[19] Harlan praised "the grace and dignity of His Highness's demeanor", observing the sense of power that Shuja projected, but also that "years of disappointment had created in the countenance of the ex-King an appearance of melancholy and resignation".

Given this history, and the fact that Afghan tribal chiefs tended to be loyal only to those who paid them the most, Harlan believed that despite the small size of his force that he could topple the Emir, Dost Mohammad Khan, who was the most able and intelligent of the fractious Barakzai brothers.

He behaved with such arrogance towards the Pashtun chiefs who had come to swear loyalty to him, expecting lavish financial rewards, that they went back to the Bazakzai brothers, who did not use court etiquette to humiliate them as Shuja had done.

[47] Harlan discovered much to his amazement that the maulvi "was an enthusiastic Rosicrucian" who was seeking the Philosopher's stone, and who kept Jubbar Khan happy with the supposed medical secrets that his occult knowledge gave him.

[54] Ranjit Singh, the "Lion of Lahore" had conquered much of what is today north-western India and Pakistan and was considered to be one of the most powerful rulers in the Indian subcontinent, which is why Harlan sought to work in his service.

[53] As a result, Ranjit Singh paid his Western officers well and Harlan noted that Allard lived in a grand mansion, which he called "a miniature Versailles in the midst of an Oriental bazaar".

[64] In Gujrat, Harlan was visited soon after his instatement by Henry Lawrence who later described him as "a man of considerable ability, great courage and enterprise, and judging by appearance, well cut out for partisan work".

[65] While serving the durbar, Harlan often encountered the Akalis, militant and heavily armed Sikh fundamentalists, who Harlan noted were seen "riding about with sword drawn in each hand, two more in the belt, a matchlock at the back and then a pair of quoits fastened around the turban-an arm peculiar to this race of people, it is a steel ring, ranging from six to nine inches in diameter, and about an inch in breath, very thin, and at the edges very sharp; they are said to throw it with such accuracy and force as to be able to lop off a limb at sixty or eighty yards".

[73] While fighting against Dost Mohammad in the pay of the warlord Habibullah Khan, Gardner's wife and his infant daughter had been killed by the Emir's forces after being captured, causing him to head to the Punjab.

[78] Gardner observed "the Sikhs sadly lost many lives at the merciless hands of the Ghazis, who, each with his little green Moslem flag, boldly pressed on, freely and fairly courting death and martyrdom".

Savages from the remotest recesses of the mountainous districts, many of them giants in form and strength, promiscuously armed with sword and shield, bow and arrows, matchlocks, rifles, spears and blunderbusses, concentrated themselves around the standard of religion, and were prepared to slay, plunder and destroy, for the sake of Allah and the Prophet, the unenlightened infidels of the Punjab".

Dal Khalsa was a powerful army, but Ranjit Singh as usual preferred to achieve his goals via diplomacy rather than war if possible, and so sought to find a peaceful way to send the Afghans home.

[96] Writing as Dost Mohammad, Harlan declared: "The field of my hopes, which had before been chilled by the cold blast of the wintry times, has by the happy tidings of your Lordship's arrival become the envy of the Garden of Paradise", going on to ask the British to ensure "the reckless and misguided Sikhs" to return Peshawar to the Afghans.

Singh had been pushing steadily into the "badlands" on the modern border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but in 1837 he recalled the best of the Dal Khalsa for a parade to honor his son's wedding in Lahore, which Dost Mohammad took advantage of by attacking the Sikhs.

[98] Under the banner of jihad, about 20,000 Afghan tribesmen swept down the Khyber Pass under the command of Dost Mohammad's son Wazir Akbar Khan to attack the Sikhs, accompanied by Harlan as his special military adviser.

[98] Harlan wrote that Singh must had been besides himself with fury, imagining that "The proud King of Lahore quailed upon his threatened throne, as he exclaimed with terror and approaching despair, 'Harlan has avenged himself, this is all his work'".

[103] Harlan noted that Dost Mohammad had shirrun i huzzoor, the Pashtun quality of modesty and politeness, but that he was also an "exquisite dissembler" capable of "the most revolting cruelty", very greedy for gold, and extremely cynical, doubting every motive except for self-interest as a reason for a man's actions.

Harlan observed that Dost Mohammad "listened to the charges of licentiousness and immorality", and with a wave of his hand ordered the man's beard to be burned off while the woman was to be put into a bag and given 40 lashes with a whip.

[106] As part of the "Great Game" between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia, on September 20, 1837, Alexander Burnes, the Scotsman who had been appointed the East India Company's agent in Kabul, arrived, and immediately became Harlan's rival.

Burnes had Christmas dinner with Dost Mohammad, Harlan and Witkiewicz, writing about the latter: "He was a gentlemanly and agreeable man, of about thirty years of age, spoke French, Turkish and Persian fluently, and wore the uniform of an officer of the Cossacks".

[114] Harlan then led his army down "past glaciers and silent dells, and frowning rocks blackened by age", battling rain and snow as "these phenomena alternately and capriciously coquetted with our ever changing climate".

[115] After an arduous journey (which included an American flag-raising ceremony at the top of the Indian Caucasus), Harlan reinforced his army with local Hazaras, most of whom lived in fear of the slave traders.

Harlan noted that because of the fear of Uzbek slavers, the houses of the Hazaras were "half sunk into slopes of hills" under "a bastion constructed of sun-dried mud, where people of the village can resort in case of danger from the sudden forays of the Tartar robbers.

"[117] Harlan further noted the brutality of the Uzbek slavers who sewed their victims together as they marched them off to the slave markets, observing: To oblige the prisoner to keep up, a strand of course horsehair is passed by the means of a long-crooked needle, under and around the collar bone, a few inches from its junction at the sternum; with the hair a loop is formed to which they attach a rope that may be fastened to the saddle.

[121] Harlan observed that the Harzara women did not wear veils, worked out in the fields with their husbands, loved to hunt deer with their greyhound dogs while riding horses at full gallop and firing arrows aside their mounts, and even went to war with their menfolk.

[125] Harlan further noted that Uzbek armies always fought the same way: "a few individual sallies of vaunting cavaliers are made in advance, the parties uttering unearthly yells of defiance, and assuming threatening attitudes.

Harlan collapsed on July 15, 1862, while serving in Virginia from the effects of a mixture of fever, dehydration, and dysentery, was ordered to give up command of his regiment, and was reluctantly invalided out of the United States Army on August 19, 1862, on the grounds he was "debilitated from diarrhea".

However, Harlan proved to be an inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's 1888 short story "The Man Who Would Be King," which in its turn became a popular 1975 film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Both were ambitious adventurers burning to conquer a kingdom in Central Asia, both entered Afghanistan disguised as a Muslim holy man, both were Freemasons, both wanted to emulate Alexander the Great, and both were granted Afghan titles of nobility.

In the 2019 board game Pax Pamir: Second Edition, Josiah Harlan is an individual of Afghan loyalty, represented as a card, whom the player's can recruit to aid them in their vying for control in Afghanistan after the fall of the Durrani Empire.