It is a very bad idea to invade Afghanistan; but as many authors have discovered, it is often a very good idea to write about it.

Afghanistan may be one of the poorest countries in the world, but it has produced a surprisingly rich seam of literature, ranging from its own traditions of poetry and epic, through great works of memoir and some of the greatest travel books ever written. More recently it has seen a clutch of exceptional works of non-fiction about the Taliban era and the current disastrous war.

One of the great pleasures of writing my new book, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42 was spending four years mining the library. Here are 10 of my own personal highlights.

1. The Baburnama by Babur

Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, was a semi-nomadic Central Asian warlord who not only established the Mughal dynasty in India, but also wrote one the most fascinating diaries ever written by a great ruler. In its pages, he opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition similar to Pepys, comparing the fruits and animals of India and Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions of falling for men or marrying women, or the differing pleasures of opium and wine. Typical is his description of falling in love with an adolescent boy from the Herat bazaar: "before this I had never felt desire for anyone… in the throes of love I wandered bareheaded and barefoot around the lanes and the streets and through the gardens and orchards, paying no attention to acquaintances or strangers, oblivious to self and others."

2. Poems from the Divan of Khushal Khan Khattak

Khushhal Khan was a tribal leader who had revolted against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in the late 17th century and eluded his armies as they chased him through the passes of the Hindu Kush. In many ways he was a sort of Afghan William Wallace, the mediaeval Scottish freedom fighter; but unlike Wallace, Khushhal Khan was also a fine poet:

Like the hawk has been my flight upon the mountains,
And many a pretty partridge has been my prey.

Or, more succinctly:

There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach
But alas! I cannot swim

3. Charles Masson of Afghanistan: Explorer, Archaeologist, Numismatist and Intelligence Agent by Gordon Whitteridge

Masson, a brilliant deserter from the East India Company artillery, was the first Brit to explore Afghanistan on foot, and became the father of Afghan archaeology – until his former masters discovered his true identity and blackmailed him into becoming a secret agent.

4. Travels into Bokhara: A Journey up the Indus to Lahore and Journey to Cabool, Tartary & Persia by Alexander Burnes

Burnes was an energetic, high-spirited and resourceful young Highland Scot whose skill in languages got him his swift promotion in the East India Company. He led two expeditions of exploration into Afghanistan, both nominally commercial, but in reality political. His journey up the Indus to Lahore, and then on to the then almost completely unknown Muslim emirates of Central Asia was one of the celebrated feats of Victorian travel and exploration, and later became the subject of one of its most famous travel books. It was also one of the defining opening moves of the Great Game. For Burnes was not really travelling as a diplomat, or for pleasure, or even out of scholarly curiosity. He had been sent by the governor general of India, who himself was acting on orders from Downing Street, as an East India Company spy. Duly appointed deputy governor during the disastrous British occupation after 1839, on 2 November 1841 his house was attacked and he was hacked to death trying to escape in Afghan dress.

5. A Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan 1841-2 by Florentia Sale

Lady Sale was possibly the only Brit to come out of the first Afghan war with her reputation enhanced. She arrived with an unmarried daughter, seeds from her Agra garden and a grand piano. She survived the retreat from Kabul, with a musket ball in her shoulder and in due course led a jailbreak of her fellow hostages. Her tombstone reads: "Here lies all that could die of Lady Sale."

6. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

Byron was a brave traveller, an art historian of erudition, and a connoisseur of civilisations. Above all, he was a writer of prose whose chiselled beauty has cast its spell on English travel writing ever since. Byron had a remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out of the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly. The visual precision of the writing in Oxiana, combined with its farcical playlets, its scholarly essays, and its fierce passion for its subject – a search for the Central Asian roots of Islamic architecture – has led to this account of a journey to Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-4 being recognised as the greatest of all pre-war travel books. As Paul Fussell neatly put it: "What Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book."

7. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

Wright's acclaimed book contains by far the most rounded biographical portrait of the central figures of al-Qaida, and how they took root in Afghanistan. It is also a beautifully written and wonderfully compelling narrative. Wright is especially revealing about Bin Laden's own personality: his naivety, egalitarianism and surprising austerity — a rare example of a Saudi billionaire prepared to move to the rigours of Afghanistan and undertake hard manual labour and to live in comfortless, rigorous poverty. Still the best of the many books on 9/11.

8. Taliban and Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid

Ahmed Rashid, a fearless reporter and authority on the politics of Afghanistan, came to world attention after 9/11 when his book Taliban was recognized to be virtually the only serious book on the regime that had given shelter to al-Qaida. As a result it quickly sold nearly 1.5m copies in 26 languages. Its sequel, the brilliant and passionate Descent into Chaos emphasises the degree to which "the US-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more dangerous world than existed on that momentous day in 2001… Afghanistan is now staring down the abyss of state collapse, despite billions of dollars of aid, 45,000 Western troops, and the deaths of thousands of people. The Taliban has made a dramatic comeback… The international community had an extended window of opportunity of several years to help the Afghan people– they failed to take advantage of it."

9. Poetry of the Taliban by Alex Strick Van Linschoten

Afghanistan has an ancient tradition of epic poetry celebrating resistance to foreign invasion and occupation. This collection is remarkable as a literary project – uncovering a seam of war poetry few will know ever existed, and presenting to us for the first time the black-turbanned Wilfred Owens of Wardak. But it also an important politically: humanising the aspirations aesthetics and emotions of the fighters of a much-caricatured and still little-understood movement that is about to defeat yet another foreign occupation.

10. Cables from Kabul by Sherard Cowper-Coles

The most important record yet published of the diplomatic wrangling that has accompanied the encirclement of western forces in Afghanistan since the 2002 invasion. It is also the best account I have read of how post-colonial colonialism actually works, exposing the mixture of arrogance, over-confidence and rudderless dithering that has defined the current occupation.

• William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42 is published by Bloomsbury.