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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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00:00A CIDADE NO BRASIL
00:30It has 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.
00:53In 1979, Russian special forces swooped over these hills in their helicopters.
01:00And 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.
01:25Don'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,
02:23you don't even need to leave contemporary London.
02:26I've come to Ealing for an evening of Afghan food, music and traditional costume,
02:31with a group of Afghans now resident here in West London.
02:39In this room, a dizzying array of ethnic groups, Pashtun, 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 5 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, and some of these people are now sitting down together around
03:27a table,
03:27and in those histories and the suspicions of who joined the Jihad, who came from which ethnic group,
03:33and many of 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,
03:46still matters deeply 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,
04:03arrived in the States, where 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.
04:25But it was so motivated, so intensely motivated, by a sense of anger, a sense of revenge, a sense of
04:33honour,
04:33that 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,
04:51you are almost guaranteed to run into trouble.
04:53I 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.
05:18How easily they become out of touch, failing to grasp 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.
05:34If 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,
05:44and Russia lay to the north, and 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.
06:19A place for the politicians and generals of empire to fret about.
06:25For hundreds of years, all the conflict had happened here in Europe.
06:29And 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.
06:47A 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, he was a massive celebrity.
09:28He returned 28 years old, had an audience with the king, was made a member of the Athenean club,
09:34got a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society.
09:38And the book Burns wrote, Travels to Bukhara, became an overnight bestseller.
09:44But 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.
10:05And it's only when Burns's travel book, Journeys into Bukhara, is translated into French and becomes widely read in Moscow,
10:13that the Russians think they should send an agent in to make sure the British are not manoeuvring and making
10:20plots in their backyard.
10:25Shortly after Burns was sent back to Kabul in 1836, he spotted this Russian agent, Yan Vikevich,
10:32and the Russians' arrival terrified the British.
10:35They became in turn very suspicious of Russia's ambitions in the country.
10:40And this mutual paranoia led to more and more foreign intelligence operations around Afghanistan,
10:49with rival officers like Vikevich 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, which describes The Great Game through the eyes of this young English
11:20boy,
11:21who's working on the Northwest frontier as a spy.
11:24It'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.
11:39Men like Vikevich, 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.
12:21There are these Russians allegedly coming over the frontiers.
12:24Of course, the Russians had a mirror image view of us.
12:26They saw our agents penetrating north of Afghanistan into areas of Central Asia,
12:31which they thought were their interest.
12:32They believed that these guys would come with propaganda, Islamic propaganda, weapons, money,
12:38and stir up these places against the Russians, so 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 policymakers in the government of India had very different ideas.
13:20They 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, Shah Shuja, a man who'd been living in British India for 30
13:52years.
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,
14:33but you then tend 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 Tatyana 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 colonisation of smaller, weaker states, and 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,
15:31as Russians 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.
15:45Kind of making face towards audience, towards public opinion.
15:52Another thing is that that was a wonderful pretext in the Parliament
15:57to demand more money for military purposes, for keeping big armies in India, and so on.
16:09The 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.
16:30And 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,
16:43that figure can 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.
16:54And 9-11 gave the neocons the excuse they were looking for.
16:57In the same way, the Hawks, the Russophobes in the British establishment,
17:00in Simla and in Calcutta, had been wanting to pre-empt the Russians in Central Asia.
17:13As they wound their way through the narrow passes towards Kabul,
17:17the British army was supremely confident.
17:20They'd never been defeated in Central Asia,
17:23and 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.
17:32Their generals were enraged.
17:34These 22-year-olds were travelling with camel trains,
17:38piled with meth silver, with eau de cologne, 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,
17:59and as they swaggered into the city,
18:00they had little idea of the horrors ahead.
18:12The British entered Kabul in squadrons,
18:16the royal horse artillery in gold,
18:18the lancers in scarlet, the dragoons in blue,
18:21the ostrich feathers on the hats of the envoys,
18:23with all the glory of a parade, a victory parade.
