{"book":"adl0970","page":145,"text":"104\n\nIndia, and to prevent the French from settling or\nresiding in Persia. In the event of war between\nthe Afghans and the Persians or the Persians and\nthe French, the British were to support Persia.\n\nThe British gold and intrigues made great\nheadway. As they themselves have admitted\n\" Every difficulty melted away beneath the magic\ntouch of English gold\". Malcolm was so\nconfident of his success that he wrote proudly\nfrom Isfahan, \" Zaman Shah can do nothing in\nIndia before the setting of rains of 1801. He has\nno time, even if he had the power for such an\nattempt, and by the blessing of God he will for\nsome years to come be too much engaged in this\nquarter to think of attacking India.\" What an\nirony of fate ! The letter had not yet reached\nIndia when the days of the Afghan sovereign were\nnumbered. The nightmare of British dreams was\ndeprived of his eyesight by Mahmud and impri-\nsoned in Bala Hissar.\n\nZaman Shah committed a blunder by appoint-\ning Wafadar Khan, a base and designing man, to\nbe his minister. The conspiring nature of this\nman rendered Zaman Shah, in spite of his amiable\ndisposition, unbearable to the other chiefs. Every-","chars":1150,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0970/00145.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":191,"title":"Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0970/145","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0970/canvas/145","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0970/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0970_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."}}