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The Dark Defile: Britain's Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842
Convinced in 1838 that Britain's invaluable empire in India was threatened by Russia, Persia, and Afghan tribes, the British government ordered its Army of the Indus into Afghanistan to oust from power the independent-minded king, Dost Mohammed, and install in Kabul the unpopular puppet ruler Shah Shuja. Expecting a quick campaign, the British found themselves trapped by unforeseen circumstances; eventually the tribes united and the seemingly omnipotent army was slaughtered in 1842 as it desperately retreated through the mountain passes from Kabul to Jalalabad. Only one Briton survived uncaptured. Diana Preston vividly recounts the drama of this First Afghan War, one of the opening salvos in the strategic rivalry between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. As insightful about geography as she is about political and military miscalculation, Preston draws on rarely documented letters and diaries to bring alive long-lost characters-Lord Auckland, the weak British governor-general in India; his impetuous aide William Macnaghten; and the prescient adventurer-envoy Alexander Burnes, whose sage advice was steadfastly ignored. A model of compelling narrative history, The Dark Defile is a fascinating exploration of nineteenth-century geopolitics, and a cautionary tale that resonates loudly today.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Diana Preston
43 books119 followersBorn and raised in London, Diana Preston studied Modern History at Oxford University, where she first became involved in journalism. After earning her degree, she became a freelance writer of feature and travel articles for national UK newspapers and magazines and has subsequently reviewed books for a number of publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times. She has also been a broadcaster for the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and has been featured in various television documentaries.
Eight years ago, her decision to write "popular" history led her to The Road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the '45 Rebellion (Constable UK, 1995). It was followed by A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), The Boxer Rebellion (Walker & Company, 2000), Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy (Walker & Company, 2002) and now, Before The Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima.
In choosing her topics, Preston looks for stories and events which are both compelling in their own right and also help readers gain a wider understanding of the past. She is fascinated by the human experience-what motivates people to think and act as they do‹and the individual stories that comprise the larger historical picture. Preston spent over two years researching Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy. She did a remarkable amount of original research for the book, and is the first author to make full use of the German archives and newly discovered papers that illuminate both the human tragedy and subsequent plots to cover up what really happened. Preston traveled to all the key locations of the tragedy, experiencing firsthand how cold the water off the Irish coast near Cobh would have been in early May when the Lusitania sank, and how eerie it was to stand inside what remains of the U-20 (now at the Strandingsmuseum in West Jutland, Denmark) where the U-boat captain watched the Lusitania through his periscope and gave the order to fire. Of the many artifacts she reviewed, it was her extensive reading of the diaries and memoirs of survivors that had the biggest impact on her. The experience of looking at photographs and touching the scraps of clothing of both survivors and those who died when the Lusitania sank provided her with chilling pictures: The heartbreaking image of a young girl whose sister's hand slipped away from her was one that kept Preston up at night.
When not writing, Preston is an avid traveler with her husband, Michael. Together, they have sojourned throughout India, Asia, Africa, and Antarctica, and have climbed Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and Mount Roraima in Venezuela. Their adventures have also included gorilla-tracking in Zaire and camping their way across the Namibian desert.
Diana and Michael Preston live in London, England.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 9, 2024
“During the harrowing journey through the [Khoord Kabul Pass], several [women] lost their children, temporarily or permanently. Afghans seized Captain Boyd’s youngest son after the camel on which he was traveling was shot. However, one young woman, Mrs. Mainwaring, clung doggedly to her child after the camel carrying them was hit. Lady Sale, who did not give praise lightly, described how she ‘not only had to walk a considerable distance with her child in her arms through the deep snow, but had also to pick her way over the bodies of the dead, dying, and wounded…’ Lieutenant [Vincent] Eyre estimated that three thousand soldiers and camp followers died in the pass that day. The victory went down in Afghan folklore. According to some villagers more than a century later: ‘When the battle entered the Khoord Kabul valley the British troops lost many of their people. Some were killed by the water, some by swords, some by guns but all by the hand of Allah…’”
- Diana Preston, The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
- Rudyard Kipling, The Young British Soldier
In 1842, the British Army of Major General William Elphinstone – whose name, and intellect, aptly puts one in mind of an elephant – was trapped in an increasingly untenable position in Kabul. Winter had arrived. Supplies were dwindling. Afghan forces surrounded them. Given assurances of safety by Akbar Khan – a son of the British-deposed king, Dost Mohammed – Elphinstone decided to lead a column of around 4,500 soldiers, most of them Indian troops, and 12,000 camp followers on a 90-mile journey to the British garrison at Jalalabad.
