About 120 million years ago, a small tectonic plate was driven out of the Indian Ocean and crashed up into the Asiatic landmass. As the plate was compressed, it began to crumple up in front, throwing up to the north the hostile terrain of the central mountains of Afghanistan. More recently, a mere forty million years back, the Indian tectonic plate came smashing in behind, throwing up another range of mountains to the west and south, a wilderness of almost impassable peaks and troughs in what is now western Pakistan and Baluchistan. In between these mountain ranges was left a vast inland basin and a single river that drained all its rainfall: the Helmand River.

The climate in this land-locked basin has fluctuated over the millennia. In some eras the snow that fell on the mountains of Afghanistan was plentiful, and the melt waters that flowed down into the Helmand basin cut deep valleys through the mountain rock, and left layer upon layer of sand and gravel in the land beneath. In arid times�� as in the modern day�� the snow and rainfall became pitiful, and only the tall canyons in the plateaus to the north preserved the memory of the once plentiful water. Rivers still trickled through them, but most became seasonal: dry-river courses, known to the British as wadis and to Afghans as nalas or mandahs, that occasionally burst into life when sudden mountain storms sent torrents of water tumbling down them, sometimes with no warning. The desert came to be called the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death.

The Helmand River itself, though, continued flowing through the desert, whatever the season, the only permanent desert watercourse between the Indus River in Pakistan to the east and the Tigris-Euphrates in Iraq to the west. Unlike those two other great rivers, the Helmand�s waters were trapped between two ranges of mountains and did not reach the sea. After flowing southwards for hundreds of miles, the river snaked round to the south-west and settled and evaporated, as it still does today, in great shallow lakes in the desert.

For humans who settled in the basin, the constant waters of the Helmand became the source of life. Agriculture, fed by irrigation, sprang up along its banks. Some of the wadis that fed into the Helmand became sparsely settled too, exploiting the alluvial soils. At the mountains� edge, the ancients began building underground tunnels, or karezes, to tap into the aquifers and underground rivers that still flowed freely beneath the dry surface sands. Access to these water flows and the scarce land into which they fed became the key to power and survival in this desert. And so it also became the source of conflict and war between the tribes that came to occupy these lands.

For wider humanity, the river had a greater strategic importance. As a gap between two hostile mountain ranges, the Helmand basin became�� as it has remained for centuries�� a great land corridor between East and West, a route for traders between Persia and India. The taxing, robbing or protecting of trade became the other great source of income for local dwellers in this land. It was also a route of conquest: for invaders from Alexander the Great in 329 BC to the hordes of Genghis Khan in 1226, to Tamerlane (or Timur the Lame) in 1383, to the Soviet army in 1979.[3]

Along this strategic route there were few natural barriers to hold back an invading army except the waters of the Helmand itself. Forts sprang up along the River Helmand�s banks. The Sultan Mahmood of Ghazni built the city of Bost in the tenth century,[4] close to the present capital of Helmand province, Lashkar Gah. It was later destroyed by Genghis Khan. Later still, the capital of what became the modern Afghan Empire was established to the east of the Helmand in a place called Kandahar, just north of the Bolan pass through to what was then India. The Helmand valley became, as it is today, both the gateway to and a line of defence for this great city.

But, though protected by forts against advancing armies, the Helmand River itself was never much of a barrier. There were too many easy places to ford. In 1880, during the second Afghan war, the British discovered this to their cost. A British force advanced to Gereshk, the town that controlled the bridge on the great trunk road from Herat, on the Persian border, to Kandahar. Their enemy was a pretender to the Afghan throne, Ayub Khan, who advanced with his army from Herat. Rather than confront the British at Gereshk, he swung up and crossed the river at Heyderabad further north. Outflanked, the British made a hasty retreat and finally came to battle on 27 July at Maiwand, on the road back to Kandahar. It proved to be one of Britain�s greatest military defeats of the Victorian era.

The Helmand the British found in the nineteenth century had much in common with what the British soldiers and their allies found in the dawn of the twenty-first. The people of Helmand were the Pashto-speaking tribes and subtribes, the same ethnic group who formed the majority of Afghanistan and who had overthrown the Persians and ruled the country since 1747. After centuries of dispute, the Pashtun people (or Pathans as they were known in British India) had settled a system of intricate land ownership and water rights that was rarely disturbed and was strictly divided up between tribes, each of whom was generally ruled locally by a pre-eminent chief, known as a khan.

By the end of the twentieth century new outside influences were beginning to be felt�� arising from both the central Afghan government, now based in Kabul, and from foreigners. Once part of a greater Kandahar region, the lower part of the Helmand River basin had now become its own province, a region stretching from where the Helmand River left the high mountains to the north-east, to Pakistan and the Baluchi mountains to the south, and the empty desert of Nimroz province to the south-west, where the river flowed out to dry in salt pans on the Iranian border. From one corner of the province to another was 302 miles, a little less than the distance between London and Edinburgh.

Between 1946 and 1959, American contractors constructed a new canal system to channel the Helmand waters.[5] A vast acreage of newly irrigated land came into being along the river to the west of Lashkar Gah, a city that was now reborn and rebuilt along a series of square gridlines that was more akin to the American midwest than the Orient. Crucially for the future, much of the new land was government-owned rather than tribally owned.

Then came the Soviet invasion on 27 December 1979. The war changed Afghanistan radically. It was not so much what the Soviets did themselves but how the foreign-backed war against the Soviets changed society. As the armed struggle gathered strength, powerful and ambitious new warlords challenged and displaced the old tribal khans. With them gone, some of the truces and understandings between local tribes that had kept relative peace in this land for centuries were shattered. And as society began to alter in war, Helmand suddenly discovered a new source of wealth and notoriety.

The first word of this change came in a report from the Helmand town of Musa Qala by a New York Times reporter named Arthur Bonner, who in 1986 had just completed a 1,000-mile journey across southern Afghanistan. He described the scene:

Bonner claimed to have spoken to dozens of rebel commanders who asserted that the opium poppy was now being planted with a vengeance, apparently as a deliberate act of war. The most powerful commander in Helmand, reported Bonner, was Nassim Akhundzada, whose Alizai tribe was scattered over the mountainous north of the province. His home and major landholdings were in Musa Qala. And it was in that town that Bonner found his elderly brother, Muhammad Rasul Akhundzada, who described himself as an Islamic teacher and had �a thick gray-and-black beard and large, watery eyes�. In the shade of an ancient tree beside the poppy fields, Muhammad Rasul explained his teachings to the farmers. The article read:

In the years that followed the Akhundzada family grew in power, and poppy cultivation spread far and wide. Within two decades, Helmand province would produce more illegal drugs, according to the United Nations, than any country in the world.[7]

When the Soviet army and its Communist puppet regime in Kabul were driven out of power at the end of the 1980s, it was Nassim Akhundzada who became the first governor of Helmand under the Mujahidin who took over. But the civil war continued, and his clan was driven from power in the mid-1990s by a new group of Islamic students who called themselves the Taliban (literally �the students� in Arabic). Nassim Akhundzada and his brother were both assassinated.

Though the Taliban was popular across much of the country for driving out the warlords and restoring security, the movement�s weakness was its close ties with some of the most violent anti-western groups in the world. After Osama bin Laden used a base in Afghanistan to train and prepare for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States invaded the country and toppled the Taliban with the help of its enemies.

Backed by other world powers, the US persuaded the United Nations to help gather a loya jirga, a traditional gathering of tribal elders, to endorse its chosen new ruler, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal elder, as the new president of Afghanistan. The decision was later ratified with national elections.

The toppling of the Taliban also brought the return of the Akhundzada clan to Helmand. Muhammad Rasul�s son, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, was now head of the family and became the new governor. He had befriended Karzai in exile in Pakistan. Karzai�s government, for Helmand and much of Afghanistan, meant the return of the warlords.

And the civil war was not over. Osama bin Laden had survived the US invasion, and so had Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive Taliban supreme leader. From a hide-out just over the border in Pakistan, the latter started rebuilding his forces.

In the summer of 2006, the British army returned to the banks of the Helmand after a gap of 126 years. Although the British had been in the north of the country since 2001, this was the first major combat mission. The aim was to bolster the Afghan government and provide security for economic development as part of a multi-nation deployment organized by NATO, known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Soon, like the Soviets before them, the NATO troops were attacked wherever they went. Fighting was intense, probably as intense as anything seen here during the Soviet occupation. Within a year, the British force had swollen from a planned deployment of 3,300 men and women to nearly 7,000�� more troops than the Red Army had ever deployed to the province.

B Company of the 2nd Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards) was formed up and ready for action. The officer commanding (OC) approached and reviewed his men, the same soldiers that I would meet three months later on the battlefield.

�Permission to have a go, sir?� said Corporal Carl Peterson, a section commander.

The men standing before the OC certainly had a skinful of courage. They were men in the peak of fitness, and they had the drills and skills, the discipline and plenty of experience too for a fight like this. But it was also true that tonight they were not in uniform and had no weapons. And it was dark, by the seaside, and they were in Blackpool, Lancashire. Not Afghanistan.

�I don�t think so, lads,� said the OC. �Not tonight.�

Major Jason Alexis Little, aged thirty-six, had a twinkle in his eyes as he looked down the line of men. He was looking at people who were family. He had known some of these men for nearly sixteen years. He had grown up with them. He knew all their strengths and weaknesses. They knew his too. They all addressed him formally as sir or Major Little or the OC. But for the seniors amongst them, in their minds at least he was simply �Jake�, and he was one of them. He had been in and out of B Company for years.

Like so many other officers that you found in Helmand, Jake was very much the army brat. His father, Peter Little, had served thirty years in the army, mostly with the Gurkhas, and had retired as a brigadier. Jake spent most of his early life in Hong Kong before boarding at a prep school and then Tonbridge School in Kent. After studying history at Newcastle University, he followed his dad and his elder brother Paddy to train at Sandhurst as an army officer. It wasn�t family pressure that led him to the military, he would say, but just the grim thought of other options, like sitting in an office. He did also feel a plain pride in the army. That certainly was inherited.

Jake�s first job in the regiment had been in B Company as a second lieutenant or subaltern in charge of a platoon. Promoted to captain, he became the second-in-command. Then he returned as the OC in the summer of 2006, taking over from his brother Paddy.

Many thought being company commander was the best job in the army, at least among the officers. As a major this was the last rank of command where you fought your war with the soldiers and where leadership still meant getting close to the thickest of action. Step one rank up to lieutenant colonel and you might just get charge of a battalion, something like a position of being God. But it was also a more remote position: both from the men and from the action.

Against a guerrilla army like the Taliban it was small units that counted. Helmand was very much a company commander�s war. Higher-up ranks might set missions, but it was people like Jake who really worked out the tactics and directed the battle. And then it was often down to his sergeants and young officers (most fresh out of training) to actually run the fight.

The company was due out to Helmand in four days� time with a mission from 52 Brigade to act as mentors for the Afghan National Army. The task was known as an OMLT, pronounced �omelette� and standing for Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team. It was not just about training but about fighting with and often leading the Afghan soldier, the type of work that in other conflicts had been done by elite special forces. This one company would be mentoring an entire ANA battalion, what the Afghans called a kandak, of 400 men. And what they were doing would be at the heart of the conflict. Everyone knew any sensible exit strategy from the Helmand war involved getting the Afghan army up to strength.

The full complement of Jake�s B Company was 120 men. But the OMLT role demanded a smaller team, a bit heavier in officers and senior ranks. So two of his platoons had been hived off to other jobs. That left behind thirty-five in his team�� and these were the men out tonight.

Of all in the 2 Yorks, it was father-of-three Sergeant Lee �Jonno� Johnson, thirty-three, whom Jake probably knew best. Jonno was something of a legend in the regiment, described by its commanding officer, Simon Downey, as �one of life�s little gems�. His reputation had not always been won for the best of reasons.

Jonno was the reason they were all standing out here in the street outside the Walkabout. The bouncers had just evicted him for being drunk, not to mention for wearing flip-flops. Jake had gone out to remonstrate. If Jonno was a little drunk, as most were that night, then he was a happy drunk and no cause for worry. The rest of the company had followed Jake out, and that was why they were lined up for action.

The trouble for Jonno, as he grew up, was that he became plagued by a certain legend. As a boxer for the regiment and a judo champion for the army, his nicknames varied from �Judo Johnson� to �Mad Dog Johnson�. Everyone who wanted to prove himself in every bar wanted to take Jonno on. And it invariably ended up in big trouble.

Jonno had moved up ranks and been busted down again more times than anyone could ever remember. But his offences�� generally for fighting�� had never taken him on the expected route to a spell in Colchester, the army military jail. And the reason was that every one of his commanding officers had intervened on his behalf. It had taken Jonno a long time, he would say himself, to realize why�� to realize he was a good soldier, a man that others looked up to, a born leader. Now, for the first time, things were going right. For the first time he had come to realize his own potential and had mended his ways. And everyone in the regiment was proud of what Jonno had become.

Jonno had been in Jake�s platoon when Jake had joined B Company. And though they were poles apart in many ways, everyone around them remembered them as very close, often drinking together into the small hours. Dealing with a young green subaltern, Jonno had seen himself as Jake�s protector. If they were in a club and someone started to pick a fight with Jake and the officers, for example, Jonno would suddenly appear from nowhere, steaming to the rescue.

Time, of course, had moved them on a long path since then. Jake had risen up the ranks and was no longer quite the party animal and night owl. He had been married now for six years and had two young children. And Jonno too had become a different man, a classic �poacher turned gamekeeper�, as his friends would say.

Like Jake, Jonno had a brother in the Green Howards, in his case a younger brother, four years his junior. Lance-Corporal Don Johnson was in C Company. Both would be going out on the tour, and Jonno would worry incessantly about how �our kid� was doing.

There were others who had been there when Jake first joined. Nearly all had a connection with North Yorkshire, the historic recruiting ground of this regiment which until a year back was simply called the Green Howards, a name dating back to 1688. Now it was just one battalion in a new and super-sized Yorkshire Regiment. Still, the tradition of the Green Howards was important. Jake�s soldiers talked of people they admired in the regiment as having �green blood�.

At forty-one, Corporal Dave McCarrick was the oldest man in the company and was one of those who had been there when Jake had first joined B Company. Plagued by injuries, including a dodgy knee, McCarrick had never got the chance to do the courses to step him up to the rank of sergeant. But he would be acting sergeant in the coming tour and, after lobbying to be on the front line, he would also be Jake�s gunner�� manning the machine gun on the back of the OC�s wagon. Like Jonno, McCarrick was from Stockton, on Teesside, and a Middlesbrough Football Club fan, and they had known each other long before the army.

Then there was Jimmy Lynas, thirty-four, probably Jonno�s best friend, from Thornaby-on-Tees, not far from Stockton. He had also been in B Company all his career and, like Jonno, had had his ups and downs. But�� also like Jonno�� he had just finally been promoted to sergeant.

All of these men�� Jake included�� had some close old friends from the Green Howards who were not there that night. They were part of other companies. But they would all soon be out together in OMLT teams in Helmand. All would play a crucial part in the events that followed.

It was Jonno who had organized that night, spending hours sourcing venues and striking deals with landlords around Blackpool. They had begun in the Eagle & Child, a pub in the village of Weeton, halfway between Blackpool and Preston and just by the 2 Yorks� new home. The regiment had moved up to the barracks some two months ago from their previous home in Chepstow, Gwent.

Jonno had overestimated the wine requirement, and at dinner early in the evening the company was faced with a veritable wine lake to consume, which they did with gusto. They moved on in hired mini-buses, singing Middlesbrough FC songs, a few bouts of �There�s only one Jake Little!�, and the first verse of the Green Howards regimental song, �The Bonnie English Rose�.

By the time they reached Blackpool, a few were the worse for wear�� particularly Jonno and Jimmy Lynas and Andy Breach, a lieutenant who was to get the rank of acting captain on the tour. A tall twenty-six-year-old, Breach had been trained as an accountant but ditched that career to join the army. He had been in about three years by now and would act as a senior platoon commander for Jake.

One man who was stone-cold sober that night was Jake�s second in command, Captain Nick Mantell. Nicknamed �the Boy� for his youthful looks, Mantell was the son of a legendary Green Howard and former SAS officer and, like Breach, had been in the army for three years. They had been in training together, in fact, although Mantell got promoted faster because he was a graduate. That night Mantell was getting grief as he was unable to drink because he had an early flight to catch.

The men trawled through a few bars. At one rather empty club, Lynas jumped up and performed a pole dance. Between water holes they lined up to get a photo taken. The first passer-by could not work the camera.

�That civvie is broke. Get me another one!� ordered Jake.

That was before they settled at the Walkabout, where the little discussion with the bouncers occurred.

Although the behaviour was �slightly undesirable�, as Jake put it, it did show how well bonded the team already was. This was very much their final blowout before departure.

Jake ordered the company to disperse and to reform at a nightclub. �That�s how we were. The lads were ready for a fight, but Jake ruled us all. We were gelled as a unit,� recalled Lynas. And the evening ended peacefully.

It had been a jovial night, concentrated mainly on getting the beers in. For the next six months, any alcohol, they knew, would be strictly forbidden. And then, as they were soldiers in a dangerous profession, there was always that extra feeling in the back of their minds. They knew what Afghanistan was like. They knew that perhaps this might be the last drink and their last real word with someone who might not return.

�Quite a few of the lads were slightly apprehensive,� remembered Jake later, �but all seemed to be excited about the tour. I think I spoke to everybody that night over countless beers, and my overriding memory was how happy they all were. We had a strong and close team, and that bred confidence amongst them. You know the training had been so intense that we all just wanted to get on with it.�

Jake woke up the next morning on Blackpool beach.

The phone rang on the desk of Dan McNeill, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force of NATO in Afghanistan. �The president is on the line,� said his assistant.

President Hamid Karzai was like that. Never reluctant to pick up the phone himself but sometimes hard to reach when you wanted him. No one seemed to know his mobile number, and there wasn�t a switchboard at the palace. For days you might speak to him constantly, and then for a while he would just disappear.

The president�s tones were hushed, as if he were trying to be conspiratorial. A Taliban commander from the sensitive Helmand town of Musa Qala was ready for betrayal. He had come to see Karzai in the quiet of the night and told him, �I want to come over to your side.� Karzai was playing all mysterious. �I can�t tell you his name for now,� he said. But he was clearly excited. This could be a turning point, just what both men had been waiting for. The Taliban commander had left Kabul, but he would be coming back.

Ever since the British had retreated from Musa Qala a year back, the town had been a source of controversy. They had made a �truce� with the town�s elders for them to keep the town peaceful. Most Americans thought it was a thinly disguised deal with the Taliban. On 2 February, two days before McNeill had taken command in Kabul, the Taliban had rolled back into the town. McNeill got his spokesman to promise his forces would return.

�We will take it back but in a manner and timing of our choosing,� said Mark Laity, a NATO press officer. �It�s not a question of if, but when.�

McNeill had wanted to act immediately. He suggested to Karzai that a mission be organized to recapture the place. He had enough forces. Karzai had said �not yet�. Everything about Musa Qala spelled trouble, and Karzai was unwilling to gamble his credibility on a new venture there. He wanted to go on working with the elders. With hindsight, McNeill wondered if it had been a mistake to ask him. Perhaps McNeill should have just gone ahead. But once he had popped the question, and the president had declined, it meant he had become stuck. It would have been a gross affront to go ahead now without Karzai�s explicit backing.

Now, McNeill gently put the question again. Was now the time to take some action? To start planning for the town�s recapture? But Karzai said no. �Don�t do anything for now.� By McNeill�s tally�� and he was keeping a note�� that was the fifth time that Karzai had turned him down on Musa Qala.

In the big military scheme of things, a town like Musa Qala hardly seemed important. And yet it was. The war was not just about adding up the number of towns you held or the strength of the enemy. It was about winning the psychological advantage. The name Musa Qala translated literally meant the �Fort of Moses�, and it was becoming as important as the name sounded.

Musa Qala was like a sore wound that was festering. Leaving the Taliban there meant a constant reminder of the fault-lines that lay embedded between Britain and America. It gave the impression of NATO impotence, was a symbol of Taliban alternative government and also gave the Taliban a secure base inside the country from where they could stage operations across the south. And it had a central role in the opium trade. For McNeill, a lot came down to opium. Follow the money. He could not understand why the Brits did not quite get it. It wasn�t an accident that Helmand was both the world�s capital of heroin production and the most volatile region of the country.

Mention an operation to take back Musa Qala to the Brits, McNeill knew, and they would start to get all nervous. They had been so damn keen on their agreement with the tribes that had covered their withdrawal from the town the previous October. They had tried so hard to sell its virtues: in such a defensive way that it seemed pretty obvious they hardly believed their own words. When the agreement was made�� by the then governor of Helmand, Daoud, and indirectly by the British under the then commander, Brigadier Ed Butler�� it was portrayed as a deal with the elders of the town. But every indication the Americans had was that it was really an agreement with the Taliban itself. And it was negotiated from a position of weakness.

Over the winter, the British had claimed the agreement was working, and that the Taliban were staying out of the town. A million dollars� worth of reconstruction projects were earmarked to support the agreement. And a new police force�� that the locals approved of�� was due to get trained.

McNeill had been briefed on the deal at the British Embassy in Washington. Then on his way out to Afghanistan he had got a request to stop by in London and was briefed again to say what a good deal it was. But McNeill was sceptical. As far as he was concerned the Taliban and their allies, the drugs bosses, had moved back in within days. When he got to Kabul, Karzai had told him bluntly that the deal was a failure and claimed he�d had nothing to do with it.

McNeill was now getting word of something new going on down in Helmand with the Brits, something that was causing tension between them and President Karzai. After Karzai�s phone call, he asked an intelligence officer if he knew who the Taliban leader from Musa Qala was that Karzai was talking about. He found some way to avoid the question. Intel people were good at that.

To the Guards officer the civilian official looked like a native. He spoke the language. He wore a turban, the long cotton pyjamas and a woollen waistcoat. And he had a wild, scraggly beard. His hair was ginger, but then Afghans came in many shapes and sizes. Perhaps this was an Uzbek from the north of the country, perhaps the lost child of a Russian soldier.

Captain Rob Sugden had not been in Afghanistan long when he first saw this strange figure. As a member of the Coldstream Guards�� the battalion that was broken up during this deployment and sent in different directions�� Sugden had been put in charge of working with the police force in the town of Gereshk.

Aged twenty-seven and the son of a half-Kenyan father who had served in the army, Sugden was a high-flyer. He had joined after an Oxford University geography degree. He had been an officer now for just over three years and had come to Afghanistan after a spell of guarding Buckingham Palace. Nothing in his background could have prepared him for Helmand.

Sugden was present today at a strange meeting. On one side were a couple of colonels, the Afghan chief of police, some British officials and then this strange �Uzbek�. Sugden was informed that he was in fact Irish. And that his name was Michael Semple.

The party of people had come down to meet two tribal leaders, Mullah Qassim and Mullah Bashir. The meeting was important because, until a few weeks back, they and their men were Taliban. Now they were known simply as �the Group�.

Sugden got a fill-in from his commanders. �We were told they were indeed ex-Taliban and this was the beginnings of a reconciliation programme,� he remembered. But the details were scarce. Semple struck Sugden as very laid-back and �not fazed by rank or anything like that�. Obviously, he had spent a lot of �time with generals or presidents� he was very at ease, a very kind of calm guy. He didn�t so much lead the proceedings, but it was quite obvious that he was central to them. And they kind of came in the whirlwind, stayed about two-and-a-half hours, and then they all disappeared again.�

Sugden was told to do some monitoring of the Group, �check in with them occasionally� and see they did not get into any major dramas. He was told that Mullah Qassim would be mainly dealing with his contacts in Kabul, principally Michael Semple and one of Semple�s Afghan contacts. �He seemed to be the voice of this reconciliation from the ex-Taliban side,� said Sugden.

Mullah Qassim, it transpired later, had just two business cards in his wallet: Michael Semple�s and that of Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador.

Brigadier Andrew Mackay was finally heading for Helmand. At his side was his military assistant, Captain Euan Goodman. They were clutching a pile of briefing notes.

The next day he would reach his new headquarters in Lashkar Gah and two days later he would assume command of the multinational brigade of more than 7,000 soldiers in Helmand as well as all the British servicemen and servicewomen deployed across Afghanistan.

Mackay believed in the mission but was not someone who approached it with blinkered eyes. It was an irony that the more you cared about the Afghan war, the more critical your voice became. Those who hardly cared rarely bothered to dissent.

Up in Kabul these last two days, the brief on the politics of Afghanistan had not been encouraging. One senior western diplomat told him bluntly that President Karzai was �not the president we want or need�. Karzai was isolated and increasingly erratic. He could not manage governance. He was surrounded, many said, by corrupt and venal ministers.

The advice the brigadier was getting was widespread in military and diplomatic circles. One senior British military officer spelled out to me what was now an accepted view: �I think there are issues right at the top of the government in Afghanistan from Karzai downwards. There are question marks over whether even his own family is closely involved in the drugs trade. My understanding is that is probably the case.� Even some of Karzai�s own advisers told me the same story. One senior Afghan diplomat said, �Every time there is a corrupt minister identified, the western governments force Karzai to sack him. But each time this corrupt man is reappointed to another post. You can forgive the president for this once or twice. But, after a while, you have to ask yourself: why is this man protecting these people?�

For Mackay, these briefings made for depressing reading. How was the British army supposed to support the Afghan government and extend its reach of power in Helmand unless the president took decisive steps to purge the warlords whose actions helped to encourage the Taliban?

Sherard Cowper-Coles opened his black canvas briefcase and pulled out a map of Afghanistan that was folded inside. It was an RAF �Escaper�s Map� printed on fake silk: the sort of thing used by downed pilots to navigate out of enemy territory. His was specially made and, printed in the languages of Central Asia, it said: �I am British and I do not speak your language. I will not harm you!�

They were in Karzai�s outer study in the palace. It was an elegant room�� ordered but not opulent. The sofas and chairs were dark-stained wood, and, despite the secret nature of the talks, the windows were left open. Shrieks from peacocks outside would interrupt proceedings.

It was the usual crowd. In the centre were the key players: the president, General McNeill, Cowper-Coles and the US ambassador, Bill Wood. In the outer orbit were the key advisers�� including Karzai�s chief of staff, national security adviser and head of intelligence.

The meeting was to debate a war. But no one seemed to have a map.

Karzai wanted to talk about Musa Qala. He said he had been on the phone with a certain Mullah Salaam, a Taliban commander. Salaam was from the Pirzai subtribe of the Alizai: the tribe that dominated northern Helmand.

�I�ve been speaking to him on the phone. He says the people in Musa Qala are fed up with the Taliban. He was saying, �If you give me some weapons and help we can take Musa Qala. There�s no need for military forces.�

�He is at home in his compound now,� continued Karzai. Salaam was apparently already in conflict with other Taliban leaders. And they were threatening to attack his home.

The men who ran the Afghanistan pictured on Cowper-Coles�s map clustered round and tried to locate the spot where Salaam was holed up. It was a village called Shah Kariz, which lay between Musa Qala and Kajaki

�We�ve got to find a way of helping him,� said the president.

Cowper-Coles was cautious in his response, and for good reason. The one thing he knew was that Britain did not need another hasty and ill-planned military adventure in Helmand. That would undermine everything he was trying to do.

The ambassador had been in his post in Kabul now since May, after a hurried transfer from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The idea behind his appointment was to beef up Britain�s diplomatic presence, reflecting its now �1.6 billion-a-year commitment to Afghanistan. His position was now made the second-most senior ambassadorship to any country in the world.

