{"book":"adl1197","page":21,"text":"- 10 -\nAs soon Zaman Shah after the death of his fathear,\nfinding his brothers' submission complete discovered that he was\nstrong enough; he unfortunately slowly began to change his at-\ntitude, and assumed an autocratic mien. During the course of\nthese events, it became apparent that Sirdar Payanda Khan, who\nhad the service of the king at heart, and was the true worker\nfor his nation as a man of considerable experience and acuemn,\nwas receding from the favour of the king. Another man, by the\nname of Wafadar Khan replaced the great Sirdar Payanda Khan\nas a minister of the Afgan monarch. This Wafadar Khan, accor-\nding to a contemporary historian was a man of political craft,\nwih soft and soothing manners and voice, which he used to a\nfault even on occasions when he acted as a Court Jester. His\nattitude towards those who served under him, was full of aro-\ngance and haughtiness, and in his behaviour in respect of those\nabove him in station, he was subservient and cringing. He was\nafraid of the least appearance of difficulty or mis-carriage in\nevents, he loved his appointment considerably, and to safe-guard\nhis own place in administration, he left nothing undone to severe\nthe connection or contact between the king and his best to pro-\nduce a sense of repugnance towards the people on the part of\ntheir ruler. This man possessing such childish traits, who was impel-\nled by no other than his personal interests, had attained such\nclose attention of the king that the monarch had placed all po-\nwer and administration in his hands, and Zaman Shah was just a\ntool in the hands of this worthless person. As was but natural,\nthe ideas of the king were poisoned to such a degree that he\ndevoutedly set his foot forward to oppose the recognised leaders\nof people; and notably was soured towards the Barak Zais. Al-\nthough the animosity between the Barakzais and the Sadu Zais,\nwhich produced such drastic difficulties both for the people and\nthe country of Afghanistan, is said to belong to other reasons\nthe real and the true reason of this conflict is that very do-\nubt and mistake which brought Wafadar Khan to the chair of a\nminister of the realm. The King's Favourite, of course, as could\nbe expected, took advantage of that weekness and of that conflict\nand the illtreatment reached to un-bearable extent, in regards to\nthe well-wishers of the country. Quite naturlly this progress","chars":2395,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00021.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/21","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/21","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl1197/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl1197_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."}}