Beset by cold, hunger, and ferocious attacks by Ghilzais, with their deadly, long-barreled jezails, the column was whittled down to nothing. As in, just about literally nothing. Though there were men and women taken prisoner or held as hostages, at the end of the road, just one man, Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, reached the destination.
This massacre, a defeat worthy of the British (for whom epic military disasters, from the Kabul Pass to Isandlwana to the Fall of Singapore, are a grand tradition), capped the woeful end to the unnecessary First Anglo-Afghan War. It also forms the centerpiece of The Dark Defile, Diana Preston’s solid, 268-page chronicle of this misadventure.
***
The war began, as Preston explains in the early chapters, as a strategic check-move against the Russians, an effort by Great Britain to protect India, the so-called crown jewel in their empire. In the “Great Game,” the glib title given to an imperial contest before Britain and Russia, Afghanistan – poor, rugged, politically striated – took on an outsized importance as a potential invasion route.
So, the British invaded, in typically overbearing fashion. The Army of the Indus, whose officers brought a pack of foxhounds for the hunt (because, of course they did), quickly occupied Kabul. They deposed the ruler, Dost Mohammed (needlessly, Preston writes), and installed a puppet named Shah Shujah, who lacked natural support. Initially, things went well. But – and please, stop me if you’ve heard this before – the occupation soon became unpopular.
***
A variety of factors led to an outbreak of rebellion. There was the clash of cultures and religion. There was bureaucratic blindness, as proponents of the invasion and occupation sent off rosily misleading reports. Troops were shipped out of the country, to other parts of the world, leaving a depleted military presence. The tipping point was a cut in subsidies to the tribes who guarded the all-important passes. Once they stopped receiving their stipends, they immediately turned on the closest supply trains.
The end result, as discussed above, was a retreat that makes Napoleon’s flight from Moscow almost preferable.
***
The Dark Defile started slowly. Part of this, I think, is that this is new material for me. I’ve read about Elphinstone’s retreat in passing, but this is the first volume I’ve read focused solely on the Anglo-Afghan War. This meant that a lot of the key players – Dost Mohammed, Alexander Burnes, William Macnaghten – were unfamiliar, and I had to work to keep everyone straight. Matters are not helped by the fact that this book gives you only the bare-bones minimum. The two maps are utterly insufficient. The chapters are numbered, rather than given names (naming chapters is a simple, yet extremely effective way to give readers an outline of your story). And there is no dramatis personae to keep everyone straight.
Things definitely pick up with the outbreak of the war. Fundamentally, this story is only one or two self-aware degrees from a colonial adventure tale by A. E. W. Mason. There is, I must admit, something thrilling about the British in a tight fix. It’s such a strange admixture of arrogance, bullying, ethnocentrism, and – ultimately – steadfastness and courage.
Preston does a good job of making relative sense of the confused and straggling retreat by Elphinstone’s caravan. Since so few men or women on the British side survived, and only one man made it down the entire road, the sources are necessarily scattershot. Having read her author’s note and perused her endnotes, I believe she has unearthed every scrap she could on the subject. Though she did not travel to Afghanistan herself (typically, based on her other books, she attempts to visit the places she writes about), she went to the effort to speak with British soldiers who had been recently stationed there.
