Dost Mohammad Khan
Dost Mohammad Khan was emir of Afghanistan from 1826 to 1839 and from 1842 to 1863, the founder of the Barakzai dynasty that ruled until 1973. He was the man the British deposed in the first Anglo-Afghan war and put back when the war had killed their army. He spent the last twenty years of his life taking the country back piece by piece and died in the week he finished. He was the eleventh son of the Barakzai chief whom the Durrani king had murdered in 1800. The brothers' revenge dissolved the Durrani state into its provinces. He held Kabul from 1826, took the title of emir in 1834, and beat the Durrani pretender Shah Shuja at Kandahar the same year. The Sikhs under Ranjit Singh took Peshawar from him. That was the loss he spent his life trying to reverse and never did. The British came because of Peshawar and Russia. He asked Calcutta for help against the Sikhs, and Calcutta preferred the Sikhs. A Russian envoy appeared in Kabul in 1837. Auckland's government decided to replace him with Shah Shuja. It marched the Army of the Indus through the Bolan pass in 1839, took Kandahar, Ghazni and Kabul, and accepted his surrender in November 1840 after he had beaten them at Parwan. That was the strangest surrender of the war. It sent him to Calcutta as a pensioner. The rising of November 1841 killed the envoy Burnes and then Macnaghten. The retreat of January 1842 killed the army in the passes, one surgeon reaching Jalalabad. The British, having burned the Kabul bazaar in revenge, let Shah Shuja be murdered and let Dost Mohammad go home in 1843 because there was nobody else. The second reign was the reconquest. There were Kandahar in 1855, Balkh and the north by 1859, Herat, held by the Persians and then by a nephew, taken on 26 May 1863 after a ten-month siege. He died there on 9 June, at seventy. He had signed with the British in 1855 and 1857 the treaties of friendship that kept him neutral in the Mutiny when the Peshawar Muslims begged him to come. That was, the British judged, the most important thing any Afghan ever did for them. He was born in Kandahar, and had twenty-seven sons. He named the third of them, Sher Ali, his heir. The other twenty-six disputed for five years.
- Lived: 1792 CE – 1863 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: emir, monarch
