ABSTRACT
In the preceding pages I have attempted to reconstruct the political landscape of Afghanistan during the reign of the first Muhammadzai king, Amir Dost Muhammad Khan. Dost Muhammad Khan’s rise to power was occasioned by the shift of authority from one powerful Durrani subdivision to another which began during the early years of the nineteenth century. While the Sadozai dynasty, which had furnished the kings of Afghanistan since 1747, remained in power until 1818, Dost Muhammad Khan’s family under the leadership of Fatih Khan Muhammadzai was able to increase its hold over government affairs gradually from the turn of the century on. Characterized by a great amount of administrative and political decentralization, the disintegration of the Sadozai empire was hastened by rivalries between two sets of royal brothers, Shah Zaman and Shah Shuja‘ on the one hand and Shah Mahmud on the other. This process intensified following Fatih Khan’s death and the deposal of Shah Mahmud in 1818 as similar power struggles erupted among Fatih Khan’s remaining brothers. With Dost Muhammad Khan’s seizure of Kabul in 1826 a sort of equilibrium was reestablished between the contending parties. In the course of these events the Sadozai empire, which had included Nishapur in the west and Kashmir, Punjab and Sind in the east during the period of its greatest extension, broke up into a number of principalities. The regions east of the Khyber Pass fell to the Sikh empire. In the 1830s Dost Muhammad Khan’s sphere of influence was limited to Kabul, Kohistan, Jalalabad and Ghazni. His half brothers, the Sardars of Qandahar, controlled a principality of equal size in southern Afghanistan, while Herat became the dominion of Shah Mahmud and his son Kamran. During the same period the Uzbek khanates of Lesser Turkistan reasserted their independence. Eastern Turkistan, including Badakhshan, was the scene of a continuously changing balance of power between the Muitan and Qataghan Uzbek chiefs. Further west, in the so-called Chahar Wilayat, Maimana held a leading position.
