Hands up the number of soldiers Tony Blair is sending to their duties . . . and in some cases to their deaths . . . who know that another of Britain's great military defeats took place in the very sands where their colleagues are now fighting the Taliban. Yes, the Battle of Maiwand, on 27 July 1880, destroyed an entire British brigade, overrun by thousands of armed Afghan tribesmen, some of whom the official enquiry into the disaster would later describe as 'Talibs'.

The Brits had been trying to secure Helmand province. Sound familiar?

Several times already in Helmand, the British have almost been overwhelmed.

This has not been officially admitted, but the defence ministry did make a devious allusion to it last year when it announced that troops in Helmand had been involved in the heaviest combat fighting "since the Korean War".

Remember the Korean War and the Glorious Gloucesters and the battle of Imjim River? It wasn't that the fighting was 'heavy' but that Britain's soldiers were simply overwhelmed by Chinese forces. The Afghans talk of one British unit which last year had to call in air strikes, destroying almost the entire village in which they were holding out.

Otherwise they would have been overrun.

General Burrows had no close air support in 1880 when he confronted up to 15,000 Afghan fighters . . . or 'ghazis' . . . at Maiwand, but he had large numbers of Egyptian troops with him and a British force in Kandahar.

Already, the British had cruelly suppressed a dissident Afghan army . . . again, sound familiar? . . . after the British residency had been sacked and its occupants murdered.

Britain's reaction at the time was somewhat different to that of its successors today.

Britain's army was run from India where Lord Lytton, the viceroy, urged his man in Kabul . . . General Roberts, later Lord Roberts of Kandahar . . . to crush the uprising with the utmost brutality. "Every Afghan brought to death, I shall regard as one scoundrel the less in a nest of scoundrelism, " he messaged.

Roberts embarked on a reign of terror in Kabul, hanging almost a hundred Afghans.

Not exactly 'hearts and minds'.

The commander of the rebellious Afghans was Ayub Khan, whose brother was forced to abdicate as king after the Kabul uprising.

When Ayub Khan marched down from that old warlord territory of Herat towards Kandahar, the luckless Burrows was sent to confront him. Almost a thousand British and Indian troops were slaughtered as Khan's army fired shells from at least 30 artillery pieces and then charged at them across the fields and dried-up river at Maiwand.

The official British enquiry . . . it ran to 734 pages . . . contains many photographs of the landscape on which the battle was fought.

The hills and distant mountains, of course, are identical to those now videotaped by 'embedded' reporters in the British army.

Outgunned and outmanoeuvred, the British found themselves facing a ruthless enemy.

Colonel Mainwaring of the 30th Bombay Infantry wrote a chilling report for the authorities in Delhi.

"The whole of the ground to the left of the 30thf and between it and the Grenadiers, was covered with swarms of 'ghazis' and banner-men (flag-bearers). The 'ghazis' were actually in the ranks of the Grenadiers, pulling the men out and hacking them down with their swords." As the British infantry retreated, even the cavalry unit sent to save them turned its horses and fled.

The wreckage of the British army retreated all the way to Kandahar where they were besieged until rescued by General Roberts himself, whose famous march of 10,000 troops from Kandahar . . . a distance of 300 miles in just 20 days . . . is now military legend.

History, it seems, haunts all our adventures in the Middle East. Who would have believed that after the British reached Baghdad in a 1917 invasion, they would face an insurgency which . . . in speed and ruthlessness . . . was an almost exact replica of the rebellion the British and Americans would confront from 2003?

British intelligence in Baghdad signalled the war office in London in 1920 that insurgents were crossing the Iraqi frontier from Syria. Lloyd George insisted in the House of Commons that the British occupation force had to stay in Iraq. Otherwise, he warned, the country would be plunged into civil war.

Sound familiar?

Alas, I fear our leaders do not read history, or do not care about it. So now the British are to reinforce Afghanistan yet again. Flying to Kandahar will not take as long as Roberts' 20 days. British soldiers are unlikely even to enter Kandahar's central square.

But if they do, they might care to look at the few ancient cannon on the main roundabout: all that is left of Roberts' artillery.