Stewart The Khyber Rifles

From the British Raj to Al Qaeda
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9558-3
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Recruited from the Pathan tribes that live in the no-mans land between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Khyber Rifles fought for the British Raj against their own kith and kin. Jules Stewart tells the story of Colonel Sir Robert Warburton, the man who raised the Khyber Rifles in 1878, and describes the Khyber Rifles in action.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stewart, Jules

Leseproben

Malcolm Morris, OBE

Australian Ambassador to Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1973–5

ONE

‘To stop is dangerous, to recede ruin’

The summit of the Khyber Pass rises 3,600 feet above sea level, a barren, rock-strewn wasteland swept in winter by blasts of icy spindrift, baked in summer by temperatures that soar above 110°F. Perched on a rocky promontory near the summit stands Michni Fort, the most remote outpost of the legendary tribal militia, the Khyber Rifles. Below to the west lies a land drenched in the blood of Greek, Persian, Moghul, British, Russian and American invaders. From here, one's gaze is drawn across the desolate Afghan flatlands stretching to the western horizon, beyond which lurk the eternal snows of the Hindu Kush. Gazing down from Michni, it is hard to repress a shudder at the dark and sombre defiles of this pass, so pregnant with disaster. They invoke an uncomfortable reminder of the fate that befell those who throughout history have entertained thoughts of Afghan conquest. The fanatical mullahs who preach jihad to their brethren must be endowed with magical powers, to have so effectively sprinkled amnesia dust in the eyes of each successive wave of invaders. For the US forces now engaged in the futile exercise of dropping bombs on rocks in Afghanistan arrived only twelve years after the mighty Soviet Red Army trudged home exhausted and humiliated, and a century and a half after the British Raj suffered its costliest ever military disaster, a few desperate miles from the Khyber Pass.

The British displayed more tenacity than even the armies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in their determination to subjugate the wild Afghan tribesmen. In 1878, thirty-six years after Britain’s calamity on the retreat from Kabul, the army once again crossed the Khyber. This time it was determined that British soldiers would not be exposed to surprise attack on the road. To ensure the army safe passage into enemy territory it was necessary to secure the Khyber Pass, the strategic route between Afghanistan and British India. But instead of stationing regular troops on the inhospitable and dangerous cliffs that tower over the road, the British came up with an ingenious scheme: why not recruit the local tribesmen into the fold, offering them the incentive of paid employment in the Government of India plus the freedom to use their weapons with impunity? After all, the Pathans knew every sniper’s nest above the pass like the back of their hands, and their long-barrel matchlocks could easily out-range British breech-loading Sniders. Thus was born the rag-tag embryo of what was to become the Khyber Rifles, the guardians of the Khyber Pass.

With the raising of the first of the Frontier Corps the British found that the tribesmen’s loyalty could in part be bought, in part commanded by officers of a very special calibre, men who spoke their language and understood their ways. The government had made significant strides in dealing with the Pathans since that fateful day in 1842 when the army marched out of the gates of Kabul to its destruction, leaving in its wake a legacy of arrogance and ineptitude. But the experience had been gained at a terribly high cost.

On a bitter January morning, a rider slumped across a dying pony was spotted stumbling across the Afghan plain towards the shortly-to-be-besieged British garrison of Jalalabad, 90 miles east of Kabul. William Brydon was a 33-year-old Scottish surgeon attached to the doomed Army of the Indus, commanded by Major-General William Elphinstone, an ageing soldier crippled by gout, an ailment that he had hoped to cure by taking the posting to India. From the outset grave doubts had been expressed about the General’s suitability for the task of leading an army against so cunning an adversary as the Afghan. Elphinstone’s previous battle experience had been at Waterloo twenty-six years before.

Brydon was close to gasping his last when a detachment of cavalry officers galloped from the fort to escort him to safety. He was rushed to the infirmary where the garrison’s surgeon worked feverishly to stem the flow of blood from multiple sword cuts to his hand, knee and head, with a musket ball wound in his leg for good measure. That evening, hunched by the fire in the officers’ mess, Brydon savoured his first proper meal in more than a week. As for his wounds, ‘how, and when, these happened,’ he recounted in a numbed state of mind, ‘I know not’. But Brydon did retain an appallingly vivid recollection of what he had endured during the seven-day retreat from Kabul, a tale that filled his listeners round the fire with a stunned horror. It was the tale of a massacre, the slaughter of more than 16,000 men of the once victorious Army of the Indus, including wives and children and thousands of camp-followers, who on a freezing January morning had tramped out of Kabul, jubilant with the prospect of returning home to the warmth and civilisation of India. In spite of the knee-deep snow that turned each step into a gruelling struggle, the retreating British were confident of reaching safety ninety miles away at Jalalabad in a fortnight’s march. Instead, the entire column perished within three days of abandoning Kabul.

