In 1878, Russia challenged British interests in Afghanistan by sending a mission to Kabul, which the Afghan Amir, Sher Ali Khan, appeared to have welcomed. In defence of his forward policy, the British Viceroy in India, Lord Lytton, sent his own emissary. When he was denied entry, the British issued an ultimatum which the Amir rejected. The British invaded in order to secure regime change. Afghan forces included both traditional irregular militias and regulars trained with British weapons by former Indian NCOs. They enjoyed superior numbers, local knowledge, mobility, and some enterprising commanders. British superiority in weapons, discipline, and training was marked. They also adopted khaki uniforms which replaced the traditional scarlet, which frustrated the Afghan use of the long-range jezail. These advantages enabled the defeat of Afghan forces under the new Amir, Ayub Khan, at the Battle of Ahmed Khel (19 April 1880). British and Indian forces were insufficient in numbers, however, to control much of the country. A defeat at Maiwand led to a renewed British commitment and General Sir Frederick Roberts’ successful 300-mile march brought decisive victory at Kandahar. The Amir was replaced with a more compliant leader, and the British withdrew.

The historiography of the Russian conquest has been blighted by a number of persistent myths about Russian motivations. Chief amongst these are the so-called ‘Great Game’ with the British in India, and the ‘Cotton Canard’, which suggests that Central Asia was conquered to provide a source of raw cotton and a captive market for Russian industry. Neither of these arguments stands up to closer scrutiny – the ‘Great Game’ is a product of Anglo-Indian paranoia which tells us nothing about Russian motives, while the ‘Cotton Canard’ is a Soviet orthodoxy derived from Lenin’s writings rather than from evidence. What the sources reveal instead is a contingent, messy process with no overall strategic or economic purpose. The Russian Empire’s military and diplomatic elite took a series of ad-hoc decisions that were often driven by very local factors, and prioritised short-term military security and relations with Central Asian states and peoples. What we do see running through these decisions is the need to maintain Great Power prestige, a resentment of Central Asian ‘insolence’, and mutually incomprehensible understandings of sovereignty. An overview of Russian military technology and tactics concludes that logistics were the most crucial factor in Central Asian campaigns – this puts the focus on camels and those who bred and managed them.

The Epilogue elaborates briefly the transformation of the Indo-Islamic world in the colonial and postcolonial centuries.

Through an analysis of some of the stock tropes (as a pawn in the Great Game, as a space of disease and pathology and as the graveyard of empires) used to describe Afghanistan, and through a close reading of one key text (Afghanistan 101), the first chapter highlights the ways in which a certain essentialised ‘idea’ of Afghanistan has become common-sense and has disguised the need for more serious engagement with the country and its people. The aim of this chapter is to foreground Afghanistan as an object of enquiry and to start questioning some of the strategies that are most commonly used to think about it.