Excerpt from William Dalrymple's 'Return of a King'  Excerpt
from William Dalrymple's 'Return of a King'  Historian William
Dalrymple's The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan,
1839-42 is a magisterial new look at the First Afghan War, in
which British and East India Company troops invaded Afghanistan
to install a puppet ruler, Shah Shuja, on the throne in Kabul,
only to be ferociously expelled by an indigenous uprising less
than three years later. Working from Afghan primary sources
never previously utilized by a Western historian, Dalrymple
paints a sweeping canvas of imperial folly, leading to military
catastrophe, that has uncomfortable resonances with today's NATO
operations in Afghanistan.  Dalrymple underscored some of those
parallels in a trenchant op-ed published on April 13 inThe New
York Times, in which he wrote: "The same tribal rivalries exist
and the same battles are being fought in the same places under
the guise of new flags, new ideologies and new political
puppeteers. The same citie