Robert’s march from Kabul to Kandahar and the Battle of Kandahar are presented as a military victory whose consequences reached beyond the battlefield. In Abdel Khader Khan’s account, the campaign both relieved the British-held city and illustrates why control of Kandahar matters to the fate of Afghanistan.

The March and Battle

Abdel Khader Khan recounts that Lord Roberts set out from Kabul with ten thousand men to relieve the siege of Kandahar. Two-thirds of the force were Indian soldiers, whom he describes as capable fighters. Roberts covered the three hundred miles between the cities in twenty-two days—a faster journey than the month-long trip from Chaman that Abdel Khader Khan and Lin had made with horses and help from villages along the way.

The march crossed freezing, snowbound mountains and then burning desert. Abdel Khader Khan says that after twenty days of this arduous journey, Roberts’s force fought the army of Prince Ayub Khan and defeated it. The victory relieved the British in Kandahar; Ayub was not killed, but escaped.

Political Consequences

After the defeat, the British placed Ayub’s close kinsman, Abdul Rahman Khan, on the Afghan throne. Abdel Khader Khan portrays Abdul Rahman’s rule as wise and argues that, under him, the British had no real power in Afghanistan. In his telling, this outcome restored a political situation resembling the one before Roberts’s campaign.

Kandahar’s Strategic Meaning

Abdel Khader Khan makes the battle part of an argument about the relationship between Kandahar and the country as a whole: Kabul is Afghanistan’s heart, he says, while Kandahar is its soul, and whoever rules Kandahar rules Afghanistan. He connects that claim to the war unfolding around them, predicting that the Russians will lose once they are forced to leave the city. This is his strategic judgment, voiced as he and Lin look toward his burning city, rather than a reported outcome of the earlier battle.

The Recounting

The episode is embedded in Abdel Khader Khan’s conversation with Lin, not narrated as a present-day battle scene. His comparison between Roberts’s march and their own journey from Chaman gives the historical distance a personal measure, while the shift from the British victory to the burning city brings the story back to the war surrounding them. The account thus serves both as a compact history of the campaign and as Abdel Khader Khan’s explanation of why Kandahar remains pivotal.