by NPR STAFF
The year is 1839, and two great empires — Great Britain and Russia — are treating the world map like a chessboard, trying to outmaneuver one another for territory. For no reason other than geography, Afghanistan gets caught in the middle.
Today, as the U.S. ends its war in Afghanistan, historian William Dalrymple recounts the first time a Western power fought in that country. In Return of a King, Dalrymple details Great Britain’s attempt to control Afghanistan by putting an ousted king back on the throne — a plan that went famously wrong.
“It is the greatest imperial disaster the British Empire ever suffered,” Dalrymple tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “It makes Yorktown [the battle in which Britain lost the American Revolutionary War] seem like a picnic in the park. … It is a total wipeout of an entire army, the army of the most powerful empire in the world at that time.”
While researching his book in Afghanistan, Dalrymple discovered a deep font of primary sources, allowing him to delve into the war’s Afghan perspective.
Interview Highlights
On Afghanistan’s surviving primary source documents
“Bizarrely, there’s actually extremely well-preserved national archives in Afghanistan. The Taliban may go around knocking down the museums, but they don’t knock down the archives. But the richer sources I found were two extraordinary epic poems written immediately after the war … These are kind of almost mythologized, but containing lots of interesting information about Afghan attitudes to the British and so on. There’s one called the “Jangnama,” there’s another called the “Akbarnama,” after the leading Afghan freedom fighter of that time. Indeed, the main diplomatic enclave in Kabul today is still called Wazir Akbar Khan, after the man who defeated the British.
“There’s also, and this is in a sense the richest thing I found, … the autobiography of the man the British installed.”
On Shah Shuja, the Afghan king the British installed
“Today we think of Afghanistan as this poor, benighted country riddled by war. But in the Middle Ages, Afghanistan was one of the great centers of culture in the region. And Shah Shuja is very much in a sense the last ebb of this moment. He’s a great admirer of gardens, a connoisseur of poetry. He’s an enormously civilized figure, and, by the standards of the time, merciful and lenient and liberal.
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