Afghanistan: the Great Game, BBC Two, review Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. In the case of Afghanistan, as Rory Stewart so eloquently showed over two nights this week, it is tragedy both times. In fact the only farcical element of his documentary Afghanistan: the Great Game (Monday and Wednesday, BBC Two) was the fact that it wasn't aired on consecutive nights. Stewart should be the subject of a documentary himself. He's as much a maverick as Lawrence of Arabia. "Stewart of Afghanistan" as we might one day be calling him, is now, at the age of 39, a Conservative MP but, unlike most MPs, he'd already had several careers before arriving at Westminster: diplomat, solider, deputy governor of a province in Iraq. And in 2002 he went on an epic 32-day solo walk across Afghanistan, to try to get to know the country the West was trying to occupy - and then he wrote a bestselling book about it. In this documentary he set out to explore the notion that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires." Given that this phrase arose in reference to the British Empire, he wanted to know why two other empires, the Soviet and the American, deluded themselves into thinking it wouldn't apply to them, too. The parallels with what the Americans are doing now and what the British did in the 19th century were shocking, even down to the talk of a threat to national security and regime change. As one historian put it to Stewart: "It is easy getting in to Afghanistan. Getting out again is the hard part. The Russians thought it would take 12 months. Only after nine years and the loss of one million Afghan lives did they eventually give up. The most electrifying moment came when Stewart was describing what happened to the British in 19th-century Kabul when they were surrounded and offered surrender terms which, in reality, were an invitation to be massacred. Stewart mentioned that he had faced the same situation when surrounded by insurgents in Iraq. Knowing his history, he had thought it probably best not to surrender. With his slight build, English teeth and bowlegs he doesn't exactly look like an intrepid adventurer from another era, but that is what the unassuming Stewart seems to be. His message was that invaders are always doomed to failure in Afghanistan because they don't make the effort to understand the people they seek to conquer. One insight he gleaned was that Afghans look at outcomes rather than intentions, which is why they pray after a meal not before it, as Christians do. Fascinating.