War
After tension between Russia and Britain in Europe ended with the June 1878 Congress of Berlin, Russia turned its attention to Central Asia. That same summer, Russia sent an uninvited diplomatic mission to Kabul. Sher Ali Khan, the Amir of Afghanistan, tried unsuccessfully to keep them out. Russian envoys arrived in Kabul on 22 July 1878, and on 14 August, the British demanded that Sher Ali accept a British mission too.
The Amir not only refused to receive a British mission under Neville Bowles Chamberlain, but threatened to stop it if it were dispatched. Lord Lytton, the viceroy, ordered a diplomatic mission to set out for Kabul in September 1878 but the mission was turned back as it approached the eastern entrance of the Khyber Pass, triggering the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
Read more about this topic: Second Anglo-Afghan War
Famous quotes containing the word war:
“This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain.... It is a war ... to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)