{"book":"adl0957","page":199,"text":"154\n\nhoped for. At the same time the appearance of a Russian agent, Capt. Vikovich, at Kabul alarmed the British and Burnes left Kabul empty-handed.\n\nThe failure of Burnes' mission gave the Governor-General of India, Lord Auckland, a pretext to invade Afghanistan, with the object of restoring Shah Shuja to the throne of Kabul. Thus the First Anglo-Afghan War began at the end of 1838 with the British invasion of the country. A British army under General Keane assembled at Ferozepur. Shah Shuja was supplied with the necessary funds to raise an army of his own. As the Sikhs did not allow the British to go through their country, it was decided that the army should march along the Sutlej down to the Indus and then via Sukkur and Shikarpur and through the Bolan Pass, advance on Kandahar. In April 1839, after suffering terrible privations and heavy losses amongst their transport animals from predatory attacks of Baluchs, Kakakrs and Achakzais, Keane's army reached Kandahar, and Shah Shuja was crowned in the mosque of Ahmad Shah.\n\nOn the 27th of June the forced moved northwards, and on the 21st of July, after a severe encounter, the citadel of Ghazni was carried by storm. In August, 1839, the British took Kabul and installed Shah Shuja on the throne. Dost Mohammad, finding his army thinned by treachery, fled across the Hindu Kush, and although hotly pursued, escaped to Balkh. A little later he was offered asylum by Nasrullah Khan of Bokhara, but later treacherously put in prison by him. How-ever, the Afghans did not take kindly to the occupation of their capital by a foreign force, nor would they tolerate being governed by a sovereign who was a mere puppet of the British. Shah Shuja was supported entirely by British bayonets.","chars":1747,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00199.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/199","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/199","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}