In 1843 shortly after his return from the battlefields of the First Anglo-Afghan War, the Army chaplain in Jalalabad, Rev. G.H. Gleig, wrote a memoir about the disastrous expedition of which he was one of the few survivors. It was, he wrote,
a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated
Still seems to have resonance.