Grand Strategy and the Graveyard of Assumptions: Britain and Afghanistan, 1839–1919

Abstract

This article comprises a reply to those who seek to use the British historical experience in Afghanistan in order to draw parallels with current operations in that country. It argues that, while the conceptual and physical response to the issue of Afghanistan on the part of Empire policy-makers during the period 1839–1919 was characterised by periods of indecision and mistaken assumptions, their grasp of strategic principles allowed the formulation of a series of Afghan policies that would serve to protect and indeed enhance British interests in the region for over a century and which stand in stark contrast to the seemingly incoherent Afghan strategy articulated by the current British government.

Key Words:

• History
• Strategy
• Afghanistan

That Afghanistan has proved historically to be an awkward nut to crack is not in dispute. The travails of the British Empire and Soviet Union attest to that and the experience of the former especially appears to have exerted a subtle yet powerful grip on the minds of observers and commentators. As a result, a consistent and powerful narrative has emerged in the popular consciousness in relation to the present coalition campaign in Afghanistan. For, in addition to justified complaints about the lack of any clear and effective political or military strategy post-2001 designed to rescue Afghanistan from seemingly everlasting conflict and the continued predations of the Taliban, one hears repeatedly of the graveyard of Empires, of lost ambitions and grand folly; of disappointment, disillusionment and, ultimately, defeat. Commentators lament the naivety of policy-makers seeking to challenge the ‘lessons’ of history and delight in the retelling of past disasters. Ultimately, they dictate that Afghanistan and its people, as they have done repeatedly throughout history, will thwart the designs of ambitious powers. In short, and with the weight of history behind it, this narrative tells us that desired strategic outcomes in Afghanistan are futile and lead only to a diminution in the power and reputation of those that try.1

This represents a fundamental misreading of history and a misapprehension, in relation to Britain's historical engagement at least, of the nature of success in relation to Afghanistan. The seemingly relentless adherence to the notion of British ‘failure’ has encouraged observers to draw lessons from the Imperial past and apply them to the current situation without either properly understanding the rationale behind British regional engagement during that period or accounting for the vast differences in strategic considerations. And while there were undeniably glaring shortcomings in the conceptualisation of, and response to, the issue of Afghanistan during this period, there has been a blurring of understanding as to the fundamental reasons behind British engagement and at what level precisely – tactical, operational, strategic or grand strategic – any failure might have occurred.

In response to this overwhelmingly negative appreciation, therefore, this article seeks to clarify the nature of historical Anglo-Afghan interaction during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offering a more nuanced judgement than that which has hitherto dominated popular consciousness. In order to provide this, the essay will review some of the conceptual approaches to strategic thought and, by highlighting the confusing, counterintuitive and often cosmetic inter-relationship between results at the tactical and operational levels of war and those at the grand strategic, and above all by stressing the sheer subjectivity of ‘success’ at the latter level, it will seek to establish this more balanced assessment of Britain's historical interventions in Afghanistan during the period 1839–1919, that period of time which spanned the three Anglo-Afghan wars and the intervening political settlements.

Of course, to claim that the British historical experience in Afghanistan can serve as an object lesson in the effortless achievement of strategic goals would be just as misleading, and erroneous, as the repetitive exclamations of defeat and disaster. But equally, if we judge Britain's Afghan strategy in light of wider strategic appreciations, it becomes clear that Empire policy-makers maintained a surer grip upon some of the fundamental aspects of strategy-making than their modern counterparts; most notably their grasp of the ‘ends, ways and means’ of achieving strategic objectives; of the relationship between military effect and grand strategy; of the limits of power and of the importance of the ‘long game’. And, ultimately, an awareness that the effectiveness of British strategy could not be judged on the basis of ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’, but by far more fluid and subjective analysis of costs and benefits.

Grand Strategy

As Hew Strachan and others have observed, the term ‘strategy’ appears to have lost all meaning in recent years, being applied in a multitude of ways to fields well outside of the military/political realm.2 But even when situated within its traditional sphere, definitions have expanded over time. Prior to World War I, strategy tended to be defined by relatively narrow parameters, locating it firmly within the field of military operations and warfare.3 However, the concept broadened over time to encompass notions of power and the utility of diplomatic, economic and cultural means among others, and witnessed the gradual emergence of grand strategy; the ‘level of final outcomes’ according to Edward Luttwak.4 So whereas traditional nineteenth and early twentieth century theorists tended to view strategy as articulated by Clausewitz that is, ‘The use of engagement for the purposes of war’, more modern interpretations tend to allow for a far broader reach.5

Colin Gray and Sir Lawrence Freedman both define strategy in terms of its relationship to the ‘ends’ and ‘means’ of policy, Gray stating that, ‘[S]trategy is the bridge that relates military power to political purpose … [it] is the use made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy’; while Freedman opines that ‘[S]trategy is … the relationship between (political) ends and (military, economic, political etc) means. It is the art of creating power.’6 This concept of ‘ends’ and ‘means’ similarly underpins the thinking of John Lewis Gaddis, and when this essay talks of British ‘strategy’ with regard to Afghanistan, it does so with his definition of grand strategy, namely the calculated relation of ends and means by the state to achieve its policy objectives, in mind.7 And with regard to ‘ends’ we bear in mind Liddell Hart's emphasis that grand strategy is as much about peace as it is about war, and it is about the evolution and integration of policies that should operate for decades or even centuries.8 As for the ‘means’ to achieve those ends, those are not intended to be specifically military, but encompass also the political, cultural, social, moral and spiritual power of the state.9

Gaddis' definition helps provide clarity to another murky issue, notably the conflation over time of strategy and policy. While at the lower levels of war a particular politico/military strategy might be clearly seen to serve policy objectives, that distinction is often harder to make at the grand strategic level whereby actions (grand strategy) and intentions (policy) appear to merge into one another in the search to achieve higher national objectives, becoming in the words of one observer, ‘Incestuously interwoven … an opaque articulation of ways, ends and means’.10 As Gaddis makes clear, grand strategy should comprise the vehicle through which policy is served but in return, as Paul Kennedy states, grand strategy relies on coherent policy, namely the capacity of the polity to bring together all of the elements required – military and non-military – for the preservation and enhancement of the nation's long-term best interests.11

Problems in defining and discerning between grand strategy and policy are compounded somewhat by the inherent difficulty in determining the success of either.12 Even at the lower levels of strategy, explicit terms such as victory or defeat tend to raise more questions than they answer and given the ambiguities and subjectivity inherent to the process one must ask whether they are particularly useful at all in their application at the grand strategic level. At the higher strategic level, the problems are obvious. According to Liddell Hart, victory in the true sense can only be judged by the state of peace achieved subsequent to conflict.13 So for those that define victory or success by the clear correlation between (war) aims and (war) outcomes, what if policy-makers identify a wrong-headed end state that leads to a worse state of ‘peace’, making the accomplishment of any particular strategy meaningless or irrelevant?14