***
This was originally published in 2012, meaning that it was written with the knowledge of the most recent invasion of Afghanistan by a U.S.-led alliance. I appreciated the way that Preston subtly threaded the modern story into the past. She doesn’t try to make simple, black-and-white comparisons, preferring instead to focus on her main storyline, using present-day happenings to enlighten certain areas as necessary.
Preston’s epilogue is also fairly excellent. In a swift and efficient 22 pages, she runs through the fallout of the First Anglo-Afghan War, crisply identifying the causal factors. It is a testament to the epilogue’s quality that it retroactively gave me a stronger appreciation of what I’d already read. She also gives a nice overview of the wars that followed.
One of the rusty clichés of Afghanistan is that it is the “graveyard of empires.” This isn’t true on any level. Britain, after all, came right back into Afghanistan and exacted a devastating toll. Preston more accurately demonstrates that Afghanistan is a fatal crossroads, a lethal juncture where the Great Powers play their deadly games of geopolitics and economic advantage; and as the giants war with each other, as they feint, and thrust, and parry, they never seem to care too much for the millions of nameless men, women, and children caught in the middle of the board, for whom the graveyard is their home.
- Diana Preston, The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
- Rudyard Kipling, The Young British Soldier
In 1842, the British Army of Major General William Elphinstone – whose name, and intellect, aptly puts one in mind of an elephant – was trapped in an increasingly untenable position in Kabul. Winter had arrived. Supplies were dwindling. Afghan forces surrounded them. Given assurances of safety by Akbar Khan – a son of the British-deposed king, Dost Mohammed – Elphinstone decided to lead a column of around 4,500 soldiers, most of them Indian troops, and 12,000 camp followers on a 90-mile journey to the British garrison at Jalalabad.
Beset by cold, hunger, and ferocious attacks by Ghilzais, with their deadly, long-barreled jezails, the column was whittled down to nothing. As in, just about literally nothing. Though there were men and women taken prisoner or held as hostages, at the end of the road, just one man, Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, reached the destination.
This massacre, a defeat worthy of the British (for whom epic military disasters, from the Kabul Pass to Isandlwana to the Fall of Singapore, are a grand tradition), capped the woeful end to the unnecessary First Anglo-Afghan War. It also forms the centerpiece of The Dark Defile, Diana Preston’s solid, 268-page chronicle of this misadventure.
***
The war began, as Preston explains in the early chapters, as a strategic check-move against the Russians, an effort by Great Britain to protect India, the so-called crown jewel in their empire. In the “Great Game,” the glib title given to an imperial contest before Britain and Russia, Afghanistan – poor, rugged, politically striated – took on an outsized importance as a potential invasion route.
So, the British invaded, in typically overbearing fashion. The Army of the Indus, whose officers brought a pack of foxhounds for the hunt (because, of course they did), quickly occupied Kabul. They deposed the ruler, Dost Mohammed (needlessly, Preston writes), and installed a puppet named Shah Shujah, who lacked natural support. Initially, things went well. But – and please, stop me if you’ve heard this before – the occupation soon became unpopular.
***
A variety of factors led to an outbreak of rebellion. There was the clash of cultures and religion. There was bureaucratic blindness, as proponents of the invasion and occupation sent off rosily misleading reports. Troops were shipped out of the country, to other parts of the world, leaving a depleted military presence. The tipping point was a cut in subsidies to the tribes who guarded the all-important passes. Once they stopped receiving their stipends, they immediately turned on the closest supply trains.
The end result, as discussed above, was a retreat that makes Napoleon’s flight from Moscow almost preferable.
***
The Dark Defile started slowly. Part of this, I think, is that this is new material for me. I’ve read about Elphinstone’s retreat in passing, but this is the first volume I’ve read focused solely on the Anglo-Afghan War. This meant that a lot of the key players – Dost Mohammed, Alexander Burnes, William Macnaghten – were unfamiliar, and I had to work to keep everyone straight. Matters are not helped by the fact that this book gives you only the bare-bones minimum. The two maps are utterly insufficient. The chapters are numbered, rather than given names (naming chapters is a simple, yet extremely effective way to give readers an outline of your story). And there is no dramatis personae to keep everyone straight.
