Pakistan is a paradigm example of a failed state that has undergone an extremely dangerous form of radical Islamisation.
First Afghan War
With the failure of the Burnes mission (1837), the governor general of India,
Lord Auckland, ordered an invasion of Afghanistan, with the object of restoring
shah Shuja (also Shoja), who had ruled Afghanistan from 1803 to 1809. From the
point of the view of the British, the First Anglo-Afghan War (often called
"Auckland's Folly") was an unmitigated disaster. The war demonstrated the ease
of overrunning Afghanistan and the difficulty of holding it.
An army of British and Indian troops set out from the Punjab in December 1838
and by late March 1839 had reached Quetta. By the end of April the British had
taken Qandahar without a battle. In July, after a two-month delay in Qandahar,
the British attacked the fortress of Ghazni, overlooking a plain that leads to
India, and achieved a decisive victory over the troops of Dost Mohammad, which
were led by one of his sons. The Afghans were amazed at the taking of fortified
Ghazni, and Dost Mohammad found his support melting away. The Afghan ruler took
his few loyal followers and fled across the passes to Bamian, and ultimately to
Bukhara, where he was arrested, and in August 1839 Shuja was enthroned again in
Kabul after a hiatus of almost 30 years. Some British troops returned to India,
but it soon became clear that Shuja's rule could only be maintained by the
presence of British forces. Garrisons were established in Jalalabad, Ghazni,
Kalat-iGhilzai (Qalat), Qandahar, and at the passes to Bamian.
Omens of disaster for the British abounded. Opposition to the British-imposed
rule of Shuja began as soon as he assumed the throne, and the power of his
government did not extend beyond the areas controlled by the force of British
arms.
Dost Mohammad escaped from prison in Bukhara and returned to Afghanistan to
lead his followers against the British and their Afghan protege. In a battle at
Parwan on November 2, 1840, Dost Mohammad had the upper hand, but the next day
he surrendered to the British in Kabul. He was deported to India with the
greater part of his family. Sir William Macnaghten, one of the principal
architects of the British invasion, wrote to Auckland two months later, urging
good treatment for the deposed Afghan leader.
Shuja did not succeed in garnering the support of the Afghan chiefs on his
own, and the British could not or would not sustain their subsidies. When the
cash payments to tribal chiefs were curtailed in 1841, there was a major revolt
by the Ghilzai.
By October 1841 disaffected Afghan tribes were flocking to the support of
Dost Mohammad's son, Muhammad Akbar, in Bamian. Barnes was murdered in November
1841, and a few days later the commissariat fell into the hands of the Afghans.
Macnaghten, having tried first to bribe and then to negotiate with the tribal
leaders, was killed at a meeting with the tribal chiefs in December. On January
1, 1842, the British in Kabul and a number of Afghan chiefs reached an agreement
that provided for the safe exodus of the entire British garrison and its
dependents from Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the British would not wait for an
Afghan escort to be assembled, and the Ghilzai and allied tribes had not been
among the 18 chiefs who had signed the agreement. On January 6 the precipitate
retreat by some 4,500 British and Indian troops with 12,000 camp followers began
and, as they struggled through the snowbound passes, Ghilzai warriors attacked
the British. Although a Dr. W. Brydon is usually cited as the only survivor of
the march to Jalalabad (out of more than 15,000 who undertook the retreat), in
fact a few more survived as prisoners and hostages. Shuja remained in power only
a few months and was assassinated in April 1842.
The destruction of the British garrison prompted brutal retaliation by the
British against the Afghans and touched off yet another power struggle among
potential rulers of Afghanistan. In the fall of 1842 British forces from
Qandahar and Peshawar entered Kabul long enough to rescue the British prisoners
and burn the great bazaar. All that remained of the British occupation of
Afghanistan was a ruined market and thousands of dead (one estimate puts the
total killed at 20,000). Although the foreign invasion did give the Afghan
tribes a temporary sense of unity they had lacked before, the accompanying loss
of life (one estimate puts the total killed at 25,000) and property was followed
by a bitterness and resentment of foreign influence that lasted well into the
twentieth century and may have accounted for much of the backlash against the
modernization attempts of later Afghan monarchs.
