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 unseat its Amir, an expeditionary force which found Afghanistan so hostile that it was wiped out of existence in such a disaster as British India has never known before or since. Again in 1879, Russian resentment over the Congress of Berlin led to the dispatch of a Russian mission to Kabul and when a British mission was turned back at the frontier, the Government of India sent a second expeditionary force to set up a new Amir at Kabul. Intrigue at Kabul became Russia's favorite reply to any strain in Anglo-Russian relations, but it was not in Afghanistan that the real weight of Russian expansion finally made itself felt. Its construction of the Trans-Caspian railway had given it a base at Askabad on Persia's north-east frontier, for an advance down across Persia to the Indian Ocean outside Bunder Abbas. Here was a project which at one stroke would not only free Russia of its inner Black Sea jail and its outer Mediterranean jail, but would enable it to create a second Vladivostok on the Indian Ocean which would take the British Indian sea lines in the flank and cut the Indian peninsula bodily out of the British Empire.

Russia now projected a railway from Askabad to the Persian provincial capital of Meshed and thence south past the Seistan, reaching the Indian Ocean presumably at Chahbar or Gwatter Bay. Having filled the Persian capital of Teheran with Russian intrigue and having thoroughly Russianized Meshed, Russia now began to close the Seistan gateway through which the great British Indian fortress of Quetta flanked the route of its projected railway. Belgian customs officials in the employ of the Russianized Persian Government, Russian "scientific"