Afghanistan defeat: British Failures of “the White Man’s burden”

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.” Rudyard Kipling

Jallianwala Bagh massacreJallianwala Bagh massacre of a horrible event of British ruleLord Curzon attacks to get to the oxus

MEMORANDUM

TO:             BritainBritain’s Neo-colonial role in the Subcontinent to achieve Mountbatten’s goals of “Akhand Bharat”

FROM:       Moin Ansari

DATED:     Today 

SUBJECT: Your “White Man’s burden”, and post Colonial involvement in Afghanistan

cliveLord Mintos SubcontinentUnion Jack goes down in the Subcontinent 

Some level of alterity is in order. When your last general left the Subcontinent, Pakistanis and Afghans believed in the cynosure chimera that “you” would really leave. We thought we would remember you for the trains bequeathed by Lord Delhousie’s. The West Asian aviary must have apocryphal magnetic powers over Englishmen. The Union Jack keeps coming back to the Middle East and South Asia.

Britain’s Neo-colonial role in the Subcontinent to achieve Mountbatten’s goals of “Akhand Bharat”Lord CorniwallisBritish Retreat  

The Empire is gone but incredulously you keep coming back. Why is it so? Is there an eschatologically obsessed version of Christianity that tries to make British foreign and domestic policy conterminous with their biblical worldview?” Is it because there were no lessons learned and the pusillanimous Kiplingish “White Man’s Burden” keeps on raising it’s ugly head every few decades. How many times will you try to civilize us?

 Lord CliveBritish defeat at the battle of MaiwandBattle of Raiwind

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child. 

Even in the 19th century technology was not the panacea that prevented defeat. Are there any lessons learned from the “Charge of the Light Brigade“.  

The Durand Line was the border defined between the British Mortimar Durand and the Afghan Abdur Rehman Khan in 1893. Eighty Four percent of the line follows clear physical features (rivers or watershed divides), and remaining line was demarcated from the 1894-95 demarcation reports and subsequent mapping such as the detailed (1:50,000 scale) Soviet maps of the 1980s.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

 How many times will you “To veil the threat of terror“? 

Take up the White M