TIME was when we used to find Scots fatally embroiled in the sort of military confusion and disorder we now see unfolding in Kabul.

A famous example was Dr William Brydon, the medical officer who from 1841 accompanied an expeditionary force sent on London’s orders to subdue a wild country in the First Afghan War.

By the next year the tribes were having the same effect on our troops as on all previous invaders since Alexander the Great, the only foreign general ever to have conquered them. In unrelenting ferocity they wore the invaders down until these gave up and fled home. Then, as they sploshed through the Khyber Pass, they could be massacred.

Brydon served in an Indian army sent to prop up a puppet regime that had tried in vain to lord it over Kabul. They all set off back through the Hindu Kush, but by the time they crossed the snow line again he was the only one left. By then he was protecting his head with a folded copy of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, because an Afghan sword had slashed through his helmet. At the lower end of the pass, he collapsed off his horse, which promptly died.

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But the good doctor himself recovered and continued to serve Queen Victoria right up until the Indian Mutiny in 1857. At last he made his way home to Nigg in Easter Ross, where he would die in his bed in 1873.

Brydon was one among dozens of brave western soldiers who have taken the occupation of Kabul too much for granted. In 2021 they are still dying as they always have done, sometimes after years of military service. Then, one fine morning, they wake up and learn they have spent their energies and resources for absolutely nothing, as the expedition dissolves. Perhaps they have a moment to think of this as they fall under the scimitars of the tribesmen.

Until the end of the British Raj in India, many of these men were Scots. Later, Kabul came first under Russian, and more recently under American control, and in alliance with the latter some of the Scots have returned to the Himalayas. Perhaps it is a little consolation that nowadays fewer of them have died.

The Russian incursion was brief, but the Americans have remained on a longer learning curve. More generally, they showed themselves in their imperialist wars ready to spend greater quantities of their own blood and gold, not least because inspired by greater idealism. They have also had an even more bitter taste of victory. But no more than anybody else have they been able to deal a decisive blow to the power of Islam and its fierce, fanatical fighters.

And so we arrive at another western defeat, always worse on the vast landmass of Asia than on any other continent. When will we ever learn?

It has been the regular practice of these alien invaders, unable to admit the ragged Afghans’ military superiority, to avoid facing their losers’ plight until the last minute.

US president Joe Biden came into office in Washington only six months ago determined on an immediate withdrawal from Kabul, which few in the international community took seriously. It was thought to be a piece of electoral rhetoric that strategic expertise and foreign pressures would cause him to supplant with some wider consensus.

This still seemed to be the position when the world woke up on Sunday morning, the very day of the specified American withdrawal. Nobody expected it to turn into headlong flight as the Taliban arrived just behind at the gates of Kabul, ready to re-inforce their message not with immediate violence but with enough firmness to make clear it would not be reversed. This meant not only the US was departing but all its allies too, as quick as could be managed. It became a capital of chaos, which only the tribesmen could control.

The manoeuvres showed how little western military superiority meant in a place already lost.

With the by now meagre British presence in Afghanistan we would have no choice but to follow the general retreat with as much order and discipline as we could muster. By sundown we had sent the Paras out there to escort our lads home.

FRENCH and Germans too, and a sprinkling of other European allies, would spend the forenoon stuttering and starting to find words that might express both the pretended importance of the martial work done and the prudence of the tactical amendments to hasten peace.

Even powers which do not wish us well at all, the Russians or the Chinese, must, after suppressing their grins, have wondered a little at the scale of the debacle which the westerners would somehow need to absorb into some appearance of the continuous working of coherent global strategy. And as for the Arabs – for the last three-quarters of a century significant sections of their nation have suffered at our hands, directly and indirectly, without at the outset having ever done anything to provoke such misjudgment or malice on our part.

Arab governments have protected the vast reserves of oil in the Middle East for westerners, while getting back expensive techniques and gadgets to keep quiet with consumer goods those societies that lack all human rights. Now it turns out the exchanges carry with them nothing of permanent value for anybody. Instead one Muslim country, wearied at the lessons

it has been forced to absorb from the west, takes a big step backwards to a place where nobody else can reach it.

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The getaway from Kabul is an event probably equal in its scale and scope to the Fall of Saigon or the Flight of the Shah, and will therefore be equally hard for westerners to understand and evaluate. When I picked up one paper yesterday morning, a columnist said solemnly, “The Taliban’s advances mean the UK must press the United Nations to send in peacekeepers if US will not act.”

What utter claptrap! For a start the UK is never going to press anybody to do anything the US won’t do and, if anybody did, these unlucky lads would soon find themselves subjected to the sort of massacre, with decapitation, on which the Taliban thrive. Precisely who would stop them?

No, the fact is that, after the latest 20 years of our ignorance and idiocy, Afghanistan is completely lost to the west. It will stay that way for as long as the Afghans wish it, which I think will be a long time. There will be no route for outsiders to penetrate these mountain fastnesses, though equally there will be little desire among the turbaned locals to come and see us, bombs in hand.

Let’s leave it that way till younger and wiser generations come along, in both east and west.