Are There Lessons We Can Learn From the First Anglo-Afghan War?

Last Monday was the 172nd anniversary of
William Brydon’s arrival at Jalalabad. Brydon, who served as
an
assistant surgeon in the British East India Company Army, was
(so
the legend goes) the only survivor of one of the worst defeats
in British military history, the retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad
during the First Anglo-Afghan War. Thousands of British troops and
civilians who followed their camp were either picked off or
captured by tribesmen or succumbed to the the winter conditions as
they traveled.

Brydon arrived in Jalalabad on a weak horse with a
slashed skull on Jan. 13 1842 and said, “I am the
army.” when asked where his comrades were.

The story of the British retreat from Kabul is only one of the
many tales that make up part of the “Afghanistan is where empires
go to die” rhetoric that is sometimes heard in discussions about
the current war in Afghanistan.

In September 2009, Dahr Jamail wrote in
Global Research that,

The United States Empire is following a long line of empires and
conquerors that have met their end in Afghanistan. The Median and
Persian Empires, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the
Indo-Greeks, Turks, Mongols, British and Soviets all met the end of
their ambitions in Afghanistan.

As Seth Jones at the RAND Corporation
pointed out in a review of William Dalrymple’s Return of a
King:
The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42, “Massive social and
political changes in Afghanistan make it thorny to pull many
lessons from the first Anglo-Afghan war.”

That said, Afghanistan is proving a difficult place for the
U.S.-led forces to manage.
NPR recently reported that despite billions of dollars being
spent on stopping opium production Afghanistan could still become a
“narco-criminal state,” and today the BBC reported
that while it is unlikely that the Taliban are in a position to
retake control of the country now it is possible that the election
of a weak president could prompt the sort of takeover seen in
1996.