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Politician and filmmaker Rony Stewart hosts this documentary look at the recent history of Afghanistan, a nation wracked by foreign invasions and war.
Rory Stewart examines how a rivalry between Great Britain and Russia led to the first British invasion of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century.
Rory Stewart examines how a rivalry between Great Britain and Russia led to the first British invasion of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century.
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00:18Afghanistan, one of the most isolated, barren landscapes on Earth.
00:23It's difficult to believe that any empire would want to invade it.
00:28And yet, it's become the unlikely target and obsession of some of the world's greatest empires and superpowers.
00:38In 1839, up these city walls above Kabul marched red-coated veterans of Waterloo.
00:47In 1879, Highlanders charged to the sound of the bagpipes.
00:52In 1979, Russian Special Forces swooped over these hills in their helicopters.
00:59And in 2001, an American-led coalition invaded Afghanistan.
01:06Each of these invasions has ended in tragedy and humiliation.
01:10And each has sparked a fierce Afghan resistance.
01:16We have never, ever liked to be conquered.
01:20It's really easy to get into Afghanistan. It's just getting out part is very difficult.
01:24Don't go into Afghanistan and get, whatever you do, involved in a tribal war.
01:33Starting with the British invasions of the 19th century, how has this history forged the Afghanistan of today?
01:40And what is it about this place and the paranoia and aggression of empires that has created repeated tragedy?
01:49In these two films, I want to explore what dragged these great nations into Afghanistan and why they found it
01:57so difficult to leave.
02:17To sense some of the complexity of the Afghanistan that Victorian Britain chose to invade, you don't even need to
02:24leave contemporary London.
02:26I've come to Ealing for an evening of Afghan food, music, and traditional costume with a group of Afghans now
02:33resident here in West London.
02:39In this room, a dizzying array of ethnic groups.
02:43Pashtun, Tajik, Khazara, Turkmen, Nuristani, all Afghans.
02:49And all holding different religious and political views.
02:57The divisions and consequences of war have led to more than five million Afghans fleeing their country since the 1980s.
03:05Do you think, for example, Britain should remain in Helmand?
03:08Until they will have the infrastructure in the proper way, I think they should remain.
03:14So you don't think the British should remain in Helmand?
03:17Absolutely not.
03:20The microcosm of Afghanistan is there in that room.
03:24And some of these people are now sitting down together around a table.
03:27And in those histories, in the suspicions of who joined the Jihad, who came from which ethnic group, are many
03:34of the fissures that continue to haunt Afghanistan today.
03:38And all this complexity in Afghan history, both ancient and modern, so difficult to understand, so often overlooked, still matters
03:47deeply for all of us today.
03:49And it continues to preoccupy commentators, such as Akbar Ahmed, who I've come to meet here in Washington, D.C.
03:57Professor Ahmed, a Pakistani who once worked as an administrator on the northwest frontier with Afghanistan, arrived in the States
04:04where he now teaches a day before the World Trade Center attack.
04:09But his direct appeal to the White House for caution fell on deaf ears.
04:16I think on 9-11 the US administration had no idea about Afghanistan, its tribes, its history.
04:24But it was so motivated, so intensely motivated by a sense of anger, a sense of revenge, a sense of
04:33honour, that at all costs it had to rush into Afghanistan.
04:38I said, many, many superpowers have gone charging into Afghanistan, be very careful.
04:44And that is the big problem, that when you combine arrogance with a lack of knowledge of that part of
04:50the world, you are almost guaranteed to run into trouble.
04:54I sensed this tension myself when I walked across Afghanistan shortly after 9-11.
04:59I found a hospitable and attractive country, but still deeply conservative, isolated and difficult for a foreigner to understand.
05:08It made me reflect on the superpowers who have so often invaded the mountains of Afghanistan.
05:14How often they get caught up in their own strategic games, how easily they become out of touch, failing to
05:21grasp the complexity and resistance of Afghanistan.
05:26And I felt the same was true for the British in the 19th century.
05:30When they came, they were focused not on Afghanistan itself, but its neighbours.
05:35If I were a British redcoat standing on this wall in 1839, I would have been told that the reason
05:41I was here was that British India lay to the east and Russia lay to the north.
05:46And Afghanistan was trapped between two expanding empires.
05:54Afghanistan, a largely barren country, but with a rich Islamic civilisation, had long fought and traded with its Muslim and
06:02Asian neighbours.
06:03But it had never encountered a non-Muslim power as alien as Britain.
06:09And yet in the 1830s, Afghanistan was perceived, as it is believed to be today, to be an immediate threat
06:16to British national security.
06:18A place for the politicians and generals of empire to fret about.
06:25For hundreds of years, all the conflict had happened here in Europe.
06:30And suddenly, it exploded east.
06:33Russia raced towards Japan.
06:36Britain came into India.
06:38And as these great empires expanded, there was this zone in between, almost a blank space on the map, with
06:45very, very few towns.
06:46A place of deserts and mountains.
06:50And although these two empires were still 4,000 miles apart, they were certain that they were about to meet.
06:58They were going to meet here, in Afghanistan.
07:07As Britain and Russia stretched and flexed, Afghanistan, one of the most remote and impoverished kingdoms in the world, found
07:15itself sandwiched between two empires, who both claimed, at least, to be its friend.
07:22Britain feared Russia might creep south towards British-ruled India, the jewel in the crown of the empire and the
07:29second centre of British political power.
07:32But suspicions worked both ways.
07:35The Russians were equally nervous about Britain moving north from its base in India.
07:47Sensing that these two empires would collide in Afghanistan, the British government was hungry for intelligence on this blank space.
