The Small Players of the Great Game

The Settlement of Iran's Eastern Borderlands and the Creation of Afghanistan

Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134383771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book deals with the 19th century Anglo-Russian Great Game played out on the territorial chessboard of eastern and north-eastern parts of the waning Persian empire. The Great Game itself has been written about extensively, but never from a Persian angle and from the point of view of the local players in that game. Looking at the territorial consequences of the Great Game for the local players is a unique approach, which deserves a special place in the studies of history, geography, politics and geopolitics of the age of modernity.

1
The Great Game and its Major Players

Introduction

The political development referred to in the studies of political history and political geography of nineteenth-century Central Asia as the Great Game, is a geopolitical game of rivalries between the two superpowers of the time: the Russian and the British empires. This game was played out on the chessboard of Greater Khorasan and had an immense impact on the political shape of the regional player, Iran. The game caused an everlasting modification in the political map of South, Central and West Asia. While the small player in this game – the Khozeimeh amirdom – is introduced extensively in Chapters 2 and 3, in this chapter the nature of the game itself will be examined followed by an introduction to the major players.

The game

In their peculiarly Western view of the world, geographers like J. A. Agnew and G. O’Tuathail trace back the emergence of a ‘world order’ only as far as the treaties of Westphalia of 1648.¹ A more global historical perspective makes it possible to see that the study of ‘world order’ can be traced back far earlier, to the first emergence of empires of global aspirations rivaling each other. Attempts by the Persian Empire to annex Greece and the Macedonian drive in annexing the Persian Empire could perhaps be recognized as early forms of conscious global geopolitics, laying the foundation for the emergence of the concept of a world order. The fact that the Macedonian invasion and annexation of the Persian Empire was motivated by Alexander’s desire to build a ‘world empire’ is confirmed by many historians and those closely concerned with historical studies. In reply to a letter by this author, Jean Gottmann, a highly respected political geographer and an authority on Greek civilization wrote on 17th June 1987:

Iran must have belonged to the ‘Western’ part of mankind, and I suspect that this was what Alexander the Great of Macedonia, a pupil of Aristotle, therefore, in the great Western philosophical tradition, found in Iran and that attracted him so much that he wanted to establish a harmonious, multi-national cooperation between the Iranians and Greeks within the large empire he was building.²

The fact that Alexander the Great found himself philosophically at home in Persia is acknowledged in his cry when capturing Persepolis that he was the true successor to Cyrus the Great. Later, in the time that preceded the Christian era, a balance was strucken between the Roman and Persian Empires with Egypt playing a key role in connection with Rome, that gave rise to a geopolitical order in the civilized world of the Western Hemisphere: in Europe, West Asia and North Africa. Similarly, at the time of the birth of Islam, Arabia was caught in a geopolitical vacuum created by a triangular balance that evolved between the Persian, Abyssinian and Roman Empires. It was this geopolitical vacuum that eased the birth and facilitated the spread of Islam. The rise in Europe of Christian powers brought them face to face with the Islamic Caliphate in the lands holy to both. Hence Palestine emerged as the heartland wherein the two sides clashed, and the wars of the Crusades continued for years without an outright winner being declared. The Islamic Caliphate’s power was shifted to the Ottoman Empire at the time when emergent European powers presented it with substantial challenge. While to the west the Ottoman Empire was in rivalry with the European powers, in the east it entered a fierce competition with the revived Persian Empire of the Safavids.

The European drive to create a world economy in the fifteenth century survived to take over the whole world. Peter Taylor (1989) believes that final attempts by both Spanish-Austrian Habsburgs and their great rivals the French Valois to produce a unified European world-empire should fail because of bankruptcy. But by 1557 the world-economy had truly arrived and survived.³ Thirty years of war among European powers resulted in the 1648 peace treaty of Westphalia. This treaty divided Europe politically between France and Sweden on the one hand, and Spain and the states of the Holy Roman Empire on the other. The great French Revolution of 1789–1799 set the foundation for the emergence of new ways of political thinking and such new political concepts as nationhood and nationalism, nation-state, international system and international relations, etc. This was the dawn of modernity in politics, and in terms of power play, it gave birth to Napoleonic Empire in France, which began to change the political map of Europe and lands beyond.⁴

The British had established their first colonial empire in the Caribbean and North America in the seventeenth century. British rivalries with the French intensified European colonial rivalries in Asia and Africa. In a treaty signed in Paris in 1783, however, the British recognized the independence of the United States of America. Nevertheless, on the European scene Britain posed the most effective challenge to the expanding French influence. Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign against his European rivals resulted in a series of military clashes in Europe generally known as the Napoleonic Wars. These wars ended in a catastrophic defeat of the French power. The Paris treaty signed on 20th November 1815 by Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia pushed France out of the race for some time and divided various colonies worldwide in a different world order.

