Episode 1 Afghanistan: The Great Game - A Personal View by Rory Stewart

Afghanistan - one of the most isolated,

barren landscapes on Earth.

It's difficult to believe that any empire would want to invade it,

and yet it's become the unlikely target,

and obsession of some of the world's greatest empires and superpowers.

In 1839, up these city walls above Kabul,

marched red-coated veterans of Waterloo.

In 1879, Highlanders charged to the sound of the bagpipes.

In 1979, Russian special forces

swooped over these hills in their helicopters.

And in 2001, an American-led coalition invaded Afghanistan.

Each of these invasions has ended in tragedy and humiliation,

and each has sparked a fierce Afghan resistance.

We have never, ever liked to be conquered.

It's really easy to get into Afghanistan.

It's just the getting-out part that is very difficult.

Don't go into Afghanistan and get, whatever you do,

involved in a tribal war.

HE CHANTS

Starting with the British invasions of the 19th century,

how has this history forged the Afghanistan of today?

And what is it about this place

and the paranoia and aggression of empires

that has created repeated tragedy?

In these two films, I want to explore what dragged

these great nations into Afghanistan,

and why they found it so difficult to leave.

To sense some of the complexity of the Afghanistan that Victorian Britain chose to invade,

you don't even need to leave contemporary London.

I've come to Ealing for an evening of Afghan food, music and traditional costume

with a group of Afghans now resident here in west London.

HE GREETS THEM IN THEIR LANGUAGE

'In this room, a dizzying array of ethnic groups,

'Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara,

'Turkmen, Nuristani, all Afghans,

'and all holding different religious and political views.'

The divisions and consequences of war have led to more than

five million Afghans fleeing their country since the 1980s.

Do you think, for example, Britain should remain in Helmand?

Until they will have the infrastructure in the proper way,

I think they should remain.

-You don't think the British should remain in Helmand?

-Absolutely not.

The microcosm of Afghanistan is there in that room,

and some of these people are now sitting down together round a table,

and in those histories and the suspicions of who joined the jihad,

who came from which ethnic group,

are many of the fissures that continue to haunt Afghanistan today.

And all this complexity and Afghan history, both ancient and modern,

so difficult to understand,

so often overlooked, still matters deeply for all of us today.

And it continues to preoccupy commentators,

such as Akbar Ahmed, who I've come to meet here in Washington DC.

Professor Ahmed, a Pakistani who once worked as an administrator

on the North-West Frontier with Afghanistan,

arrived in the States where he now teaches,

a day before the World Trade Center attack.

But his direct appeal to the White House for caution fell on deaf ears.

I think on 9/11 the US administration had no idea about Afghanistan,

its tribes, its history,

but it was so motivated, so intensely motivated

by a sense of anger, a sense of revenge, a sense of honour,

that, at all costs, it had to rush into Afghanistan.

I said many, many superpowers have gone charging into Afghanistan.

Be very careful.

And that is the big problem, that when you combine arrogance

with a lack of knowledge of that part of the world,

you are almost guaranteed to run into trouble.

I sensed this tension myself when I walked across Afghanistan shortly after 9/11.

I found a hospitable and attractive country

but still deeply conservative,

isolated and difficult for a foreigner to understand.

It made me reflect on the superpowers who have

so often invaded the mountains of Afghanistan,

how often they get caught up in their own strategic games,

how easily they become out of touch,

failing to grasp the complexity and resistance of Afghanistan.

And I felt the same was true for the British in the 19th century.

When they came, they were focused not on Afghanistan itself, but its neighbours.

If I were a British Redcoat standing on this wall in 1839,

I would have been told that the reason I was here was that

British India lay to the east and Russia lay to the north,

and Afghanistan was trapped between two expanding empires.

Afghanistan, a largely barren country, but with a rich Islamic civilisation,

had long fought and traded with its Muslim and Asian neighbours,

but it had never encountered

a non-Muslim power as alien as Britain.

And yet, in the 1830s,

Afghanistan was perceived, as it is believed to be today,

to be an immediate threat to British national security,

a place for the politicians and generals of empire to fret about.

For hundreds of years,

all the conflicts had happened here in Europe

and suddenly it exploded east.

Russia raced towards Japan, Britain came into India,

and as these great empires expanded,

there was this zone in between,

almost a blank space on the map with very, very few towns,

a place of deserts and mountains.

And although these two empires were still 4,000 miles apart,

they were certain that they were about to meet.

They were going meet here, in Afghanistan.

As Britain and Russia stretched and flexed, Afghanistan,

one of the most remote and impoverished kingdoms in the world,

found itself sandwiched between two empires who both claimed,

at least, to be its friend.

Britain feared Russia might creep south towards British-ruled India,

the jewel in the crown of the Empire, and the second centre of British political power.

But suspicions worked both ways.

The Russians were equally nervous

about Britain moving north from its base in India.