07:55A spy was dispatched.
07:58Alexander Burns, a man I believe to be one of our greatest ever political officers.
08:05This is not a man actually in fancy dress.
08:09He's in disguise.
08:11One of dozens of British officers who made their reputations doing journeys which were almost suicidal.
08:20Burns was one of the very first to study Afghanistan for British intelligence.
08:25His spying mission was both extraordinary and brave.
08:29In 1831, travelling undercover in disguise, he surveyed the route all the way from India through Kabul to Bukhara,
08:37and produced the first detailed accounts of Afghan politics.
08:42He set off with no protection into one of the most dangerous and unknown parts of Asia.
08:48A place where his predecessors had been killed, where he was having to run the gauntlet of slave traders,
08:54where he was a Christian moving through some regions which were fanatically Muslim and which were famous for killing infidels.
09:01Trying to rely all the way, not on his sword, but as he says in a letter to his mother,
09:06on his languages, on his charm, on his politeness.
09:11Along with the suicidal danger of what Burns did was the incredible reward,
09:17because when he returned back to London having completed this journey,
09:21this nearly 12-month journey through largely unknown country,
09:25he was a massive celebrity.
09:28He returned 28 years old, had an audience with the king,
09:32was made a member of the Athenean club, got a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society.
09:38And the book Burns wrote, Travels to Bukhara, became an overnight bestseller.
09:43But although it gave Britain a unique insight into this largely unknown land,
09:49according to historian William Dalrymple, his visit also terrified the Russians,
09:54and had an unanticipated counterproductive effect.
09:58There are British agents in Central Asia long before the Russians are taking any interest in cities like Bukhara and
10:05Kiva.
10:06And it's only when Burns' travel book, Journeys into Bukhara, is translated into French,
10:10and becomes widely read in Moscow, that the Russians think they should send an agent in
10:16to make sure the British are not manoeuvring and making plots in their backyard.
10:25Shortly after Burns was sent back to Kabul in 1836,
10:29he spotted this Russian agent, Yan Vykevich,
10:32and the Russians' arrival terrified the British.
10:35They became in turn very suspicious of Russia's ambitions in the country.
10:41And this mutual paranoia led to more and more foreign intelligence operations around Afghanistan,
10:49with rival officers like Vykevich and Burns sending back countless reports on each other's activities.
10:59The Russians called it the Tournament of Shadows.
11:03The British now remember it, thanks to Rudyard Kipling's later writing, as the Great Game.
11:12One of my favourite books is Kipling's Kim,
11:16which describes the Great Game through the eyes of this young English boy
11:20who's working on the north-west frontier as a spy.
11:23It's incredibly dangerous work, his intrigues with the Russians.
11:27He's a secret agent, he's deniable, he's at arm's length from the British government.
11:32But of course, this was a game that had two teams, and on the other side, the Russians.
11:38Men like Vykevich, travelling into Kabul, developing relationships with the Afghan king,
11:45returning with his own documents and maps.
11:47The beginning of a whole tradition whereby whenever the British saw a Russian painter turn up in the city,
11:53a Russian hunter turn up on the frontier, they would immediately assume that this was a double game of espionage.
12:01It was all these fears and suspicions of empire that were to turn Afghanistan into a battleground,
12:08according to Britain's former ambassador to Moscow, historian Sir Roderick Braithwaite.
12:13They thought that the Russians are getting their agents into Kabul and we must forestall them.
12:20We've got to do something here, these Russians allegedly coming over the front.
12:23Of course, the Russians had a mirror image view of us.
12:26They saw our agents penetrating north of Afghanistan into areas of Central Asia which they thought were their interest.
12:32They believed that these guys would come with propaganda, Islamic propaganda, weapons, money, and stir up these places against the
12:40Russians.
12:40So they were as terrified as we were.
12:50By 1839, the British government was increasingly obsessed with the Russian threat.
12:56Key advisers, men who'd never set foot in Afghanistan, began to claim that Russia might use Afghanistan as a stepping
13:04stone for the invasion of British India.
13:08Britain's man on the ground in Afghanistan, Alexander Burns, thought that Afghanistan should be left well alone.
13:15But a small group of policy makers in the government of India had very different ideas.
13:21They ignored Burns completely.
13:23In their minds, Afghanistan was an empty, failed state into which Russia would move.
13:32The Hawks decided the answer was regime change, to topple the sitting king of Afghanistan, Dost Muhammad, and replace him
13:40with their own man.
13:44British intelligence felt they had the perfect candidate.
13:48Shah Shuja, a man who'd been living in British India for 30 years.
13:52A bane and beautifully dressed, a man who could be relied upon to do Britain's bidding.
14:00To justify themselves, they published a document claiming that Dost Muhammad, who was trying to keep his distance from both
14:06Russia and Britain,
14:07was in fact disloyal to the British and represented an imminent and urgent threat to the British Empire.
14:17The motives are always very mixed.
14:19It's both the aggressive, expansive imperial instinct, plus the terror that it's going to come up against a brick wall
14:25or somebody's going to come and take it all away from you.
14:28And the trouble with intervention is that you may or may not have identified the right target, but you then
14:34tend to use the wrong means for dealing with it.
14:39So were the Hawks right to fear Russia?
14:44Here in Moscow, I've come to meet an eminent Russian historian of the period, Professor Tatiana Zagorodnikova.
14:52I wanted to ask her if Russia was really preparing to invade Afghanistan as a bridgehead for an attack on
14:58India.
15:01That was the time of colonization of smaller, weaker states.
15:06And that was a process all over the world.
15:09Not only in Great Britain and in Russia.
15:12The same in France, the same in other, I mean, great powers.
