{"book":"adl0957","page":204,"text":"159\n\nthe Indian frontier was to rest not upon the Indus but upon the command of the passes.\n\nThe triumph was short-lived. The Indian Government once more, by painful experience, had to learn the lesson that the moment any ruler of Afghanistan is supported by any foreign power, he forfeits all the respect and allegiance of his fellow countrymen. How blind the Viceroy was to the real state of affairs may be seen from his statement that \"the Afghans will like and respect us all the more for the thrashing we have given Sher Ali\". A month after these words were written, the clouds were ominously gathering and the fate of Burnes and McNaughten awaited Sir Louis Cavagnari, who had entered Kabul as British Resident on July 24, 1879. On September 2, Cavagnari sent a telegram to the Viceroy containing the words: \"All well\". The next day the envoy and the whole of his escort were murderd in the Bala-Hissar. The jubilation with which Beaconsfield and Lytton regarded their handiwork was rudely disturbed. \"The web of policy\", wrote the Viceroy, \"so carefully and patiently woven, had been rudely shattered\". British forces were once again in motion and before the close of October, General Roberts was able to occupy Kabul. Yakoub Khan abdicated and was sent to India, where he resided until his death in 1923.\n\nRoberts' position in Kabul was far from secure. The Afghan People had once again risen in arms against the foreign invaders, led by different tribal leaders. In winter, there was fierce fighting in and around Kabul, and it was with great difficulty that Roberts kept his communications with India open. Indeed, for ten days, December 14 to 24, he was forced to abandon Kabul and the Bala-Hissar, and retire within the defences of Sherpur where he was besieged by 100,000 nationalist forces. To hold Afghanistan permanently was now out of the question. Lord","chars":1870,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00204.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/204","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/204","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."}}