What he came to discover was that British politicians were being misled. Endless reports from both the military and the diplomats had poured forth a stream of stories of progress. Yet the facts on the ground were at odds with these reports. The ambassador came to see that the country as a whole was slipping ever deeper into rebellion. Back in the spring, three permanent secretaries from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development had toured the theatre. Their report, said UK officials, began: �Overall, we are optimistic.� How exactly had they reached this conclusion? others wondered.

Cowper-Coles believed firmly his job was to send back the unvarnished truth. �I thought that one of the things that had bedevilled our engagement in Iraq was the failure to offer ministers honest advice,� he told me when I met him later. He added: �You know, a lot of people had been rather naive about what could be done here in Afghanistan. There was still sort of a hangover of misplaced optimism.�

A month after he arrived, Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as prime minister, opening the door for a fresh view of what Britain was doing in the country. There were some in Brown�s new government who were said by Whitehall sources to regard the whole Helmand venture as a huge strategic blunder. The new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was �very insistent with me then that he wanted honest advice and he got it,� recalled Cowper-Coles.

Soon afterwards, the ambassador�s telegrams were getting a reputation in Whitehall. There were murmurs from the military about their �undue negativity�

In Helmand, the ambassador saw a military campaign that was beating the Taliban tactically. But he was said to think the army�s policy of constant rotation of commanders was a poor idea, and that the campaign had also still to address the root cause of the conflict. The Taliban were strong because the Afghan government was weak. And the people of Helmand had not decided who to support.

Of the chiefs of the different government departments in Helmand, only four out of eight could even read or write. One Karzai adviser was said to have told the ambassador there were only 200 capable officials across the whole Afghan government. The current Helmand governor, Asadullah Wafa, was ruling the province by mobile phone with virtually no staff. It was almost medieval.

Between Cowper-Coles in Kabul and Adam Thomson, the senior official for the region in London, the elements of a �strategy refresh� were now coming together. Cowper-Coles told me: �We faced a persistent insurgency that I was convinced wasn�t going to be dealt with by military force alone. We had a serious counter-narcotics problem. We concluded early on that success here was going to take a very long time.

The campaign in Helmand, they believed, needed civilian leadership. The emphasis should be on building up the Afghans. Above all the accent should be on the long term. The population would not be won over by shiny new bridges or brand new schools or wells. The Soviets had tried that. What counted for Afghans was to know who was going to be in charge in five years� time. Then they would step off the fence and back a winner.

In his telegrams back to London, according to other sources, much of what Cowper-Coles began advocating involved a better understanding of the tribal politics of Afghanistan. He began to argue for creating a sort of home guard in the villages to be called Community Defence Volunteers, and for a greater emphasis on reconciliation, with some real outreach to the Taliban, at least to those who could perhaps be turned.

The arrival of Mullah Salaam, then, was exactly the kind of opportunity the ambassador wanted. And if Mullah Salaam could be turned, how many more Taliban leaders were out there waiting to be reconciled?

Yet something held him back. The one thing the ambassador did not want was for Salaam�s phone calls to become an excuse for another operation in Musa Qala that ended in embarrassment for Britain, or worse, a bloodbath. Seven British servicemen had died defending Musa Qala in vain last year.

It was a visit to a base in the green zone that finally clinched Brigadier Mackay�s opinion there had been too much killing: too many pointless �clearances� of Taliban territory and too much emphasis on counting the enemy dead. For the last six days, Forward Operating Base Keenan had been run by the eighty-strong 3 Company of the Coldstream Guards, part of Mackay�s 52 Brigade. The place had been captured during the previous brigade�s push north from Gereshk. The new arrivals thought they would be there for four to six weeks, and then rotate out through Camp Bastion. Mackay told them they would spend six months there.

�You�re going to be staying here. You need to get to know your ground, to know your enemy and you�ve got to get to know your population.�

The Guardsmen took a look at the bare interior of the base. The previous unit here, A Company of the 2 Mercians, had been living out of their bergens (rucksacks) and day sacks, and with nothing else there except some walls made of Hesco Bastion, the mud-filled wire baskets that had become the instant defensive ramparts on British and American bases across Iraq and Afghanistan. They looked shocked. One turned round: �But, sir, there is no population!�

They had all fled; they were living in the desert. �And sure enough, when you put your head over the wall, there was no population, Mackay recalled. Looking out of the sangars, what the soldiers called their watchtowers, Mackay could see the ruins of a local school. The Taliban had used it as a firing position and so it had been pounded by the Mercians and then pounded again these last few days. Across the province, the destruction was not hard to see.

Mackay�s brigade was taking over Helmand after a summer of intense violence. Brigadier John Lorimer, his predecessor, had taken the fight into the countryside between the towns along the Helmand River. Putting together large-sized manoeuvre forces, flanked by armour, he attacked the Taliban in their strongholds. But Lorimer did not have the forces to hold every compound or village he captured. The Taliban would creep back in afterwards. He described his operations to journalists as �mowing the lawn�

Lorimer�s last operation, code-named �Palk Wahel�, had involved a sweep through the green zone between Gereshk and Sangin. It had proved costly�� and controversial. In the month of September, seven British soldiers lost their lives, and another was killed the following month as he returned from the same operation.

Within a week of Mackay taking command, the Taliban had shown they were far from cowed. On 15 October, a Danish company commander, Major Anders Storrud, was injured by mortar fire just north of Gereshk and died of his wounds. The same day, the Royal Marines base at FOB Inkerman on the outskirts of Sangin came under full-scale attack.

Four days later, the Mercians were on the helipad at Keenan�� ready to fly off�� when mortars started landing, and rockets started pounding the base and the checkpoints around. For the Mercians, it was just routine. They did not need an officer or a senior to tell the private soldiers what to do.

Lieutenant Daniel McMahon, a young officer with 3 Company, found the handover daunting. �There were us junior officers turning up with no operational experience at all. And there were all these strong, tanned guys talking as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have fire fights, to have rocket-propelled grenades going around, and mortars landing.

The departing soldiers had established this base and others deep into what had been Taliban-controlled countryside. But, Mackay now asked himself, to what purpose unless these places were held over the long term, and by soldiers who got to know the people? The company here�� with all its tremendous fighting strength�� could, if he chose, be used to push further north and to extend the boundaries of the British-controlled zone. Mackay had seen the way that soldiers like the Mercians had bounced around from one area to another. They had defeated the Taliban every time. But there was a bitter lesson learned from conflicts like the Vietnam war�� that a battlefield victory might contribute little or nothing to a strategic success. There were already signs that, over the ground where the previous brigade had won their battles, the Taliban were coming back. Hundreds of the �enemy� had been killed, but that did not seem to make the least difference. In fact, in a Pashtun culture of revenge, killing one man might recruit two others to avenge his death.

Every war was different, every terrain different, and every enemy had different tactics. But this was not an excuse for throwing out the rule book and ignoring all the hard lessons, those learned over decades about how to fight and defeat guerrilla armies.

At the heart of a winning strategy, thought Mackay, was the population. Yes, the insurgents had to be fought and defeated. But the population had to be brought to your side. When your enemy was like the Taliban and wore no uniform and blended seamlessly with the locals, only those locals could be your eyes and ears. They needed to see that you were on their side.

When it arrived in Helmand, the British army proposed to implement what they called the �ink-spot theory�, a doctrine used in the Malaya campaign to defeat a Communist revolt. It preached a cautious approach of concentrating effort on creating safe zones free of guerrilla influence from which the �ink� of security and development would spread out gradually across the people and the terrain. People needed to see the benefits of stable government. Only then could they be allies in the war. The way the US army explained this doctrine, the idea was to clear, hold, then build. Drive the enemy from an area. Keep them away. And then start to build something positive for the population, win them over and turn their hearts against the enemy. But for the last year, as the British ranged across Helmand, Afghans had seen plenty of �clear�, precious little �hold�, and almost no �build�.

The war had often been fought instead�� despite the best of intentions�� as a war against a conventional army, where the simple act of killing the enemy might somehow secure you victory. The trouble for NATO troops in Helmand and across Afghanistan was that there was rarely the number of troops required to hold an area for very long. �We�re not really doing counter-insurgency operations yet,� said one senior British general. �We just haven�t got enough people.�

Without actions to win over the population, endless operations to disrupt the enemy or to defend beleaguered government-held towns, as soldiers from the Parachute Regiment had done when they first arrived in Helmand, could be counter-productive. And that raised an uncomfortable question: had blood been shed in vain?

The sight of the destruction the war had brought, despite all the sacrifice, caused real anger among some of those freshly arrived soldiers. One young officer who visited the town of Sangin with Mackay�s brigade spoke from the heart as he described his raw frustration to find that�� almost six months after the town had been captured back from the Taliban�� almost nothing noticeable had been done to clear the rubble of destruction, and no serious plans were in place for redevelopment, for giving something back to the people. It was not what they believed Britain was in Afghanistan for.

�All those stories that came out about the Paras and later are basically embarrassing. They aren�t war!� he exclaimed. �I mean, you were talking blokes put in unfair positions with thirty to forty men on a parapet dropping JDAMs [satellite-guided bombs] all around them night and day for weeks on end.� The effect on the local population and the towns had been disastrous, he felt. And then sweeps through the green zone over the last summer had been conducted on far too great a scale, with no real focus. �There was no need for those blokes to die,� he confided. �We have gone backwards. We have created rubble, and a load of blokes died clearing green zones, which is utterly pointless.�

There were other viewpoints. Many argued that in all wars it took time to find the right strategy and right tactics. All death was a tragedy and, in the preliminary stages of a long war, it was far too early to tell if someone�s sacrifice had achieved something meaningful. Others said the previous brigades had fought necessary �break-in battles�, which established a psychological advantage by demonstrating to the population that the Taliban would lose every battle with the British.

Mackay diplomatically avoided discussion on the rights and wrongs of how the war had been fought until now. But, as he told his staff when he returned from his visit to FOB Keenan, he was determined to push strategy in a new direction.

Three miles to the north-east up the Helmand River from FOB Keenan, another company of soldiers had also just arrived into the thick of fighting. Commanded by a thirty-five-year-old Oxford graduate, Major Chris Bell, the Right Flank company of the 1st Battalion, Scots Guards were mounted in Warrior armoured fighting vehicles, a new arrival to the Afghan battlefield. They were relieving 3 Company of the Grenadier Guards, who had just established a new base called FOB Arnhem.

�When we got there, it was in a pretty bad way,� recalled Bell. Mortars and rockets were coming in, he said, and 3 Company�s flag was peppered with shrapnel holes. Its soldiers cheered when they saw the armour on the horizon.

The new base was on the edge of Heyderabad, a village halfway between Sangin and Gereshk with a reputation as the �heart of darkness��� a Taliban stronghold where the stares of the farmers would send a chill through your bones and where a fight was guaranteed. As Bell was discovering, it was a place that illustrated well the dilemmas of this war. It seemed to have been �cleared� of Taliban more often than anywhere.

Special forces also attacked the village regularly. To the north of Heyderabad and south of Sangin was FOB Robinson, the home of Task Force 32, the American special force Green Berets that operated outside NATO command. They regularly struck the village: moving through and provoking a fight. But afterwards they returned to base. The special forces operated in small numbers. They might organize a shura after the fighting, hand out some aid or dispense a bit of medical care and try to spread good feeling. But they weren�t there to hold ground.

In the weeks that followed his arrival, Bell saw evidence that �attrition��� the business of killing the enemy�� was important. But the key thing was what came afterwards. Just as at FOB Keenan, when his soldiers arrived at Arnhem, they saw a landscape denuded of its population. �To avoid the fighting, the locals would live in the desert,� he remembered. �And they would walk into the green zone soon after morning prayers, do some work and then leave well before dusk to avoid the frequent fighting that took place at that time of day. They got it down to quite an art.�

As they pushed into the green zone from FOB Arnhem, the Scots Guards were confronted by a hardline Taliban commander who called himself Mullah Basheer (not to be confused with the Mullah Bashir who defected). For the Afghan army working with them the battle against Basheer became quite personal.

The Afghans had a two-way radio, and their sergeant-major spent hours trading insults with the Taliban leader, whom the Afghans called �Basheer motherfucker�. Basheer would say, �You sold out, you�re a slave of Bush, the only thing that matters to you is the dollar, the devil�s money.� The ANA sergeant-major would reply, �You�re paid in goat shit. I have money, I have schools, my children have a future.� The British cracked themselves up laughing as they listened.

Basheer finally met his end when the Afghans heard him detail his own position on his radio. �I�m pinned down by mortar fire,� he said. And �I�m by a tree.� There only was one tree in the area. The tree and Basheer were destroyed with a 500-pound bomb.

Basheer�s death made a difference. Such Taliban leaders would intimidate local people. After his death, the Scots Guards began to gain some ground. The attacks lessened off, and the people started to return. Bell pushed troops out of the base, which was on the edge of the desert, into a �patrol base� that was in the green zone itself and among the people. It was dangerous work. �They were very exposed, and our main effort as a company was to be ready to assist them and to keep them supplied,� said Captain Matthew Jamieson, Bell�s second-in-command. The platoon was ambushed again and again as they patrolled around�� often from multiple directions. And the Taliban crept up and laid mines and bombs in the fields around. One struck home, seriously injuring two men, including one lance-corporal who was hit in the eyes.

But the platoon and the company began to do small things for people like handing out blankets. They got their response. People started helping. Some began flashing lights when a Taliban patrol came close and pointing out the paths they used. Bell began to plan ambushes.

The intelligence chief was emphatic. �This is a chance to break their backbone� to break the tribal resistance in northern Helmand,� said Amrullah Saleh, head of the NDS, Afghanistan�s secret police and intelligence service. This was the first meeting of the War Cabinet�� a new body to run the war, and Musa Qala and the defection of the Taliban�s Mullah Abdul Salaam was their first subject.

�This guy is not what you think, Mr President,� said Dan McNeill, the NATO commander, who was on the sofa opposite Karzai. He tried to lower expectations. �Listen, he has got fifty-five fighters, tops, and it�s probably all he ever had. He�s a lightweight.�

But Karzai was firm. He was getting angry that nothing was being done. �General, I want you to protect Mullah Salaam.�

McNeill said that Task Force Helmand already had a plan ready to deploy a company of Scots Guards soldiers (Chris Bell�s armoured Warriors) up towards Salaam�s home. The whole idea stuck in McNeill�s craw. His preference was to have nothing to do with Salaam. If Salaam was a Taliban fighter worth having on your side, why did he need NATO�s protection? But he knew this man was becoming Karzai�s obsession and he knew his mission, after all, was to support the Afghan government. �Let�s put them in his compound for ten days and see what Salaam does and how many fighters he can recruit,� he said.

Cowper-Coles continued his cautious approach. He suggested a less direct intervention: keeping the Warriors nearby but not actually in his village. Karzai agreed but added: �We have to support anyone who has turned on the Taliban. We must help Salaam without question in any circumstances!�

The president himself had just spoken to Salaam as well as to the former Helmand governor, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada. What he saw unfolding was a grand alliance of the Alizai tribe against the Taliban. Akhundzada might have imprisoned Salaam and tortured him when he was governor, but the two had now spoken and had been reconciled. Akhundzada had paid him some money.

�Salaam has told me that the two main Taliban commanders from the Alizai will work with me,� the president said. Musa Qala might be returned to government hands without the intervention of any NATO troops, thought Karzai. But, for now, Salaam needed to be kept alive.

�We�re not talking here of a major military operation to take Musa Qala,� said the British ambassador. �The idea instead is to let the population of Musa Qala come to us,� he added, in what later became something of a slogan. Karzai nodded.

McNeill left the meeting unconvinced. He wondered how diplomats like Cowper-Coles and their advisers�� both UK and US�� could be swept along with Karzai�s rather impulsive thinking and apparently swallow this talk of a tribal solution. Perhaps they were just, well, being diplomatic�� playing along with the palace politics. In McNeill�s view, Musa Qala was in the grip of drug barons and extremists. Only force was going to drive them out.

At 05.00 on 2 November, a day after the War Cabinet in Kabul, a large column of British troops set off from Camp Bastion to ride to the rescue of the man the soldiers would soon call �Mullah Salami�.

At the head of more than fifty vehicles with 250 men and women on board, were Chris Bell�s Warrior company. They would be the strike force, along with another eighteen armoured Mastiff vehicles from the King�s Royal Hussars (the KRH). The latter�s job was to protect a logistics convoy, bringing the food, fuel and ammunition to keep the hungry armoured vehicles and their crews going. There were also mortars, assault engineers, a combat troop of Royal Marine commandos and a troop of three 105mm field guns from the Royal Artillery. Most involved would not be leaving the desert for weeks. As he surveyed the size of the force, Bell muttered: �This guy Salami. He better be worth it. He better deliver.

Just after first light on 3 November, a force of Royal Marine commandos crossed the Helmand River from their base in Sangin and temporarily secured the southern tip of the hostile Musa Qala wadi, allowing the convoy to cross over and reach the desert plateau around Salaam�s home in Shah Kariz.

As he moved through, Bell noted the size of operation to get his force into position�� requiring the greater part of 40 Commando�s combat strength. If it took such combat power to get them in, it might take the same to get them out. �Having the door in and out in an unknown area controlled by somebody else is never the most comfortable feeling,� he said later.

The mission had a name now: Operation Mar Changak, or, as the British translated it, �Operation Snakebite�. Bell�s orders were to reassure Salaam �through a visible presence around his village but do not go in�.

The second part of his orders hinted at a future, bigger operation. He was also to perform a �feint�, a military ruse. He was told to: �FEINT and DECEIVE the Taliban by feinting at their Musa Qala defences�� but do not be decisively engaged.

Mackay recalled he wanted the Taliban to get a message in capitals: �We Are Coming To Get You.�

It was quiet, far too quiet. The village was empty: not a sign of life up here. Not even a scrap of paper. Not an abandoned toy, nor a rag of clothing, only a broken wooden bucket. They felt the breeze their sweat-covered foreheads�� and it was the chill breath of ghosts.

Second Lieutenant Colin Lunn, the platoon commander, tried to peer through the darkness with his night-vision monocle. Through it he saw green circles of light from the soldiers� infra-red torches dancing on the pitch-black walls.

More whispers. The scrunch on gravel as a boot slipped. Heavy breathing. A bark from a distant dog. Then Lunn quietly exhaled: �OK, go.�

BANG. The sound of a crashing door burst the silence. Echoing: once, twice. Then nothing. Nothing at all.

A crackle on the radio. �All clear, boss,� came the thick Yorkshire voice of Sergeant Lee �Jonno� Johnson.

Under a deep blue sky, Major Jake Little was standing by the river bridge and inspecting the new sandbagged defences that Lieutenant Simon Farley and his platoon were putting into place with the Afghan army. There was an air of panic in the town behind them. The district governor had fled. The police had locked themselves into their central station. Few children ventured on the streets, and those that did cast a wary and dispirited eye.

To the north, across a table-flat desert of sand that stretched to the edge of the mountains, Little and Farley began to notice what looked like the gathering clouds of a dust storm. To the military eye, it meant one thing only: the approach of a large convoy of vehicles.

Up there into those dark peaks and canyons was Taliban country and the town of Golestan. It had just fallen to the enemy. Delaram, where Jake and his B Company, 2 Yorks, had arrived yesterday, was expected to fall next.

The commander of the convoy�� an American special force reservist�� came to tell his sorry tale in Jake�s makeshift headquarters, the bullet-marked compound of the absent governor. Setting off three days earlier to reconnoitre a route up the mountain gorge into Golestan, the convoy had been clinically and savagely ambushed. Nineteen Afghan soldiers were dead, some of them captured then executed by the Taliban.

B Company, which now had to pick up the pieces, had been in Helmand months now. Arriving on 15 September, they had been attached as mentors to the 400-strong 2nd kandak of an Afghan army brigade based in Helmand. They spent the first few weeks in training at Camp Shorobak, the ANA base by Camp Bastion, while a few of Jake�s men like Sergeant Lee Johnson had been detached and sent up to the Kajaki dam to mentor the ANA up there.

They had learned some lessons. For the first few weeks it was Ramadan, and the Afghans refused to work more than two hours a day. They also resisted the training. �That kandak was never keen to learn,� recalled Jake, �mainly because of the Afghan nature of thinking they knew it all already. They felt it was slightly demeaning for them to be trained again.� But, over time, they had built relationships and got a sense of individuals.

Then the typically abrupt order had come from President Karzai. The ANA were told to grab their weapons as soon as possible and head out west from Helmand and straight to Delaram in next-door Nimroz province. If the Taliban captured the town it would be dire news. It controlled a bridge on Highway One�� the main strategic ring road from Herat on the Iranian border through Helmand and on to Kandahar.

Then, when they got there, the orders changed again. Now Karzai wanted to move his army 35 miles north to take Golestan back from the Taliban. �It was all very short notice, both times,� remembered Jake. �Both times it was sort of we�re going in four hours. Both times, we managed to stall them by saying, essentially, if you go now you�ll be without us, and therefore you won�t have cover. You won�t have any helicopters for casualty evacuation. So wait until we�re ready!�

While Karzai might have ordered an Afghan attack, it was Jake who had to lead the mission. Jake�s ANA kandak commander, Colonel Rahimi, was already in an excitable state in Delaram, particularly when the Taliban began probing the town�s defences and lobbing mortars. �Every time they heard an explosion they sent for me to tell them what to do. It was a little pathetic,� said Jake. He had to calm Rahimi down by stationing him up a hill to �survey his troops� and leaving the running of the kandak to B Company�s teams. When the order came to move north, Rahimi was happy to send his men forward under Jake�s command, but he refused point blank to go himself. That did make life a bit easier for B Company. But it was not a great omen.

In the end, Jake led a sixty-vehicle convoy north composed of the survivors of the local ANA force, about half of his ANA kandak and an A-Team of the US Green Berets. The US reservists stayed behind this time.

Intelligence said there were 400 to 1,000 Taliban around Golestan. This was exaggerated �Afghan numbers�, said Jake. But he was clear the enemy force was substantial, and they had mined the approaches from a mile away.

The direct approach to Delaram went up a steep-sided canyon. But, to avoid mines and ambush, Jake decided to cut a trail through the mountains in the ultimate of cross-country driving. �It was the most beautiful terrain I think I have ever seen,� he said, �utterly devoid of people, apart from the odd nomad, and utterly barren.�

By avoiding the enemy�s defences, Jake and his force shocked them into simply abandoning the town: melting away sensibly to avoid a stand-up fight.

Looking back on it, Jake would regard the trip to Delaram and Golestan as one of the highlights of the tour. He and his sergeant-major, Daniel Benson, got to know their men and the Afghans better; it was beautiful country; everything went to plan and there were no casualties from his troops or from among his Afghans.

But it was also Jake�s first taste of the gulf between tactics that worked and a broader strategy in Afghanistan that seemed to make little sense.

�The frustrating thing was we spent a week there in Golestan. We stabilized it, patrolled around and talked to the locals. We held shuras. Everything went very well. They wanted the government to stay there and told us of their intimidation by the Taliban, who had murdered several of the town�s elders. They welcomed the ANA and ISAF troops. And then we left.�

After building up the hopes of the people of Golestan, a promise by the Italian military to take over security came to nothing. When B Company pulled out, the town was simply abandoned, and within four days was back in Taliban hands.

�So it was a clearance without a hold,� said Jake. �And therefore in many ways a waste of time, other than it probably relieved the pressure on Delaram, which did not fall to the Taliban. It was very successful in the sense that we avoided fighting. It is a success when you don�t have to flatten a place. So that�s good.� But, though he was no expert on Afghan politics, this did strike him personally as at least one example of �people not always being able to control President Karzai and therefore Karzai being able to just throw out pretty daft orders, which he is not backing up with resources to do the follow-up afterwards.�

�Every time I shoot at a soldier, I am not sure if it is right or wrong,� said the Taliban commander. He was using the old word angleez, English, for his enemy.

�Why?� said the journalist.

�Well, it is not the soldiers who are the occupiers. I think about their families. It is their leaders, the politicians and generals, that I would like in the sights of my gun,� he said.

Mullah Sadiq, the commander talking on the mobile phone, had a thing about politicians. He used to joke about putting Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden in a boxing ring with Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard, then the Australian prime minister.

�Lock them in the ring. Let them fight to the death. Whoever wins the match can win this war,� he said.

�That sounds a bit unfair. It�s two against three!

�That does not matter. Whoever will survive will survive!

Sadiq was from Sangin and still kept his family at home there, but he was now the chief commander on the Kajaki frontline, in daily battle with the Royal Marines and one of those they used to see in the distance, talking on a mobile phone or a radio. Today, he was talking to Qais Azimy, a senior journalist with Al Jazeera�s English channel. They had been in touch for many months after they met by accident at an emergency hospital in Lashkah Gah.

Wrapped in a white dressing gown, Sadiq, a lanky man with a toothy grin, had told how NATO had already announced his death in a press release. He had been driving through the desert when his pick-up was cornered by an Apache helicopter that opened fire. His three bodyguards saved him by leaping over and protecting him. All of them died, �martyred� as Sadiq would put it. With a serious leg wound, Sadiq had to crawl alone to the nearest village to get someone to call for an ambulance.

A few days after the interview, Sadiq had called Qais and invited him up to Sangin. At the time, the British had claimed to occupy Sangin, but in reality they were besieged in their base. Armed Taliban fighters walked openly through the market place.

�These are George Bush�s kites,� said Sadiq, pointing up at the aeroplanes that circled by. Qais was getting nervous. The Taliban were clearly unfazed, sitting with Sadiq�s family in an open courtyard and eating rice and spinach, the best he could offer. �The spinach is grown among the poppy,� Sadiq explained. His wife joined them for the meal�� a sign not only that they trusted Qais but that Sadiq was not a religious extremist.

Sadiq would insist, �You know, this is not a war about religion. It�s about the freedom of my country.� That was his catchphrase lament: �My country! My country!�

Not all Taliban were alike. It was obvious Sadiq was a different breed to some of his more extreme brethren. And it was obvious to Qais there were deep suspicions between the groups.

As he travelled to meet Sadiq one time, Qais ran into other groups of Taliban, those who revealed their deep and brutal paranoia. Some appeared to be linked to Dadullah Lang, the leader at that point of the more hardline factions in Helmand. The men showed them mobile phone videos of �spies� being slaughtered. �We�ve killed more humans than chickens,� said one man.

On a hillside in the desert somewhere near Gereshk, Qais also met Abdul Rahim, the Taliban�s overall commander in the province. He kept his face disguised. But he was clearly the boss�� a cleaner turban, a neater cut to his trousers�� and he spoke with authority. At one point, out in the open, there was a crowd of dozens of armed fighters around them. �This is the moment the airstrike comes,� thought James Bays, a British correspondent that Qais had brought along.

Sadiq later told Qais he distrusted many of the old Taliban, the ones who had held power before. He also detested Dadullah and his extreme followers. When the press reported the Special Boat Service had killed Dadullah in early 2007, he was delighted. He declared: �The dirty spot on the white pure cloth of the Mujahidin has been wiped away.�

Mullah Sadiq and the journalist knew that NATO intelligence was probably intercepting and listening to their calls. But they used to speak constantly. For the journalist, Sadiq provided a window into the rebellion, a chance to understand just why this war was happening.

Sadiq�s story of how he became a Taliban leader was emblematic of this whole rebellion. The son of a government official, Sadiq was in his forties. He was an educated man, unlike many in his movement. Ever smiling, sometimes confidently, he was mild-mannered, hardly a typical warrior. He was also full of black humour�� he saw the irony everywhere. He was a smart fighter too: full of new ideas for tactics, like getting his men between two sets of angleez troops and opening fire in a way that made the British fire on each other, or fire on their Afghan army allies, or vice versa.

