I have just returned from my latest visit to central, northern and western Afghanistan. I was again reminded that Afghanistan is one of the grimmest places on earth, a land of desolate deserts and rugged mountain passes. But now, as winter approaches, I am also reminded that the snow will begin to fall and the winds will whip and buffet those foolish enough to attempt to cross the high mountain deserts and passes where the winds howl day and night.

These physical conditions pale into insignificance when you consider what ordinary Afghans have been through.

Afghanistan lies at the epicentre of the world’s most volatile, tangled and extreme region. History should inform us, and any Western government agency wishing to hunt down any targets in Afghanistan, to take note of the difficulty of such a task. The Taleban leadership are former Mujahidin (holy warriors) who were once supported by the CIA and the Pakistan military. Although Afghanistan is largely under the control of the Taleban, the central government is weak and law and order are almost non-existent.

There are still numerous former communists, Islamicists (non-Taleban), monarchists, heroin traffickers and smugglers, further split along language, cultural and religious divisions, fighting what little power the Taleban’s central government exerts. Some commanders and their men have switched allegiances several times, more often than not to the highest paymaster. Most will keep open their links to all warring parties and have even been known to fight for both sides. In Herat the former militia commanders Daoud Jawan and Syed Ahmed had their men fight for the government by day and for the Mujahidin at night. This lawlessness is a result of the intervention and past mistakes of Pakistan, the United States and the former Soviet Union.

During the past 23 years more than one and a half million Afghans have been killed as a direct result of the many wars that have taken place on Afghan soil. Most of those killed were civilians: children who were out in the street playing or in the mountains shepherding their animals, ordinary people like you and me. The local populace has never been spared — sometimes it was targeted in the belief that this would stop it harbouring the enemy.

Of the commanders who chose not to flee to neighbouring countries, the West, the former Soviet Union or Australasia, few have fallen in battle, and those who were killed have mainly lost their lives to a close associate, relative or ally. Men often linked by kin, tribe and strategic interests — men they thought they could trust. They have been poisoned, machine-gunned at close quarters, dropped from helicopters, blown to pieces by rocket-propelled grenades, tortured, lynched and murdered while in prayer on the Sabbath. Power comes at a price.

Over the years I have travelled with some of the guerrilla leaders and commanders, I have come to realise just how difficult it is to assassinate them unless you are prepared to sacrifice your own life. Those who are still alive have seen more active service than any other professional soldiers in the world today.

Commanders whose lives are at risk live as fugitives, constantly on the alert and on the move. They never sleep under the same roof for more than one night at a time. Sometimes they send out decoys in the hope of fooling those in pursuit. Before sitting down to a meal — which is often eaten hurriedly — an aide will taste the food first. As they are constantly on the move, every means of transport is used: foot, horse, bus, pick-up, off-road vehicle, helicopter and, more rarely, plane. Moments of leisure are few and far between and are sometimes spent in prayer.

When I travelled with Ismail Khan, a leading Mujahidin commander who has recently returned to fight the Taleban, his travel plans were never revealed to even his closest associates. There were countless times that horses had been prepared only for an order to be made to switch at the last minute to an off road vehicle or, if a pick-up had been prepared, to switch to horses. No route was ever used twice.

Villages that expected his imminent arrival would be disappointed. Those that never expected to see him would be taken by surprise. His bodyguard, often ten to 20 men armed with a wide range of weapons, including a shoulder-held surface-to-air missile, were never told their destination and would not know it until we had made the final stop of the day.

These leaders have sacrificed everything for their cause. Rare are their links or visits to their families, who have often gone into exile for their own security. Friends are made up of those who have often fought alongside them. A brother is often either part of the immediate bodyguard or in charge of security. Nothing is carried from place to place other than what can be placed in a waistcoat pocket — often a small short-wave radio on which to listen to the

BBC World Service, and a gun with a chest pouch containing several spare magazines of bullets. There is no such thing as a luxury other than the pocket radio and a keepsake, usually a pendant with a Koranic inscription. Headed paper, official stamps and pens are carried by a personal secretary. Nowadays a satellite phone is also de rigueur and will be carried by one of the many bodyguards. There is only one constant: you are never out of range of your enemies — Ismail Khan was betrayed by an ally and handed over to the Taleban; he spent three years, often chained to a wall, before escaping with the help of his enemy’s jailers.

It is no coincidence that two Arab suicide bombers assassinated Ahmed Shah Massood, the leader of the Afghan opposition to the Taleban, 48 hours before the terrorists attacked the United States. Massood had links not only to the French, as well as to Western and Russian intelligence agencies, but he was able to unite some of the disparate forces of the anti-Taleban coalition. He was also the one rebel commander upon whom the West might have relied to provide assistance in any battle to topple the Taleban and root out the thousands of Pakistani and 2,000 Arab Taleban who have been given shelter in Afghanistan.

In a recent letter to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations asking for help, Massood wrote: “South-Central Asia is in turmoil, some countries are on the brink of war.

