nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47into two rival states. Sher ‘Ali Khan eventually triumphed but at great cost,
both personally as well as to the nation as a whole. For the remainder of
his reign, the Amir fought to hold the country together and to contain a
growing Islamic and anti-British faction within his court as well as a series
of rebellions beyond the Hindu Kush and the dispute with his son, Ya‘qub
Khan, over the succession. To add to his difficulties, after 1868 Afghanistan
shared a common frontier with Russia while the pretenders to the throne,
‘Abd al-Rahman Khan and Ishaq Khan, were living at Russian expense
in Samarkand.
The Amir’s solution was to seek a new and better treaty arrangement
with Britain or, at the very least, an agreement that would provide him
with urgent financial and military aid. Yet despite three conferences and
repeated assurances by British officials that they wanted good relations
with Afghanistan, the British government was not prepared to commit
to any formal treaty. Lord Lytton did offer Sher ‘Ali Khan the possibility
of a treaty, but on terms that were both unrealistic and unacceptable, for
they could well have led to the Amir’s downfall. Lord Lytton made matters
worse during the Peshawar Conference by interpreting all previous Anglo-
Afghan agreements as a one-way street in which all the obligations were
placed on the Amir and few, if any, on Britain. From the British point of
view, Sher ‘Ali Khan also made unreasonable demands in respect of the
defence of his realm and the issue of succession. Yet by demanding the
Amir should prove his loyalty by admitting the Pelly Mission and agreeing
to a permanent British officer being stationed in his country, Britain cut off
its nose to spite its face. Lytton must have known that the Amir would only
agree to such a demand at the point of a bayonet. So instead of strength-
ening Anglo-Afghan ties at a time when the Russian threat to India was
deemed to have risen exponentially following the conquest of Bukhara
and Khiva and the Russo-Turkish War, the Disraeli government’s policy
actually led to the very thing Britain sought to avoid. All Lytton’s aggres-
sive imperialism succeeded in doing was to start another costly war with
Afghanistan which would inflict even more misery on ordinary Afghans.
It is something of a mystery why the Umballa or Simla conferences
failed to end in a treaty, or at least a renewal of the arrangement made with
Dost Muhammad Khan – missed opportunities that contributed to the
eventual war. Both parties had everything to gain by building on the 1855
and 1857 treaties and, given Britain’s paranoia about the Russian threat to
Afghanistan and India, the decision not to provide regular financial and
military aid to the Amir made little sense strategically. Furthermore, had a
legally binding treaty been agreed in 1869 or 1873, Lytton and the Disraeli