afghanistan
All those who are best qualified to form an opinion say that the
Amir will strongly object to the presence of British officers in
Afghanistan and this view is confirmed by his proceedings since
I have been in India. We think it is very desirable to place a British
officer in Herat, if it can be arranged with the cordial consent of
the Ameer, but that if it is done against his will under pressure, the
officer will have no real power of being of use, and his presence
is as likely as not to occasion a breach some day between us and
Afghanistan. 29Salisbury was unmoved and in response accused Northbrook and
his Council of cowardice, claiming that the disaster of the First Anglo-
Afghan War had ‘entered like iron into their souls’ and rendered them
incapable of ‘decisive’ action. Britain’s current position was ‘both dangerous
and humiliating’, he declared, and it was time to abandon the ‘stationary’
policies of Lawrence and his successors. In the government’s view, the
Amir had already opened the door for Russia to ‘make herself mistress’
of Afghanistan, and ‘we cannot leave the keys of the gate [of India] in the
hands of a warder of more than doubtful integrity.’ 30
In the end the Indian government had no option but to implement
London’s policy, but in the autumn of 1875 Lord Northbrook resigned in
protest, though his official letter of resignation cited only ‘personal reasons’.
In private, he told friends and well-wishers that he found it impossible to
work with the Disraeli administration and he refused to implement its
Afghanistan policy. His resignation, however, provided Salisbury with the
opportunity to appoint Lord Lytton, a Conservative who shared Salisbury
and Disraeli’s views on Afghanistan. It was Lytton’s appointment, more
than anything else, that led to the final breach with Sher ‘Ali Khan and
drew Britain once more into war with Afghanistan.
On his way to India, Lytton stopped off in Cairo where he met with
one of the leading ideologues of the Forward Policy, Sir Bartle Frere, whose
supporters claimed that ‘no man living possesses a more intimate know-
ledge of the questions concerned with our relations with Afghanistan’. 31
In fact, this was very far from the case. Frere had spent his first six years
in India in Multan and Sind, but for the rest of his career he had served in
Calcutta as a member of the Viceroy’s Council and subsequently governor
of Bombay. Frere’s Frontier experience was therefore limited, with minimal
involvement in Afghanistan’s political affairs. However, he did have one
close, though negative, connection to Afghanistan. His brother Richard
had served in Sale’s Brigade at the siege of Jalalabad and had died shortly