The consistent aim of the British policy
was to maintain Afghanistan in the position of a strong, friendly, and
independent state, prepared in certain contingencies to co-operate in
keeping at a distance foreign intrigue or aggression; and while this
object was promoted by donations of money and arms, to abstain from
interference in the internal affairs of the country, while according a
friendly recognition to the successive occupants of its throne, without
undertaking indefinite liabilities in their interest. The aim, in a word,
was to utilise Afghanistan as a 'buffer' state between the northwestern
frontier of British India and Russian advances from the direction of
Central Asia. Shere Ali was never a very comfortable ally; he was of a
saturnine and suspicious nature, and he seems also to have had an
overweening sense of the value of the position of Afghanistan, interposed
between two great powers profoundly jealous one of the other. He did not
succeed with Lord Northbrook in an attempt to work on that Viceroy by
playing off the bogey of Russian aggression; and as the consequence of
this failure he allowed himself to display marked evidences of
disaffected feeling. Cognisance was taken of this 'attitude of extreme
reserve,' and early in 1876 Lord Lytton arrived in India charged with
instructions to break away from the policy designated as that of
'masterly inactivity,' and to initiate a new basis of relations with
Afghanistan and its Ameer.
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