Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/497

Rh fusion by the war, and the death of the Amir Sher All had left it without a ruler. Yakub Khan had neither the experience nor the strength of character required for the mastery of such a situation; his troops were unpaid and mutinous; and his influence was slight over a fierce, indomitable people, whose inveterate hatred of foreigners was intensified by the presence of a British officer at Kabul. The whole fabric of our arrangements with Afghanistan, as it had been built up on the treaty of Gandamak, depended on the envoy's personal safety. Within three months his assassination brought it down with a terrible crash; and thus, while during the first period of the war we had been engaged in fighting the Amir Sher Ali, in the second we found ourselves involved in the much more arduous task of fighting the Afghan people. Immediately upon receipt of the news that Cavagnari, with all his escort, had been murdered, the war was renewed. Kabul was captured by a rapid and daring march of Sir Frederick Roberts upon the capital; Kandahar, which Sir Donald Stewart had just evacuated, was reoccupied; but although we managed to retain a firm military hold on these two important points, the Indian government was now confronted by a most awkward dilemma. The attempt to subdue and pacify the whole country was beyond our power, and had never been contemplated by our policy, while, if we withdrew our garrisons, Afghanistan would have been left to masterless anarchy, and the war would have been waged to no purpose. The armed tribes, believing that the subjugation of