Sensing that these two empires would collide in Afghanistan,

the British government was hungry for intelligence on this blank space.

A spy was despatched.

Alexander Burnes, a man I believe to be one of our greatest ever political officers.

This is not a man actually in fancy dress.

He's in disguise.

One of dozens of British officers who made their reputations

doing journeys which were almost suicidal.

Burnes was one of the very first to study Afghanistan for British intelligence.

His spying mission was both extraordinary and brave.

In 1831, travelling undercover in disguise,

he surveyed the route all the way from India through Kabul to Bukhara,

and produced the first detailed accounts of Afghan politics.

He set off with no protection into one of the most dangerous

and unknown parts of Asia,

a place where his predecessors had been killed,

where he was having to run the gauntlet of slave traders,

where he was a Christian moving through some regions which were fanatically Muslim

and which were famous for killing infidels.

Trying to rely all the way not on his sword but, as he says in a letter to his mother -

on his languages, on his charm, on his politeness.

Along with the suicidal danger of what Burnes did

was the incredible reward because, when he returned back to London having completed this journey,

this nearly 12-month journey through largely unknown country,

he was a massive celebrity.

He returned 28 years old, had an audience with the king,

was made a member of the Athenian Club,

got a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

And the book Burnes wrote, Travels To Bukhara,

became an overnight bestseller.

But, although it gave Britain a unique insight into this largely unknown land,

according to historian William Dalrymple, his visit also terrified the Russians

and had an unanticipated, counterproductive effect.

There are British agents in Central Asia long before the Russians

had taken any interest in cities like Bukhara and Khiva.

And it's only when Burnes' travel book Journeys Into Bukhara

is translated into French and becomes widely read in Moscow,

that the Russians think they should send an agent in

to make sure the British are not manoeuvring

and making plots in their backyard.

Shortly after Burnes was sent back to Kabul in 1836,

he spotted this Russian agent, Jan Vitkevich,

and the Russian's arrival terrified the British.

They became, in turn, very suspicious

of Russia's ambitions in the country.

And this mutual paranoia led to more and more

foreign intelligence operations around Afghanistan,

with rival officers like Vitkevich and Burnes sending back

countless reports on each other's activities.

The Russians called it The Tournament of Shadows.

The British now remember it, thanks to Rudyard Kipling's later writing,

as The Great Game.

One of my favourite books is Kipling's Kim,

which describes The Great Game through the eyes of this young English boy,

who's working on the North-West Frontier as a spy.

It's incredibly dangerous work, his intrigues with the Russians.

He's a secret agent, he's deniable,

he's at arm's length from the British government.

But, of course, this was a game that had two teams and on the other side,

the Russians, men like Vitkevich, travelling into Kabul,

developing relationships with the Afghan king,

returning with his own documents and maps,

the beginning of a whole tradition,

whereby whenever the British saw a Russian painter turn up in the city,

a Russian hunter turn up on the frontier,

they would immediately assume that this was a double game of espionage.

It was all these fears and suspicions of empire

that were to turn Afghanistan into a battleground,

according to Britain's former ambassador to Moscow,

historian Sir Rodric Braithwaite.

They thought that the Russians are getting their agents into Kabul and we must forestall them.

We've got to do something here, with these Russians allegedly coming over the frontiers.

The Russians had a mirror image view of us.

They saw our agents penetrating northern Afghanistan

into areas of central Asia, which they thought were their interest.

They believed that these guys would come with propaganda,

Islamic propaganda, weapons, money, and stir up these places against the Russians,

so they were as terrified as we were.

By 1839, the British government was increasingly obsessed with the Russian threat.

Key advisers, men who'd never set foot in Afghanistan,

began to claim that Russia might use Afghanistan

as a stepping stone for the invasion of British India.

Britain's man on the ground in Afghanistan, Alexander Burnes,

thought that Afghanistan should be left well alone,

but a small group of policy-makers in the government of India had very different ideas.

They ignored Burnes completely.

In their minds Afghanistan was an empty failed state into which Russia would move.

The hawks decided the answer was regime change,

to topple the sitting king of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad,

and replace him with their own man.

British intelligence felt they had the perfect candidate,

Shah Shuja, a man who'd been living in British India for 30 years,

urbane and beautifully dressed,

a man who could be relied upon to do Britain's bidding.

To justify themselves, they published a document

claiming that Dost Mohammad, who was trying to keep his distance

from both Russia and Britain, was in fact disloyal to the British

and represented an imminent and urgent threat to the British Empire.

The motives are always very mixed.

It's both the aggressive, expansive imperial instinct,

plus the terror that it's going come up against a brick wall or

somebody's going to come and take it all away from you.

And the trouble with intervention is that you may

or may not have identified the right target

but you then tend to use the wrong means for dealing with it.

So were the hawks right to fear Russia?

