War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

Building a new army 49modern army, not only for defensive but also for offensive warfare. Theywished not only to defend themselves against the inexorable pressure fromRussia but also to regain lost territory in the Caucasus and to the west inAfghanistan, which had been under the rule of their Safavid predecessorsin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in this way appropriating someof the religious charisma of the Safavids and legitimizing their own rule. 4The first and second Qajar shahs, Agha Mohammad Shah and Fath-Ali Shah,struggled for decades to reassert their hegemony against Russian challengesin the eastern Caucasus, especially over Georgia, and creating reformedregiments was a key element in their strategy. Later shahs continued toharbour hopes of using military power to advance their dynastic claims.Mohammad Shah in 1837, and Nasser-edin Shah in 1856, launched warsto take possession of Herat in western Afghanistan, both attacks frustratedby British diplomatic, military and naval power, and in 1860 Nasser-edinShah made an ill-fated attempt to assert his sovereignty over the oasis-townof Merv in Central Asia. It was only towards the end of the century thathe finally abandoned these increasingly unrealistic objectives and Iranianopinion began to reconcile itself, in practice if not always in theory, to thecountry’s existing borders. 5For the shahs of Iran in the nineteenth century, the recovery of lostterritories through military means was of great significance in terms ofideological legitimization and the consolidation of the dynasty. But militaryreform was intimately linked to state-building in another, novel sense. Theestablishment of reformed regiments would enable the shahs to embark ona project in which the existing balance between the state, as expressed in theperson of the shah, and the rest of the political system as expressed in layersof princes, courtiers, notables, tribal khans and ulama, would be fundamentallyaltered. It was the centrality of this function to programmes of militaryreform and, in the Iranian case, its eventual overriding importance, whichdetermined the choice of model to be adopted. There was no evidence thatnezam troops were superior in warfare to the forces which they were intendedto replace. Their great advantage was that they were entirely dependent onand, formally at least, loyal to the shah, possessing no other allegiance thanto the state.For all the reforming rulers of the nineteenth-century Middle East, to reformmeant to Europeanize. 6 The reforming elite’s preference for regular disciplinedforces on the European model never seems to have been questioned. Yet, inpurely defensive terms, other modes of military organization appear to havebeen much more successful. It may be argued that in the nineteenth centurythe goal of defence against European armies was unrealistic. At the beginningof the nineteenth century, Iran’s traditional forces were able to stalemateRussia in the eastern Caucasus for many years but, by the beginningof the twentieth century, Russian armies could march through northern Iranunopposed by the nezam regiments. During the nineteenth century, the mostpowerful opposition to European expansion was offered, not by the nezam