Durrani Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Durrani Empire was born from nine days of deliberation in the summer of 1747, when Afghan tribal leaders gathered near Kandahar to choose a new king. A holy man named Mohammad Sabir Khan stepped forward and silenced the debate. He placed wheat or barley sheaves in Ahmad Khan's turban and crowned him Pādshah, Durr-i-Durrān, meaning Shah, Pearl of the Pearls. The man crowned that day was younger than his rivals. But within years, he would rule an empire stretching from Central Asia to the plains of northwestern India. Who was Ahmad Shah Durrani, and how did a tribal assembly near Kandahar produce one of the most powerful Islamic empires of the eighteenth century? What happened when that empire tried to match wits with the Qing dynasty of China? And why, within fifty years of Ahmad Shah's death, did the whole edifice collapse into civil war?

• 2. The Founding Moment

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  June 1747 was a moment of unusual openness in Afghan history. Nader Shah Afshar of Persia, who had dominated the region, had just died. His former commander Ahmad Khan saw the opening and moved fast. The loya jirga, a grand council of tribal leaders, had been called precisely because no single power filled the vacuum left by Nader Shah's death. Two main candidates emerged: Hajji Jamal Khan of the Mohammadzai lineage, and Ahmad Khan of the Sadozai. The darwish Sabir Khan tipped the balance. He had earlier predicted that Ahmad Khan would lead the Afghans, and in the council chamber he made that prediction feel like destiny. Ahmad reportedly hesitated to accept, so Sabir Khan acted again, placing the sheaves in his turban and declaring the verdict. Several factors worked in Ahmad's favor beyond the holy man's endorsement. His father had served as Governor of Herat and died defending the Afghans in battle, lending Ahmad a lineage of both political standing and sacrifice. After his selection, he changed his tribal name from Abdali to Durrani, and the dynasty took that name. His first military moves were immediate: he took Qalati Ghilji and Ghazni from the Ghilji, then captured Kabul and Peshawar from the Mughal-appointed governor Nasir Khan.

• 3. An Empire Carved by Speed

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  In 1749, the Mughal Emperor Ahmad Shah Bahadur agreed to cede Sindh, the Punjab region, and the trans-Indus River territories rather than face an Afghan assault on his capital. Ahmad Shah Durrani had gained vast eastern lands without a major battle. He then turned west, taking Mashhad from Shahrukh Afshar, the grandson of Nader Shah, who acknowledged Afghan suzerainty. North of the Hindu Kush, Afghan armies brought the Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, and other tribes under control in rapid succession. Ahmad Shah invaded the Mughal Empire on eight separate occasions in total. In 1757, he sacked Delhi itself. He allowed the Mughal dynasty to remain as a nominal figurehead, on the condition that the ruler acknowledge his suzerainty over Punjab, Sindh, and Kashmir. He left his second son Timur Shah behind to protect his gains and returned to Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah was widely noted for winning engagements against forces numerically larger than his own. The Durrani army's edge lay in its structure: a core of ten thousand mounted ghulams, or slave-soldiers, armed with sher-bacha blunderbusses. A third of them had previously served as Shia soldiers under Nader Shah. The bulk of the army was irregular tribal cavalry armed with lance and broadsword. Infantry and artillery played minimal roles; artillery appeared mainly in the form of light swivel guns, called Zamburak, mounted on camels.

• 4. Panipat and the Limits of Power

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  The Maratha Confederacy had been expanding steadily since the Ahamdiya treaty of 1751-52, when Peshwa Balaji Bajirao secured a deal that gave the Marathas nominal control over nearly all of India. After Ahmad Shah sacked Delhi in 1757, the Peshwa dispatched Raghunathrao, who drove out Timur Shah and the Afghan garrisons from Punjab, retaking Lahore, Multan, Kashmir, and other territories. Ahmad Shah was forced to return to India. He declared a jihad against the Marathas, drawing warriors from Afghan tribes and the Baloch people under Mir Nasir I of Kalat. Suba Khan Tanoli, also known as Zabardast Khan, was appointed army chief. By 1759 the Afghans had reached Lahore. The Maratha forces, now consolidated under Sadashivrao Bhau, met the Afghan army at Panipat on the 14th of January 1761, on a front twelve kilometers wide. The Durranis won decisively. The Peshwa Balaji Rao received the news of the defeat at Bhilsa on the 24th of January 1761, while leading a relief force north. He had lost his son Vishwasrao in the battle. The Peshwa himself died on the 23rd of June 1761 and was succeeded by Madhav Rao I. Panipat was the high point of Ahmad Shah's power. Yet even before his death in 1772, the Sikhs were rebuilding in Punjab after Ahmad Shah's forces destroyed the Golden Temple and massacred thousands of Sikh inhabitants at Amritsar. Within two years of that assault, the Sikhs had rebuilt their holy city, and Ahmad Shah's repeated attempts to subdue them permanently all failed.

