Stories of foreign troops battling in Afghanistan while diplomats try to find a strong leader for the remote and rugged country sound like today's headlines. Yet they perfectly describe Britain's war in Afghanistan in the late 1870s.
When the British invaded Afghanistan for the second time it wasn't to fight the Afghans so much as it was to thwart the Russian Empire. The feeling in London was that Russia wanted to eventually move southward and seize Britain's prize possession, India.
When the British Army marched into Afghanistan in late 1878 things actually went too well at first. A weak Afghan leader agreed to conditions he couldn't enforce, and the British soon faced a disaster in Kabul that could have rivaled the horrendous winter retreat from the Afghan capital in 1842.
After a year of both miscalculation and heroics, the result of the Second Anglo-Afghan War was that Britain installed an Afghan leader who would keep the country stable. And the Russians were denied a stepping-stone to the riches of British India.
Photograph: General Roberts, hero of Kandahar/Library of Congress
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