The British forces garrisoned in Kabul had been lulled into a state of complacency by the ease with which the Afghans had been beaten into submission by their new masters in 1838, one year after the royal teenager Victoria had ascended to the throne of England. The first two years in Kabul passed without major incident, and with mulberry blossoming in spring the troops, no longer an expeditionary force, were settling down as an army of occupation. Bungalows were erected, gardens laid out, wives sent for, and not a soul among them could anticipate the calamity that lay in waiting like a tiger crouched in a thicket. The enemy king Dost Mohammed had surrendered in November 1840 and was given honourable asylum in India. The British Lion roared with victory, and all was well.

The melancholy events that enfolded on the march from Kabul in 1842 came about largely as a result of the East India Company seeking to cut back on expenditures. One of history’s earliest episodes of corporate downsizing was to touch off a major human and political cataclysm. With wisdom that may be generously described as dubious, the cost-conscious government babus in Calcutta had decided to reduce the subsidies that were doled out each year to the Khyber tribal chieftains. These allowances were given on the tribesmen’s commitment to keep open the lines of communication with the army and its outposts across the border in Afghanistan. The British could generally rely on the tribal maliks to keep their word, that is so long as the baksheesh kept rolling in. But directly the bribes dried up, the all too predictable outcome was an immediate Pathan uprising. Revolt swept swiftly and suddenly across Kabul in November 1841. The incapacity of the British command to deal with the situation was surpassed only by the treachery of the Afghans. The British Envoy Sir William Macnaghten, a fastidious, pinched-mouth career bureaucrat, had taken it upon himself to break the news to the tribesmen: following orders from the East India Company he announced abruptly to the maliks assembled in jirga, the government subsidy was to be slashed from £8,000 to £4,000. The tribal leaders went away to ponder this piece of intelligence, and their response was to summarily cut off the key road connection to and from British India, the Khyber Pass. A tidal wave of horsemen fell upon every caravan that ventured up the road, looting the baggage trains and spreading havoc among the camel drivers. Spurred on by the Dost Mohammed’s favourite son, Akbar Khan, a slight, feline creature with a wispy moustache and almond eyes, who bore a deep hatred for the feringhee, the flames of revolt spread up and down the Frontier, to finally engulf the unsuspecting British forces and their families in Kabul, where the situation was deteriorating by the hour.

Kabul was now effectively cut off from the powerful garrison at Jalalabad. Another British Envoy to the city, the adventurer Alexander Burnes who had attempted to negotiate an alliance with Dost Mohammed, was the first high-profile figure in the cantonments to fall victim to the mob. On 2 November the Afghans torched the Residency, hacked Burnes to pieces, along with two British officers and all the sepoy guards inside. The kindly but doddering Elphinstone, when told of the assassination, took pen in hand and wrote to Macnaghten: ‘We must see what morning brings and then think what can be done.’ Macnaghten barely had time to ponder his commander’s soothing words. As the government’s caretaker administrator, Macnaghten was looking forward to taking up his new appointment as Governor of Bombay. He arranged to meet Akbar Khan for truce talks at a spot by the banks of the Kabul river, a quarter mile from the Residency. No sooner had Macnaghten alighted from his horse, he was brutally murdered in the presence of the amir’s nephew. The crafty Afghan, who was in his early twenties, disclosed to the attending mob that the British envoy was plotting to abduct a tribal chief, and that was provocation enough for the tribesmen to fall upon Macnaghten. To the delight of the Afghans already intoxicated with the scent of British blood, Akbar Khan ordered Macnaghten’s head to be paraded through the city on a pole. As for the rest of the hapless Envoy’s remains, the rabble took it upon itself to hang Macnaghten’s headless corpse from a hook at the entrance to the bazaar.

The game was now well and truly up. This supreme humiliation of the British master roused...