Free The Dark Defile by Diana Preston Page B

struggle, one of Dost Mohammed’s younger sons, Sher Ali, emerged as the new emir. (Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammed’s favorite son, had died in 1845 at the age of twenty-nine.)
    THE IMPROVED RELATIONS between Britain and Russia continued during the 1840s, but by 1854 differences between the two over the “Eastern question”—the potential breakup of the Ottoman Turkish Empire—led to the Crimean War, in which Britain, allied with the Ottoman Turks and the French, fought Russia. The 1856 Treaty of Paris concluding the conflict ended for the present Russian ambitions to extend southwest. In the east, under Nicholas I, who died in March 1855, and his son and successor, Alexander II, Russia had continued after the end of the First Afghan War to expand into Central Asia, pushing a line of fortresses through the Kazakh steppes and establishing a presence on the Aral Sea. In 1869 Bokhara was compelled to accept czarist suzerainty, and Russian power reached the banks of the Amu Darya, or Oxus, River. Although the British had refused to commit themselves to aid Afghanistan in fighting the Russians if they crossed the Amu Darya, in 1874 British policy changed with the election of a Tory prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who advocated a forward, interventionist policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
    In 1875, in a remarkable coup, Disraeli succeeded in buying the virtually bankrupt Khedive of Egypt’s 40-percent stake in the company owning the Suez Canal, opened in 1869. In doing so, he did much to safeguard a new and quicker route from Britain to India, increasing the importance as a coaling station of the port of Aden (Yemen) seized by Lord Auckland during the period of the Afghan War. In 1876 Disraeli’s government sanctioned the British occupation, annexation and fortification of Quetta and the surrounding area.
    When Sher Ali acquiesced in 1878 in the arrival of an uninvited Russian diplomatic mission in Kabul, the British demanded that he should receive one from them as well. Sher Ali asked them to delay because he was in mourning for his eldest son, but the British claimed that this and what they considered subsequent unsatisfactory responses to their diplomatic initiatives were provocatory, and in that year dispatched three invading columns numbering some forty-five thousand men into Afghanistan, opening the Second Anglo-Afghan War forty years after the first began. In London George Lawrence, the veteran of the first war, inveighed against this second intervention: “ I regret to think that the lapse of years has apparently had the effect … that a reaction has set in, and that a new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting by the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us … in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country. ”
    Kandahar soon fell to the southernmost of the invasion columns. Other British forces had advanced through the Khyber Pass when Sher Ali died as he was trying to cross the border into Russian territory to secure a meeting with the czar himself. The emir was succeeded by his son Yakub Khan. He agreed to meet the British at Gandamack, where in 1842 the Forty-fourth Foot had stood and died. Eventually he agreed to allow Britain to direct Afghan foreign policy and to control the main passes into Afghanistan from British India, as well as to accept a British mission in Kabul. In return, he was to receive a subsidy and the usual vague promises of British support against (other) foreign intervention.
    In the summer of 1879 the British mission led by Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an Italian father and Irish mother, headed into Kabul with a military escort of seventy-five men. At the same time, the nearest major British force was pulling back from the Khyber Pass in an attempt to escape an outbreak of cholera. Transmitting his message for part of its journey by a newly established telegraph line, Cavagnari reported his entrance to the