Ahmad Shah Durrani

• 1. Introduction

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  Ahmad Shah Durrani entered a tent at Quchan in June 1747 to find the man who had shaped his entire career dead, killed by his own personal guard. Ahmad Shah took two things from the body of Nader Shah: the Koh-i-Noor diamond and a signet ring. Then he rode for Kandahar. He was somewhere between twenty-five and twenty-seven years old, born sometime between 1720 and 1722. Within months he would be crowned, and within a year he would invade India for the first time. He would do so again and again, over the next twenty-four years. How does a man with no administrative experience, raised partly as a political prisoner, build one of the largest Islamic empires in the world? Why would he sack the same cities over and over, then ride home rather than sit on the thrones he had won? And how did a single battle on a plain north of Delhi come to be called the largest of the entire eighteenth century? Ahmad Shah is often called the founder of modern Afghanistan. The man Afghans came to call Ahmad Shah Baba, the Father, left a record stranger and bloodier than that title suggests.

• 2. The Name And The Ear

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  Ahmad Khan was the birth name, given to a boy born into the Abdali tribe of Pashtuns. After he took power in 1747, he became Ahmad Shah, and he made his whole tribe change its name from Abdali to Durrani. He even forbade the old name, insisting on Durrani, an act likely meant to ward off rival Abdali claimants to his throne. He took the epithet Durr-i Durran, meaning Pearl of Pearls, and the title Padishah. The sources still slip between the two tribal names, and he is often called Ahmad Shah Abdali. There is a story, told as legend, about how Nader Shah marked him. Nizam ul-Mulk, the Mughal governor of Hyderabad and a supposed expert in physiognomy, is said to have predicted the young man would one day be king. Nader Shah took notice. He clipped part of Ahmad Shah's ear, reportedly saying, "When you become a king, this will remind you of me." The historian Sajjad Nejatie is skeptical of the whole account. Even Ahmad Shah's birthplace is disputed. Modern scholarship generally favours Multan in present-day Pakistan, but Nejatie argues that most sources from his own era, including a primary history he himself commissioned, the Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi, place his birth in Herat instead.

• 3. Prisoner To Commander

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  Zaman Khan, the emir of Herat, died in 1721, leaving his son to be raised alongside his brother Zulfiqar Khan in Shindand and Farah. Ahmad Shah then vanishes from the record until 1731 or 1732, when Zulfiqar Khan was defeated by the Iranian monarch Nader Shah. The two brothers fled to Kandahar and became political prisoners of Hussain Hotak, the Hotak king. Nader Shah's conquest of Kandahar set them free, and Ahmad Shah's life folded into the service of the very man who had once driven him into captivity. He accompanied Nader Shah on the invasion of India between 1738 and 1739, possibly commanding a regiment of Durrani tribesmen whose forces took part in the sacking of Delhi. In 1744, Ahmad Shah was promoted to Nader Shah's personal staff. In a campaign against the Ottomans he distinguished himself, and Nader Shah let him raise a contingent of three to four thousand Durrani tribesmen. That unit became one of Nader Shah's most trusted, and he leaned on it to suppress commanders he suspected of plotting against him. It was that suspicion that put Ahmad Shah in the tent at Quchan, ordered to arrest the royal guard at first light, on the night the plot turned against the king himself.

• 4. Crown By Council

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  A piece of wheat or barley placed on a turban is how the legend tells it. The story says Ahmad Shah called a Jirga of tribal leaders who unanimously chose him as king, and the historian Ganda Singh repeats it, despite no contemporary evidence that the gathering ever happened. The reality was harder. Ahmad Shah came to power through a nine-man military council, in what scholars describe as a military coup rather than an election. His path to the crown ran through wealth and blood. On the road back to Kandahar he killed his own uncle, Abd al-Ghani Khan, the governor of Kandahar, to take full control of the Durrani regiments. He intercepted a military convoy carrying the annual tribute from Sindh, whose value estimates range wildly, from 3 to 260 million rupees. One of its escorts, Mohammad Taqi Khan Shirazi, joined him and split the wealth. The other, Nasir Khan, refused, was imprisoned, then released on the promise of 500,000 rupees a year. Ahmad Shah's army swelled past eighteen thousand men and came to include war elephants. His accession was still disputed by Jamal Khan, leader of the powerful Barakzai. They settled it with a bargain: Jamal Khan would submit, and in return he and his descendants would be made wazir. Then Sabir Shah, Ahmad Shah's advisor, attached a stalk of greenery to his cap and crowned him.

• 5. An Empire Built On Plunder

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  Afghanistan was a relatively poor country, and Ahmad Shah's answer to that poverty was to take wealth from elsewhere. Following conquerors like Mahmud of Ghazni before him, he invaded India to plunder, and adopting the practices of Muhammad of Ghor, he invaded to establish political dominance. He had no administrative experience, and neither did most of his closest advisors. So he borrowed a government style from the Mughals and Safavids, an absolute monarchy with a tribal council acting as a cabinet. He then made the cabinet posts hereditary, which made it nearly impossible to dismiss an advisor without sparking conflict. The real machinery ran on others. The civil service was dominated by the Qizilbash, because most of the Durrani elite were illiterate, and the Qizilbash also formed much of his bodyguard, a counterweight to rival Durrani tribes. Resentment built fast. Ahmad Shah exempted his own tribe from taxation and barred other Afghan tribes from the administration. He auctioned the right to collect revenue to the highest bidder, usually members of his own tribe, who were free to tax as much as they wished. Durranis grew rich while some landholders fell into debt and sold their lands or fled the kingdom, their land often bought by the very Durranis who had bankrupted them. Ahmad Shah rarely stayed in Kandahar, his own capital, returning only to restore order after a fight. He saw himself as the successor of Nader Shah, and he chose war over governance, knowing any shortfall could be covered by the treasures of the next campaign.

