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May 25, 2007 In 1801 Alexander I of Russia annexed Georgia. In 1810 Persia ,in agreement with Great Britain, sent General John Malcolm to Persia in order to help it modernize its army. At about this time Captain Charles Christie and Lietenant Pottinger of the 5th Bombay Native Infantry Regiment entered Baluchistan disguised as horse traders. Christie entered Herat staying for 30 days noting in his log book that there was a good fort and a valley that would grow crops and keep the fort supplied. Pottinger went west in order to scout out roads suitable for the transportation of an army and for other approach roads through the Persian desert. In 1812 the French defeat in Russian bought about a feeling of camaraderie between the British and the Russians. Captain John Macdonald seconded to the political department stated that the current assumption in London and in Calcutta that the deserts and mountains ringing India would keep it safe was not borne out by history or by those who had scouted the area on the border. Twenty or so attempted invasions had been made over the millennia .In 327BC Alexander the Great had crossed the Hindu Kush .In 13th century Genghis Khan laid waste to Samarkand ,Bokhara Balkh and to Merv; going on to invade India .In the 14th century Tamerlane had crossed the Hindu Kush and descended into the Punjab to sacked Delhi,while Babur had invaded India from Afghanistan .Nabir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739 and, among other things, took the famous Koh-I-Noor diamond and the Peacock throne. In February of 1825 British agent William Moorcroft reached Bokhara to be greeted by the locals as Russians .Four years earlier a Russian expedition had arrived in order to ascertain the where about of captured Russians who were being kept as slaves. He then went on to Balkh in northern Afghanistan: and vanished. In 1830 Lieutenant Arthur Connolly of the Bengal Light Cavalry reconnoitred the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass for a year. He found that there were only two routes a Russian army could take. One was to Khiva through to Balkh which then went through the Hindu Kush to Kabul ans so on to Jalalabad ,its southern end traversing the Khyber Pass to Quetta. The other one went through Herat to Kandahar, to Quetta and then through the Bolan Pass into India. The British came to the conclusion that they needed Afghanistan as a buffer zone against the Russians. They first tried to bring Ranjit Singh, the leader of the Punjab, who had one of the largest armies in the region, onboard. He was partial to fine horses and a team of Clydesdales in addition to a large cash payment. Next advances were made to Dost Mohammed of Afghanistan. In 1830 Tsar landed troops at Constantinople to ‘protect’ the Sultan from the rebellious elements within the Egyptian army stationed there in order to support him. In November of 1837 Russian army troops marched upon Herat .Edward Pottinger ,the son Henry Pottinger, a British agent working in the area, rallied the troops within the fortress.His efforts encouraged the garrison to hold out for two months until British troops landed in Persia thus threatening Tehran forcing the Russians to lift the siege . In Afghanistan Dost Mohammed asked the British agents if they could help him regain the lost province of Peshawar in the Punjab.The British Army of the Indus was set up in order to accomplish this and in 1883 marched in to Afghanistan entering Kabul in August. To to the north in Siberia a Russian expedition assembled at Orenburg for an attack on Khiva under General Perovsky consisting of 5,200 infantry, and 10,000 camels. It was described by the Russians as a scientific expedition to the Aral Sea .The camels died at the rate of a hundred a day .Halfway to their objective this army turned back reaching Orenburg minus 1,000men and 8,500 camels. In order to stop the Russians from using their captured citizens as an excuse for an invasion of Herat the British attempted to arrange for their release. An agent by the name of Shakespeare was sent who managed to secure their release ,then travelling with them to St Petersburg to receive a decoration from the Tsar. On return to Britain he was also decorated, this time by Queen Victoria. A rebellion broke out in Kabul forcing the British Army of the Indus to retreat which after many months of hardship in the extreme cold combined with repeated guerrilla attacks resulted in the disbandonment of this army,the casualty rate while acceptable by European standards was viewed as catastrophic by colonial war standards. In September of 1842 another army was sent which recaptured the country ,the next ten years being a period of détente with the future Central Asian States on the northern border of Afghanistan. Russia suppressed the rebellion breaking out among the Circassians destroying guerrilla strongholds along the Styr-Darya river .Britain seized the Sind making it a province of India , against the orders of the British government ,the commander of the British force charged with the bringing in of a criminal gang believing that if he neutralized the Sind he would be more easily able to accomplish his task,the telegram to his HQ bearing only the word ‘Pavacci’(Latin; I have sinned). The Russians expanded eastwards .The former Russian attaché to London ,Ignatov, given the job of reconnoitring the Central Asian Republics sending back word to his masters in Russian that they could be annexed. He was next sent to China where he arranged for the transfer of 400,000 square miles of territory in the present day Russian Far East to Russia.Russian then seized several fortress in the north of the Khanate of Kokand taking Tashkent in the process . Russian General Konstantin Kaufman was made governor general of Turkmenistan and becoming aware of Bokhara troops amassing at Samarkand in order to drive out the Russians from Bokhura invaded driving out the Bokharans who surrendered. Samarkand was now absorbed into the Russian Empire. In present day Sinkiang Moslem leader Yakub Beg rebelled against China setting him self up as Emperor of the independent Moslem kingdom of Kashgaria.The Indian viceroy asked him if he would agree to be a buffer zone between Britain and Russia.Russian General Kaufman launched an attack into Kashgari territory from Orenburg and Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea ,and from Tashkent. With the Russian troops 200 miles from the capital Kashgar British scouts found a route 50 miles wide going through Kashgaria from India, good for invading India and Baluchistan. Baluchistan was bought into an alliance agreeing to lease the Bolan Pas to the British .By 1877 Kaufmanns 30,000 troops were in Afghanistan ready to strike at India. The Russian advance was bought to a halt with the end of the Turko -Russian war. In 1878-81 the second Afghan war had ended with the death of the Emir. Yakam Khan ascended the throne. London controlled Afghanistan’s foreign policy and the Khyber Pass and lands south of the frontier in exchange for a guarantee of protection from Russia. This protection ended with the revolution in Russia during WWI and at the end of WWII all of the Central Asian States and Kazakhstan became part of the USSR.
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