• 5. The Qing Confrontation

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  In 1763, Fazil Biy of Kokand and Kyrgyz chieftains appealed to Ahmad Shah for protection against Qing expansion. Ahmad Shah occupied the regions between Tashkent and Kokand, though he withdrew by 1764 after no firm alliance materialized. That same year he sent an embassy to the Qing emperor Qianlong. The letter Ahmad Shah sent is now lost, but from Qianlong's reply, it appears to have celebrated Afghan conquests, particularly the victory at Panipat, framing them as bringing order to lawless regions. When the Afghan embassy arrived in Beijing, the chief envoy, Khwaja Mirhan, refused to perform the kowtow before Qianlong. Qing officials pressed him until he acquiesced, but the incident damaged relations permanently. Qianlong interpreted Mirhan's refusal as Ahmad Shah declaring himself an equal. Among Ahmad Shah's gifts to Qianlong were four horses, which were painted by the Qing court painter Giuseppe Castiglione. Diplomatic niceties aside, Qianlong began securing Qing frontiers as soon as the envoy departed. The Afghan seizure of Badakhshan in May 1768 tested Qing resolve directly. Afghan forces under Shah Wali Khan took Sultan Shah's capital, Fayzabad. A Qing agent named Yunggui argued for intervention. Qianlong refused, calling military action irrational. Sultan Shah wrote desperate letters through the winter of 1768 and into 1769, appealing as a Qing vassal. In December 1769, he accused Qianlong of failing in his duties. Qianlong replied that under no circumstances would the Qing send aid. Qianlong's refusal rested on a hard calculation: Qing armies in Altishahr were stretched thin and the terrain between the Afghan and Qing realms was formidable. Within the year, Ahmad Shah occupied Badakhshan and Sultan Shah was executed.

• 6. Succession and Collapse

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  Ahmad Shah died in 1772 in the mountains east of Kandahar, where he had retired. Before his death, he named his son Timur Shah as heir, bypassing his elder son Sulaiman Shah on the grounds that Sulaiman was violent and unpopular among the Kandahari Durranis. Senior generals and tribal leaders had backed Sulaiman. After Ahmad Shah's death, two of his officials, Shah Wali Khan and Sardar Jahan Khan, concealed the fact of his death, pretended he was merely ill, and marched his body toward Kandahar before announcing Sulaiman as king. Timur, warned by opposing Amirs, raced to Kandahar as well. The two factions met at Farah, where Shah Wali Khan and his sons were killed. Sulaiman surrendered. Timur Shah ascended the throne in November 1772 and moved the imperial capital from Kandahar to Kabul, with Peshawar serving as the winter capital. Each of the rulers who followed governed with diminishing control. Zaman Shah, a grandson of Ahmad Shah, came to power at twenty-three after imprisoning his half-brothers. He was later blinded on the orders of his brother Mahmud Shah, who took the throne in 1801. Shuja Shah, another of Timur Shah's sons, signed the first Afghan treaty with a European power on the 7th of June 1809, agreeing with Britain to oppose Franco-Persian aggression. Only weeks after signing, Mahmud deposed him. By 1818, the Sadozai rulers controlled little more than Kabul and a radius of about 160 kilometers around it. The Durrani Empire's last years saw a rapid sequence of rulers: Abbas Mirza in 1810, Sultan Ali Shah from 1818 to 1819, and Ayub Shah until 1823. Ayub Shah was deposed and presumably killed that year, ending the empire's first phase. The Barakzai dynasty under Dost Muhammad Khan eventually supplanted the Durranis entirely, establishing the Emirate of Afghanistan.

• 7. Ahmad Shah Baba's Legacy

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  Ahmad Shah Durrani earned the title Ahmad Shah Baba, meaning Father of Afghanistan, a recognition that outlasted the dynasty he founded. The Durrani Empire is regarded as the foundational polity of the modern Afghan nation-state. Next to the Ottoman Empire, historians place it among the most significant Islamic empires of the second half of the eighteenth century. The empire's military model blended Turco-Mongol cavalry tactics with flintlock firearms, a combination that gave Ahmad Shah his edge across campaigns stretching from Delhi to Mashhad to Badakhshan. What Ahmad Shah ultimately built was a structure that depended on his own skill at balancing tribal alliances and directing tribal energies toward conquest rather than internal conflict. His successors could not replicate that balance. Painda Khan Barakzai, whose support had helped bring Zaman Shah to power, was executed by the very ruler he helped install, triggering the chain of betrayals that fractured the dynasty from within. The Sikh Empire, meanwhile, claimed Peshawar, Multan, and Kashmir in the early nineteenth century, erasing much of what Ahmad Shah had won. His empire lasted in one form or another until 1823, and briefly revived under Shah Shuja during the First Anglo-Afghan War between 1839 and 1842, before that chapter too closed. The name Durrani, which Ahmad Shah chose to replace the old tribal name Abdali, remains the label history uses for the first unified Afghan state.