India
The Second Afghan War.
Russia's glacial advance into Turkistan and Samarkand
sufficiently alarmed Prime Minister Benjamin
Disraeli and his secretary
of state for India, Robert
Salisbury, that by 1874,
when they came to power in London, they pressed the government
of India to pursue a more vigorous interventionist line with
Kabul. Viceroy Lord
Northbrook (governed 1872-76),
resisting all such cabinet promptings to reverse Lawrence's
noninterventionist policy and to return to the militant posture
of the First Afghan War era, resigned his office rather than
accept orders from ministers whose diplomatic judgment he believed
to be disastrously distorted by Russophobia. Lord
Lytton, however, who
succeeded him as viceroy, was more than eager to act as his
prime minister desired, and, soon after he reached Calcutta,
he notified Shir 'Ali that he was sending a "mission"
to Kabul. When the amir refused Lytton permission to enter his
hermit kingdom, the viceroy bellicosely declaimed that Afghanistan
was but "an earthen pipkin between two metal pots." He did not,
however, take action against the kingdom until 1878, when Russia's
General Stolyetov was admitted to Kabul while Lytton's envoy,
Sir Neville Chamberlain, was turned back at the border by Afghan
troops. The viceroy decided to crush his neighbouring "pipkin"
and launched the Second
Afghan War on Nov. 21,
1878, with a British invasion over the high passes. Shir
'Ali fled his capital and country, dying in exile early
in 1879. The British army occupied Kabul, as it had in the first
war, and a treaty signed at
Gandamak on May 26, 1879,
was concluded with the former amir's son,
Ya'qub Khan.
Ya'qub Khan promised, in exchange for British
support and protection, to admit to his Kabul court a British
resident who would direct Afghan foreign relations, but the
resident, Sir Louis
Cavagnari, was assassinated
on Sept. 3, 1879, just two months after he arrived. British
troops trudged back over the passes to Kabul and removed Ya'qub
from the throne, which remained vacant until July 1880, when
'Abdor Rahman Khan, nephew
of Shir 'Ali, became amir. The new amir, one of
the shrewdest statesmen in Afghan history, remained secure on
the throne until his death in 1901.
Viceroy Lord
Lansdowne (governed 1888-94),
who sought to reassert a more forward policy in Afghanistan,
did so on the advice of his military commander in chief, Lord
Roberts, who had served as field commander in the Second Afghan
War. In 1893 Lansdowne sent Sir Mortimer
Durand, the government
of India's foreign secretary, on a mission to Kabul to open
negotiations on the delimitation of the Indo-Afghan border.
The demarcation, known as the
Durand Line, was completed
in 1896 and added the tribal territory of the Afridis,
Mahsuds, Waziris, and Swatis
as well as the chieftainships of Chitral and Gilgit, to the
domain of British India. The 9th Earl of
Elgin (governed 1894-99),
Lansdowne's successor, devoted much of his viceregal tenure
to sending British Indian armies on punitive expeditions along
this new frontier. Viceroy Lord
Curzon (governed 1899-1905),
however, recognized the impracticality of trying to administer
the turbulent frontier region as part of the large Punjab province.
Thus, in 1901 he created a new
North-West Frontier Province
containing some 40,000 square miles (about 100,000 square kilometres)
of trans-Sutlej and tribal borderland territory under a British
chief commissioner responsible directly to the viceroy. By instituting
a policy of regular payments to frontier tribes, the new province
reduced border conflicts, though for the next decade British
troops continued to fight against Mahsuds, Waziris,
and Zakka Khel Afridis.
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