18:27But around them, in the crowded bazaar,
18:30blank 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,
18:45their need for security made them live in protected compounds separate from 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,
19:04seeing hostile Afghan faces, glimpses of tiny 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
19:31was a culture of extraordinary richness.
19:34The culture of calligraphy, miniature painting and poetry,
19:39with sophisticated Afghan forms of law, government and patronage.
19:51The occupation dragged on and the British only became more and more entrenched
19:57and the Afghans began to get anxious.
19:59The thing that really worried the Afghans was when the women began to arrive
20:05and European babies were born, that the British were here to stay.
20:15The British and the towers of their fort,
20:18and the Afghans gazing back at them from their family compounds,
20:22began to look at each other with deepening mistrust and incomprehension.
20:31I've come to a rain-soaked Boston to meet a world authority
20:35on Afghan anthropology and history, Professor Tom Barfield.
20:40Appropriately, I met him here in the Helmand restaurant,
20:43and I wanted to ask him about some of the many differences between these cultures.
20:48If you go to an Afghan feast, people are very religious,
20:53but they're religious at the end of the meal.
20:56You thank God for having eaten a wonderful meal.
20:59One of my Afghan friends said to me,
21:01why do you Americans pray before the meal?
21:04You haven't eaten it.
21:05You 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
21:16that the 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.
21:29And 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,
21:55only I can keep control of the Afghans, and I can only do that if you send me money and
22:01weapons.
22:02By 1841, Britain's choice of ruler had proved a disaster.
22:07Once Shah Shuja was on the throne, Afghans quickly saw him as weak, as corrupt, and worst of all,
22:14as a puppet of a foreign, non-Muslim government.
22:18In a courtyard in Kabul, I asked Afghan academic Omar Sharifi about how Afghans perceived Shah Shuja.
22:26When Shah Shuja came and his era as a king, the tradition was like you meant a coin with a
22:34poem
22:34that describes who you are and what you mean.
22:37I am Shah Shuja, the great king, and I will rule the one who rules from the depth of the
22:42sea
22:43all the way to the height of the skies.
22:45Afghans saw that in the bazaar, in the market.
22:48They've changed the poem, and the poem says,
22:50this infidel Shah Shuja.
22:52He's nothing but the light of the eyes of the lords, which is the British,
22:56and Burns, which was Alexander Burns.
23:00If you were an Afghan seeing a red-coated British soldier in the street,
23:04what 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 in the streets.
23:22And they are not Muslims.
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,
23:33they were going to be able to win.
23:34And suddenly, when rumours began to spread through the tea houses and the bazaars,
23:38that British officers were interfering with Afghan women,
23:42a match had been lit, which would spark an insurgency.
23:46Suddenly, 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
23:57and for Islam against a foreign military occupation.
24:11Dost Muhammad, the Emir the British had deposed to make way for Shah Shuja,
24:16was in exile, but he and his family used the presence of non-Muslim occupiers
24:22to mobilise Afghans by calling for a jihad.
24:27And 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,
25:25he was seeing a hostility that he 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
25:39and in his most confident manner, in beautiful Persian,
25:43appealed 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,
25:57asking for help.
25:59And for the first time, retreated back into his house,
26:03knowing that the only thing that stood between him and death
26:06were the gates of his house.
26:17Burns's home, his paradise where he'd entertained for so long,
26:23the Kabul that he loved, had become a death trap.
26:31Burns's last glimpse of a city that he loved and thought the most beautiful in the world,
26:35was not of gardens, not of poetry, but a last desperate sprint across his neighbours' roofs,
26:41hoping that he could find a way out.
26:43But the crowd was everywhere.
26:45He wrapped a turban around his head, dropped down, praying he wouldn't be recognised,
26:50and for a moment he wasn't.
26:51But then the cry went up.
26:53Sir Kander Burns, he was hacked down.
26:58The next morning his head was on a pole in the bazaar.
