Last month I released a small game looking at the event that kicked off the second phase of the 1st Anglo Afghan War, the attack on Alexander Burnes in his Kabul house in 1841. The event is an interesting one to me for a number of reasons, one: as you read more about the projection of British Imperial power in Asia, it becomes more and more apparent the absolute reliance they felt upon the support of local rulers and powerbrokers. The East India Company, while being formidable with it's control of trade, and with it's own standing army, was nevertheless lacking in the numbers to actually exert any control over the day to day realities without the existing power structures that were diffused into the areas they occupied.
I get a sense that the power stemmed from an idea of invulnerability that the British had to exude. It was in their interest to get into people's heads and beat them before anything even came of dissatisfaction. If a person felt that they couldn't force the British out, or that they would suffer hugely in trying, then that is a major factor in just staying put.
Looking at Afghanistan in this time this becomes apparent. The British invasion was at first successful. This came as no surprise to anyone involved, the invasion force had been nearly 20,000 strong and were professional soldiers. The issues came after the invasion, when the prospect of governing a vast area like Afghanistan, when the infrastructure required to allow a small force to cross large distances quickly just was not existent. When the majority of the force was recalled to India to ifght other expansionary wars, the 8000 soldiers left behind found they had to garrison a country where loyalties were fluid, and if they stayed together for safety, that left the vast majority of the area out of their sphere of influence.
To add fuel to the coming fire, the nominal reason for the British invasion of installing the "rightful" king, Shah Shujah, came to be more and more transparently the lie it was. The occupying army were allowed to bring their families to join them in Afghanistan, and the perception that the British were here to say began to grow. Tensions began to build in the region, and a reckoning was inevitable.
Kabul 1841 is my attempt at modelling the thesis I have regarding the events at Alexander Burnes' house on that day. Namely, the outcome of events was almost certainly a foregone conclusion by the time things boiled over and the Durrani assembled on the street before the house.Shah Shujah's regime, with his British backing, was never a popular one. Tensions had been building for a number of months, and relations between Burnes and McNaughten, the two principal agents of the EIC in the region at the time were frosty and attentions were elsewhere. At the same time, the occupation of Afghanistan by the foreign troops had caused prices for basic goods to skyrocket, fuelling antagonism towards the British.
The Durrani chiefs, already upset at Dost Mohammed's imprisonment in India, stoked tensions among their supporters with talk of the occupiers' punitive actions to tribes who hadn't submitted and the soldiers' licentious behaviour. As the crowd gathered outside of Burnes' house, word also spread that the garrison treasury was the building next door. In fact, this had been vacated by it's resident, Captain Johnson, who served as paymaster for the Shah's army. Johnson had fled the city for the safety of the cantonments leaving behind just a skeleton garrison.
A reckoning was imminent, and Burnes' arrogant belief that the way for the EIC to counter the growing insurgency was by projecting an aura of invincibility and fearlessness would lead to his death, and the spark that would light the Afghani revolution Kabul 1841 attempts to model this with a sort of inexorable flow of the protesters. The garrison of the house knew that there was help not even 30 minutes away from either the Shah's troops in the Bala Hissar, or from McNaughtens' men in the cantonment. The game places you in the position of trying to divert this tide. The attackers will not stop, the mass of people have reached a flashpoint unknown to them until things kicked off, but now that it is in motion, things have to come to their inevitable end.