In contrast to this tendency to utilise this ‘fixed end-state’ identification to define success, others emphasise the value of a far more fluid cost/benefit ratio to determine the degree to which policy objectives have been met. The difficulty being of course that interpretation of costs and benefits is again often entirely subjective and varies wildly according to a variety of factors. Nevertheless, some consider this – the ability of the state to exercise judgement in balancing the risk of losing vital interests against the cost of securing them – to be the ultimate judgement of effective grand strategy; a metric that applies effectively to this analysis of historical British intervention in Afghanistan.15

What is without doubt, however, is the near-impossibility of drawing a straight line between events at the tactical level and effect at the grand strategic. Strategy in the military sense has been characterised as the way in which, ‘[M]ilitary force creates political effect.’16 That effect, however, is hugely difficult to accurately forecast. This lack of any universal correlation between military strategy and grand strategy creates a situation where measured disharmony is the norm, rather than the exception.17 For while at the military level the result is fairly easy to discern – win, lose or draw – the relationship between the military and strategic levels is often complex, uncertain and unpredictable: ‘Brilliant achievements at the technical, tactical, operational levels … may translate directly, or have quite the opposite effect, or even remain without consequence in the confluence of grand strategy.’18

And added to this non-linearity of effect, there is the inherently paradoxical nature of strategy and strategy-making, amply illustrated by Luttwak's simple analogy of the ‘bad road’. Although his scenario refers to a tactical level decision, it applies equally well at the highest strategic level and it demands that when analysing events such as the British military defeats in Afghanistan, that one be prepared to acknowledge the possibility, contrary to what appear to be clear-cut instances of damaging failure, that bad can indeed equal good.19

The phenomenally unpredictable and counter-intuitive nature of strategy-making has been highlighted in glaring terms most recently by the experience, in Iraq, of both the UK and US, and in the case of Pakistan, in its relationship with Afghanistan since the mid-1990s.20 These three examples illustrate the ease with which apparently clear-minded political strategies undermine, and are in turn undermined by, military strategies; the subjective nature of success and failure; the difficulty of achieving success at all levels of strategy and the sheer unpredictability of strategic effect. And these contemporary examples bring us back to the questions posed at the very beginning. How should we judge the effectiveness of grand strategy? Is there a tendency sometimes to misunderstand the nature of success? Does success or failure at the military level still blind some observers to the reality of events at the very highest levels of strategy? And in light of these questions, how should we assess British historical interventions in Afghanistan?

The Nature of the Threat

‘Contemporary Afghanistan … had become a true ‘buffer’ state in exactly the way that England desired.’ 21

Before analysing the nature and circumstance of Britain's Afghan engagements 1839–1919, it is worth clarifying the wider strategic picture that prevailed in the minds of those policy-makers and military commanders tasked with formulating appropriate and effective strategy. Britain during the period under discussion was divided conceptually and physically between the United Kingdom on the one hand and the Indian Empire on the other; two entities faced with the presence between them of Russia, a rival empire operating on interior lines. Relatively invulnerable to British naval power, it was remorselessly furthering the extent of its own territory in Central Asia, a policy that impacted heavily upon British India's interests in that same region.22 This rival empire, however, was also a potential ally for the United Kingdom among the shifting political sands of mid- to late-nineteenth century Europe, acting as a potential counterweight to French and German influence.

Consequently, for much of the period under discussion, both the United Kingdom and British India were forced to view Russia through the prism of their respective strategic concerns; the former wary of its interference in the delicate balance of power in Europe, the latter concerned with the potential implications of its growing encroachment into Central Asia, a concern most volubly articulated by its own influential military hierarchy.23 A strategy of protecting Britain's European interests by accommodating the growing Russian presence in Central Asia might simply increase the vulnerability of British India, whereas precipitate action by British India in defence of its own interests might harm Britain's European concerns. The so-called Great Game, therefore, if indeed it ever existed in the way that we have been led to understand, was less a simple power-play against a rival power in the wastes of Central Asia than a long-term, sophisticated strategic level intercourse that reciprocated between London, Calcutta and St Petersburg and encompassed a variety of regional actors and distractions.24 And for Britain of course, this rivalry was simply one of many pressing strategic concerns that extended around the globe.25

For the British then, from the early 1800s until the same point a century later, the vexatious issue of Afghanistan sat within a particularly complex strategic environment characterised by great power rivalry, competing priorities on the part of London and Calcutta, rival political philosophies within the Indian administration itself, an energetic and forceful Indian military command structure that added its own weight to the strategic debate and a series of global concerns that stretched both attention and resources. Whatever policy was decided had not only to deter Russia but simultaneously avoid the potential for conflict, and do so with the maximum economies in the military and financial resources that comprised the foundations of the British Raj. And yet Britain's varying Afghan strategies would, over time, manage to satisfy these competing demands, a fact that reflects a fundamental grasp of grand strategy. That it must be judged on more than just military defeats, or a failure to establish political control. Rather, the results yielded are a matter of subjective interpretation – each government maintains its own goals and therefore measures results accordingly. It is clear therefore that in relation to British strategy in Afghanistan, these goals must be clarified.26

Part of the reason for the common notion of British strategic failure in Afghanistan is misunderstanding of what policy-makers were trying to achieve. Conventional wisdom dictates that the British occupied Afghanistan in order to create a pro-British buffer state able to withstand the onward march of Russian influence that would result eventually in a physical invasion of British India. The subsequent inability of the British on two occasions to dominate Afghanistan, exert political control and transform it into the requisite vessel for their influence thus represented a major failure of strategy and a savage blow to the reputation of a Great Power. This is, however, a hugely simplistic and one-dimensional analysis of events which encourages modern-day observers to draw correspondingly simplistic and one-dimensional conclusions as to the ability of Imperial Britain (and thus any modern-day actor) to shape Afghanistan to its advantage. For while it is true to say that the British were baffled and defeated in their attempts to transform Afghanistan into the desired agent of British influence, experiencing difficulties just as severe as those of today, the British concept of shaping Afghanistan to meet strategic requirements did not require, by necessity, physical or political control. And the reason for this was the nature of the prize, and the nature of the threat at hand.