27:12The day before Burns's death, the British had been congratulating themselves
27:16on the peace and tranquillity in Afghanistan.
27:18The day after, everything had collapsed.
27:22A British trooper came staggering into the fort,
27:25with five musket wounds in his body, cuts to his head and shoulders,
27:28stark 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's death,
27:39the British generals were talking about a treaty of surrender
27:42and a retreat from Kabul.
27:45The British commander, General Elphinstone, tried to negotiate with the Afghans.
27:51The Afghans offered him safe passage,
27:54provided the British handed over their heavy weapons
27:56and retreated immediately to India.
27:59It must have felt like an impossible decision.
28:02If the garrison tried to stay, they could starve and be wiped out.
28:07But if they were to retreat,
28:09could they really trust the assurances of their enemy?
28:13I faced a similar dilemma, on a smaller scale,
28:16when I was the deputy governor in the south of Iraq after 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
28:30and hand ourselves over to him, he would take us safely out of the fort and back.
28:36At the time, I thought it was a trick.
28:37It was a trick to massacre us.
28:40And I felt again the same thing when I read this history.
28:44In Iraq, we stayed and defended the compound,
28:47but the British and Kabul in 1841 were deeply divided.
28:53Many young officers were determined to fight on,
28:55but Elphinstone overruled them and ordered a retreat.
29:00All the troops, their wives and children,
29:03were forced to leave the relative safety of their compound
29:06and to try and reach the British garrison in Jalalabad,
29:09nine days' march east of Kabul.
29:14They made painfully slow progress,
29:17and after two days, this straggling column of soldiers and civilians
29:22met their fate beneath this mountain.
29:26This 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, Khord Kabul,
29:51they had spent two nights out in the open in three-foot snow,
29:55in temperatures of minus 15, without tents,
29:58waking up to discover frozen corpses around them.
30:01They staggered into this valley, starving, frozen,
30:07with no supplies and 80 miles to go,
30:10and it was at that point that the attack began.
30:28Behind every boulder was an Afghan with a musket,
30:33taking 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,
30:48but for five miles of a ravine.
31:00By the time they reached the end of that valley,
31:0290% of the British army had been extinguished.
31:19A handful of soldiers managed to fight their way through,
31:23but 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.
31:39They're relying only on their bandits.
31:41And the picture we see here is half of them are dead,
31:43and the patans are about to close in and end it with their swords.
31:49Of the 17,000 men, women and children
31:52who'd set out nine days earlier from Kabul,
31:55only one made it to 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,
32:06about to collapse,
32:07and he is seen limping towards Jalalabad.
32:10And they assume he's only the first of thousands of troops
32:13to make it through,
32:14and the gates are opened and a party's sent out.
32:17And they realise he's the only one.
32:19And that night, the commanding officer
32:21orders the bugles to be sounded all night.
32:26The wind was blowing very strongly that night.
32:29And rather than billowing out into the plain of Jalalabad,
32:33it blew back into the town.
32:35And he said that the noise of the trumpets
32:39echoing amid the wail of the wind
32:41sounded like an elegy to the dead army.
32:45The British Empire never had, and never would,
32:49experience a defeat like it.
32:51The First Afghan War was a major event for the Afghans.
32:55We always see it through our perspective
32:56as the great imperial disaster.
32:58But for the Afghans, this was their Trafalgar,
33:01their Battle of Britain, their Waterloo all in one.
33:05They were the only non-colonial power to see off
33:10a modern westernised army in the 19th century,
33:14on the magnificent scale that they did,
33:18and completely destroy an entire Victorian army
33:21at 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
33:42is the first Anglo-Afghan War.
33:44After that, it never really goes away.
33:48Beginning with the British invasions,
33:50Afghans 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.
33:59You know, you got to go into infidel lands
34:03and take home a lot of good stuff.
34:05But inside Afghanistan, you couldn't do jihad.
34:08Now, when these foreigners invaded,
34:09people would say, yes, we're fighting non-Muslims.
