You have got to know what you are looking for, but on the present-day US aerial photograph of the Helmand valley you can see a hamlet called Khig and there you can just about make out some odd-looking piles of stones. They are bleached white to look at and scattered around what pass for gardens and orchards in that part of Afghanistan – but it is hard to see what function they have. Well, they do not have much function at all these days, other than to cover the bones of the British and Indian troops who fell there exactly a hundred and thirty-one years ago, in July 1880.

But here is the twist. Many of those graves mark the bodies of men of the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment who were killed by Talibs and religious zealots called Ghazis, who believed that eternal paradise would be theirs if they fell in battle against the infidel. Today, the 66th’s descendents – 1st Bn. The Rifles – are facing Taliban, and fanatics called Al Qaeda, on exactly the same piece of ground: Maiwand.

The area where the battle was fought lies below a hilly range, is cut about by dry watercourses and is set with a couple of villages. Today, it has hardly changed. Just there, however, on 27 July 1880, in the space of four hours, a proud brigade of four thousand men was cut to ribbons. They had marched out from Kandahar to challenge about twelve thousand Afghans. The force was a mixture of British and Indian troops. They were eventually overwhelmed by a tidal wave of furious tribal warriors and Afghan regulars who left almost one thousand experienced and campaign- hardened Imperial troops dead on the field. The pride of the Bombay Army had been butchered, as well as most of the 66th Regiment and many gunners from the Royal Horse Artillery. On top of this, a clutch of guns had been lost and scores of valuable horses slaughtered.

The fighting was some of the most vicious I have ever read about. Whilst researching my third novel I went through countless diaries and letters from the survivors. All dwell on the mad charges of the Ghazis, who wereevery bit as fanatical as today’s suicide bombers. But these holy warriors would not trust complex guns or explosives; well-honed steel was the only acceptable tool.

These warriors charged at the khaki-clad ranks of British and Indian troops. They defied the slamming volleys of Martini-Henry and Snider rifles, ignored the sheets of canister shot from the Horse Gunners’ nine- pounders, fell by the dozen but still ran forward, propelled by sheer hatred for the invader. Then razor-sharp knives crossed with needle-like bayonets, stabbing and slashing until the desert floor was rusty with blood.

Ayoob Khan, the Afghan commander, had marched from Herat on the Persian border to claim the principality of Kandahar and eject the invaders. With him he had brought almost thirty guns and a host of uniformed, regular infantry and cavalry. As he marched he gathered about him clouds of tribesmen and Ghazis. His argument was not with the cause or beliefs of the British, but rather with their presence at all. Similarly, Khan did not seek to conquer British India nor raise his flag over Whitehall; he merely wanted what he regarded to be rightfully his. Is it not odd that this army resembles so closely the mixture of tribes and ideology that makes up today’s Taliban and their Al Qaeda backers?

Essentially, the British brigade under Brigadier General Burrows was hammered by Ayoob Khan’s guns and then pinned by his infantry and cavalry amongst the very water courses and hamlets where he had intended to slam the Afghans. His reconnaissance and planning were good, but the great swallow-tail of servants and bearers who always followed such forces in the nineteenth century slowed him with fatal consequences. By the time he reached Maiwand his enemies were already there; they had literally stolen a march.

There was not much manoeuvre. The smaller Imperial brigade served its handful of nine-pounders against the thirty or more heavier guns of the Afghans with great bravery, but they were soon short of ammunition whilst their vital horses were knocked down by the dozen. The infantry stood firm, at first, against assault after bloody assault. Finally, however, the Bombay Grenadiers and Jacob’s Rifles broke, leaving the 66th fighting tooth and claw around their Colours. Burrows fell his brigade back, rallied them around Khig and fought alongside the survivors until Khan’s men closed in for a last time. Eventually, the Colour parties of every regiment were swamped. Lt. Col. James Galbraith of the 66th, a forty year old Ulsterman, was first shot and then stabbed time and again alongside most of his officers – some still in their teens – and his Sergeant Major with whom he had served for almost twenty years.

Later, Kipling wrote about Maiwand in his poem, ‘That Day’. He told of the slaughter of the battle, of Khan’s pounding artillery and the horror of the retreat, where as many men died of thirst and loss of blood as perished on Afghan knives. Yet nowhere did he mention why the troops were there. And there is the irony, for the expedition of 1880 had very clear objectives which, despite the horror of Maiwand, were largely achieved.

