Its attempts to secularise and modernise Afghan society created as many problems as benefits it promised, and in the countryside the need to maintain stability entailed all manner of compromises and was the background to much internal division in the party and government. But it was in office by reaching an accommodation with regional and clan figures. The fractious PDPA was communist-led and had a real electoral base in the urban centres with a long-standing presence in the military and among the technical intelligentsia. What struck me from my time in Afghanistan was the defining character of Afghanistan’s vast territory, its strong cultural traditions and the essentially local character of political power. Compensation came as an enjoyable night on the ale with Sikh troops from the Afghan national army on leave for their spring festival of Vaisakha and more nights with some very basic vodka obtained from a nearby unit of the Soviet army. We were delayed in Jalalabad - a provincial city on the trade route to the south-east - by a mojahedin offensive which made air transport a risky enterprise and road transport even riskier. We had no sense that the US and Britain would invade again in 20. He recounted how successive British invasions were accompanied by brutal murders, rape, the punitive destruction of crops and entire settlements while the Afghans established a reputation of intransigent resistance and exemplary retaliation for the crimes committed against them. More than a century later in the summer palace of the King of Afghanistan in Jalalabad I was apologetically reminded of this history by a comrade from the central committee of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Britain went to war in Afghanistan again in 1919. The regional balance of power fell to the Russian empire and in 1878, the British invaded again and again in 1897. Thus, in 1843, GR Grieg, chaplain to the British Army wrote of the empires’s catastrophic defeat in the First Afghan War as an expeditionary force of 4,500 military personnel and over 12,000 camp followers fled Kabul to Jalalabad. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.”

Not one benefit, political or military, was acquired with this war. “A WAR begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it.

Afghanistan graveyard of empires