34:14The British government would have liked
34:16to cover up the extent of this tragedy, but it was not to be.
34:20Almost every last grisly detail
34:23was 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.
34:34And later released.
34:35And her original diaries and letters
34:38are 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.
34:51And 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.
35:09To 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.
35:23This 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 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 at all.
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.
36:19Not 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
36:36was indeed propaganda, I think.
36:39She was paraded before Queen Victoria.
36:40There 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 the fact
36:54that we're really lions.
36:55Yes.
36:56Yeah.
37:01The British Empire had been humiliated,
37:04and the defeat was seared into our historical memory,
37:08creating 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 the British sent an army of retribution,
37:21which sought savage revenge for its losses
37:24and razed to the ground Kabul's historic bazaar.
37:27But having dealt the Afghans a punishing blow,
37:30instead of occupying the country,
37:33they 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 two,
38:00but he tells the British,
38:02I understand your needs, you 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,
38:15to 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, no,
38:27I've signed an agreement with the British,
38:29and besides, I think they're going to win.
38:34The Afghans took enormous pride in their resistance to the British,
38:38and the political settlement led to a period of confidence
38:41and relative stability,
38:43during 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,
39:38the Afghan emir signed an agreement with the British.
39:41But a new envoy, Sir Louis Cavanares,
39:43another swashbuckling multilingual officer,
39:46was installed in Kabul.
39:48Remembering that Burns had been massacred,
39:50escaping from his unfortified house in the old city,
39:54Cavanares took up residency in this ancient citadel,
39:57the Bala Hisar.
39:59Sir Louis Cavanares, the new British envoy,
40:02rode in on his elephant into this citadel
40:05with 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.
40:16And never touch the local women.
40:19But despite all his care,
40:22he was soon hearing rumours that the Afghans wanted to kill him.
40:27Cavanares 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
41:16and they took, you know, the East Indian Company,
41:19you know, was so successful in India,
41:20they figured, ah, Afghanistan, rowdy people, you know,
41:23with baggy pants and turbans, you know,
41:25easy to rule, easy to control.
41:27But they forgot that Afghanistan is a nation of warriors.
41:31I couldn't help asking him
41:33if we were making the same mistakes today.
41:36There was an American, I will not say which organisation,
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,
41:59they will do one of two things,
42:00either invite you in
42:01or they will send somebody out to meet with you.
42:04Then once they invite you in,
42:06you 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,
42:13you will have them in your pocket.
42:14The 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 and Kabul.
42:27Finally, an Afghan regiment mutinied and marched on his residence.
42:32Kavanari 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
42:59and to strike it swiftly and deeply.
43:03Four weeks after the envoy was killed,
43:06a highland regiment had fought its way to the top of that ridgeline.
43:10And the next day, General Roberts had seized Kabul.
43:13He came here to the citadel,
43:15where he saw the blood-spattered walls
43:17and the mangled corpse of the envoy and his comrades.
43:22Enraged, General Roberts set up a gallows on the wall.
43:25He hanged a hundred Afghans,
43:27demolished the palaces of the Afghan nobility,
43:30and at that point, with honour satisfied,
43:33many suggested he should withdraw.
43:35But the Afghan king had been deposed.
43:38The country was unstable.
43:40Britain had taken responsibility for Afghanistan
43:43and leaving no longer seemed an option.
43:49While General Roberts sat in Kabul,
43:51the countryside was now in revolt.
43:55Suddenly, a jihad had been called against them
43:58and when they looked out on a winter evening
44:00from their small camp in Kabul,
44:02they could see right along this ridgeline
44:0460,000 watchfires burning
44:08from Afghans bent on their destruction.
44:11It must have seemed as though history
44:14was repeating itself exactly.
44:17And the one lesson that Britain should be taking away
44:20was never to invade Afghanistan.
44:23This time, unlike his predecessor,
44:26General Roberts decided to stay and fight
44:29and he was able just to withstand the siege
44:32of his compound in Kabul.
