Download Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 AudioBook Free
From William Dalrymple - award-winning historian, journalist and travel article writer - a masterly retelling of that which was possibly the West's greatest imperial catastrophe in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to your own time. With access to newly discovered major options from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India - including some previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies - the author offers us the most immediate and detailed bill yet of the magnificent first battle for Afghanistan: The British isles invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little level of resistance, nearly 20,000 British isles and East India Company troops poured through the hill goes by from India into Afghanistan to be able to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, so that their puppet. But after bit more than 2 yrs, the Afghans rose in response to the decision for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with a whole army of that which was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and demolished in snowbound hill passes simply by prepared Afghan tribesmen. Only 1 British synthetic it through. But Dalrymple requires us beyond the bare format of the infamous battle, and with penetrating, well balanced understanding illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West's first devastating entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the uncomplicated facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai talk about the same tribal traditions; the Shah's primary opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today constitute the bulk of the Taliban's foot soldiers; the same locations garrisoned by the Uk are today garrisoned by international troops, attacked from the same bands of hills and high goes by from which the British confronted assault. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan's age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the country and the ways in which they ensnared both Uk in the nineteenth century and NATO pushes in the twenty-first. Enlightened by the author's decades-long firsthand understanding of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark products as a narrative historian and his singular attention for the evocation of place and culture, The Go back of a King is both definitive evaluation of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.