Asked why he had joined the Taliban, he would weep openly as he described a period �before the Taliban got strong� and he approached a checkpoint of foreign troops. He had a sick woman in his car and had needed to get to the hospital. The troops just told him, �Go away! Go away!� Sadiq used to repeat, �That�s what occupation means!�

But the deeper story came back to the same predatory politics that the EU diplomat Michael Semple and British officers had separately described to me: of how the chief of Helmand�s secret police appointed when President Karzai took power had turned Sangin into his private fiefdom. Sadiq said the man�� nicknamed �Dado��� had started a private jail, was always drunk or stoned, had raped boys and women and was systematically stealing from the population. Sadiq previously had had a minor role in the old Taliban. This was his call back to arms.

Sadiq and his family, like many in Sangin, crossed the Rubicon of rebellion in the summer of 2006, just as the British arrived. He was involved in the revenge attack that slaughtered members of Dado�s family. There was no turning back now. They blew up Dado�s home, although Sadiq used to complain, �We spent so much on explosives and it is still half there.�

Soon after all this, the Afghan government persuaded Britain to send its paratroopers into Sangin to maintain order. That was the start of the bloody battle of Sangin. As far as Sadiq and most were concerned, the British were there to prop up Dado and his cronies.

Many of the fighters, Sadiq explained, were local villagers. They were paid nothing but fought to defend their families� and tribe�s interests. They were also involved in drug production. �It�s the season of drugs. People can�t fight very much at the moment,� Sadiq would say. Sadiq acknowledged help from the drug dealers. One of his cars was a gift from them.

There were also many fighters who were sent from the madrassahs, the hundreds of religious schools over the frontier in Pakistan. These were not �foreign fighters� but Afghans, often the children of refugees. They would be paid for service�� about 20,000 Pakistani rupees a month (about 300 US dollars at the exchange rate then). But the money was usually sent back to the madrassah.

For those who always wondered at the Taliban�s apparently suicidal tactics�� sending waves of fighters against British machine guns�� Sadiq�s fighters had the answer. Once they captured some British night-vision equipment. They were discussing what it would fetch in the market. �Aren�t you going to use it?� said Qais. The Taliban just laughed. As one leader explained to the journalist later: �What you have to understand is that for every fighter who is martyred here, the madrassahs will send two to replace him. They become heroes in their schools!� So sending young men forward to die was not just religious zeal, it made a rather cynical, calculated sense.

There were a few genuine �foreign� fighters�� the Saudis or Chechens. Qais never saw any of these. And, according to Sadiq, they had little value. For survival, Taliban fighters depended on village hospitality. When dealing with any coddled Saudi, even a young religious zealot, then hospitality was a heavy burden. �They don�t know the area at all, and it costs more to provide them with hospitality than the value they bring to the fight.� But Sadiq had instructions from Pakistan to look after them well�� give them the best food and put them up in the best houses �so they will go back and tell others to come�. Sadiq believed this war would be won or lost by Afghan fighters, not outsiders�� just like the war against the Soviets.

Sadiq complained about the fighting in Kajaki, ironically echoing the complaints of many British soldiers. �You know we are shooting many of them. But they never announce about their injured,� he said. Despite his status as a mullah, a religious teacher, Sadiq used to swear a lot. He was full of awe of the British medics. �Even if the angleez soldier is in bits then they have a motherfucking doctor who can piece them all together.�

Now, Sadiq was starting to talk to Qais about suspicions of a coalition attack on Musa Qala, which he used to call a �resting place� for his front-line fighters. Sadiq was offering a trip into the Taliban stronghold. �Bring your cameras,� he said. �We will guarantee your safety.�

The Royal Marines patrol from Alpha Company had been out for nearly six hours now, pounding out from the FOB to explore the villages up north. The intelligence reports said up to thirty foreign fighters were lying in wait. But it was no good just sitting in the base and waiting for an attack.

Back at brigade headquarters, staff were reporting a level of Taliban activity across Helmand that had not been seen since the green zone clearances of Operation Palk Wahel in September. New fighters were coming in from Pakistan, said intelligence, and others were slipping down from the north. All in all, the brigade staff thought, it was a clear attempt to divert the British from their pressure against Musa Qala.

All day long the marines overheard the taunts over the Taliban�s radio network. Every other moment, they had heard an order to attack and a reply saying, �I�m ready.� But no one had seen anything. Nothing had happened. So they had started heading home. Two close combat troops provided the combat strength. 2 Troop was in the lead; 1 Troop had the rear. The company headquarters was in the middle. Everyone was on foot.

About a mile and a half from the FOB, some of the marines had begun to see some strange things, like some well-dressed farmers fiddling with a haystack, just seeming to be moving stalks for no particular reason. They had passed a man whose mobile phone rang and he hadn�t even moved to answer it. Then three men were spotted running into the trees with weapons. Most of the patrol were in the open then, stretched along a mud track by the side of a drainage ditch. Everyone started jogging to reach some kind of cover.

�There was a small pause,� recalled Andy Brownrigg, the company sergeant-major. �It was almost like it was a gentleman�s agreement that we will wait for you to get into a hiding place and we will get into our hiding place.

The opening shot of the ambush that became known as the �Battle of 9/11� was fired at 16.06.

As machine-gun fire began and RPGs came whooshing over, everyone dropped down. A few men were knocked to the ground by a blast from one grenade. Most of the headquarters ended up in the ditch, pinned down by the gunfire. But they knew they had to reach solid cover to start getting organized. So they dashed one-by-one for a nearby walled but isolated compound. It was a trap. The only entrance, and the roof of the small building inside, were easily raked by enemy fire.

Marine Gary Ogden, a twenty-six-year-old medic with trademark orange-tinted sunglasses, was lying behind another of those little mud banks, firing shots at a couple of Taliban he could see.

�I glanced back at the compound entrance and I could see the rounds striking the wall and a figure screaming for a medic,� he recalled. The man in the entrance was Captain Paul Britton, the twenty-seven-year-old fire support team commander, whose job was to call up guns, mortars and aviation. �Rounds were hitting the doorway all around him, and I wondered why they weren�t hitting him, said Ogden. With the air filled with the crack and thump of bullets, Ogden picked himself up and charged across the field.

Britton had only just reached the compound after dashing from a ditch. He arrived to see a smear of blood dripping down the walls and a machine-gunner, Corporal James Fletcher, being dragged down with his leg looking lifeless. Fletcher had been on the roof when an RPG blast showered him and his gun team with shrapnel. Marine Matthew Fenwick, an ammo bearer, caught shards of metal in his legs and ankles. Fenwick was a reservist whose job back home was a lifeguard at a Bristol leisure centre.

�As I put my head up on the roof,� recalled Fenwick, �I could hear the rounds coming over my head. I knew it was going to be pretty intense.�

Fenwick spun round to pull another machine gun on to the roof when he heard a boom and a felt a sharp kick from behind. �The next thing I know I am on the floor upside down thinking, �What the hell was that?��

Things then got even worse. A section leader, Corporal Simon �Si� Greening, moved forward to the compound entrance to yell at his men in the ditches around. They saw him staggering backwards shouting, �Fuck, I think I�ve been shot!�

Britton and Major Adrian Morley, the OC of Alpha Company, who was just running in, caught Greening as he stumbled. They ripped off his body armour and clothes and tried to put on a field dressing as Ogden finally came running into the compound. Ogden started going over Greening front and back to look for the entry and exit wounds. He had been shot in the side, bypassing his armour.

�As I rolled Si back he passed out,� said Ogden. �I think the OC thought he was dead or on his last legs. But I checked his carotid [artery] and found he was fine. His heart was racing like a bastard, but he was still with us.�

Ogden started putting a needle line for an intravenous drip into Greening�s arm to give him some fluids to replace the blood loss.

Then Ogden was being called over to treat Corporal Fletcher. �The RPG took all the muscles off Fletcher�s legs, tore his legs to bits. There was lumps of flesh everywhere and so much blood coming out of him,� said Ogden. �It was fucking chaos. He came down totally out cold.�

Others had put tourniquets on both of Fletcher�s legs to block off the blood flow. Without them he would have been dead in minutes. They followed up with field dressings. Ogden found his breathing was OK but was worried about the blood loss. He also checked Fenwick and decided he was stable.

Then Ogden was called back to Greening whose field dressings had come loose and who was pumping out blood again. Blood was also beginning to drain into his lung. Ogden could put a chest drain in, but that would lower his blood pressure massively, so he delayed that option. Greening then woke up and started chatting and �giving me a load of shit�, said Ogden.

It was 16.09 when the watch keepers at FOB Inkerman got the radio message that Alpha Company were three men down�� just three minutes after the contact had begun.

Inkerman got on the radio network to Carbon Zero, the operations centre of 40 Commando�s Battle Group North. Their day had already been fraught. In the early hours, a vehicle leaving Sangin district centre, 4 miles south of Inkerman, had rolled into a water-filled ditch, killing Lance-Corporal Jake Alderton of the Royal Engineers. Then a Chinook landing at Now Zad narrowly escaped being struck by mortars. And just as the battle outside Inkerman began, a fire fight erupted in the main street of Sangin bazaar. An Afghan soldier was seriously hurt. There were now two simultaneous requests for a rescue helicopter.

Meanwhile, just as it couldn�t get any worse, another fire fight began erupting with a US special force unit operating across the river from Sangin. Three serious gun battles were going on at once.

And that was just in the north of Helmand. Down in the southern town of Garmsir, the Gurkhas were just pausing for breath after a four-and-a-half hour battle that had led to serious injuries. It was the most sustained attack down south for the last two months.

Most of Alpha Company were still in the ditches in a storm of bullets, facing Taliban that had ambushed them from multiple directions and was now on the move�� threatening a deadly flank through head-high maize and deep ditches. It was hard to spot their firing points. Sometimes it was just the rustling of the corn that gave them away.

The noise was phenomenal. Paul Britton and his mortar controller, Duncan Maddocks, were calling in a barrage of mortar rounds from Inkerman and preparing to bring in artillery. Apache helicopters were also inbound.

Then a flash and bang as another RPG arched down into a wall inside the compound. Shrapnel hit a signaller, Corporal Dave Watts, in the backside. It struck Britton in the arm and hand.

�I knew there was something wrong with my arm,� recalled Britton. �It hurt and then went numb. I looked across�� I saw that my arm was still there, but I couldn�t really move it.

�People had jumped on to Corporal Watts because it was obvious he was quite badly injured.� No one noticed Britton had been hit. Britton went up to Maddocks, who was talking on the radio.

�My arm!�

Maddocks didn�t even look at him; just raised his hand to say he was busy. Britton repeated: �No, I want you to see my arm!�

Maddocks looked over. He saw the blood.

�Oh yeah! Your arm!�

He dropped the handset and ripped off Britton�s T-shirt and put a dressing on. It felt a lot better and tighter now, but Britton still could not move it. He did not even spot the shrapnel that had gone into his hand. Maddocks offered Britton morphine, but he refused. He had to keep his mind straight.

Ogden had seen Watts drop and he sped across, worried that shrapnel could have severed an artery, but Watts seemed more concerned about his manhood. Ogden checked it out and assured him everything was intact. He patched him up and gave him a cigarette.

By now, it was clear the injured needed a helicopter medevac. Urgently. With so much blood loss from Fletcher and Greening, it would take too long to get them back to the landing site at Inkerman.

Outside the compound, the 2 Troop machine-gunners were running out of ammo. Jim Wright, the troop sergeant, called men forward to resupply with chain-links of bullets wrapped round their shoulders like Rambo.

One of them, instead of using the bridge over the ditch, ploughed into the river, which went up to his neck. Wright thought he had seen the last of him. But he came out the other side crawling towards them like a cat. It all seemed in slow motion. �This is fucking surreal,� thought Wright. Meanwhile, the sergeant-major, Brownrigg, had the task of securing a helicopter landing site. He and 1 Troop started flanking through the thick maize to get to the rear of the compound. The rounds came buzzing through. They couldn�t see the enemy. All they could do was use their ears to work out where to fire back at.

The initial attack had been mainly from the east, but the Taliban had flanked now round to the west. And when 1 Troop came out of the maize into open ground again by the planned landing site, they found the Taliban were firing from the south too, from barely 100 yards away.

Two Apaches were now on station and blazed at the tree lines with cannon, rockets and Hellfire missiles. At 16.45, Alpha Company reported the landing site was secure.

It was time to quit the compound, avoiding the fire-raked entrance. A Gurkha engineer tried to crowbar through a wall but gave up. Instead he got out a stick of explosive and blew a �mouse-hole� through. Fenwick, the injured marine, was told to move. When he got to the wall, he found it was only a tiny hole. �Oh my God, I�m not going to get through,� he thought. The marines bashed away some more of the mortar, and he managed to squeeze through.

The last to leave the compound was the air controller, Sergeant Michael Garth. With his headphones on he seemed oblivious and was walking, said one marine, �like nothing was going on, because obviously he was in the middle of telling lies to the AH [Apache helicopters]�. Precise records of what exactly was said to the helicopters were not revealed. But legend has it that Garth, in something of an understatement, told the Apaches the landing site was as �secure as it will be�, and the full meaning of that message never quite made it to the rescue Chinook.

Just before the Chinook came in, Brownrigg saw an Apache hovering over FOB Inkerman and just twirling around and pouring fire from its cannon. Brass shell casings rained down beneath. All at the same time, mortars were whistling down; and shells from Inkerman�s battery of three 105mm artillery guns shrieked across and exploded with a whumph. Soldiers watching from the base thought it was like a scene from Apocalypse Now.

For the past half hour, the Chinook had been circling in the desert near by. At the controls was a Royal Navy pilot, Flight Lieutenant Nichol Benzie, with RAF co-pilot Flight Lieutenant Al Sparks. The pilots had no direct contact with the marines. Sergeant Garth was speaking to the Apaches. And the Apaches spoke by secure radio to the crewmen in the back of the Chinook. And the crewmen relayed the message by intercom to the pilots.

�When you�re getting stuff relayed like this, it�s a bit like Chinese whispers,� said Sparks. �It gets a little diluted.� He was on his first tour of Afghanistan. He was feeling pretty wide-eyed. Sometimes it was just as well the information was filtered.

When they got the call that the landing site was clear, the pilots still thought they were heading for FOB Inkerman. It was only when they got �in amongst the weeds�, flying �ultra-low�, said Benzie, that they noticed orange smoke rising in the green zone itself. They took a deep breath. There was almost no protection from gunfire there.

At 03.30 on 11 November, the first elements of the Brigade Reconnaissance Force (BRF) leave a patrol base in the green zone near the village of Zumberlay under the command of Major Tony Phillips. They take the road through Gereshk and then turn right into the desert.

The following day, the second half of the force, commanded by Captain James Ashworth, leaves at 04.30 to rendezvous with them to the west of Musa Qala.

The force is mounted in eighteen WMIK Land Rovers and six Pinzgauer trucks, and the total strength of eighty men consists of two fighting troops totalling forty-eight men, a fire support group armed with two 81 mm mortars, snipers and Javelin missiles, a unit that can deploy a small UAV �Desert Hawk� drone and a headquarters element.

They are travelling light. Everything they need to survive is carried in their vehicles. While Chris Bell�s Warrior company, the Mobile Operation Group East, has its own special supply camp�� with truckloads of fuel, ammunition and supplies, and a troop of three field guns to support them�� the BRF are on their own.

Their destination is to be called Operations Box Inferno, and Major Phillips� orders state: �Carry out reconnaissance north and west of Musa Qala, find and disrupt the enemy, and influence the civilian population.�

Their camp at night is known as a �harbour�, a place of refuge in a sea of sand and rock. It is to be strictly arranged in the shape of a box, with the fighting troops guarding the corners and the headquarters and fire support team, including mortars ready to fire, arranged in the middle.

Major Tony Phillips crawled into his plastic bivvy bag and zipped the top shut over his head. He switched on his red head torch. Then he opened his personal diary to scrawl a brief note. It had been a long day.

A few minutes before, as the last golden light faded beneath the black shadows of the distant mountains, his elite Brigade Reconnaissance Force had been on �stand to�. That was the centuries-old warrior tradition of standing ready for action at the close and break of day, ready to repel an attack at the classic moments of danger. Then all lights had been put out and all his men had fallen silent. Soon, the only noise was the snores of men and the howl of the wolves that crept around in the darkness. The sentries would see them moving through their night-vision goggles.

As he gathered his thoughts, Phillips could not know then what lay ahead, that this night would be the beginning of what would become an epic three-month adventure and one of the longest British desert patrols in memory. It would be tinged with tragedy. When they were all assembled, the BRF patrol of eighty men that had left the green zone behind would finally come out of the desert with twelve men down�� ten injured and two who would be killed in action.

For now, though, Phillips was still filled with the thrill of his mission�� the danger of the enemy that lay all around and the large area he was being asked to cover, and the responsibility that lay on his shoulders. His mission was reconnaissance for Brigadier Andrew Mackay, who used to describe the BRF as �my eyes and my ears�. But where the BRF went within that mission�� and how they did it�� was Phillips� choice, and his alone.

�There are no two ways about it,� he wrote quickly, �this is the brigade commander�s baby! It�s his idea and we are working directly to Brigade. I have an area of nearly 300 square kilometres in which to do what I want. It�s all very exciting. We are in the middle of the desert so should be safe but as Musa Qala has hundreds of Taliban and is their stronghold they could try anything.�

A native of Lancashire, thirty-eight-year-old Phillips had a reputation as something of a rough diamond. By his own description he was �not exactly your clean-cut nose-clean type of officer� and not infrequently he got into trouble for speaking his mind. Someone once described him as a �break glass in time of war� type of leader, valued most of all for his physical tenacity and personal courage. Joining the army after a geography degree at Manchester University, he had seen action in Northern Ireland as a troop commander and dealt with the aftermath of an IRA bomb that killed one of his soldiers.

A week ago, Phillips and his men were still in the lush green zone of the Helmand River valley. His force had been manning a patrol base just north of Gereshk. It had been classic counter-insurgency work of the sort that Mackay favoured�� getting out to talk to the locals, helping them with some basic medical care and establishing a stable government presence in a village, Zumberlay, that a year earlier had been Taliban heartland and where my colleague at the Sunday Times, Christina Lamb, had been with the Parachute Regiment as they were pinned down by gunfire.

The BRF had already had their baptism of fire. Ironically, the first fire fight had been not with the Taliban but with the Afghan National Police. They had been driving in the night out of Camp Bastion when they came under a volley of machine-gun fire. Only later did they find out who their adversaries were.

Then they had been attacked by a suicide bomber just on the outskirts of Gereshk town. A white Toyota Corolla (it always seemed to be a Corolla) came haring towards them. Only quick reactions saved his men. Four of his soldiers had opened fire on the driver, and the car exploded between two vehicles. There were minor injuries, but the main effect was a wake-up call. It made them realize the training phase was over.

The incident that most affected the men down in Zumberlay had been when they tried to help a young Afghan boy. He had burned himself with hot milk that poured all over his skin, and the wounds had been left to fester. The medics had spotted it was a highly serious injury. But appeals to send him to a coalition hospital had been rejected. So the soldiers intervened themselves and collected 300 dollars for him. The boy was driven over to Gereshk and handed over to the Afghan police to take him for treatment. But the next morning he came back wrapped in a carpet. He had died in the night.

Then the orders came through from Brigade to move into the desert. Really the only no-go zone for them was the town of Musa Qala itself. Everywhere else they were to probe relentlessly: testing the Taliban reactions, working out their defensive positions, assessing their strength and figuring out routes for any future NATO advance.

Everyone slept at night by their vehicle on the rocky desert floor, contending not only with fearsome camel spiders, up to six inches long, but also with snakes that might come seeking warmth. Recalled Phillips: �Nobody was permitted to move outside the �box�, so cooking, sleeping, washing and pooing all occurred within a few yards of the vehicle, and its crew. There was no room for shyness.�

This was Taliban country. To his north-west was the town of Now Zad, surrounded on all sides by the enemy. To his east was the Musa Qala wadi, 30 miles of green zone running north to south and entirely in the enemy�s hands and the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala town slap bang in the middle. And throughout the desert in between were small pockets of settlement, each one a potential place from which to be ambushed.

There were also objective dangers. The intelligence maps he was given showed clouds of red�� marks that indicated the presence of thousands of mines left behind in the desert by Soviet troops.

They got attacked almost as soon as they arrived. In the desert it was mortars, thankfully missing them by hundreds of yards, but always setting nerves on edge. As they approached the Musa Qala wadi and the villages around, it was gunfire and RPGs that awaited them.

Michael Semple was at his desk and glancing at his diary. He was halfway through a busy day�� nine meetings, beginning with breakfast with a close relative of the elusive Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Omar, and with an office call to a senior official in Afghan intelligence, the NDS, planned for 15.30. His mobile phone rang. It was Naquib, his Afghan partner, calling from a guesthouse in the city suburbs. He spoke in code, something like: �The Eagle has landed!

In all his months of meeting with the Taliban, people always wondered how exactly Semple did it. Was he mad or foolish? How could he meet these people safely? Did he have to be disguised or protected? But Semple had a big secret: rather than disappearing off to meet the Taliban, the Taliban came to him, frequently in Kabul. It said something about the nature of this war. The British and Americans wore uniforms, looked foreign and drove about in armoured cars. Moving just 10 miles took hours of planning. But their enemy wore no uniform. They had the freedom of the roads. A Taliban leader could wake up in a Helmand trench one morning, put down his AK-47, get a lift to Kandahar and a bus to Kabul and be up there in a single day.

Semple threw his laptop into his briefcase and jumped into his office car. As his car honked its way through the crowded streets he thought about the man who was waiting for him�� a top Taliban commander. He could not but admire his courage. If anyone from his side found out about the talks, he could be hanged. A field worker for Semple had been wooing this man and had tracked him down deep in Taliban territory. After meeting him face to face, the field worker suggested the commander simply jump in a car to meet up with Naquib and Semple. And the commander had agreed.

Meeting Afghans and winning their trust involved rituals�� and a language that went beyond words. As he entered the guesthouse, Semple could see that Naquib had placed the commander on a couch, not on floor cushions. �OK, he is urbanized,� thought Semple, reading the clue.

The commander�� whose name Semple still keeps secret�� rose up and hugged the Irishman. There was a routine: arms round chest, pull left, pull right, pull left again, lean back and shake hands. The two men looked at each other and compared beards. His was a little longer than Semple�s but with no wavy edges, revealing that he trimmed it. �In local terms that meant he was a liberal!� explained Semple later.

His headgear gave away a little more. It was a simple grey-checked kefiya scarf, rather than the rolled-up 9 yards of black silk that hardliners seemed to find essential. He looked Semple straight in the eye through a pair of professorial spectacles without tints. �Confident!� thought Semple.

The commander got quickly to the point. It was about trust. A high-up Taliban official shared the commander�s view that the fighting would have no happy ending. He knew about Semple�s and Naquib�s reconciliation work. But to end the fighting in his area he needed to trust both foreign forces and the Afghan government. �Can I trust you? And can I trust them?� he asked.

Semple knew something of this man by reputation and the fighters he led, some of the fiercest and apparently intransigent Taliban groups that were in battle with NATO forces. And yet here he was, sharing with him a cup of tea from a silver-coloured teapot and picking at the sugared almonds and toffees. They jousted over who should pour the tea.

�You are a guest,� said the commander.

�No, you are a guest,� said Semple.

The commander told his story in a few words. That was a good sign. Experience told Semple �to be wary of those who had too much to say�. This man was a real veteran, one who had fought as a Mujahidin against the Communist regime in Afghanistan in the 1970s�� even before the Soviets had arrived. After the Soviets left, he went into business. And when the Taliban came he built cordial relations with them, but was never one of them.

The new government under President Karzai had also given him high expectations. He built a fine house in the local district centre. �And then his local rivals tricked the Americans into trashing and looting his house, supposedly looking for the enemy,� recalled Semple. After that the man headed for the mountains and joined the resistance. The war had taken hold and before long the government was driven from their area.

Semple quizzed the commander about current details of the fighting, going through the picture village by village. It gave Semple a way of checking if this man was who he said he was. He appeared relaxed�� tensing up only when he talked of civilian casualties. �I felt he was on the verge of tears,� he recalled.

Talking fluently in Pashtu, Farsi and Urdu, the commander voiced his view that any peace settlement would be hard. He did not like the war. It had been forced on him and his people. But the men he led were tough and committed and would carry on fighting �however long their houses were bombarded�.

�If I could really trust you and the government then it might be possible to find a way out of this,� he said, adding only that, while he could vouch for local Taliban fighters, he could not control the foreigners who joined the Taliban to fight their jihad. �They have their own reasons for what they do,� he said.

The more the commander talked, the more excited Semple was. It was clear this man was not only a serious player, but also serious about a path to peace. Plying him with questions and bubbling with enthusiasm, he abandoned all thought of taking notes on his laptop. Naquib, who had already done his part, said nothing throughout, ready as the silent umpire to give his verdict afterwards. Semple felt a buzz of adrenalin. �We really have a chance to do some good, perhaps to save dozens of lives,� he thought.

Semple asked the commander if he would stay the night. �We would be honoured. It is not good to travel back so late,� he said. But the commander knew his mind. He had to get back before he was missed. No one knew about his trip.

Semple took his permission to get up and leave. Clambering into his official car, he got out his laptop and rattled off an excited note as his driver, Waheed, pushed through the traffic. He was on his way to his next appointment with Dr Abdullah, the deputy head of the NDS and a small man in a big office of panelled walls. Semple had heard stories of the gadgets the walls concealed.

This afternoon, Abdullah was full of energy and enthused over what Semple was doing. They talked of what lay ahead. As Semple recorded in his computer that night, the spy chief�s view was that the main obstacles were �corrupt ministers� and provincial governors. Looking back, Semple would see those words as prescient.

Semple told Abdullah he was pushing ahead in Helmand province and would tell him if he needed help. He raised the question of backing from President Karzai. Abdullah said that Karzai was positive. �I suggested it might be useful for us both to discuss it with the president�� so I could say nice things about the NDS, and the NDS could say nice things about me!� recalled Semple. Abdullah described that as a �wonderful idea�.

The meeting with Karzai never happened, though. The commander that Semple had met that day had said pointedly he believed a negotiated peace was possible �if only we could trust the government�. Did he know something that Semple was ignoring?

There is a blank in the mind of Lance-Corporal Onur Caglar about all that happened in the instant of the explosion. All he remembered was seeing his captain, John McDermid, thrown upwards and consumed in a great fire.

After their patrol was split in half earlier, their mentor team consisted of just the two of them, along with six Afghan soldiers and an interpreter. They were on the outskirts of Sangin, heading back to their base after a patrol through the green zone. Caglar felt the hot wind of the blast press against his face and jolt him off balance. Then, as the smoke cleared, he instinctively jumped sideways into a sort of grass-covered miniature garden as bullets started to crack around him. They were at a road T-junction and beneath a set of electrical pylons. He looked up and saw wires tumbling down in a shower of sparks. All the Afghan soldiers were in front of the blast and in front of him, and he saw it was they who were firing backwards towards him in panic. He shouted, �Stop, stop,� and they lowered their weapons.

Caglar looked forward at where McDermid had been standing. He had vanished.

�When all the dust had settled,� he remembered, �all I saw was Captain McDermid�s leg, a big massive hole and then the interpreter lying there, and there was like bits of blood and stuff all up the wall.�

The interpreter was shouting for help, but Caglar shouted back: �No. I can�t help you at the moment. I just need to� I need to make sure there�s no other devices here.�

Out on another patrol in the green zone, Mike Scott, the company sergeant-major for the 2 Yorks in Sangin, heard and saw the blast, and knew it was an improvised explosive device, an IED, but like others he could not quite pinpoint the location. He remembered turning to Colour Sergeant Mark Syron and saying, �Fuck, I hope that�s not a command one,� meaning a command-wire detonated explosive�� the worst type because it was hard to detect.