44:34But in Helmand province,
44:35the Afghans completely defeated
44:38and 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 Aryan, an Afghan living in London,
44:51at this British memorial to Maiwand.
44:54History has it that the Afghans won
44:56because of the rousing battle cry
44:58of a young woman called Malalai.
45:01She's an ordinary Afghan girl.
45:03As she's standing in the battle,
45:05she can see that Afghans are losing.
45:07And she stood there, took a veil off and said,
45:11if you love your country and if you're real Pashtun
45:13and if you don't want to be ashamed,
45:15you have to go and fight the British.
45:17Remember when Elizabeth stood
45:19in 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,
45:30in some ways, it's a kind of shame for her and her family.
45:33Everybody sees her face, but she's going to die,
45:35so it doesn't matter.
45:35Absolutely.
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
45:46and the retreat from Kabul,
45:47Maiwand was not covered in a serialisation in the times.
45:51So although a thousand British soldiers were killed,
45:54this 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.
46:03This battle, like the retreat from Kabul,
46:07is still the stuff of legend.
46:09As an Afghan child, as you learn how to walk,
46:13you know about the battles we had with the British.
46:16Uh-huh.
46:16It's part of our DNA.
46:18It'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 sunny, hot day.
46:28We didn't have as much as...
46:29The Afghans had superior firepower.
46:31How can Afghan army have a superior firepower than the British?
46:36British troops fighting in Helmand today are often warned by local Afghans
46:41that they will meet the same fate as 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.
47:06This 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.
47:13For 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.
47:25Honestly it is.
47:27Because nobody believed that.
47:28Afghans wouldn't accept that.
47:30How can somebody bring peace with a gun and weapons?
47:33You 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.
47:48There followed one of the most celebrated marches
47:51of the entire Victorian era.
47:53General Roberts with an elite band of Gurkhas and Highlanders
47:57set off from Kabul through unknown territory with no support.
48:02320 miles in 20 days in 100 degree heat.
48:08Arrived safe at Kandahar and 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?
48:26All the fears, all the pride that had dragged them into Afghanistan
48:30were 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,
48:54who 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.
49:22After decades of battling Russian influence in Afghanistan,
49:27the British Empire, at the peak of its power,
49:30bowed to Afghan realities and struck a deal with their opponent.
49:35Just as in 1842, Britain again allowed the most powerful Afghan leader
49:41to take the throne, even though he was their enemy.
49:45Abd al-Rahman was an ally of the Russians
49:47and had been living on Russian soil,
49:49but he was the only man who seemed to have the support and authority
49:53to 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
50:02and put the Taliban back in charge.
50:06This extraordinary gamble paid off.
50:09For his part, the new king Abd al-Rahman demanded a massive subsidy
50:13and no internal interference in his country.
50:17In return, Britain got control of Afghan foreign policy,
50:20and most importantly, Abd al-Rahman did not allow the Russians
50:24to threaten British India.
50:25For Britain, it was a perfect solution.
50:35And even when Europe descended into the First World War,
50:39Afghanistan 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,
51:00had its own ambitions.
51:05For the first time, Afghanistan, so often on the receiving end
51:08of British firepower, itself became the principal aggressor.
51:13The new king of Afghanistan saw Britain exhausted by war,
51:17facing unrest in India.
51:20He called another jihad, took his chance,
51:22and 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,
51:38Britain saw less need for an interest in Afghanistan,
51:41and granted the Afghans full independence.
51:49But what Afghanistan did with that independence
51:51was 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
52:05in the Middle Ages.
52:07The 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,
52:28but through an Afghan king.
52:32King Amanullah ruled from this extravagant palace
52:35in 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
52:47had changed little in the century that had passed
52:50since Britain first took an interest here.
52:53It was a country with almost blanket illiteracy,
52:55a fragmented country of isolated villages and mountain valleys
53:00under feudal rule, the way Britain had found it and left it.
