Forever War: Invade. Retreat. Repeat.

What is unfolding in Afghanistan today is proof that the west has not learnt its lessons from previous Afghan wars

- William Dalrymple

It was a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.

These words were written not in 2021, but in 1843. The writer was Rev G.R. Gleig, chronicling Britain’s disastrous, expensive and entirely avoidable entanglement with Afghanistan between 1839 and 1842. The First Anglo-Afghan War was arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the east—only the British mass-surrender to the Japanese in 1942 comes close.

On the infamous Retreat from Kabul, which began on January 6, 1842, only one of the 18,500 who left the British cantonment—assistant surgeon Dr William Brydon—made it through to Jalalabad six days later. Almost all of the Indian sepoys, who made up 90 per cent of the force— mostly Brahmins and Rajputs from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—were either massacred or enslaved.