The prize, of course, was not Afghanistan but India – the basis of British global strength. In truth, the ability of the Russian Empire to mount an armed invasion of India at any point during the period under discussion was remote; indeed, it has been argued convincingly that due to the immense physical and logistical challenges posed, Russia never seriously contemplated such a move, certainly not prior to the 1870s.27 But British Indian policy-makers, and senior military officers especially, were witnessing a seemingly remorseless Russian advance across Central Asia.28 They feared, therefore, a Russian presence in Afghanistan or on the borders of India that might, by its symbolic challenge to British authority, lead to the nightmarish scenario of widespread political agitation and unrest within India – the rise of the ‘internal enemy’.29

Were such an event to occur, the Indian Army, a fundamental component of British global reach, would be transformed from an expeditionary to a garrison force and Britain would be required to pour financial and military resources into India that it could ill-afford in an attempt to maintain control; a course of action that might ultimately have the effect of transforming the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ into an endless drain on resources, forcing Britain to relinquish its position on the subcontinent in order to preserve power elsewhere.30 How to best prevent this state of affairs from arising would consume the thoughts of generations of British Indian policy-makers and senior military officers.31

Fractious debates over the correct strategy to be adopted would ensue, centring on the competing ‘forward’ and ‘close border’ schools of thought – the former envisaging an advance to meet the threat posed by directly forestalling a Russian presence before it reached India, while the latter proposed using the inherent nature of Afghanistan itself as a defensive buffer. Therefore, as Malcolm Yapp's seminal Strategies of British India suggests, physical control of Afghanistan was but one option available to the British as they sought to address the immensely complex and strategically vital issue of Indian security.32 But ultimately, the forward and close border policies were simply two sides of the same coin – a response to the potential threat of the ‘internal enemy’. The former sought to tackle that threat by using available resources to address and deflect any external stimuli. The latter, alternatively, preferred to husband those scarce resources within India, using them to directly address the internal enemy and thus, by extension, strengthen British India against the external threat. And despite the headline interventions in 1839 and 1878, over the vast majority of the period under discussion it was the latter which proved preferable to British policy-makers.33

Consequently, if one seeks to use the British colonial experience of Afghanistan as a negative model for the fraught nature of intervention in that country, (and an accurate model at that), one must also accept that throughout, the British displayed a clear minded appreciation of their ultimate strategic intent. Even when the flawed forward policy was utilised, it was able to disrupt rival influence in Afghanistan while avoiding the consumption of resources that could not be spared without damaging British interests elsewhere; a fundamental grasp of Gaddis' balance between risks and costs. In the autumn of 1842 it was decided that the cost of maintaining a position in Afghanistan in the face of Afghan hostility was greater than the Government of India was willing to sustain, especially in light of the fact that the apparent Russian menace had receded. Similarly, in 1881 it was decided that, after reconquering Afghanistan, any potential merit in maintaining a British presence was outweighed by the material and fiscal burden of occupation – far better to exert influence from afar by a combination of control of Afghanistan's foreign relations and subsidies to its ruler. Even in May 1919, the occasion of the Third Anglo-Afghan War, when Afghanistan invaded British India, largely in an effort to shake off the shackles of external control of its foreign relations, the Government of India considered it prudent to allow the relinquishing of such influence, despite the ease with which it had defeated the joint Afghan-Pashtun tribal force. The Russian threat had, realistically, disappeared and the gains of trying to exert control over the Afghan government were, again, simply not worth the costs involved.34

The Anglo-Afghan wars of the nineteenth century present us, therefore, with a curious dilemma. If one takes the orthodox view, British strategy – the attempted transformation of Afghanistan into a guaranteed pro-British buffer state – was reduced to tatters on both occasions. Despite its unrivalled military strength and political influence the world's Great Power had been unable to shape the political picture in Afghanistan to its own satisfaction; a grand strategic failure and a state of affairs that only appears to pander to current fears. Yet in reality Britain could feel relatively well satisfied with the outcome of its Afghan policy. Potential conflict with Russia was avoided and regional tensions resolved relatively amicably by way of the Anglo-Russian Accords of 1907.35 And despite the defeats, misadventures and suffering of three Anglo-Afghan wars – 1839–42, 1878–81 and 1919 respectively – at no point did Afghanistan or events in Afghanistan upset a potentially fragile situation in India where only 60,000 British soldiers and roughly the same number of civilian administrators held sway over 300 million Indians, a people and country that represented the foundation stone of the entire British Empire.36

Ultimately, the failure of direct intervention in Afghanistan in 1839–42 and 1879–81 did not matter to the British in the most elevated of strategic terms – this was not a zero sum game by any means. Policy-makers were able to distinguish between the failure of policies, namely gaining physical control over Afghanistan and altering the nature of its society, and a failure at the grand strategic level. For them, failure in Afghanistan in true strategic terms would be measured by one simple metric – the loss of India. Britain could afford to fail in Afghanistan at the lower levels of war for the simple reason that British failure had to be accompanied by a commensurate increase in influence on the part of a rival power and/or a weakening of Britain's own authority within India. Fortunately for Britain the inherent weakness of that rival and the sheer difficulty for any external power to shape events in Afghanistan to suit its objectives, combined with the determination of policy-makers to match their relatively limited means with the required ends, meant that the loss of a few tens of thousand mainly native soldiers during two failed interventions was a justifiable if regrettable price to pay for denying both external and internal enemies the time and space needed to exert pressure on British India. In the most simple terms, Britain may have been forced out of Afghanistan in 1842, but it did not leave India until 1947, and it did so voluntarily.

Military Defeat versus Strategic Defeat

As Liddell Hart states, the classic error in war is to mistake military victory for political victory.37 But the reverse – the fact that military defeat does not mean political or strategic defeat – is equally valid. And the Anglo-Afghan wars are a classic example of the way in which military effect should be judged accurately in its relation to the achievement of strategic aims. Why is this of importance? Because the dominant narrative regarding British fortunes in the First and Second Anglo-Afghan wars is one of defeat.38 With the Soviet experience in mind, this has led to a seemingly all-pervasive pessimism concerning the probability of military success in Afghanistan in the modern day, a failing that will ultimately result in a fatal inability to achieve strategic objectives.

There is no disguising the fact that the British met with numerous military reverses over the course of their engagements in Afghanistan. But as historians and strategists well know, history is replete with examples of military failure proving no obstacle to strategic success.39 Good strategy, as both Thomas Mahnken and David Lonsdale propose, is the effective translation of military effect into political results. They do not, however, stipulate the need for victory – merely effect.40 And the real purpose, argues Mahnken, is ultimately to convince the enemy that they cannot achieve their aims.41 And here is the key point in relation to British intervention in Afghanistan; the enemy was not Afghans or Afghan leaders, but those who might challenge British primacy in India.

