On chauffeur duty today, delivering my 12-year-old daughter to see a friend of hers at the Marble Arch end of the Edgware Road, I find myself on Seymour Place (home of the West London Synagogue and one of London's finest secret interiors -- a moorish extravaganza built in 1870 which, with its wrap-around mezzanine floor, reminds me of nothing so much as a high Victorian Methodist church). Anyway, I snuck into Abu Ali's, a Lebanese joint on the next block up, for a quick falafel wrap with chopped parsley on the side, and coffee.

What confronted me there, hanging from a ceiling above the cashier's desk and a row of well-used hookahs (they smoke a large aromatic tablet that looks like a carbonised firelighter), was a wide TV screen on which, on this occasion, a conventionally attractive woman presenter was speaking in Arabic directly to camera. A succession of images of turbanned men with beards played out behind her. Packing serious small arms heat, they were relaxing on tanks, shouting, smiling, waving and tossing paper money into flags. It occurred to me that these weren't like any pictures I'd seen on the BBC, and eventually the camera focussed on a white vapour trail making its way slowly across a deep blue sky. I realised (I'm very slow) that these pictures were coming from right inside Afghanistan, and that the plane in question was probably a US spy drone.

So I asked the waiter which news station this was -- judging by the by the western presentation style, women presenters too -- I imagined it was coming out of Beirut, but he said no, no, it's from Qatar, in the Gulf. So this was it then. This was Bin Laden's favourite station -- Al-Jazeera (online in Arabic only at AlJazeera.net -- from which, until such times as the Taliban are replaced, all news stations and newspapers worldwide will be taking their lead. And I thought, hey. Wow.

Of course I'm easily impressed. And I was suddenly aware of the fact that I know absolutely no Arabic, and wanted to know what this beautiful doe-eyed chick was saying. Every so often bits of arabic script -- all elegance itself -- would pop up onto the screen. Like Hebrew, it moves from right to left, so, I get to thinking, it can't have been invented by a right- hander, because it's much more difficult for a right-hander to write from right to left, so must have been designed by a left-hander. Are left-handers intrinsically cleverer than right-handers when it comes to inventing language scripts? Could just be. After all, first Hebrew, then Arabic. Or does Arabic look so elegant and floaty because it's designed so that right-handers can write it easily from right to left across the page? Or could it have been designed by a very stupid right-hander who didn't realise it would be easier to go from left to right? Unlikely, if he was clever enough to invent a script he'd probably have realised...

And so on. I just paid and left. When I got home I made a point of reaching up to the high shelves, with some difficulty taking down, and, for the first time ever, opening The British Conquest and Dominion of India by Sir Penderel Moon. Why did I leave it so long? This 1,235-page doorstopper was given to me about twelve years ago by the late Colin Haycraft (the tricky, daft, irritating, brilliantly clever and eccentric chairman of the publishers Duckworth) and when it comes to the Afghan wars, I have to tell you that Moon's book is definitive.

Just one fact for you for now. The first, most disastrous Afghan War of 1839 appears to have occurred as a result of the timidity of the then Governor General, the bachelor George Eden, 2nd Baron Auckland. While closeted away in his summer capital at Simla (that pleasant hill sanatorium described by a contemporary writer as a "cradle of political insanity"), George failed to stand up to the paranoid russophobia of his three political advisers, the most senior of whom was a nutcase called McNaghten, a strange but gifted linguist who "spoke Persian rather more fluently than English; Arabic better than Persian, but, for familiar conversation, rather preferred Sanskrit".

The message of history is clear, therefore. When considering Afghan matters, Mr Bush and his headline-grabbing ally Blair should avoid clever, paranoid advisers -- particularly linguists. I'm sure they will, though the presence on the scene of Richard "The Prince of Darkness" Perle and Donald "Darth" Rumsfeld, both of whom are clever and paranoid, must be a worry. But on no account should anyone take any decisions in Simla.