“Illegal drug production, terrorist activities and planning are on the rise.

“Ethnic and religiously motivated mass murders and forced displacements are taking place; the most basic human and women’s rights are shamelessly violated. The country has gradually been occupied by fanatics, extremists, terrorists, mercenaries, drug mafias and professional murderers. One faction, the Taleban, which by no means rightly represents Islam, Afghanistan or our centuries-old cultural heritage, has with direct foreign assistance exacerbated this explosive situation. It is unyielding and unwilling to talk or reach a compromise with any other Afghan side.”

Military strategists will now realise as they pore over possible plans for either an aerial or terrestrial attack that Massood could have provided not only men and weapons, but the knowledge and experience of the terrain that the Americans need.

Like all Afghan rebel commanders who have had a price on their head, those now being actively targeted by the US will have taken to the hills. They will also be relying on their followers’ loyalty and so will be very hard to root out while the current Afghan regime is in power.

The difficulties that foreign soldiers are likely to encounter are mirrored by the difficulty the Soviets had in capturing Western journalists and foreign aid workers who had entered the country clandestinely. Nothing would have provided better propaganda to the Soviet-backed Afghan regime than to capture one of them. Edouard Lagourgue, a director of Mission Enfance who has made many trips into Afghanistan, says: “We knew the Russians were after us; they wanted to either take us prisoner or kill us, but even when they knew where we were, they were unable to pick us up, because we were either on the move or protected by the Mujahidin and their local knowledge and experience of the terrain was of greater importance than the might of a superpower.” Those journalists and aid workers who were killed or captured had been betrayed by the Mujahidin.

Much of Afghanistan is like a scene from Mad Max or some futuristic movie. Everywhere is the debris of war: Russian tanks and armoured personnel carriers with their turrets torn off; the wrecks of former clinics, schools, and shops; razed walls; cratered and mined roads. Desolation everywhere, and few signs of life beyond the dust blown by the wind — I have often thought of Dresden and Nagasaki. In several cities across Afghanistan the government forces and their Russian allies first decided to starve the Mujahidin of support, and to deprive them of any cover for attacks, and then, when the Mujahidin took power, rival groups took further action to destroy the little that had been left standing. But the armed groups lived on in the shells of the buildings, behind splintered doorways and at the end of blasted gardens.

Will American or Allied soldiers be prepared for a country blasted back into the Middle Ages? If they are able to secure the poorly defended Taleban airports, they will step off one of the Starlifters and be hit immediately by the furnace heat and the flies that settle on everything. They will be entering a world with few roads, and where electricity, running water and telephones are all but non-existent. How will the US troops, who were ordered not to leave their Humvees (high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles) while patrolling Kosovo, cope when villages cannot be reached by road or track, and take four days to reach on foot, through towering gorges and mountain passes that are likely to be primed for an ambush and mined? How will they manage when they find that the drinking wells are as dry as the riverbeds? Afghans can march up and down mountains for days with no more than a few stale pieces of nan bread for sustenance. They will stop only for prayers, gathering in rows behind their leaders, who lead them into battle as well as in worship.

I have lived with Afghan rebel groups. They could never have been described as anything more than a ragtag army dressed in broken plimsolls worn as slippers or in plastic sandals, and equipped with old and poorly maintained Kalashnikovs — they have always relied on foreigners to provide the military hardware: the US, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China. Most Afghans who have taken up arms crave peace and a decent living more than anything else. Others have been press-ganged or forced to go to the front line to fight, or have joined because there have been too many mouths to feed at home, but few foreigners can match them for sheer guts and stamina and the will to defeat their enemies.

Those seeking to hide from enemy forces will move at irregular intervals both in broad daylight and at night. When not on the move their evenings will be spent around a Tilley lamp, where, in the sputtering light, they go over the day’s events. As they make plans for the following day, one of them will be resuscitating the flame by frantically pumping away at the primitive contraption to build up the pressure and a steady flow of gas. The room will be bare save for a few cushions on the floor, a bowl of soup with a knuckle of mutton, a pot of tea and a few glasses, and the Kalashnikovs and ammunition pouches that hang on the walls from bits of wood driven into the mortar between the mud bricks.

In the recent Afghan war few Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner; when Britain last retreated from Afghanistan, in the 19th century, there was one British survivor out of 16,000 soldiers, camp followers, women and children.

Afghans remain proud of their achievements in the face of overwhelming odds, but they are no more natural warriors than other nationals. What Afghans have is the “proper instruments of war” as described by one of the world’s greatest military strategists, General Karl von Clausewitz: “War is the province of physical exertion and suffering. A certain strength of body and mind is required, which produces indifference to them. With these qualifications, under the guidance of simply a sound understanding, a man is at once a proper instrument for War.”

Afghans have always been the best instruments of war and the United States and its allies would do well to remember that Afghan history repeats itself — it has always been the battleground and graveyard for the interests of great powers.