• 6. The Road To India

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  Ahmad Shah crossed the Ravi River on the 10th of January and camped at the Shalimar Gardens outside Lahore for his first invasion. The next day, at the battle of Lahore, the Afghan regiments in his enemy's army defected, and a much larger Mughal force collapsed. That set the pattern for nine campaigns centered on India. Disaster came almost immediately after. At Manupur, twelve thousand Afghans faced sixty to seventy thousand Mughals, and the Afghans pressed hard until their own ammunition stores caught fire and exploded, incinerating a thousand men and forcing a full withdrawal. The Mughals did not pursue, distracted by the death of their emperor Muhammad Shah. Subsequent invasions ground down the Mughal hold on the northwest. By a treaty signed on the 3rd of April 1752, Mughal rule in Punjab ended, and Ahmad Shah's general Shah Pasand Khan took Kashmir with fifteen thousand men. The most lucrative campaign was the fourth. Crossing Attock in late 1756 with eighty thousand men, Ahmad Shah entered a Delhi whose streets were deserted, its people barricaded in their homes. He minted coins in his name, married a daughter of the emperor Alamgir II, and ordered all Hindus to wear distinctive marks and forbade non-Muslims from wearing turbans. Then came the extortion. Those suspected of hiding valuables were tortured, including foot whipping, and many thousands died, were crippled, or killed themselves. The Afghans uncovered buried fortunes, recovering over fifteen million rupees in cash, diamonds, rubies, pearls, emeralds, and two hundred golden candles the size of a man. The campaign reached its cruelest point at Mathura, a city of pilgrims gathered for the Hindu Holi festival, where Jahan Khan offered a bounty of five rupees for every Hindu head. The massacres ran so deep that the Yamuna River was said to flow red for two weeks. Over twenty-eight thousand elephants, camels, and mules carried the loot home, and contemporary writers put its worth between 30 and 300 million rupees. Months later, the Bengal army, drained by the fight against the Afghans, was beaten at the Battle of Plassey, opening the door to British power in India.

• 7. The Largest Battle Of The Century

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  Seventy-five thousand Marathas, at a minimum, died on a single field. The third battle of Panipat, fought on the 14th of January, has been called the largest battle of the eighteenth century, and it was the climax of Ahmad Shah's fifth invasion. He had been summoned by a remarkable chorus of letters. Shah Waliullah Dehlawi wrote pleading with him to save the Muslims of India, a letter Hari Ram Gupta called one of the most important historical documents of the century. Even Hindu rulers, Madho Singh of Amber and Vijay Singh of Marwar, wrote to him, alarmed by Maratha expansion. Ahmad Shah used Shah Waliullah's letter to have a jihad declared in Kandahar. The campaign turned on supply and starvation. The Maratha commander Sadashivrao Bhau, described as proud and short-tempered, led his army into a camp at Panipat that was slowly cut off from food. When Govind Pant Bundela tried to break the Afghan supply lines, he was killed and his force routed at Meerut. By January the Maratha camp was gripped by hunger, and Sadashivrao resolved to attack. On the day, the Maratha gunner Ibrahim Khan Gardi opened fire, but his inexperienced crews sent their shots flying harmlessly over the Afghan heads. The Marathas breached three lines of the Afghan centre before Ahmad Shah fed in his reserves, four thousand Qizilbash to the right wing, ten thousand to the centre, and his zamburaks tore into the Maratha ranks. When Vishwasrao, heir of the Maratha Confederacy, was killed by a bullet, the news broke the army's nerve. Sadashivrao himself was killed in the fray, and resistance collapsed. After the battle, fifty thousand Maratha camp followers were massacred or sold into slavery, and the loss ended Maratha influence in Northern India. The day after, Ahmad Shah entered Panipat wearing the Koh-i-Noor, ordered every male over fourteen killed, and enslaved the women and children. He kept none of it for an Indian throne. He placed Shah Alam II on the Mughal seat and, with his troops unpaid for over a year and a half and demanding to go home, began the march back to Afghanistan in March.

• 8. The Empire That Faced Every Direction

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  Three campaigns in Khorasan and three in Afghan Turkestan show how far Ahmad Shah's wars reached beyond India. At Nishapur in 1750, his army shattered against the defences of a city held by only a few thousand soldiers. Its governor Jafar Khan refused to surrender, and after the Afghans breached the walls with cannon, the defenders sprang a trap. Jafar Khan was killed, but his nephew Abbas Quli took command and repulsed the Afghans, inflicting some twelve thousand dead. The retreat to Herat was worse than the battle, as winter killed thousands more and the frozen Hari Rud cracked underfoot, sweeping men and pack animals away. Ahmad Shah came back. During his second Khorasan campaign he besieged Nishapur again, and lacking siege equipment, he had every mounted soldier carry kilograms of gunmetal. His Armenian cannon makers melted it down to forge a single great cannon, whose first shot blasted through the city walls. In Afghan Turkestan his hand reached the Amu Darya, where his commander Allah Khan built a pyramid from the heads of dead Bukharan soldiers after defeating an invasion in 1761. In 1768, to avoid battle, the Bukharan ruler Shah Murad surrendered the cloak of Muhammad, and Ahmad Shah built a shrine for it, the Kirka Sharif in Kandahar, raised beside his own tomb. He would lie there himself in 1772, dead in Maruf after years of nonstop campaigning wore down his health. He had fought over fifteen major campaigns and rarely lost a battle, and historians have set him beside Marlborough, Mahmud of Ghazni, Babur, and Nader Shah, the man whose diamond he carried out of a murdered king's tent. The cloak he demanded still rests in the shrine he raised next to his grave.