His fears turned out to be well founded. The explosion detonated a concealed 105 mm artillery shell. It had been �daisy-chained� to connect to two pairs of mortar shells. But, luckily for the rest of the patrol, these had not gone off

McDermid had set off that morning with a team of seven British soldiers plus the Afghans. But they had been hearing something that worried them as they listened in on the Taliban�s radio network.

�Usually they�ll say they�re watching and they�re going to shoot you with their big guns and take no mercy and all that shit,� said Caglar later. �But it�s normally just probably to wind you up. But this time they were saying exactly where we were.� The Taliban were giving names of buildings or clumps of trees they were walking by, and the soldiers turned to each other and said, �Actually, yes, we are right there.�

McDermid decided to split the patrol in half. It was an old anti-ambush tactic from Northern Ireland called �satellite-ing�. An enemy will only see one half of the patrol at any one time. And so they will be afraid to attack because they cannot tell if their back is covered. The tactic seemed to work. The Taliban radio went silent.

Unfortunately between McDermid and Caglar, only McDermid had a radio. Now both he and his radio had disappeared. And Caglar had no idea where his other comrades were.

Caglar was trying to work out what to do. He saw the Afghans start to run around in panic. He shouted, �Stop! There might be more bombs.� The trouble was the interpreter was in no fit state to help to communicate.

He ran forward to try to treat him. �He had a big chunk missing out of his thumb,� said Caglar. �There was blood all over his hand. All his face was bloody, his hair was all matty and dusty and had blood all over it. It was pretty much as if from his waist upwards he�d just been sprayed with shrapnel. There was just little holes all over. His body armour had� it was just pierced. And he had one big hole in like� just above his collar bone there. In his neck.� Caglar tried to give him morphine. But he realized his own hands were shaking. He got an Afghan soldier to put the needle in and to put on some bandages.

Then a car pulled up about 15 yards from the bomb crater. Caglar shouted, �Stop,� and then bundled the wounded interpreter into the back. He shouted to the driver, �DC!� (�DC� was the district centre, the main British base). He hoped he would understand and take him back for evacuation. That was all he could think of doing at that moment.

Turning round, he started looking for McDermid. He noticed part of his body armour. �It was just like sat there as if someone had just put it there.� And then he saw the top part of his rifle, with the rest torn off. �It was leaning against the wall. Just like someone had just placed it there.�

In his heart, he knew that, with a leg missing, he must be dead. But he shouted anyway.

�And I tried shouting for him, thinking, you know, that he might� he might still be alive. I knew� when it first happened I knew that he was dead because from the blast where it was he was directly above it when it went off. But I shouted for him anyway. Just in the hope that he might shout back. But I didn�t get any reply.�

Caglar needed to tell someone what had happened. They needed to find McDermid, and he needed to warn others that there could be secondary devices. And he needed to get the Afghan soldiers safely back to base.

But at that moment he was completely alone�� out of touch with his own army and alongside soldiers who hardly understood a word he said.

�Anyone got a mobile phone? Mobile phone?� he shouted.

�Uh.�

�Right. We need to go back to camp.�

�Uh.�

�Tangiers [the men�s patrol base].�

�Uh.�

�Right. We�ve got to go!�

�Uh.�

Nothing seemed to register. Caglar realized he needed to go off alone. He got the ANA on to a piece of grass and set up for all-round defence. Then he picked up his machine gun, slung it across his front and started to �peg it�.

At first he skirted along the walls of the alleyways, trying his best to think of anywhere another bomb might be laid. All he could think of in his head was: �Boom! Boom! Boom!� Then he was into Sangin�s main bazaar, and it was packed with men. It was the middle of the day. Everyone turned and stared at the spectacle of a lone British soldier running through their midst. Most days, the market was friendly territory. But Caglar knew he was vulnerable. In his mind, anyone was now a potential Taliban spy or a kidnapper. He raised his pistol as he ran along, firing shots in the air to clear a path.

�The run felt like for ever! I was totally and utterly blowing out my arse, but I was still running. I don�t know how I was still running. I think it was just so much adrenalin pumping through.�

Reaching the Tangiers base, Caglar flung his helmet on the floor and found Sergeant Mattie Lynn in bed. He�d heard the explosion, but then you heard explosions all the time.

�Mattie! Mattie!�

�What? What?�

�Fuck! The boss is dead!�

They found there wasn�t even a spare radio at the base. All of them were out with patrols. Together, they jumped in a WMIK and sped down the road to the bomb site. They found the rest of the soldiers from the patrol still hadn�t turned up, so they drove on to the main Royal Marines compound at the district centre. Caglar was glad to find the interpreter had made it back. Already by now, a quick reaction force of marines had been sent out, although they hadn�t located the blast site. Caglar could now guide them in.

That night, Caglar thought back over his time knowing McDermid. A forty-three-year-old from Glasgow, McDermid was a volunteer for the front line. After twenty-five years in the army, he had risen through the ranks from private soldier to officer, ending up with a staff position at the Sandhurst military academy. But he had volunteered for a tour in Afghanistan. He had told Caglar that morning: �I am in a good mood this morning, because I woke up and listened to the Proclaimers.�

For the soldiers that worked in Sangin, now, it was the danger of these IEDs that hung heavy over their patrols. The British and Afghans had bases all over the town. They dominated this urban centre. But the Taliban guerrillas in their midst had not departed, merely gone underground. Their tactics were now more subtle and more unnerving.

For Scott, as he tried to motivate his soldiers after McDermid�s death, he realized the blast did serve at least one thing positive. �It might sound a bit callous, but it did give some fucking people a big wake-up call. Until that point, it was becoming a bit more like war tourism than actually doing a job, and that really did focus people�s attention.� He remembered briefing young soldiers who asked, �What can we do to stop these command wires?� And all he could say was, �Fellas, fucking common sense.� There was no magic gadget to stop them.

But there was ultimately one weapon that could fight these hidden killers: the support of the local people. However ingeniously a bomb might be hidden, it was rarely possible to hide it from the local population. If they came on side and started informing, then the bombs could be found and disarmed quickly. That gave Scott both the chills and a glimmer of hope. While the bombs continued, it meant they had plenty of enemies out there. But it also showed that, if they got things right with the people, there was a way to win in this place.

�Why all this delay? Why have we had so many meetings on this?� said the president at the War Cabinet. He was getting impatient and unpredictable.

Karzai had been speaking constantly to Mullah Salaam, as well as to the former Helmand governor and nemesis of the British, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada. He had spoken too with the Musa Qala elder who had negotiated the truce agreement the previous year that secured the British pull-out. The latter was an uncle of the main Taliban leader in Musa Qala, Mullah Torjan. But all these leaders of the Alizai tribe were right behind an action to seize the town back for the Afghan government. This was a �historic opportunity�, said the president. For the first time that anyone could remember, certainly since the war with Russia, the subtribes of the Alizai were coming together.

The NATO commander was listening. It was time, he thought, to strike a clear deal of his own. Until now, Karzai had been talking endlessly about action but had been endlessly vague about what exactly he wanted.

�So, Mr President, you want me to do this thing?�

Karzai nodded.

�I will be happy to set the right conditions�� but I want Afghans to go into the district centre.�

General McNeill said the plan was for NATO forces to surround the town, to bear down with pressure on all sides. That would pave the way for an Afghan force to push through the town itself.

�Yes. We want it like that,� said Karzai.

But McNeill said he wanted Karzai�s agreement on two more things. Firstly, Afghans had to hold the place afterwards. He did not want another beleaguered British force left to defend itself. Secondly, he wanted �better governance� down in Helmand. It was a strong and clear hint that Karzai should sack Governor Wafa.

�Go ahead, then,� said Karzai. But no civilians should be killed, he said.

�It won�t be my aim, Mr President, but I can�t make that guarantee. We can do this thing, but stuff will get broken,� said the general. �And we need some time here, you know.� It would take until December to assemble his forces.

Karzai looked unhappy at that.

Bismullah Khan, the Afghan army chief of staff, intervened. Speaking in Dari, he said Afghan forces were not only ready to go up and reinforce Salaam but could quite easily take Musa Qala on their own.

That just angered McNeill. Five times since he had taken command in Afghanistan, Karzai had rejected the general�s suggestion of an operation to recapture the town. Now, after finally giving the green light, the Afghans wanted it done yesterday. There was also delusional thinking going on here, thought McNeill. A �tribal alliance� might make the people welcome the Taliban�s removal. That was crucial to the future. But it was not going to drive a bunch of jihadi fighters and narco barons out of town. Nor would the toothless Mullah Salaam help. And nor could the Afghan army do it on their own. They were becoming better trained and more effective. But, if they attacked alone, they would be slaughtered.

None of this was said to Karzai, however. In a gathering like this, no one was going to shatter his pride. In fact, as one senior westerner present at such meetings wondered aloud to me, �Was the president in his palace ever getting the raw truth?�

McNeill concealed his feelings. Backed by the US ambassador, the general said diplomatically that it would simply be better to wait for all forces to be in place. �Otherwise the Taliban will simply escape.�

Karzai was still not satisfied. What exactly was the plan to go and rescue Mullah Salaam if his compound was assaulted by the Taliban? It would be the �worst possible outcome� to pull out Salaam in ignominious defeat, with his tail between his legs.

The Afghan defence minister suggested a separate plan to protect Salaam. That calmed Karzai.

For all the president�s frayed nerves, an agreement was finally in place. Musa Qala would be taken by force. NATO troops would surround the town, but the decisive part of the operation, the seizure of the town itself, was to be done, it was agreed, by the Afghan army.

The meeting that approved an �Afghan-led� military action had taken place with the British ambassador still away on leave. Cowper-Coles, who had been the voice of caution, was to get a shock when he returned.

McNeill swung rapidly into action. That night he summoned Brigadier Mackay up to Kabul to brief him the following day on how this operation could work. Mackay informed London: �COMISAF has directed that the conditions have been met to launch decisive operations against Musa Qala.�

They knew they were being watched everywhere. The Taliban had their �dickers��� as the British called the spotters�� on motorbikes or trucks or dug in somewhere. They were shadowing the British forces out in the desert and calling down mortars and rockets to attack their positions.

To the east and west of Musa Qala, the two mobile operating groups, the eastern commanded by Major Chris Bell and his Warrior company and the western by Major Tony Phillips� Brigade Reconnaissance Force, were now in daily battle with the Taliban as they probed the town�s outer defences. Raids by US special force Green Berets were also intensifying�� targeting Taliban strongholds in villages to the south of the town.

Out to the west, Phillips recalled �we were the only show in town� for the Taliban. All day long, listening to the Taliban�s radio network, his men heard their enemy preparing to attack. �We could hear them broadcasting a running commentary of what we were doing. And we would later find out why: the enemy had observation points in the high ground.�

As they manoeuvred in the desert, the BRF�s contact with local Afghans was sporadic, and those they met were cautious. One bedouin shepherd, wandering alone in a pair of trainers, said it all when he spoke to Captain Duncan Campbell, one of the officers, and threw up his arms in despair. �You are always coming here to ask about the Taliban. The Taliban come and ask about the British. Me, I�m still looking for my sheep!

Getting supplied was everything on this desert patrol. Most of it came by parachute�� palettes pushed out of a Hercules plane on to a drop zone they marked at night. Sometimes it was a Chinook chopper. That was the best because it brought the mail (too risky to drop by air) and maybe some cigarettes. They would feast for a while on parcels from their families. And then it was back to the boil-in-the-bag field rations. For a while, they ate special halal Muslim food. They had ordered some for the interpreters but then got three months� supply for everyone. And no British rations.

Life developed a pattern out here. In the day they approached the Taliban-held villages, always targeting a new place and always by a new route. And at night they retreated back to their harbour, set up camp and cooked their rations. For the moment, even as they fought the Taliban on a daily basis, the BRF seemed to be blessed. They struck no mines and they took no injuries. They remembered how, after the suicide strike, the locals in Gereshk called them the �warriors protected by God�.

Their life had a certain romance. They looked like the SAS with their long beards and dusty smocks and shemagh headdresses. But most just found it plain hard, and sometimes boring.

�I enjoyed it, to be honest with you,� recalled Simon Annan, a thirty-year-old sniper. �But you have the same conversations with everybody. It�s just Groundhog Day. It�s almost like you want something to happen because it gives you something else to talk about. There were periods we sat for two or three days doing nothing, prepping for something. You�ve just got to try and motivate yourself.

Much of the fighting involved exchanges of fire at long distance. But some of it was at close quarters. One of the BRF, acting sergeant John �Matty� Cockburn, would later be awarded a Military Cross, an award for gallantry, for leading a six-man team that charged 200 yards to assault a Taliban trench and captured a prisoner after coming under fire from heavy machine guns.

On the eastern side of Musa Qala, Chris Bell�s Warrior company of the Scots Guards, now code-named on the Taliban radio as the �Desert Devils�, kept up a similar routine of camping in hidden positions�� often in old Russian trenches�� and then moving to the edge of Musa Qala to engage in daily battle.

�It�s a wearing thing to do for week after week after week,� said Bell. �We were disrupting the enemy but we didn�t know what effect we were having. We certainly knew that we could drive out to any village in the area and cause absolute chaos�� women and children running out, mopeds appearing on hills, the guys in black, who were clearly Taliban, directing. We really didn�t know to what degree we were disrupting the enemy. We just knew that we were attracting fire almost every day.�

The squadron of King�s Royal Hussars in their six-wheeled Mastiff armoured vehicles were also in action. Deployed primarily to protect the logistics convoy that kept the Warriors going, they played a game of cat and mouse, moving and hiding the soft-skinned logistics trucks away from Taliban spotters. They also began to launch their own independent attacks against the Taliban defences. The Mastiff was the one vehicle the British had that was practically mine-proof. The squadron was to hit fourteen IEDs and mines�� and no one suffered a serious injury in one.

For all their attempts to harass the British troops with mines or mortars, the Taliban were powerless to prevent the build-up of a large armoured encirclement, a sort of ring of fire around Musa Qala. By constantly probing the Taliban�s defences, they steadily turned up the psychological heat on the Taliban forces in the town. It was what Brigadier Mackay called an �influence operation�.

Not all activity was productive. Both the KRH and Scots Guards spent days on standby supposedly in readiness to help arrange a secret meeting, instigated by some other agency, between Mullah Salaam and a VIP. They were never told who that was supposed to be, whether it was President Karzai himself or just their brigade commander. �All we knew of it,� said Bell, was that �there were people who wanted to speak to Mullah Salami, for whom we were doing all this running around. Every morning it would be �It�s on,� and then �It�s definitely off.� That was our life for about a week, and it never happened. And we were doing a lot of reassurance for him, hanging around his village constantly.�

In the weeks that followed, Bell�s Warriors were withdrawn to prepare for the attack on Musa Qala itself. They were replaced out in the desert around Mullah Salaam�s compound by a squadron of light tanks, the C Squadron of the Household Cavalry Regiment. The handover took place about as far north as British conventional forces had ever reached in Helmand. Circling round through the desert to a point 16 miles north of Musa Qala, the two armoured forces crossed tracks in the stunning scenery of what became called the Grand Canyon Crossing.

Phillips� BRF had scouted the route and remained in position along it. As the vehicles moved across, the Taliban fired over volley after volley of mortars. The soldiers in armoured vehicles could just jump inside and shut their hatches. The BRF, mostly in their open-topped Land Rovers, could only crouch on the ground.

At brigade headquarters, Major Nick Haston, the deputy chief of staff, was staring at a line of figures on a spreadsheet�� and it did not add up. The shortage and state of repair of military equipment in Helmand was already bad, but, with a huge operation now on the cards, it was not clear how the troops would get what they needed.

Haston already had some strong feelings on the subject. In public, politicians and generals were claiming the troops were happy with the equipment they had. But he pointed to a yawning gap between the official military estimates of what was needed for this war and the actual equipment in a working state in Helmand.

A few days before, Brigadier Mackay had signed a forthright �ground truth� memo back to London that warned of a �grave� situation. The facts at the time were stark. According to brigade staff:

This was not to mention simple design flaws in some British vehicles that, according to some military engineers, made their drivers and front-seat commanders (typically officers or NCOs) uniquely vulnerable to being killed by mine strikes. The continued use of such designs was �barking mad�, thought Haston. In his memo, Mackay was said to have warned of a �grave crisis� with too much equipment that was �tired, limited, and failing regularly�.

Time and again, Haston recalled, he and his team found ways to �manage�, but that meant pieces of equipment�� from night-vision goggles to machine guns to Land Rovers�� were constantly shuffled from one unit to another. Brigade staff, who should have been thinking of the bigger picture, spent time following the fate of an individual set of goggles or even a packet of nuts and bolts.

Held back by a bureaucracy in the UK that was not on a war footing, Haston said he had to bend the rules�� buying spares with a credit card on the Internet, for example. And after being kept waiting for weeks for the springs for the Mastiff squadron�s vehicles, it took their commander, Major Richard Slack, to pick up a satellite phone from the desert and phone a factory in Coventry to discover and prove that the springs could be easily made in Britain.

As the Musa Qala operation built up, Haston was having to �beg, borrow and steal� Land Rovers for Helmand from British units based in Kandahar. He would tell them the vehicles he took would be back in a week. �I kept lying to them for three months! It�s awful but we did� But that sort of thing creates tension, mistrust��

The complaints to higher command went down badly, Haston recalled, particularly Mackay�s tersely worded memo. There seemed to be a feeling that 52 Brigade, with its humble origins, was somehow naive�� as if real warriors in a real war just managed with what they had. All experienced soldiers, the thinking went, had to tailor their suit to fit their cloth. �I think they thought he [Mackay] was slightly naive to write it,� recalled Haston, �when he knew damn fine what he was doing. He did not want this issue smothered.�

When he returned from Afghanistan, Haston was to quit the army in disgust. �I�ve resigned for a reason�� and some of that reason is that I think there are some mediocre, high-level managers who are unwilling to admit and face up to some of the issues we�ve got� I would say that some of the people that procure [equipment] in our Ministry of Defence haven�t a clue.�

It was early in the morning when a truck pulled up to the gates of the base. On sentry duty, the Gurkhas of B Company, 1 Royal Gurkha Rifles, could see the bodies of several wounded Afghans slumped in the back. The injured were angry. They claimed that foreign and Afghan soldiers had raided their village by helicopter. At least eighteen people, including children, were dead. Their homes�� which the Afghans later identified as the village of Toube�� were about twenty minutes� drive to the south, on the Taliban side of the front line. The Gurkhas were surprised. They knew of no operations which had been underway that night. Either the incident was invented or this was the result of something secret, most likely the work of special forces.

There were two hospitals in the area of Garmsir. One was the medical centre at the Delhi base. The other was run by the Taliban. Why had they chosen the British base? the Gurkhas wondered. Some of the injured were men of fighting age. They could be Taliban. Their blast and gunshot injuries suggested a fire fight. But, if they were Taliban, why had they come here?

The doctor on duty was perplexed by some of their injuries. They needed more specialist care. �It�s pretty inconclusive either way,� he told the Gurkhas. He decided to send the injured onwards to the civilian hospital in Lashkar Gah.

No public announcement was made of the incident that day. No statement was released to the press. But the incident would not be forgotten.

More than three weeks later, a report appeared on the Internet from an international news agency, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). The agency, which works across conflict zones, had received British funding to train journalists in Helmand in the basics of news reporting. Now these same local journalists had their scoop. The headline read: �Foreign Troops Accused in Helmand Raid Massacre�. The IWPR reported the story of a young baker called Abdul Manaan, who was still lying in Lashkar Gah�s emergency hospital with his throat bandaged. He claimed to have survived despite his throat being cut by a group of soldiers�� Afghan and foreign�� that arrived by helicopter on 18 November. The IWPR reported:

As Abdul Manaan lay under the tarpaulin, holding his hand to his neck wound, he heard the soldiers moving around the house and children screaming. When the soldiers left after about half an hour, he said, �I got up and went to my brother. He was cold.� He found the women and children alive in another room, together with some who had come from other houses. �Everyone was screaming and crying,� he said.

In the morning, Abdul Manaan was taken to hospital in Lashkar Gah. �I survived, but my brothers are dead,� he said. �What shall I do now?�

For months now the IWPR had documented frequent cases of civilians dying in NATO bombing raids. Often the coalition claimed that Taliban had been fighting from or hiding in the compounds of ordinary civilians. Their deaths were accidental. But this raid appeared different and far more brutal. The report continued:

Who was really responsible for the raid? And what was the truth of the events that night?

After the injured had left, a phone call came in from a secret unit, asking for the identity of the injured they had treated. Major Mark Milford, the B Company commander, was less than impressed. Why had they not bothered to inform him of the raid? Technically, the target was outside the area he controlled. But only just. And, as night follows day, it was his company of Gurkhas that would be left picking up the pieces�� and dealing with any local anger that followed. For the Afghans, the forces involved were simply �foreign troops� backed by local soldiers. American or British, special forces or conventional troops. They could not tell them apart.

�My complaint was that I wasn�t told about it,� recalled Milford. �You know, we had no details on it. So, we ended up, you know, trying to photograph people, trying to treat them at the same time, trying to figure out what had gone on but not knowing what had happened.

�We treated the people and then released them. And then, all of a sudden, they were saying to us, �Right, what about Omar whatever his name was? Was he in the truck when it came?� Well, I had absolutely no idea. They hadn�t left a liaison officer or anything with us. They just hit the target.

Milford declined to identify the unit involved. But American sources in Kabul revealed its identity: a unit known only by a code-number, Task Force 373.[17] This was not only US special forces, but elite �tier 1� special forces, the US Navy Seals supported by Army Rangers. The job of 373 was to hunt and �take down� human beings: the top commanders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The mission that night was code-named Operation Black Carib, the sources said, and it had been successful: it had fatally wounded a Taliban commander, Sher Agha, who had mounted a series of attacks on the British in Garmsir since the beginning of November.

Lieutenant Colonel Brian Mennes, commander of Task Force 1 Fury, looked down on the floor of the tent and studied the British plan marked out on a huge map, and he was not best pleased. In fact, he was horrified. The forty-one-year-old led an elite force of paratroopers who had been fighting in Afghanistan for almost eleven months now. Much of it had been in Helmand. They had launched air assaults up in Kajaki and down in Sangin, and in the green zone north of Gereshk. And he was not going to let his men down now by agreeing to something foolish.

It was Thanksgiving�� three days earlier�� when his battalion had been driving south, and he had got the call to proceed to Lashkar Gah. His higher command said the Musa Qala op had the green light. It could happen within a week. And his soldiers would be in the teeth of it. Mennes did not know Brigadier Mackay and he did not know his views or reasons. But what he saw was a plan from Mackay to split his forces with two air assaults. And, as he put it mildly later, �I was adamantly against it.�

Task Force 1 Fury was the name used on deployment for one of America�s most famous airborne assault units, the 1st Battalion of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division�� also known as the �Red Devils� or simply the 1�508. They had dropped into Normandy on D-Day and fought in the Ardennes in the Second World War, and then fought later in Vietnam, Panama and, more recently, Iraq. Since January they had been in Afghanistan as the theatre reserve, effectively a strike force under the personal control of the NATO commander, General Dan McNeill.

Originally from Buffalo, New York, Brian Mennes, the 1�508 commander for the last year, was a veteran of US special forces. He had been one of the first to deploy on the ground in Afghanistan when the �war on terror� was launched after 9/11. Running missions against Al Qaeda targets, he had been based at the Rhino airfield in the desert of eastern Helmand. When he returned to Afghanistan in January 2007 as 1 Fury�s commander, he had expected to be there for a year. But now American soldiers were serving gruelling fifteen-month tours�� in combat zones where the action was relentless.

Ever since they had arrived in the country, his men had known that Musa Qala lay on the horizon. NATO had announced it was not a case of if but when. But, like so many things in the military, when the plans came together, they came in a hurry.

Mennes had misgivings before he even arrived at the British headquarters. His commanders, or �Higher� as he called them, had told him it was going to be simple: �You�re just gonna go out and support the Afghans. They�re going to do the heavy lifting.� He had seen the same talk of Afghan �heavy lifting� in a PowerPoint slide sent up by the British from Helmand. But, as he flew down, he had thought to himself: �There�s no way this Afghan force is going to take this town.� One of two things was going to happen, he thought. Either they would get into a fight, and the special forces guys would have to bring in �huge kinetic effects� just to get them in there, in other words heavy air and artillery strikes that brought the risk of killing civilians. Or it would just be a huge failure and embarrassment. The Afghans were �going to get stuffed and we�re gonna have to bail them out�. And trying to rescue a unit in contact was hard �because the enemy gets bolstered, and then you�re in a real bad way�.

Mennes had been worried about the timing too. He knew Karzai was pressing now for action fast. McNeill had even talked of action by 1 December. Just one week away. And if they left it longer�� after the moonlight began to fade�� then they would have to land by daylight. 1 Fury had done at least six helicopter assaults in Helmand since they had arrived. None of them were in daylight.

He had wanted more time for his men to get ready. For the last four months they had been based up in the north-east of the country, doing softer-edged counter-insurgency work. He told Higher: �I need to get my guys in physical shape.� They needed to train, do target practice and get rested before they did something big.

Arriving now at the British headquarters for an all-day �war game� for Musa Qala, he was worried he was coming late, when some basic assumptions, including some wrong ones, had already been made, he feared. The British wanted to put half his forces just south of Musa Qala in a blocking formation and another half that would assault the town. Not only would he be splitting his forces �in two near-simultaneous air assaults�, which was �not prudent�, recalled Mennes, but he also disliked the direction of the attack. NATO troops would be coming from the south and south-west�� just as the Soviets had attacked the town in 1983.

Of course, the British way of planning was different from the Americans, whose commanders imposed more top-down direction. And, from Mackay�s point of view in hindsight, what Mennes had seen as firm plans had only been options.

Mennes believed in working with the Brits. The way he saw it, he had done something unique, even historic, down in Helmand. Time and again, he had put his US troops under the direct command of British brigadiers for their operations. But he also had his bottom lines. As a US commander he was not going to do something that put his own forces at risk or guaranteed some debacle. Either his partners got that message gently, or he would have to draw a line in the sand.

Back in April when his men had led the recapture of Sangin, he had caused a look of surprise on the face of the then British brigade commander in Helmand, Jerry Thomas.

�Are you saying you�re subordinating yourself to me?� said Thomas

�Yes!�

�Are you allowed to do that?�

Everyone was always excited about those national caveats�� the rules set by each nation�s governments that limited what their forces could do.

�Absolutely, sir, I can do pretty much what I want.�

They had sat in Thomas� tent, war gaming for over twelve hours. �It was sort of like a World War Two thing, you know, Brits and myself around the table sorting out the strategy for Sangin.� Later, when the battle was almost won, the two men shared a Cohiba cigar in the bunker at Sangin district centre to celebrate.

Over the summer, he had put his men under British command again, this time under the brigadier who took over, John Lorimer. Under Lorimer�s orders his men had swept down the green zone south of Kajaki and down round Heyderabad.

But Mennes hadn�t really seen much sign of long-term thinking. �We ended up mowing the lawn all the time,� recalled Mennes when I met him later. Like everyone else, 1 Fury had gone and �cleared� Heyderabad. �Another high-risk air assault, found caches and killed a bunch of guys, but what for?� What was the �Big Team�, as he called top commanders, going to put in place to make the gains worthwhile, to win people over? �It�s not about killing everybody. Killing is just a piece of it, as well as political development and economic development, social development. We struggled with that for a whole year,� he said.

