Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

by William Dalrymple

the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

Amid all this civil and fratricidal war, Durrani Afghanistan quickly fractured into anarchy. It was during this period that the country accelerated its transformation from the sophisticated centre of learning and the arts, which led some of the Great Mughals to regard it as a far more elegantly cultured place than India, into the broken, war-torn backwater it was to become for so much of its modern history.