'We loosed off shots, but never could get near the fellows, they being all mountaineers and we being burdened with heavy riding-boots and spurs...'.
These are words lifted from the diary of Brigadier-General Henry Brooke who in April 1880 assumed command of the British garrison in Kandahar just as the Second Afghan War took a further violent twist and the city came under siege. A torrid time he and his men were to have of it. There are many truths and salutary lessons for today contained in that slim and forgotten volume.
For Brooke, there was no disguising his initial enthusiasm for the campaign. After all, two years earlier and after a diplomatic spat, Britain had sent in some forty thousand troops and spent the intervening period marching them about to suppress uprisings and impose her will. There was cause for optimism. 'I feel sure that change will be good for me in every way', he wrote.
Then, as now, we embarked on the mission ill-equipped and unprepared for the hazards that lay ahead. Then, as now, we won countless skirmish and yet failed to win Afghanistan. Then, as now, we imposed western and heavy-handed systems of control and later wondered why it fell apart. Then, as now, we fought a kinetic campaign of contacts and hard kills and lost sight of the politics. And then, as now, our leaders scrabbled for an exit strategy with as much dignity and little panic as they could muster. The despair of Henry Brooke is obvious when he later penned: 'A more useless and unnecessary thing than an expedition into this country could not be imagined...'. How little things have changed.
Make no mistake, Afghanistan is dying. Do not be misled by news of elections and talk with local Talib, by media reports of village fruit stalls piled high and assurances our latest push has met with scant resistance. On every level we misread the signs. Years on and the insurgency remains alive and undefeated and the Pakistani-sourced Taliban have time, patience and unlimited manpower on their side. I have spoken with many old Afghan hands and few are optimistic. Indeed, the majority are agreed we are morphing crisis into failure and will call it by another name, will walk away and wash our hands and blame disaster on the Afghan. Our problem, our flawed policies, our fault.
With hubris and historical illiteracy, we somehow believed we could parachute in a weak and pliant Afghan president and win over the population. So consider this. Of the thirteen predecessors to the current incumbent, twelve have been killed or chased from office. Mark my words. One day, appearing on a television screen near you will be President Karzai either smiling and waving from happy tax-exile or hanging from a Kabul lamppost with greenbacks stuffed in his open mouth. We put him there.
Return to the nineteenth-century and we were doing the same. The problem is that the Great Game of yesteryear involving Britain and Russia today embraces the toxic mix of Pakistan vs. India, Iran vs. the west, the Taliban vs. the Kabul regime and its overseas-sourced support, and the al-Qaeda brand of jihadism vs. any Unbeliever living on the planet. There is too a far more deadly fault-line running beneath: Afghans - especially the Pashtuns - will always fight, in particular against foreign occuptation and those they consider mercenary stooges of a hated central government. Tribalism, kinship, blood-feud and skirmish are part of the national psyche. And we forgot this to our cost.
In one of his final diary entries, Henry Brooke wrote: 'Still so many foolish things have been and are continually done in connection with our campaigns in Afghanistan, the present moves after all may achieve nothing'.
The Brigadier-General was shot and killed on August 16 1880 as he led an attempt to clear insurgents from the village of Deh Khoja not five thousand yards from the walls of Kandahar. His body was carried home to Co. Fermanagh for burial with full military honours. Placed on his coffin were sprigs of maidenhair fern grown by his widow from a cutting he had taken whilst travelling through the Bolan Pass en route for Kandahar. One hundred and thirty years later, the coffins still arrive and we continue to mourn the fallen.