15:17Great Britain, at that time, considered every step of Russia, either in Europe, or in Asia, and maybe even in
15:30Africa, as Russian stepped towards India.
15:33Everything was considered as the Russians' march to India.
15:39Were the British paranoid?
15:40Well, it was just, to my mind, it was a game.
15:44Kind of making face towards audience, towards public opinion.
15:52Another thing is that that was a wonderful pretext in the parliament to demand more money for military purposes,
16:01for keeping big armies in India, and so on.
16:10The Hawks were obsessed with putting their man on the throne.
16:14But their belief in a Russian threat was more faith than reality.
16:18The dossier was torn to pieces in the British press.
16:22Everyone from the Duke of Wellington attacked the idea as madness.
16:26But rather than calling off the mission, these men pushed on.
16:31And within a few weeks, the army of the Indus was marching into Afghanistan.
16:36As we know in our own time, if you create a phantasm, a horror figure of your own imaginings, that
16:44figure could actually come into being.
16:45You can imagine a threat into life.
16:48Just like the neocons had wanted to topple Saddam Hussein long before 9-11, and 9-11 gave the neocons
16:56the excuse they were looking for.
16:57In the same way, the Hawks, the Russophobes in the British establishment, in Simla and in Calcutta, had been wanting
17:03to preempt the Russians in Central Asia.
17:13As they wound their way through the narrow passes towards Kabul, the British army was supremely confident.
17:20They'd never been defeated in Central Asia, and many in the army were treating it as a game.
17:27A lot of the young officers were behaving as though they were going on a grand picnic.
17:31Their generals were enraged. These 22-year-olds were travelling with camel trains, piled with meth silver, with eau de
17:40cologne, with exotic wines.
17:42The 16th Lancers even managed to bring their own pack of foxhounds towards Afghanistan.
17:54The army of the Indus arrived in Kabul in April 1839, and as they swaggered into the city, they had
18:01little idea of the horrors ahead.
18:12The British entered Kabul in squadrons, the royal horse artillery in gold, the lancers in scarlet, the dragoons in blue,
18:21the ostrich feathers on the hats of the envoys, with all the glory of a parade, a victory parade.
18:27But around them, in the crowded bazaar, blank faces, hostility, suspicion.
18:35Britain had taken a decisive step and placed an army of occupation in this distant and unlikely land.
18:42But as the soldiers settled into life in Kabul, their need for security made them live in protected compounds, separate
18:50from the Afghan people.
18:51And this only encouraged suspicions on both sides.
18:56The English knew so little about the real life of Kabul.
19:00If they came down to the city at all, they travelled in armed groups, seeing hostile Afghan faces, glimpses of
19:08tiny windows, blank mud walls.
19:11And they had very, very little idea about the rich civilisation behind those doors.
19:27Largely hidden from and totally misunderstood by most British troops was a culture of extraordinary richness.
19:34A culture of calligraphy, miniature painting and poetry, with sophisticated Afghan forms of law, government and patronage.
19:52The occupation dragged on, and the British only became more and more entrenched, and the Afghans began to get anxious.
20:00The thing that really worried the Afghans was when the women began to arrive, and European babies were born, that
20:08the British were here to stay.
20:15The British and the towers of their fort, and the Afghans gazing back at them from their family compounds, began
20:22to look at each other with deepening mistrust and incomprehension.
20:30I've come to a rain-soaked Boston to meet a world authority on Afghan anthropology and history, Professor Tom Barfield.
20:39Appropriately, I met him here, in the Helmand restaurant, and I wanted to ask him about some of the many
20:46differences between these cultures.
20:49If you go to an Afghan feast, people are very religious, but they're religious at the end of the meal.
20:56You thank God for having eaten a wonderful meal.
20:59As one of my Afghan friends said to me, why do you Americans pray before the meal?
21:04You haven't eaten it, you have no idea whether God deserves the praise or not, or the host.
21:09But the lesson that I took from him is that we foreigners are too keen to praise the fact that
21:17the feast is here, and the Afghans say there's one more step.
21:20Let's eat the feast and decide whether it deserves it.
21:24So the Afghans tend to look more at the outcome than at the intentions.
21:28And that logic appears to apply to how Afghans choose the perfect leader.
21:35The ideal ruler says to the Afghans that without me, these foreigners would invade and occupy our country.
21:44Without me and my skill, Afghanistan would not be independent.
21:49I am defending a Muslim nation.
21:52At the same time, he turns to the foreigners and says, only I can keep control of the Afghans, and
21:58I can only do that if you send me money and weapons.
22:02By 1841, Britain's choice of ruler had proved a disaster.
22:07Once Shah Shujaa was on the throne, Afghans quickly saw him as weak, as corrupt, and worst of all, as
22:14a puppet of a foreign, non-Muslim government.
22:18In a courtyard in Kabul, I asked Afghan academic Omar Sharifi about how Afghans perceived Shah Shujaa.
22:27When Shah Shujaa came and his era as a king, the tradition was like you meant a coin with a
22:34poem that describes who you are and what you mean.
22:37I am Shah Shujaa, the great king I am, and I will rule the one who ruled from the depth
22:42of the sea all the way to the height of the skies.
22:45Afghans saw that in the bazaar, in the market.
22:48They have changed the poem, and the poem says, this infidel Shah Shujaa.
22:52He is nothing but the light of the eyes of the lords, which is the British, and Burns, which was
22:58Alexander Burns.
23:00If you were an Afghan seeing a red-coated British soldier in the street, what would your reaction be?
23:05What the Afghans saw, a bunch of people in red-coats, muskets on their shoulder.
