First Anglo-Afghan War

The Battle of Ghazni took place in city of Ghazni in central Afghanistan on July 23, 1839 during the First Anglo-Afghan War. In the 1830s, the... British were firmly entrenched in India but by 1837, the British feared a Russian invasion of India through the Khyber and Bolan Passes as the Russian Empire had expanded towards the British dominion of India. The British sent an envoy to Kabul to form an alliance with Afghanistan's emir, Dost Muhammad against Russia. The Emir was in favour of an alliance but wanted British help in recapturing Peshawar which the Sikhs had captured in 1834. The British refused to help. Dost Muhammad then started negotiating with the Russians who had also sent an envoy to Kabul. This led the Governor General of India, Lord Auckland to conclude that Dost Muhammad was anti-British. British fears of a Russian invasion of India took one step closer to becoming a reality when negotiations between the Afghans and Russians broke down in 1838. This led to Persian troops along with their Russian allies to attack the Afghan city of Herat in western Afghanistan in an attempt to annex it.
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The Battle of Jellalabad in 1842 was an Afghan siege of the isolated British outpost at Jellalabad about 80 miles east of Kabul. The siege was... lifted after five months when a British counterattack routed the Afghans, driving them back to Kabul. The outpost was no more than a wide place in the road with a fort, held by about 2,000 troops under General Sir Robert Sale. After the massacre of the British force during their retreat from Kabul in January 1842, Jellallabad was surrounded by Afghan forces which launched a series of attacks on the force. The British managed to beat off the assaults, and even captured 300 sheep from the besieging force when rations ran short. Eventually, after five months under siege, Sale mounted an attack against the Afghan forces, captured their main camp, baggage, stores, guns, and horses and the Afghans fled to Kabul. The defence of Jellalabad made heroes of the 13th Foot. It is reported that as the regiment marched back through India to return to Britain every garrison fired a ten gun salute in its honour.
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Gandamak is a village in Afghanistan, 35 miles from Jalalabad on the road to Kabul. During the retreat from Kabul of Major-General William... Elphinstone's army in 1842, a hill near Gandamak was the scene of the massacre of the last survivors of the British force: twenty officers and forty-five soldiers of the British 44th Regiment of Foot. The British force had been relentlessly pursued by Akbar Khan's Afghan forces during the slow retreat from Kabul that had gradually become a running battle through two feet of snow. The men had no shelter and little food for weeks. The ground was frozen and icy. Only a dozen of the men had working muskets, the officers their pistols and a few unbroken swords. When the Afghans surrounded them on the morning of the 13th the Afghans announced that a surrender could be arranged. "Not bloody likely!" was the bellowed answer of one British sergeant. It is believed that only two survived the massacre. More notable in the English-speaking world at least is Captain Thomas Souter, who with the regimental colours wrapped around himself was taken prisoner, being mistaken by the Afghan as a high military official.
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for other uses of the term see Battle of Kabul The Battle of Kabul was fought from August to October, 1842, between British and Afghan forces. It was... the concluding engagement of the First Anglo-Afghan War. The British advanced on Kabul from Kandahar and Jalalabad to avenge the earlier Massacre of Elphinstone's Army. Having recovered several prisoners captured in that event, the British demolished parts of Kabul before evacuating Afghanistan and retreating to India. In the late 1830s, the British government and the British East India Company became obsessed with the idea that Emir Dost Mohammed of Afghanistan was courting Imperial Russia. They arranged passage through Sindh for an army which invaded Afghanistan and restored the former ruler Shuja Shah Durrani, who had been deposed by Dost Mohammed thirty years earlier and who had been living as a pensioner in India. They also agreed safe passage for supplies and reinforcements with Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Sikh Empire, in return for inducing Shah Shuja to formally cede the disputed region of Peshawar to him. The British captured Kabul, and Dost Mohammed surrendered himself into British custody.
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