Maiwand is a village in southern Afghanistan. It was the site of the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, a major battle in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, in which the Afghans defeated two small brigades, though at the high cost of over 2,000 lives with another 1,500 injured.
Anglo-Afghan War. Though the British officially won the war, Afghanistan was hardly secure either during the occupation or in the decades that followed. In that sense, the first Anglo-Afghan war presaged a century of precarious imperial power on the frontier of the Raj. Image: Detail: ‘Remnants of an Army’ by Elizabeth Butler portraying William Brydon arriving at the gates of Jalalabad as the only survivor of a 16,500 strong evacuation from Kabul in January 1842. This image is in the public domain in the United States as its copyright has expired.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War grew out of longstanding tensions between Russia and Britain over Britain’s prized colonial possession of India. It lasted from November 1878 to May 1881. Image: Battle of Kandahar, 1880, by W. Skeoch Cumming. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.