afghanistan
Though Burnes did not know it at the time of his first meeting, some
two weeks before he arrived in Kabul, Lord Auckland wrote to Ranjit Singh,
who was worried about the true object of Burnes’s mission, to reassure
him that Britain had no intention of making any political treaty with Dost
Muhammad Khan and would ‘do nothing in Cabool without [Ranjit’s]
consent’. 43 Auckland also informed the Maharaja that he regarded the
attack on Jamrud as an act of blatant aggression by the Amir against a
trusted treaty partner, and if Ranjit Singh decided to march on Kabul and
punish Dost Muhammad Khan, he would not object. At least Britain would
have a reliable ally beyond the Khyber. As for Dost Muhammad Khan,
Auckland believed he could not be trusted, for he had written both to the
Shah of Persia and the Russians seeking aid against the Sikhs, an action
that was hostile to British interests. Auckland then told Burnes to inform
Dost Muhammad Khan that if he were sincere about good relations with
Britain he should immediately cease all correspondence with both powers.
Dost Muhammad must have been at a loss to understand why the
British had bothered to send Burnes to Kabul since clearly he had no
plenipotentiary powers to negotiate a solution to the dominant political
issue facing him. To all intent and purposes, Burnes was just a messenger
boy. In the Amir’s view:
this was not the good offices of the English which he had expected;
that his hopes were quite different; that he now had a turban of
muslin on his head, but on entering into friendly relations with the
British he had sanguine hopes that he would have a shawl one in
lieu of muslin. On the contrary, he finds the English wish to keep
the old material on his head, with the obliging promise that they
will not allow another power to deprive him of it. To this act of
amity he attaches not much importance, as he was not afraid that
any one will ever wrest it from him. 44Yet as a show of goodwill, Dost Muhammad halted all correspondence
with Persia and Russia. He had never been that serious about a Persian
alliance anyway, since that too would have been politically unacceptable
to the powerful Sunni Islamist lobby. It was an alliance with Britain, the
dominant power in the region, that he coveted.
In November 1837 the situation took an unexpected turn when news
reached Kabul that a Persian army was marching on Herat, a campaign
that Muhammad Mirza Qajar pursued in the face of strong objections
by Sir John McNeill, the British envoy, in Tehran. Britain believed that