First imperial defeat

Return of a King — The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-1842 by William Dalrymple; Bloomsbury; Price: Rs.799; 602 pp The mountain nation of Afghanistan (pop. 30 million) — less a nation than a conglomeration of mutually antagonistic tribes which unite only when invaded by foreign armies — has proved to be a graveyard of mighty powers. Primitive and backward Afghanistan is perhaps easy to conquer, but impossible to retain. A study of the First Anglo-Afghan War spanning 1839-42 would have saved the Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in 1979 only to throw in the towel a decade later, and the US which took over the country in the aftermath of the bombing of the twin towers in New York in 2001, a mountain of grief. Better late than never, the well-known India-centric historian William Dalrymple has written a deeply researched narrative of the ignominious rout of a 20,000-strong British expeditionary force which easily took Kabul in 1839, and installed a puppet king (Shah Shuja) at a time when British imperial power was at its zenith. The British feared that the Russians, in alliance with Persians, would invade and conquer Afghanistan to serve as a base for the invasion or subversion of the British Raj in India. These fears were baseless. But their apprehensions were probably stoked by the fact that in 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte had also taken Egypt. “Through Egypt we shall invade India,” he wrote. “We shall re-establish the old route through Suez.” But Napoleon’s India ambitions were thwarted when his fleet was destroyed by Admiral Nelson in the Battle of the Nile (1798). Nevertheless, the British had good cause to worry about trouble on the north-west frontier. A brilliant Polish nobleman, Viktorovitch Vitkevitch, who had initially fought against the Russian occupation of his country before becoming a Russian agent, was sent to negotiate with the then ruler of Afghanistan. Although he was eventually disowned by his Russian masters and blew his brains out when he was still in his early 30s, Vitkevitch’s activities further fuelled British suspicions of Russian designs on Afghanistan and India. Be that as it may, a warped rationale was given for sending British troops, led by British officers but manned mainly by Indian and Gurkha soldiers, into Afghanistan in 1839. Two famous paintings sum up the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War — Lady Butler’s The Remnants of an Army, in which a badly wounded British army surgeon Dr. Brydon, almost falling off his horse, is shown arriving at the walls of the British-garrisoned town of Jallalabad. The common perception is that he was the only survivor of the ill-fated British invasion of Afghanistan. Dalrymple’s exhaustive research shows that there were hundreds of others, but they were either sold into slavery or taken prisoner. Some survived in mountain caves, but only through cannibalism. “It was nonetheless an extraordinary defeat for the British and an almost miraculous victory for the Afghan resistance,” documents Dalrymple, in this gritty narrative of the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War. However, he confirms that the overwhelming majority of British army officers, soldiers and camp followers perished, either in battle or from…