For the British, military defeat in Afghanistan meant relatively little, in detrimental terms, at the strategic level. Partly this was because on each occasion defeat was swiftly and comprehensively avenged, partly because military casualties were on both occasions relatively limited and partly because the British, by virtue of their expeditionary nature, were relatively inured, on a conceptual level, to such occurrences.42 But the main reason why defeat meant relatively little was to be found in those curious paradoxes that war throws up, and because the British were able to achieve the desired ‘effect’, regardless of the outcome of military engagements. Rather counter-intuitively, one could argue that military defeat in Afghanistan during the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars actually benefited British strategic interests. On both occasions, had Britain secured control of Afghanistan it would simply have been yet another vast expanse of territory requiring the presence of troops that could be ill-afforded from the defence of India, and the extension of British interests even further into Central Asia, thus only encouraging the possibility of direct contact with Russian forces, themselves wary of a British ‘springboard’ into their central Asian territories.43

In the event, fears of overstretch and any potential Great Power tension were quelled by withdrawal from Afghanistan, as were, somewhat counter-intuitively, concerns over possible dissident activity in India. Fears were strong in 1842 especially, but also 1880, as to how news of British defeat by native forces would be greeted by dissidents within India. Yet the logic of defeat in both cases dictated that scarce military resources, rather than remaining in Afghanistan to support the residual British presence, or indeed reintroduced in numbers in an effort to salvage prestige, were instead withdrawn and shepherded back into India, reinforcing the infrastructure of imperial rule.44 Certainly with respect to the events of 1842, the merit of this decision was amplified by the events of 1857–58 and the Great Rebellion.45 A close run thing at certain points, had 10,000 or 15,000 troops been stationed in Afghanistan rather than India, one might potentially have witnessed a strategy that allowed Britain to strengthen its grip on a now meaningless satellite state as the foundations of its Indian possessions, and therefore the Empire as a whole, crumbled before its eyes. Indeed, had the rebellion spread to native sepoys in Afghanistan, it may have lost both in turn.

With regard to the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–81), not only did withdrawal allow the conservation of resources, but military defeat was used to magnify martial prowess. Although the destruction of a British brigade at Maiwand in July 1880 was a shock on a par with defeat at Isandhlwana in South Africa the previous year, the then Major-General Sir Frederick Roberts' legendary march from Kabul to Kandahar and his speedy destruction of the Afghan force responsible transformed the episode into a celebration of British arms. The Viceroy, Lord Ripon, exclaimed to Roberts that ‘[Y]our march … has seemed to me to be one of the most remarkable exploits of its kind upon record.’46 Indeed, such was the delight over Roberts' victory that one observer commented: ‘[T]he perfect success of Roberts's operation brings the war to a close that must be satisfactory to the Government and a carping press.’47

And the issue of military defeat in Afghanistan poses another question that deserves to be addressed. Why, even as late as the turn of the century and subsequent to two apparently disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, was Britain evidently interested in mounting further operations there in furtherance of its interests?48 Were British policy-makers so blind to the events of the past, and seemingly so stupid, that they were willing to engage yet again in an apparently guaranteed folly? Or was the traumatic experience of defeat in Afghanistan rather less traumatic than is supposed?

First, the assumption that Afghanistan as a whole was inherently and incessantly resistant to any British presence overstates the case somewhat. Due to its disparate and fragmented nature, described as more of a ‘geographical expression’ than a country, it was in reality comprised, for much of the period under discussion, of power centres in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat.49 Therefore, when one talks in the historical sense of British disaster in Afghanistan, one is talking more accurately of Eastern Afghanistan, and Kabul in particular, rather than the country as a whole. Indeed, in the Kandahar region the British felt their presence to be so secure and advantageous that policy-makers repeatedly recommended annexation under British influence.50

Most importantly, of course, military defeat had little negative effect in the strategic sense. Post 1842, Dost Muhammad, who had ousted the British favourite Shah Shuja, served the Government of India's interests perhaps more effectively than either Shuja or their own continued occupation may have guaranteed. He remained neutral during the tough campaigns against the Sikhs in 1845–46 and 1848–49 that eventually brought the British conquest of the Punjab and, crucially, kept his counsel during the Great Rebellion at a point when the effective dominion of British India lay in the balance. Most importantly, of course, he resisted Russian intrigues and showed no inclination to ally himself to any interests that threatened those of Britain.51 A similar pattern emerged post 1881 and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Although the war had originated through faulty appreciations of Russian intentions, withdrawal (eventually) left in place a relatively amenable ruler, Emir Abd-er-Rahman, who in return for subsidies placed control of his foreign relations in the hands of the British. Despite his prickly attitude toward the presence of British authority on his eastern border and his habit of proving his independence from British authority, Abd-er-Rahman was even more resistant to the gradual encroachment of Russian influence, as evidenced by the numerous clashes between Afghan and Russian units, notably at Panjdeh in 1885.52 Simply put, in common with the First Anglo-Afghan War, military defeat resulted in an agreeable political settlement that served British interests by not serving Russian interests.

Even the Third Anglo-Afghan War of May 1919 provided succour to observers. Despite occurring so soon after the conclusion of a gruelling global conflict, and thus forcing exhausted Empire troops into action just at the moment that they were looking forward to demobilisation, Sir George Roos-Keppel, Chief Commissioner of the North-West Frontier Province at the time, cabled the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, with his perspective on events:

On the whole it is a good thing that this outburst happened. Our interception of Afghan correspondence proves quite clearly the close connection between Afghanistan and the revolutionary party in India. Now the people not only in Afghanistan but India have been shown what we can do when we are aroused from our slumbers … Our recent successes have had a remarkable effect but the greatest effect of all has been caused by the never ceasing arrival of troops at a time when people thought we had no troops left.53

Intelligence and Debate

Of course, one could argue that such beneficial developments were a case of accident rather than design. But although the path of Britain's Afghan strategy was not a smooth one, to make such a claim would not only be doing a disservice to its architects but it would have to account for how an accidental policy was able to safeguard British interests for over a century. In reality, policy-makers were required to cope with competing ideologies, shortfalls in resources, an overbearing military and a dissonance in strategic perspectives between London and Calcutta, all of which posed huge obstacles to the formulation of a coherent response to the strategic challenge of Indian defence. And with regard to Afghanistan specifically, they had to act in awareness of seemingly insurmountable gaps in their knowledge and understanding.54 Yet despite these difficulties, the challenge was met.

