The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan

In Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, a young adventurer named Daniel Dravot penetrates feudal Afghanistan disguised as a cleric. In this nonfiction account with a similar title, MacIntyre, a columnist for The Times of London, tells the story of the real life adventurer who may have been Kipling's inspiration. He describes the life and adventures of Josiah Harlan (1799-1871), a young Quaker from Chester County, Pennsylvania, who set sail for China in 1822, telling his fiancée that they would marry when he returned. Upon reaching Calcutta, Harlan received a letter announcing that she was marrying another man. He resolved never to return home. So began his adventures. After a failed stint in the Indian army--an action for which the Quakers excommunicated him--Harlan met Shujah al-Mulk (1792-1842), an Afghan king exiled to India in 1809 after just six years on the throne. Harlan offered a deal: he would raise an army, subdue Kabul, and restore the kingdom. In exchange, he would become vizier, the equivalent of prime minister. The deal struck, Harlan began recruiting native troops, using the U.S. flag as his own. In 1827, he and his army began their long march. But he soon had second thoughts about his army's loyalty. He picked a trusted team, paid severance to the others, and launched his Plan B: dressed as a dervish, he made his way to Kabul, arriving in 1828 just as an epidemic of cholera ravaged the city. Years passed and Harlan changed his allegiance to Shujah's rival, King Dost Muhammad Khan (1793-1863), to whom he became aide-de-camp. This Afghan king granted Harlan's wish for power. The itinerant Pennsylvania Quaker and stilted lover became prince of Ghor, today a province in central Afghanistan. Harlan's story is riveting. MacIntyre describes his adventures, disillusionments, and eventual return to the United States as the only Afghan general to serve in the U.S. Civil War. Harlan was not alone in his adventures. In the nineteenth century, a handful of men made dangerous journeys through Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Tibet. Not all survived. Author Peter Hopkirk has chronicled their stories.[1] But it is rare that so much new material surfaces in one book, and for this MacIntyre deserves special credit. After learning of this curious American from cursory references and footnotes in old travelogues gathering dust in the British Library, MacIntyre made it his mission to uncover the saga of this historical Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. His quest took him to Punjab and Pennsylvania, Kabul and California. He scoured through the official records of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore and poured over the intelligence archives of imperial India, whose agents were suspicious of Harlan's plots and schemes. Finally, in a Chester County museum, MacIntyre found a long-lost manuscript replete with love letters and sketches. Explanations of historical and cultural context weave together in his fluid prose. The result is impressive and

A fascinating read in every respect. Macintyre is a fluid writer and the book is a real page turner. Apart from vivid details of the remarkable adventures of the first American in Afghanistan; the intrigues, machinations and sheer depravity of virtually all the players in the great game are in plain sight. The book also provides rare insights - via Josiah Harlan's prism - of British mendacity, misrule and astounding arrogance. Harlan's account of British shenanigans may have a tinge of exaggeration owing to his eventual deep hatred of the Empire and many of its emissaries but the substance of Harlan's writings can be corroborrated in other accounts such as the Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham (another British author) and in more substantive form with relevant data in Angus Maddison's The World Economy. Macintyre deserves considerable praise for presenting the unvarnished truth, albeit through Harlan's pen, about the largely negative legacy of the British Empire. It is a shame that Harlan's story, despite this wonderful book, remains largely unknown both in the US and the East.

Most people who pick up this book will already have read some of the travelogues of the "mad dogs and Englishmen" who wandered through Central Asia in the 19th and early 20th century: Burnaby and Nazaroff's memoirs, as well as any of Peter Hopkirk's books on the era. But here we have a real fish out of water story, and a fascinating one at that: an American Quaker leading, or joining, armies through Afghanistan and elsewhere in the name of, variously: the sitting ruler of Afghanistan, the deposed predecessor, his Sikh neighbor, the British Empire, and arguably himself as "Prince of Ghor." The tale is fascinating because it's so poorly-known, despite the fact that Kipling's fiction, which I understand to be inspired by Harlan and other adventurers of the time, is so well-known. Undoubtedly, Harlan's own financial misfortune and quiet death contributed to the obscurity of the narrative, but Macintyre does a great job of weaving the scraps together, and keeping the story's pace. An interesting read, and a bit of history which has earned its place in Central Asian lore.

Whatever else we must blame them for, Al Queda and the Taliban can be thanked for bringing back to our memories a forgotten American, the first American who was ever in Afghanistan. Josiah Harlan, born in 1799, was barely remembered as a footnote from the First Afghan War, and understandably was snubbed by the British historians of that conflict. Reporter Ben Macintyre, researching the history of the area in order to cover its current events, found references to Harlan and became intrigued. He hunted for Harlan clues in Afghanistan itself, and was led to a tiny local museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He came upon what other biographers can only dream of getting: a previously unknown autobiography handwritten by the subject. There was also an ancient proclamation making Harlan absolute ruler of a principality in Afghanistan. Indeed, Harlan inspired a Kipling story, which in turn brought the wonderful John Huston film, and which has now given Macintyre's book its title: _The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). His life is as surprising and exciting as the fictions it inspired.Harlan first sailed to Calcutta and Canton in a commercial venture in 1820. On a subsequent voyage, while he was in Calcutta, he learned that his fiancée back home in Philadelphia had married another. Emotionally adrift, hearing that the British were about to go to war against Burma, he signed on as a surgeon to the East India Company. Macintyre writes, "That he had never actually studied medicine was not, at least in his own mind, an impediment." His service over, he signed on with an exiled king to lead an army to reclaim Afghanistan, but he had plenty of intrigues and shifts of alliances before that could happen. Eventually he would meet up with the Hazara tribe, which in turn wanted him to create their own invincible military. Of course, he had a price; the prince "transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute forever." Harlan had indeed become a king. He also imagined himself a sort of reincarnated Alexander the Conqueror, following Alexander's trails. He even took on his conquests an elephant, the symbol and mascot of the Macedonian conqueror, but it could eventually take no more of the mountain cold. Harlan took comfort in that having to send back the elephant, he was once again emulating Alexander, who had had to leave his own elephant troops behind for the same reason.Harlan's enterprising assumption of command and kingdom was only put to an end by the Great Game between Britain and Russia in their struggle over the area. He tried to play along, with the plots and shifting alliances that he used for all his fifteen years in the region, but eventually the British booted him out, or in his version, he was disgusted by how the British treated the Afghan natives and sent himself home. He remained active, and was on hand to advise the American g

Ben Macintyre's biography of Josiah Harlan is an adventure page after page. Most folks who read this review will probably know the story about Harlan being the real life character behind the story by Rudyard Kipling and the movie with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.Recently I received an email of trivia facts. One of them was that it was still legal to hunt camels in Arizona. This was supposed to be true albeit the last camel hunted in Arizona was hunted in the 1930s. In the late 1840s and 1850s Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, decided that camels might be cheaply imported in order to replace the role of horses in the Southwest desert. Davis had taken the idea from Josiah Harlan. And it might been that the US Cavalry became the US Army Camel Corps had not Harlan misunderstood the resistance of American horses, mules, and cows to the aggressive camels. The Camel Corps was disbanded in 1863. Camels were set free in Arizona. "Harlan did not care because he had another brilliant idea." This is yet another adventure of the "man who would be king."