Diana Preston, The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838–1842 (New York: Walker & Company, 2012), 320 pp., $28.00.

FOR MANY foreigners, the history of Afghanistan reads like a morose, Shakespearean tragedy. A litany of armies ventured into the fabled “graveyard of empires,” sometimes well-intentioned, only to face insurmountable challenges and withdraw in humiliating defeat. Without a doubt, the quintessential Afghan tragedy is the First Anglo-Afghan War, the subject of Diana Preston’s book, The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838–1842.

As Kabul and growing parts of the country rose up in rebellion, the British embarked on an inglorious retreat in January 1842 led by Sir William Hay Macnaghten, Britain’s chief representative to Kabul, and Major General William Elphinstone, commander of the British Army in Afghanistan. The British-led force, which numbered about 4,500 soldiers and included a large contingent of Indian sepoys, was eviscerated as it battled through biting cold, knee-deep snow and apoplectic tribesmen. Dr. William Brydon, the lone European survivor to reach the British fort at Jalalabad, later recalled: “This was a terrible march, the fire of the enemy incessant, and numbers of officers and men, not knowing where they were going from snow-blindness, were cut up.”

The Dark Defile, whose title comes from the lines of a Rudyard Kipling poem, is an impressive book, and Preston relies on primary sources to tell an intriguing story from the British perspective. It is not as comprehensive as the classics by such historians as John William Kaye, whose History of the War in Afghanistan remains a paradigmatic account of the British experience, but it is well sourced and well written.

Given the current war in Afghanistan, it is natural to inquire about the applicability to today of Britain’s nineteenth-century experience. But its relevance is limited. Not every empire that ventured into those lands experienced the same dire fate as the British did in the nineteenth century. Still, two lessons bear close attention. The first is a virtual tenet among most Afghan anthropologists: a strategy that focuses only on creating a strong central government is unlikely to succeed in a country where power remains local. The second is perhaps more sobering: contrary to modern counterinsurgency theories, victory—and defeat—may ultimately be more a function of winning the hearts and minds of domestic constituents than of local Afghans. Both lessons become vividly apparent in The Dark Defile.

PRESTON TELLS the British tragedy in colorful prose. In the early nineteenth century, Britain was a global superpower that boasted impressive political, military and economic might. It was, to be sure, the era of Pax Britannica. The country’s gross national product was $8.2 billion, and it boasted a 53 percent relative share of European wealth, had the largest iron and steel production in the world, and enjoyed a 10 percent share of world-manufacturing output. The only countries that came close were Russia and France, which had large populations and similar levels of gross national product, world-manufacturing output and industrial potential.

In South Asia, the British Empire was firmly entrenched in India, where the East India Company had flexed its economic and military muscles to annex or subdue much of the subcontinent. Britain’s chief rival in the region was Russia, and the two engaged in a growing balance-of-power struggle. The “Great Game” was alive and well. As Preston writes, “the British perceived the Russians as the greatest threat to India,” either directly or by inciting others to act against British interests. Reacting to reports from British spies and diplomats across the region, including the indefatigable Alexander Burnes, the British had become increasingly edgy about Russian expansionism. Burnes’s reports emphasized that Afghanistan could be a profitable trade route and help balance Russian power.

In May 1838, senior British government officials debated several options. Lord Auckland, the governor-general of India, wrote to Sir John Hobhouse, president of the Board of Control in London, that one option was to “leave Afghanistan to its fate” and focus on shoring up British India. A second was to “attempt to save Afghanistan” by supporting the current ruler in Kabul, Dost Mohammed Khan, and other local power brokers. The third option—and the one Britain eventually adopted—was to invade the country and impose the elderly Shah Shuja as king, who the British assessed was more malleable than Dost Mohammed Khan. For British officials, Shah Shuja’s weakness was an asset.