Here in Moscow, I've come to meet an eminent Russian historian of the period,

Professor Tatiana Zagarodnikova.

I wanted to ask her if Russia was really preparing to invade

Afghanistan as a bridgehead for an attack on India.

That was a time of colonisation of smaller, weaker states and that was a process all over the world,

not only in Great Britain and in Russia.

The same in France,

the same in other great powers.

Great Britain at that time considered every step of Russia,

either in Europe or in Asia,

and maybe even in Africa, as a Russian step towards India.

Everything was considered as the Russians' march to India.

Were the British paranoid?

Well it was just, to my mind, it was a game,

kind of making face,

towards audience, towards public opinion.

Another thing is that that was a wonderful pretext

in the parliament to demand more money for military purposes,

for keeping big armies in India, and so on.

The hawks were obsessed with putting their man on the throne,

but their belief in a Russian threat was more faith than reality.

The dossier was torn to pieces in the British press.

Everyone from the Duke of Wellington attacked the idea as madness,

but rather than calling off the mission, these men pushed on

and, within a few weeks, the Army of the Indus was marching into Afghanistan.

As we know in our own time, if you create a phantasm,

a horror figure of your own imaginings,

that figure can actually come into being.

You can imagine a threat into life.

Just like the neo-cons had wanted to topple Saddam Hussein long before 9/11,

and 9/11 gave the neo-cons the excuse they were looking for.

In the same way the hawks, the Russophobes,

in the British establishment in Simla and in Calcutta,

had been wanting to pre-empt the Russians in central Asia.

MILITARY DRUM AND PIPE MUSIC PLAYS

As they wound their way through the narrow passes towards Kabul,

the British Army were supremely confident.

They'd never been defeated in central Asia,

and many in the army were treating it as a game.

A lot of the young officers were behaving as though they were going on a grand picnic.

Their generals were enraged.

These 22-year-olds were travelling with camel trains,

piled with mess silver, with eau de cologne, with exotic wines.

The 16th Lancers even managed to bring their own pack of foxhounds towards Afghanistan.

The Army of the Indus arrived in Kabul in April 1839,

and as they swaggered into the city

they had little idea of the horrors ahead.

The British entered Kabul in squadrons,

the Royal Horse Artillery in gold,

the Lancers in scarlet,

the Dragoons in blue,

the ostrich feathers on the hats of the envoys,

with all the glory of a parade, a victory parade.

But around them in the crowded bazaar - blank faces, hostility, suspicion.

Britain had taken a decisive step

and placed an army of occupation in this distant and unlikely land.

But as the soldiers settled into life in Kabul,

their need for security made them live in protected compounds,

separate from the Afghan people,

and this only encouraged suspicions on both sides.

The English knew so little about the real life of Kabul.

If they came down to the city at all,

they travelled in armed groups,

seeing hostile Afghan faces, glimpses of tiny windows,

blank mud walls and they had very, very little idea

about the rich civilisation behind those doors.

Largely hidden from and totally misunderstood by most British troops,

was a culture of extraordinary richness,

a culture of calligraphy,

miniature painting and poetry,

with sophisticated Afghan forms of law, government and patronage.

The occupation dragged on

and the British only became more and more entrenched

and the Afghans began to get anxious.

The thing that really worried the Afghans was when

the women began to arrive and European babies were born,

that the British were here to stay.

The British, in the towers of their fort,

and the Afghans gazing back at them from their family compounds,

began to look at each other with deepening mistrust and incomprehension.

I've come to a rain-soaked Boston

to meet a world authority on Afghan anthropology and history,

Professor Tom Barfield.

Appropriately, I met him here in the Helmand Restaurant.

And I wanted ask him about some of the many differences between these cultures.

If you go to an Afghan feast, people are very religious,

but they're religious at the end of the meal.

You thank God for having eaten a wonderful meal.

As one of my Afghan friends said to me,

"Why do you Americans pray before the meal?

"You haven't eaten it. You have no idea whether God deserves

"the praise or not, or the host."

But the lesson that I took from him

is that we foreigners are too keen to praise the fact that

the feast is here and the Afghans say, "There's one more step.

"Let's eat the feast and decide whether it deserves it."

So the Afghans tend to look more at the outcome, than at the intentions.

'And that logic appears to apply

'to how Afghans choose the perfect leader.'

The ideal ruler says to the Afghans that,

"Without me, these foreigners would invade and occupy our country.

"Without me and my skill,

"Afghanistan would not be independent.

"I am defending a Muslim nation."

At the same time, he turns to the foreigners and says,

"Only I can keep control of the Afghans and I can only do that if you send me money and weapons."

By 1841, Britain's choice of ruler had proved a disaster.

Once Shah Shuja was on the throne, Afghans quickly saw him as weak,

as corrupt and, worst of all,

as a puppet of a foreign non-Muslim government.

In a courtyard in Kabul, I asked Afghan academic Omar Sharifi

about how Afghans perceived Shah Shuja.

