An almost perfect catastrophe

Lots of people have subsequently discovered this important imperial maxim: ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ But the first western power to demonstrate the point of it was the British, in the late 1830s. The First Afghan War is the most famous of Queen Victoria’s ‘little wars’ for its almost perfect catastrophe. The British went in, installed a puppet emperor, and three years later were massacred. The story goes that only one man, Dr Brydon, survived the march back from Kabul to Jalalabad. Actually, there were a few more survivors, though not many. The celebrated canvas of Dr Brydon’s solitary arrival, Lady Butler’s ‘The Remnant of an Army’, has stuck in the communal mind. It was the first really extensive British setback, and encouraged all sorts of independent thinking about the subject peoples from the 1857 Mutiny onwards.

The story has been told many times — and I myself wrote a novel about it ten years ago, The Mulberry Empire. I invented most of it and did little research beyond reading about 50 books on the subject. If there is an obligation on novelists to cover every point of view and to describe characters in accordance with their historical reality I have not yet heard of it.

Historians, on the other hand, do have an obligation to write truthfully and to try to find out what everybody said about the subject at the time. Amazingly, no western historian until William Dalrymple has used Afghan sources in a narrative history of the war — there is an interesting, though demanding book of a non-narrative sort by Christine Noelle called State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan which does go into these sources. (Only very recently have historians started to look at Russian sources, even, and Russia was the great rival to the British in this corner of the Great Game.