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to nothing.
    Outside Britain there was general satisfaction at Britain’s unexpected reverses in Afghanistan. In the United States the Afghan War took up numerous column inches in the nation’s newspapers, large and small. Outrage at the “odium” and “wickedness” of the British intervention and admiration for the “indomitable love of independence” of the Afghans were almost universal. Atrocities committed by the British as they sought retribution were equally condemned. Afghanistan became somewhat of an issue in the 1842 congressional elections with British attitudes and actions being seen as emblematic of behavior America should avoid. The U.S. administration, however, made no protest to Britain. It was more concerned with negotiating a major treaty with Britain—the Webster-Ashburton Treaty—regulating outstanding issues between the two countries, including the definition of parts of the border between the United States and Canada, and securing favorable trading rights under British aegis in Asia, and in particular China, following Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars and the secession to them of Hong Kong.
    WITH THE BENEFIT of hindsight, among the more important lessons the British should have learned from the First Afghan War were many that resonate today. Their leaders were not honest with themselves or their public about their motivation, providing partial and misleading information to both Parliament and public. In their own minds they exaggerated the threats to their position in India and exaggerated the power of their available troops to cope with the demands an Afghan campaign would make on them.
    The British entered Afghanistan without clear objectives or a defined exit strategy or timetable. In what could be termed regime change , they endeavored to impose on the country a ruler unpopular with his people. The Duke of Wellington correctly prophesied that Britain’s difficulties would begin when its military success ended. These 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. They alienated an increasingly hostile population excited into jihad against the infidel British by Islamic clerics and their followers, the ghazis , ready to martyr themselves.
    British intelligence was poor. Although they saw Russia as their main rival in Central Asia, there was no Russian speaker anywhere in their administration in India. Their knowledge of the terrain was sketchy, and they were ignorant until too late of the tribal nature of the politics of the country which barely merited that name, being split up between semiautonomous tribes, people looking very different from each other and speaking mutually incomprehensible languages. They did not understand that these tribes united only rarely and that when they did so it was against a foreign invader such as themselves.
    Many senior British officers’ only experience of action had been in the defeat of Napoleon’s vast armies on the plains of Europe a quarter of a century before. When, beaten in conventional warfare, the Afghans changed their tactics into those of the guerrilla fighter, these same British officers found it difficult to react to an enemy who picked off their soldiers, highly visible in their red coats, from vantage points high above the passes, their long-barreled jezails accurate at far greater range than the British Brown Besses. The British learned that it was both difficult to recruit and train Afghan troops to support Shah Shuja and when they did so found their loyalty and performance in battle was unreliable, one officer complaining, “ They would never be fit for anything. ”
    In general, British troops struggled to distinguish between hostile and peaceful Afghans, both in Kabul and in the countryside, even when, as was not always the case, they tried hard to make such distinctions. As a consequence innocent civilians