afghanistanof 1880 and 1893 were government-to-government arrangements or merely
personal undertakings by Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan. If the latter were
the case, then both treaties effectively terminated with the death of Habib
Allah Khan’s father.
Habib Allah Khan was not prepared to risk leaving Afghanistan,
but assured Curzon that he would ‘adhere firmly’ to the Anglo-Afghan
alliance. 6 Curzon, however, was not satisfied. In the autumn of 1903 he
persuaded the Amir to allow Sir Henry Dobbs to travel to Herat, report
on the frontier situation and repair the broken boundary pillars. 7 Dobbs’s
mission, though, was obstructed by both Russian officials and the gover-
nor of Herat, whom the British suspected, rightly, of accepting bribes from
the Russians not to cooperate. In the end all Dobbs accomplished was
an inspection of the broken pillars and filing an alarming report about
the chronic shortcomings of Herat’s defences. Tensions increased when
Ernest Thornton, a British engineer working in Kabul, informed the Indian
government in confidence that Russian agents had recently visited the
Afghan capital and had held secret talks with the Amir. 8 Then, at the end
of 1903, Russia opened the rail link between Tashkent and Turkistan and
began to survey the route from Samarkand to Termez on the Amu Darya.
Since Russia already had a railhead at Khushk, just across the Herat fron-
tier, British officials feared that when the Termez line became operational,
Russia would be able to move thousands of troops and munitions quickly
to the Afghan frontier and mount a two-pronged invasion of Herat and
Mazar-i Sharif.
This scenario was a nightmare for British military strategists as they
knew Britain was powerless to prevent any Russian occupation of Herat
or Afghan Turkistan. In the autumn of 1903 British military chiefs held
war games in Simla, simulating a Russian invasion of India through
Afghanistan. The outcome was the alarming conclusion that any army
sent into Afghanistan would be defeated. The problem was the logistical
impossibility of simultaneously supplying 50,000–60,000 troops in three
separate armies: one to attack the Russians in Herat; a second to draw a
Maginot Line on the Helmand; and a third to occupy Kandahar, Jalalabad
and Kabul. It emerged that the railheads at Chaman and Peshawar did not
have sufficient capacity for such a campaign and they were too far away
from the theatre of war to facilitate the swift movement of so many troops
and their baggage and equipment. It was also estimated there were not
sufficient pack animals, not just in India, but in the whole world, to supply
such an army in a region where the attrition rate of beasts of burden was
the highest in the empire. When Curzon tried to address the problem and