When Gurkhas were deployed to Afghanistan in late-2001 alongside coalition forces, they walked in the footsteps of their forebears. Generations of Nepalese had fought and bled on that same soil over two centuries and would continue to in the subsequent years.
Back in the early 1800s, when British-Gurkha relations were in their infancy, Afghanistan had been treated as a buffer zone between the Empire and that of expansionist Imperial Russia. Wishing to protect their Indian colony at all costs, by the late-1830s the British had attempted to create
