text: [17] [17] The system unpalatable as it was to the nation might no doubt have been carried through by an overwhelming military force if the country had been worth the cost; but if it was not intended to retain permanent possession of Affghanistan it appears to us that the native government was far too much interfered with--that the British envoy the British officers employed in the districts and provinces and the British army stood too much between the Shah and his subjects--that we were forming a government which it would be impossible to work in our absence and creating a state of things which the longer it might endure would have made more remote the time at which our interference could be dispensed with