In 1989, as an aspiring foreign correspondent, I was sent to Afghanistan to cover the final stages of the decade-long war between the Soviet Army and the CIA-backed Mujahideen guerrillas. Afghanistan was then the crucible of the Cold War.
Having made arrangements to join a Mujahideen group, I headed to Peshawar on Pakistan’s northwest frontier, 40 miles from the Afghan border. The bazaar was thronged with Pushtuns, the Afghan warrior tribe the British knew as Pathans. An enterprising stall-holder offered to sell me a captured Soviet tank. I settled instead for the standard Mujahideen outfit: Pathan pancake hat and dun-coloured saggy pyjamas, or shalwar kamiz, over which I wore the regulation foreign correspondent’s sleeveless photographer’s jacket with many unnecessary pockets. I had already grown something that might pass for a beard.
At dawn the next day, a trio of armed Mujahideen arrived at my hotel room and led me to a waiting Jeep. For the next 12 hours we drove up rocky tracks that wound deep into the mountains, until we finally arrived at the camp of the Mujahideen commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Over the ensuing weeks I was swept away by my own Afghan adventure. The Mujahideen fighters looked after me as one might a vulnerable and rather dim younger brother, and I wrote breathless dispatches for my newspaper, with rather too much emphasis on the first person. I thought myself very dashing indeed.
Returning to Peshawar, I joined the milling press pack at the American Club. Almost everyone had stories of night skirmishes and narrow escapes, the self-inflating chaff of the war zone. We were all living out our romantic fantasies in a land that invited and nourished them. During the day we lounged around the pool, swimming, planning, and Kipling. The works of Rudyard Kipling were required reading, for Britain’s bard of imperialism captured the wildness and wonder of the northwest frontier like no other writer, before or since.
It was in Peshawar, fresh from my first foray into Afghanistan, that I first read The Man Who Would Be King, Kipling’s timeless short story that John Huston later adapted into a film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Written in 1888, when Kipling was just 23 and working as a journalist for the Allahabad Pioneer, The Man Who Would Be King tells of a bearded adventurer, Daniel Dravot, who penetrates the remotest mountains of Afghanistan in the middle years of Victoria’s reign, disguised as a Muslim holy man. Following the trail of Alexander the Great deep into the Hindu Kush, he trains a tribal army and is crowned king by the local tribesmen. It was thrilling stuff, a story of freelance imperialism in which a white man becomes a powerful potentate in a distant land, but also a cautionary tale of colonial hubris, ending in disaster. The narrator is a newspaperman, who hears the story from the adventurer’s dying partner. The Man Who Would Be King made a profound and lasting impression on me.
Over the next few years, I made several more reporting trips to Afghanistan and twice visited Kabul, but after the Soviets retreated, the West swiftly lost interest. Afghanistan fractured into civil war; and the country was left to slide towards fundamentalism. Long before the rule of the Taleban, the news story had moved on – and so had I, to New York, then Paris, and finally to Washington. I returned to Britain just a few days before September 11, 2001.
In the wake of that atrocity, as America declared war on terror and the Taleban, I found myself writing about Afghanistan again, trawling through the histories to piece together a narrative of that broken land for this newspaper. While American bombs were blasting al-Qaeda fighters out of the caves of Tora Bora, I was combing the British Library. There was one name that caught my attention, deep in the footnotes of books about 19th-century Afghanistan: Josiah Harlan, the first American to enter that country.
A Pennsylvania-born Quaker and Freemason, Harlan had slipped into Kabul disguised “as a dervish” in 1824. The adventurer was said to have trained an army for the amir of Kabul, crossed the Hindu Kush, and proclaimed himself a prince in the mountains. His story sounded impossibly romantic, deeply implausible, and strangely familiar. I was not the first to notice the similarity between Harlan’s life and Kipling’s short story. The US State Department précis on Afghanistan notes that, “Josiah Harlan, an adventurer from Pennsylvania who was an adviser in Afghan politics in the 1830s, reputedly inspired Rudyard Kipling’s story The Man Who Would Be King”. Harlan, it seemed, was doomed to remain an enigmatic presence in history, a figure in fiction, but not in fact. As British and US troops poured into Afghanistan at the beginning of the 21st century, this unwritten half-life seemed uncannily contemporary.
I extended my search to the Punjab, where Harlan had lived in the 1820s, to his birthplace in Pennsylvania, to San Francisco, where he died, and back to Kabul. Gradually, Harlan’s life began to take shape: in the official records of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore, in the memoirs and diaries of contemporary travellers and soldiers, and in the intelligence archives of imperial India. In a tiny museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania, I finally discovered Harlan’s lost voice: in an old box, buried and forgotten among the files, was a tattered manuscript handwritten in curling copperplate – most of Harlan’s missing autobiography, unnoticed and unread since his death, along with letters, poems and drawings.
In 1842, Harlan boasted to a newspaper reporter that he had once been the prince of Ghor, a realm high in the Hindu Kush, under a secret treaty with its ruler. “He transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute for ever,” Harlan was quoted as saying. “The absolute and complete possession of his government was legally conveyed according to official form, by a treaty which I have still preserved.” This contract was assumed to be lost. Some claimed it had never existed. But there, yellow with age at the bottom of the box, was a document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.
In the winter of 1839, a conqueror, enthroned on a large bull elephant, raised his standard in the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush. His soldiers cheered, fired matchlock rifles into the air, and beat swords against their hide shields. Two thousand native horsemen shouted their loyalty. Six cannon roared to salute the flag, the echoes ricocheting across the snowy pinnacles. The commander reviewed his troops with satisfaction. Although not yet 40, his bearded face was as rugged as the landscape around it. Beneath a flowing fox-fur cloak he wore robes of maroon and green satin, a girdle of silver and lace, and a great silver buckle in the shape of a soldier’s breastplate. His catskin cap was circled with gold.
Like Alexander of Macedon, who had led his army on the same mountain path 22 centuries earlier, His Highness Hallan Sahib, Prince of Ghor, was called great by his followers and was even said to have magical powers. He never travelled without his books, and when the guard had been posted for the night and the mastiffs howled to ward off the wolf packs in the ravines, he retired to his tent and wrote, tumbling torrents of words in a language none but he could read. For His Highness had started his life in another country by another name. The man who was to inspire Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King was, in fact, Josiah Harlan of Chester County, Pennsylvania, the first American to set foot in Afghanistan.
The adventures of Josiah Harlan started in Ludhiana in northwest India, a dusty border post where civilisation, as the British saw it, ended, and the wilderness began. With an unhappy love affair behind him, this is where Harlan found a different sort of romance. Beyond Ludhiana was the mysterious Punjab, and even further west, across the mighty Indus, lay mythical Afghanistan. It was in Ludhiana that Harlan met Shah Shujah al-Moolk, now in exile, having been forced out of Afghanistan by his rival, Dost Mohammed Khan. The exiled king’s fabled wealth and the wild, primitive land beckoning from beyond the Indus captured Harlan’s imagination. If the British would not return this great man to his throne, then Harlan himself might take a hand in the restoration.
