Therefore kill them to the extent of your ability.' A curious commentary this on the Amir's protestation of loyalty.
Notwithstanding this piece of treachery, it was decided not to break off negotiations, and Yakub Khan was informed by Cavagnari that a Mission would proceed to Kabul so soon as the necessary arrangements could be made for its reception.

At the same time Lord Lytton himself wrote to the Amir, telling him that, as he was willing to receive an Envoy, Cavagnari would be deputed to visit Kabul, and communicate unreservedly with him upon the questions at issue between the two States.
I, personally, was not at all satisfied that the time had come for negotiation, for I felt that the Afghans had not had the sense of defeat sufficiently driven into them to convince them of our strength and ability to punish breach of treaty, and, therefore, that a peace made now, before they had been thoroughly beaten, would not be a lasting one, and would only end in worse trouble in the near future.
The Afghans are an essentially arrogant and conceited people; they had not forgotten our disastrous retreat from Kabul, nor the annihilation of our array in the Khurd Kabul and Jagdalak Passes in 1842, and believed themselves to be quite capable of resisting our advance on Kabul.

No great battle had as yet been fought; though Ali Masjid and the Peiwar Kotal had been taken, a small force of the enemy had been beaten by Charles Gough's brigade, near Jalalabad, and a successful Cavalry skirmish had occurred near Kandahar, the Afghans had nowhere suffered serious loss, and it was not to be wondered at if the fighting men in distant villages, and in and around Kabul, Ghazni, Herat, Balkh, and other places, still considered themselves undefeated and capable of defying us.

They and their leaders had to depend for information as to recent events upon the garbled accounts of those who had fought against us, and it was unlikely they would be shaken in their belief in their superiority by such one-sided versions of what had occurred.

On many occasions I had been amused, in listening to Afghan conversation, to find that, while they appeared thoroughly conversant with and frequently alluded to their triumphs over us, they seemed to know nothing, or had no recollection, of Sale's successful defence of Jalalabad, or of Pollock's victorious march through the Khyber Pass and the destruction by him of the chief bazaar in Kabul.
My ideas about the negotiations being premature were freely expressed to Colonel Colley,[1] Lord Lytton's Private Secretary, who paid me a visit in Kuram at this time, and had been a constant correspondent of mine from the commencement of the war.