The Disaster in Afghanistan
Afghanistan's past remains its present and its future, threatening every major player in the region.
By Vivek Y. Kelkar, Mumbai
The Disaster in Afghanistan
The year was 1842. Britain ruled the waves and the land, an imperial power at its zenith. It sought to control Afghanistan as a buffer against Czarist Russia’s threat to its Indian colonies. On January 6, Major-General Sir William Elphinstone began his retreat from Kabul, with 18,500 men, after a tenuous negotiation with Wazir Akbar Khan, the son of Dost Mohammed, whom the British had ousted from power just three years before.
On January 13, 1842, one man straggled back into the safety of British-controlled Jalalabad, en route to India—William Brydon, the assistant surgeon of Shah Shuja’s Contingent, a British-commanded infantry force recruited in India to provide protection for the East India Company’s puppet ruler in Kabul. When asked where the army was, he famously replied, “I am the army.” The British had been annihilated, by treachery and the local opposition, all along the route back to India.…
