nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47after Pollock’s relief army arrived, probably from wounds received during
the siege.
Frere had accompanied the Prince of Wales on his state visit to India
and Salisbury commissioned him to report on Frontier affairs and British
relations with the Amir. After visiting his brother’s grave in Rawalpindi,
Frere spent two weeks in Peshawar where he had a series of meetings with
the Commissioner, Sir Richard Pollock, who refused to divulge any inform-
ation of a confidential nature on Afghanistan. This infuriated Frere and in
his dispatches to Salisbury he claimed, erroneously, that Pollock had no
authority and that he did not have access to the Persian dispatches. When
it came to ‘accurate and reliable information’ on Afghanistan, he wrote,
the Commissioner ‘had little or none and can have none under the present
blind-man’s bluff system’, and claimed he could only make ‘shrewd guesses’
about the Amir’s intentions.
Despite his lack of access to confidential government documents, Frere
pontificated about Afghan affairs and informed Salisbury that Amir Sher
‘Ali Khan’s disposition was ‘one of most bitter hostility’ to Great Britain.
He then endorsed Salisbury’s position regarding stationing at least one
permanent British officer in Afghanistan and added that:
Robert Bulwer-
Lytton, 1st Earl of
Lytton and Viceroy of
India, 1876–80. His
aggressive pursuit of
the Forward Policy
was instrumental
in provoking the
confrontation with
Amir Sher ‘Ali Khan
that led to the Second
Anglo-Afghan War.