The Siege of Kandahar was the crisis that followed Prince Ayub Khan’s victory over a British and Indian force at Maiwand. As Abdel Khader Khan recounts it to Lin, the city’s relief became a decisive contest over who could command Afghanistan: Roberts’s rapid march from Kabul broke the siege, while the episode’s family histories and political aftermath give it meaning beyond a single military campaign.

Causes and the Battle of Maiwand

In Khader’s account, the conflict begins with the British occupation of Kabul and the harsh rule imposed there by Lord Frederick Roberts. In June, Prince Ayub Khan left Herat with ten thousand men and announced a jihad to drive out the British. The British officer responsible for Kandahar, Burrows, marched out of the city with fifteen hundred British and Indian soldiers to meet him at Maiwand. Ayub’s victory forced the British back to Kandahar, which he then surrounded, beginning the siege.

The battle had exacted heavy losses on both sides: the British lost half their force, while the Afghans lost two thousand five hundred men. Khader presents the battle as both a military reversal and a family inheritance. Ayub was his ancestor, and many of Khader’s kinsmen served in the army he raised. He also links the conflict to his former teacher, Mackenzie Esquire, whose grandfather had fought in Lord Roberts’s army. The war had placed their forebears on opposing sides.

Roberts’s Relief March

Roberts set out from Kabul with ten thousand men to relieve Kandahar. Two-thirds of his force were Indian soldiers, whom Khader recognizes as capable fighters. They covered the three hundred miles from Kabul to Kandahar in twenty-two days, crossing from cold mountain conditions to desert heat. After the march, Roberts’s army fought Ayub’s forces and defeated them, saving the British-held city.

Khader makes the speed and hardship of the march part of his comparison with his own journey alongside Lin from Chaman: that shorter journey had taken them a month, even with good horses and help from villages. The contrast underscores the scale of Roberts’s achievement without obscuring its purpose: the force’s arrival turned the siege into a British victory and made Kandahar the place by which Roberts would thereafter be known.

Aftermath and Significance

Ayub escaped after his defeat. The British then put his close kinsman Abdul Rahman Khan, another of Khader’s ancestors, on the Afghan throne. Khader says Abdul Rahman ruled with enough political skill that the British had no real power in Afghanistan, presenting the outcome as a return to an earlier balance rather than a lasting British settlement.

Khader tells this history while he and Lin look toward the fires of Kandahar in the later war. He argues that Kabul is Afghanistan’s heart but Kandahar its soul: whoever rules Kandahar, he believes, rules Afghanistan. On that reading, the city’s fate is the strategic measure of the contemporary conflict too. Roberts’s relief of the nineteenth-century siege supplies Khader with a precedent for his prediction that the Russians will lose the war if forced out of Kandahar.