Things definitely pick up with the outbreak of the war. Fundamentally, this story is only one or two self-aware degrees from a colonial adventure tale by A. E. W. Mason. There is, I must admit, something thrilling about the British in a tight fix. It’s such a strange admixture of arrogance, bullying, ethnocentrism, and – ultimately – steadfastness and courage.
Preston does a good job of making relative sense of the confused and straggling retreat by Elphinstone’s caravan. Since so few men or women on the British side survived, and only one man made it down the entire road, the sources are necessarily scattershot. Having read her author’s note and perused her endnotes, I believe she has unearthed every scrap she could on the subject. Though she did not travel to Afghanistan herself (typically, based on her other books, she attempts to visit the places she writes about), she went to the effort to speak with British soldiers who had been recently stationed there.
***
This was originally published in 2012, meaning that it was written with the knowledge of the most recent invasion of Afghanistan by a U.S.-led alliance. I appreciated the way that Preston subtly threaded the modern story into the past. She doesn’t try to make simple, black-and-white comparisons, preferring instead to focus on her main storyline, using present-day happenings to enlighten certain areas as necessary.
Preston’s epilogue is also fairly excellent. In a swift and efficient 22 pages, she runs through the fallout of the First Anglo-Afghan War, crisply identifying the causal factors. It is a testament to the epilogue’s quality that it retroactively gave me a stronger appreciation of what I’d already read. She also gives a nice overview of the wars that followed.
One of the rusty clichés of Afghanistan is that it is the “graveyard of empires.” This isn’t true on any level. Britain, after all, came right back into Afghanistan and exacted a devastating toll. Preston more accurately demonstrates that Afghanistan is a fatal crossroads, a lethal juncture where the Great Powers play their deadly games of geopolitics and economic advantage; and as the giants war with each other, as they feint, and thrust, and parry, they never seem to care too much for the millions of nameless men, women, and children caught in the middle of the board, for whom the graveyard is their home.
March 29, 2012
"It is evident that Afghanistan must be ours or Russia's." Those are the words of British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston in October 1838 as Britain is contemplating an invasion of Afghanistan to place a puppet king on the throne of that country, thus dashing Russian hopes to dominate Central Asia (and protect all roads leading to British India). As the blurb on the inside jacket of Diana Preston's brilliant, fast-paced new book succintly states:
"Some 170 years ago, Britain sent a powerful army into Afghanistan to protect its national interests. It was catastrophically destroyed. This is the story of the First Anglo-Afhan War and the start of the "Great Game.""
More than that, Diana Preston's elegant, witty writing had me shaking my head throughout, astonished at how we and our allies are apparently doomed to repeat past mistakes, since we certainly haven't learned from them. From the flimsy premise for the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1838 to the rose-colored glasses firmly in place for William Macnaghten, the British envoy in Kabul, Preston catalogues one military miscalculation and diplomatic misstep after another, building an incredibly shaky house of cards that inevitably tumbles down. By 1842 the supposedly indomitable Army of the Indus was forced into an ill-timed and fatal retreat through the snowy and frigid mountain passes of Afghanistan, exposed to freezing temperatures, startvation and repeated horrific attacks by Afghan tribesmen of which "only one Briton survived uncaptured."
Preston starts with the flimsy premise for the invasion, when Britain believes it's jewel in the crown, India, is threatened by Russia's imperialist ambitions, Iranian aggression and warring Afghan tribes (sound familiar?) The government builds the case that by replacing Afghan king Dost Mohammed, by all accounts a fair and popular (but independent) ruler, with their choice, Shah Shuja, they will further be able to protect all roads to India. From the beginning the plan was riddled with holes, as British travellers familiar with Afghanistan, like Alexander Burnes, tried to relay to London. He and other critics knew that Shah Shuja was looked upon by the Afghans as weak and ill-favored, distant and inaccessible to the Afghan people (pot, meet the kettle - or should I say, Shuja, meet Hamid Karzai...) As things deteriorate, Preston points out, a British officer points out that Shuja's power extends very little beyond Kabul - pretty much the same thing Vice-President Joe Biden told Karzai not long ago, that he was little more than "the mayor of Kabul"!