If you were an Afghan seeing a red-coated British soldier in the street,

what would your reaction be?

Nobody really knew what was happening in Afghanistan.

Optimistic British officers felt that with a bit more time,

and a bit more money, they were going to be able to win.

And, suddenly, when rumours began to spread

through the tea houses and the bazaars

that British officers were interfering with Afghan women,

a match had been lit, which would spark an insurgency.

Suddenly, up and down the country,

Afghans began to feel that their culture had been insulted,

that their king was only a puppet,

and that they needed to fight for Afghanistan

and for Islam against a foreign military occupation.

Dost Mohammad, the emir the British had deposed

to make way for Shah Shuja, was in exile.

But he and his family used the presence of non-Muslim occupiers

to mobilise Afghans by calling for a jihad.

And for many Afghans, this action was

the birth of the modern state of Afghanistan,

the moment around which they united as a nation.

By November 1841,

Muslims in Kabul were ready to join this jihad.

But the British were taken completely by surprise.

Even Alexander Burnes, our envoy so prized for his local knowledge,

completely underestimated how dangerous the situation had become.

Alexander Burnes loved Kabul and Afghan culture.

He was used to walking through the streets as though he was at home in Scotland.

If you'd asked him, he would have said he could have trusted Afghans with his life.

But on that night in November 1841,

he walked home to a city that had changed.

He looked into eyes that no longer greeted him

and, as he made his way back through the narrow streets towards his house,

he was seeing a hostility that he hadn't sensed before.

By dusk, an armed mob had surrounded his house.

In one last attempt, he walked out onto the balcony of his house

and in his most confident manner, in beautiful Persian,

appealed to their sense of hospitality, of generosity,

their treatment of a guest.

But he got nothing back and, in the end,

he had to send a desperate message to the British garrison asking for help,

and, for the first time, retreated back into his house knowing that

the only thing that stood between him and death were the gates of his house.

Burnes' home, his paradise where he'd entertained for so long,

the Kabul that he loved, had become a death trap.

Burnes' last glimpse of a city that he loved

and thought the most beautiful in the world was not of gardens,

not of poetry, but a last desperate sprint across his neighbours' roofs

hoping that he could find a way out, but the crowd was everywhere.

He wrapped a turban around his head, dropped down,

praying he wouldn't be recognised and for a moment he wasn't.

But then the cry went up - "Sikander Burnes". He was hacked down.

And the next morning his head was on a pole in the bazaar.

The day before Burnes' death, the British had been congratulating

themselves on the peace and tranquillity in Afghanistan.

The day after, everything had collapsed.

A British trooper came staggering into the fort

with five musket wounds in his body, cuts to his head and shoulders,

stark naked, having just escaped from the Afghan insurgents.

The food was lost, the ammunition was running down,

and within three days of Burnes' death,

the British generals were talking about a treaty of surrender

and a retreat from Kabul.

The British Commander, General Elphinstone,

tried to negotiate with the Afghans.

The Afghans offered him safe passage,

provided the British handed over their heavy weapons

and retreated immediately to India.

It must have felt like an impossible decision.

If the garrison tried to stay, they could starve and be wiped out.

But if they were to retreat,

could they really trust the assurances of their enemy?

I faced a similar dilemma on a smaller scale

when I was a Deputy Governor in the south of Iraq

after the invasion in 2004.

Our compound was under siege.

We were being attacked by Sadarist militia,

and their commander came to us and said that if we agreed

to leave our weapons and hand ourselves over to him,

he would take us safely out of the fort and back.

At the time I thought it was a trick, a trick to massacre us,

and I felt, again, the same thing when I read this history.

In Iraq, we stayed and defended the compound,

but the British in Kabul, in 1841, were deeply divided.

Many young officers were determined to fight on,

but Elphinstone overruled them and ordered a retreat.

All the troops, their wives and children,

were forced to leave the relative safety of their compound,

and to try and reach the British garrison in Jalalabad nine days' march east of Kabul.

They made painfully slow progress

and, after two days, this straggling column of soldiers

and civilians met their fate beneath this mountain.

This valley is the jaws of hell.

Into this, in mid-winter,

the cream of the British army marched

and they were treated as though they were in a slaughterhouse.

By the time they reached this valley, Khord Kabul,

they had spent two nights out in the open, in three-foot snow

in temperatures of minus 15 without tents,

waking up to discover frozen corpses around them.

They staggered into this valley, starving, frozen, with no supplies,

and 80 miles to go, and it was at that point that the attack began.

Behind every bolder was an Afghan with a musket taking careful aim,

able to pick off, individually, 3,000 people and kill them

as they made their way through the valley.

And it continued, not just for one or two miles,

but for five miles of a ravine.

By the time they reached the end of that valley,

90% of the British army had been extinguished.

