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The imperial debacle in Afghanistan: avoiding conspiracy theories
NICK WRIGHT looks at left approaches to the US's humiliation and its reverberations at Westminster
The hearse carrying Navy Corpsman Maxton Soviak leaves Edison High School stadium after his funeral in Milan, Ohio. Soviak was one of 13 US troops killed in a suicide bombing at Afghanistan's Kabul airport on August 26

CONFUSION ruled in the British socialist movement in 1884. The leader of the marxist Social Democratic Federation, Henry Hyndman, had antagonised much of the membership in arguing for a British military mission to rescue General Gordon then besieged by the Sudanese in Khartoum.

Accustomed to his role in asserting British imperial authority over the Sudanese people, the hapless colonial overlord was an early practitioner of the tactics that have caused countless deaths – of colonial subjects and British soldiers alike – over the generations and, in this instance, his own.

This came about when, in defiance of his instructions, which were simply to evacuate, he instead fortified the city and began to treat with the the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad.

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