The Khyber Pass Paddy Docherty Faber & Faber, 261pp, £17.99 ISBN 0571219772

Glancing down at a map, you might still fail to spot a small channel through the Hindu Kush mountains, just south of an unremarkable Afghan town called Asadabad. My own atlas marks it with what looks like an Ordnance Survey symbol for "small bridge". And indeed, the route it represents is only 30 miles long, and at times around 50 feet wide.

But the Khyber Pass is the only naturally formed route through the Kush, and for most of human history has been the only practical route from central Asia to the Indian subcontinent. Crossing the Khyber was, quite literally, a rite of passage for every conqueror who showed up in the region: Persians, Greeks, Mongols and Mug hals each came through, along with Islam and (back the other way) Buddhism. It is rather like discovering that the Normans, Angles and Saxons all invaded Britain by way of a particularly narrow section of the M2.

The main achievement of Paddy Docherty's book is to convey the importance of this "strategic possession without equal". Raw geography, he shows, has impinged on the region's history with more insistence than any other force. What if there were no Pass? What if the Pass were wider, and less vulnerable to attack from the rocks that loom either side? How differently might things have worked out in India, Afghanistan and, indeed, the whole of Asia. A mountain road associated mainly with hippie backpackers and Sid James turns out to be of more influence than any great empire or army.

Sadly, having set out the sheer scale of this story, Docherty then tells it in just 250 pages. His task is further complicated by an admirable determination to describe everything else that happened nearby, from the origins of Greek expansionism in the fourth century BC, to the Mongol conquest of China (check out the map: they did not go via the Khyber).

There are plenty of fascinating tales along the way. I was rather taken by the Turkic empire-builder Mahmud, who plundered India, carrying away the usual booty of gold and jewellery, but also plenty of the country's scholars. The emperor apparently required intellectual stimulation when he got back home from a hard day's conquering. And Docherty's account of the repeatedly futile British efforts to control Afghan istan serves as an obvious warning to our present-day rulers.

But much of this is a whistle-stop chronology, one Cyrus, Darius and Genghis after another. The complex codes of behaviour of the Khyber's indigenous Pathan tribespeople are explained as follows: "They were known for their ferocity." Maybe one should admire such economy of words, but they sometimes sound as if they come from a Baedeker.

Docherty attempts to liven things up with repeated calls on the reader to imagine historic moments. "Imagine the fear rising," he suggests, "at the approach of [Alexander's] army." Later, we are asked to "imagine the Princess, turning her head, the sun reflecting from her golden crown". And after the hapless Persian, Harpagus, is tricked into eating his own son, Docherty suggests: "We can only imagine . . . the sickening horror and sense of violation . . ." I counted ten exhortations to "imagine" this, or "picture" that, before I gave up and began to wonder how it would sound if somebody wrote the history of 20th-century Europe in this way: "We can imagine Hitler alone in the Reichstag as he plots the conquest of France. His moustache is trimmed, he combs his hair into its familiar parting . . ."

But The Khyber Pass provides a thoughtful-enough account to leave the reader suspecting that violence might be inevitable at this faultline of global conflict. Greeks and Persians, Mughals and Sultans, Soviet troops and US-backed mujahedin: all have faced each other across the Khyber. The author reminds us that the Pass has also, in its time, carried plenty of "poets, craftsmen . . . scholars and holy men". But with al-Qaeda firmly entrenched in north-west Pakistan and a US-supported government across the way in Kabul, the Khyber is once again a frontier between competing ideologies and competing spheres of influence.

Paul Moss is a reporter for Radio 4's "The World Tonight"

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