A handful of soldiers managed to fight their way through,

but only to meet their fate later.

What we've got here is the last stand of the 44th Foot at Gandamak.

50 men make it to the village of Gandamak.

They stand on this low hill and they have run out of ammunition,

they're relying only on their bayonets.

And the picture we see here is half of them are dead

and the Pathans are about to close in

and end it with their swords.

Of the 17,000 men, women and children who'd set out nine days earlier from Kabul,

only one made it to the British garrison in Jalalabad.

One man has made it on from there, this Dr Brydon.

And in this picture, Dr Brydon is sitting on his old nag,

about to collapse and he is seen limping towards Jalalabad,

and they assume he's only the first of thousands of troops to make it,

and the gates are opened and a party sent out.

And they realise he's the only one.

And that night the commanding officer orders the bugles to be sounded all night.

The wind was blowing very strongly that night and,

rather than billowing out into the plain of Jalalabad,

it blew back into the town, and he said that the noise of the trumpets

echoing amid the wail of the wind sounded like an elegy to the dead army.

The British Empire never had, and never would,

experience a defeat like it.

The first Afghan war was a major event for the Afghans.

We always see it through our perspective as the great imperial disaster,

but for the Afghans, this was their Trafalgar,

their Battle of Britain, their Waterloo, all in one.

They were the only non-colonial power

to see off a modern westernised army in the 19th century,

on the sort of magnificent scale that they did,

and completely destroyed an entire Victorian army at the very peak of Britain's power.

For Afghans, this had confirmed that they were a warrior nation,

one even capable of seeing off a great power like Britain,

but Western historians point to another legacy that resonates today.

The first time there's really a feeling of jihad inside Afghanistan

is the first Anglo-Afghan war.

After that, it never really goes away.

Beginning with the British invasions,

Afghans begin to perceive themselves as fighting an outside non-Muslim world.

Now, they had known this before.

When they raided India, that was jihad, you know.

You got to go into infidel lands and take home a lot of good stuff.

But inside Afghanistan, you couldn't do jihad.

Now when these foreigners invaded, people would say, "Yes, we're fighting non-Muslims."

The British government would have liked to cover up

the extent of this tragedy, but it was not to be.

Almost every last grisly detail was immortalised

in the bestselling diaries of Lady Sale,

wife of one of the senior officers in the Kabul Army.

She was captured during the retreat and later released,

and her original diaries and letters are kept here in the British Library.

I took a look at them with historian Jane Robinson.

Well, the book ran into several reprints in the first couple of years.

It sold 7,500 copies, which was huge, and it was serialised in The Times.

And the response to it was unprecedented, I think,

because this was the first time that a woman, a British woman,

had written from the theatre of war.

Lady Sale's account of the retreat from Kabul was shockingly explicit.

To see women and children and soldiers and camp followers

in various states of decomposition,

and she actually describes it...

I see here that some of the text has been excised,

I think as possibly being too strong.

This was horrific stuff.

"Subsequently we heard that scarcely any of these poor wretches escaped

"and that, driven to the extreme of hunger,

"they'd sustained life by feeding on their dead comrades."

And she knew that the army was doomed.

She does say earlier on, "I fear that nobody is going to survive this."

The newspaper serialisation sparked a macabre fascination

with the savagery of the Afghans.

She was a British representative in Kabul.

She was part of the establishment there, part of the machine.

And the fact that she had been attacked by the Afghans,

it meant that the Afghans were particularly dastardly

because they had attacked what was most, not sacred,

but almost sacred, about British society abroad.

But, actually, that's extremely unfair because, in fact,

the Afghans went out of their way to save all the women and children.

Yes, but that's not what the audience got from this. Not at all.

What they saw was the sensation.

What they was the dead bodies. What they saw was the cannibalism.

Perhaps to limit the damage to our imperial reputation,

the British spun this as a story of heroism and bravery.

The way this was treated when it was published was, indeed, propaganda, I think.

She was paraded before Queen Victoria.

There was a city named Sale in Australia. There was a ship named Sale in the Navy.

And she was promoted as a heroine.

She was made into a celebrity to try and distract, I think.

-We're defeated, but we turn out of the defeat the fact that we're really lions.

-Yes, yeah.

The British Empire had been humiliated.

And the defeat was seared into our historical memory,

creating a view of Afghanistan as a graveyard of empire, an unconquerable land.

But that's only part of the story, because later that year the British sent an army of retribution,

which sought savage revenge for its losses

and razed to the ground Kabul's historic bazaar.

But, having dealt the Afghans a punishing blow,

instead of occupying the country, they ended the first Anglo-Afghan war with a deal.

At this point they announce, "Now we're going to withdraw.

"But now you can see that if we want to come back, we can do it.

"You guys have not defeated us militarily.

"Now we need to cut a deal."

And they take Dost Mohammad, the ruler that they had dispossessed,

they say, "OK, you can go back again."

