LONDON �?This week the world learned that the United States Army has been investigating more than 30 claims of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2002. So far, officials have found a catalog of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the hands of American captors. This horrible scandal represents the most serious crisis for the coalition since the war on terrorism began. Occupation inevitably creates resentment; but humiliation fosters outright rebellion, and winning back the moral high ground after this calamity is far more important than reasserting control in Falluja or in the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.

Military domination is fatally undermined when occupiers, even if only a tiny minority of them, misuse their power to demean the conquered. The perils of such behavior resonate throughout history. As America finds itself ever more deeply embroiled in Central Asia and Iraq, it need only look at the experience of its coalition partner, Britain, in Afghanistan to learn about the hubris and transience of empire.

Curiously enough, the most astute witness to one of Britain's worst imperial episodes was an American �?a doctor, soldier, Quaker, Freemason and adventurer by the name of Josiah Harlan. In 1839, General Harlan (as he chose to style himself) stood on the ramparts of Kabul and watched as a foreign army marched in to "liberate" the city, with flags waving and trumpets blaring. General Harlan had spent the previous 12 years in Afghanistan, and he had a premonition of disaster: "To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force," he later wrote, "is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe."

The current situation in Afghanistan appears, if not peaceful, then manageable, at least compared to Iraq. Coalition troops are working alongside the indomitable Afghans to rebuild a country shattered by two decades of war. But as always in Afghanistan, peace is fragile. Much of the country remains riven by the fiefs of competing warlords, the government's authority beyond Kabul varies from tenuous to nonexistent, and the still-rising toll of American dead is a reminder that the Taliban is far from vanquished.

Over the centuries, successive foreign armies have tried to pacify Afghanistan �?Macedonian, Mogul, Persian, British, Russian and Soviet �?only to discover that this deeply divided land has a way of uniting furiously against any invader that does not tread with the utmost care. As America is discovering, with much of the Islamic world united in outrage over the images of Iraqi captives being abused by servicemen and women, maintaining the peace is a far more delicate and demanding task than winning the war.

No one knew this better than Josiah Harlan. While many of his contemporaries were exploring the Wild West, Harlan had headed for the rather wilder East. Eccentric, cantankerous, ambitious and ludicrously brave, he plunged into the unmapped wilds of Afghanistan in 1827, determined to make himself a king.

General Harlan was no stranger to hubris. Over the ensuing years he parlayed with princes and potentates, led an army across the Hindu Kush mounted on an elephant, and was appointed commander in chief of the Afghan Army by Dost Muhammad Khan, the mighty emir of Kabul. Finally, by striking a pact with native chiefs high in the Hindu Kush, General Harlan became prince of Ghor, a potentate in his own right.

But his reign was short-lived. By 1839, the British, in a decision with eerie modern echoes, opted to remove Dost Muhammad and replace him with a more pliable puppet. The emir was a threat to stability, London declared, an unpredictable autocrat ruling a rogue state. A vast army was assembled in British India, and marched on Kabul: Dost Muhammad's bodyguards melted away, and the ousted ruler took to the hills. When they entered the city, the British found General Harlan calmly having breakfast. The American introduced himself as "a free and enlightened citizen of the greatest and most glorious country in the world."

The British settled in, importing foxhounds, cricket bats, amateur theatricals and all the appurtenances of empire. After an easy victory, it was assumed that the Afghans were docile. The invaders rode roughshod over the local culture, treating the Afghans with disdain, oblivious to the growing rumble of discontent. General Harlan was outraged at such arrogance: "I have seen this country, sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion of senseless stranger boors, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes."

What would he have made of his own country's forays into Afghanistan and Iraq nearly two centuries later? In some respects he might have approved. He believed strongly in using military force to bring civilization to the benighted of the earth. He was no friend to tyrants and religious fanatics: he would have been equally revolted by the extremism of the Taliban and the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

Yet he was also insistent that the imperial impulse brought with it heavy responsibilities, an obligation to treat indigenous cultures with respect, to work within local power structures. He saw the British occupation through the eyes of an Afghan, but his response was that of an American; instead of bringing enlightenment, he believed, the British had imposed their own heavy-handed tyranny, and would pay the price in anger and bloodshed. Today, 165 years later, it is America's turn to stand accused of brutal occupation, as the grim and graphic secrets of Abu Ghraib prison are revealed.

Josiah Harlan warned the British of the growing danger, but his words went unheeded. The occupying British swiftly bundled this interfering American out of Kabul, and carried on with their imperial tea party, alternately abusing and offending Afghans.

"Vainglorious and arrogant, the invaders plunged headlong towards destruction," General Harlan wrote in an angry anti-British polemic, as he headed home to America, and obscurity. Within two years the entire British garrison, 15,000 men, women and children, soldiers, families and camp followers, was massacred by Afghan tribesmen in the passes of Kabul, leaving a single wounded survivor, Dr. William Brydon, to stagger into Jalalabad with news of the worst disaster in British imperial history.