dreams melted into air, 1919–29known as the Massacre of Amritsar. On 13 April 1919 Brigadier General
Dyer ordered his sepoys, which included a contingent of Pathans, to fire
on a large crowd of unarmed protesters assembled in the walled garden of
Jallianwala Bagh, an action that led to the deaths of hundreds of unarmed
civilians, including women and children, and inflamed the situation
even further.
Although most of the dead and injured were Sikhs, the Indian revo-
lutionaries in Kabul exploited the massacre as justification of the Amir’s
jihad. On 1 May 1919 Amir ’Aman Allah Khan called another darbar where
he read out an account of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and claimed that
most of the dead and wounded were Muslims. He then referred to the
campaigns of Lawrence in Arabia and the Hijaz and the British occu-
pation of the Ottoman cities of Jerusalem, Aleppo and Damascus, and
claimed that Britain was planning the extermination of Islam and that
the honour of every Muslim was violated. Having whipped his audience
into a religious fervour, the Amir gave orders for the army to be moved
to the India frontier.
Afghan and Western historians represent the Third Anglo-Afghan War
primarily as a War of Independence, but officially it was a jihad. After all,
Amir ’Aman Allah Khan did not have to go to war to secure independ-
ence, since he had already declared Afghanistan independent and he knew
Britain was not in a position to do anything about it. The Amir, however,
needed to legitimize his invasion of India by securing a fatwa and to this
end state propaganda portrayed the war as in defence of Islam and perse-
cuted Muslims. Once he secured this decree, however, ’Aman Allah Khan
pl ayed the ethno-nationalist card, appealing to Pushtuns on both sides of
the Durand Line to rise up and expel the British from the Punjab. Later the
government issued proclamations to the Mohmands and Afridis ‘printed
in shockingly bad Pushtu which is almost impossible to translate’. 10
The Afghan campaign consisted of a three-pronged attack. General
Saleh Muhammad Khan commanded the Nangahar division which
consisted mostly of Mohmand and Afridi levies. His objective was to seize
control of the Khyber Pass and attack Peshawar. Meanwhile, Mahmud
Tarzi and the Indian revolutionaries, with the help of the Afghan agent
in Peshawar, planned an uprising in Peshawar to coincide with Saleh
Muhammad Khan’s advance. 11 The second front was entrusted to Nadir
Khan, who was gathering an army in Khost. His orders were to occupy
Waziristan and the Khurram agency, territories that Afghanistan had ceded
to Britain under the Durand Agreement. However, Nadir Khan’s plans were
delayed by a revolt in Gardez and a decided lack of enthusiasm for the jihad