Read Online The Dark Defile by Diana Preston - Free Book Online Page B

were punished and killed, and even more of the population were turned into ready recruits for the enemy. The British and the Afghans alike had problems in understanding each other’s cultures and characters. The British stereotyped the Afghans as cunning, corrupt and deceitful and thus found it difficult to believe in the motives of those who were in fact well disposed toward them. The Afghans accepted British protestations of their reputation for straight dealing at face value and were thus the more let down when the British proved duplicitous and Machiavellian. 26 The Afghan propensity for assassination as well as the taking and subsequent trading between themselves of hostages initially appalled the British, but later they at times found themselves complicit in plans for targeted assassination as the easiest way to rid themselves of troublesome opponents. The attitudes and ambitions of Persia and the passage of forces and weapons across the Helmand River as well as the porous, imprecise border complicated British policies.
    Changes of government in Britain changed policy in Afghanistan. Politicians—even those who favored the intervention—were concerned about cost as timescales extended, preferring to take the short rather than the long-term view. In Kabul, too, British civilian officials and military commanders bickered about the division of responsibilities between them. Civilian officials such as Macnaghten, whose careers depended on the success of the mission, created a conspiracy of optimism . 27 Generals protested in vain against withdrawal of forces to a level that led to an overstretching of resources and a consequent inability to control more than a few strategic outposts outside Kabul, rather than the whole countryside. Sometimes even these outposts were overrun.
    The British found it easier to purchase acquiescence to their own and Shah Shuja’s activities than to win over Afghan hearts and minds. Therefore, perhaps the biggest British miscalculation was—in response to cost-cutting pressures from home—unilaterally to reduce some of the subsidies paid to Afghan tribal chiefs. Their economy measure was immediately followed by an Afghan rising.
    The long time taken for communications between London and the governor-general’s administration in Calcutta and then from Calcutta to those in command in the field in Afghanistan inevitably hampered effective decision making—a problem exacerbated by the fact that the British did not choose their senior officials and generals well. On the military side the deficiencies of Elphinstone and Shelton are so obvious as to require no recapitulation. Among the civilians, the supreme command lay with Lord Auckland, as governor-general. Two phrases used by the Roman historian Tacitus in his assessment of Galba—one of the unsuccessful Roman emperors in the year of the four emperors, A.D. 69—could have been used of Auckland: magis extra vitia quam cum virtutibus (a man rather without vices than possessing virtues) and capax imperii nisi imperasset (considered capable of exercising power if he had not been called upon to do so).
    Auckland, a pleasant character, had proved a good administrator in less demanding posts in the government in London. However, even if the post of governor-general was slightly less powerful than that of Roman emperor, he was insufficiently strong a character or leader when placed in supreme command of policy in India, thousands of miles and many weeks in terms of communication away from London, to withstand either the conspiracy of optimism generated by Macnaghten from Kabul or pressures from home both to economize and to expedite success and withdrawal. It was not that he was a complete failure—he did restrain some of Macnaghten’s plans for operations beyond Afghan borders—but that he was not equipped temperamentally or intellectually to dominate the situation. He preferred to acquiesce in his subordinates’ plans to continue existing