“A war begun for no wise purpose, carried on in 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 by this war.”
This indictment, which might well describe the America experience
in the war in Afghanistan, was in fact written in 1843 by the Rev G. R. Gleig,
the British Army chaplain who accompanied the ill-fated British attempt to
subdue Afghanistan. William Dalrymple
has written an excellent work, Return
of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42, detailing the whole ill-fated British expedition which ended
in such humiliation in 1842.
One would have thought our Ivy-League-educated East
Coast ruling elite would have learned something from the British experience, or
if not that, then at least from the disastrous Russian experience of 1979-1989,
which was far more recent. But as the philosopher
George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it.”
Return of a King
is an interesting book to read, because there are so many parallels between the
British experience and the American experience in Afghanistan. Both expeditions
were launched by ideologically blinded people who drastically underestimated
what would be required, both expeditions were hampered by inconsistent strategy
and incompetent political and military leadership, both undertakings were distracted in the middle by other wars (Iraq for us, the Opium wars in China for the British), both undertakings suffered badly
because the invaders did not understand the Afghan culture.
This is a book worth reading.
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