Britain’s Greatest Military Disaster by a Third World Nation

What possessed Britain to attempt to subordinate a primitive, desolate country that was trapped in the Middle Ages? How was it possible that a third rate force could massacre 17 000 British soldiers with only ten survivors – a surgeon and an officers wife amongst them? This defeat even exceeded that against the Zulus at Isandlwana in Natal.

The country in question is Afghanistan, a country wedged precariously between two expanding Empires – the Russian and the British. The Russians under the Tsars during the nineteenth century were rapidly expanding eastward towards Alaska whereas the British were initially content on the Indian subcontinent.

Main picture: Alexander Burnes – Scottish explorer and adventurers & fluent Persian speaker

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Afghanistan: The Great Game DVD

Short heading: Hugely informative & very topical

Rating: 5 out of 5

Rudyard Kipling, the great British poet & novelist, introduced this extant term into mainstream consciousness. It referred to the strategic rivalry & conflict between the British & the Russian Empires for supremacy in Central Asia.

In comparing three “invasions” of Afghanistan viz the British in mid-19th century, the Russians in the 1978 & the Americans in 2001, Rory Stewart, the producer is guilty of disambiguation. Strictly speaking only the initial British forays into Afghanistan fall within the accepted definition of the Great Game.

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