afghanistanand weapons the Muhammadzais needed to defeat their enemies. Britain
also tacitly encouraged and ultimately legitimized the expansion of the
Durrani kingdom to the banks of the Amu Darya. This dramatic reversal
of Afghanistan’s fortunes must have seemed almost miraculous to govern-
ment officials in Kabul, especially since the provider of this bounty was
the very nation that had invaded and deposed Amir Dost Muhammad
Khan a few years earlier.
Britain’s Afghanistan policy during the colonial era continued to
be confused and vacillated between intervention and disengagement,
depending on which administration was in power in London. On occa-
sion the British were held hostage by the Amirs on the one hand, and by
the ideolo gies and vested interests of imperialist politicians and military
theorists on the other. Britain’s Afghanistan policy was also increasingly
tainted by assumptions about Britain’s innate cultural, racial and religious
superiority and its civilizing mission, ideas derived from Ptolemaic myths
about Alexander the Great’s conquest of Asia as well as an Orientalist
vision of Islam and Islamic civilization. Steeped as British administrators
and planners were in classical history, British strategists regarded rivers,
particularly the Indus and the ‘Oxus’, as Central Asia’s Rubicons. Like many
other assumptions on which the Defence of India policy was constructed,
this was a fallacy, for historically it was mountain chains, or rather passes
and watersheds, that traditionally formed the northern frontiers of India
and Central Asia. Even today watersheds and ridgelines still determine
community boundaries as well as water and grazing rights.
Yet despite many strategic, political and moral ambiguities, the British
government could claim its Central Asian policy succeeded, since Russian
influence and the threat of invasion were deterred. Afghanistan therefore
fulfilled its colonial function as a buffer state, but it was touch and go.
Following the annexation of Samarkand and Bukhara in the late 1860s,
Russia pushed the boundaries, literally, as far as it dared. Had the Tsar
called Britain’s bluff and occupied Herat or Afghan Turkistan, British mili-
tary strategists knew there was little they could do to prevent such a move,
given the logistical nightmare this involved. It was also privately accepted
that the Afghan army, despite all the cash and military equipment Britain
had supplied, would offer only token resistance.
Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan was not due to any sense of
paternalistic altruism or an innate interest in the welfare of the people
ruled by the Amirs, but merely seen as the best way to serve Britain’s own
geopolitical interests. In many ways this has been the story of all European
interventions to date, as Afghans have found themselves unwittingly caught