1.  I Have the honour to submit a brief account of an interview which took place between the Amir Yakub Khan and myself on the 22nd October.  The interview was a private and informal one; but recent events have lent some interest to what passed on the occasion, and I have, therefore, thought it desirable that a report should be prepared for the information of the Governor-General in Council.

2.  After some conversation upon matters of no special importance, the Amir introduced his father’s name, and thus gave me the opportunity I had often wished to have of leading him on to speak naturally and unconstrainedly about Sher Ali Khan’s feelings and policy during the last ten years.  I was most careful to avoid any expression of my own views upon the subject in order that I might, if possible, obtain from the Amir a perfectly spontaneous and truthful account of the circumstances which led, in his opinion, to Sher Ali’s estrangement from ourselves and rapprochement to Russia.  In this I think I succeeded.  Yakub Khan spoke readily and freely of all that had passed, and needed no question or suggestion from me to declare his conviction regarding the cause of his father’s unfriendly attitude towards us during the past few years.

    3.  The substance of the Amir’s statement was as follows: 

’In 1869 my father was fully prepared to throw in his lot with you.  He had suffered many reverses before making himself secure on the throne of Afghanistan; and he had come to the conclusion that his best chance of holding what he had won lay in an alliance with the British Government.  He did not receive from Lord Mayo as large a supply of arms and ammunition as he had hoped, but, nevertheless, he returned to Kabul fairly satisfied, and so he remained until the visit of Saiyad Nur Muhammud to India in 1873.  This visit brought matters to a head.  The diaries received from Saiyad Nur Mahomed during his stay in India, and the report which he brought back on his return, convinced my father that he could no longer hope to obtain from the British Government all the aid that he wanted; and from that time he began to turn his attention to the thoughts of a Russian alliance.  You know how this ended.

’When my father received from the Government of India the letter informing him that a British Mission was about to proceed to Kabul, he read it out in durbar.  The members of the Russian Embassy were present.  After the reading was finished, Colonel Stolietoff rose, saluted the Amir and asked permission to leave Kabul.  If permitted, he would, he said, travel without delay to Tashkent, and report the state of affairs to General Kauffmann, who would inform the Czar, and thus bring pressure to bear on England.  He promised to return in six weeks or two months, and urged the Amir to do everything in his power meanwhile to prevent the British Mission from reaching Kabul.

    ’Colonel Stolietoff never returned to Kabul.  He lost no time in
    reaching Tashkent, where he remained for a few weeks, and he then
    started for Russia.