afghanistan
The angry nobles petitioned the king to abrogate the order, only for
Shah Shuja‘ to accuse them of being cowards who uttered idle threats. He
then informed them that, since he was king in name only, they should
address their complaints to Macnaghten, Burnes and Trevor. The result
was mutiny. On 1 September 1841 all but a handful of the officers refused
to take the new oath of allegiance, whereupon Shah Shuja‘ banned them
from court and told them either they took the b a’ it or face banishment.
After a stand-off that lasted nearly a month, most of the officers took the
oath under duress. In secret, some senior military officers began to plot to
avenge themselves on Macnaghten, Burnes and Trevor, whom they blamed
for instituting the reforms and their public humiliation.
Macnaghten then proceeded to alienate two other powerful factions
who had supported Shah Shuja‘ al-Mulk’s return to power. In the autumn
of 1841 Macnaghten received Auckland’s orders to reduce expenditure
and had to find savings of several hundred thousand pounds within a
matter of weeks. Convinced that the recent victories in the Helmand and
at Qalat-i Ghilzai had cowed all opposition, Macnaghten decided to halve
the payments made to the chiefs of Tezin and the Jabbar Khel, as well as
the Kohistani pirs. European historians tend to depict these payments as
bribes, but this is not the case. The Safavids, Mughals and the Durranis had
all paid tribal maliks an annual subsidy in return for maintaining security
on the king’s highways. Indeed, it was such an arrangement between Shah
‘A b b a s i and Saddu Khan that led to the rise of the Saddozai dynasty. As
such, these payments were for services rendered.
In September 1841 Macnaghten summoned the chiefs of Tezin and
the Jabbar Khel to Kabul and informed them of the reduction in their
payments, justifying his decision on the grounds that Sultan Muhammad
Khan Tela’i had paid the Jabbar Khel a mere 13,000 rupees per annum.
This was irrelevant as far as these chiefs were concerned, since Shah Shuja‘
had contracted to pay them a much higher rate and even Macnaghten
admitted that these tribes had scrupulously honoured their side of the
bargain and kept the Kabul–Jalalabad road open and bandit free. The
dramatic cut in their payments was thus a kick in the teeth for these khans,
particularly as the payments were key to maintaining their own power
and positions in their tribes and to buying off rivals. The loss of revenue
therefore posed a serious threat to their own standing in the tribe and,
given that the Kabul army’s only supply route to India ran through the
Jabbar Khel territory and Tezin, Macnaghten’s decision was a prescription
for disaster.
nandana
(Nandana)
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