Though British power increased to the level of a large empire in the seventeenth century in the Americas, it reached global proportions when Lord Arthur Wellesley completed his conquests in India at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was the time when the Russian Empire was making rapid advances in Central Asia, and Russian power too increased to the level of a global superpower at the turn of nineteenth century when the Kazakh conquests were completed and Russia’s southward push began. The territories contested in this clash of giants belonged to the Persian Empire in an ancient and long-exhausted federalist system. From the point of view of political geography, the vast expanse that included Central Asia and Afghanistan was but a collection of principalities ruled by local khans and amirs who were officially dependants of the Persian Empire. Hence the Great Game was played out between Britain and Russia in direct geopolitical and territorial rivalries, with Iran acting as a passive player whose eastern and northeastern territories were treated as the squares of a chessboard on which Britain and Russia conducted their game. Lord George Nathaniel, Marquis Curzon of Kedleston, British Viceroy in India at the end of nineteenth century and a major figure in the Great Game itself, said of this:

Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia – to many these words breathe only a sense of utter remoteness, or a memory of strange vicissitudes, and of moribund romance. To me, I confess, they are the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world.⁵

Iran’s dependent principalities of Kabul, Herat and Qandehar were joined together in the independent kingdom of Afghanistan in the wake of Nader Shah Afhshar’s assassination in 1747, with Ahmad Khan Abdali crowned as Ahmad Shah Dorrani, its first king. The new kingdom disappeared in the 1770s with the demise of Ahmad Shah, and Kabul, Herat and Qandehar went back to their traditional status as separate principalities tributary to the Persian Empire. The British began in the 1820s and 1830s to suspect a Russian threat to India. There were two views in these suspicions of the way that Russia might attack India. One view was that it might attack via Turkestan, but informed circles in India eventually dismissed this. The other view, which was taken seriously by the British, was that Russia might gain influence in Iran and use that country as a means of attacking Afghanistan. By doing so, Russia could gain a strong position near the borders of British India and would be able, whenever it suited her, to stir up unrest in India and thus oblige Britain to increase her military garrison there to such an extent as to make it unprofitable to hold India in the future.

Furthermore, the British believed that by gaining leverage in India the Russians could use it as a means of compelling them to make concessions to Russia in Europe and other places. Hence the British began searching for a solution to these possibilities either by rebuilding friendship and confidence with Iran or by creating an alternative position of strength in Afghanistan. British efforts in the 1830s to build confidence with Iran collapsed in 1837 when the Iranians moved troops to Herat to put down a rebellion there. Suspecting the Iranian Prime Minister Haj Mirza Aghasi of acting under the influence of the Russians, the British decided to establish their own influence in the countries that later made up the amirdom of Afghanistan. The British decided to establish their influence in that country by replacing the existing rulers with one who would be under British control. This end was accomplished in 1839.⁶

Britain’s geopolitical game in Afghanistan ran into difficulty as the first Anglo-Afghan war broke out. The British found out as a result that the burden of sustaining a puppet regime in Afghanistan was simply too great and the Afghan position was abandoned in 1842.⁷

The Iranians, in the meantime, succeeded in maintaining their Central Asian dependent principalities of Marv and Khiveh in 1839. Iran’s military actions against the rebellious khans prevented Russia from establishing her control over these states in Central Asia. It was as a result of this new status quo in Afghanistan and Central Asia that the British and the Russians became more willing to cooperate in Iran and its dependent principalities. But the practice of this cooperation broke down in 1854 when the Crimean War began in Europe and in the East the British decided to support the aspirations of Dust Mohammad Khan of Kabul in the mid-1850s revive the independent amirdom of Afghanistan.⁸

The Russian armies continued their progress into the khanats of Khiveh, Bokhara and Kughand. Apparently this was not the reason for the resumption of the Anglo-Russian game in Central Asia, rather the game was resumed because of a revived interest in Kashgharia as an area whereby Russian armies might reach Hindu Kush.⁹ To prevent this from happening, the British decided to assist in the revival of the kingdom of Afghanistan as a buffer zone between India and Russia. The British therefore, assisted Dust Mohammad Khan of Kabul and his heir and successor Shir Ali Khan in recreating and maintaining the unity of Afghanistan. Dust Mohammad’s forces subdued Qandehar and seized Herat in 1863 before his death later that year. A number of British agents like James Abbott, Elder Pottinger, Henry Rawlinson, Richmond Shekespear and D’Arcy Todd were involved in intrigues to safeguard the consolidation of Dust Mohammad’s new territorial achievements.

