Lord Lytton and the Afghan war / by W. J. Eastwick.

“Lord Lytton and the Afghan War is a scathing critique of the Afghan policies of Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the viceroy of India who is credited with provoking the Second Anglo-Afghan War. A poet, novelist, and diplomat, Lytton was appointed viceroy in 1876 by Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Lytton purportedly feared the spread of Russian influence in Central Asia. In November 1878 he launched the invasion of Afghanistan from British India by an Anglo-Indian force with the aim of replacing the Afghan amir, Sher Ali, who was reputed to harbor pro-Russian sentiments, with a ruler more favorable to Britain. Published in 1879 by William Joseph Eastwick, a former high-ranking official of the East India Company, the book criticizes the errors of fact and judgment made by Lytton in pursuit of his “forward” policy toward Afghanistan. Eastwick accuses Lytton of misleading Parliament and the British public about the situation in the country, exaggerating the threat posed by Sher Ali, underestimating the duration and ferocity of the resistance the invasion was likely to provoke, disregarding previous diplomatic understandings with Russia, and undermining progress in India, where Eastwick regarded British rule as a force for good. Many of Eastwick’s pessimistic predictions about the war were eventually borne out, as the conflict dragged on until the fall of 1880 with rising human, financial, and political costs”—copied from website.

The Library of Congress donated copies of the digitized material (along with extensive bibliographic records) containing more than 163,000 pages of documents to ACKU, the collections that include thousands of historical, cultural, and scholarly materials dating from the early 1300s to the 1990s includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers and periodicals related to Afghanistan in Pushto, Dari, as well as in English, French, German, Russian and other European languages ACKU has a PDF copy of the item.

English