It turned out to be an extraordinary gamble. One Afghan leader pointedly told the British that they “could never win over the Afghan nation” with Shah Shuja, who did not enjoy the legitimacy and popularity of Dost Mohammed Khan. This reality was reinforced on August 7, 1839, when the city of Kabul gave a lukewarm reception to Shah Shuja during his initial entrance into the city. An Indian army infantryman named Sita Ram poignantly captured the irony: “The truth began to dawn on us that despite all the assurances Shah Shuja had given us in Hindustan that the Afghans were longing for his return, in reality they did not want him as their ruler.”

The British had broken a major tenet of modern-day counterinsurgency theory: they failed to win the support of the local population. This miscalculation led to the installation of a weak and unpopular leader. Even worse, the British had made a dangerously naive assumption. They believed Shah Shuja would shortly firm up control of the country, allowing the British to withdraw most of their forces.

It was only a matter of time before Afghanistan exploded. In 1840, Pashtun tribes began to rebel in the southern, eastern and central parts of the country. By 1841, the unrest reached Kabul as the inhabitants rose up against their European occupiers. As Macnaghten wrote, “The whole country . . . had risen in rebellion; our communications on all sides were cut off.” British forces and civilians were pinned down in several cantonments. Perceiving the gravity of the situation, Macnaghten and Elphinstone cut a deal with the insurgent leader, Mohammad Akbar Khan, and agreed to leave.

Their timing couldn’t have been worse. It was January, and Kabul was suffering from subzero temperatures. On January 6, 1842, the British retreated with a contingent of 4,500 soldiers (of whom 690 were European) and twelve thousand camp followers that included women and children. Some died from the extreme cold. But most died an ignominious death at the hands of Afghan tribesmen, who picked apart the force from behind rocks, on horses, and through daring ambushes and raids. Those who were too weak to continue were cut to pieces by waiting tribesmen.

Vincent Eyre, who was captured during the retreat and later went on to serve as an English general in the Indian army, described the scenes in lurid detail:

The snow was absolutely dyed with streaks and patches of blood for whole miles, and at every step we encountered the mangled bodies of British and Hindustani soldiers and helpless camp-followers, lying side by side . . . the red stream of life still trickling from many a gaping wound inflicted by the merciless Afghan knife.

Upon reaching the British fort at Jalalabad, Brydon was in a wretched condition. Exhausted from the fighting and the extreme cold, his body was a mass of cuts and abrasions, and his feet were so swollen with frostbite that he could barely stand.

The British responded with a mixture of shock and rage. Macnaghten and Elphinstone, both of whom died during the retreat, were vilified for their strategic and tactical blunders. Still, the British had to exact justice. Later that year, they sent a raiding party to Afghanistan that reached Kabul in late September 1842 and caused widespread destruction. But it was a pyrrhic victory. Dost Mohammed Khan returned to his throne in 1843 and remained the Afghan leader until his death in 1863.

ONE MIGHT be tempted to overstate lessons from the First Anglo-Afghan War. Preston sometimes does. She suggests, for example, that the British exaggerated the threat Afghanistan posed to their national security—much like today. While this assessment may be accurate in the British case, it is not for the current war. In the 1830s, Afghanistan did not pose a direct threat to the British homeland, but British policy makers were nonetheless concerned about a domino effect if Afghanistan fell into Russian hands—not unlike American fears about Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, events taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially near the two countries’ border, do pose a serious threat to the territories of the United States and its Western allies. Consider the following list of major terrorist attacks that have been planned or carried out since September 11. In July 2005, al-Qaeda struck ferociously in London, detonating a series of bombs that killed fifty-six people and injured more than seven hundred. In August 2006, another group of radicalized British Pakistanis plotted to blow up transatlantic flights from London to the United States and Canada with the assistance of al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan near the Afghan border.

In 2008, Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan American, traveled to Pakistan, where he received training in bomb making and agreed to undertake a “martyrdom operation” inside the United States. Zazi was arrested the following year and confessed to planning to detonate a bomb in the New York City subway. In December 2009, five Americans from Alexandria, Virginia—who were in contact with an al-Qaeda facilitator near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—were arrested in Pakistan and later convicted on terrorism charges. They had been radicalized in the United States and went to Pakistan for training and operational guidance. Finally, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate an improvised explosive device in Times Square in New York City after being trained along the border by bomb makers from the Pakistani Taliban.