What not all appreciated was that the US army fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq was not the same army that had arrived here in 2001 or had invaded Iraq in 2003. There were still plenty of the old school. But most had learned some hard lessons fast. Chris Bell, the Warrior commander who had been to US staff college, recalled noticing the Americans were now, if anything, more attuned and more adapted to winning in counter-insurgency. �While the half-educated Brit recalled false lessons from a Malayan and Northern Ireland history he only half-understood, his American counterpart was asking, �What have I got wrong?� and �What do I need to do it right?� The British were well ahead in 2003�� but five years later the Ameicans were streets ahead and moving away.�

Now, in the planning room in Lashkar Gah, Mennes could see the old Brit suspicion of American war fighting rearing its head�� that he was going to land his troops all guns blazing, would leave behind a heap of dead civilians and would play by his own special American rules. That was the trouble with the British system of troop rotations every six months�� a system that many who cared about winning the war found ridiculous. Here he was again, dealing with his third brigadier and having to win his trust all over again.

He was not sure at first these British knew who they were dealing with. �I was sitting in a planning room with them, and they were talking about operations in and around Helmand and Sangin and I said, �I was there.� They didn�t really know or appreciate that. I said, �I know about this enemy and I think I know how he is going to fight this thing.��

In the end, the plan did become acceptable, said Mennes, but �it just took a while, a bit of team building�.

Mennes actually drew his own sketch map of how parts of the plan could look, and he handed it over to Mackay�s staff. The end result did not look too different.

Sherard Cowper-Coles was on the end of a secure phone, and he did not sound too happy. Three days earlier he had returned from England to find out that plans to attack Musa Qala were moving much faster than he had imagined.

�I was very surprised,� he told Andrew Mackay. �I thought the idea was that Musa Qala would have to come to us, not for us to go to Musa Qala.�

Uppermost in the ambassador�s thinking, it appeared, was the imminent visit of the prime minister, Gordon Brown. As things stood, the very climax of the operation would be on the day he arrived. Cowper-Coles could see already how this might play out. Brown was coming�� after months of preparation�� to put the final seal on a new Afghan strategy. And now there was this vast military operation in the works that could totally divert both the prime minister�s attention and that of all the media too. If Musa Qala was captured without a hitch, then Brown�s visit could be denounced back home as an act of political opportunism. People would say he had come to gain political capital from the courage of the soldiers. But then if it went badly�� if civilians were killed in great numbers, as happened too often�� then Cowper-Coles could just picture the scene: Brown standing next to Karzai on a podium in Kabul as Karzai denounced NATO for its callous actions. The press would have a field day when they saw the snub to Brown. And Gordon Brown�s speech to parliament to announce the new strategy, planned for when he returned from Kabul the following day, could be completely overshadowed.

Following his conversation with Mackay, Cowper-Coles expressed his fears in an email to London which managed to upset the Brigadier. He quoted Mackay, brigade staff recalled, as having �given me reassurances that� they will make sure it�s not overly kinetic while the PM is visiting.� The message had been copied back to the brigade via Permanent Joint Headquarters. Mackay thought it was disingenuous to have his private words quoted back by others, and inaccurately too. He could not imagine altering a military operation just because a politician was visiting. He told PJHQ the email was nonsense.

The British ambassador was not giving up. �The concept of this operation seems to have changed,� Cowper-Coles told General McNeill, after he sat down in the general�s office. From the initial idea of ISAF working to support Afghan forces and a �tribal uprising�, it was now becoming more and more a coalition-led attack. He repeated what he had told Mackay: that he was worried about political fallout from the Gordon Brown visit. He warned McNeill again: �It is vital there are no civilian casualties here.�

He was worried too about what plans existed in the long term, of how the Afghans could keep hold of Musa Qala. �There is not really a credible Afghan plan to hold this place,� he said. On that point both were agreed.

The two brigadiers strode into the tent, and the assembled officers�� almost 100 of them, Afghan, British and their allies�� stood up to attention. This was the formal delivery of orders, the �O-Group�.

What had begun as an operation to put pressure on the Taliban and protect a defecting commander, Mullah Salaam, had morphed first into an operation for the Afghan army to support a tribal uprising in Musa Qala and then finally into something much bigger, more �kinetic�. The scale was going to be huge, a manoeuvre of almost 5,000 combat troops: Brigadier Muhammad Mohaydin�s Afghan brigade of 2,500 men, plus a 600-strong battalion of American paratroopers (Task Force 1 Fury), more than 1,200 British troops including a battle group led by the Royal Marines, a battle group led by the Household Cavalry, a battle group of the 2 Yorks regiment, plus two A-teams of US special forces to join the Afghan brigade, and a screen of further special forces, American and British, to hit the Taliban�s key leadership. And all was to be backed by a huge armada of aerial strike power.

But one force was missing: after days of vacillation the Afghan government had declined to send its elite Commando kandak. The climax of the battle�� the central thrust against Musa Qala itself�� would largely be on the shoulders of Colonel Mennes and his paratroops. In theory, this whole operation was still to be led by the Afghans, who perhaps for the first time had full access to the secret planning of the mission. Brigadier Mohaydin spoke first at the orders and was consulted throughout, and he ripped up key parts of the plan. But talk of Afghan �leadership� of the forthcoming battle was a fiction. The primary role of the Afghan troops was not to win the battle but to influence the town�s population to believe that it was the Islamic national government who had returned to control the town, and not a force of foreigners. The use of the Afghan troops was also to influence the Afghan government. It had to feel Musa Qala was its victory�� and feel responsible for what happened next.

For all the firepower, this was going to be no conventional battle. It was too important. Victory in Musa Qala, Mackay told the audience, would be defined not just by driving the Taliban away, but by how it was taken and what happened afterwards. Musa Qala had to be captured with little damage. �It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,� a US major was quoted as saying about the assault on Ben Tre in Vietnam in 1968. No one seriously thought like that these days. But from the Israeli attack on Jenin in Palestine in 2002 and the US attack on Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004 there had been too many big-scale battles that had recaptured a town from a rebel force, but half destroyed it in the process. Musa Qala had to be won back long-term from the Taliban. That meant securing the support of the people of the town�� by doing the operation without killing them or destroying their homes. And as or more importantly, it meant a plan for the follow-up, �stabilization� phase, when Mohaydin�s Afghan troops, it was hoped, could genuinely take the lead.

Lastly, Musa Qala had to be a strategic victory, a blow to the morale and plans of the Taliban and a boost to the morale both of the Afghan nation and of the western nations whose men and women were fighting here. Heavy casualties�� whether of innocent civilian or NATO troops�� could all turn a tactical victory into a strategic defeat (just as the British prime minister was flying into the country).

The plan Mackay outlined to achieve that victory was not, then, a conventional one. The key emphasis�� as it was when Chris Bell�s Warriors first crossed into the desert on 3 November�� was �influence�.

To avoid the destruction of an urban battle, the Taliban had to be persuaded to flee the town, to realize their defeat was inevitable. Psychological pressure needed to be ramped up not only through the step-by-step escalation of actual combat power but also by spreading the fear of NATO strength by using the media, by using deception and ruse, and by using various discreet channels to tell key Taliban commanders it would be suicidal to join this battle. The message to send to the Taliban was the same as when this all started: �We Are Coming to Get You!�

For the soldiers listening, the pressure was intense�� above all, for the combat commanders who were actually going to run the battle. What they heard was not so much a detailed set of orders but more of a vision. There was a clear plan for the build-up to battle, a sense of what should happen afterwards, but, as one key British commander put it, �there was a big gap in the middle�, in other words, how to fight this thing.

After the formalities, a detailed discussion began that quickly became heated. Bell, who was watching, wondered how the Americans would react to this very British scene. �The Americans are very hierarchical. They�ve worked it all out. There is not much discussion�� and, if there is, it�s offline [in private]. But this was very much officers saying, �I don�t think that would work.��

As the debate developed, the Americans began pitching in too. The talk came down to the heart of Mackay�s vision: of preventing the destruction of the town. Mackay�� and his NATO superiors�� wanted to put a �no-go zone� around the town centre into which no heavy weapon or airstrike could be launched without higher approval. The Americans�� led by Colonel Mennes�� thought it a nonsense. If his troops were fired on from the district centre then they had the right of self-defence. No one was going to accuse his men of taking the issue of collateral damage lightly. But the enemy had to be struck where you found it.

�If I was being fired upon from inside Musa Qala, I can use anything and everything to hit that target,� said Major Guy Jones, the 1 Fury operations officer. �That�s not the same Rules of Engagement as the Brits have. So that was a huge friction point,� he recalled. �General Mackay said, �No, you have to gain approval for us to strike.� And Colonel Mennes� point was, �No I don�t if it is self-defence, if my guys are taking fire.��

Chris Bell, who was a friend of Jones from staff college, remembered watching a smartly dressed staff officer from Regional Command South, the higher headquarters in Kandahar. He was declaring�� again and again�� that his boss, the British Major General Jacko Page, would want to authorize each and every air strike on the centre. �He was standing there saying, �Well, I think my commander, General Page, will want to keep control of the centre of Musa Qala, and he will decide whether you can use certain types of weapons or not.� All the commanding officers were saying, �Well that�s a crazy idea,� particularly the American commander, who was saying, �I promise you, I�m not going to do this.� And the staff officer was saying, �No, no!��

Bell, who was sporting a full desert-grown beard, remembered looking at the officer dressed for headquarters. �He was there with his little lanyard on�� I remember looking at his lanyard thinking, �You idiot!��

As the discussion degenerated, Bell watched as each of the key combat commanders gradually sloped off and left the staff officer to his argument. �The whole thing sort of broke down,� he said. �They gathered in their own corner and began to work out how exactly this battle would be fought.�

Mennes finally ended up speaking to Brigadier Mohaydin. And that was where he finally worked out what the Afghans wanted to do.

�Hey, boss,� said Mennes as they shook hands. �They say they want me to go in there with you. What are you needing me to do?�

Mohaydin gave him a puzzled look.

�I can�t do this on my own. You go in and we�ll be partners.�

�I agree we need to be partners. I said we will get you in there. You come up and meet up with us and we will get you in there.�

It was clear, recalled Jones, that Mohaydin wanted the US troops to go much further than the plan on paper actually called for. Mohaydin, it was clear, had no desire or intention to do much fighting. No US troops nor even any NATO troops were supposed to enter the town. But Mohaydin had his own idea: �I�m not going into town. At night, you all clear it, and make sure it�s good, and I�ll go in, in the morning.

�OK, got it,� said Jones.

Mennes for now wasn�t spelling out where his men were going. But he told Mohaydin, �Hey, when I think they�re gone, you just walk right through!

In the next few days, a cabal of commanding officers�� Mennes, Smyth-Osbourne, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Birrell, the commanding officer of 40 Commando and Battle Group North, and Lieutenant Colonel Simon Downey, the 2 Yorks commanding officer�� got together at Camp Bastion and worked out a plan for how they would coordinate the manoeuvre of all these thousands of troops. Mackay�s planning officer, Major Geoff Minton, was at those meetings. And then Mackay flew over and heard their conclusions�� and gave it his backing.

Throughout this process, the Afghans had a way of letting the NATO commanders know who ultimately mattered.

Meeting in Birrell�s tent, one of Mohaydin�s kandak commanders, Colonel Roussal, walked in to demand, �Who�s in charge here?

�I am,� said Birrell.

�Where�s the coffee and tea then?�

Sergeant Lee �Jonno� Johnson was going to Musa Qala. Of that he was certain. But was he going to come back alive? He was getting spooked.

He had come back from Kajaki now and had been due to go on R&R. He had been sitting at the Shorobak camp waiting to go when the news came in of the Musa Qala op. He�d had a night with his brother to mull things over. Lance-Corporal Don Johnson was just out of Sangin and was due up in Kajaki, so his brother gave him a brief.

Jonno took out a map of Kajaki and explained the lie of the land up there and who the main people were. �It was a really good handover,� remembered Don, �and then the next morning I flew to Kajaki to take his place, and that�s how it worked.� Before he left that night, Jonno talked about himself.

�I�ve got the option of going to Musa Qala rather than going on leave. So what do you think I should do?�

He always used to come like that and ask Don for advice. Don thought of his elder brother as a little immature, however good a soldier he was. As kids, thought Don, they had hardly known each other. It was being together in the army that had made them close. That night, for the first time in their lives, they said they loved each other.

�What do you think I should do?� said Jonno.

�It�s up to you. This is the biggest battle the Battalion has ever had, and if you missed out on it, you would kick yourself for ever and ever� If you do go and you get hurt, you�re probably going to regret it for the rest of your life� You can�t ask me what I think, I only tell you what you need to hear.�

Jonno said, �Yeah. Musa Qala. I need to take Musa Qala.�

�I know you do; you just wanted to ask me.�

�I�m going.�

�You need to be sure you want to go.�

�Yeah, I�m going.�

�OK.�

That was how the conversation ended. As he went to bed, Don thought Jonno was always going to go, no matter what he had said.

When Private Lawrence Fong and the rest of Jonno�s team up at Kajaki came back to camp, they were surprised to find Jonno still at Shorobak. He hadn�t gone on his R&R. They also learned he had started going to church. Someone said he hadn�t been to one for seventeen years. �Things change,� said Jonno.

Having Jonno in the camp was a pain for some people. He was getting a little concerned about his brother and seemed to hover round the Ops Room. Every thread of news about Kajaki was turned into a question about Don. One night he heard there had been a mine strike up in Kajaki, and his brother was involved. He shook a friend of his, Corporal Lee Brook, awake in his cot to tell him.

�What the fuck are you doing, Jonno?�

�Guess where our kid is now?�

�Kajaki.�

�Yeah, and guess what he�s doing.�

�I don�t know. What�s he doing, then?�

�He�s in a minefield. He�s poking for mines.�

�You�re fucking joking� but what are you doing up at four o�clock in the morning?�

�How did Jonno know to be up when it happened?� his brother Don wondered later. �How was he up? He shouldn�t have been out of bed at all. That�s just the way it was. How did he find out? He just knew. He knew.�

The mine strike at Kajaki was a horrible event�� and it made Don realize how unprepared he had really been for the reality of war.

It was in the middle of the night, and the 2 Yorks mentoring team and their ANA patrol were moving fast down a dry riverbed to meet an H-Hour for an operation with the Royal Marines. There was a section that was in front, sweeping for mines, and Don�s section was right behind. Don had stopped suddenly because a battery alarm in his day sack started to go off. �Right, go firm,� said Don, and he and his men got down on one knee. And then �for some strange, random reason� an interpreter behind him ran straight past, right in front of him and stepped on a mine about 3 yards away and got blown up.

�There was no explanation of why he was running past,� remembered Don. �He had no reason to be. He should have been with his section commander. He ran past and he just got blown up.�

Don knew it should have been his own head blown off. �If there was ever a time when I thought I do not fucking want to be here then that was it.� The incident only lasted about twenty minutes, and he gathered his thoughts again. �We tried to treat him but he�d lost his� his left hand had been completely blown off. Lost a few of his fingers, he had a big hole in his chin, I think his eye had popped out. It was a mess, his nose, you could see where he had been cauterized� It was a total mess. Me and the combat medic tried to save him, but I think we broke most of his ribs trying to give him CPR [resuscitate him], he was an absolute mess. We got him back to the helicopter landing site, but he couldn�t make it. If that had happened to me, I wouldn�t have wanted to make it.�

That whole thing made Don wonder about his luck. Back in Sangin he had walked right past a pressure-plate IED that had hit Sergeant Eddie Nicholls and he had been saved on that occasion too. And it also made him think that next time�� if and when he returned to Afghanistan�� he would tell all the young lads all the worst stories and show them the worst videos to prepare them for the horror.

�I think it hit a lot of the lads, situations like that. I was not ready to see someone with so many missing body parts and trying to save him. It will scar me. Daft little things like you need to put rubber gloves on. You need to put them on before you treat him. But my rubber gloves were in the bottom of my medic pouch and probably cost me like two minutes to get them out� it probably cost that lad two minutes. But you need to prepare the lads for that, because if that�s me or one of them on the floor, or one of their muckers, you need to save his life. You need to save his life!

Over in Kajaki, Don was reading electronic messages from Jonno like �I think I�ve made a really bad decision� or �I don�t think I should go� or �I�ve got a bad feeling�. But Don told him, �It will be all right, we will be laughing in a few months� time in the pub.�

On a rocky cliff above the southern Musa Qala wadi, the guardsmen of Chris Bell�s armoured Warrior company scanned the horizon. It was a piercing cold early morning, and under a blue sky the view was crystal clear and spectacular.

Bell�s men and vehicles were dug into old abandoned Russian trenches while apparently oblivious shepherds wandered the slopes around with sheep and goats. �The sense of history was palpable,� recalled Bell. There they were, staring up towards the snow-capped Hindu Kush, the latest �in a long line of foreign military expeditions into this corner of the world�.

In the direction of the rising sun the land dropped sharply down to the wide-open Musa Qala wadi, with its patchwork of green opium and corn fields, sprawling mud-brick compounds and ditches and trees on either side of a wide riverbed of grey pebbles, rocks, small rivulets and water pools. On the nearside bank was a small dirt road that snaked up 20 miles due north to Musa Qala itself. Across the riverbed, a line of cliffs marked the far side of the wadi and beyond that a stony and empty plateau.

Behind him to the west stretched the grey-and-brown plateau of the open desert, broken up by the incisions of the deep canyons that cut through it like the veins of a leaf. Beyond to the north-west lay the dark, brooding snow-capped peaks of what the soldiers called Crocodile Ridge: a barrier chain of mountains that separated the open desert from the hostile town of Now Zad.

It was in that direction Bell first noticed billowing clouds of dust that meant a convoy of vehicles was approaching. As they got closer, it got stranger and stranger. Driving along the hard-packed mud track under escort from some armoured cars were what appeared to be two large coaches, something like the old Greyhound buses that criss-cross America. Peering through his binoculars, he could see the curtains were drawn. For a moment he had an image in his head of a convoy of strike-breakers under escort.

Bell turned to his second-in-command, Captain Matthew Jamieson, and pointed out the �comedy coaches�. They laughed as they watched the buses creaking and bouncing through the rocks towards the wadi. �We�ll be called over to recover that lot before too long!� he said.

What Bell did not then know was he was witnessing a secret operation. The coaches were school buses but they contained not schoolchildren but a militia hired in Kabul. Their mission that day was to provide a guard force for Mullah Salaam, the rebel Taliban chief who was claiming he was switching sides to the Afghan government and would help liberate Musa Qala with his dozens of loyal fighters. Quite why he needed such protection, when he boasted of his own militia, was an open question.

Something about those bedraggled buses had to make everyone who saw them grin. Here was Britain�s biggest operation in Afghanistan. Everyone was tuned up for high drama, blood and bravery. Yet in its first moments there was already that essential element of high comedy.

The operation to retake Musa Qala had begun at dawn and it had begun the way that Royal Marines like it: with an amphibious assault. After marshalling in the safety of the Sangin district centre, a column of tracked Viking armoured vehicles trundled down to the riverside and then plunged into the cold waters of the Helmand. In the front passenger seat of one of the Vikings was Stuart Birrell, commander of Battle Group North. With him was Major Dan Cheesman�s Bravo Company (who were leaving their base in Sangin in the care of a company of Gurkhas), as well as several trucks of ANA soldiers.

Emerging on the other side, Birrell�s forces turned north. His mission that day was to establish the southern block at the base of the Musa Qala wadi. It was partly the first phase of a deception plan to make the Taliban think the main attack would come from this direction. It was also to start boxing in the Taliban: preventing both reinforcement of Musa Qala from the south and suppressing any diversionary attack by the Taliban down towards Sangin and Gereshk.

The Taliban had known for days now that an offensive was about to start. They were bullish. �Our lines are so strong that the foreigners will never break them,� one commander told an Afghan reporter. �The foreigners say they are going to launch a major operation in Musa Qala. We are ready for that. In Musa Qala alone, we have 2,050 armed fighters. It will be very easy for us to resist the attack.�[18]

US special forces were already watching the town and trying to track the movement of the Taliban�s key leaders. Two days earlier the first blow had been struck. A bomb hit a compound in the town, and the US announced they had killed a senior commander responsible for the kidnap of an Italian journalist.

Birrell�s assault that day took the Taliban by surprise. Not far downriver from his crossing point was the village of Qaleh-e-Gaz, a Taliban stronghold that had never yet been �cleared�. It wouldn�t have been hard for the Taliban to muster forces to oppose the assault. Still, within a few hours, there were mortars and rockets dropping down on their new positions across the river.

Birrell�s forces pushed north from the crossing point, taking the high ground to the east and west at the entrance to the Musa Qala wadi. He was joined by his Delta Company as well as Chris Bell�s Warrior company, both of which had hooked through the desert to reach the block from Camp Bastion.

Next to arrive near the block that day was a second battle group led by the commanding officer of the Household Cavalry Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Smyth-Osbourne, who was known to most simply as �Colonel Ed� or CO HCR. Startlingly tall, charismatic and self-effacing, and with a penchant for quoting the words of Rudyard Kipling, he was a man who seemed to find Helmand one magnificent adventure. �He�s so English� he makes my coffee turn to tea,� said one American of him. His enthusiasm was so infectious and his comic irony so disarming that men who had been reprimanded by him were said to walk away feeling grateful. But he also had a steely side. When required, he could be ruthless, not least with his own superior officers.

Chris Bell was sitting in the back of his Warrior that morning, drinking a brew with his sergeant-major. They heard a little knock on the door. They opened it. There, stood in the middle of the desert, was CO HCR drinking a mug of tea�� and wearing a knee-length camel duffel coat. The coat reminded Bell of pictures of David Stirling, the founder of the SAS. �Morning, fellas, what�s going on?� asked the colonel.

Under his command, Colonel Ed would have his own C squadron of the HCR, driving their �antiques road show� of light reconnaissance tanks, the squadron of armoured Mastiffs of the King�s Royal Hussars, a unit of the Coldstream Guards reconnaissance force, Bell�s Warriors and a small company from the Afghan army.

The convoy was stationary and waiting. Some people turned off their engines. The cigarettes and biscuits were passed round, and water bottles opened. Moving through the desert was like this. You powered over the sand or gravel at top speed. And then you came to a VP, a vulnerable point, and it was a delay of minutes, or hours, while you waited for a route to be cleared.

A crossing through a steep-sided wadi was where the danger lay. You wouldn�t place a mine in open ground where there were a million routes to choose. You put them where your enemy was channelled�� where the terrain forced him to take a narrow path. There were few easy ways across. Often your only route down was where a small tributary valley (known as a re-entrant) cut a gentler slope.

Major Tony Phillips, the BRF commander, was escorting a group of vehicles from the Royal Artillery that had come up from Camp Bastion. They were heading north with a pair of 105 mm field guns to set up a position in range of Now Zad and Musa Qala. With them were some large trucks that carried the artillery�s ammunition and supplies. That ruled out some of the crazier routes that the BRF�s vehicles could usually power up.

About 400 yards beyond where the main convoy was halted, Captain Duncan Campbell�s A Troop was scouting the route and had sent Sergeant Daniel Wagstaff with two WMIK Land Rovers to go and clear ahead. This wadi wasn�t an area marked on their maps of potential minefields. But then their mine map was only based on limited intelligence. It wasn�t that precise.

Each WMIK had three men on board: a vehicle commander, a driver, and a gunner stood up on the .50 cal in the back. Lance Bombardier Ian Wylie, known as �Swede�, was the driver of the second WMIK. His commander was Lance-Sergeant Glynn Bellman, inevitably called �Dinger�. Their top-gunner was a twenty-one-year-old Territorial Army soldier named Trooper Jack Sadler, who had joined the BRF a few months previously.

The BRF planned to cross this wadi the same way they had gone the day before. But when Wagstaff looked down, he realized it would be too steep for the trucks. The nimble Land Rovers drove along the contours and found a better route. Then they followed it to the bottom of the wadi and up the other side, checking for mines and potential ambush sites.

Everything looked good, and Sergeant Wagstaff headed back towards the convoy to lead it through. To make things quicker, he used a short-cut up the route they had planned to take earlier, the steep one. They went up one at a time. The key to getting up such a slope was to gun forwards as fast as you could. Wagstaff powered up the slope, over a steep lip and disappeared over the top. Wylie pushed his accelerator pedal down, revved the engine and followed. He remembered reaching the lip. That was when the rest of the convoy heard an almighty bang and looked over to see a cloud of dirty smoke billowing up.

The chatter on the BRF�s radio net was always incessant. A report from here. A question from there. But now silence, an absolute, terrible silence. Just that ominous black-grey plume of smoke rising upwards and a sickening feeling. �I waited a moment for somebody to actually confirm the situation,� recalled Phillips, �but nothing came through, nobody seemed to want to utter the words and admit we had fallen victim.� Seconds ticked by. Then Phillips pressed the radio switch and shattered the silence: �Hello Maverick Zero. This is Hercules Zero Alpha. Contact� Mine strike!�

Wylie would not later remember the explosion. �I was going pretty fast and I thought I�d lost control of the vehicle. I remember Dinger shouting out �Swede!�� He must have blacked out for a second or two. The next thing he knew the vehicle had lifted off, spun round 180 degrees so it was facing downhill and turned on to its left side. Wylie opened his eyes, and he was still inside and staring at the dirt inches away. The vehicle was on fire.

Wylie got himself out and checked himself. He was bleeding from his head, but otherwise he was all in one piece. Then he found Dinger, who was in a lot of pain. Bullets starting to zing about. �We�re under attack!� he thought. Wylie dragged Dinger behind a rock. Dinger asked for morphine, but Wylie knew Dinger was not about to die. He told him to fix himself. He knew he had to find Jack Sadler. He couldn�t see him anywhere.

He realized the bullets were coming from the burning vehicle, detonated by the heat.

Sergeant-Major Anthony Richards�� the senior sergeant of A Troop�� ran to the scene.

�What�s happened? Where is everyone?� he shouted. At first he thought it was Wagstaff�s vehicle that had blown up. He couldn�t see Lance-Corporal Simon Cooper. �Where�s Coops?� he said.

He heard Cooper reply. �No, no, it�s not me. I�m here. It�s Jack.�

�Where is he?� said Richards.

Cooper said, �I don�t know. I just saw him get blown up in the air and went over� you know� the vehicle.�

The ground around the vehicle was hard, sharp rock. It was hard to see how anyone could have hid a mine or booby-trapped bomb in there. Campbell and Richards started searching around for Jack Sadler, walking round the burning vehicle and searching in the rocks. The medic, Pete Langhelt, started treating the casualties who�d been found.

Richards decided to climb up what amounted to a 6-foot cliff to get a better sight. And as he got over the brow, he saw Sadler lying on the ground with his body armour in tatters and blown to one side and his helmet nowhere to be seen. It was clear he was in a bad way, and Richards shouted to Campbell, �He�s here. I found him.� Campbell worked his way round so he could see Richards, who shouted to him, �Get a medic!

Sadler was still breathing, weakly, but he was unconscious and so could not feel any pain. His mouth was full of blood, and it was clear he�d suffered traumatic injuries.

By now the wrecked WMIK was burning with an intense flame. More and more half-inch (.50 calibre) bullet rounds were cooking off in the heat, and also phosphorus grenades that spewed molten white-hot metal. Richards lay down next to Sadler and used himself as a shield between Sadler and the vehicle. He put a plate of body armour next to Sadler�s head. He wanted desperately to move him but could see it wouldn�t be easy. He talked to Sadler, trying to get a response and trying at the same time to keep his airways clear.

The explosions were getting louder. It was hard to tell if it was all coming from the vehicle or if by now they were under some sort of attack. Richards remembered: �It was just loud, very loud. The whole vehicle was on fire, and there were parts of the vehicle like suspension springs and weapon systems blown everywhere. And the force of the explosion was enough to set everything off; so it felt like, within seconds, all the ammunition was cooking off. It was just whizzing everywhere. So, you�ve got all the rat-a-tat. You�ve got the explosion of the Claymore mines on board and the phosphorus grenades, which are particularly nasty. Some of it hit my helmet.� Sadler�s clothing even caught fire from something.

