This shared image is the painting of the Assistant Surgeon, Dr, William Brydon, of the British Army, who happily accompanied the strong 20, 000 invading British Army into Afghanistan with grand pomp and show along equal numbers of their Indian servants.
The purpose was to dethrone my immediate ancestor Amir Dost Muhammad Khan, the second greatest Hero in the Afghan history after Ahmed Shah Abdali and founder of the Muhammad Zai dynasty, who first fled to Bokhra and later surrendered when a hundred thousand rupee head money was announced for his capture.
His brave son the legendary Afghan General Wazir Akbar Khan, initiated a guerilla war exactly the way it was fought against the Soviet Union and today against America and ensured the entire army along with their Indian servants are wiped out and ensured his father was restored on the throne before as reprisal he was poisoned to death through his Hindu Munshi ( modern day Secretary) aged 29 only. .
Amid the harsh Afghan winter it was exactly 13th January 1842 that then the 30-year-old Scot doctor Brydon was found by the British rescue party who reported having found nearly a dead man, exhausted, his uniform torn and blood stained but when asked where was the rest of the army and he managed to reply ” I am the Army”,
Exactly, the way today the abandoned American Humvees on the Afghan soil are symbolic of their humiliating defeat being humbled by a much inferior force both numerically and qualitatively. Sadly all that is learnt from history is that nothing is learnt and the same lesson kept repeated as a futile exercise to rediscover the world and its already well established realities that no superiority can either challenge or change.