This pattern demonstrates that the situation now is vastly different from that of the early nineteenth century. Actors in Afghanistan and Pakistan can directly threaten American and European homelands, an unthinkable prospect in the 1800s. As a result, the risks of a complete withdrawal like the one the British orchestrated in 1842 would be far greater.

A second erroneous parallel is to compare the despised Afghan leader Shah Shuja with today’s president, Hamid Karzai. Preston writes that early British successes “led them into an open-ended commitment to a ruler whom they had not chosen well and, when they realized this, hesitated to replace or ‘guide’ sufficiently.” While this was certainly true of Shah Shuja, the situation with Karzai is different. Karzai’s tenure has, of course, been laced with problems. His government is corrupt (as is the Taliban). He has been plagued by indecisiveness and wild mood swings. And he exerts little control outside the capital.

Yet there are two major differences between Shuja and Karzai. First, Karzai was elected to office; Shuja was unabashedly installed by the British. Karzai won the 2004 presidential elections with 55 percent of the vote; the runner-up, Tajik leader Yunus Qanuni, won only 16 percent. The 2009 presidential elections were marred by concerns about ballot stuffing, intimidation and other electoral fraud. I was living in Kabul at the time and found the evidence of corruption incontrovertible, though it occurred with other candidates as well. Still, preelection polls found Hamid Karzai leading his nearest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, by a wide margin.

Second, opinion polls today give us a good way to gauge popular support. Assuming a healthy margin of error with polling in a war-torn country, polls still show widespread support for Karzai. A 2010 Washington Post poll found that his government enjoyed a 62 percent approval rating, while Karzai was viewed positively by 82 percent of the population—nearly double that of the U.S. president. In 2011, 46 percent of Afghans believed their country was going in the right direction, up slightly from 44 percent in 2006, according to the Asia Foundation. When asked to assess the way the national government was carrying out its responsibilities, nearly three-quarters of respondents in 2011 gave a positive assessment.

A final error would be to compare the Taliban with the widespread insurgency that rose up against the British. By early 1842, the British faced a massive, populist revolt inside Afghanistan spearheaded by Ghilzai and Durrani Pashtuns. Today, the Taliban, whose command-and-control node is in Pakistan, is not a widely popular movement. When asked who they would rather have ruling Afghanistan today, 86 percent of Afghans said the Karzai government and only 9 percent chose the Taliban, according to a December 2010 poll by the Washington Post and other news organizations. When asked who posed the biggest danger to the country, 64 percent of respondents said the Taliban, up from 41 percent in 2005.

It’s not difficult to see why the Taliban is unpopular. Its ideology, which is based on an extreme interpretation of Deobandi Islam, is opposed by most Afghans. In the 1990s, the Taliban closed cinemas and banned music, along with almost every other conceivable kind of entertainment. Most Afghans don’t subscribe to their religious zealotry, which is so extreme that the founders of Deobandism wouldn’t recognize it.

DESPITE THESE differences, there remain some valid lessons from the First Anglo-Afghan War. One of the most important is the fiction of a strong, central Afghan state. “Instead of being a united kingdom under a strong ruler,” Preston presciently writes in The Dark Defile, “Afghanistan was—even when at its most unified—a loose grouping of semiautonomous tribes, some speaking different languages and looking physically different from their neighbors.” This remains true today. Social structures have evolved over the past few decades because of war, droughts, migration patterns, sedentarization and other factors. But power remains local in rural areas, where the insurgency is largely being fought.

Pashtuns have long based identity on a nested set of clans and lineages that stem from a common ancestor. In the absence of strong government institutions, descent groups help Pashtuns organize economic production, preserve political order and defend the group from outside threats. These bonds tend to be weaker in urban areas, where the central government’s control is stronger. The identity of many Pashtuns may shift depending on the context and include their tribe, subtribe, clan, family or village. Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of behavior, shapes daily life through such concepts as badal (revenge), melmastia (hospitality), ghayrat (honor) and nanawati (sanctuary). Local councils, or jirgas, remain instrumental in decision making at the local level, rather than formal courts.