British agents had established a certain influence in Kabul – which was some compensation for the virtual extinction of a British role in Tehran. The consolidation of Duost Mohammad’s rule assuaged many fears in Calcutta. The post-Mutiny strategy of concentrating the bulk of British and native forces in the north and northwest not only defined the Punjab’s role in the maintenance of India’s internal security but tacitly served notice on any ruler of Kashmir that he kept his throne by compliance with the viceroy’s dictate.¹⁰

Appreciation of these successes in Afghanistan, the Punjab and Kashmir should have done away with British India’s Russophobia, but the Great Game went on and the British began to consolidate Dust Mohammad Khan’s amirdom of Afghanistan by fiercely pursuing the matter of its territorial definition. Iranian Prime Minister Mirza Agha Khan Sadre Azam Nouri put an end to rebellion in the dependent principality of Herat by occupying that province. But the British prevented re-establishment of Iran’s direct rule in Herat in 1856 and imposed upon her the treaty of Paris of 1857, whereby Herat was to be separated from Iran. This development left Herat undefended by Iran. Another treaty in 1857, this time with the Afghans, paved the way for the capture of Herat by Dust Mohammad Khan in 1863. The British succeeded in defining the Perso-Afghan frontiers in Sistan. General Frederick Goldsmid’s boundary mission delimited the two countries’ border line in the middle of Iran’s traditional dependencies of Sistan and Baluchistan in 1872, giving the eastern half of each to Afghanistan and India respectively. This boundary mission consolidated Afghanistan’s western flanks during the rule of tyrant Shir Ali Khan. Nevertheless, the Afghans fought their second war with the British in 1878, which lasted until 1880. After this war the British won control of Afghanistan’s foreign relations, effectively reducing the country to a British protectorate. The cause of this war is said to have been the unstable character and neurotic impulses of Viceroy Lord Lytton. The officials of the British Indian Empire, whom Lytton resisted, eventually secured a degree of cooperation at the close of the war in 1880, which resulted in the assertion of authority in Kabul by another tyrant – one even worse than Shir Ali Khan. This was his son Abdur-Rahman Khan, during whose reign Captain Algernon Durand of British India delimited and demarcated the boundary between Afghanistan and British India in 1893. This boundary line, generally known as the Durand Line, though it gave further approval of the notion of Afghanistan being a buffer zone between the British and Russian Empires, proved to be a disappointment for the Afghans. With this boundary demarcation a sizeable part of Pashtunistan was given to the western half of India (now Pakistan) and Chitra was passed to Kashmir. To compensate Afghanistan for these losses, Captain Durand gave parts of Baluchistan – traditionally a dependency of the Persian Empire in India’s western borderlands – to Afghanistan. Durand was showered with praise, but his strangely put together boundary line proved to be a major source of friction and territorial conflicts between Afghanistan and Pakistan when the latter was created in mid-twentieth century.

Despite the spread of Russophobia across the British Empire, London and St Petersburg found common grounds for cooperation in other areas of world affairs. The early years of the twentieth century witnessed a search for accommodation in the face of a changed political map of Europe. This accommodation was enshrined in the 1907 Anglo-Russian convention whereby Iran, Afghanistan and Tibet were divided into two zones of influence between Britain and Russia (in the case of Iran leaving a middle zone of no foreign influence for the local government). Russian and British motives for seeking this entente differed fundamentally: Russia was concerned about the growing menace of Germany in Europe and wanted less pressure in the east, whereas Britain’s preoccupation was to protect the security of its Indian Empire from the menace of Russia by keeping the Russians busy elsewhere. Notwithstanding this search for accommodation, Britain’s strategic problem regarding India remained complex. On paper, the British even contemplated a major assault on Russia in Transcaspia, and from there to the Caspian sea and the Caucasus as far as the Black Sea.¹¹ The reality however, was somewhat different. Not only were the British unable to contemplate to marching through the northern passes, but nor were they able to garrison India adequately. Putting together an army that could undertake the mammoth task of attacking Russia on its home territory was completely out of question. Hence they still preferred to have the amirdom of Afghanistan as their buffer against Russia’s seemingly inexorable advance towards India’s northern frontiers. Russophobia nevertheless drove some quarters in India to concoct a scheme for the establishment of a field army which could meet direct attack or engage in pre-emptive operations. While Russia was clearly able to raise a massive army by mobilizing Central Asia, Britain, in an enormous effort, raised just two divisions for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1878.

In the 1880s Russia made major advances in east Turkistan as far as Pamir. These undertakings shifted Anglo-Russian geopolitical game from the west of Afghanistan – Central Asia – to the east near China. During the viceroyalty of Lord Ripon – appointed by British premier Gladstone – the Great Game was in relative abeyance. Ripon was opposed to the idea of creating buffer zones and bribing local chiefs for their allegiance. Nor did he believe in local initiatives, which had formed the essence of the Great Game that made British India what it had become. Rather, he preferred to adhere to Gladstone’s dictum that British representatives at a ‘distant point’ should do as they were told by higher authority. This situation changed in the 1890s with Lord George Curzon’s appointment as India’s new viceroy. Curzon was just the man for games of geopolitics in the East. He was a visionary who had his own ideas of the political geography of South and Central Asia, and indeed it was he who masterminded the actual modification of the political geography of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The great game and its major players
• 2 Small players: the Khozeimeh family
• 3 Khozeimeh foreign relations
• 4 The partitioning of Khorasan and the creation of Afghanistan
• 5 The partitioning of Khorasan and Baluchistan and the emergence of modern boundaries
• 6 The partitioning of Sistan and the evolution of boundaries with Afghanistan
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index