Britain relied heavily on RAF bombings to suppress an anti-British insurgency.

One of the participants in this campaign was Arthur 'Bomber' Harris. In 1924, the future architect of strategic bombing in Germany enthusiastically described the psychological impact of one RAF attack on Arab and Kurdish insurgents who "now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target."

Ironically, one of the first battlegrounds where Harris acquired his expertise was Afghanistan, where bombing brought a British victory in the Third Afghan War in 1919.

Now the same dismal process is unfolding in the era of surgical strikes, pinpoint technology and legal consultations on targeting guidelines. Though carpet-bombing drove the Taliban from power, such methods are unlikely to win the unconventional warfare at which Afghans have traditionally been so adept and are more likely to be counter-productive. In his visit to Afghanistan last week, Gordon Brown claimed that

British soldiers were preventing terror attacks in the UK. Such vacuous drivel can't hide what George Orwell called 'inconvenient facts'.

Not only are the US and Nato failing to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans; they support a corrupt and unviable government and are committed to a war that they cannot win on the ground, let alone from 20,000ft.

All this, as the baseball player Yogi Berra once said, is like deja vu all over again. Once again, the 'white man's burden' begins with talk of nation-building, morality and civilisation, and ends with bombs raining down on wedding parties. The more bombs are dropped, the more likely it is that civilians will die. And no matter how often these deaths are denied or explained away with weasel expressions of 'regret', they will continue to erode the lofty ideals of Nato's 'civilising mission' in Afghanistan - in the eyes of Afghans if not the West.

"If we don't drop a bomb they [the Taliban] win," declared the Nato glove puppet Mark Laity last month. The history of guerrilla warfare suggests that armies that think like this are already losing.