And it was met through a combination of intelligence, reason, flexibility and self-assessment. Intelligence, in that the ability to maintain control of India for so long, in the face of such a multitude of pressures and with such constraints on resources, could be achieved no other way.55 Reason, in terms of the fact that those responsible for formulating strategy engaged in a dynamic, constant and reciprocating debate over the merits of respective approaches, a debate which sounded not only through the highest levels of the political and military hierarchy, but within public circles too, and which enjoyed the free, fair and continual exchange of ideas.56 Flexibility, in that those same policy-makers used events in Afghanistan to discern between what was essential and what was not and reacted accordingly. In other words, war was used to clarify what was important and thus reinforce strategic logic, rather than serve to obscure it, which appears to be the case today. And throughout, self-assessment and awareness served to delineate the limitations of understanding, influence and power. Occasionally, policy-makers felt compelled to step beyond that line in order to confront that which concerned them, but never to the extent that the response might comprise a greater danger to their interests than the threat posed.

Conclusion

From the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, Afghanistan served two distinct purposes in the official mind of British India. First, it acted as a safety valve through which Britain could visibly communicate to other regional actors its intent to protect its interests on the subcontinent and its willingness to fight to do so. The entire Afghan debate had proved not that Britain had failed to absorb the lessons of Afghanistan, but arguably that both Russia and Afghanistan were reminded, when necessary, that Britain had the determination and capacity to enforce its will.57 Second, it formed an integral component of India's defence. As the liberal MP John Bright exclaimed in 1879: ‘Small Afghanistan has provided the distance [from India] as the “silver streak”[the English Channel] is to England … They have enabled her to do without those huge standing armies found necessary by continental nations whose boundaries are coterminous.’58

In other words, as time progressed Afghanistan satisfied both strands of British strategy – it hindered rival attempts to pin Britain down on the subcontinent while simultaneously reducing the need for the kind of elevated levels of military expenditure that would inevitably prove detrimental to the interests of the Government of India. Of course, that government was able to regard Afghanistan as a purely strategic problem, and was free from burdensome complications of the humanitarian and developmental aspects. The demands of these today, although offering a panacea to a domestic population sceptical of military intervention and lending the aura of necessary legitimacy to intervening powers, simultaneously shape, complicate and restrict both political and military strategies and the range of possible options open to policy-makers.

Nevertheless, Anglo-Afghan relations from 1839 to 1919, far from being a ‘warning from history’, offer instead at least four instructive reminders for today's policy-makers.

First, any failure in Afghanistan was not a failure of strategy, but a failure of a discrete, experimental course of action – the Forward Policy – that was rescued by the ability to fall back, when required, upon a secondary course of action – the Close Border policy. The latter offered a different but ultimately successful approach towards satisfying the demands of Indian security, an approach which illustrated that the ultimate strategy of using Afghanistan as a component of that security was a viable one. In simple terms, risk was mitigated by the existence of a ‘Plan B’.

Second, policy-makers sought throughout to understand precisely how Afghanistan related to Britain's wider strategic concerns, to clarify the exact ends to which British policy should ultimately be focused. The understanding reached was not automatic, nor did it achieve total consensus, but it was arrived at after serious, informed and near continual debate at the right (and highest) levels of government, something that does not appear to be happening today.

Third, there was a refusal to devote relatively scarce resources to policies unlikely to achieve strategic objectives, a decision facilitated by the implementation of exit strategies as and when required.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, there was a willingness to recognise, when necessary, the limits of British power, thus avoiding a spiral of increasingly costly engagement and potentially counter-productive effect at the grand-strategic level.

Whether the present UK government possesses any similar grand strategic awareness in relation to Afghanistan is something that concerns many observers and analysts.59 The consistent narrative, repeatedly emphasised by the Brown government, was that UK engagement in Afghanistan is predicated on the need to meet and defeat the terrorist threat at source before it manifests itself on the streets of the United Kingdom.60 Yet the noted counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen reveals that, in conversation with a senior architect of the British government's Counter-Terrorism Strategy (CONTEST) in 2006, it was disclosed that the British deployment to Afghanistan was viewed as an alliance commitment rather than part of any wider counter-terrorism strategy.61

If this is indeed still the case, then there are several implications. First of course, it raises the question of whether government departments in charge of the variety of lines of operation at play in Afghanistan; the Ministry of Defence (MOD), Department for International Development (DFID), the Treasury and the Intelligence Services to name but a few, share different appreciations of the rationale behind engagement in Afghanistan.62 If they do, any wider national strategy becomes exceedingly difficult to realise. But Kilcullen's point raises another issue. If indeed Britain is treating Afghanistan as an opportunity to fulfil alliance commitments, it simply raises the spectre of yet another military deployment, so soon after Iraq, occurring outside of any coherent grand strategy beyond the furtherance of Anglo-US relations. Deploying British troops to Helmand Province, the centre-ground of Taliban activity in Afghanistan, in pursuit of this ambition is all well and good if those forces are supplied with an effective strategic end-state to work towards and resourced appropriately, at both the government and cross-governmental level, to the extent that they are perceived by US military commanders as contributing in a positive and effective manner. Yet although the relatively sizeable commitment of UK forces in Afghanistan since 2001 compares favourably to that of other NATO members, the much lauded ‘comprehensive approach’ appears to be lacking in substance, British ground forces are perceived in some quarters to have underperformed, and the recent deployment of US forces into Helmand Province in the early summer of 2009, as well as rumours of a British move to the Kandahar region, simply reinforces the image of Britain under pressure, from allies and enemies alike.63

Despite the government's attempts to dictate a strategic narrative that focuses upon the terrorist threat in Afghanistan and its links with Britain, the dominant media narrative is actually far more parochial and centres upon allegations of equipment shortages affecting British troops.64 Setting military commanders objectives that are beyond reach with the resources at hand creates outrage within public and political circles within the UK, leads to increasingly strident calls for withdrawal and does further damage to the UK's wider reputation elsewhere. But perhaps this ongoing tactical level debate benefits the government in so far that it distracts attention from the even more detrimental paucity of any plausible Afghan grand strategy.

As things stand, the aforementioned requirement to confront terrorism, added to increasingly vacuous promises of ‘development’ and capacity building, and loudly proclaimed support for a worryingly incapable Karzai administration, simply create more questions than answers.65 Is development an end in itself, or a means to an end (defeating terrorism)? Is the UK's desire for an approach that ‘combines respect for sovereignty and local values with respect for international standards of democracy, legitimate and accountable government and human rights’, a strategy or, as Rory Stewart pithily points out, simply a list of what Afghanistan has not got?66 Is the fundamental assumption that an ungoverned, non-democratic Afghanistan poses a clear and present danger to our interests actually justified?67 Is it even remotely possible for us to dictate to the Afghan people our vision of what their state should look like? And how precisely does engagement in Afghanistan contribute to breaking the oft-quoted ‘chain of terror’ when (a) much of the threat originates from within Pakistan, and even hitherto ignored regions such as the Horn of Africa and Yemen, rather than just Afghanistan and (b) intervention in Afghanistan designed to confront terrorism at source has the potential, by virtue of alienating elements of the UK's Muslim community, of actually enhancing the terrorist threat within our own shores. Disabling a potential or actual terrorist threat in the far distance is of limited strategic benefit if, by so doing, one creates a similarly capable and even more insidious threat on the streets of Britain.

