Free The Dark Defile by Diana Preston

policies when they began to go awry, rather than ordering either a halt or a thorough review. 28
    Chief among Auckland’s subordinates was Macnaghten. Though an undoubtedly clever man, he was out of both his milieu and his depth in Afghanistan. Nearly all his career had been spent in the secretariat in Calcutta, and he had little experience of independent command. His ingrained optimism led him throughout to minimize or ignore difficulties. He underestimated the military capabilities of the Afghans and overestimated those of the British and Indian troops, leaving him both to accept troop reductions and deployments when he should not have and to propose grandiose operations beyond Shah Shuja’s borders—for example, against Herat—which were entirely unfeasible. Though he understood the importance of making it appear to the Afghan population that Shah Shuja was a true king and thus ensured that his troops led the army on its marches and made the first ceremonial entries into cities, in promoting the invasion and Shah Shuja himself, he was far too optimistic in his assessment of Shah Shuja’s abilities and of the ease with which the diverse and stubborn Afghans could be induced to accept as a ruler a man they considered to have an aura of ill fortune.
    As for Alexander Burnes, as well as courage, he had needed great self-confidence, resourcefulness and strength of judgment to succeed in his youthful journeys in Central Asia. Such qualities rarely go hand in hand with humility. What is more, Burnes seems to have allowed all the praise and attention he had received in London to turn his head to the extent that in his subsequent career he found it easier to antagonize less celebrated but more senior colleagues than to devote enough of his time and charm to convince them of the undoubted soundness of many of his views, particularly those in regard to Dost Mohammed. Thwarted, and urged on by his unrequited ambition, he preferred, to the detriment of his historical reputation, to acquiesce, albeit sulkily, in policies that he believed wrong. He did so in the hope of obtaining, by his temporary passivity, high office in which he would remedy others’ deficient policies, thus fulfilling his youthful promise—something fate never allowed him the opportunity to do.
    DESPITE ALL THE soul-searching about British actions at home and abroad, not long after the last British regiments had returned to India down through the Khyber Pass, the British in India returned to their expansionist policies. Their confidence restored by the success of the army of retribution and at the urging of Governor-General Lord Ellenborough, they moved west into Sind, where the emirs, emboldened by British defeats in Afghanistan, had increased tolls on the Indus and then indulged in what the British saw as a variety of provocations. The last straw had been an assault in February 1843 on a British mission led by Colonel James Outram. This in the government’s view justified them in “ introducing to a brigand infested land, the firm but just administration of the East India Company. ”
    Lord Ellenborough dispatched an expeditionary force of 2,500 men led by General Sir Charles Napier, who pronounced before departing, “We have no right to seize Sind yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it will be.” Known to his troops variously as “Old Fagin” or “the Devil’s Brother” because of his wild unkempt appearance and large hooked nose, Napier was as good as his word, swiftly defeating the emirs, after which the British soon annexed Sind. 29 The Indus was now open to British navigation and commerce. Karachi, never relinquished by the British, began its rise from a fishing port with three thousand inhabitants to Pakistan’s leading commercial center and port with a population of around 15 million today.
    The next people to suffer the advance of the British were their old allies the Sikhs. Their lands had