America decides to fight and win in Afghanistan. (What? We weren’t interested earlier?)
on 11/02/2008 at 09:39 AM
Afghanistan is a tough place. It eats whole armies, such as the British Army in 1842, the First Afghan War:
On January 6, 1842, the British began their withdrawal from Kabul. Leaving the city were 4,500 British troops and 12,000 civilians who had followed the British Army to Kabul. The plan was to march to Jalalabad, about 90 miles away.
The retreat in the brutally cold weather took an immediate toll, and many died from exposure in the first days. And despite the treaty, the British column came under attack when it reached a mountain pass, the Khurd Kabul. The retreat became a massacre.
Slaughter in the Mountain PassesA magazine based in Boston, the North American Review, published a remarkably extensive and timely account titled “The English in Afghanistan” six months later, in July 1842. It contained this vivid description (some antiquated spellings have been left intact):
On the 6th of January, 1842, the Caboul forces commenced their retreat through the dismal pass, destined to be their grave. On the third day they were attacked by the mountaineers from all points, and a fearful slaughter ensued…
The troops kept on, and awful scenes ensued. Without food, mangled and cut to pieces, each one caring only for himself, all subordination had fled; and the soldiers of the forty-fourth English regiment are reported to have knocked down their officers with the butts of their muskets.
On the 13th of January, just seven days after the retreat commenced, one man, bloody and torn, mounted on a miserable pony, and pursued by horsemen, was seen riding furiously across the plains to Jellalabad. That was Dr. Brydon, the sole person to tell the tale of the passage of Khourd Caboul.
More than 16,000 people had set out on the retreat from Kabul, and in the end only one man, Dr. William Brydon, a British Army surgeon, had made it alive to Jalalabad.
You can read about it here and here.
Actually, there were two survivors of the Retreat from Kabul. The second was Sir Harry Flashman, who
...survived the ensuing debacle by a mixture of sheer luck and unstinting cowardice. He became an unwitting hero: the defender of Piper’s Fort, where he was the only surviving white man, and was found by the relieving troops clutching the flag and surrounded by enemy dead. Of course, Flashman arrived at the Fort by accident, collapsed in terror rather than fight, was forced to stand and show fight by his sergeant, and was ‘rumbled’ for a complete coward. He had been trying to surrender the colours, not defend them. Happily for him, all inconvenient witnesses had been killed.
This incident set the tone for Flashman’s life. Over the next 60 years or so, he was involved in many of the major military conflicts of the 19th century—always in spite of his best efforts to evade his duty. He was often selected for especially dangerous jobs because of his heroic reputation. He met many famous people, and survived some of the worst military disasters (the First Anglo-Afghan War, Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Cawnpore, Battle of the Little Bighorn, Battle of Isandlwana), always coming out with more heroic laurels. The date of his last adventures seems to have been around 1900. He died in 1915.
I won’t be surprised if we find an ‘honorable’ way out of Afghanistan. We should have just kicked @ss and left. Instead, we are ‘nation building’. You can’t force a tribal culture to become a nation.
11/02/2008 at 10:33 AM
