A new history of the first Anglo-Afghan war shows how little America has learned from Britain's misadventures in the "graveyard of empires":
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| Staggering into Jalalabad |
In 1842 some 700 European soldiers, 3,800 Indian sepoys and 14,000 civilian staff fled Kabul in the deep chill of winter. The British occupation of Afghanistan, in place since 1839, was no longer tenable. A week later a single survivor from this fleet staggered into view at the British-held fort at Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. This lone soldier on a collapsing pony, as depicted in Elizabeth Butler’s 1879 painting “Remnants of an Army” (pictured), has become a lasting image of the first Anglo-Afghan war. It is an appropriately bleak one.
It was “a war begun for no wise purpose”—and one that need never have taken place. It would stand as the worst British military disaster until the fall of Singapore exactly a century later. William Dalrymple, a British historian, recounts Britain’s early misadventures in Afghanistan in “Return of a King”, a masterful history. This is a story that hangs heavy with imperial overconfidence, political incompetence and wilful bureaucratic misjudgment. And as the latest occupying force in Afghanistan negotiates its exit, this chronicle seems all too relevant now. [...]
It makes for grim reading. Like the current adventure in Afghanistan, this first one was undone by the unsustainable cost of occupation, waning political and public interest, and the need to divert resources. In the race to secure the country, the British ambassador in Tehran believed “that he who is not with us is against us”. [...]
Today’s bloody conflict in Afghanistan is scarcely different, with a complex web of allegiances fiercely fighting the occupation. Few lessons have been learned from past mistakes. Mr Dalrymple’s book is a timely reminder of the way that wars can begin with promise but end in disgrace.
