{"book":"adl0957","page":141,"text":"104\n\nafter sustaining heavy casualties. No nation or race has ever\nshown more dauntless courage or more indomitable energy than\nthe Afghans in their wars with Arabs. The Arabs attacked\nKabul and the Central Afghan plateau no less than six times,\nbut all their efforts were frustrated and each time they had to\nfall back precipitately.\n\nIn modern times the regiments of the British army which\nstormed triumphantly through Africa and Asia, suffered crushing\ndefeats at the hands of the Afghans. Only the Afghans defeated\nthe British Empire, not once, but three times and at the\nBritishers' game of war. The disaster of the British troops—\ntroops long accustomed to oriental fighting, during the First\nAfghan War (1838—42), cannot be explained in any way other\nthan that the British were outfought by the Afghans who were\narmed with but primitive weapons. The Second Afghan War\n(1878—1881) was another debacle. The Third Afghan War\n(1919) proved conclusively that the vast development of Britain's\nfighting methods during those four years (1914—1918) did not\nenable her to subdue the Afghans.\n\nThe Afghan ideal of progress seems to consist in a proper\nbalance of material advancement and spiritual renovation. It\npermits the assimilation of the substance of the great cultures\nof the world, without impairing its national individuality. The\nAfghans want to preserve a spiritual civilisation which is as\nimportant as material progress, realising that the Western\ncivilisation, with all its great achievements in the field of science\nand art and other departments of knowledge, is lacking in this\nrespect.\n\nThe Afghans are physically a very fine people. They are\nof robust build, strong, stalwart and muscular. They have high","chars":1720,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00141.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/141","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/141","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}