Afghanistan: The killing fields John Sweeney

On 13 January 1842, a sharp-eyed sentry in Jalalabad saw the more-dead-than-alive figure of the British army surgeon Dr William Brydon crossing the plain, struggling to stay on his pony. He had a bad head wound and was bleeding from the hand. When eventually the pony was taken into a stable, it lay down and died.

Roughly 16,000 British troops and camp followers hadn't made it from Kabul - one of the most terrible defeats of British military might in the 19th century, commemorated in Lady Elizabeth Butler's painting Remnants of an Army. Brydon was the sole survivor. The massacre of Lord Elphinstone's army prompted a series of revenge attacks by the British, which developed into wars. In 1849, 1850 and 1851, huge numbers of British troops swarmed into Afghanistan, butchered and then bolted. And still the Afghans fought back.

In 1860 the British took Peking but a few years later they were back in Afghanistan's borderlands with 12,500 troops - more than the army needed in order to subdue the Chinese capital - and still the Afghans fought back. In 1878 came the Battle of Sangin. The British had immense advantages in material - better guns, better communications, better everything - but still the Afghans fought back. On 17 January 1880 a small and extremely emaciated Talib, or religious student, approached a group of British Royal Engineers in Kandahar and tried to stab Sergeant Miller to death. This incident was the first recorded suicide attack in Kandahar. The Afghans were fighting back, asymmetrically.

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In 1893 the Amir of Afghanistan, a "cunning rogue" named Abdur Rahman, talked sweetly with the British but also wrote a book in which he attacked the infidel and called for jihad, using exactly the same extracts of the Quran as Osama Bin Laden did a century later. The Afghans were fighting back, ideologically.

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Butcher and Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan- David Loyn

Hutchinson, 351pp, £18.99

Butcher and Bolt challenges such rigidity of thinking. Loyn rubbishes the Americans' supernatural belief in technology above all things, and points out that the Taliban have one and a half million recruits in Pakistan's madrasas, just over the border. It is a bleak conclusion to a book that should be a must-read for every politician who sends our squaddies into Afghanistan - but one based fairly and squarely on the weight of history.