For more than a century and a half the UK has been intimately involved in the future of Afghanistan. In fact, the UK fought three successive wars between 1839 and 1919 to gain a foothold in the struggling nation. Essentially, these wars were a conflict between two powerful nations — the United Kingdom and Russia — who both desperately wanted to forge their own sphere of influence in central Asia.
In truth, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the British had little or nothing to do with the nation itself; rather, it was all about preventing the Russians from gaining influence in the region. Over the next seventy years there would be two additional conflicts between the two powers, in which Afghanistan served as the primary battlefield.
However, by the Third Anglo-Afghan war, the British turned their attention to the Afghans themselves, instead of the Russian, who they viewed as a possible threat to their colonisation of nearby India. While the British did win a minor victory in the war with the Afghanis, they would never again restore amicable relations with a nation they had once defended. That leads us to the present and to the state of Euro news today .
More than eighty years after the third and final Anglo-Afghan war, the UK returned to Afghanistan to support the Americans in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th. For years, Afghanistan has been the unfortunate home of a violent and repressive regime known as the Taliban. It was this brutal group of thugs and terrorists who were most directly responsible for the attack.
Now, more than eight years later, the UK still has troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan. In fact, according to the military, more than one hundred soldiers from the UK died in Afghanistan in 2009. With a newly elected American president, we can only hope and pray that the conflict is soon resolved.