That's just one example, but the parallels are amazing, highlighting most importantly to me, the unchanging nature of Afghanistan's tribalistic, honor-based, primitive culture, where people never forget a wrong or slight; Preston points out how many Afghans still talk about the wrongs of the British invaders 170 years ago as if it were last year! Our military, I am sure, has more sense than to make some of the catastrophic blunders the Army of the Indus did as to location of housing, supplies, arms, troops, etc. One can't help, however, hearing echoes of the original eternal optimist (and purveyor of the rose-colored glasses outlook) Macnaghten, the British envoy whose head ended up displayed on a pike at the Kabul market, in the voices of our military brass testifying before an increasingly restive Congress asking for "one more fighting season" to continue the apparently fruitless effort to "win hearts and minds."
A brilliant, heartbreaking, fascinating book I would recommend to anyone hoping to understand the tragedy and farce that is the Afghanistan War - how we got to this point and how will we ever get out? Most importantly, how can we spare even one more of our brave young soldiers and all of their promise from being thrown away in this graveyard of empires? I love reading well-written history that deepens my understanding of the present by looking at the fears, foibles and characters of the past, and I plan to look for Preston's other books. Highly recommended.
"Some 170 years ago, Britain sent a powerful army into Afghanistan to protect its national interests. It was catastrophically destroyed. This is the story of the First Anglo-Afhan War and the start of the "Great Game.""
More than that, Diana Preston's elegant, witty writing had me shaking my head throughout, astonished at how we and our allies are apparently doomed to repeat past mistakes, since we certainly haven't learned from them. From the flimsy premise for the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1838 to the rose-colored glasses firmly in place for William Macnaghten, the British envoy in Kabul, Preston catalogues one military miscalculation and diplomatic misstep after another, building an incredibly shaky house of cards that inevitably tumbles down. By 1842 the supposedly indomitable Army of the Indus was forced into an ill-timed and fatal retreat through the snowy and frigid mountain passes of Afghanistan, exposed to freezing temperatures, startvation and repeated horrific attacks by Afghan tribesmen of which "only one Briton survived uncaptured."
Preston starts with the flimsy premise for the invasion, when Britain believes it's jewel in the crown, India, is threatened by Russia's imperialist ambitions, Iranian aggression and warring Afghan tribes (sound familiar?) The government builds the case that by replacing Afghan king Dost Mohammed, by all accounts a fair and popular (but independent) ruler, with their choice, Shah Shuja, they will further be able to protect all roads to India. From the beginning the plan was riddled with holes, as British travellers familiar with Afghanistan, like Alexander Burnes, tried to relay to London. He and other critics knew that Shah Shuja was looked upon by the Afghans as weak and ill-favored, distant and inaccessible to the Afghan people (pot, meet the kettle - or should I say, Shuja, meet Hamid Karzai...) As things deteriorate, Preston points out, a British officer points out that Shuja's power extends very little beyond Kabul - pretty much the same thing Vice-President Joe Biden told Karzai not long ago, that he was little more than "the mayor of Kabul"!
That's just one example, but the parallels are amazing, highlighting most importantly to me, the unchanging nature of Afghanistan's tribalistic, honor-based, primitive culture, where people never forget a wrong or slight; Preston points out how many Afghans still talk about the wrongs of the British invaders 170 years ago as if it were last year! Our military, I am sure, has more sense than to make some of the catastrophic blunders the Army of the Indus did as to location of housing, supplies, arms, troops, etc. One can't help, however, hearing echoes of the original eternal optimist (and purveyor of the rose-colored glasses outlook) Macnaghten, the British envoy whose head ended up displayed on a pike at the Kabul market, in the voices of our military brass testifying before an increasingly restive Congress asking for "one more fighting season" to continue the apparently fruitless effort to "win hearts and minds."