Preston makes clear that rural governance was similar during the nineteenth century, where “in each tribe the gathering of elders—the jirgha—played almost as important a role as the titular ruler.” In this environment, it is impossible to develop an effective counterinsurgency strategy without understanding Afghanistan’s social structure, especially its local nuances. Today’s insurgency is composed of a loose amalgam of the Taliban and other opposition groups, allied tribes, drug-trafficking and other illicit groups, local power brokers and state sponsors. How these groups come together varies considerably across villages, districts and provinces.

The British understanding of Afghanistan’s tribes, Preston argues, was negligible. It culminated in Macnaghten’s ill-informed decision to dock British payments to the Ghilzai tribes that controlled eastern Afghanistan, including the passes they would use on their shameful retreat. “Perhaps the biggest British miscalculation,” she writes, was “unilaterally to reduce some of the subsidies paid to Afghan tribal chiefs. Their economy measure was immediately followed by an Afghan rising.”

With a few exceptions, the United States and other NATO countries have largely failed to understand the local nature of power in Afghanistan. Many Western countries are characterized by strong state institutions in which power emanates from a central authority. But in a range of countries—such as Afghanistan—the central government has historically been limited. Top-down state-building strategies may have been appropriate for countries such as Japan and Germany after World War II, both of which had strong centralized state institutions. But they aren’t likely to work as well in countries such as Afghanistan where power is diffuse.

Since the Bonn agreement in December 2001, international efforts in Afghanistan have largely focused on top-down efforts to establish security by trying to strengthen central-government institutions. On the security front, this translated into building only Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army forces as the bulwark against Taliban and other insurgent groups. On the economic and development fronts, it translated into improving the central government’s ability to deliver services to the population. An effective strategy must include co-opting Afghanistan’s tribes and other communities.

A final lesson is the political reality of war. The British decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was made, in part, because of growing economic problems back home. As Preston notes in The Dark Defile, a series of poor harvests, a downturn in home demand for manufactures and rising government costs contributed to growing skepticism about the importance of Afghanistan. As Lord Auckland wrote to Macnaghten in 1841, British support for Afghanistan was more at risk “from financial than from military difficulties.” The parallels with today are unmistakable, where economic travails in Europe and the United States have forced policy makers to rethink the financial costs of the war.

THE FIRST Anglo-Afghan War left behind a cauldron of searing images that enshrined Afghanistan as a graveyard of empires. Lady Butler’s famous painting of Dr. William Brydon is symptomatic. It shows the paltry survivor alone, disheveled and clinging to life on a decrepit horse. On the horizon, the sun sets as Brydon leaves behind a parched Afghan landscape. The symbolism is unmistakable.

Fortunately, this perception is largely mythical. As anthropologist Thomas Barfield soberly reminds us, “while the popular press often repeats the claim that no conqueror, including such figures as Alexander the Great or Chinggis Khan, ever succeeded in subduing the country, this is untrue.” Many of these conquerors did in fact subjugate the country and occupy the territory. What is less clear, however, is whether today’s foreign powers will learn the wrong lessons from Afghanistan’s history.

A precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, as some in the West hope for, may have grossly unintended consequences, especially if it leads to a Pakistan-backed Taliban takeover of the country. Today’s Afghan insurgents, including the Haqqani network and the Taliban, continue to cooperate with al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, both of which have targeted the United States. A Taliban government in Afghanistan would almost certainly remain an ally of al-Qaeda and would likely provide a boost to Islamic extremism in the region.

Haven’t we learned that lesson before?

Seth G. Jones, author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (W.W. Norton, 2009), is a senior political scientist at RAND. From 2009 to 2011, he served in various positions at U.S. Special Operations Command, including in Afghanistan.