Ayub Khan
Ghazi Muhammad Ayub Khan Barakzai (1857 – 7 April 1914), remembered as the Victor of Maiwand and nicknamed by the British "the Afghan Prince Charlie," was a son of Amir Sher Ali Khan, governor of Herat, briefly a claimant to the Afghan throne, and the commander who destroyed a British brigade in open battle before losing everything and ending his days on a British pension in Lahore.[1][2]
Son of Sher Ali
Born in Kabul in 1857, Ayub was a younger son of Amir Sher Ali Khan of the Barakzai dynasty. His father appointed him governor of Herat in 1872, when Ayub was only fifteen, and he held the province for eight years before the Second Anglo-Afghan War broke out. During this period he built a reputation as an energetic administrator and a capable military commander, modernising the Herat garrison and maintaining strong defences.[1][2] When the Second Anglo-Afghan War broke his father's reign, Ayub held Herat as governor; after his brother Yaqub Khan abdicated under British occupation in October 1879, Ayub proclaimed himself amir and became the rallying point of armed resistance to the British.[1]
Maiwand and Kandahar
In June 1880 he marched out of Herat at the head of an army of regular troops and ghazi volunteers. At Maiwand on 27 July 1880 his forces annihilated Brigadier-General Burrows' brigade, a victory that saved Kandahar from permanent British occupation and made Ayub a national hero. He followed up by besieging the British garrison in Kandahar, but on 1 September 1880 Roberts' relief army from Kabul routed him outside the walls, capturing his camp and artillery — the end of both his campaign and the war (see Battle of Kandahar (1880)).[1][3] The siege of Kandahar lasted roughly a month, during which Ayub's forces were unable to breach the citadel's defences despite their numerical superiority. Roberts' march from Kabul — covering approximately three hundred miles in twenty days — remains one of the most celebrated forced marches in military history.[1]
The last campaign
Ayub retreated to Herat and did not accept the settlement that left Kandahar in Amir Abdur Rahman Khan's hands. In July 1881, short of funds and plagued by restless troops, he marched again: he beat the new amir's governor at Maiwand itself — on the first anniversary of Burrows' defeat — and seized Kandahar for a few weeks. Abdur Rahman, backed by British money, advanced from Kabul and crushed him outside the city. Ayub fled into Persia, and Herat fell to the amir that October.[1] This second campaign, though initially successful, demonstrated Ayub's inability to sustain a prolonged military effort without adequate financial backing — a weakness that had been evident during the siege of Kandahar.[2]
Exile in Lahore
Negotiations with Sir Mortimer Durand, the British minister in Tehran, ended in 1888 with Ayub accepted as a pensioner of the Raj. Escorted from Karachi to Rawalpindi by a political officer, he settled in Lahore, where he lived for twenty-six years — maintaining a large household of eleven wives and some twenty-five children on British bounty — until his death on 7 April 1914. He was buried not in Kabul nor Lahore but in Peshawar, near the shrine of Sheikh Habib in the Durrani graveyard; two of his grandsons later served as brigadiers in the Pakistan Army.[1][2] Despite his exile, Ayub retained a degree of prestige among Afghans who remembered him as the Victor of Maiwand. His pension, paid by the British government, was substantial and allowed him to live in comfort, but he never fully accepted the settlement that had removed him from power.[2]