Our Man in Kabul

GENERATIONS OF AMERICANS grew up on the deeds of such mythologized frontier heroes as Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett. Ben Macintyre’s entertaining and illuminating biography The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan suggests these icons had an unheralded peer: Josiah Harlan, an adventurer of quixotic spirit and supreme courage whose travails were every bit as harrowing as those of his legendary compatriots.

Unfortunately, Harlan acted on a stage that does not exist in textbooks of American history. But while the journey of Josiah Harlan fails to resonate in our national lore, his story reveals a resourcefulness and ambiguity that is quintessentially American. In the early 1800s, when his fellow countrymen were heading west to seek their fortune, Harlan found a way to go east. The restless Quaker left an affluent home in Pennsylvania to join the merchant marine. At the docks in Calcutta he received a letter informing him that his fiancée back home no longer wished to see him. Stunned, Harlan plunged into tribal Afghanistan and one of the stranger chapters in the history of Central Asia.

A student of both poetry and botany, a scholar obsessed with the ancient classics, a mercenary whose travels were initiated by rejection in love, Harlan was a man steeped in the Romantic tradition. It is thus fitting that his legacy would prove worthy of a work of literature, his exploits becoming the likely inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s novella “The Man Who Would Be King.” To enable the reader to fully appreciate the epic nature of Josiah Harlan’s achievements, Macintyre carefully positions this out-of-place Yankee within the larger historical framework of nineteenth-century geopolitics.

In the 1830s, the two largest empires in the world, imperial Great Britain and czarist Russia, struggled to dominate Central Asia in a contest that became known as the “Great Game.” For eighty years, the English and the Russians employed diplomacy, trade, warfare, and espionage in an effort to win over the more powerful princes and khans of the lands that reached from the north of India to Russia’s southern border in the Caucasus. It was in the early years of this tumultuous period that Josiah Harlan appeared.

Macintyre succeeds in capturing the spirit and arrogance that drove Harlan. Within a few weeks of making an appearance in Ludhiana, a river town south of the Punjab, Harlan acquired an audience with the deposed king of Kabul, Shah Shujah. Harlan convinced the shah to give him money and command of a small army, so that he could march on Kabul three hundred miles north and retake the shah’s usurped territory.

What follows is a tale that reads like the ultimate survivor’s handbook. Harlan was something of a dilettante, a man with no formal military training, and yet, time and time again he surmounted seemingly impossible challenges. Confronted by a mutiny of his irregular troops, Harlan survived by offering his irate militia the bags of Shah Shujah’s gold. He recounted in his diary: “All the valuables of my establishment I had secretly packed away in ordinary loads which were . . . placed on the camels, trusting nothing to the Rohillahs but the camp equipage and trunks of books.” Soon after Harlan adopted the disguise of a holy man to pass through a hostile town. Confronted by a mullah, Harlan faced certain death if exposed as an infidel impostor. Lacking knowledge of either the native language or the Koran, he feigned religious contemplation, ultimately satisfying the mullah with his pontificating gaze and solemn aspect. His acme was not limited to clever bluffs, however. His surgical skills won over more than a share of khans and princes. More than once he operated on cataract-stricken Afghans, a feat that would win him an interview with the one-eyed Prince of Lahore, Ranjit Singh.

WHILE HARLAN’S WITS and raw nerve kept him alive, it was his considerable diplomatic skills and keen political mind that allowed him to flourish. In 1827 he led Shah Shujah’s army to overthrow Dost Muhammed Khan of Kabul. Failing in this venture, he went on to persuade the prince of Lahore to award him a governorship, a coveted but highly dangerous position–given that the prince had a fetish for removing the noses of those who failed him. A contemporary commented on Harlan’s adroit gubernatorial skills, writing: “The fact of his nose being entire, proved that he had done well.”

His reputation as a tough and skilled diplomat grew to greater heights when he outwitted and outmaneuvered the prince’s most significant foe, Dost Muhammed Khan. Soon after, Khan, the very man he had bested months earlier, offered Harlan the coveted post of head vizier of his kingdom.

To navigate the labyrinthine diplomacy and Byzantine politics of the antiquated and complex power structure that existed in Central Asia in the 1800s was no mean task. Macintyre illuminates Harlan’s talents by comparing him to one exceptional peer, the British officer Sir Alexander Burnes. This young upstart had earned fame as the first Englishman to sail up the Sutlej River. Harlan, however, would outlast his English contemporary and sometime rival–though Burnes and the British seemed to have the upper hand when they occupied Kabul in 1839.

Triumphant, they cavorted with the Afghan women, smoked cigars, and played cricket. Harlan, ever the moral, sober Quaker, foresaw the results of such behavior and wrote in his diary: “Vainglorious and arrogant, the invaders plunged headlong toward destruction.” Months later, Burnes and the entire British garrison would be mercilessly slaughtered by the tribesmen of Kabul.

Macintyre invests his subject with a humanity that, perhaps, sets him apart from all the other soldiers, traders, and spies that played their hand in the Great Game. In 1838, serving as head vizier and general for Dost Muhammed Khan, Harlan took his army north to annihilate the slave trader and bandit king of Kunduz, Murad Beg. “The idea of punishing a notorious slave dealer appealed to Harlan’s sense of moral justice, but there was another compelling reason. . . . In 329 B.C., Alexander the Great had crossed the Hindu Kush. . . . Here was an opportunity to pursue Alexander’s trail still deeper into the interior.”

It was a fateful campaign. When it was over, he assumed a role and achieved a status beyond anything Davy Crockett could have imagined. The Hazara people of Turkistan bestowed upon him the powers and title of the prince of Ghor. As wily as Sitting Bull, as pushy as George Patton, as self-righteous as Cotton Mather, Harlan seized greatness in a place far more convoluted and alien than anything his contemporaries faced in America. Macintyre should be lauded for reviving this indomitable figure from the mists of time.

Cortright McMeel is a writer in Baltimore.