So it's like Dost Mohammad part two,

but he tells the British, "I understand your needs. You must understand mine,"

and the two sides come to a modus vivendi.

So, yes, the Afghans can claim a great victory but, on the other hand, the ruler they've put back in power

understands what Britain needs to such an extent

that when the mutiny occurs in India in 1857,

the so-called Sepoy rebellion,

and the Afghans are urged to march on Peshawar to ally with the rebels,

Dost Mohammad says, "No, I've signed an agreement with the British and,

"besides, I think they'll win."

The Afghans took enormous pride in their resistance to the British,

and the political settlement led to

a period of confidence and relative stability,

during which time the British and the Afghans treated each other with a wary respect.

But the rivalry between Russia and Britain only continued to intensify.

A thousand miles from Afghanistan, in 1854,

the two powers fought a brutal war in the Crimea.

And, if anything, the fears of Russian ambition was growing.

Then, in the late 1870s, Russians again appeared in Kabul.

A new generation of British hawks decided the only response was again to invade.

Again, there was a public outcry.

Again, imperial paranoia triumphed

and once again a British army, this time 40,000 strong,

was marching into Afghanistan.

To prevent Kabul being taken,

the Afghan emir signed an agreement with the British that a new envoy,

Sir Louis Cavagnari, another swashbuckling multilingual officer,

was installed in Kabul.

Remembering that Burnes had been massacred escaping from his unfortified house in the old city,

Cavagnari took up residency in this ancient citadel, the Bala Hisar.

Sir Louis Cavagnari, the new British envoy,

rode in on his elephant into this citadel with a tiny escort.

He'd taken three lessons from the death of his predecessor Alexander Burnes.

Always live within the fortified citadel.

Don't come in with a large army of occupation,

and never touch the local women.

But despite all his care, he was soon hearing rumours that the Afghans wanted to kill him.

Cavagnari thought he had learned from Burnes that it was

better to be in the Bala Hisar,

but this was actually the palace of the Afghan kings,

and his presence there also caused offence.

Here I met up with Prince Ali Seraj, a member of the Afghan royal family

whose palace this was.

People were not very pleased that a British Ambassador had been put in the Bala Hisar.

Why were the angry about that?

Because it reminded them of the first Anglo-Afghan war,

they forget here comes the British again you know,

and they're here to occupy Afghanistan once again.

We have never, ever liked to be conquered.

We have accepted poverty because we want to be free.

They don't understand the Afghan psyche.

They forget that they were in India and they took the East Indian Company,

you know, were so successful in India, they think,

"Oh, Afghanistan, rowdy people with baggy pants and turbans," you know,

we're easy to rule, easy to control,

but they forgot that Afghanistan is a nation of warriors.

I couldn't help asking him if we were making the same mistakes today.

There was an American, I'll not say which organisation, he say,

"Oh, Prince Ali, I have received a billion dollars from the United States."

I said, "What are you going to do with this money?

He said, "Well, we're going to roll into the village and we're going to build things."

I said, "Sir, if you roll into the village, they'll roll you out."

I said, "You roll up to the village, then you send an emissary inside the village,

"talk to the elders. They will do one of two things.

"Either invite you in or they will send somebody out to meet with you.

"Then once they invite you in, you sit down and you talk to them,

"but don't tell them what you're going to do.

"Ask them what they want.

"Respect. If you do that, you will have them in your pocket."

The Afghan king who'd negotiated with the British was seen as weak.

Ordinary Afghans hated the deal he'd struck with the British

and they hated the presence of Cavagnari in Kabul.

Finally, an Afghan regiment mutinied and marched on his residence.

Cavagnari looked out on the screaming mob,

knowing the nearest reinforcements were hundreds of miles away.

He led a suicidal charge,

was killed, and his mutilated corpse was put on display.

Mortified by his death and desperate to salvage their credibility,

Britain launched another invasion into Afghanistan.

The commander of the lead column, General Roberts, was told

"Your objective should be to strike terror and to strike it swiftly and deeply."

Four weeks after the envoy was killed,

a Highland Regiment had fought its way to the top of that ridgeline

and the next day General Roberts had seized Kabul.

He came here to the citadel where he saw the blood-spattered walls

and the mangled corpse of the envoy and his comrades.

Enraged, General Roberts set up a gallows on the wall.

He hanged a hundred Afghans,

demolished the palaces of the Afghan nobility

and, at that point, with honour satisfied,

many suggested he should withdraw.

But the Afghan king had been deposed, the country was unstable,

Britain had taken responsibility for Afghanistan and leaving no longer seemed an option.

While General Roberts sat in Kabul,

the countryside was now in revolt.

Suddenly, a jihad had been called against them and when

they looked out on a winter evening from their small camp in Kabul,

they could see right along this ridgeline,

60,000 watch fires burning from Afghans bent on their destruction.

