Kandahar in the Nineteenth Century

Kandahar in the Nineteenth Century
Author: William B. Trousdale
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2021-03-08
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9004445226

This comprehensive history of Kandahar uses unpublished and fugitive sources to provide a detailed picture of the geographical layout and political, social, ethnic, religious, and economic life in Afghanistan’s second largest city throughout the nineteenth century.

Kandahar

Kandahar
Author: Charles River Charles River Editors
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2017-08-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781974287482

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the city *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading The city of Kandahar dates back to the middle of the first millennium BCE, originally as a Persian town on the edge of the great Registan Desert in southeastern Afghanistan that was reestablished and repopulated by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE. The ancient site of Kandahar developed on a rocky ridge some 3 kilometers to the west of the present-day city of the same name, which was founded in the 18th century. Kandahar was strategically located on the trade routes connecting India and the Middle East, and for this reason it was the target of many conquerors throughout the ages. The city has been in the hands of Persians, Greeks, Arabs (from the 7th century), Turks (10th century), Mongols (12th century) and Indians (16th century). Later it was conquered by the Safavid-Persians and the Ghilji, a tribe instrumental in the emergence of the modern state of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, as one writer put it, "The Arab Muslim armies that arrived in the 7th century were following the routes used previously by Persian and Greek invaders, but none of these empires, or the nearly 20 empires and dynasties that came late, found Afghanistan easy to conquer and control. The Afghan peoples, though internally divided, tend to unite in fierce opposition to outsiders." The old city of Kandahar was abandoned following its near-total destruction in 1738, but a few years later a new city was founded a few kilometers to the east, at the location of present-day Kandahar. Between 1748 and 1773 this was the capital of the new kingdom of Afghanistan. Subsequently, the city was temporarily conquered by British troops during the Anglo-Afghan wars, and has been the site of considerable fighting and destruction during the ongoing conflicts in the region. Almost half of Kandahar's history is interlinked with the rise and dominance of Islam in southeastern Afghanistan. Indeed, there is a bias towards the Islamic period in the city's narrative, because of two factors: the near-total destruction of the city's pre-Islamic archaeological remains in 1738, and the lack of excavation (and interpretation of excavated materials) in the modern period, due in part to the ongoing conflicts that the country faces. However, on a broader scale, the story of Kandahar is one of great cultural, political, and religious fusion. Throughout antiquity and the modern period, this region has been closely linked to the processes of cultural and mercantile exchanges between the neighboring regions of the east, north and west. Kandahar encountered diverse collection of religions because of its position on the frontiers between India, the Middle East, and the Silk Road. One of the earliest religious systems of the region was Zoroastrianism and the worship of Ahura Mazda, which continued to persist in the region up to the 10th and 11th centuries CE. With the conquests of Alexander the Great the region encountered the Greek pantheon of deities. Around the time of the Mauryan dynasty, Buddhism extended from India into Afghanistan. Islam arrived to the region in the 7th century CE, and for a period of time Gautama and Muhammad were venerated equally by the population of Kandahar. Kandahar: The History and Legacy of One of Afghanistan's Oldest Cities looks at the remarkable city and its impact on the region. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about Kandahar like never before.

Personal Records of the Kandahar Campaign

Personal Records of the Kandahar Campaign
Author: Waller Ashe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1881
Genre: Afghan Wars
ISBN:

The Kandahar Campaign was the last phase of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80). It began in late June 1880, when Ayub Khan, the governor of Herat, led an Afghan force toward Kandahar, then occupied by an Anglo-Indian army. A column of troops under Brigadier General George Burrows was sent from Kandahar to try to intercept Ayub Khan's force but was defeated in a fierce battle at Maiwand on July 27. The remnants of the British force struggled back to Kandahar, followed by Ayub Khan, who laid siege to the city. A column of approximately 10,000 soldiers under the command of Lieutenant General Frederick Roberts then was sent from Kabul to relieve the city. After marching some 480 kilometers to reach Kandahar, Roberts decisively defeated Ayub Khan at Baba Wali on September 1, thereby bringing the war to an end. The new Liberal government of Prime Minister William Gladstone, formed in April 1880, already had decided to terminate the war and had ordered the withdrawal to India of all British troops in Afghanistan, which the Kandahar Campaign delayed by some months. Personal Records of the Kandahar Campaign, by Officers Engaged Therein is a compilation of letters by officers serving with the armies of General Burrows and General Roberts, assembled by Waller Ashe, an author and retired British army major. The documents provide extensive and detailed accounts from the British perspective of this final phase of the war. Waller does not give the names of the men who wrote the letters, some of which may have been fictionalized or embellished by the compiler. The book contains an introduction by Ashe that summarizes the history of Afghanistan and of the two Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century. Ashe was an enthusiast for the British Empire and British military glory. He was also co-editor of The Story of the Zulu Campaign, published in 1880 and likewise compiled from the letters of officers who served in the campaign.

Return of a King

Return of a King
Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307958299

From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.

The Other Face of Battle

The Other Face of Battle
Author: Wayne E. Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190920645

Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lackedtriumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020) - conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in"irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure - victory and defeat - in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipatedinsurgencies, and strategic stalemate.War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold incommon as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever.

A Kingdom of Their Own

A Kingdom of Their Own
Author: Joshua Partlow
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307962652

The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the former Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post. The United States went to Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. Over the course of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and money—supplied to one of the poorest nations on earth, in ever-greater amounts—left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived. At the center of this story is the Karzai family. President Hamid Karzai and his brothers began the war as symbols of a new Afghanistan: moderate, educated, fluent in the cultures of East and West, and the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. The siblings, from a prominent political family close to Afghanistan’s former king, had been thrust into exile by the Soviet war. While Hamid Karzai lived in Pakistan and worked with the resistance, others moved to the United States, finding work as waiters and managers before opening their own restaurants. After September 11, the brothers returned home to help rebuild Afghanistan and reshape their homeland with ambitious plans. Today, with the country in shambles, they are in open conflict with one another and their Western allies. Joshua Partlow’s clear-eyed analysis reveals the mistakes, squandered hopes, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be political dynasty. Nothing illustrates the arc of the war and America’s relationship with Afghanistan—from optimism to despair, friendship to enmity—as neatly as the story of the Karzai family itself, told here in its entirety for the first time.

The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Land Warfare

The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Land Warfare
Author: Byron Farwell
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 936
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780393047707

The late Byron Farwell served as an engineer in the British forces of World War II and was an author of at least seven books on various aspects of military history. In this encyclopedia, a labor of love intended for both scholars and general readers, entries include information on wars, revolutions, battles, sieges, spies, soldiers, technical military terms, weapons, and other aspects of 19th-centruy wars and military life. The length of an entry does not necessarily correspond to its importance. Some lesser conflicts and minor personalities are given more space, because information is not readily available elsewhere; and conversely, if information on a topic is widely available, the entry is short. Small bandw images enhance the text. A selected bibliography is included at the end of the volume. Indexing, at least by country or general topic would have improved this otherwise carefully prepared reference. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

External Influences and the Development of the Afghan State in the Nineteenth Century

External Influences and the Development of the Afghan State in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Zalmay Gulzad
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN:

This monograph analyzes the dynamics of Anglo-Afghan relations in the nineteenth century, a case where peripheral factors figured prominently in Britain's drive towards imperial expansion. In 1838 and 1879, British Indian authorities endeavored to conquer Afghanistan. In neither instance did Czarist Russia threaten India or British interests in the region. Instead, evidence suggests that internal political factors within the empire guided British India's policy towards Afghanistan. Thus, this book demonstrates that Anglo-Russian rivalry was not a significant factor in shaping British India's relationship with Afghanistan.