One hundred and thirty-one years is a long time ago, and many would say that Victorian experiences are now irrelevant. One has to look no further than the political backdrop of the times, though, to see some frightening similarities. Gladstone’s Whigs committed troops to operations on the Helmand without any proper assessment of the enemy, despite the existence of a very active and capable military/political department whose very job it was to keep the government as well informed as they could.

Contrary to the normal practices of the time, no attempt was made to talk to Ayoob Khan during his three week march from Herat towards Kandahar. Letters were subsequently exchanged which showed that he might have been persuaded not to fight: indeed, he claimed that he was surprised by the obvious desire of the British for combat on the morning of Maiwand; he fully expected some form of parley. Does this not sound awfully like the sort of debates that are still swirling about over the subject of whether or not we should talk to the Taliban? Phrased like that, the idea is unpalatable, but once we suggest ‘peeling the Taliban off’ from Al Qaeda and remember the adage that ‘you may not buy an Afghan but you can certainly hire one’ then does not the prospect seem so much more attractive than a heavy trickle of British deaths for the foreseeable future?

Look at the other similarities. In the summer of 1880 a headquarters was established at Gereshk (exactly the same spot where British commanders are today). The local troops whom we were meant to be supporting (or

‘mentoring’ in modern speak) proved to be unreliable. They soon found themselves facing determined and battle-hardened enemies with too few troops and equipment that was meant for an entirely different sort of fighting. Above all else, however, Brigadier-General Burrows laments about inadequate transport. With very little cavalry and a serious lack of draught animals to pull his guns, Burrows was quickly pinned by Ayoob Khan and destroyed piecemeal. For horses and mules we might read helicopters and troop carriers, for lack of cavalry we might read a shortage of reconnaissance forces; in any event the result was similar – brave men poorly equipped and thoughtlessly deployed, who paid with their lives.

The function of public opinion is also fascinating. The film Zulu has obscured the British public’s reaction to the killing of over ten thousand tribesmen in South Africa just eighteen months before the events at Maiwand. The people had become heartily sick of stories of blood- letting and what we would now call ‘collateral damage’ in far-off lands, accompanied by heavy, British casualties. When a new adventure in Afghanistan hove into view there was no stomach at all for the murder of our envoys, nor for tales of stray British shells that killed women and children. It was as if the same ennui that gripped the British public during and after the Iraq war held sway in early 1880. Certainly, it was enough to destroy Disraeli’s government in the general election of that year.

Here the similarities end, though. The one quality of which there was no shortage in Britain’s Imperial government of the time was empathy, for they not only had a good feel for tribal envies and ambitions, they also tried to learn from the lessons of history. The First Afghan War of 1839-42 had been a disaster of Biblical proportions. From that, the British realised that any intervention in Afghanistan had to be as brief as possible; any attempt to stay put would result in a general uprising which would be impossible to control. As if to underline this point, in 1874 Lady Elizabeth Butler painted her famous picture of the sole survivor of the Kabul garrison in 1842, Doctor Brydon. His harrowed form and starving horse seem to warn the government of the day of the perils of war beyond the Bolan and Khyber Passes.

Therefore, when it was thought necessary to punish the Afghans again in late 1879, three fast-moving columns entered the country, occupied Kabul and Kandahar and set about imperial pacification. The clear aim was to get out of the place as fast as they reasonably could. Certainly there were mistakes – Maiwand being the most obvious – but there was no intention of a long and aimless occupation. The Allies have been in Afghanistan now for almost a decade with, apparently, no clear objective. Take the mounting of the expeditions into Helmand in 2006: it prompted me to say, during a debate in the Commons, that if one of my students had presented me with such a plan at Staff College then I would have, ‘failed him and failed him badly’. At least our forebears understood the strategy.

The analogy breaks down over the ambiguous presence of Pakistan, however. I would argue that Afghanistan is merely a flank of the conflict in Pakistan and that it is wrong to view the violence as anything other than a regional war that stretches from the borders of Russia to those of Iran – but that is a separate argument. The one thing that our forebears realised in the late nineteenth century was that if you went into Afghanistan at all you went there with a well-made plan to get the hell out.

One hundred and thirty-one years later the same British regiments face the same tribesmen and fanatics, on the same piece of ground, and with those at home viewing it all with much the same distaste. Even parts of the political background are the same. We seem to have got ambition mixed up with ability. However, the big difference is that the Victorians read their history and knew that Afghan adventures were exceedingly dangerous. It is a sad fact that there are no books in the House of Commons Library on Britain’s last experience of the Helmand valley and that when an Al Qaeda spokesman warned that this time, ‘there wouldn’t even be a Dr. Brydon’, no one in the MoD seemed to know who that lonely soul was!