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The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42
Knopf
April 2013
On Sale: April 16, 2013
560 pages
ISBN: 0307958280
EAN: 9780307958280
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist
and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps
the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an
important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris
that has striking relevance to our own time.
With
access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series
of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and
biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and
comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle
for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom
in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed
helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British
and East India Company troops poured through the mountain
passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish
Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But
after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer
to the call for jihad and the country exploded into
rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire
army of what was then the most powerful military nation in
the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain
passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British
man made it through.
But Dalrymple takes us beyond
the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with
penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny
similarities between the West’s first disastrous
entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He
delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and
President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the
Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today
make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same
cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by
foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and
high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple
also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s
age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the
politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared
both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces
in the twenty-first.
Informed by the author’s
decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and
superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative
historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place
and culture, The Return of a King is both the
definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work
of stunning topicality.
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