On the heights of the Kabul Gorge, they still find ancient belt  buckles and corroded sword hilts. You can no longer read the  insignia of the British regiments of the old East India Company  but their bones ­ those of all 16,000 of them ­ still lie  somewhere amid the dark earth and scree of the most  forbidding mountains in Afghanistan. Like the British who came  later, like the Russians who were to arrive more than a century  afterwards, General William Elphinstone's campaign was  surrounded with rhetoric and high principles and ended in  disaster. George Bush Junior and Nato, please note.

  Indeed, if there is one country ­ calling it a nation would be a  misnomer ­ that the West should avoid militarily, it is the tribal  land in which Osama Bin Laden maintains his obscure  sanctuary. Just over two decades ago, I found out what it was  like to be on an invasion army in that breathlessly beautiful,  wild, proud plateau. Arrested by the Russian Parachute  Regiment near the Salang Tunnel, I was sent with a Soviet  convoy back to Kabul. We were ambushed, and out of the  snowdrifts came the Afghans, carrying knives. An air strike and  the arrival of Soviet Tadjik troops saved us. But the mighty Red  Army had been humbled before men who could not write their  own names and whose politics were so remote that a mujahid  fighter would later insist to me that London was occupied by  Russian troops.

  Back in 1839 we British were also worried about the Russians.  General Elphinstone lead an East India Company army of  16,500 ­ along with 38,000 followers ­ into Afghanistan,  anxious to put an end to Dost Mohamed's flirtation with the  Tsar, took Kandahar and entered Kabul on 30 June with the  first foreign force to occupy the city in modern times. Dost  Mohamed ­ the British Superpower of the time knew how to  deal with recalcitrant natives ­ was dispatched to exile in India,  but the Afghans were not prepared to be placed under British  tutelage. To garrison a foreign army in Kabul was folly, as  Elphinstone must have realised when, on 1 November, 1840, a  British official, Alexander Burns, was hacked to pieces by a  mob in the souk and his head impaled on a stake. A  300-strong British unit in the field fled for its life back to Kabul.  And when Dost Mohamed's son turned up, leading an Afghan  army of 30,000, Elphinstone was doomed.

  He bartered his freedom in return for a safe passage back to  the British fort in Jalalabad, close to the Indian frontier. It was  one of the coldest winters on record and with few supplies,  virtually no food and false promises of safety, he led his army ­  their columns 10 miles in length ­ out into the frozen  desolation of the Kabul Gorge. The camp followers were left by  the wayside; contemporary records describe Indian women  attached to the British army's colonial force, stripped naked,  starving, raped and knifed by Afghan tribesmen, their corpses  left in the snow. Elphinstone had long since given up trying to  protect them. Yet each new foray down the chasm of the Kabul  Gorge ­ I was to see the remains of a Russian convoy littered  across the same track almost 140 years later ­ led to further  ambushes and massacres.

  Elphinstone secured the safety of himself, a few officers and a  party of English ladies. The last British guardsmen were cut  down on the heights, surrounded by thousands of Afghans,  firing to the last round, the company commander dying with the  Union flag wrapped around his waist. Days later, the last  survivor of the massacres, galloping his exhausted horse  Jalalabad was attacked by two Afghan cavalry. Hacking them  away from him, he broke his sword, Hollywood-style, on one of  the men. But with his horse dying beneath him, he reached the  British fort. It was to date the greatest defeat of British arms in  history.

  The British clung to Afghanistan as if it was a jewel in the  crown. Under the Treaty of Gandamak, the Amir Yakub Khan  could rule Kabul and a British embassy would be opened in the  city. But within months, in 1879, the residency was under  siege, its few occupants fighting ­ once more ­ to the last  man. With the embassy on fire, the handful of Britons inside  made repeated forays into the ranks of the Afghans. "When  charged,'' a later British account would claim, "the Afghan  soldiers ran like sheep before a wolf". But within hours, the  British were fighting from the burning roof of the residency,  slashed to bits with swords, stripped and their bodies burned.  The Consul, born to a French father and an Irish mother, was  Major Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, KCB, CSI. A British  journalist with the Kabul Field Force found a few scorched  bones in the residency yard; they included, no doubt, Sir  Pierre's remains.

  Ironically, one of Elphinstone's successors was visiting the site  of the 1842 massacre in 1880 when he heard that his army ­  this was the Second Afghan War ­ had been attacked in a  remote semi-desert called Maiwand where the 30th Bombay  Infantry was fighting off thousands of ghazi warriors who were  charging suicidally at British cannon and Egyptian colonial  troops. Savage in their assaults, waving green Islamic banners  and utterly heedless of their own lives ­ and the word "suicidal"  is not used loosely here ­ they threw themselves among the  British.

  We were to conduct a military inquiry into the disaster that  followed and now, in the fragile, yellowing pages of the Indian  British Army's Intelligence Branch report we can find chilling  evidence of what this meant. Captain Wainwaring was to recall  how "the whole of the ground to the left of the 30th Native  Infantry, and between it and the Grenadiers, was covered with  swarms of ghazis and banner-men. The ghazis were actually in  the ranks of the Grenadiers, pulling the men out and hacking  them down with their swords ...''. A young Afghan woman ­ all  we know is that her name was Malaleh ­ feared that the  tribesmen might withdraw and so tore off her veil, holding it  above her head as a flag and charging at the Grenadiers  herself. She was shot down by British rifle fire. But the British  fled. In all, they lost 1,320 men including 21 officers, along with  1,000 rifles and at least 600 swords.

  The Great Game was supposed to be about frontiers ­ about  keeping a British-controlled Afghanistan between the Indian  Empire and the Russian border ­ but it was a history of  betrayals. Those we thought were on our side turned out to be  against us. Until 1878, we had thought the Amir Sher Ali Khan  of Kabul was our friend, ready to fight for the British Empire ­  just as a man called Osama bin Laden would later fight the  Russians on "our" behalf ­ but he forbade passage to British  troops and encouraged the robbery of British merchants.

  He had "openly and assiduously endeavoured ... to stir up  religious hatred against the English,'' our declaration of war had  announced on 21 November, 1878. The Amir's aiding and  abetting of the murder of the British Embassy staff was "a  treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible  disgrace upon the Afghan people,'' Sir Frederick Roberts  announced in 1879 when, yet again, the British had occupied  Kabul. The Amir's followers "should not escape ... penalty and  ... the punishment inflicted should be such as will be felt and  remembered ... All persons convicted of bearing a part [in the  murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts.'' It was an  ancient, Victorian warning, a ghostly preamble to the words we  have been hearing from President Bush ­ and, indeed, Mr Blair  ­ in the last 48 hours.

  The Russians were to endure their 10 years of Calvary exactly  a century later, though in truth it was the Afghans who suffered  a virtual genocide under the Soviets. Osama bin Laden, who  had himself escaped several murder attempts by Russian  agents, survived. Perhaps Vladimir Putin who is being asked to  subscribe to the West's new battle for "democracy and liberty''  against the forces of darkness might remind Mr Bush just how  painful Russia's military adventure in Afghanistan proved to be.  Perhaps we could all go back to the history books before  suggesting ­ and the idea of such an adventure is clearly being  dreamed of in Washington ­ that the Great Game should be  taken up once more.