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.