While these questions remain unanswered, the military will continue to labour in hostile lands. And while we may nod in appreciation of the difficulties faced by UK forces apparently deprived of both strategy and equipment, and marvel at their ability to get the ‘job done’ in the face of tremendous hardship, one cannot escape the thought that although their forebears may have endured even greater hardships on Afghanistan's soil in times past, they did so on behalf of policy-makers equipped with a rather surer grasp of national strategy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Alex Marshall and Dr Warren Chin for their insightful comments during the drafting of this article.

Notes

¹The most notable publication in this regard is David Loyn's Butcher and Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan (London: Hutchinson Press 2008). The UK print media has also been culpable in this regard. See in particular Ben Macintyre, ‘Written Again in British Blood’, The Times, 6 July 2006, Comment; ‘The Harsh Lessons of Afghanistan: Little has Changed in 200 Years’, The Times, 13 Nov. 2008, Comment; and ‘Lessons of History: Spirit of Defiance Lives on in a Land no Outsider has Tamed’, The Times, 26 Sept. 2009, Afghanistan News. See also Jeremy Page, ‘Rockets, Guile and the Lessons of History’, The Times, 23 Aug. 2008, World News and Christina Lamb, ‘Death Trap’, Sunday Times, 9 July 2006, News. Some articles, however, appear not to follow this trend, notably Peter Bergen, ‘Graveyard Myths’, New York Times, 28 March 2009, Opinion.

²Hew Strachan, ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival 47/3 (Autumn 2005), 33–54. Also see Isabelle Duyvesteyn, ‘Understanding Victory and Defeat’, in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom, (eds), Understanding Victory and Defeat in Modern War (London: Routledge 2007), 224.

³See Beatrice Heuser, ‘Clausewitz's Ideas of Strategy and Victory’, in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (eds), Clausewitz in the 21st Century (Oxford: OUP 2007), 140.

⁴Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2001), 90.

⁵Hew Strachan, ‘Clausewitz and the Dialectic of War’, in ibid. and Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz in the 21st Century, 14–45.

⁶Heuser, ‘Clausewitz's Ideas of Strategy and Victory’, 142–3.

⁷John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Containment and the Logic of Strategy’, The National Interest (Winter 1987/88), 27–38.

⁸Paul Kennedy, ‘Grand Strategy in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition’, in Paul Kennedy (ed.) Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1991), 4.

⁹See Towards a Grand Strategy in an Uncertain World: Reviewing Transatlantic Partnership (Noaber Foundation 2007), 91,<http://csis.org/files/media/csis/events/080110_grand_strategy.pdf>.

¹⁰Conversation with Dr Alexander Marshall, Department of History, Univ. of Glasgow, 21 July 2009.

¹¹Kennedy, ‘Grand Strategy in War and Peace’, 4.

¹²See Robert Mandel, ‘Defining Post-war Victory’, in Understanding Victory and Defeat in Modern War, 13–46.

¹³Kennedy, ‘Grand Strategy in War and Peace’, 2.

¹⁴See Mandel, ‘Defining Post-war Victory’, 15. Mandel uses the 1991 Gulf War and the lack of regime change as an example of ‘wrongheaded’ policy leading to arguably increased insecurity.

¹⁵See Gaddis, Containment and the Logic of Strategy, 29–30.

¹⁶See David Londsdale, ‘Strategy’, in David Jordan et al., Understanding Modern Warfare (Cambridge UP 2008), 22.

¹⁷Ibid., 36.

¹⁸Luttwak, Strategy, 211.

¹⁹In Luttwak's analogy, an advancing force can choose between two routes to its objective; one is straight and well paved, the other circuitous, narrow and unpaved. The good road is bad, because the enemy will expect an advance along that route, while the bad road is good precisely because it is bad, and therefore possibly unguarded. See Luttwak, Strategy, 3.

²⁰For a detailed appreciation of the failings in strategy in these three instances see, for Britain in Iraq, Hilary Synott, Bad Days in Basra (London: I.B. Tauris 2008) and Warren Chin, ‘The United Kingdom and the War on Terror: The Breakdown of National and Military Strategy’, Contemporary Security Policy 30/1 (Jan. 2009), 125–46. With regard to criticisms of US ‘success’ in Iraq 2007–08, see Thomas Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (London/New York: Penguin 2009), 297, 318–21, David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (London: OUP 2009), 115–86 and Geraint Hughes and Christian Tripodi, ‘Anatomy of a Surrogate: Historical Implications for Modern Counterinsurgency and Counter-Terrorism’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 20/1 (Jan. 2009), 1–31. Pakistan's now troublesome strategy of support for the Taliban during the mid-1990s and its subsequent impact on Pakistan's fortunes is well documented in Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos (London: Allen Lane 2008) passim.

²¹For this summary of General Staff Captain A.I. Andogskii's 1908 report, ‘Afghanistan as a Region for Offensive Operations by the Russian Army’, see Alex Marshall, The Russian General Staff and Central Asia 1800–1917 (London: Routledge 2006), 159. For more on Russian policy toward Afghanistan and Central Asia during this period see David Mackenzie, ‘Turkestan's Significance to Russia (1850–1917)’Russian Review 33/2 (April 1974), 176–88; Adrian Preston, ‘Sir Charles Macgregor and the Defence of India 1857–1887’, Historical Journal 12/1 (Jan. 1969), 58–77; I. Klein, ‘The Anglo-Russian Convention and the Problem of Central Asia 1907–1914’, Journal of British Studies 11/1 (Jan. 1971), 126–47; and N.A. Khalfin, ‘Indian Missions in Russia in the Late 19th Century and British Historiography of International Relations in Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 21/4 (Oct. 1987), 639–46.

²²See Edward Ingram, The British Empire as a World Power (London: Frank Cass 2001) 31.

²³Even though Britain and Russia would fight two wars against each other between 1800 and 1917– the Anglo-Russian War 1807–12 and the Crimean War 1854–56, they either fought as allies or cooperated during the Napoleonic Wars, the Greek War of Independence 1821–29, the Boxer Rebellion 1899–1901 and World War I, 1914–17.

