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The Folly of Double Government Lessons from the First Anglo-Afghan War for the 21St Century

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The Folly of Double Government Lessons from the First Anglo-Afghan War for the 21St Century Noah Arjomand The Folly of Double Government Lessons from the First Anglo-Afghan War for the 21st Century The double government, which had been British state-building project in Afghanistan in terms established, was becoming a curse to the whole of relations between an imperial power and its local nation. The Shah and his officers ostensibly collaborators and ask why the project broke down as controlled all the departments of civil rapidly as it did. I also ask how thinking about double government can help us analyse 21st century state- administration; but everywhere our English building interventions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. officers were at their elbow, to counsel and suggest… It could hardly be said that the King This paper does not reveal new facts, either about st possessed a government of his own, when the the first Anglo-Afghan War or 21 century control of the army and the exchequer was in Afghanistan. Rather, the purpose is to show how seemingly discrete problems that might otherwise be the hands of others.1 explained with reference to, for example, particular clashing personalities, personal incompetence, During and in the years after the first British debacle xenophobia or secret nefarious agendas are actually in Afghanistan, the Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842, driven by a specific and overarching structural British participants and observers focused a great problem. deal upon what military historian and former army officer Sir John William Kaye, writing a decade after the war, described as “double government.” It was Historical overview ‘double’ because, side-by-side, there existed not only an Afghan regime that the British East India Company In the post-Napoleonic era, Asia was the scene of the had brought to power, but also a large-scale British so-called Great Game, a veritable cold war between political and military administration that remained in the British and Russian empires. Britain was the country and governed alongside the Afghan state. consolidating its power over the Indian subcontinent, The role of double government in the failure of British and Russia was expanding southward through Central state-building has generally fallen from view. In Asia. Apprehensive that Kabul’s ruler, Amir Dost subsequent histories as well as in today’s popular Muhammad Khan, was falling under the sway of rival 2 press, the revolt that erupted in late 1841, less than Russia, the British East India Company’s army three years into the British intervention, is explained in two ways: in terms of either individual tactical 2 The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East blunders or the innate resistance of Afghans to Indies, or East India Company, was originally a private entity with a foreign occupation. In this paper I want to take legal trade monopoly but accountable only to its shareholders. double government seriously. I examine the first Over the century preceding the First Anglo-Afghan War, the company had conquered most of the Indian subcontinent with a private army and expanded its revenue stream from trade to 1 John William Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. II, taxation, ‘taxation’ being in many cases a euphemism for London, W. H. Allen and Company 1890, 16. plundering whatever treasures came to hand. A series of reforms, 2 Arjomand: The Folly of Double Government invaded Afghanistan in early 1839 to restore the objects, you will consider whether the Shah may not former monarch of the Saddozai dynasty, Shah Shuja with advantage promise their amendment... [O]ffer al-Mulk3 to the throne. After successfully installing such advice in the commencement of the new order of their man in Kabul in June 1839, the British, led on things as may tend to gain the affections of the the civilian side by the Indian Governor-General’s Afghan people, and to secure the stability of the Envoy, Sir William Hay MacNaghten, embarked upon Suddozye Empire.6 an experiment in state-building designed—they In these orders, the tension between the mandates insisted—to shore up popular support for Shah Shuja for Afghan independence and for good governance is and set his government on its feet. already evident. It is resolved on paper through the The British considered Afghanistan’s value to be instruction to merely “offer advice” to the sovereign; geostrategic rather than intrinsic: Russophobe British in practice, as will be illustrated, convincing Shah strategists had become worried that the mountain Shuja to behave as the British desired was not so passes to India through Afghanistan constituted a straightforward. The British experiment in state- critical vulnerability to their empire.4 It seems the building collapsed after just two and a half years in British genuinely intended to establish a friendly the face of uprisings to the north and east of the buffer state in Afghanistan and then withdraw their capital and in Kabul itself. With MacNaghten