Posted on 09/22/2021 9:03:38 AM PDT by Rebelbase
On January 13, 1842, a single man on horseback approached the British garrison at Jalalabad, where soldiers were waiting for a retreating army of several thousand. Exhausted, the man had part of his skull shaved off by a sword and his horse was so exhausted that it would soon perish. As he was brought into the walls of the city the lone man was asked where the rest of the army was. “I am the army,” he replied. Thus ended a disastrous retreat from Kabul, where a British force of some 4,500 soldiers and thousands of civilians was almost entirely destroyed.
They lie like a rug.
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.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
The Young British Soldier
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_youngbrit.htm
Never trust the words of an Afghan.
Ha! Here’s to the Chinese discovery the meaning of “the graveyard of Empires”!
we should have left after tora bora and strayed in Iraq
kipling was masterful
That was a fascinating lesson for me.
Harry Flashman survived too (of course).
The past is always prologue.
It is perhaps America’s greatest failing that we think our fancy tech will solve all problems.
The reality is human beings don’t change. We are the same fallen creatures we were 200 years go. We have no more ability to control the Afghan clans than the British did.
No - don’t put a doddering old fool in charge of your troops.
A competent general would have avoided that destruction.
Replying to your post with my tagline.
“It is perhaps America’s greatest failing that we think our fancy tech will solve all problems.
Arithmetic on the Frontier
Rudyard Kipling
[snippets]
A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow.
Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.
That last line sums it up nicely.
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