Seen from the air, Afghanistan’s dusty Helmand province hardly looks like a place worth fighting and dying for.

It is hot, unpleasant and backward. Aside from the muddy waters of the Helmand river, which snakes through the middle of the province providing irrigation for small poppy farms, most of the terrain is a moonscape inhabited only by insurgents, drug smugglers and “cuchies” — Afghanistan’s colourful nomads.

The small towns that dot the landscape are remote, deeply conservative and suspicious of foreigners, the last visitors being Soviet troops who were driven out two decades ago by the Mujahidin. The local economy is almost entirely dependent on the opium trade — an added reason for locals to distrust outsiders and support the Taleban, the former rulers now heading the insurgency and implicated in drugs trafficking.

It was into this hostile environment that the first British troops were sent just over two years ago on a mission to impose security, allow reconstruction to take place and encourage the Afghan Government to control one of its most lawless outsposts.

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The generals and diplomats who devised the strategy badly underestimated the size of the challenge in Helmand. John Reid, the former Defence Secretary, famously hoped that the mission could be completed without a shot being fired. The first British force sent into the area was badly undermanned and poorly equipped to meet the challenge.

Instead of dominating the province, British soldiers and Marines found themselves fighting for their lives in one of the most intense counter-insurgency wars of modern history, which has claimed the dozens of troops, not to mention hundreds of Taleban fighters and Afghan civilians caught in the middle. It is tempting, as some now advocate, to write the mission off and put it down as another failed British military misadventure in Afghanistan, not to be repeated. But that would fail to take into account the progress achieved in Helmand and the importance of the province in determining the fate of the whole country. As many Afghans and foreigners will confirm, what happens in Helmand matters.

British Forces, now double the size of the original force and backed up by US Marines, have pushed the Taleban out of the main towns and inflicted heavy casualties on the insurgents, who now fight mainly through roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

The setback should allow aid workers to rebuild infrastructure in the province and encourage the Afghan Government to begin retaking control of the area for the first time in a generation.

This will not be easy. Afghan officials and police are corrupt. The drug barons have huge resources to prevent stability returning to the area. The Taleban are looking for a foothold to re-establish their authority over the Pashtu-speaking areas of southern Afghanistan, and Helmand could be the ideal place to start.

But the obstacles do not mean that the mission is impossible. Ask any older Helmandi what the province was like in the past and he will likely recall a region known in the 1960s for producing the finest fruit and vegetables in the country, where the only shots fired were from the guns of hunters out in the desert shooting gazelle.

Source: Ministry of Defence Factsheet:

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FactSheets/OperationsFactsheets/OperationsInAfghanistanBritishFatalities.htm

Map positions are approximate, dependent on the amount of information given by the MoD.

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