A brilliant, heartbreaking, fascinating book I would recommend to anyone hoping to understand the tragedy and farce that is the Afghanistan War - how we got to this point and how will we ever get out? Most importantly, how can we spare even one more of our brave young soldiers and all of their promise from being thrown away in this graveyard of empires? I love reading well-written history that deepens my understanding of the present by looking at the fears, foibles and characters of the past, and I plan to look for Preston's other books. Highly recommended.
Want to Read
November 12, 2014"The consequences of crossing the Indus once to settle a government in Afghanistan will be a perennial march into that country."--The Duke of Wellington, 1838
"There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against in our endeavor to re-establish the Afghan monarchy than the overweening confidence with which Europeans are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of their own institutions and the anxiety that they display to introduce them in new and untried soils."--Claude Wade, January 1839.
Apparently we are doomed to ignore the lessons of the past.
"There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against in our endeavor to re-establish the Afghan monarchy than the overweening confidence with which Europeans are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of their own institutions and the anxiety that they display to introduce them in new and untried soils."--Claude Wade, January 1839.
Apparently we are doomed to ignore the lessons of the past.
August 24, 2021
If you want to see how badly successive American Administrations Handled Afghanistan you need to,read this book
This is a tremendous source of history that needs t be required reading for every military, state department or other official dealing with Afghanistan. The problem is that we do not learn from history.
This is a tremendous source of history that needs t be required reading for every military, state department or other official dealing with Afghanistan. The problem is that we do not learn from history.
October 16, 2018
The Brits didn't learn anything from the American Revolution and the world didn't learn anything from the Brit's invasion of Afghanistan. Since the world has failed to study Afghanistan we are repeating the same mistakes and suffering the same outcomes.
November 30, 2020
If any phrase could be used to describe the history of Afghanistan for the last 200 years, it would be “war without end”. Diana Preston’s book tells the story of the first major European involvement in the affairs of that unfortunate country, and tells it in an engaging and compelling manner that holds the reader’s interest from beginning to end, going back to the 11th Century and carrying the story up to the 21st. While some detail is left out in order to simplify the story, the reader is left with a much improved understanding of the events of the last several decades in Central Asia and why it remains such a focus (and “hot spot”) of world attention today. Better maps would have helped; and, if any detail should have been included, it should have been a better explanation of the intensely tribal, and competitive, nature of Afghan society, which helps explain the continuous warfare and the hatred of foreigners which has always characterized the place, and why it has come to be known as “the graveyard of foreign armies”.
The First Afghan War of 1838-42 was but one episode in the “Great Game”, the rivalry between Britain and Russia for power and influence in Central Asia. Britain sought to protect and insulate India, the “crown jewel” of its empire; Russia, as always, sought to expand its empire and gain access to the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. Afghanistan (and Persia/Iran) were caught in the middle as power and influence seesawed back and forth over the decades. Britain’s defeat in this war, and the loss of the Army of the Indus, was due to failure to understand the nature of the society, incompetent political (through many diplomatic missteps) and military leadership, and the realities of geography, all of which mitigated against its success. Preston explains all this in a clear and understandable manner; her account of the attempted retreat of the army from Kabul to Jalalabad, and the horrific suffering and death which resulted (only one survivor, Dr. William Brydon, managed to get through), is riveting and heart-rending. Atrocities and what would be considered today as war crimes took place on both sides. Although the British mounted a revenge attack later in 1842, installing a puppet ruler to their liking, and fought a second (and victorious) war against the Afghans in 1879, and again briefly in 1919, nothing really changed. The country continued to be run by rival tribal warlords always competing for power and influence, and presided over by a king or emir whose authority was nominal and actually extended very little beyond Kabul.
