Review: William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

This review was originally published in Sindh Courier on October 23, 2020. After the victorious Taliban takeover of Kabul on August 15, 2021 and President Ghani’s flight from the country, Dalrymple’s prediction that the American Occupation would end up handing power to the same regime they set out to destroy seems eerily prescient.

Early in Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury 2013), William Dalrymple quotes Mehrab Khan’s (the Khan of Kalat) remark to the British diplomat and adventurer Alexander Burnes: “You have brought an army into [Afghanistan] but how do you propose to take it out again?” (Dalrymple 161). As the British and subsequent foreign powers would find out, it is extremely difficult to successfully withdraw from Afghanistan. It has now been nearly two decades since the current US-led invasion began in 2001 and President Trump is promising to extensively draw down the presence of US troops, after having signed a deal with the Taliban–the regime that the US went to war to remove. In such a context, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War remains extremely relevant.

Return of a King takes its title from the attempt of the British to put Shah Shuja—the grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the founder of modern Afghanistan — back on the throne after an exile of over thirty years in British India. This attempt took place in the context of the Great Game–the British-Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia. The British feared that Dost Mohammad Khan, who had usurped power from Shah Shuja, was pro-Russian and hence decided that he needed to be replaced with Shuja, whom they would use as a puppet leader. While they succeeded in removing Dost Mohammad and giving the crown to Shuja, they could not have anticipated the resistance that they would face.

The bulk of the book describes the war in an extremely detailed fashion. Dalrymple’s style is novelistic and makes the reader feel that they are actually a witness to events as they occur. For example, here is the description of the only survivor of the disastrous retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad:

That night lamps were raised on the gates of Jalalabad and bugles blown to guide in any last stragglers, but none limped in. ‘ A strong wind was blowing from the south, which sent the sound of the bugles all over the town,’ remembered Captain Thomas Seaton, ‘The terrible wailing sound of those bugles I will never forget. It was a dirge for our slaughtered soldiers and, heard all through the night, it had an inexpressibly mournful and depressing effect. Dr Brydon’s tale struck horror into the hearts of all who heard it… The whole army had been destroyed, one man alone escaping to tell the fearful tale ( 387).

The retreat from Kabul was followed by an Army of Retribution which set out to punish the Afghans. After retaking Kabul, this army burned large parts of the city. Dalrymple writes:

… as well as destroying the empty shops and houses of their supposed enemies, the marauding British troops also committed what today would be classified as war crimes against their Qizilbash and Hindu allies. Indeed the peaceable Kabul Hindu trading community that had for centuries survived arbitrary arrests and torture by a whole variety of Afghan rulers bent on extorting their money was wiped out in just forty-eight hours by the depredations of the British, as an official inquiry later acknowledged (460)

As for Shah Shuja, he not only lost his throne but ended up assassinated, not for any fault of his own but due to his loyalty to the British. Dalrymple writes:

Shuja was always unusual for his honourable loyalty to his allies and his faithfulness to his agreements, in a region not known for either… He saw himself as the true heir to a highly cultured Persian-speaking Safavid and Timurid civilisation, and as well as writing fine verse and prose himself was a generous patron to poets and scholars… His vision of his kingdom was one which saw it not as an isolated and mountainous backwater but instead as tied by alliances to a wider world, and which through the common Persianate civilisation was diplomatically, culturally and economically integrated with the other countries of the region. It was sadly not a vision that shows much sign, even today, of being realised, though the idea has never completely died (422-23).

The First Anglo-Afghan War ended with Dost Mohammad — the very ruler that the British had gone to war to depose — back on the throne. His descendants would continue to rule Afghanistan until the end of the monarchy in the 1970s. The war thus serves as a striking example of colonial hubris. In his “Author’s Note”, Dalrymple explicitly compares this British Occupation to the current American one:

Nevertheless due to the continuities of the region’s topography, economy, religious aspirations and social fabric, the failures of 170 years ago do still hold important warnings for us today. It is still not too late to learn some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842. Otherwise, the west’s fourth war in the country looks certain to end with as few political gains as the first three, and like them to terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought to overthrow (493).

In 2020, as the US withdraws after making a deal with the Taliban and intra-Afghan negotiations are occurring on a new power-sharing arrangement which may herald a significant role for the Taliban, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War continues to hold important lessons for those of us in the region as well as for the wider international community. It is a deeply engaging and important work of historical research.