{"book":"adl0973","page":52,"text":"those courtiers who had turned traitors, and lack of experience and sheer incapacity on the part of others went a long way to strengthen Bacha's position. Raids now gave way to pitched battles in which the royal forces met with crushing defeats. Thenceforward Bacha treated the prisoners of war with kindness.\n\nThe condition of the city of Kabul at this time may well be imagined. The news of the fall of Nimla, blockade of the trade routes and repeated reverses of royal troops in the north greatly upset the people. Prices of food-stuffs and other necessities of life were daily rising and added greatly to the miseries of the inhabitants. Exaggerated stories were told of the strength of the rebels and of their victories. Like vultures gathering over a carcase, people came from all parts of the country to secure their share of the plunder; and the presence of these undesirable elements was a source of constant terror to the citizens.\n\nFinding that he could not crush the insurrection, the King thought of playing off one enemy against another. He opened negotiations for peace with Bacha and his adherents, and promised them handsome\n\n23","chars":1145,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0973/00052.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":315,"title":"Progressive Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0973/52","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0973/canvas/52","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0973/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0973_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."}}