Sense of deja vu, all over again
Reviewed by Khushwant S. Gill 

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-1842
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury. Pages 567. Rs 799

The Afghan dilemma never seems to end. Armies and nations come and go but the endless cycle of violence, death and destruction flows on. For a beautiful land and it's people this is a continual tragedy on a monumental scale. Celebrated writer and historian William Dalrymple strums this cord perfectly as he unfolds a captivating tale of 19th-century imperial intrigue, human ambition, bravery, treachery, incompetence and hubris.

At one level, the book follows the fortunes of Shah Shuja, the deposed king of Afghanistan who, instead of giving up and languishing in exile, persistently tries to regain the throne of Afghanistan with British help. Set against this backdrop, Dalrymple's book brilliantly weaves in many other colourful threads and characters that made the history of this period so unsettled and exciting — the uneasy relationship between the East India Company and Ranjit Singh's Sikh kingdom; the Great Game between Russia and Britain for control of Afghanistan and South Asia; the crystallisation of the modern Afghan state from a loose, often-changing, confederation of city-based states extending into Central Asia and referred to as Khorasan; and the intersecting rivalries, connections and nature of the Afghan tribal structure.

The last element, still misunderstood and either overly romanticised or reviled, is of relevance to the 21st century. He proposes that the ill-conceived British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 has it's parallels to the more recent Russian and US invasions and further emphasises the near impossibility of imposing an "outside" solution to the Afghan problem. True in some aspects, it is an overstatement. The 2001 invasion was a hunt for Bin Laden and Al-Qaida and by extension the destruction of their hosts, the Taliban. Ridding a nation of a terrorist organisation and it's infrastructure is no easy job and only the billions of dollars spent each year by having boots on the ground has accomplished this task. The Taliban are still around, but they never were the primary target. Despite drawing this oversimplified parallel between 1839 and 2001, Dalrymple has produced a highly enjoyable and informative read. Down the ages Afghanistan's problems have usually not originated within itself but come from outside — be it international intrigue and power play or foreign terror organisations staking out the mountainous nation. As a young British captain scribbles in his diary in 1838 before setting off for the First Afghan War, "We are on the verge of something momentous. They say we are going to fight the Russians or Persians."

Writing in a lucid, sweeping style and drawing upon Western, Indian and Afghan sources, Dalrymple makes good use of the dramatic events of the First Afghan War to highlight this cyclical obsession with and desertion of Afghanistan. In the process, he spins a historical yarn that borders on fiction in it's readability.

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