23:13They do not look like them, do not talk like them, do not think like them.
23:16How they can live when they see the foreigners, the British, walking on the streets.
23:22And they are not Muslims.
23:24What?
23:27Nobody really knew what was happening in Afghanistan.
23:30Optimistic British officers felt that with a bit more time and a bit more money, they were going to be
23:34able to win.
23:35And suddenly, when rumours began to spread through the teahouses and the bazaars,
23:38that British officers were interfering with Afghan women, a match had been lit, which would spark an insurgency.
23:45Suddenly, up and down the country, Afghans began to feel that their culture had been insulted,
23:52that their king was only a puppet, and that they needed to fight for Afghanistan and for Islam
23:58against a foreign military occupation.
24:11Dost Muhammad, the Emir the British had deposed to make way for Shah Shuja, was in exile.
24:17But he and his family used the presence of non-Muslim occupiers to mobilise Afghans by calling for a jihad.
24:26And for many Afghans, this action was the birth of the modern state of Afghanistan,
24:33the moment around which they united as a nation.
24:36By November 1841, Muslims in Kabul were ready to join this jihad.
24:42But the British were taken completely by surprise.
24:46Even Alexander Burns, our envoy so prized for his local knowledge,
24:51completely underestimated how dangerous the situation had become.
24:56Alexander Burns loved Kabul and Afghan culture.
25:00He was used to walking through the streets as though he was at home in Scotland.
25:04If you'd asked him, he would have said he could have trusted Afghans with his life.
25:08But on that night, in November 1841, he walked home to a city that had changed.
25:15He looked into eyes that no longer greeted him.
25:19And as he made his way back through the narrow streets towards his house, he was seeing a hostility that
25:27he hadn't sensed before.
25:30By dusk, an armed mob had surrounded his house.
25:35In one last attempt, he walked out onto the balcony of his house, and in his most confident manner, in
25:41beautiful Persian, appealed to their sense of hospitality, of generosity, their treatment of a guest.
25:50But he got nothing back.
25:52And in the end, he had to send a desperate message to the British garrison, asking for help.
25:59And for the first time, retreated back into his house, knowing that the only thing that stood between him and
26:06death were the gates of his house.
26:17Burns' home, his paradise where he'd entertained for so long, the Kabul that he loved, had become a death trap.
26:31Burns' last glimpse of a city that he loved and thought the most beautiful in the world was not of
26:36gardens, not of poetry,
26:37but a last desperate sprint across his neighbour's roofs, hoping that he could find a way out.
26:43But the crowd was everywhere. He wrapped a turban around his head, dropped down, praying he wouldn't be recognised, and
26:50for a moment he wasn't.
26:51But then the cry went up. Sir Kander Burns, he was hacked down.
26:58The next morning, his head was on a pole in the bazaar.
27:12The day before Burns' death, the British had been congratulating themselves on the peace and tranquillity in Afghanistan.
27:18The day after, everything had collapsed.
27:21A British trooper came staggering into the fort, with five musket wounds in his body, cuts to his head and
27:28shoulders, stark naked, having just escaped from the Afghan insurgents.
27:32The food was lost. The ammunition was running down.
27:36And within three days of Burns' death, the British generals were talking about a treaty of surrender and a retreat
27:43from Kabul.
27:45The British commander, General Elphinstone, tried to negotiate with the Afghans.
27:51The Afghans offered him safe passage, provided the British handed over their heavy weapons and retreated immediately to India.
27:58It must have felt like an impossible decision.
28:02If the garrison tried to stay, they could starve and be wiped out.
28:06But if they were to retreat, could they really trust the assurances of their enemy?
28:13I faced a similar dilemma, on a smaller scale, when I was the deputy governor in the south of Iraq,
28:19after the invasion, in 2004.
28:22Our compound was under siege. We were being attacked by Sadrish militia.
28:26And their commander came to us and said that if we agreed to leave our weapons and hand ourselves over
28:31to him, he would take us safely out of the fort and back.
28:36At the time, I thought it was a trick. It was a trick to massacre us.
28:39And I felt again the same thing when I read this history.
28:44In Iraq, we stayed and defended the compound, but the British and Kabul in 1841 were deeply divided.
28:52Many young officers were determined to fight on, but Elphinstone overruled them and ordered a retreat.
29:00All the troops, their wives and children, were forced to leave the relative safety of their compound and to try
29:07and reach the British garrison in Jalalabad, nine days march east of Kabul.
29:14They made painfully slow progress.
29:17And after two days, this straggling column of soldiers and civilians met their fate beneath this mountain.
29:27This valley is the jaws of hell.
29:31Into this, in mid-winter, the cream of the British army marched.
29:37And they were treated as though they were in a slaughterhouse.
29:48By the time they reached this valley, Horde, Kabul, they had spent two nights out in the open in three
29:54-foot snow,
29:55in temperatures of minus 15, without tents, waking up to discover frozen corpses around them.
30:02They staggered into this valley, starving, frozen, with no supplies and 80 miles to go.
30:10And it was at that point that the attack began.
30:29Behind every boulder was an Afghan with a musket, taking careful aim, able to pick off individually 3,000 people
30:39and kill them as they made their way through the valley.
30:44And it continued, not just for one or two miles, but for five miles of a ravine.
31:00By the time they reached the end of that valley, 90% of the British army had been extinguished.
31:19A handful of soldiers managed to fight their way through, but only to meet their fate later.
31:26What we've got here is the last stand of the 44th foot at Gundamug.
31:3150 men make it to the village of Gundamug.
31:34They stand on this low hill.
31:36And they have run out of ammunition.
31:38They're relying only on their bandits.
31:41And the picture we see here is half of them are dead.
31:43And the batons are about to close in and end it with their swords.
31:49Of the 17,000 men, women and children who'd set out nine days earlier from Kabul, only one made it
31:56to the British garrison in Jalalabad.
31:59One man has made it on from there.
32:01There's Dr Bryden.
32:03And in this picture, Dr Bryden is sitting on his old nag, about to collapse.
32:07And he is seen limping towards Jalalabad.
32:10And they assume he's only the first of thousands of troops to make it through.
32:14And the gates are opened and a party is sent out.
32:17And they realise he's the only one.
32:19And that night the commanding officer orders the bugles to be sounded all night.
32:26The wind was blowing very strongly that night.
32:30And rather than billowing out into the plain of Jalalabad, it blew back into the town.
32:35And he said that the noise of the trumpets echoing amid the wail of the wind sounded like an elegy
32:43to the dead army.
32:45The British Empire never had and never would experience a defeat like it.
32:52The First Afghan War was a major event for the Afghans.
32:55We always see it through our perspective as the great imperial disaster.
32:58But for the Afghans, this was their Trafalgar, their Battle of Britain, their Waterloo all in one.
33:05They were the only non-colonial power to see off a modern westernised army in the 19th century,
33:14on the magnificent scale that they did,
33:18and completely destroy an entire Victorian army at the very peak of Britain's power.
33:25For Afghans, this had confirmed that they were a warrior nation,
33:29one even capable of seeing off a great power like Britain.
33:33But western historians point to another legacy that resonates today.
33:38The first time there's really a feeling of jihad inside Afghanistan is the first Anglo-Afghan War.
33:44After that, it never really goes away.
33:47Beginning with the British invasions, Afghans begin to perceive themselves as fighting an outside, non-Muslim world.
33:56Now, they had known this before.
33:57When they raided India, that was jihad.
34:00You know, you got to go into infidel lands and take home a lot of good stuff.
34:05But inside Afghanistan, you couldn't do jihad.
34:08Now, when these foreigners invaded, people would say,
34:10yes, we're fighting non-Muslims.
34:14The British government would have liked to cover up the extent of this tragedy, but it was not to be.
34:20Almost every last grisly detail was immortalised in the best-selling diaries of Lady Sale,
34:27wife of one of the senior officers in the Kabul army.
34:31She was captured during the retreat and later released,
34:35and her original diaries and letters are kept here in the British Library.
34:41I took a look at them with historian Jane Robinson.
34:45Well, the book ran into several reprints in the first couple of years.
34:49It sold 7,500 copies, which was huge, and it was serialised in the times.
34:53And the response to it was unprecedented, I think,
34:58because this was the first time that a woman, a British woman,
35:01had written from the theatre of war.
35:05Lady Sale's account of the retreat from Kabul was shockingly explicit.
35:10To see women and children and soldiers and camp followers
35:15in various states of decomposition, and she actually describes it,
35:19I see here that some of the text has been excised, I think,
35:22as possibly being too strong. This was horrific stuff.
35:26Subsequently, we heard that scarcely any of these poor wretches escaped,
35:30and that, driven to the extreme of hunger,
35:32they'd sustained life by feeding on their dead comrades.
35:36And she knew that the army was doomed.
35:39She does say earlier on,
35:41I fear that nobody is going to survive this.
35:45The newspaper's serialisation sparked a macabre fascination
35:49with the savagery of the Afghans.
35:52She was a British representative in Kabul.
35:55She was part of the establishment there, part of the machine.
35:59And the fact that she had been attacked by the Afghans,
36:02it meant that the Afghans were particularly dastardly,
36:05because they had attacked what was most, not sacred,
36:09but almost sacred about British society.
36:12But actually, this is extremely unfair,
36:13because, in fact, the Afghans went out of their way
36:15to save all the women and children.
36:17Yes, but that's not what the audience got from this, not at all.
36:20What they saw was the sensation,
36:22what they saw was the dead bodies,
36:23what they saw was the cannibalism.
36:26Perhaps to limit the damage to our imperial reputation,
36:29the British spun this as a story of heroism and bravery.
36:33The way this was treated when it was published
36:37was indeed propaganda, I think.
36:38She was paraded before Queen Victoria.
36:41There was a city named Sail in Australia.
36:43There was a ship named Sail in the Navy.
36:45She was promoted as a heroine.
36:48She was made into a celebrity to try and distract, I think.
36:52We're defeated, but we turn out of the defeat
36:53the fact that we're already lions.
36:55Yes, yeah.
37:01The British Empire had been humiliated
37:04and the defeat was seared into our historical memory,
37:07creating a view of Afghanistan as a graveyard of empire,
37:12an unconquerable land.
37:15But that's only part of the story
37:17because later that year,
37:18the British sent an army of retribution,
37:21which sought savage revenge for its losses
37:24and raised to the ground Kabul's historic bazaar.
37:27But having dealt the Afghans a punishing blow,
37:31instead of occupying the country,
37:32they ended the first Anglo-Afghan war with a deal.
37:39At this point they announced,
37:40now we're going to withdraw.
37:42But now you can see that if we want to come back,
37:45we can do it.
37:46You guys have not defeated us militarily.
37:48Now we need to cut a deal.
37:50And they take Dos Mohamed,
37:53the ruler that they had dispossessed,
37:55they say, okay, you can go back again.
37:57So it's like Dos Mohamed Part 2,
38:00but he tells the British,
38:02I understand your needs,
38:03you must understand mine.
38:05And the two sides come to a modus vivendi.
38:07So yes, the Afghans can claim a great victory,
38:10but on the other hand,
38:11the ruler that they've put back in power
38:13understands what Britain needs
38:15is to such an extent
38:16that when the mutiny occurs in India in 1857,
38:20the so-called Sepoy Rebellion,
38:21and the Afghans are urged to march on Peshawar
38:24to ally with the rebels,
38:26Dos Mohamed says,
38:27no, I've signed an agreement with the British,
38:29and besides, I think they're going to win.
38:34The Afghans took enormous pride
38:36in their resistance to the British,
38:38and the political settlement led
38:40to a period of confidence and relative stability,
38:42during which time the British and the Afghans
38:45treated each other with a wary respect.
38:49But the rivalry between Russia and Britain
38:51only continued to intensify.
38:58A thousand miles from Afghanistan in 1854,
39:02the two powers fought a brutal war in the Crimea.
39:06And if anything,
39:08the fears of Russian ambition was growing.
39:11Then, in the late 1870s,
39:14Russians again appeared in Kabul.
39:17A new generation of British hawks
39:19decided the only response was again to invade.
39:22Again there was a public outcry,
39:25again imperial paranoia triumphed,
39:28and once again a British army,
39:30this time 40,000 strong,
39:33was marching into Afghanistan.
39:35To prevent Kabul being taken,
39:37the Afghan emir signed an agreement with the British.
39:41But a new envoy, Sir Louis Kavanary,
39:43another swashbuckling multilingual officer,
39:46was installed in Kabul.
39:49Remembering that Burns had been massacred,
39:51escaping from his unfortified house in the old city,
39:54Kavanary took up residency in this ancient citadel,
39:57the Bala Hisar.
39:59Sir Louis Kavanary, the new British envoy,
40:02rode in on his elephant into this citadel with a tiny escort.
40:07He'd taken three lessons from the death of his predecessor,
40:10Alexander Burns.
40:11Always live within the fortified citadel,
40:14don't come in with a large army of occupation,
40:17and never touch the local women.
40:19But despite all his care,
40:21he was soon hearing rumours that the Afghans wanted to kill him.
40:26Kavanary thought he'd learned from Burns
40:29that it was better to be in the Bala Hisar,
40:31but this was actually the palace of the Afghan kings,
40:34and his presence there also caused offence.
40:40Here I met up with Prince Ali Siraj,
40:43a member of the Afghan royal family whose palace this was.
40:50People were not very pleased that a British ambassador
40:52had been put in the Bala Hisar.
40:54Why were they angry about that?
40:55Because it reminded them of the first Anglo-Afghan war.
40:58They figured, here comes the British again, you know,
41:00and they're here to occupy Afghanistan once again.
41:04We have never, ever liked to be conquered.
41:08We have accepted poverty because we want to be free.
41:12They did not understand the Afghan psyche.
41:15They figured that they were in India and they took,
41:17you know, the East Indian Company, you know,
41:19what was so successful in India.
41:20They figured, ah, Afghanistan, rowdy people, you know,
41:23with baggy pants and turbans, you know,
41:25were easy to rule, easy to control.
41:27But they forgot that Afghanistan is a nation of warriors.
41:31I couldn't help asking him if we were making the same mistakes today.
41:36There was an American, I will not say which organization.
41:39He told to me, he says, ah, Prince Ali,
41:41I have received a billion dollars from the United States.
41:44I said, what are you going to do with this money?
41:45He says, well, we're going to roll into the village
41:48and we're going to build things.
41:49I said, sir, if you roll into the village,
41:52you're going to roll you out.
41:53I said, you roll up to the village,
41:56then you send an emissary inside the village,
41:58talk to the elders, they will do one of two things,
42:00either invite you in or they will send somebody out to meet with you.
42:04Then once they invite you in, you sit down and you talk to them,
42:07but don't tell them what you're going to do.
42:09Ask them what they want.
42:11Respect.
42:12If you do that, you will have them in your pocket.
42:15The Afghan king who'd negotiated with the British was seen as weak.
42:20Ordinary Afghans hated the deal he'd struck with the British
42:23and they hated the presence of Kavanari in Kabul.
42:27Finally, an Afghan regiment mutinied and marched on his residence.
42:31Kavanari looked out on the screaming mob,
42:34knowing the nearest reinforcements were hundreds of miles away.
42:38He led a suicidal charge, was killed,
42:41and his mutilated corpse was put on display.
42:45Mortified by his death and desperate to salvage their credibility,
42:50Britain launched another invasion into Afghanistan.
42:53The commander of the lead column, General Roberts, was told,
42:56your objective should be to strike terror and to strike it swiftly and deeply.
43:03Four weeks after the envoy was killed, a highland regiment had fought its way to the top of that ridgeline.
43:10The next day, General Roberts had seized Kabul.
43:13He came here to the citadel, where he saw the blood-spattered walls and the mangled corpse of the envoy
43:20and his comrades.
43:22In rage, General Roberts set up a gallows on the wall.
43:25He hanged 100 Afghans, demolished the palaces of the Afghan nobility,
43:30and at that point, with honour satisfied, many suggested he should withdraw.
43:35But the Afghan king had been deposed.
43:38The country was unstable.
43:40Britain had taken responsibility for Afghanistan,
43:44and leaving no longer seemed an option.
43:49While General Roberts sat in Kabul, the countryside was now in revolt.
43:55Suddenly, a jihad had been called against them,
43:58and when they looked out on a winter evening from their small camp in Kabul,
44:02they could see right along this ridgeline 60,000 watchfires burning from Afghans bent on their destruction.
44:11It must have seemed as though history was repeating itself exactly,
44:17and the one lesson that Britain should be taking away was never to invade Afghanistan.
44:23This time, unlike his predecessor, General Roberts decided to stay and fight,
44:29and he was able just to withstand the siege of his compound in Kabul.
44:34But in Helmand province, the Afghans completely defeated and wiped out another British unit.
44:40This time, in the Battle of Maiwand.
44:44It's one of Afghanistan's most famous victories,
44:48and I met Abi Arian, an Afghan living in London, at this British memorial to Maiwand.
44:54History has it that the Afghans won because of the rousing battle cry of a young woman called Malalai.
45:01She's an ordinary Afghan girl.
45:03As she's standing in the battle, she can see that the Afghans are losing.
45:07And she stood there, took a veil off, and said,
45:10if you love your country, and if you're real Pashtun, and if you don't want to be ashamed,
45:15you have to go and fight the British.
45:17Remember when Elizabeth stood in front of the Spanish Armada?
45:21Uh-huh.
45:23Gave this speech to the British army.
45:25To us, that was equivalent to that.
45:27And by revealing her face, actually, in some ways, it's a kind of shame for her and her family.
45:33Everybody sees her face, but she's going to die, so it doesn't matter.
45:36Absolutely.
45:36And in fact, she dies in the battle as well.
45:39But the encouragement she gave to the Afghans there was immense.
45:44Unlike the massacre of the British army and the retreat from Kabul, Maiwand was not covered in a serialisation in
45:50the times.
45:51So although a thousand British soldiers were killed, this memorial in Reading is almost all that remains,
45:58and its meaning is now largely forgotten.
46:00But ask an Afghan, and you get a very different response.
46:04This battle, like the retreat from Kabul, is still the stuff of legend.
46:09As an Afghan child, as you learn how to walk, you know about the battles we had with the British.
46:16Uh-huh.
46:16It's part of our DNA. It's part of our life.
46:20Maiwand is like a legend in Afghanistan.
46:22I think, in a way, the British are trying to justify it and say,
46:25Oh, it was really a semi-hard day.
46:28We didn't have as much as...
46:29The Afghans had superior firepower.
46:31How can an Afghan army have a superior firepower than the British?
46:36British troops fighting in Helmand today are often warned by local Afghans that they will meet the same fate
46:42as befell their predecessors in Helmand at Maiwand.
46:47We say that all doors are always open for invaders.
46:51Look from Alexander the Great all the way to the British and today.
46:54It's really easy to get into Afghanistan.
46:57It's just getting out part is very difficult.
46:59We always don't mind foreign invaders getting in there, relaxing and feeling comfortable.
47:05Then we start our fight. This is our traditional way of doing things.
47:09What do you think an Afghan villager feels they're fighting for?
47:11For their home and country. For their independence.
47:15They don't like foreign invading army to come through their villages.
47:19To do it with your mighty force and say,
47:21Look, I'm here. I'm going to provide you peace and security.
47:24This is a joke. Honestly, it is.
47:26Because nobody believed that. Afghans wouldn't accept that.
47:30How can somebody bring peace with a gun and weapons? You can't do that.
47:37A thousand British soldiers have been massacred at the Battle of Maiwand.
47:42The war was turning against Britain.
47:44But the response this time was immediate.
47:47There followed one of the most celebrated marches of the entire Victorian era.
47:53General Roberts, with an elite band of Gurkhas and Highlanders, set off from Kabul through unknown territory with no support.
48:02At least three hundred and twenty miles.
48:05And then they got a hundred-degree heat.
48:05In 20 days. In 100 degree heat.
48:08Arrived safe at Kandahar.
48:11And won a decisive victory.
48:13That brought the second Anglo-Afghan war, to a close.
48:21Having won a victory, the question was what would Britain do next?
48:25all the fears, all the pride that had dragged them into Afghanistan was still there.
48:31They'd spent blood and treasure.
48:33There were so many reasons to try to continue an occupation,
48:37and yet they decided to declare a victory and get out.
48:42And this is because, despite all these fears,
48:46the British Empire had a lot of people who knew the region well,
48:49who spoke the languages well, who understood their limits,
48:53who understood that it couldn't be done,
48:56and nobody summed it up better than General Roberts himself.
49:01He said,
49:03We have nothing to fear from Afghanistan,
49:06and offensive though it may be to our pride,
49:09the less they see of us, the less they will dislike us.
49:23After decades of battling Russian influence in Afghanistan,
49:27the British Empire at the peak of its power bowed to Afghan realities
49:32and struck a deal with their opponent.
49:35Just as in 1842, Britain again allowed the most powerful Afghan leader to take the throne,
49:42even though he was their enemy.
49:45Abdurrahman was an ally of the Russians and had been living on Russian soil,
49:49but he was the only man who seemed to have the support and authority to control the country.
49:55It's as though after ten years of fighting the Taliban today,
49:59the United States and their allies left Afghanistan and put the Taliban back in charge.
50:06This extraordinary gamble paid off.
50:09For his part, the new king Abdurrahman demanded a massive subsidy
50:13and no internal interference in his country.
50:16In return, Britain got control of Afghan foreign policy,
50:20and most importantly, Abdurrahman did not allow the Russians to threaten British India.
50:25For Britain, it was a perfect solution.
50:35And even when Europe descended into the First World War, Afghanistan remained neutral.
50:43But this would change in the aftermath of that great war,
50:46as the great powers of Europe met here in Versailles.
50:51Here empires were broken up, new nation states were created,
50:56and Afghanistan, although excluded from the negotiating table, had its own ambitions.
51:05For the first time, Afghanistan, so often on the receiving end of British firepower,
51:10itself became the principal aggressor.
