as governor of Kabul, although when he heard the
British planned to withdraw, he opted for exile in India. Roberts ordered
the construction of a series of new defensive positions in and around the
capital and levelled everything around Sherpur to improve the field of fire.
All the buildings in the lower Bala Hisar were also levelled and the Royal
Engineers drew up detailed plans for new barracks, a parade ground, a
military hospital and a new road to link the eastern and western gates. The
works were abandoned before any of the new buildings were erected, but all
the shopkeepers, government servants, ghulams and other inhabitants were
evicted anyway without compensation, while most of the wood, stone and
other building material was used to repair Sher ‘Ali Khan’s half-completed
Sherpur citadel. Among the buildings destroyed by the Royal Engineers
were what was left of the Mughal and Saddozai palaces and Afghanistan’s
only Christian church, used by Kabul’s small Armenian community. Later
one old Armenian woman wryly noted the irony of how the church built
for them by a Muslim king had been destroyed by Christians. 15 Roberts
also sent a column to the Koh Daman to punish Mir Bacha Khan, whose
home village of Baba Kachgar, which Sale had burnt to a cinder in 1840,
was once more razed to the ground.