Nothing the British, Americans, or other members of the international coalition fighting in Afghanistan since 2001 have done has been able to fundamentally change this reality, and after the final foreign troops leave, whenever that is, what is left behind will be a legacy of hatred and bitterness which every foreign intervention since 1838 has only served to intensify. Terrorist groups will likely continue to find a haven there because of the limited power and authority of the central government and the allies they will probably find among one or more of the tribal groups; and though the Taliban may end up controlling much of the country, they will eventually be replaced by a rival entity. The powers of the West (and Russia and now China and India as well) will continue to have to deal with the problem of Afghanistan and how to handle it diplomatically and militarily in order to preserve at least a modicum of stability in Central Asia, if that is even possible.
**** review by Chuck Graham ****
The First Afghan War of 1838-42 was but one episode in the “Great Game”, the rivalry between Britain and Russia for power and influence in Central Asia. Britain sought to protect and insulate India, the “crown jewel” of its empire; Russia, as always, sought to expand its empire and gain access to the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. Afghanistan (and Persia/Iran) were caught in the middle as power and influence seesawed back and forth over the decades. Britain’s defeat in this war, and the loss of the Army of the Indus, was due to failure to understand the nature of the society, incompetent political (through many diplomatic missteps) and military leadership, and the realities of geography, all of which mitigated against its success. Preston explains all this in a clear and understandable manner; her account of the attempted retreat of the army from Kabul to Jalalabad, and the horrific suffering and death which resulted (only one survivor, Dr. William Brydon, managed to get through), is riveting and heart-rending. Atrocities and what would be considered today as war crimes took place on both sides. Although the British mounted a revenge attack later in 1842, installing a puppet ruler to their liking, and fought a second (and victorious) war against the Afghans in 1879, and again briefly in 1919, nothing really changed. The country continued to be run by rival tribal warlords always competing for power and influence, and presided over by a king or emir whose authority was nominal and actually extended very little beyond Kabul.
Nothing the British, Americans, or other members of the international coalition fighting in Afghanistan since 2001 have done has been able to fundamentally change this reality, and after the final foreign troops leave, whenever that is, what is left behind will be a legacy of hatred and bitterness which every foreign intervention since 1838 has only served to intensify. Terrorist groups will likely continue to find a haven there because of the limited power and authority of the central government and the allies they will probably find among one or more of the tribal groups; and though the Taliban may end up controlling much of the country, they will eventually be replaced by a rival entity. The powers of the West (and Russia and now China and India as well) will continue to have to deal with the problem of Afghanistan and how to handle it diplomatically and militarily in order to preserve at least a modicum of stability in Central Asia, if that is even possible.
**** review by Chuck Graham ****
March 13, 2018
Very in depth study of an incident in history that not too many people know about. Tragic for the people charged to fulfill this mission their superiors concocted and embarrassing for the British Government after it's failure. Unbelievably they tried the same thing twice more before 1900 and of course again after 911. I guess learning from your mistakes does not apply to war or nation building.
November 1, 2012
This is a well researched, well written general history of the First Afghan War, fought by the British in Afghanistan from 1838 to 1842. The savagery of the fighting is quite overwhelming and the utter stupidity of the British as they occupied a country they knew nothing about, for reasons that were overtaken by events even before the invasion began, led by political and military incompetents of the highest (lowest?) order, is almost too tragic to believe. I tend to be cautious about drawing any direct parallels between the British experience in 1842 - when exactly one person survived the retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad in January 1842 - and today's experience of the Americans in Afghanistan, but I would say it should be required reading at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon.
June 23, 2013
This is an excellent book on the British first invasion of Afghanistan. Having read several books on the period, I did not find a lot of new material, but what I did find was a very well researched and written overview of the period, and the events leading to the British disaster. The author does a very fine job of providing context for many of the stories that I had read elsewhere, creating a cohesive narrative in a single volume. Recommended for anyone with an interest in the NorthWest Frontier, but especially for those new to the period and theater.
January 5, 2015
Grade A.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews