Abdur Rahman Khan
Abdur Rahman Khan was emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, the Iron Amir. He was the grandson of Dost Mohammad whom the British, at the end of the second Afghan war, recognised at Kabul because he was the only man who could hold it. He spent twenty-one years making the country a state by force, the first it had been. He had spent eleven years in exile in Russian Samarkand after losing the family's civil war of the 1860s. He came back in 1880 across the Oxus with Russian money. He took the throne on the British terms, which were that they controlled his foreign relations and paid him a subsidy, eighteen lakhs of rupees a year, and did not enter the country. He kept them out for twenty years and took the money. The state was made in blood. There were the Ghilzai rising of 1886 and 1887, and the Hazara war of 1891 to 1893 in which the Shia Hazara of the centre were conquered, enslaved and dispossessed. There was the conversion of the pagan Kafirs of the eastern mountains at the sword in 1896, after which Kafiristan was Nuristan, the land of light. There were the hundred thousand he is said to have executed, some in the iron cage on the Kabul road and some blown from guns, which the British agents counted and did not mind. He built the army, the arsenal, the provincial governors, the spies, the tax-gatherers and the treasury. He moved rebellious Pashtun tribes to the north to hold the Uzbek lands. He signed the Durand line agreement of November 1893 with the Indian foreign secretary, which drew the frontier through the Pashtun country and left half of it in India. It is a line no Afghan government has since accepted as a border and it is the border. The Pamir agreement of 1895 gave him the Wakhan corridor so that Russia and India should not touch. It was a strip of mountain he did not want and was made to take. He was born in Kabul, the son of Afzal Khan. He was gouty and in pain for his last decade. He dictated an autobiography to his secretary that the British published. He died in October 1901 in his bed, which no Afghan ruler of the century had managed. His son Habibullah succeeded without a war, which none had managed either.
- Lived: 1844 CE – 1901 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: emir, monarch
