The Anglo-Afghan Wars

The Anglo-Afghan Wars. Three times between 1839 and 1919 the British Empire marched into Afghanistan, and three times it learned the limits of power in the Hindu Kush. The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) began as Great Game paranoia: to pre-empt Russian influence, the British deposed Dost Muhammad Khan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja at Kabul with a garrison. The occupation collapsed into catastrophe: an uprising forced retreat, and in January 1842 some 16,000 British and Indian soldiers and camp followers marching out of Kabul were destroyed in the snowbound passes - one surgeon, William Brydon, reaching Jalalabad as the army's symbol.

The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) repeated the pattern. Demanding a British mission at Kabul against Russian influence, Britain invaded; its envoy Cavagnari was killed in the Bala Hissar uprising; Kabul was reoccupied and Kandahar besieged, saved at the last moment by Roberts's march (1880) against Ayub Khan. This time Britain settled for control without occupation: it recognized Abdur Rahman Khan, the 'Iron Amir', as ruler, handling his foreign affairs and paying him subsidies - and demarcated the Durand Line (1893), splitting the Pashtun tribes and sowing a border dispute that poisons Afghan-Pakistani relations to this day.

The Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919) was brief and different: the young, reforming King Amanullah attacked British India to assert full independence; a month of frontier fighting and British bombing of Kabul ended with the Treaty of Rawalpindi, which gave Afghanistan control of its foreign affairs - the practical independence the wars had always been about.

The wars' legend - the graveyard of empires - grew from their real lessons: Afghanistan ungovernable by outsiders, the frontier tribes unconquerable, the costs ruinous. Britain's Afghan trauma shaped its strategy for a century and echoed in every later intervention, Soviet and American.

To read more about this topic:

Britannica: Anglo-Afghan Wars Encyclopaedia Iranica: Anglo-Afghan Wars World History Encyclopedia: First Anglo-Afghan War