51:13The new king of Afghanistan saw Britain exhausted by war, facing unrest in India.
51:20He called another jihad, took his chance, and invaded British India through the Khayba Pass.
51:28Although Britain saw off this unexpected aggression,
51:31they suffered twice as many casualties as the Afghans.
51:36But with Russia no longer the threat of old, Britain saw less need for an interest in Afghanistan,
51:41and granted the Afghans full independence.
51:49But what Afghanistan did with that independence was the opposite of what the British expected.
51:56The new king, Amanullah, revealed himself to be a moderniser.
52:01The British policy was really to keep Afghanistan locked in the Middle Ages.
52:06The last thing they wanted was Afghanistan to change and modernise.
52:11And then suddenly, in 1919, modernity came.
52:16British ideas came to Afghanistan against Britain's will.
52:21And this great process of modernisation came not through the Empire,
52:26came not through British bayonets, but through an Afghan king.
52:32King Amanullah ruled from this extravagant palace in a European style which he built on the outskirts of Kabul.
52:39And he championed a new modernising intellectual elite in Afghanistan.
52:44But the country that he was determined to transform had changed little in the century that had passed since Britain
52:51first took an interest here.
52:53It was a country with almost blanket illiteracy.
52:56A fragmented country of isolated villages and mountain valleys under feudal rule,
53:01the way Britain had found it and left it.
53:09Dreaming of modernity in 1927, Amanullah embarks on a grand European tour,
53:14the first such trip by an Afghan ruler.
53:21The Afghan king arrived in Britain for a full state visit.
53:26The flags were out, and a slightly anxious British government responded in time-honoured fashion
53:32by taking him to shop for guns and for cars, which his impoverished country could hardly afford.
53:47And when he toured the Rolls-Royce factory, he bought a fleet of cars to take back home.
53:53It started a long love affair between Afghan royalty and Rolls-Royce.
53:58And this car was later part of their fleet, now owned by businessman Richard Rainsford.
54:03For an Afghan, possessing this car really shows that you're part of an international group.
54:08You're no longer part of an isolated country at the other end of the world.
54:11Well, that's right. He was a very sophisticated man.
54:14When he went to Europe in 1928, he was not just looking for Rolls-Royce cars,
54:19he was looking really to means to be inspired by the West,
54:24how he could modernize his very backward country.
54:26And therefore the Rolls-Royce trip to the Derby works was part of that overall quest for inspiration and for
54:33modernization.
54:39A car like this, at the time, was a pretty expensive thing.
54:43It would cost as much as a house in Fulham.
54:46It would be about £1,500 for the chassis and another £1,500, even more, up to £2,000 for
54:51the body,
54:52depending on how exotic a body was ordered by the excited owner.
55:00What would an Afghan have felt looking at this kind of car?
55:03It would be like looking at something equivalent to a space shuttle, I imagine, to an Afghanistan farmer or peasant.
55:12I think it's tempting today when we look at a car like this to imagine Amanullar as some sort of
55:18corrupt dictator
55:19who was spraying money around on Rolls-Royces.
55:23But in fact, really, this is part of his love of technology or machinery.
55:27It's as though he's returning to the country with a jet engine or a new computer system.
55:32He's coming back with whole new interests in railways and printing machines and mining technology and medicine.
55:40But for the conservatives in Afghanistan, this is all very dangerous and very dubious.
55:45The big story that's spreading through the streets when he arrives is he's bringing back a new machine to turn
55:50human corpses into soap.
55:54Amanullar was just beginning to discover how conservative his country still was.
55:58In this case, wild rumours were circulating about how he had become a Catholic.
56:03Ate pork, drank alcohol.
56:05He became perceived as a foreigner in his own land, attempting to impose a foreign ideology on his own people.
56:14It's easy to laugh at Amanullar, and indeed there's a lot that you can laugh at him for.
56:18For example, he gathered the tribal elders and insisted they wore pinstripe trousers and western jackets.
56:23But there was also a highly developed, serious programme of reform.
56:29In fact, the most radical programme for state transformation in Afghanistan came from an Afghan.
56:34He wanted parliamentary elections, a progressive constitution, education particularly for women.
56:40And in the end, when photographs were circulated in the bazaar of his wife, the Queen, with her head uncovered,
56:47with pearls over a plunging neckline, he had to flee.
56:51The wheels of that new Rolls Royce spinning vainly in the snow to exile in Italy.
57:04It is ironic, when today we're concerned with a powerful hold of Islam and the problems of establishing democracy in
57:11that country,
57:12that the only attempt in this whole period to modernise and democratise Afghanistan didn't come from British rule, but from
57:19the Afghans themselves.
57:24So why did the British go into Afghanistan in the 19th century?
57:28It wasn't really about Afghanistan in the end, it was about the fears of empire, fear of empty space, fear
57:34of the Russians, fear in the end about their own credibility, their pride.
57:41In the second film, two superpowers come calling, and these armies invade Afghanistan not just to protect their selfish strategic
57:51aims,
57:51but also with the objective of bringing profound social change and reshaping Afghanistan more in their own image.
57:59And the result, for the people of Afghanistan and their invaders, was to be even greater horror and tragedy.
58:09If you were going to pass a message to the American and British troops today, what would you say to
58:14them?
58:15They will quickly return to the guerre of the Jews' lives and good on the side of the country.
58:20You will not die!
58:21That's right, that is correct, that is correct.
58:25I have to say goodbye.
58:26You will never die!
58:26I will not die!
58:28I will die.
58:29Let's leave to the left!
58:31Now you will never die!
58:33You will not die!
58:33You will not die!
58:34You will not die!
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