²⁴Anglo-Russian interests and competition included the security of the Bosporus and Eastern Mediterranean, trade rights in China and the control of Persia. Until 1849, the Sikh Kingdom provided an additional dimension to Afghan considerations, lying as it did between that territory and British India. See Malcolm Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan 1798–1850 (Oxford: OUP 1980) passim.

²⁵During the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Britain enhanced and entrenched its imperial possessions throughout Africa and the Far East, notably China, the latter only creating another potential flashpoint in relations with Russia.

²⁶Luttwak, Strategy, 211.

²⁷For an excellent treatment of this issue see Yapp, Strategies of British India and Ben Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008).

²⁸See Marshall, The Russian General Staff and Central Asia 1800–1917, passim. In 1759 the British Indian and Russian territories lay 4,000 miles apart. By 1885 that gap had narrowed to 400 miles.

²⁹See M. Yapp, ‘British Perceptions of the Russian Threat to India’, Modern Asian Studies 21/4 (Oct. 1987), 647–65.

³⁰Ingram proposes that the basis of British Imperial power was not the Royal Navy but the Indian Army. The latter, between 1801 and 1945, saw action not only in India, Afghanistan and Burma but also Egypt, China, New Zealand, Burma, Malta, Turkestan, the Ottoman Empire, Abyssinia, South Africa, the Western Front and Italy. See The British Empire as a World Power, 34–5.

³¹The fear of external stimuli encouraging internal dissent was still evident throughout the 1930s. In 1933 Indian policy-makers warned that, ‘[O]ur conviction [is] that the Soviet Government is using every endeavour to recover her position in Afghanistan … in order to establish a convenient base for hostile propaganda in India … Any slackening of control by the Central Govt over internal or frontier administration … will afford additional opportunities to the Soviet Govt for introducing hostile propaganda into this country.’ See IOR/L/PS/12/3155 Policy in regard to Afghanistan 17 Oct. 1932 to 13 Dec. 1933: Government of India's dispatch No. 1 dated 5 June 1933 to the Secretary of State for India: Subject Re-examination of the conclusions contained in the report of the defence of India committee, 19 Dec. 1927.

³²The key personalities (among others) in respect to these strategies were, for the Forward Policy, Henry Rawlinson, political officer during the First Anglo-Afghan War and Member of the Council of India 1868–1895; Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India 1876–1881; and the then Col. George Pomeroy Colley, Professor of Military Administration at the Indian Staff College and subsequent author of ‘Memorandum on the Military Aspects of the Central Asian Question’ in 1876. For the Close Border policy, Lord Lansdowne, Viceroy 1888–1894 was its most forceful adherent. Lord Curzon. Viceroy of India 1899–1905, implemented the ‘modified’ forward policy in 1901, which was essentially an amalgam of the two, withdrawing the army into India but maintaining influence over the intervening tribal areas of the North-West Frontier Province by way of political officers and native militias. See Robert Johnson, ‘Russians at the Gates of India: Planning the Defence of India 1885–1890’, Journal of Military History 67/3 (July 2003), 697–743; and Christian Tripodi, ‘Good for One but not the Other: The Sandeman System and its Application to Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier 1877–1947’, Journal of Military History 73/3 (July 2009), 767–803.

³³The Forward policy was to hold sway on two discrete occasions, 1838–42 and 1875–81. This must be placed in the context of a British engagement with Afghanistan that lasted arguably from the early 1800s until 1947.

³⁴Yapp, British Perceptions of the Russian Threat to India, 661–3.

³⁵The 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention was designed to de-conflict British and Russian designs, giving Russia influence in northern Persia in return for abandoning its intentions in Afghanistan. See Rogers Platt Churchill, The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press 1939). Jennifer Siegel, however, argues that Anglo-Russian rivalry was still a factor post 1907, at least until the outbreak of war in 1914. See Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia (London/New York: I.B. Tauris 2002).

³⁶British units were supported by about three times as many Indian infantry and cavalry forces, themselves commanded by British officers. However, the British never felt entirely confident as to the loyalty of their Indian troops, and subsequent to the Mutiny of 1857–59 until Britain's withdrawal in 1947, Indian Army brigades continued to feature two Indian and one British battalion, the latter placed to ensure the former's allegiance. See Richard Holmes, Sahib: The British Soldier in India, 1750–1914 (London/New York: HarperCollins 2006), passim. For more on the loyalty of Indian forces Tarak Barkawi, ‘Peoples, Homelands and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War against Japan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (Jan. 2004), 134–63 and Kaushik Roy, ‘Military Loyalty in the Colonial Context: A Case Study of the Indian Army during World War II’, Journal of Military History 73 (April 2009), 497–529.

³⁷Basil H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York: Penguin 1991), 338.

³⁸Specifically, the headline disaster of the First Anglo-Afghan War when the Army of Kabul was destroyed in January 1842 on its retreat from Kabul, and the equivalent, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, when a brigade was destroyed at the Battle of Maiwand in July 1880. In actual fact, the 16,000 strong Kabul ‘Army’ was in fact a garrison forces comprising some 700 British troops (44th Foot), 3,500 native sepoys, and around 12,000 camp followers and family members. At Maiwand, around 1,000 men were killed (the vast majority again native troops) but an equivalent number survived.

³⁹A clear example of this might be Gamal Abdel Nasser's triumph in challenging British, French and Israeli power during the Suez Crisis of 1956, an incident which, despite military defeat, only enhanced both his and Egypt's reputation on the international arena and in the Arab world particularly. Britain, on the other hand, despite its local military victory, suffered a crushing blow to its international reputation at the hands of US and Soviet pressure.

⁴⁰Anwar Sadat's achievement in gaining strategic advantage for Egypt by way of the October War of 1973 is a prime example of military ‘effect’. See Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East (Berlin: Shocken Books 2005).

⁴¹Thomas Mahnken, ‘Strategic Theory’ in J. Baylis, J. Wirtz, C. Gray and E. Cohen (eds), Strategy in the Contemporary World (Oxford: OUP 2007), 68.

⁴²The British tended to view tactical defeats by native armies as an occupational hazard of imperialism; politically costly, certainly, but something to be endured. Between 1879 and 1900 the British suffered military defeat at the hands of indigenous forces in South Africa, (both Boers and Zulus), Afghanistan and in the Sudan. Other imperial actors reacted differently to such setbacks. Italy's loss of 4,500 of her soldiers at Adowa, Ethiopia, in 1896 led to the paralysis of further expansionism in East Africa and a feeling of national inferiority that was not resolved until victory in the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36. Paul Kennedy points to these differences in national character as a key variable in grand-strategy making. See Kennedy, Grand Strategy in War and Peace, 5.

