ARCHIVED FORUM: Gurdwara Tapoban Sahib
Interesting Article
Posted by : jagroop singh
Date: 7/08/2004 8:54 am
Vahiguru ji ka khalsa, Vahiguru ji ki fateh!
Sadh Sangat Jio,
The following article makes an amusing mention of Ranjit Singh...anyone who can shed light on this alleged characteristic?
Vahiguru ji ka khalsa, Vahiguru ji ki fateh!
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Peace eludes a nation of warring tribes
By Anthony Paul
THE British did a great favour for the first American in Afghanistan - they threw him out. As a result, they saved his life. The American, one Joshua Harlan, missed being part of a massacre of a British force that, until Singapore's fall 100 years later, was the worst defeat Western armed forces had suffered in Asia.
ARTWORK BY ADAM LEE
Though a similar debacle at Afghan hands is these days most improbable, the events of 1841-42 offer an important lesson: West Asia's traditional methods of governance are a formidable barrier to well-meaning nation-builders.
London sent a 17,000-man force - massive by 19th century standards - to Kabul to pacify tribes causing disorder on the western frontiers of its Indian empire. But the sole survivors of this undertaking were a British military doctor, William Brydon, and his horse.
As Harlan put it so succinctly in a comment on the debacle, the British had managed to bring about what no Afghan ruler had ever achieved. They had united Afghanistan - 'a nation whose principle of existence lies in the separate interests of its constituent tribes'.
Since the 19th century, the eccentric Harlan has been one of West Asia's more bizarre historical footnotes. Hearing of his exploits, Rudyard Kipling turned him in 1888 into a fictional Englishman ruling his own Afghan fiefdom in the classic short story, The Man Who Would Be King.
Two recent developments encourage us to focus on this American again. A new book by Ben Macintyre, a former London Times war correspondent, has borrowed Kipling's title for the first biography of Harlan - The Man Who Would Be King: The First American In Afghanistan (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York).
And in recent weeks, fierce fighting has been reported from Ghor. In 1839, the American was proclaimed ruler of what was then a principality and is now an Afghan province. A contest there between today's warlords - fighting that President Hamid Karzai's government lacks the resources to suppress - reminds us of how little the region has changed since the mid-19th century.
In the 1820s, as a 20-something wanderer in India, Harlan, observing how European adventurers flourished as courtiers of local princes, became obsessed with the idea of ruling his own nation. By reading medical textbooks, he conned his way into the role of medical adviser to a series of feudal potentates in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Three memorable West Asians saw to it that Harlan was seldom bored - Shah Shujah Al-Moolk, deposed king of Afghanistan; Shah Shujah's brother, Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, who deposed the Shah and seized the Afghan throne; and Ranjit Singh, maharajah of Lahore, who had given asylum in Peshawar to the exiled Shah and his court.
As a freelance secret agent, Harlan travelled to Kabul in search of allies willing to help put the Shah back on his throne. Because the British had little time for this American upstart, Harlan made little progress, and finally gave up this project.
From 1829 to 1834, he moved back east to Ranjit Singh's fiefdom. A famous hypochondriac in constant need of medical advice, the Sikh king made Harlan governor of Gujrat for a time, saying: 'If you behave well, I'll increase your salary. If not, I'll cut off your nose.'
But then Amir Dost Mohammed demanded a slice of Ranjit Singh's territory. The Sikh king sent Harlan back to Kabul to dissuade the Afghan. In the course of his mission, Harlan, with the insouciance of an Afghan, switched sides. The Amir gave him his own war elephant and a 4,000-man army, and sent him off deep into the mountains north-west of Kabul with orders to subdue restless tribes.
Harlan's army trounced an ethnic Tajik rabble. Impressed, one Mohammed Reffee Beg, prince of Ghor, a mountain kingdom inhabited by the Tajiks' rivals, the Hazaras, sought out the American. The two men quickly saw the advantages of an alliance: Harlan would teach Hazaras modern military science. In return, the Hazara warlord gave Harlan what he had long wanted: the kingdom of Ghor. In return, the abdicating king became its hereditary prime minister.
Harlan's reign was very short. When the American returned to Kabul expecting a hero's welcome, he found the Amir deeply distracted. Britain's feared army of the Indus had invaded.
Soon the Amir's troops, in the Afghan manner, concluded that their 'principle of existence' dictated that they should switch sides. The Amir fled, barely escaping a lynching. The British occupied Kabul, forcing Harlan out from his mansion, then from Afghanistan, then from India.
The Amir's son raised an army committed to recapturing Kabul. When the British in the city foolishly halved the amount of a bribe paid regularly to the Ghilzai, a powerful local tribe, Kabul exploded in violence. Unable to contain the resistance, the British withdrew towards India in a vast, vulnerable caravan, but were slaughtered to all but one man and his horse. By the time Harlan heard of the catastrophe he was back in his native Pennsylvania.
In the century or so that followed, Americans would inherit Britain's policing role in West Asia. But it was George Curzon, one-time viceroy of India, who may have best summarised Afghanistan's role in Anglo-Saxon history.
'In the history of most conquering races is found some spot that has invariably exposed their weakness like the joints in armour of steel,' he wrote in 1889. 'Impregnable elsewhere, (Britain) has shown herself uniformly vulnerable here.'
Like so many Afghan rulers before him, President Karzai faces problems of making himself something more effective than a mere mayor of Kabul. But the news from Ghor in 2004 suggests that Afghan tribesmen's 'principles of existence' have changed little.