It felt like hours that he was all alone waiting for help. It was probably less than two minutes. Even though he had a background in teaching first aid, there was just too much for Richards to deal with alone. Finally the young medic, Peter Langhelt, showed up after moving round from the other two injured. Richards saw Langhelt appear from behind a rock. With all the heat, smoke and flying bullets, he seemed reluctant at first to break cover. Richards shouted out and gestured with his arms. �You�ve got to come over. I can�t move him!� Langhelt looked as if he was gasping something, but Richards couldn�t hear. The medic�s eyes were like saucers.

Richards shouted again: �Pete, look, you�ve just got to fucking get over here, mate, because he�s going to die.�

Langhelt summoned up the courage and sprang into action. �He was absolutely fantastic,� Richards would say later. They realized they would have to find a way of moving Sadler out of range of the bullets and the heat from the burning WMIK. �It was the most intense heat that I ever felt because, when I lay down, it was just on my back. It felt as if the whole thing was just melting down.�

A big Fijian, Private Tamani Rabakewa, ran up with a stretcher, and they got Sadler out of the heat and down to the safety of a depression where the battery sergeant-major, Paul Hodgson, had found a place for a helicopter landing site.

Phillips had been busy meanwhile organizing the arrival of the medevac chopper. He had also called for air support after Taliban radio chatter suggested they were preparing to launch an attack on the now-static convoy. An RAF jet dived down and screamed over them in a show of force to the Taliban�� and a show of solidarity to the BRF.

It was probably another thirty minutes before the Chinook arrived. Langhelt and Richards fought on desperately to save Sadler. They tried to stop his bleeding and, after many attempts, managed to get a needle into his collapsing veins to start replacing fluids. They worked in the back of a Pinzgauer. Hodgson kept popping his head in, saying, �How�s he doing?�

The other two injured appeared OK. Bellman might have broken his back. He couldn�t move but was otherwise lucid. Wylie had a big cut to his face but it was mainly the shock that was affecting him. Both were conscious and able to talk.

The Chinook came in, and they put Sadler on. After it left the BRF still had to clear through what now appeared to be a freshly laid minefield. All they had was a couple of metal detectors that looked to the soldiers �like something out of the Second World War�. Phillips was just wondering who to order to go first when Cooper stepped forward and said, �I�ll do it.� He went ahead with others, and then the convoy just drove off.

The voice of the Commander of Joint Operations, Lieutenant General Nick Houghton, came booming out of the speakers in the meeting room like the Wizard of Oz.

Houghton, reporting by video-phone from the nuclear bunker at the Permanent Joint Headquarters in west London, was the link to the men on the ground. Today, he was briefing Whitehall on the operation to take Musa Qala. He warned the generals and civil servants present they should prepare for the worst. People could die in the coming days. The operation might just prove to be a walk in the park, or it could be much, much worse. Most likely, it would be somewhere in between, but �we have to brace ourselves for the extreme of the arc,� he said.

According to several sources who described it later, the meeting was tense, unusually so. Normally sensitive debates would be resolved outside such formal meetings. But today�s business was pressing, and troops were already pushing forward. Today, the Whitehall officials were as nervous as cats. The prime minister was due to be heading out to Iraq and then Afghanistan, and then to return home to announce his new strategy for the war. The coincidence of timing was extraordinary. And if Musa Qala went wrong�

Two months previously, Gordon Brown had been in Basra during the Conservative Party conference. When he announced that 1,000 troops would be home from Iraq by Christmas, he was roundly condemned for playing politics with the army. Coupled with the perception that he had just bottled out of calling an election, it had sent Brown�s popularity nose-diving in the polls.

Houghton, the sources remembered, revealed the H-Hour for the landing of airborne troops was just three days away, and the push into Musa Qala would fall on the day when the prime minister would arrive in Helmand.

�Does it have to be so soon? Can�t it all be delayed?� asked an official.

The Foreign Office explained that the ambassador, Cowper-Coles, shared their concerns about the timing. This operation could skewer the announcement of the new Afghan strategy. What if civilians died? Karzai would not hesitate to confront Gordon Brown, even in public.

�This whole thing could be �lose, lose� for the prime minister,� somebody warned. It risked undermining any proper attention being paid to his statement to parliament.

The military explained there were few options available. The cycle of the moon meant that light levels were fading for operations at night. The whole operation was also geared to Afghan politics and timed to exploit something as variable as moonlight�� the support of the Afghan president. Moreover, in practical terms, the helicopter assault might not have happened, but the operation was already under way.

Houghton was asked to check back with theatre and see if there could be any slippage, but few expected anything to change. Could Gordon Brown really phone up Karzai and call his visit off, saying, �Look, this operation is not looking good for me or my visit�?

And then someone raised the media coverage. Two journalists�� myself, with the Sunday Times, and Rupert Hamer of the Sunday Mirror�� were already embedded with the troops, it was revealed. (We had just arrived at Camp Bastion from Kandahar but were told it was uncertain when we would move forward due to �decisions� being made elsewhere.)

�Why have we got two embedded journalists? Who are they? Will they be objective?� asked a Cabinet Office official.

There was a suggestion it might be better not to let us go forward with the troops, but instead report from the desert base at Camp Bastion.

But Houghton was insistent that it was too late to intervene. The journalists were already there.

He pointed out that if you wanted poisonous coverage, or at least articles infected by a certain bitterness, there was nothing worse than holding journalists back. And at Camp Bastion all we would get to report on was the wounded or dead casualties coming back in helicopters.

At a new camp site in the desert, Major Tony Phillips zipped up his bivvy bag and, under the light of his red head torch, pulled out the diary that he wrote out each night. A little earlier, Phillips had gathered his men round and told them the news he had just received from Camp Bastion. Jack Sadler was dead. And, as he recounted the events of the day over two full A4 pages in the notebook, Phillips tried to recall his brief time of knowing Sadler.

How cruel was the death of someone so keen, so elated to be living his dream. Jack loved the military. He had just finished a war studies degree at King�s College, London, and talked about applying to Sandhurst to become an officer. He was a walking encyclopedia on military history and had entertained the lads with comparisons between the BRF�s desert manoeuvres and General Montgomery�s tactics in the Western Desert in the Second World War.

But something was missing from the BRF now, Phillips realized, and it wasn�t just Jack Sadler. They had had their suicide bomb in Gereshk and all had survived. They had been driving in these unarmoured WMIKs all over the mine-strewn desert at top speed and had never been struck. They did that with confidence because, somehow, they could tell themselves it wouldn�t happen to them. �It was like we were invincible,� Wylie, the driver in Sadler�s vehicle, would recall. But now that bubble was burst. Every bump in the track was a potential explosive. Maybe it was just because they were so awfully tired after all those days of sleeping rough. But fear had crept into the BRF, and Phillips knew he would have to dig deep and fight it hard.

As a commander he too had his doubts, even if for now he could share them only with his diary. He believed in God. But, as he asked himself that night, where was He now?

The �Greyhound� buses came out of the desert, carrying the militia that was supposed to be going to protect Mullah Salaam. They were escorted by some Czech special forcesWaiting for them was Lieutenant David Warwick, a young officer from the King�s Royal Hussars.

The men who poured out the buses looked nothing like fighters: ranging from teenagers to men in their sixties, they looked just like ordinary Afghans, dressed in thick woollen smocks. The militia were angry, hungry and thirsty. They�d been sitting in the buses with no food or water all the way from Lashkar Gah, they said.

In charge of the militia was a man called Nick Muhammad, selected apparently for the mission by the presidential palace. Back in Kabul, Michael Semple had been asked for a briefing on him. Muhammad was �just some minor thug who was running a police checkpost on the main road, and the only reason to run checkposts on the main road is to steal from people,� he recalled. He told those who asked about him: �If we need a job for a nightclub bouncer and it�s not a salubrious place, then Nick Muhammad�s your man.� But as far as the British soldiers had been told, all of these men were former Taliban and dangerous.

�They started shouting, getting angry, and refused to move on with us,� said Warwick. The Czechs started to edge away, but Warwick made them stay for now.

Then Muhammad�s men started getting hold of their weapons. �They disappeared off, lifted up the storage containers on the side of these buses and started getting out AK-47s and magazines and ammunition and loading up these magazines and loading their weapons and making them ready.� Things were soon getting out of hand. At first the KRH had their Mastiffs in a circle, with their guns trained outwards for all-round defence. But they soon had some of their guns pointing inwards.

�We�d been told these guys used to fight for the Taliban, that they�d been fighting against British soldiers only nine or ten months back. This was all pretty threatening. And they were waving their weapons around in my face and the interpreters� faces. One of the interpreters started crying.�

Warwick managed to persuade Muhammad to get the guns lowered, and soon Colonel Ed arrived to help. They persuaded the militia to accept some biscuits and water and to get back in the buses. They were told they could keep their weapons, but they agreed to unload them.

The next trouble was to get them down and across the Musa Qala wadi along a track that only an off-road vehicle could make. They got transferred into the Mastiffs�� not something that made their crews comfortable. The plan was to take them up to Mullah Salaam�s compound and unload them, but when they reached the outskirts of Shah Kariz, there was no one there to meet them.

�It was embarrassing,� recalled Staff Sergeant Rob Sinclair, a troop leader in the KRH. �We basically picked up these militia, dropped them off, and went, �Right, someone should be here to collect you.� And no one was.�

The British asked around the Afghans to see if anyone had a mobile phone or Mullah Salaam�s number. Everyone was waving phones around, struggling to find a signal. Someone reached Mullah Salaam. The British said: �Where are you? We need to come and drop these guys off.� But Salaam demanded to know who this militia force actually was. The soldiers had been told that Nick Muhammad was some kind of best friend of Salaam. Now they heard he did not know him.

Salaam asked if the militia had heavy weapons like large-calibre machine guns. The militia too were saying, �We�re not fighting if you haven�t got any heavy weapons.� At that point, the interpreter handed the phone over to the soldiers. There was an English-speaking voice on the line. There was someone inside the compound with Salaam. �Oh hello,� he said. �Can I speak to whoever�s in charge?

The conversations went round in circles. It seemed they would have to take the militia back and �find a way to get rid of them�. Salaam did not want them. The British were not going to give Nick Muhammad more weapons. Mullah Salaam said, �Well, I don�t want the guys then.� To add to their problems, one of the Mastiffs had now broken down. A fan belt snapped. It was getting dark. Things were edgy. They did not know if the village in gunshot range was really friendly. Had they been lured into an ambush?

To the electric guitar of AC/DC�s �Back in Black��� blared from the loudspeakers of the American anti-tank platoon�� the ANA�s leaguer in the desert broke camp at dawn on 7 December. At 07.30 it began to head north.

The convoy moved 12 miles north across the desert, passing close to where Jack Sadler had been killed. At 12.30, the main convoy established a new leaguer, but B Company broke off and led 2nd kandak away from the main convoy and crept towards Musa Qala. Vehicles were parked about a mile away from a village on the edge of town.

Before the soldiers set off on foot, an intelligence flash message stated simply: �Enemy will fight.� Together with photographer Nick Cornish, I joined B Company on the attack.

A burst of gunfire erupted in front, and we dived into a shallow ditch for cover. It was no protection. We had little choice but to run. Bullets slammed into the ground around us as, feeling horribly exposed, we raced for the sanctuary of an armoured Humvee.

Captain Andy Breach and his company of ANA were the furthest forward when the firing began. They had a gully to their left and they dived into it. For some reason, it felt quite funny as everyone hunkered down. People were giggling. But Breach knew someone had to poke their head up and start returning fire. �I would have been quite happy just lying there and not doing anything,� he said. It was just like they had taught him at Sandhurst: �There is a moment when everyone just turns round and looks at the officer and asks for leadership,� he recalled. Breach looked back at Jake kneeling in a ditch across the road and saw the OC giving him the thumbs up. Jake was opening fire�� encouraging the others to get their heads back up. So Breach followed suit and everyone began. It was hard to get the ANA to fire. And it wasn�t helped by the fact that the interpreter, Raj, had run away to the rear.

On Jake�s side of the road, Jonno and his lieutenant, Craig Dawson, were dealing with an ANA company that was even more in pieces. Amid all the incoming fire, they�d become distracted by another drama that was unfolding. As the gunfire opened up, three vehicles were coming up the road. It was the main route leading south-west out of Musa Qala, and, from what we had already seen further back, there was a steady flow of refugees trying to get out. One of the vehicles, a white saloon car, stopped in its tracks. But the other two�� a white Toyota Corolla and a wooden-sided green-and-grey truck�� started to accelerate. Their drivers were in a panic trying to escape. To their misfortune, those on board were heading straight for two American Humvees and for British soldiers coming down the road. Many feared these cars were suicide bombers: they had been warned the Taliban might be planning such attacks.

Walking at the rear, Jake�s second-in-command, Nick Mantell, and Corporal Gregory �Cagey� Roberts, who was carrying a radio set, watched the tragedy in slow motion. They watched as the Toyota sped towards them. Cagey thought it was a suicide bomber, and he wanted to open fire, but Mantell was in the way. Mantell thought it was just people trying to flee the fight. But neither was sure.

It was the gun trucks of American special forces that opened fire first. Their .50 calibre bullets ripped through the two moving vehicles: instantly killing the drivers of both car and truck. Jake felt the same threat as the cars surged past him, and he too fired some warning shots. But when he saw the Americans engaging directly, he shouted out: �Don�t shoot! Don�t shoot! There are women and children in the back!�

But British soldiers had opened fire too.

Lee Bellingham was one of them. Six months later, when we met again and talked things over, he still saw the scene vividly in his mind and still thought of it as he lay awake at night, picturing those children. He, like the Americans, thought it was a suicide attack.

�So the SF [special forces] and us opened fire. They got fifty metres past us, and we just saw the car slip out down and the truck explode in half. When the car landed, it landed on its roof. You could see the hands coming out the windscreen then� I�ll never forget it� there were two kids in the boot because the boot opened up. They fall out and� as you�re looking you hear a bang next to you, and as you�re looking RPGs are flying past you� and then you just forget about it because you just get told that you�ve got to move your men this way, got to move your men that way.�

The first thing I had seen was the Toyota Corolla lying upside down on the road. Its windscreen was covered in blood. Closer still was the truck with two bodies, one dead and one dying, lying by the side. Children were crying and a crowd was gathering. They were looking at the British, shouting, �Go away! Go away.� They were joined by the ANA kandak commander, Rahimi, and Corporal Phil French, the company medic, who tried to save the dying man.

There was a scene I did not know about until months later, one that took the death toll far above the two I initially reported. Further up the hill, where the wounded civilians were being brought, Mantell and Cagey found a pick-up truck with two injured women and about eight children, and a man in the passenger seat who was clearly dying. Matt Hughes, a signaller who was also a team medic, was trying to deal with him. There was also a saloon car with two dead children in the boot, shot through the head, and an injured man in the back, shot in the stomach. And there were two further dead adults.

One of the women was bleeding through her burqa. The soldiers wanted to help her, but she would let no one near.

They radioed to get French brought up and Mantell sent a nine-liner (a casualty report) up to brigade for a helicopter to collect the wounded.

One of the men�� whose wife and two kids were injured�� said he wanted to drive the group to Gereshk to reach the hospital. But that was a five-hour drive, and Mantell, speaking through an ANA interpreter, urged him to stay. �There�s a helicopter coming,� he said.

Sergeant David McCarrick, who had been looking after B Company�s parked vehicles, came across to see what he could do to help. He and Matt Hughes saw the open boot, the dead children and the man laid out on the back seat. The families were refusing to let the soldiers touch the kids. They were persuaded eventually, and Cagey, Mantell and McCarrick started picking off children from the back of the pick-up and undressing the ones that were screaming. �Sure enough,� remembered Mantell, �we started finding gunshot wounds on, I think, two of the children. But thankfully the boy�s was a graze to the arm, and the little girl�s was just a gash.� They would survive.

French and Hughes talked over what to do about the man in the back seat. He had been shot through his liver. They could give him a drip to replace some fluids, but that would only postpone his death. With a battle still raging, they decided they had to conserve their supplies.

Mantell needed to get back with the company in the village, and Jake also needed the company medic, French, to be back with the troops, just in case there were more casualties. Cagey and Mantell took a WMIK and drove French back to the village.

Back at the top, Dave McCarrick was still fighting for the chopper and looking after the wounded, along with Hughes, the team medic.

�We will have a helicopter in five minutes,� they told him.

And then an hour later, he was still saying: �Where�s the fucking helicopter?�

�Oh yeah, it�s on its way,� he was told. After about four hours, he heard it definitely wasn�t coming. By that time, the man on the back seat had died anyway. It was getting dark and getting cold.

The ANA said, �Look, they need to go. They need to go.�

�Just go, then,� McCarrick said.

At least seven civilians, including the two children, had been killed so far�� more than three times what I had reported.

An American paratrooper stood in pitch darkness. He was catching his breath after a long march. As he smoked, he shielded the orange glow of his cigarette in the cup of his hands. He looked upwards, and, as the tobacco burned down, the sky began to change. From the east came the dimmest of lights. One by one, the stars were snuffed out.

Then he heard in the wind the call to prayer. The words came not from some loudspeaker. They were shouted in Arabic, as they had been for fifteen centuries, by a lone man standing on the roof of a town mosque.

One hundred yards from the American soldier and his platoon, a group of young Afghan men shook away their thin blankets. They leaned their weapons on the side of a mud-brick compound and prostrated themselves towards the holy city of Mecca. Few of these men doubted God�s will that today would be the day of shaheed, of holy martyrs.

The paratroopers of 1 Fury had been marching through most of the night, slowed down by their unexpected arrival at a more distant landing site. The absence of a moon did not help. The night-vision goggles they used were high-tech, but they worked by amplifying the ambient light. On utterly dark nights like this, with no illumination but the stars, they had all the clarity of a poorly tuned television set. It all made for hard going as, laden with supplies, the paratroopers had trudged on foot through a series of rocky desert ravines.

As they emerged from the desert, the stage for the battle ahead was to be an altogether different scenery: the cultivated green zone of the Musa Qala wadi. Overlooked by sharp cliffs, it stretched as wide as 3 miles by the town itself. But it was cut in two by a flat gravel riverbed which, as much as 600 yards across in places, was the town�s most natural defence. A small but fast-flowing and treacherous stream snaked through the middle, and the town of Musa Qala lay on the far, western bank.

Brian Mennes, the 1 Fury commander, proposed to defeat the Taliban in Musa Qala by sweeping towards it from three sides. His Bravo Company would cross the riverbed and come down from the north. Charlie Company would also cross and then sweep up from the south, and Alpha Company would seize the high and low ground opposite the town itself.

By first light on 8 December, the slow march had put them behind schedule. Bravo was across the riverbed but had established only a toehold, and Charlie, who had the furthest to walk, had yet to make it across. But Alpha had successfully taken the Roshan Tower, a mobile telephone mast on a twin-peaked hill that overlooked and dominated the town and where Mennes had now established his command post.

So far, apart from pre-emptive strikes from the air, 1 Fury had not been in contact with the enemy. Nor did they know where the enemy was.

The Battle of Musa Qala wadi began shortly after dawn with a single round from an AK-47. Captain Adam Wehrle, the acting commander of 1 Fury�s Charlie Company, thought at first it was a negligent discharge by one of his soldiers. Then came incoming RPGs and automatic fire.

The Taliban were firing from all around Charlie, trying as much as the Americans were to find out exactly where their enemy had appeared from. They were scattered in positions throughout the tree lines, mostly for now on the same western side of the wide dry riverbed as the American paratroopers. They were making use of a deep irrigation ditch that ran in parallel to the riverbank, allowing them to run northwards and southwards as fast as they wanted.

Wehrle called for help from the battalion�s mortar line. Jet planes were soon on station and dived past in a show of force. And a bomb was dropped on a position about 75 yards away.

On the Musa Qala side of the river, about 4 miles further north, Bravo Company came under attack shortly after Charlie�s battle began. At 06.15, Specialist Brad Malone was on the roof of a little mosque setting up his machine gun when he shouted down, �Hey, I think I see someone with shovels or RPGs. I can�t tell.�

A moment later, he knew for sure. Two RPGs darted in, and a day-long fight began.

Malone was in cover behind two small domes on the roof. But he wasn�t protected from behind. The fire was coming from all sides. A bullet went through his Camelback water pouch. Seeing the attackers had crept within yards, Malone pulled out the pin from a grenade and was still holding it as he leaped off the roof, twisting his ankle. He managed not to let go.

Most of his 1st Platoon and the company headquarters were still below, trying to dry themselves off. After eight hours of walking and then crossing through the river and mud, most of the men were drenched.

If they had not arrived so late, Captain Don Canterna, the twenty-eight-year-old commander of Bravo Company, had planned to stretch his forces in a line across the green zone�� from the riverbed on the western side to a road on the east. His three platoons would then have leapfrogged south towards Musa Qala centre. Instead, his 2nd Platoon had barely made it across the riverbed and was more than half a mile behind his 3rd Platoon and 1st Platoon. The latter was now in the centre of the green zone and vulnerable to attack from the north, east and south. With his line of attack incomplete, Canterna would at first not be mounting the sweep through the green zone he had planned but rather a hasty perimeter defence.

1st Platoon and Captain Canterna�s headquarters had stopped to rest in a mosque and a private home. A small alleyway ran between the two buildings, protected only by a low wall on the eastern side and a tree-flanked canal to the west.

After the attack began, Staff Sergeant Otilio Vasquez and his gunner, Sergeant Daniel Aguto, were the first to run out. The scene was surreal. Bullets were flipping up the dirt. And a camel stood impassively on one side. Vasquez ran beside it.

�Well, I got scared,� he said, explaining why he got to know the camel inside its little shelter. �I�m like: �OK, I need to get in here. Scoot over.� RPGs were hitting the wall; the camel just stood there the whole time eating hay.�

Sergeant Jason Murray was in a pair of shorts in the mosque when the fighting started, and Sergeant Harry Jauert was practically naked. They put their clothes on as the bullets ricocheted in through the door. �It was an insane scene,� Jauert remembered.

The pair came out and made it to the low wall. Beyond was a field with trees and ditches and little earth mounds. The enemy was creeping up, low-crawling through the cover. Murray and Jauert could see two fighters really close, maybe only 15 yards away. The paratroopers would pop up to look, fire a few bursts and then dive down behind the wall before the enemy could zero in on them. Bullets struck the wall in front, throwing up a cloud of dust.

About the third time Murray got up to fire, a stream of tracer swung towards him. A bullet struck the sights of his rifle: smashing debris into his face. Blood gushed out, and Murray went into shock.

�Jauert, Jauert, they got me. They got me. Oh man, I�m hit. I�m hit.�

Jauert had to grin. Murray�s face was priceless, a picture of worry. His face clearly hurt badly. He thought he had lost something important. But Jauert could tell that, for all the blood, the wounds were superficial.

�Oh, it�s just�� you�re fine. You just got caught with plastic or something.�

Robinson, a radio operator, came over to patch him up. Jauert got back on with the firing.

Vasquez had meanwhile got to the other end of the alley. When he looked behind him he saw Murray�s head bound in white bandages. He remembered Murray once teasing a squad leader who found it hard to shoot straight. �I can�t see. I can�t see, � Murray had mocked. Seeing Murray now bandaged like some First World War gas victim, Vasquez shouted, �Murray, you can�t see, you can�t see!

At his end of the alley, Vasquez had sent a machine-gun team across a waist-deep stream to set up a position under some trees. But a flank was exposed. As Specialist Julian Reyes waded across, an RPG rocket came skimming along like a flat pebble on the surface of the water. But his reflexes were razor sharp and he dived under, the RPG skipped over, and he popped up again, already shooting at the man who had fired. �Oh, God, oh, my, did this really just happen?� thought Vasquez. And Reyes� eyes were wide open, agog.

By now the attack on 1st Platoon was coming in from almost all sides. About the only safe direction was towards the river, where 3rd Platoon were. Only an assault mounted out of 3rd Platoon�s compound spoiled the enemy�s attempt to encircle them. As it was, they got perilously close to breaking the company�s defences.

Sergeant Brian Reese, the platoon leader, noticed at one point that almost his entire platoon were pinned down, unable to lift their heads for more than a few moments. It meant the Taliban could keep creeping forward and threatening their whole position. Lobbing hand grenades, he killed two men who had got within 10 feet.

Canterna spent much of the fight working with his forward air controller, Keith Mellon, trying to call in air strikes. But they found the fighting was at such close quarters that dropping bombs would risk fratricide. Meanwhile, mission after mission of artillery shells and mortar fire were called in, much of it �Danger Close�, meaning closer to them than normally allowed for safety reasons. �The situation was that desperate,� said Canterna.

When the attacks eventually died out�� for the morning at least�� Vasquez looked over at the camel in the stable and a donkey tied up in the field. They were just chewing away like nothing had happened.

The fight that had begun that morning, thought Canterna, had followed months of preparation by the Taliban. Stocks of weapons and ammunition had been spread ready for use all around Musa Qala. With numerous tree-covered irrigation ditches to use like trenches, their manoeuvres were hard to spot at the best of times. But the zero illumination at night, due to the lack of moonlight, had made them virtually invisible to them and even to sophisticated equipment like the Predator UAVs. �Neither forces� early-warning networks were very effective�� ours or the enemy�s,� he recalled. As soon as the Taliban learned where the main body of the American force was, they had rushed their fighters over.

Sergeant First Class Ronald Strickland was walking down the hilltop trench line where 200 paratroopers were sprawled out. His men were smoked. After hours of humping their gear from the landing zone, of assaulting this hill in darkness and of setting up their perimeter defences, most had barely slept an hour. Strickland hadn�t slept at all. But it was light now and he was kicking them all awake.

For the last half hour Strickland, a thirty-five-year-old from Pembroke, North Carolina, had been standing on the ridgeline and watching the tracer down the valley where Charlie Company was in contact. As the light came up, he knew their turn would come soon.

�Hey, man, we better back it up, you know, because we might start getting shot,� he told a fellow sleepwalker.

They got a warning. An EW (Electronic Warfare) sergeant emerged from the command post with a radio intercept. �We�re gonna get mortared. Better spread the word,� he said. Strickland was doing just that with his feet. Within two minutes the rounds started coming in.

The Taliban had opened up not with mortars but with a Dushka, a nickname (meaning �sweetie� in Russian) for the DShK 1938 machine gun used by the Red Army in the Second World War and in the decades after. Like the American and British .50 cals (which entered service just after the First World War and have changed little), it fired half-inch calibre rounds. They were accurate, dinging on the metal of the red-and-white tower and smashing into the walls of the concrete hut underneath.

The men started putting their gear on. Villagers could be seen fleeing along the road beneath the cliff. A full-scale attack was on.

The fire was coming from multiple directions: from the Dushkas straight across the wadi but also now from the green zone just below the tower. �The Taliban were trying to manoeuvre on us. They wanted to take the tower back,� recalled Captain John Pelikan, thirty-two, the Alpha Company commander.

Anyone with a military mind had always known the hill around the Roshan Tower was the key to controlling this town. In the 1983 Soviet attack on Musa Qala, the Mujahidin had kept hold of it and kept the Red Army at bay for seven days. The trenches were still there. And still just as useful. The surprise was the Taliban had not defended it the previous night. But holding a high feature was always a double-edged sword. You could aim your guns from here at everywhere. But everyone in the valley had clear sight of you. The mobile phone mast was a perfect target marker.

Strickland was organizing his men. The biggest threat he knew by now was from the south, where a steep road snaked up the hill from a village through which fighters were already sneaking up. Grabbing a team with a 240 machine gun, Strickland moved down the old trench lines. In some places they were dug deep, in other places only shallow scrapes were left. But the worst thing was a little dip between the two high points on the summit. The Dushka gunners were watching the gap. You just took a deep breath, shouted �OK, ready?� Go,� and had to run across with the rounds cracking by.

Reaching the far position, overlooking the village, he found a team leader crouching for cover. He had just popped his head up� and dived promptly back down.

�Where�s it coming from?� said Strickland. The soldier leaned back and pointed over his shoulder. �From right down here somewhere, right at these compounds.

Strickland crawled up to the edge and looked over. Straightaway he saw a gunman running from a building to a tree and opening fire. A narrow tree wasn�t much cover. �Is he retarded?� thought Strickland as he shot him, knocking him on his backside. The man kept trying to get up. So Strickland shot him five more times. Then another fighter came out and stood behind another small tree. Strickland shot him too, and the fighter fell.

Following Strickland�s lead, more paratroopers opened up. They pointed their weapons almost vertically down the cliff. More fighters streamed forward, and soon Strickland was bowling grenades straight down the cliff-face. �It was like attacking a castle,� remembered their commander, Colonel Mennes, �and the image I had in my head was our guys are pouring hot oil down the castle walls.�

The heaviest fighting in the battle for Musa Qala is between Taliban forces and US paratroopers Task Force 1 Fury of the 82nd Airborne Division. After landing by helicopter at sunset on 7 December, 1 Fury�s three companies march through the night. All are in heavy contact with the Taliban at dawn.

Sunrise across the wadi ushered in a day that few in 1 Fury will ever forget.

As the men blinked in the early morning light, the rounds from the Dushka guns started whizzing again over their trenches. Forward observers were ready to coordinate return fire. Suspected firing points were identified. The 81mm mortars were called in from the rear, so were the British 105mm artillery guns, firing from the desert. The scouts in their Humvees on the ridgeline thought they saw the Dushka moving on a truck. They called in a mortar strike. The Apaches now on station thought they saw four men crawling into a firing position. They engaged them with their 30mm cannon. And this was all in the first hour.

Then all eyes turned behind after a loud boom. A black-grey mushroom cloud billowed up. Radios crackled. The scout platoon had been trying to push up the back of Roshan Hill. A Humvee had struck a pressure-plate IED. Corporal Tanner O�Leary, twenty-three, from South Dakota, was killed outright. Another soldier was wounded.

There was no time for contemplation. Up on Roshan Hill the firing became more intense. The Taliban Dushkas were getting braver by the minute. Most times, in most contacts in Helmand, the arrival of Apache attack helicopters on station would bring a lull in the battle. The Taliban would hide. But in this battle it just intensified. The Taliban started to fire directly at the choppers.

Some thought the .50 calibre rounds being fired by the Taliban that day were explosive-tipped. They seemed to be blowing up as they made impact. However many guns the Taliban had, it seemed they could take a heavy pounding. The Apaches were firing back at their positions with 30mm rounds and Hellfires. They took out a truck full of weapons. They took out one, perhaps two Dushka positions. But if they flew away and then returned, then machine-gun fire would pour out from a whole new spot.

The helicopter finally came that morning for Jonno�s body. Nichol Benzie, the Chinook pilot, remembered being woken up to go and do the mission. As with all flights in those days, it was not a case of simply going and getting Jonno and coming back. They also picked up some prisoners. And then they were ordered over to pick up both O�Leary�s body and the gunner who had been injured in the explosion. As they approached, recalled Benzie, they saw a Humvee that had been destroyed in a really, really bad way. �And you�re always nervous, then, landing because if a mine�s blown up the Humvee, then what other mines are there?�

Jonno�s departure on Benzie�s chopper meant B Company could finally move off the ridge. But first Jake wanted to get rid of Jonno�s Vector, as well as the Afghan truck. It was partly to destroy the sensitive equipment and to deny any ammunition left behind inside the twisted wreck to the enemy. But it was also about providing some closure for the lads. So everyone could move on.

Packing up camp, B Company moved off with the American Green Berets and the ANA along the desert plateau. They stopped about a mile away. The American forward air controller was going to call in an air strike: one JDAM on each of the vehicles.

On the ground it seemed a long, long wait�� almost two hours of just standing waiting for the plane to drop its bombs. All the time the vapour trails in the sky showed there were plenty of aircraft on station who could do the job. What the soldiers on the ground did not see, however, was how this one request from Jake to deny two vehicles caused one of the biggest rows back at the Brigade HQ of the entire air operation.

It all came down to how air strikes were organized. When troops were in contact�� their lives facing an immediate threat�� then commanders on the ground like Jake had almost total authority to call in whatever close air support they needed. Every pilot had responsibility for what he dropped, and he would always ask for some double or triple checks. But there wasn�t the need for every target to be approved by someone at a higher level. But strikes that dropped bombs when no one�s life was in immediate danger were governed by a whole set of different rules. Time and again questions came back from higher command demanding: �Are there any civilians near by?� and �Do you know where all the friendly forces are?�

On the ground, Jake was insisting there were neither �friendly forces� nor civilians near by. Above him, the pilots were getting frustrated. All down the Musa Qala valley, and across Helmand too, there were troops in contact. But these planes were just circling around and burning up their fuel waiting for an OK to destroy two empty vehicles in the desert.

Simon Tatters, the brigade air liaison officer, could work out what was happening. A rogue Predator was wandering around near the scene and collecting pictures to which the brigade had no access. Controlled from Nevada but�� apparently�� under the control of an unknown commander, it was being used to second-guess the judgements that Jake and the forward air controller and the human pilots were making. The Predator, recalled Tatters, was �providing, from our point of view, disinformation�. The picture they were building up from the ground was being questioned, and the �frustration slowly built and built and built.

Among their augmented air team, the brigade had three American air force colonels, so Tatters was glad it was the American who was typing out the �fucks� and �bullshits� on the electronic chat as the frustration grew.

The first aircraft overhead, a pair of F-15s, went away and refuelled from a tanker aircraft, came back, waited around and returned to base without dropping a thing. Now a couple of A-10s were on call. And they too were getting angry. They had been pulled away �from the fight elsewhere�.

�The aircraft had good eyes on,� said Tatters, �but it was a time-sensitive target, because we needed to deny these vehicles to allow the ground units to move on. And it just went on and on and on and on, and meantime, there were a lot of things happening elsewhere. This was starting to detract.�

After two and a half hours, the permission finally came through. It came with relief but also derision. Tatters guessed the final word had come from the general in Qatar. Perhaps he was on holiday somewhere and they had needed to track him down.

1st Platoon were still in the same compound they�d been sitting in for a day and a half, the same one where they�d been attacked on the morning they arrived. After the battles they�d fought, they�d run quickly short of ammo and all this time they had been waiting for resupply and waiting for 2nd Platoon to catch up.

That lunchtime someone else decided to have another go at them, perhaps just one man sticking his weapon up and firing a few rounds. Sergeant First Class Reese remembered: �I could see this guy being a loser and shooting at us, so I did a little textbook move to go and sort him out.�

One soldier, Sergeant Tuyen Doan, however, �took an extra step on the outside where he shouldn�t have� and caught a bullet in his arm. He was in a lot of pain and couldn�t move his hand. The medics did their work and he was moved out for a medevac chopper and, said Reese, �at the same time, we pushed out to go take down this guy who was being a loser. We killed him. And then, right when we killed him, we were in this big open field, so we stopped and came back and we had to wait all day long for resupply.� It was getting frustrating.

Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes unlucky, and then sometimes someone just does something really stupid.

At 13.36, an American Chinook was coming in with a resupply that everyone in 1 Fury was sorely needing. On board was a team to take back some prisoners from Bravo Company, and also Sergeant First Class Matthew Hatfield, the senior sergeant in the 1 Fury�s forward observation team. Hatfield had spent the early battle back in Kandahar, but with the forward HQ now firmly established on Roshan Hill, it was his turn to move forward.

Everyone on the Roshan remembered that moment. All morning they�d been under fire and they had made pretty sure that everyone knew that. The supply helicopters were told to approach from the desert behind, not to fly over Musa Qala itself. That made it pretty surprising to look down to the right and see a Chinook steaming straight down the middle of the wadi�� right over Musa Qala town and between Roshan Tower and the Taliban opposite.

It was even more of a shock for those on board the chopper, not least Sergeant Hatfield. The ramp was lowered at the back, and he could see all too clearly when the RPGs started whooshing in�� air bursting with a boom and a black cloud of shrapnel in the air just behind. He could hear the Dushka too. The gunners in the Chinook door started returning fire, rocking up and down as the chain-belt ran through their machine guns. �Hey, this ain�t good,� he thought.

Hatfield turned to the soldier next to him and shouted, �They gotta get this chopper on the ground. We gotta land.� The Chinook started corkscrewing, swerving desperately to avoid the fire, banking left to get up and out of the wadi and back into the desert.

What saved them was an act of heroism. Waiting in the sky above was an Apache helicopter, call-sign Arrow 2�3. The pilot, Tim Slade, and his gunner, Thomas Malone, had spent all morning in the skies around Roshan, playing cat and mouse with the Dushka gunners. Both airmen were reservists with three weeks left of a one-year tour. In normal life, Malone was a bouncer in Tucson, Arizona. They had been over Musa Qala since 7 a.m. and already seen some strange sights�� like a group of Taliban fighters jump out of a truck all dressed in women�s clothes. When they saw the Chinook flying below, it radioed to say it was taking fire from the Dushka. Slade and Malone came swooping in�� putting themselves between the Chinook and the Dushka. �A Chinook would be more of a target because it doesn�t shoot back. So with an Apache you have to get closer than the Chinook, make yourself seem like an easier target,� said Malone. RPGs started airbursting in front of them�� little black puffy clouds of flak. They could hear nothing. �It feels like a video game,� said Malone. But the move was to cost them. Two bullets struck Arrow 2�3. One hit Malone in the leg. It felt like it was blown off, �like somebody strapped a piece of dynamite to my leg.� Malone�s words were preserved by a cockpit recorder. �I�m� My God! I�m hit, I�m hit, I�m hit! I�m shot in the leg, shot in the leg!�

The bullet had smashed Malone�s knee into the cyclic, the Apache�s main control stick. Arrow 2�3 rolled left and started plunging into a gut-wrenching groundward dive. �I couldn�t move my leg, so I had to grab it with my hands and pull it off the cyclic. My leg was about three times normal size�� like a big blob of Jell-O.� Slade fought to correct the roll, slamming hard on his cyclic, a move that automatically separated the two men�s controls apart and also shifted the helicopter from mechanical guidance on to computer-controlled �fly by wire�.

�You all right? You all right?� said Slade. He realized another bullet round had struck and knocked out one of their two engines. The power was dropping. They had got within 80 feet of the ground.

Malone thought the bullet must have hit an artery. He could see he was bleeding badly. He tried to wrap a tourniquet on to stop the flow. But the space was too cramped and the leg was too swollen. Every time he tried to reach down, his leg would hit the cyclic and make the chopper turn again. �All I could do was stick my fingers in the [bullet] hole and I just shoved my fingers in there as hard as I could and just hoped for the best.�

Slade now had the helicopter to fly, one engine to watch, and radios to work. He had to jettison their weapons in the desert to get more power. But it was slow going. An electronic clock showed a countdown of the time needed to get back to Camp Bastion, the nearest hospital�� thirty-three minutes.

�Just keep talking, keep talking,� said Slade.

�Hey man, I�ll let you know if I pass out.�

By the time he reached base, Malone had lost two-thirds of his blood.

On the Predator feed, Colonel Mennes and Major Jones could see the desert spot where the Apache�s weapons had been dropped. Within five minutes there were motorbikes out there to collect the loot.

�Sir, we need to shoot those guys!� someone said.

Mennes couldn�t tell though if they were Taliban or just looters.

�I don�t know, I don�t like it,� said Mennes. �I�m not going to shoot those people.�

Vince Corona, a sergeant from Indiana, was on point again with 2nd Platoon of Bravo Company. They were back out in the open riverbed, moving south after finally getting a resupply. Of course, after waiting so long, when it had finally come, as always, it was too much. First the British BRF had made it across the wadi at first light, driving �their crazy British vehicles�. And then finally a Chinook had come in, unloading two huge pallets of water and ammunition. There was so much they had to cut open half the water bottles and burn a load of ration packs. They didn�t want to leave them for the enemy.

The aim now was to link back up with 1st Platoon, dump some resupply with them and then finally move to what had been 2nd Platoon�s initial objective�� right across the other side of the green zone by the main road.

It took only thirty minutes after setting off before the Taliban opened up. They had just reached level with 1st Platoon, who they saw waving from the green zone to their left. Fusco, the platoon sergeant, had by now �acquired� a couple of pick-up trucks, and he�d thrown the hated quad bikes in the back, along with rucksacks, excess weapons and everything that was weighing people down. It was pretty certain they would soon be in contact. Corona had just spotted a track through the green zone that could take them over to the compound.

The Taliban opened up this time from in front, from across the wadi to the south-east. One of the trucks took an AK-47 bullet through the door. The platoon dived for cover behind the trucks and were soon calling for artillery to drive the attackers away.

Finally the patrol could move on again. The trucks rolled into 1st Platoon�s compound just as it was getting dark. The men refilled their canteens, and Corona walked up to Fusco and First Lieutenant TJ Tepley to check up on the map and the plans. He was told his next objective and entered the coordinates on to his Garmin GPS. The plan was to head east for 900 yards and then turn round finally south towards Musa Qala centre. �It had been three days and we weren�t even at our first objective,� recalled Corona, �so we were kind of eager to get in there and start clearing our objective, because, until then, you know, we were just held down by vehicles and sporadic fire, and we hadn�t really moved.�

Joe McGovern heard nothing. No pops, thuds nor whistles. Just explosions out of nowhere. Others heard a hiss and then a boom, like a mortar, except backwards. There was confusion�� some people shouted �mortars�, others shouted �RPGs�. Whatever it was, there was plenty of it coming in.

That day Alpha�s 1st and 3rd Platoons had been pushing south, clearing down the green zone on the opposite bank of the wadi from Musa Qala centre. After their earlier fight in the village, McGovern�s 2nd Platoon had stayed to guard the Roshan Tower and the battalion headquarters.

The day had begun like the day before. Waking up in the cold dawn to the zinging sound of Dushka rounds. The Taliban had been firing Dushkas at the hill all day�� and at the choppers too, scoring that hit on the Apache. But most of the fire was just harassing rounds. The big attack came when the sun was beginning to set. This time, they struck home.

Tyler Clas was cooking up some rations on the hilltop. He heard one bang and thought it was a stray RPG. Then after three more booms, he put on his armour vest and ran for the trenches, clutching his half-cooked food. His team was standing there staring at him wide-eyed. �Aw, it�s not that big a deal,� he said. He hadn�t seen the explosion behind him, just where he had been sitting.

They lay flat down in the trench for two minutes. Then Clas switched on his radio and heard the call. �Hey, we got wounded. We got wounded, four guys wounded.� With the rounds still landing, two of his guys ran down the hill to help while Clas looked for stretchers. Then there was a pause. The Taliban waited. They knew the men would run for the wounded. They opened up again when they saw movement. This time�� with paratroopers on the hilltop now firing back at what they thought was the firing point�� the enemy were firing back more wildly.

Specialist David Goth was closer to the action. His team leader, Sergeant Stephen McBride, had just called him over to help guard the line. He looked across and saw one round hit and then another. He glanced at the weapons squad, all lined up together in a shallow trench. He saw McBride and Jason Strickland, a private just twelve days in theatre. He saw the shadow of a round going right at them and then a bang and smoke and he was thinking �They�re fucking toast.�

That explosion had hit McBride and Strickland; and another took out Specialists Adam Blackburn and Steven Martinez as the pair ran down the hill to help with the casualties.

It was a scene from hell. Goth recalled: �Everyone was just getting up, fucking rolling. Strickland�s fucking crawling, oh my God, you know, �cause he can�t walk, his feet are fucked. I mean, Marty�s bolting down the fucking hill. Everyone�s just scattering. And, I mean, I figured that fucking�� I figured Strickland was done. But I saw Marty get down the hill. He started bleeding out of his thigh and shit. I�m guessing like anyone, it�s pure adrenalin. He fuckin� bolted down the hill. He got about down and he was like �Oh, shit.� Same with Blackburn. I mean, all the guys were just like�� Sergeant McBride got hit in the arm. He didn�t even know it until somebody pointed it out to him.�

Strickland had been lucky. He had been lying flat on his stomach with his legs spread apart, and the round landed right between. It messed up his legs, though. Martinez was hit by shrapnel in both legs; Blackburn got hit on his backside and abdomen.

McGovern, the platoon leader, was by now at the scene. He got the feeling that the enemy must have an observer somewhere close. By now a new volley of rounds was getting close again, like it was being walked towards the target. The men started �hauling ass� downhill. Strickland and Martinez were on stretchers; Blackburn was hobbling along. Though McBride was hit in one arm and about to be evacuated he insisted on helping carry another casualty with his other, good arm. They got down to the medevac landing site, the same one they had used a day earlier.

The radio message said: �The helicopter landing site is hot. Helicopter will require an armed escort.

Major Paul Pitchfork and his A Company of the 1st Battalion, Royal Gurkha Rifles, had been fighting now for nearly three hours. They were almost surrounded. Their ammunition was running low. They had two men who were seriously wounded. He had to get them out. The two casualties�� who like all the Gurkha soldiers joined the British army from the hill stations of Nepal�� were being treated in a mud compound near the banks of the Helmand River.

A photograph records a scene of serenity as they lay calmly waiting for their rescue. While the battle continued outside, behind the walls of a mud-brick compound, soldiers smoked and chatted quietly. In three days� time, they were supposed to be on R&R. One of the injured, Rifleman Jeevan Shrees, whispered to his platoon sergeant, Bahadur Budha, of his holiday plans. He called him �Guruji�, respected teacher. �We had planned to hire a nice car to go around Nepal, but unluckily I will miss it,� he said.

The sergeant-major of the company, Shuresh Thapa, tried to keep his spirits up. But he was worried. Jeevan�s wounds were getting worse. He had a gunshot wound in his upper thigh, and five bone fractures and his legs were swelling. The rescue that day he remembered as nightmarish. �Can a helicopter ever land here with all this fighting?� he wondered.

Outside, Pitchfork had the same question on his mind. The night before, his plan made clear sense. All afternoon the centre of Sangin and all the Afghan army bases in town had been pummelled by the Taliban, the first offensive on the town for months. At nightfall, the enemy had slipped away. But intelligence suggested they would be back in strength in the morning. It all seemed like a deliberate and determined diversion, not so much an attempt to draw NATO forces directly from Musa Qala but to strike a psychological blow that would undermine any coalition victory up there.

Gathering his tired officers round a map board, Pitchfork had come up with a plan to catch them off balance. He had not wanted to fight them in the town, with all the destruction and death of civilians that risked. Instead, he and his Gurkhas would slip out along the river southwards in the dead of night and round into the green zone. They might just catch them off balance and hit them from behind at daybreak.

This bright morning, alone in the green zone, he could see the plan was having the right effect. The Taliban were being drawn away from the town. But his own company�s situation, he recalled, was looking �none too rosy�. A Company was being attacked from all sides by a bold enemy, pinned down by accurate fire, hampered by casualties and facing the prospect of an under-resourced 2-mile fight on foot to get back to the Sangin base.

In the hours before battle on Tuesday, the men had risen from their bivouacs and cleaned their kit for the final time. Black smoke belched up from the flames of the paraffin burners that cooked their last hot meal. And the Afghan soldiers crept to the edge of the camp and bent down to say their prayers. Jake Little went round and shook every man�s hand. Then the cry went up: �All on Fong.� Fong was the company�s unofficial chaplain. His prayer was spoken in Fijian, a language that no one understood, but everyone knew its purpose and all said, �Amen.�

�I tried to lift everyone�s spirits up,� Fong explained to me later. He had told B Company the story of Joshua and Moses, of how Moses had led his people to the promised land, but never reached it.

�Moses died because he had done what the Lord had told them to do. The Lord told him: �You will never touch the land but you will be able to see.� So on the mountain where he died, he had this aide, Joshua, and Joshua was the one that took over. So he took the Israelites over to Jordan. Before they went, the Lord spoke to Joshua and said: �You see the land, Joshua? That�s the land I promised Moses, so that�s where you�ll take my people.� He told Joshua that no one would be able to stand against the Israelites. The Lord said: �As I was with Moses, so I will be with you, and I will never forsake you.��

Fong compared this to Jonno�s death: �I said, �We are like God�s people; we are going to move on.� I told them the Lord was with us and I knew after that prayer everyone was strengthened and had this new spirit in them, and I think it helped us.�

How, I asked Fong, did he reconcile God�s word with his soldier�s job? �You have to follow orders in the army,� said Fong. �But I normally pray about it, and there�s times where I had to bear a rifle and fire at the enemy. But I always said to myself before I killed anyone that you have to do these things to save your friends� I prayed about it afterwards, but God will be the only judge of that� I am thankful that most of us got back alive. But I think everything that happens there has a purpose� Even the negative things, everything has a purpose. They happen for a reason.�

Just before we left, one of the survivors from Jonno�s vehicle, Lee Bellingham, came and told me he had said a prayer the morning of Jonno�s death. �I never normally pray,� he said, �but I said something that day. And I feel someone looked after me. I�ve said a prayer again this morning.�

The convoy move was painfully slow. The vehicles inched forward, their brakes screeching and squealing. The route took them back through Deh Zohr e Sofla�� the village that B Company had attacked just four days earlier.

It was 11.30 and baking hot when the vehicles came to a halt. The forming-up point was on the far side of the main stone-filled riverbed through the Musa Qala wadi. But it was concealed from the town by thick copses of poplars that lined a dyke on the bank. This was close to where 1 Fury�s Charlie Company had first crossed over. The American paratroops were somewhere in the fields around� But they were invisible. There were Humvees visible as miniature shapes on the ridgeline up above, and further along the armoured vehicles of the United Arab Emirates special forces. In theory they might provide fire support.

It was strangely quiet. Small noise carried far�� the boots scrunching on the rocks, the muted squawks from the radios and a hum of a propeller high above: an invisible UAV circling in the sky. A message came through the radio. An intelligence report from Higher: �Taliban Tier One foreign fighters have stayed behind to defend the district centre.� Another message said the ANA had cut a bomb detonation cable.

Andy Breach gathered his platoon to move ahead. �My day sack is the weight of a small child, a fat American child,� he said.

The soldiers began moving up towards the town. Everyone kept spaced out in single file. About half a mile along the bank swung round to the right at the entrance to the smaller east�west Bagni wadi. The riverbed there was the final open piece of ground before the beginning of the district centre itself.

It was C Company under Major Matt Adams that went over first, with the 1st kandak of the ANA. An A-team of US special forces lurked behind the corner in their Humvees�� ready to drive up and provide fire support if the Taliban opened up.

Everyone had their theories and suspicions, but no one knew what lay ahead. Adams had been told that across the wadi lay a system of Taliban trenches and bunkers. Everything seemed quiet. No one could be seen. But did that simply mean the enemy was hidden?

Sending his men in broad daylight across this 80-yard width of riverbed into the Taliban�s most prized town made Adams feel like he was ordering some kind of First World War attack. One well-placed and well-aimed machine gun could have cut them all to shreds. All the geography gave the advantage to the defenders. Adams was preparing to take significant casualties.

That morning, like Jake, Adams had said a few words to his C Company. They had shaken hands and had taken photos, but it was difficult. There was a feeling that one of their number would not survive. Some felt that, after Jonno�s death, it was C Company�s turn to lose someone.

The hardest decision Adams made, though it was unavoidable, was ordering the combat engineers over first. They had the job of going in front and checking the crossing for mines. As they walked across with metal detectors, Adams placed a team of machine-gunners behind them and to their flank�� poised to fire instantly if the Taliban opened up. The engineers reached the other side, spraying the pebbles with yellow paint to mark a safe route. The main body of Adams� company and the Afghan kandak started manoeuvring across. Few were surprised when the Afghans largely ignored the prepared path. It was only when they reached and cleared the first compound on the other side that Adams could allow himself a brief pause to breathe. Still no sign of the Taliban.

B Company then started inching forward. Following C Company�s route, they crept through the trees along the riverbank and then reached the crossing of the open east�west wadi. I watched as Afghan soldiers paused to grab clumps of marijuana that was growing freely. After all those days in the washed-out brown colours of the desert, it was pleasant to be back among the lush greenery. One Yorks soldier said it �reminds me of home after all that sand�

At 14.20, Jake�s B Company started crossing the riverbed. Reports ahead said C Company had not met any resistance. A stash of RPGs had been found.

The southern entrance to the town still lay about half a mile further east. From here the bazaar of Musa Qala stretched 1,200 yards due north to the monument that marked the crossroads of the district centre. The plan called for C Company to clear all the ground and buildings on the left-hand side of the road while B Company would clear the right-hand side.

At 14.40, B Company reached the road and began clearing its sector. There was still no sign of the Taliban. �It looks like they have well and truly fled,� said Mantell. If they were going to defend the town, he thought, then the edge of the wadi was the place. A motorbike lay abandoned on its side by the metal pole barrier that marked the town entrance. A dead man sprawled near by. He had apparently been shot by 1 Fury from across the wadi a couple of days before. An Afghan flag was raised by the ANA.

Walking through the compounds was disconcerting. Every home was locked up. The shops were shuttered. Vegetables and fruit lay arranged and untouched on the wooden stalls in front. The people had clearly left in a hurry. Apache choppers were still circling overhead. Shots rang out every few minutes. People looked vaguely for where they might jump. But all the bangs were either warning shots or bullets used to break open locks to search the compounds.

The day�s objective had been the district centre. But no one was taking chances with booby traps or ambushes. So progress was slow. By sunset, the two kandaks had reached just halfway up the road. Jake gathered his soldiers to spend the night in the courtyard of a large garage repair complex.

After the stress of that day, no one really wanted to talk. Most still expected trouble. Even if the Taliban had largely fled, just one bomb left behind or one well-concealed ambush position in the town centre could cause mayhem. Wherever the enemy were, they weren�t too far away. The Afghan soldiers and interpreters eavesdropping the Taliban�s radio channels reported the Taliban still manoeuvring, still giving orders and talking about where to lay an ambush.

But for others, those far from the front line, the battle of Musa Qala was long over.

In Kabul, the Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi announced Musa Qala was now in the hands of NATO and Afghan forces, who were �strengthening their positions and continuing clean-up operations�. President Hamid Karzai said Musa Qala had been entered following reports of brutality there by the Taliban, Al Qaeda and foreign fighters. �The successful attack was aided by some local Taliban leaders switching allegiance to the government,� Karzai said. A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said militant fighters had left Musa Qala because of a strategic decision to avoid Taliban and civilian casualties.

In Musa Qala no one was quite ready to celebrate, even though the Afghan army had wrapped flowers round their rifle barrels.

Just before nightfall, Breach was told by Jake to go out and secure the perimeter by holing up in a compound on the edge.

�What if we get attacked,� he asked. �Is there a QRF [Quick Reaction Force]?�

�No,� said Jake. �We�re going to sleep.�

An American interrupted.

�Don�t worry,� he said. �Just get on the net� We�ll reduce the threat.�

The men from Task Force 32 now had a new name: �The Reducers�.

It seemed colder than the desert had been that first night in Musa Qala. In the morning there was frost on our bivvy bags. I woke up at one point in the darkness, thinking I could hear gunfire. But it was just Nick Cornish, the Sunday Times photographer, snoring. I drifted back off to the comforting drone of the Spectre gunship overhead.

�I can�t wake up the rats,� Benson, the sergeant-major, was shouting at first light.

The commander of the kandak, Colonel Rahimi, had the only armoured vehicle of his unit, a Humvee. He�d installed a bed in it. He wanted to stay there in the warm.

The advance was supposed to start again at 06.30, but no one shifted for another hour. I was with Nuri, the interpreter, who had a radio scanner tuned to the Taliban�s frequencies. When we got going, the radio announced: �The infidel are moving.�

We pushed round the back of the market and through a maze of alleyways. It was quiet again but just as tense. There was a herd of cats that crawled round our ankles. More locks were blown off. A message said somewhere ahead a helicopter had been fired on. The UAVs checked the courtyards in front, but no one saw anything. Taliban radio declared: �It�s your decision if you want to stay.�

A twenty-year-old man, Bagi, was hanging around with the Afghan soldiers and saying that he had stayed behind to mind the shop. He claimed the Taliban always complained about his beardless face and wanted money from his family. The whole population had left the town about six days before. �All the Taliban have gone, and all the people have gone north to Baghran. They�ll be back soon with their sheep and goats.

We went down an alleyway, and Nick Mantell spotted some ANA smoking pot. �This is a big operation, lads. Hashish no good. Hashish no good!� he told them.

Someone said the ANA had found an old man who said he had already seen people �with uniforms like yours� moving through a couple of days before. �Fucking SF!� said Jake, referring to special forces. (Commanders would always later deny there was anyone in the town before us.)

Then we were inching up the final stretch of the main road leading to the district centre, the engineers in the lead with some kind of indestructible truck. But Captain Dan, from the special forces, was worrying again. �None of these buildings has been searched. This is not clever,� he said, pointing out that everyone was walking past shops that could contain a massive bomb.

At 09.30 we came out to the central crossroads. To the right was a mound of rubble. Welcome to the Musa Qala district centre!

Jake and B Company continued to push on. Their job was to secure the northern edge of the town. A ring of security would then be in place so the generals could arrive to celebrate a victory.

A single mortar round that whistled over our heads was the Taliban�s last gasp. Well trained by now, I dived into a ditch. It was full of sewage, and I cut my arm too. Afghan soldiers, who had not flinched, burst out laughing.

I stayed behind in the centre to wait for the flag to be raised. We were all tired now. It was all such an anti-climax. Everyone had wanted one last battle�� a few hardened Taliban foreign fighters who could have made a last stand and made all the stress and fears feel like something that would have been worth it, made it feel like a prize that deserved to be captured.

Jake was glad he wasn�t there for the media event. It fell to Matt Adams and C Company to sort things out for the cameras. Spare Afghan flags were on hand in case the ANA forgot theirs. �Who has got the Afghan flag?� someone asked. The British hid their WMIKs and Vectors, but Adams also had to get the American Humvees moved away. He found it all very embarrassing, and the Americans at first were unresponsive. They didn�t want to collapse their perimeter security. Adams told them there were forces now deployed in depth, and they reluctantly complied. It became something of a farce, though, with gun trucks hidden down alleyways.

Then a convoy of Afghan vehicles came sweeping up the main street and the ever-charismatic Brigadier Mohaydin strode out to take charge. Two soldiers took the flag up a tottering bamboo scaffolding on the central monument, and everyone held their breath as they balanced themselves precariously. Mohaydin made a brief speech and then picked up a telephone and phoned President Karzai to tell him the job was done. �Three days ago all the terrorists were standing here,� he told me. �I am sure we have defeated the Taliban in Musa Qala now. They haven�t got the authority to come back and fight us.�

The dramatic scene of waving the flag was filmed and broadcast round the world by the Ministry of Defence�s Combat Camera Team. They had been with Adams for the last few days but, soldiers claimed, had been under instructions to send back only pictures of Afghans in the operation.

It was at the flag raising that I first met Brigadier Mackay. He did his formal interviews, and then we wandered down the street and sat in a porchway and he told me what this had all been for. �We could have come here any time and trashed the place,� he said, but then the follow-up�� the stabilization and reconstruction�� would have been hard. The whole operation to take Musa Qala had been calibrated to minimize the use of �kinetic force�.

Though the destroyed district centre buildings lay around us, he said it was the Taliban, not the coalition, which had knocked those down.

Musa Qala had been a �running sore�, a base for the Taliban that affected everything in Helmand. When 52 Brigade took over, they had come up with a plan for putting pressure on the Taliban using everything from special force operations to conventional disruption to information operations. Then he had put Chris Bell�s Warriors into the equation. �I took a bet where this would lead us,� he said. The Taliban had reacted to that by putting �enormous pressure� elsewhere�� for example with major attacks down in Sangin. �We realized what the Taliban were trying to do was draw us back down from Musa Qala so they carry on holding this place. We decided instead that we should increase the pressure on Musa Qala.� That was when he had deployed Tony Phillips� BRF. The Afghan government had also hoped that a tribal alliance could come together and overthrow the Taliban peacefully, but that didn�t happen.

That afternoon, as Mackay flew home to Lashkar Gah, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, stood up to address the House of Commons. He announced a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, as well as emphasizing that Britain�s policy was to kill or isolate the Taliban�� not to negotiate with them.

He said: �Let me on the morning of the capture of Musa Qala praise the professionalism and resolve of our forces who have helped defeat the insurgents and in a vital district of Afghanistan restored peace. And let me make it clear at the outset that as part of a coalition we are winning the battle against the insurgency�� isolating and eliminating the leadership of the Taliban, not negotiating with them.

That night, back in Musa Qala with B Company, Jake turned to Fong and thanked him for his prayers. It felt like a miracle to take the town without fighting. Fong replied: �Don�t thank me, just thank the Lord because he works in mysterious ways.�

Governor Asadullah Wafa finally switched his gaze to Michael Semple, the EU official sitting next to him. He frowned. �Michael, what are you up to at the moment?� he asked.

Semple and his party had already been there for some minutes, but Wafa, who took little account of Afghan courtesies, had been deep in conversation with his intelligence chief, Muhammad Naeem. The atmosphere was already claustrophobic. The living room of the governor�s residence was long and narrow, and the windows were all shut off. Wafa was clutching a notebook. For someone who never appeared to listen to a conversation, it seemed a rather strange thing.

Joining Semple on the over-ornate couches was his Afghan partner, the former air force chief General Naquib (the man who had first made contact with Mullah Salaam). Also there were his close friend, the UN diplomat Mervyn Patterson, and his assistant, Amini. Judging by the time of their invitation, they could expect to stay for dinner.

Semple, who was following Wafa�s lead in switching from Persian to Pashto, tried to think of a way of introducing the idea of the training camp. What were Wafa�s thoughts on the follow-up to Musa Qala? He didn�t want to present the plan to train former Taliban as a given. But Wafa already knew about Semple�s idea. And he had an agenda.

�Do you want to set up a military unit for the Taliban?� Wafa asked.

�No. But we are suggesting some rehabilitation training for them�� something to make humans of them!�

Semple tried to expand the conversation, asking those around the room to give a summary of the ideas they had for exploiting the success of Musa Qala. He asked Naquib to speak. Naquib was very measured.

�Nobody wants to set up a military unit, but there is this idea of a training camp to provide a destination for the Taliban who have fought ��

Wafa suddenly interrupted his flow, his face tensing with anger. �Guards, arrest these men!� he bellowed, pointing at the Afghans in Semple�s party.

At this point, Naeem�s plain-clothes officers stepped into the room. Silent, they looked in their element and produced metal handcuffs.

Semple turned to Wafa: �This is out of order. Naquib is an officer; you don�t need to handcuff an officer.

But Wafa burst into a torrent of abuse, calling him a �fake general� and a �son of a Pakistani dog�. Semple urged him to calm down. Wafa was still shouting, telling the guards to arrest Amini too. Another man walked in, the cousin of the head of the Human Rights Commission, who had come round to drop off Semple�s luggage.

�Arrest him too,� said Wafa.

�But he�s from the Human Rights Commission,� said Semple.

�They are all drug dealers, drug dealers!� said Wafa, boiling with rage.

It was not typical Afghan behaviour. Even the cruellest of betrayals are customarily delivered with great courtesy. In a land bedevilled by feuds that last generations, every move of an Afghan chief is calculated, in normal circumstances, to minimize an enmity that may linger.

�It�s the president�s orders,� shouted Wafa when Semple protested. �Talk to the president, not me. It�s the president�s orders. Don�t ask me,� he shouted again, as the Afghans were led away.

Lance-Bombardier Ian Wylie and the rest of A Troop panted their way up to the ridgeline after a patrol in the village beneath. There had been reports of enemy in the neighbourhood, but the patrol had passed without incident. It was mid-afternoon and finally getting warm after a freezing cold morning. The heat, as things turned out, was deadly.

At the top, they paused for breath and looked at the view. Before them was a dusty and dry rock-strewn slope down to the wide, flat expanse of the water-fed farmland of the Musa Qala wadi, with the town itself just over 2 miles in front to the left, and the Roshan mobile phone tower standing out on the sharp cliffs opposite. Behind was the undulating brown moonscape of a high desert plateau. Mount Musa Qala, what the soldiers called �Mount Doom�, stood towering to the north.

Wylie and the others reached the vehicles they had parked in a tight square in a dip just behind the ridge. C Troop�s vehicles were elsewhere, providing cover on two positions on higher ground.

Wylie got into top cover position, manning the .50 cal machine gun on a WMIK. He had just got back to the Brigade Reconnaissance Force. After driving the WMIK that had struck the mine or explosive device that had killed Jack Sadler in the Musa Qala operation, he had been sent home with minor injuries. He had wanted to return, but, riding now in the position where Sadler had died, he was not comfortable, nervous of another mine going off.

The plan was to head off back into the desert that had long been the BRF�s home. One of the vehicle commanders, Bombardier Danny Kay, moved off. His driver, Trooper Adam Cox, turned his wheel right on full lock. As they circled across the sandy ground towards the edge of the ridge, the front wheel struck a mine. When the smoke cleared, Kay was still in his seat, but in agony. The front of the vehicle had twisted back on to him, shattering the bones in his legs and dislocating his toes. Cox had blast injuries to his legs. The top gunner, Troy Bayliss, was clutching his wrists.

Wylie stared in disbelief, fearing the same nightmare all over again. But Kay, a South African, broke the ice as they carried him out. He started swearing in Afrikaans and then even laughing. He was obviously in agony and needed treatment, but he had had a lucky escape. He was not going to die.

The BRF had lived in the desert around Musa Qala for more than two months, bar a three-day break just after the town was recaptured. But like most of 52 Brigade, they were still barely halfway through their tour.

Fighting had continued. A large British force was still in place, keeping the Taliban out while plans advanced for development in the town. The American paratroopers, 1 Fury, were only just leaving. They and the British had continued fighting in the villages up in the desert between Musa Qala and Kajaki, and in the hostile wadi south towards Sangin. A fortnight previously, 1 Fury�s Sergeant David J. Drakulich, of Reno, Nevada, had been killed down there in an IED blast.

The constant moving and fighting and forever living from their vehicles was beginning to wear down the men of the BRF. After the deaths of Jack Sadler and Lee Johnson, they knew how vulnerable they and their vehicles were.

One of the biggest dangers was the so-called legacy mines left by the Soviets. The intelligence they had on threat maps they carried showed them practically everywhere. But the map was large-scale, 1:100,000. It gave you enough detail to keep you scared, but not enough detail to navigate round the danger. The map showed Soviet mines somewhere near this ridge top, but no real clue of where they were.

The battery sergeant major, Paul Hodgson, was organizing the rescue. The injured were brought on stretchers a couple of hundred yards along the ridge top to be treated by his vehicle, one of the four-wheel Pinzgauers.

It was obvious now there were mines about. But Hodgson and the stretcher-bearers stayed on the ridge top track, which they judged had effectively been cleared by their movements along it all day. �It had been used by locals, which was clearly a good sign,� he recalled, �but there were no recent tracks. No one had been here for a while.� The metal detectors were also brought out, and the soldiers were checking for other mines.

Hodgson himself walked further up the track and found a good helicopter landing site on flat ground. They had got word by radio of a Chinook that was already up in the Musa Qala area. It was not the Incident Response Team that carried medics but instead had on board a VIP, Major General Jacko Page.

Hodgson popped a green smoke grenade to guide the chopper in. As it came down Kay and the other injured were still being put on to his �Pinz�, about 400 yards back. Hodgson radioed back: �If you don�t get those casualties on there in the next sixty seconds then it�s going to take off.�

The acting second-in-command, Captain Richard Waddell, was standing close to Hodgson�s Pinz and got the message. He turned to the driver, a twenty-five-year-old corporal, Darryl �Daz� Gardiner, and said, �All right, you need to basically go.� He walked round the back to see the injured on board and then gave Gardiner the thumbs-up and shouted, �They�re on. You can go.�

Ever since the mine blast, Gardiner had been busy helping treat the injured. Now, Adam Cox was in his passenger seat, his legs on the dashboard. Cox said that after losing Jack Sadler and now this, �I�m not sure how we�re going to cope.� As he drove off, Gardiner replied: �Don�t be daft! You�ll be on the chopper soon�� and getting down a warm meal at Bastion!�

Hodgson remembered seeing Gardiner�s vehicle go about 10 yards. Then there was a bang, and he saw Gardiner being thrown from his seat into the sky and landing about 20 yards away. His three tons of Pinzgauer was also flung into the air and spun round 180 degrees.

Hodgson turned towards the Chinook helicopter, the twin rotors of which were still thrashing the air. He made a cutting motion with his hand across his throat, meaning: �Just go, leave.� The chopper roared off, and Hodgson went running back to the disaster. He saw the vehicle, which served as the ammunition resupply store, was now on fire. After what happened after the Sadler mine strike, his first priority would be to douse the flames quickly.

Waddell was so close to the blast that the flash burned the skin off his nose. His vehicle was parked right by. If Gardiner had not hit the mine, it might have been him. �The strangest thing was how quickly that vehicle went from being a normal vehicle to being on its side, facing the wrong way and being on fire. You know, it was quicker than the blink of an eye.�

Further along the ridge, Sergeant Jonathan Walton was working his way down with a mine detector. �No, this is�� it�s not happening!� he thought. A Fijian soldier was helping him. After seeing Gardiner being blown in the air, Walton asked the soldier, �Who was that?�

�Oh, it�s Daz� He�s gone.�

�How do you know that? You don�t know. He might be all right. Let�s get up there and see if he�s all right.�

But the deeply religious Fijian said he had seen an angel come out of Gardiner. Walton tried to calm him. He gave him the metal detector to keep him busy.

The three people injured in the first mine strike had now been through a second one. Miraculously, none seemed to have got more physical injuries. The casualties were triaged�� a process of working out who needed the most help. Everyone seemed calm. Businesslike.

When one of the medics, Collin Vincent, first saw Gardiner, he found him unconscious but with a weak pulse. Working with Lance-Corporal Peter Langhelt, another medic, and Sergeant Robert Leslie, who had good medical skills, they patched his wounds and tried desperately to get some fluids into his veins.

Those with metal detectors worked furiously meanwhile to clear a certain path to the landing site for when the medevac chopper came in. It was hardest for those, like most, who were told to stay put. No one wanted another blast to make things even worse. Wylie�s face looked totally blank and shocked. He would remember that for almost an hour he just sat still, too choked to move one inch.

Eventually the medevac Chinook came in and took the injured away. Then it all sunk in. They were in fading light in the middle of the minefield, and no one knew whether Daz Gardiner was alive. He was close to them all. From Salisbury, Wiltshire, he was on attachment from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as the BRF�s armourer: fixing weapons. Everyone knew him. He had become one of them. A keen skydiver in his spare time, he always had something to say. He kept them all amused.

Vincent knew that Daz was not going to make it. So did Hodgson. He had seen the look of his eyes. But this was not the time to say anything. Everyone had such faith in the medevac choppers and the standard of care back at Camp Bastion. Some of the best surgeons in Britain were said to volunteer to work there.

It broke Vincent�s heart. All he could do was mutter: �He had a pulse when he left us. It is in their hands now.� It was depressing.

A little later the radio message came through. The men were called together and told, �Daz didn�t make it.�

It took the BRF another seven hours to clear their way off the ridgeline in the dark�� down the slope and back into Musa Qala centre. Other mines and metal objects were found and marked. They were helped by 2 Yorks soldiers, who cleared up the hill from the town and met them halfway.

The next morning Wylie got on a helicopter for Camp Bastion and a week later returned to the UK. �I didn�t want to be involved in another similar incident. I didn�t feel comfortable in a vehicle,� he recalled.

The rest of the BRF had been brought back to Bastion for a rest too. But the day before Gardiner�s repatriation ceremony�� when his body was carried by pallbearers on to a plane for the flight home�� most of them were flown back to Musa Qala, missing it all. The following day, Brigadier Mackay came out to see them. They were in a raw mood, almost rebellious. The soldiers asked the brigadier why they were out in the mine-strewn desert in the old design of WMIKs, while soldiers were driving round Camp Bastion in a newer version that had better mine protection.

The soldiers recalled Mackay telling them: �You need to pick yourself up. You look like a unit that�s down.� The BRF burned with resentment at that and reacted badly. It was not helped by the fact their OC, Tony Phillips, was away on his R&R.

Mackay, who was perhaps prouder of the BRF than any other unit, would harbour no resentment though. �Tough soldiers speak their minds,� he said later, �but there was a tough message I had to give them too.� The timing of his trip had been quite deliberate. He had heard the BRF�s morale was plummeting. He remembered telling them that �after all the success of your tour, this is not how you want to be remembered�.

Some used to think enviously of the BRF�s desert mission as a kind of Mad Max fantastic adventure. Officers used to tell Phillips: �It must have been brilliant!� But he used to say: �No. It was unpleasant, dangerous. We were doing a job.�

For many of the soldiers who fought in Afghanistan on the winter tour of 2007 and 2008, their return was but a brief respite before preparing for a new deployment.

The 2 Yorks (Green Howards) Battalion returned to their base at Weeton near Preston. Most of B Company were soon training again for a potential deployment in the winter of 2009. Many of their officers were moving on, though. Jake Little left B Company after completing his two years of command and went on to the directing staff of the army college at Shrivenham. He was awarded a Military Cross (MC) for his �decisive, bold and skilful leadership� and gallantry. His second-in-command, Nick Mantell, decided to leave the army. He was not sure he wanted to do the same all over again.

Captain Andy Breach stayed on with the 2 Yorks, as commander of recce platoon. Jimmy Lynas stayed with B Company as a platoon sergeant. Both Lynas and his late friend Jonno got a �mention in dispatches� gallantry award. Jonno�s was for motivating the troops in the village outside Musa Qala. His citation read: �Johnson, in an exemplary display of courage, drive, and leadership, energized an ANA company that had lost the will to fight and, notwithstanding the enemy threat or difficulties of language and culture, drove them forward.� Lawrence Fong passed a junior leaders� course that put him in line for promotion. Mike Scott, the sergeant-major in Sangin, was deployed to Iraq as a regimental sergeant-major attached to another unit. Dave McCarrick was working in the sergeants� mess at the 2 Yorks headquarters in Weeton. Mark Syron moved to Brecon in Wales to be a sniper instructor.

Of others in the 2 Yorks, the commanding officer, Simon Downey, received an OBE and was promoted to full colonel and left for a new appointment. From C Company, Onur Caglar got a mention in dispatches for his lone actions on the day that Captain McDermid died.

Among the Royal Marines, of the four injured on the patrol to Khevalabad from Kajaki on 4 November, all were making a slow but steady recovery. Matt Kingston, who was shot in the ankle, eventually opted to have his leg amputated after his wound failed to heal. But he was hoping he could in future return to front-line duty with the aid of a prosthetic limb. The men�s troop commander, Captain Sim Jemmett, was himself seriously injured after that patrol. An RPG blast left him with burns to his eyes and throat and shrapnel to the neck. When he woke up back in Britain, he was all but completely blind. His sight has since recovered well, but he cannot drive or shoot. He was given a job as aide-de-camp to the Marines� commandant general. Also injured by the same blast were Corporal Jon Kersey and Marine Lee Stewart, both of whom have returned to duty. The Kajaki commander, Duncan Manning, received a mention in dispatches, as did Company Sergeant-Major David Layton for his quad-bike rescue on the Khevalabad patrol.

Marine Ogden, the medic in the Inkerman battle of 9/11, was also commended for his �selfless actions and advanced medical skills� that �undoubtedly saved lives� in dealing with nine casualties in a single incident. His OC, Major Morley, was awarded an MC for his �magnificent leadership� at Inkerman.

Among the injured on 9/11, Paul Britton also won an MC for �his outstanding display of professionalism, inspirational leadership and selflessness� during the 9/11 battle�� a particular mention was made of his refusing morphine and evacuation so that he could continue to lead his team. Simon Greening, who was shot in the side, recovered from his injuries and returned to the Marines, promoted to sergeant. James Fletcher, who had blast injuries to both legs on the roof of the compound, and lost so much blood, is back running six miles in forty minutes. A reservist and painter and decorator by trade, he has been kept mobilized by the Marines until he makes a full recovery.

The Sangin commander, Dan Cheesman, got an MBE with a citation describing him as �warrior and a diplomat in equal measure�. And 40 Commando�s commanding officer, Stuart Birrell, got a DSO for �his leadership, commitment and selfless service of the very highest order�. He moved to a job at the Ministry of Defence, as did the Household Cavalry commander, Ed Smyth-Osbourne, who got a mention in dispatches for his �inspired leadership� and was promoted to full colonel.

Paul Pitchfork, who led the Gurkhas in their defence of Sangin on 10 December, was awarded an MC for demonstrating �the very highest standards of leadership, courage and initiative under fire and in face of a most determined enemy threat�. Bhim Gurung�s MC was awarded for his �great courage� in crossing open ground that day, twice, under heavy fire and without cover.

James Fraser and James Manchip, the artillerymen, both received mentions in dispatches for their mission in Now Zad�� Fraser for rescuing the truck containing British and American ammunition and supplies, and Manchip for the inspiration he offered his men.

Chris Bell, who led the Scots Guards in the desert, received an OBE and went on to become chief of staff at 20 Armoured Brigade, which was deployed to Iraq in November 2008. Tony Phillips, who led the BRF, received a mention in dispatches for displaying �magnificent levels of bravery� and producing the same in his men. He remained to finish his command of his battery at Catterick, Yorkshire. The BRF�s Simon Cooper, attached from the Royal Engineers, got a Queen�s Commendation for Bravery for when he volunteered to clear the route out of the mine strike that killed Jack Sadler.

At headquarters, Andrew Mackay was awarded a CBE for his tour and was due to be promoted to become a two-star major general with command of a division. Mark Gidlow-Jackson received an MBE for his role as chief of staff and returned to his unit, 4 Rifles, as a company commander and expected a deployment soon to either Afghanistan or Iraq.

Major Nick Haston, the deputy chief of staff, decided to quit the army, in part in frustration at the Ministry of Defence�s handling of equipment shortages and care.

Among the Chinook pilots, Nichol Benzie left the front line. He was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his rescue in the 9/11 battle. The rest of the squadron was heading back to Afghanistan.

Among the Americans, the 1 Fury commander, Brian Mennes, was deployed to combat again within weeks of his return from Afghanistan, this time in command of a Rangers special forces battalion that deployed to Iraq in September 2008. Don Canterna, who had commanded Bravo Company, joined the 2nd Ranger Battalion, an elite combat unit, out of Fort Lewis in Washington State.

Sergeant First Class James Brasher was awarded the Silver Star, one of the highest American bravery awards, for his assault down from Roshan Tower on 8 December. The citation described how �His quick decisions and aggressive stance against the enemy saved the lives of his men� and how, despite his serious arm injury, �he continued to fight and give combat instructions. The medics had to force medical care on him.� Brasher told me his injured arm was �not doing fantastic�, but he was hopeful that an operation in the next few months would see him fit to return to combat. At Fort Bragg, I had also watched President Bush present Ronald Strickland, the man who led the first defence of Roshan Hill, with a Silver Star. This was for his actions in Kajaki in May 2007 when he led an assault to the site of a Chinook that had been shot down by Mullah Sadiq�s fighters.

The Apache co-pilot injured in Musa Qala, Thomas Malone, was back in Arizona still recovering from his injury and as yet unable to fly.

Dan McNeill handed over command of ISAF on 3 June 2008 and, after forty years of service, returned to Fort Bragg and retired from the army a few weeks later.

Michael Semple was living in Islamabad, Pakistan, writing a contemporary history of Afghanistan.

Sherard Cowper-Coles was due to leave Kabul to take up a new post as special UK envoy to both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

President Hamid Karzai faced presidential elections in the summer or autumn of 2009. He wondered how much support he would get from Britain and America.

Mullah Salaam was in a gloomy mood when I met up with him in Kabul. �I�m a marked man,� he told me. �When you return to Musa Qala, I will most likely be dead.�

I had tracked down Salaam to a guesthouse in the capital where he was preparing to return home after a meeting with the president. I�d just heard word the Taliban were hoping to greet him back in Musa Qala with a suicide bomb.

As his comments were being translated, he fingered his black beard and kept producing a strange rasping noise. I thought at first it was something wrong with the tape recorder. Salaam�s head was sinking steadily between his palms, as he contemplated the gap between promises of redeveloping Helmand and the grind of reality. Things were so bad, he told me, he was questioning his whole endeavour. �I should never have changed sides. All this has been a big mistake. I should have stuck with the Taliban.�

This was all a bit ironic. The final twist in the Musa Qala tale was the allegation now circulating in intelligence circles that the man sitting before me, the one whose defection had caused such a stir, was in fact �the wrong Mullah Salaam�. I had now been told that Mullah Salaam from the village of Shah Kariz outside Musa Qala had been initially confused with a man who, known as �Gut Mullah Salaam�, or Salaam the Lame, was also from northern Helmand. The latter was paralysed below the waist but was a former Taliban corps commander and was active in the rebellion with a large posse of armed followers.

�When there was all this talk of Mullah Salaam and all the fighters he was going to defect with, they thought they were talking about the other Mullah Salaam, the real fighter. In fact, the one who did defect was really a minor tribal elder,� said one source in the intelligence world. �And when it became clear there were actually two of them, everyone just shut up and kept that quiet.�

For all that, right man or wrong man, the Salaam I was now meeting had proved useful to the coalition, diligently playing the part of a convert to the government side, and urging villagers across northern Helmand to turn their backs on the Taliban. But now, like many of his new allies, he was beginning to wonder if all the hopes he had raised would be dashed.

Salaam told me: �I have promised the people so much, but we have delivered so little, and people will turn on me. Everything comes so slowly.� It wasn�t foreigners like the British he blamed particularly. �The whole government here; they are all criminals,� he said. �They keep the money for themselves.�

Few western officials in Kabul would have offered much of a different view. While celebrating the laying of foundations for a mosque in Musa Qala, one diplomat casually mentioned that the mosque had actually been paid for by the British taxpayer twice before, but the money had disappeared.

Diplomats spoke to me about a realpolitik that defined British and American policy. Afghanistan was not for the squeamish. One intelligence officer characterized the policy of the British ambassador, Cowper-Coles, as a kind of �reverse ethical foreign policy�, based on the necessity of striking deals with bad people. �I think he has come to realize that no one comes to any position of power in this country without having done something really awful. And yet you have to work with these people.�

The Afghan government�s heroin-addicted policemen might stifle commerce with their illegal checkpoints to raise bribes. Its local officials might be in league with drug barons. But these people were still preferable to the Taliban. Better to educate and reform them than walk away in defeat.

None of this reflected cynicism. Oddly, most of these people believed in prosecuting this war. But it was a journey to the dark side, a vision of the real thoughts that apparently lay behind the public face of this war.

In Pakistan, the former EU official Michael Semple, now exiled from Afghanistan, affirmed his view that soldiers� lives were being put on the line to defend the opium interests of local political chiefs. For Semple, the whole Musa Qala operation had been not so much about restoring the power of the Afghan government in the valley, but about wresting back control of the opium trade into the hands of its restored police chief, Commander Koka.