Diana Preston - The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842

One of the earliest governors of Madras was Elihu Yale, who acquired in India the fortune out of which he founded the university that bears his name.

By the start of the First Afghan War improvements to communications were close but not yet in place. In 1837 Samuel Morse exhibited his first electric telegraph in New York, and in 1838 the British ship Sirius was the first to steam continuously across the Atlantic.

Among Tipus prized possessions, seized by the British, was a near life-size mechanical model of a tiger consuming an English soldier. It is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

A young British officer, Captain Arthur Conolly, probably coined the term the Great Game in the 1830s before losing his life playing it, but Rudyard Kipling popularized it. His world of secret agents and assassins, disguises and subterfuge, concealed messages and forged letters evoked in novels such as Kim was reasonably accurate, if pervaded with some of the romanticism that often clouded British perceptions of the region and its people.

Colin Mackenzie, a British officer who later met Zaman Shah, reported, He still goes through the ceremony of having a glass held up before him during his toilette, even though he had been blind for many years. So great a man cannot be vulgarly blind! This trifling trait shows the animus of his race, which is that of insane pride.

Punjab means Land of the Five Rivers and comes from the Persian panj , meaning five, and ab , meaning waters, because five tributaries of the Indus flow through it. The drink punch also derives from the word panj because it has five ingredients: rum, sugar, lemon, water and spice.

Scots made a disproportionately large contribution to the making and the running of the British Empire at all levels.

The horses are said to have soon died from a mixture of overfeeding and inactivity.

These are the statues recently destroyed by the Taliban, though Burnes noted that they had already suffered damage.

The name Zerafshan means gold-bearing. The river also flows past Samarkand.

The next person to display it and to call himself Amir-al-Mominin would be Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, in 1996.

The British Museum in London has many specimens collected by Masson, including 6,200 coins.

In a similar way, in the twentieth-century the Western powers would be reluctant to name China and Russia as their enemy formally when engaging in proxy wars.

The origin of the name Brown Bess isnt certain, although some claim it derives from an order by the Duke of Wellington to his soldiers at Waterloo to paint their gun barrels brown so the enemy would not be alerted to troop movements by seeing them gleaming in the sun.

The majority of British soldiers were illiterate, but for those who were not and were willing to carry the extra weight in their packs, newly available novels included works by Charles Dickens such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby .

Sutteethe rite whereby living wives and concubines joined their dead husbands on their funeral pyres, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes notwas practiced by Sikhs and Hindus but had been outlawed in British India.

Shrapnel shellsdevices which explode in flight, scattering lead shot and other lethal materialswere invented by the British artillery officer Henry Shrapnel in the 1790s.

Another young British officer, Captain James Abbot, had earlier tried but failed to secure the release of the Russian slaves at Khiva. Abbot later had a successful military career in British India. Abbottabad, where Osama Bin Laden was killed, was named for him.

The Hazaras, who inhabit western Afghanistan, are believed by some to be the descendants of the Mongol cavalry of Genghis Khan. As an ethnic minority and as Shia Muslims in a country where the majority follow Sunni Islam, they were traditionally servants, even slaves, and were and are still looked down on by other tribes.

Updating monetary values is notoriously difficult, but if one uses the Bank of England calculator, 1.25 million equates to 108 million in todays values, or $178 million if converted at current exchange rates.

Auckland is often blamed for specifically instructing Macnaghten to take this step but in fact only argued for economy, learning of the particular measure after the event.

In early 2009, U.S. vice president Joseph Biden is said to have suggested to President Karzai in a similar vein that he was little more than mayor of Kabul.

An Irish private would later claim to have spotted one of the men in Jalalabad. Perhaps more confident in his powers of identification than he should have been, he would administer his own justice by holding him facedown in a deep pool until he drowned.

Pottinger told Mackenzie that he had earlier heard Akbar Khanunaware that Pottinger understood both languagesshout, Slay them in Pashtu, though he called to them to stop firing in Persian.

According to Lady Sale, among others, Akbar Khan had predicted that only one survivor would reach Jalalabad. It is possible that he engineered this outcome. He was certainly intelligent enough to appreciate its potential effect on British morale.

So convinced had the Afghans become of English duplicity and cunning that Taliban troops in 2005 nicknamed one of their leaders Mullah DadullahThe Lame Englishmanon account of his war wound and particular deviousness.

The term conspiracy of optimism was used by a recent former British ambassador in Kabul to describe current official perceptions of the present coalition intervention.

Auckland was strongly criticized on his return to Britain. However, after a further change of government he again became First Lord of the Admiralty. He died unexpectedly on New Years Day, 1849.

Napier never sent the punning telegram consisting of the single word PECCAVI, which was an invention of the humorous magazine Punch . Recipients would at once have recognized the word as Latin for I have sinned and realized Napier was actually saying, I have Sind.

Lady Sale died in 1853 in Cape Town.

During one of the running engagements, a British officer, General Hugh Gough, was saved from a bullet by a suit of chain mail, probably but not certainly the last British soldier to be saved by personal armor until the advent of Kevlar and similar modern body armor.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes identify Dr. Watson on their first meeting as a veteran of the Second Afghan War, and in the 1960s, much to Afghan surprise, the Baker Street Irregulars asked the bemused Afghans to place a monument to the fictional Dr. Watson on the Maiwand battlefield.

According to current on-the-spot reporters, some of the frontier villages that suffered most in the fighting with the British at that time are among those that have given the greatest support to Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters.

Many of the insurrections leaders were mullahs. Some, such as Mullah Sadullah in Swatnicknamed by the British the Mad Fakirwere Muslims of the Wahhabi sect.

The long history of British meddling in Persia goes some way toward explaining why, instead of, as many others have done, seeing Britain as a kind of secondary force in the Middle East and Afghanistan, Irans propaganda quite often portrays Britain as a cunning and malevolent old lion manipulating a stronger but less sophisticated United States.

Dost Mohammed, ruler of Afghanistan, temporarily deposed by the British.

Shah Shuja, restored to the Afghan throne by the British as their puppet king.