History of the War in Afghanistan Vol. II

CHAPTER I.. [August-December: 1839.]Dawn of the Restoration—Difficulties of our Position—Proposed Withdrawal of the Army—Arrival of Colonel Wade—His Operations—Lord on the Hindoo-Koosh—Evils of our Policy—Defective Agency—Moollah Shikore—Our Political Agents—Operations in the Khybur Pass—The Fall of Khelat.. Restored to the home of his fathers Shah Soojah was not contented. Even during the excitement of the march to Caubul he had complained of the narrow kingdom to which he was about to return; and now as he looked out from the windows of his palace over the fair expanse of country beneath him he sighed to think that the empire of Ahmed Shah had been so grievously curtailed.Very different indeed was the Douranee Empire over which the sceptre of Shah Soojah was now waved from that which his father had handed down to Zemaun Shah and his brothers to be sacrificed by their weakness and disunion. The kingdom which had once extended from Balkh to Shikarpoor and from Herat to Cashmere had now shrunk and collapsed. On every side its integrity[2] had been invaded. Cashmere and Mooltan had fallen to the Sikhs; Peshawur had been wrested from the Afghans by the same unscrupulous neighbour; the independence of Herat had been guaranteed to a branch of the Royal family; the Beloochees had asserted pretensions unknown in the times of Ahmed Shah; the petty Princes on the northern hill-frontier no longer acknowledged their allegiance to Caubul. In whatsoever direction he turned his eyes he beheld the mutilations to which the old Douranee Empire had been subjected; and yearned to recover some of the provinces which had been severed from the domain of his fathers.