The Last American King of Afghanistan

"Josiah Harlan served as the basis of Rudyard Kipling�s short story, "The Man Who Would Be King," written in 1888 while Kipling was a journalist for the Allahabad Pioneer newspaper. The real-life Josiah Harlan was born in 1799 into a Quaker family from Pennsylvania. As an adolescent, Harland read works in botany and medicine, but above all Greek and Roman history, having taught himself Latin and Greek. He became inordinately interested in the life and adventures of Alexander the Great, after whom he would no doubt later fashion his own adventures.

...In 1822 Harlan sailed for Calcutta on a merchant ship.

...[In 1826] Josiah succeeded in gaining a meeting with al-Moolk [the deposed king of Afghanistan residing in Punjab], during which he offered to travel to Kabul and link up with Shah Shujah�s allies in an effort to organize a rebellion against Dost Mohammed Khan, the prince who had stolen his crown.

...Harlan left Ludhiana with a rag-tag army comprised of mercenaries and headed for Kabul. Along the way, he passed himself off as a religious mystic, a wealthy adventurer, and as a doctor, even treating the locals he encountered with a variety of ills. In 1828 Harlan reached Kabul and sent a message to Dost Mohammed Khan requesting a meeting, as news of a "feringhee" or foreigner having entered Kabul circulated throughout the city. Harlan wrote in his memoir that he found Dost Mohammed to be as intelligent and sophisticated as any Western ruler.

Bored, and hearing that Ranjit Singh, maharajah of the Punjab, was recruiting European generals, he rode off to Lahore, where he found a debauched one-eyed alcoholic who gave parties at which he "indulged without remorse or shame in sensualities of the most revolting description." Yet Harlan set aside his Quaker sensibilities after being offered the governorship of Gujrat. Later, when Joseph Wolff, an itinerant English missionary, sought a meeting with the Gujrat ruler, "to his great surprise he heard someone singing 'Yankee Doodle.' � It was His Excellency the Governor himself. He was a fine, tall gentleman � with an Indian hookah in his mouth."

Harlan's 15 years in the region were a febrile period of plots, treachery and edgy negotiations with murderous despots; he was involved in them all.

In 1842, Harlan boasted to a newspaper reporter that he had once been the prince of Ghor, a realm high in the Hindu Kush, under a secret treaty with its ruler. "He transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute for ever," Harlan was quoted as saying. "The absolute and complete possession of his government was legally conveyed according to official form, by a treaty which I have still preserved." This contract was assumed to be lost. Some claimed it had never existed. But there, yellow with age at the bottom of the box, was a document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.

Like Alexander of Macedon, who had led his army on the same mountain path 22 centuries earlier, His Highness Hallan Sahib, Prince of Ghor, was called great by his followers and was even said to have magical powers. He never travelled without his books, and when the guard had been posted for the night and the mastiffs howled to ward off the wolf packs in the ravines, he retired to his tent and wrote, tumbling torrents of words in a language none but he could read. For His Highness had started his life in another country by another name. The man who was to inspire Kipling�s The Man Who Would Be King was, in fact, Josiah Harlan of Chester County, Pennsylvania, the first American to set foot in Afghanistan."

"His journey began in Philadelphia and landed him in Calcutta, India, by way of China in 1824. In India he enlisted as an assistant surgeon in the army of the East India Company (the precursor to the British Raj) although the only medical knowledge Harlan possessed came from a medical manual he read during his ocean crossing. After being injured during battle in Burma, Harlan obtained his discharge from the Company's army and traveled to northwest India and Afghanistan, seeking to realize his fondest dream - to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.

For several years, Harlan crossed and re-crossed the border between India (now Pakistan) and Afghanistan. In a political climate, where every man was spinning in a private orbit of political ambition, alliances were made and broken with dizzying pace. Harlan played the field on several different sides with the keen eye of a mercenary. He accumulated considerable wealth, acted as a doctor and a governor to a powerful Indian king, sided with and opposed the British and conspired for and against several Afghan aspirants to the throne.

Between the years,1837 -1839, Harlan returned to Afghanistan for the final and most eventful of his journeys. By this time he was thoroughly enamored of this rugged and dangerous land, spoke the local languages fluently, dressed in Afghan garb and sincerely admired the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammed, who made him his military advisor. On behalf of the king, Harlan undertook a grueling expedition across the treacherous Hindu Kush Mountains. His mission, to subdue a particularly pesky and unscrupulous Uzbek warlord, based in the vicinity of Balkh, a central Asian town closely associated with Alexander of Macedonia. The dual purpose of serving his friend, the king, and traveling in Alexander's footsteps made it a doubly attractive venture and Harlan performed his duties with aplomb and joy. His impossible mission was successful and somewhere between leaving Kabul, defeating the enemy and his return to the capital, the Quaker from Pennsylvania became the Prince of Ghor, the ruler of the Hazaras ! It was to be the most momentous event in Harlan's already interesting life.

Josiah Harlan returned home to Pennsylvania after 22 years of high adventure and in his own mind, as an Afghan "king". His first order of business upon returning home was to write and publish a bitter diatribe against the British imperial design in the Indian subcontinent. He continued to write prolifically but could never again publish another book, including his memoirs. His first book caused so much uproar and anger in Britain that the American publishers did not want to take another chance with Harlan's writings. Disappointed, Harlan spent the rest of his life as a mill operator, a "civilian general" in the Union army during the Civil War, got married and had a daughter. But he had left his heart in Afghanistan and longed to return there and claim his "kingdom". To that end, he tried to convince the US government to finance his trips to Afghanistan as a "camel procurer and a grape agent"! But Harlan never did return to his kingdom which was as much a geographical place in a far away land, as it was a fantasy in his own mind. He died a poor and lonely man in San Francisco in 1871. Among his meager belongings which were returned to his widow, were a "fine golden sword, an ancient miniature ruby engraved with the image of Athena and a sheaf of yellowing papers in Persian script, which were the royal warrants of an Afghan prince".

Josiah Harlan's life story reads like a fairy tale adventure with echoes in the present. An American, leading military expeditions through Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif, Bamian and Kabul - places most American first heard of after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. The Afghanistan of 1830's was not too different from Afghanistan today - invasions by Western powers, widespread unrest, sporadic and precarious peace and warlords running amok. Harlan, the mercenary prince and early imperialist, faced the dilemma of all occupiers - either the colonizer must shed his own humanity in order to oppress fellow humans or he must acknowledge the humanity of his enemy. For Harlan, the second path prevailed and the "pompous prince" began to see the colonization through the eyes of the colonized. His observation is as true today as it was more than one hundred fifty years ago - "To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force,.... is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe." In the end, Harlan reverted to what he was brought up to be in the progressive and tolerant Quaker community of his youth - a Jeffersonian American who militated at the outrage of "offense against liberty"."