53:09Dreaming of modernity in 1927, Amanullah embarks on a grand European tour,
53:15the first such trip by an Afghan ruler.
53:21The Afghan king arrived in Britain for a full state visit.
53:26The flags were out.
53:28And a slightly anxious British government responded in time-honoured fashion
53:32by taking him to shop for guns and for cars,
53:36which his impoverished country could hardly afford.
53:47And when he toured the Rolls-Royce factory,
53:50he 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,
54:00now owned by businessman Richard Rainsford.
54:04For an Afghan, possessing this car really shows
54:07that you're part of an international group.
54:08You're no longer part of an isolated country
54:11at the other end of the world.
54:12Well, that's right. He was a very sophisticated man.
54:14When he went to Europe in 1928,
54:16he was not just looking for Rolls-Royce cars,
54:19he was looking really to means to be inspired by the West
54:23to how he could modernise his very backward country.
54:26And therefore, the Rolls-Royce trip to the Derby works
54:30was part of that overall quest for inspiration and for modernisation.
54:39A car like this, at the time, was a pretty expensive thing.
54:44It would cost as much as a house in Fulham.
54:46It would cost about £1,500 for the chassis
54:48and another £1,500, even more, up to £2,000 for the 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,
55:05I imagine, to an Afghanistan farmer or peasant.
55:12I think it's tempting today when we look at a car like this
55:15to imagine Amanullah as some sort of corrupt 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
55:31or a new computer system.
55:32He's coming back with whole new interests in railways and printing machines
55:37and mining technology and medicine.
55:40But for the Conservatives in Afghanistan,
55:42this is all very dangerous and very dubious.
55:45The big story that's spreading through the streets when he arrives
55:47is he's bringing back a new machine to turn human corpses into soap.
55:54Amanullah was just beginning to discover how conservative his country still was.
55:58Wild rumours were circulating about how he had become a Catholic.
56:02Ate pork, drank alcohol.
56:05He became perceived as a foreigner in his own land,
56:09attempting to impose a foreign ideology on his own people.
56:14It's easy to laugh at Amanullah, and indeed there's a lot that you can laugh at him for.
56:18For example, he gathered the tribal elders
56:20and insisted they wore pinstripe trousers and western jackets.
56:24But there was also a highly developed, serious programme of reform.
56:29In fact, the most radical programme for state transformation in Afghanistan
56:32came from an Afghan.
56:34He wanted parliamentary elections, a progressive constitution,
56:38education particularly for women.
56:40And in the end, when photographs were circulated in the bazaar
56:44of his wife the Queen, with her head uncovered,
56:47with pearls over a plunging neckline,
56:50he had to flee.
56:52The wheels of that new Rolls Royce spinning vainly in the snow
56:56to exile in Italy.
57:04It is ironic, when today we're concerned with a powerful hold of Islam
57:08and the problems of establishing democracy in that country,
57:12that the only attempt in this whole period to modernise and democratise Afghanistan
57:17didn't come from British rule, but from the 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.
57:30It was about the fears of empire, fear of empty space, fear of the Russians,
57:35fear in the end about their own credibility, their pride.
57:41In the second film, two superpowers come calling.
57:46And these armies invade Afghanistan not just to protect their selfish strategic aims,
57:51but also with the objective of bringing profound social change
57:56and reshaping Afghanistan more in their own image.
57:59And the result, for the people of Afghanistan and their invaders,
58:05was to be even greater horror and tragedy.
58:09If you were going to pass a message to the American and British troops today,
58:13what would you say to them?
58:15What would you say to them?
58:23I'd like to pick up my brother and his help .
58:24I'd like to pick up my brother and his family up here and get there,
58:25as soon as he met.
58:26I've been waiting for a while to get there.
58:26it has been a practice in this film to get there now.
58:30I'm waiting for the time,
58:31I'm waiting for the world to get there.
58:31We're waiting for life.
58:33It's money for aaya and the retaining of the militia.
58:34Do the defense of the militia.
58:35Obrigado.
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