238 DESTINY DISRUPTED
contract he had signed, however, Iran now had to pay Baron Reuters a
forty-thousand-pound penalty. Fortunately {for the shah), this didn't come
out of his pocket but out of the Iranian treasury. Thus, the country {and
its taxpayers) had to pay a British lord an immense sum to build nothing-
and the deal did leave him with a controlling interest in the new Iranian
national bank.5
This sort of thing happened again and again, each deal putting cash in
the pockets of a corrupt king and his relatives and giving a European com-
pany or government control over some aspect or other of the Iranian econ-
omy. If the deal was rescinded as it sometimes was, this always cost Iranian
taxpayers some huge sum in penalties. Iranian citizens knew quite well
what was happening, but could do nothing about it. Weak as they were,
the Qajar kings had plenty of power over their own people: they could still
put their subjects in prison, torture them, execute them.
From the European point of view, however, the country being sliced
and diced and consumed was only the spoils: the great question was which
European country would get to do the consuming and which would end
up with a strategic advantage for further exploitation. Since the two chief
adversaries were pretty evenly matched, Britain and Russia eventually di-
vided Iran up into zones of influences, with Russia securing the right to
dominate and plunder the north and Great Britain the right to do the
same in the south. This agreement more or less solidified the country's
northern and southern borders and marked a line east of which all bets
were off, a line that became Iran's border with Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Great Game was playing out in that wild territory to
the east as well, the Hindu Kush mountains and the plains north of them.
Here, in the early eighteenth century, a tribal chieftain named Ahmad
Shah Baba had united the unruly Afghan tribes and carved out one of
those sprawling empires that unfurled periodically into India. Ahmad
Shah's empire was to be the last of these, however, because his successors
had to deal with a new reality: the two mighty European imperial powers
pressing in from north and south. The Russians kept sending spies and
agents into Afghan territory to press for alliances with the king or with any
of the rival chieftains who might overthrow him. The British did the same.
Twice, Great Britain invaded and tried to occupy Afghanistan, in order
to block out the Russians, but each time the Afghans drove the British