Included in the narrative are the wider Pashtun population that lived astride the British Imperial/Pakistan border, not just those Pashtuns resident in the modern state of Afghanistan.
The literature on the Afghan wars and frontier actions is almost entirely Anglo-centric and ‘agency’ on the part of Afghans/Pashtuns is largely missing. Even modern accounts by journalists, former soldiers, policy-makers and commentators have tended to reduce the Afghans and Pashtuns to stereotypes and deprive them of any initiative. Ironically their nineteenth-century contemporaries were rather more generous in their appraisal of their fighting prowess.
Rob Johnson presents more than just another military history of the Afghan Wars; he seeks to open a new chapter in the debate about Afghanistan and, crucially, aims to ‘tell the story’ from the Afghan side, countering the inaccurate and sometimes rather fanciful interpretations of events, in order to present a more fully rounded account of the military history of the Afghans. ( )