Finished an amazing book while on the way back and forth to Boston.

“The Man Who Would Be King,” by Ben Macintyre.

It turns out that in November of 1827, Pennsylvania native Josiah Harlan set out into the Punjab and Afghanistan with the intent of making himself a prince.

And, amazingly enough he succeeded, becoming the prince of the Hazaras in central Afghanistan under Dost Mohammed Khan, the ruler forced out by Macnaghten and Burnes. Dost Mohammed’s son, Akbar Khan, led the bloody revolt which drove the British out of Afghanistan and murdered all but one of the British forces, wives, children, and camp followers.

But Harlan had already left.

There’s an interesting and prescient quote in the book about Afghanistan:

As a student of Dost Mohammed Khan’s rule, Harlan firmly believed there was only one way to ensure peace in Afghanistan: co-option and bribery, using the existing system of chieftainships. “The government of the Avghauns by their own institutions would have been facile,” he declared. “If the English had conciliated the heads of the tribes [and] arranged them around the king as sustainers of the government, which privilege they had a right to expect, they would have become willing hostages to the good conduct of their tribes.” Instead, Shah Sujah was bent on vengeance. With the sanction of the British, he “imprisoned many who represented themselves for employment and honours [and] deputed the offices of state to a swarm of hungry expectants, who attended him during his 30 years exile.” The invaders might easily have purchased acquiescence: “The English, who now well the value of gold, could have controlled the Avghans by fiscal diplomacy, without incurring the odium of invading and subjugating an unoffending people.”

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The next time someone suggests that we need 100,000 more NATO troops in Afghanistan, keep this in mind…

A county museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania revealed Harlan’s manuscripts. He died, alone and poor, in San Francisco in 1871.