William Brydon

But incessantly attacked during its march, and almost annihilated in the Kurd-Kabul Pass, it ceased to exist as an organized body.

General Elphinstone and other officers, invited to a conference by Akbar Khan, were forcibly detained as hostages, and on January the 13th a solitary Englishman, Dr. Brydon, arrived at Jalalabad, being, with the exception of a few prisoners, the sole remaining representative of the force.

I have given this short sketch of the first Afghan war because, disastrous as it was, the causes of our failure were due throughout far more to rash and mistaken policy than to any shortcomings of the British troops engaged.

Kaye, in his history, gives a clear summary of its original object and unfortunate results.

Man, woman, and child.

I, Dr. Brydon, am the army, all that remains of it.

The commander heard him in astonishment and horror.

General Elphinstone had 17,000 soldiers and camp followers in his camp at Kabul.

Did Dr. Brydon mean to say They are all gone, was the feeble reply.

I am left.

All the others are slain.

The army had vanished.

The 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and these were just warm-up acts, because on September 11th, 2001, 19 hijackers, 15 of them Saudi nationals, murdered nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and a farmer's field in Pennsylvania.

The command and control for that operation ran through Afghanistan, and so the United States went to war.

Which returns us to our opening scene, Destroyer 1-1 kicking off what came to be known as Operation Enduring Freedom.

Make no mistake, though, the United States was not interested in occupying Afghanistan indefinitely or remaking Afghan society.

But the close air support SME was especially busy, as I recall, developing tactics for strike fighter crews coordinating with the teams of CIA officers and special forces inserted to link up with the Northern Alliance, already fighting the Taliban on the ground.

Those handfuls of Americans became the eyes and ears for an air campaign unlike anything seen before.

Riding on horseback or in pickup trucks and communicating by satellite radio, they identified Taliban troop concentrations, armored vehicles, artillery positions, and command centers for combat aircraft orbiting overhead.

Precision-guided munitions from Air Force fighters and bombers, Navy and Marine Corps-based strike fighters, and cruise missiles launched from hundreds of miles away systematically dismantled the Taliban's military infrastructure.