It must have seemed as though history was repeating itself exactly,

and the one lesson that Britain should be taking away was never to invade Afghanistan.

This time, unlike his predecessor,

General Roberts decided to stay and fight and he was able, just,

to withstand the siege of his compound in Kabul.

But in Helmand Province, the Afghans completely defeated and wiped out another British unit,

this time in the Battle of Maiwand.

It's one of Afghanistan's most famous victories

and I met Abbie Aryan, an Afghan living in London,

at this British memorial to Maiwand.

History has it that the Afghans won

because of the rousing battle cry of a young woman called Malalai.

She's an ordinary Afghan girl.

As she's standing in the battle, she can see that the Afghans are losing

and she stood there, took her veil off and said,

"If you love your country and if you're a real Pashtun,

"and if you don't want to be ashamed, you have to go and fight the British."

-Remember when Elizabeth stood in front of Spanish Armada...

-Uh-huh.

-..gave this speech to the British army?

-Yep.

To us, that was equivalent to that.

And by revealing her face, actually, in some ways,

it's a kind of shame for her and her family, everybody sees her face.

But she's going to die so it doesn't matter?

Absolutely. And she, in fact, she dies in the battle as well,

but the encouragement she gave to the Afghans there was immense.

Unlike the massacre of the British army in the retreat from Kabul,

Maiwand was not covered in a serialisation in The Times.

So although a thousand British soldiers were killed,

this memorial in Reading is almost all that remains,

and its meaning is now largely forgotten.

But ask an Afghan and you get a very different response.

This battle, like the retreat from Kabul, is still the stuff of legend.

As an Afghan child, as you learn how to walk,

-you know about the battles we had with the British.

-Uh-huh.

It is part of our DNA It's part of our life.

Maiwand is like a legend in Afghanistan.

I think, in a way, the British try to justify it, saying,

"Oh, it was really sunny hot day. We didn't have as much as...

"Afghans had superior fire power."

How can Afghan army have a superior fire power than the British?!

British troops fighting in Helmand today are often warned by local Afghans

that they will meet the same fate as befell their predecessors in Helmand at Maiwand.

We say that all doors are always open for invaders.

Look from Alexander The Great, all the way to the British and today.

It's really easy to get into Afghanistan.

It's just the getting-out part that's very difficult.

We always don't mind foreign invaders getting in there,

relaxing and feeling comfortable, then we start our fight.

This is our traditional way of doing things.

What do you think an Afghan villager feels they're fighting for?

For their home and country. For their independence.

They don't like foreign invading army to come through their villages.

To do it with your mighty force and say,

"Look, I'm here, I'm going to provide you peace and security."

This is a joke, honestly is, because nobody believe that.

Afghans wouldn't accept that - as how can somebody bring peace with a gun and weapons?

You can't do that.

A thousand British soldiers had been massacred at the Battle of Maiwand,

the war was turning against Britain,

but the response this time was immediate.

There followed one of the most celebrated marches of the entire Victorian era,

General Roberts, with an elite band of Ghurkhas and Highlanders,

set off from Kabul, through unknown territory with no support.

320 miles, in 20 days,

in 100-degree heat, arrived safe at Kandahar,

and won a decisive victory that brought the second Anglo-Afghan war to a close.

Having won a victory, the question was, what would Britain do next?

All the fears, all the pride that had dragged them into Afghanistan was still there.

They'd spent blood and treasure.

There were so many reasons to try to continue an occupation

and yet they decided to declare a victory and get out.

And this is because, despite all these fears,

the British Empire had a lot of people who knew the region well,

who spoke the languages well, who understood their limits,

who understood that it couldn't be done.

And nobody summed it up better than General Roberts himself.

He said, "We have nothing to fear from Afghanistan

"and, offensive though it may be to our pride, the less they see of us,

"the less they will dislike us."

After decades of battling Russian influence in Afghanistan,

the British Empire, at the peak of its power,

bowed to Afghan realities and struck a deal with their opponent.

Just as in 1842, Britain again allowed the most powerful

Afghan leader to take the throne, even though he was their enemy.

Abdur Rahman was an ally of the Russians

and had been living on Russian soil,

but he was the only man who seemed to have the support and authority to control the country.

It's as though after ten years of fighting the Taliban today,

the United States and their allies left Afghanistan

and put the Taliban back in charge.

This extraordinary gamble paid off.

For his part, the new king, Abdur Rahman,

demanded a massive subsidy and no internal interference in his country.

In return, Britain got control of Afghan foreign policy

and, most importantly, Abdur Rahman did not allow the Russians to threaten British India.

For Britain, it was a perfect solution.

And even when Europe descended into the First World War,

Afghanistan remained neutral.

But this would change in the aftermath of that Great War,

as the great powers of Europe met here in Versailles.

Here, empires were broken up, new nation states were created,

and Afghanistan, although excluded from the negotiating table,

had its own ambitions.