and his army; they were not merely using the pretext of royal deputy, Sir Alexander Burnes, killed, the British army restoration to gain a toehold and eventually turn of occupation withdrew from Kabul in the first days of Afghanistan into a directly administered colony. For 1841, only to be massacred wholesale in the example, MacNaghten's original secret marching mountain passes en route to Jalalabad. orders read, "The British government has no objects of territorial conquest or aggrandizement…as soon as Afghan independence shall be established, this Army Alternative explanations for British will retreat."5 failure Establishing “Afghan independence” here in fact meant not only defeating Dost Muhammad and his After the revolt broke out, many British officers Barakzai faction, but also encouraging the new king to blamed the Afghans’ implacable religious fanaticism 7 reform the state and economy: and xenophobia. This claim that Afghan hostility to foreign non-Muslims was inherent is, however, … the British Government has no stronger wish than contradicted by the fact that the general population for the Peace and Prosperity of the surrounding did not initially treat the British with hostility. Shah Nations, and for the freedom and independence of Shuja, for his part, was initially accepted as holding Commerce, and if amongst the present institutions of the hereditary qualifications for legitimacy as a direct Afghanistan there should be any inimical to these descendent of Ahmad Shah Durrani, on the condition that he also provide the expected political patronage starting in the 1770s, had, however, brought the company under to his followers.8 Political and religious leaders greater control of the British parliament, and after 1833 the East (generally referred to as “chiefs” and “mullahs” by India Company served essentially as a managing agency for the 9 British government in India. See William Dalrymple, ‘The East India contemporary British writers) in both Kabul and the Company: The Original Corporate Raiders’, The Guardian, 4 March 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east- 6Maddock to MacNaghtan, 12 September 1838 [see FN 5]. india-company-original-corporate-raiders; Encyclopædia 7 Britannica, “East India Company,” 2015; Mackeson to Maddock, Date of letter unknown, The British http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/176643/East-India- Library, London, India Office Records, L/PS/5/162, No 109, 418-19. Company. 8 Even Dost Muhammad implicitly recognised the legitimacy of 3 Shuja was a member of the Saddozai subtribe of the Popalzai Saddozai kingship when he took on the title of amir rather than tribe of the Pashtun Durrani tribal confederation and the grandson shah in 1826. See Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who in 1747 founded an empire, which is Political History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, 111. viewed as the antecedent of modern Afghanistan. Shuja had been 9 I make use of 19th century terms such as ‘chief’, ‘tribe’ and deposed in 1809 and subsequently lived as a guest of the British in ‘native’ throughout this paper. Neologisms such as ‘local power the Punjabi city of Ludhiana. brokers’ or ‘subnational kinship-based political groups’ or 4 The British hoped to benefit from the transit of their goods ‘autochthonous populations’ in academic usage today have the through Afghanistan, Kabul being a small but important hub of advantage of not being associated with the assumption that non- regional commerce at the time. However, this economic interest Western ‘natives’ are inherently different from Westerners in their was secondary to geopolitical concerns. See Christine Noelle, State social relations and are organised into primordial kinship groups as and Tribe, Richmond, UK, Curzon 1997, 23-24; and Peter Hopkirk, their only political orientation or with the assumption that it is The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, London, John ‘natural’ that that those tribal natives be under the direction of a Murray 2006, 97-98. hereditary chief with inherent traditional authority. Chiefs and tribes do not just exist unchangingly, but are created and 5 As in a correspondence by Sir Herbert Maddock, Governor- transformed by patronage and other forms of relationships with General Lord Auckland’s secretary at Fort William, to MacNaghten, others; indeed writers on empire have argued that, in many cases, dated 12 September 1838. Some writers have cited such the position of a singular powerful tribal chief has not been the correspondence as Auckland to MacNaghten. traditional norm, but rather created out of a system of indirect AAN Discussion Paper 02/2015 Arjomand: The Folly of Double Government 3 surrounding country, some plied with British bribes rule, the coloniser’s model of government and and promises of future subsidies, likewise initially civilisation is transposed onto the colony, which the defected en masse from Dost Muhammad’s camp, coloniser administers directly, recruiting ‘natives’ (as forcing the latter to flee Kabul without a fight.10 they were called in the day—see footnote 7) as Indeed, some of the very clerics who later would bureaucratic administrators.
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