⁴³For one perspective of Anglo-Russian rivalry during this period see Edward Ingram's chapter ‘Rivalry as Formation Dance’ in The British Empire as a World Power, 53–96.

⁴⁴The British were hugely concerned with issues of prestige, the then Gen. Sir Frederick Roberts stating, ‘We live by prestige, and we cannot afford to let our native troops or the people of India doubt the maintenance of our supremacy.’ Johnson, ‘Russians at the Gates of India’, 725.

⁴⁵The Great Rebellion, otherwise known as the Indian or Sepoy Mutiny, began in May 1857 and was not finally concluded until June 1858. The brutal nature of the uprising had a traumatic and far reaching effect on Anglo-Indian relations, entrenching divisions between the British Raj and native society. See Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (London: Penguin 1986) and Saul David, The Indian Mutiny (London: Viking Press 2002).

⁴⁶Rodney Atwood, The March to Kandahar: Roberts in Afghanistan (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword 2008), 156.

⁴⁷Gen. Donald Stewart quoted in Atwood, The March to Kandahar, 157.

⁴⁸For the full debate over potential British actions in Afghanistan see Johnson, ‘Russians at the Gates of India’, 697–743.

⁴⁹See Kumar Ghosh Dulip, England and Afghanistan 1849–1887 (Calcutta: World Press 1960) and Mohammed J. Hanifi, Annotated Bibliography of Afghanistan, 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: HRAF Press 1982).

⁵⁰Yapp, Strategies of British India, 439.

⁵¹The subject of Russian attitudes towards Afghanistan during this period vary but the general consensus is that although the official level was characterised by ambivalence and a general desire to reduce tensions with Britain, individual actors sought to push Russian influence forward, in exactly the same way that individual British officials operated themselves. In that respect, the Russian trio of Alexander Duhamel, Count Simonich and Paul Vitkevich were simply mirrored in their actions by men such as Alexander Burnes and James Outram, British political officers noted for their work in Afghanistan, Sind and Khelat. For more on these individuals see Yapp, Strategies of British India. For a wider appreciation of the role of individual agency in furthering British interests in India and, by extension Afghanistan, see J. Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review 112/447 (June 1997), 614–42.

⁵²Abd-er-Rahman was certainly guilty of intrigues against British interests, notably in provoking Pashtun tribal elements on the North-West Frontier to rise up in revolt against the British in 1897. However, tribal uprisings posed little threat to the security of British India as a whole.

⁵³See [India Office Library, United Kingdom, private papers] D 613 Private Papers of Sir George Roos-Keppel, Chief Commissioner NWFP 1908–1919. Letter to Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India 1916–1921, 17 May 1919.

⁵⁴See Rory Stewart, ‘The Irresistible Illusion’, London Review of Books, 9 July 2009, 9.

⁵⁵Quite reasonably, some might point to the brutality exercised by British forces during the Great Rebellion (1857–58), incidents such as the Amritsar Massacre of April 1919 and political repression in the shape of laws such as the Rowlatt Act (designed to combat political ‘agitation’ by indefinitely extending wartime emergency measures) as evidence of a military dictatorship. However, violent repression was the exception rather than the rule and the use of force does not, in itself, indicate the absence of intelligent policy.

⁵⁶Contrary perhaps to perceptions of British politics during this period, policy decisions such as this were a feature of regular public debate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, featuring heavily in newspaper articles and public lectures.

⁵⁷Ingram, The British Empire as a World Power, 90.

⁵⁸Quoted in Johnson, Russians at the Gates of India, 714.

⁵⁹At the time of writing, this article was referring to the Labour administration of Gordon Brown, now replaced by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron. The most articulate critics of the Brown administration's strategy, or lack thereof, are Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrat Party and putative EU Ambassador to Afghanistan, Simon Jenkins, former political editor of The Economist and London Times columnist, and Rory Stewart, former British diplomat, explorer and academic with significant personal experience of Afghanistan and who is now Conservative MP for Penrith and the Border.

⁶⁰See Rosa Prince, ‘Gordon Brown: Crucible of Terror Threatening British Streets’, Daily Telegraph, 28 April 2009; ‘Deaths not Halting Success – PM’, BBC News, 12 July 2009, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8146327.stm>; and ‘PM Pays Tribute to Dead Marines’, BBC News, 13 Dec. 2008, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/77812 40.stm>.

⁶¹Kilcullen, Accidental Guerrilla, 280. Kilcullen also calls for a contemporary equivalent to the 1941‘Arcadia’ conference, by which British and US leaders established their broader strategic approach with respect to the Axis powers.

⁶²For criticism of DFID activity in Afghanistan see Kim Sengupta, ‘DFID Afghan Aid Blunders Waste Millions’, The Independent, 16 Oct. 2008, News; ‘UK Aid Effort in Afghanistan Dysfunctional’, Reuters, 6 Feb. 2008; and Sean Rayment, ‘British Army Officer Launches Stinging Attack on “Failing” UK Strategy in Afghanistan’, Daily Telegraph, 20 June 2009, News.

⁶³It should be stressed that the author considers any ‘underperformance’ to be a consequence of lack of resources, and muddled government policy, rather than declining military skills. The author's statements in respect to criticisms of the British performance in Afghanistan are based upon his personal and private conversations with significant numbers of serving officers (and men) of the British Army and Royal Air Force with experience of active service in Afghanistan and Helmand Province. Indeed, the British Army is not above reflective self- criticism. See Daniel Marston, ‘Smug and Complacent? Op Telic: The Need for Critical Analysis’, British Army Review 147 (Summer 2009), 16–24.

⁶⁴See ‘Helicopter Shortage a Scandal’, BBC News, 19 July 2009, <http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8157978.stm>; ‘Troops Face Helicopter Shortage’, BBC News, 18 March 2005, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4360089.stm>; ‘Afghanistan Equipment Issues’, House of Commons Library, 14 July 2009, <www. publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090716/debtext/90716-0011. htm>.

⁶⁵See Adam Holloway, In Blood Stepped in So Far? Toward Realism in Afghanistan (London: Centre for Policy Studies Oct. 2009) and Marc Sageman, ‘Confronting al-Qaeda: Understanding the Threat in Afghanistan and Beyond’, Testimony to US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 7 Oct. 2009.

⁶⁶Stewart, ‘The Irresistible Illusion’, 7.

⁶⁷For a convincing articulation of an alternative grand strategy with regard to Afghanistan and the wider conflict against Al-Qa'eda, see Patrick Porter, ‘Long Wars and Long Telegrams: Containing al-Qaeda’, International Affairs 85/2 (March 2009), 285–305.