For the first time, Afghanistan,

so often on the receiving end of British firepower,

itself became the principle aggressor.

The new king of Afghanistan saw Britain exhausted by war,

facing unrest in India.

He called another jihad, took his chance

and invaded British India through the Khyber Pass.

Although Britain saw off this unexpected aggression,

they suffered twice as many casualties as the Afghans.

But with Russia no longer the threat of old,

Britain saw less need for an interest in Afghanistan and granted the Afghans full independence.

But what Afghanistan did with that independence was the opposite

of what the British expected.

The new king, Amanullah, revealed himself to be a moderniser.

The British policy was really to keep Afghanistan locked in the Middle Ages.

The last thing they wanted was Afghanistan to change

and modernise and then, suddenly, in 1919, modernity came.

British ideas came to Afghanistan against Britain's will,

and this great process of modernisation came not through the empire,

came not through British bayonets, but through an Afghan king.

King Amanullah ruled from this extravagant palace in a European style,

which he built on the outskirts of Kabul,

and he championed a new modernising intellectual elite in Afghanistan.

But the country that he was determined to transform

had changed little in the century that had passed

since Britain first took an interest here.

It was a country with almost blanket illiteracy,

a fragmented country of isolated villages

and mountain valleys under feudal rule,

the way Britain had found it and left it.

Dreaming of modernity, in 1927,

Amanullah embarks on a grand European tour,

the first such trip by an Afghan ruler.

The Afghan king arrived in Britain for a full state visit.

The flags were out and a slightly anxious British government

responded in time-honoured fashion by taking him to shop for guns and for cars,

which his impoverished country could hardly afford.

And when he toured the Rolls Royce factory,

he bought a fleet of cars to take back home.

It started a long love affair between Afghan royalty and Rolls Royce.

And this car was later part of their fleet,

now owned by businessman Richard Raynsford.

For an Afghan, possessing this car shows that you are part of an international group.

You're no longer part of an isolated country at the other end of the world.

Well, that's right. He was a very sophisticated man.

When he went to Europe in 1928,

he was not just looking for Rolls Royce cars,

he was looking, really, to...means to be inspired by the west

to how he could modernise his very backward country.

And, therefore, the Rolls Royce trip to the Derby works

was part of that overall quest for inspiration and for modernisation.

A car like this at the time was a pretty expensive thing.

It would cost as much as a house in Fulham.

About £1,500 for the chassis

and another £1,500 pounds, even more, up to 2,000, for the body,

depending on how exotic a body was ordered by the excited owner.

What would an Afghan have felt, looking at this kind of car?

It'd be like looking at something equivalent to the space shuttle,

I imagine, to an Afghanistan farmer or peasant.

'I think it's tempting today when we look at a car like this

'to imagine Amanullah as some sort of corrupt dictator

'who was spraying money around on Rolls Royces,'

but in fact, really, this is part of his love of technology or machinery.

It's as though he's returning to the country with a jet engine or a new computer system.

He's coming back with whole new interests in railways and printing machines,

and mining technology and medicine,

but for the conservatives in Afghanistan, this is all very dangerous and very dubious.

The big story that's spreading through the streets when he arrives

is he's bringing back a new machine to turn human corpses into soap.

Amanullah was just beginning to discover how conservative his country still was.

Wild rumours were circulating about how he had become a Catholic,

ate pork, drank alcohol.

He became perceived as a foreigner in his own land,

attempting to impose a foreign ideology on his own people.

It's easy to laugh at Amanullah and, indeed, there's a lot that you can laugh at him for.

For example, he gathered the tribal elders

and insisted they wore pinstriped trousers and western jackets,

but there was also a highly developed serious programme of reform.

In fact, the most radical programme for state transformation

in Afghanistan came from an Afghan.

He wanted parliamentary elections, a progressive constitution,

education, particularly for women.

And, in the end, when photographs were circulated in the bazaar

of his wife, the queen, with her head uncovered,

with pearls over a plunging neckline, he had to flee,

the wheels of that new Rolls Royce spinning vainly in the snow, to exile in Italy.

It is ironic, when, today, we're concerned with the powerful hold of Islam

and the problems of establishing democracy in that country,

that the only attempt in this whole period to modernise and democratise Afghanistan

didn't come from British rule, but from the Afghans themselves.

So why did the British go into Afghanistan in the 19th century?

It wasn't really about Afghanistan in the end.

It was about the fears of empire, fear of empty space,

fear of the Russians, fear in the end about their own credibility, their pride.

In the second film, two superpowers come calling,

and these armies invade Afghanistan,

not just to protect their selfish strategic aims,

but also with the objective of bringing profound social change,

and reshaping Afghanistan more in their own image.

And the result for the people of Afghanistan,

and their invaders, was to be even greater horror and tragedy.

If you were going to pass a message to the American

and British troops today, what would you say to them?

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd