AS the Afghan sun set over the end-of-tour memorial service last Wednesday at British headquarters in Lashkar Gah, 32 names of the dead, aged between 19 and 52, were solemnly read out, including that of the first woman killed, Corporal Sarah Bryant. Almost every other name, it seemed, was from 2 Para.

The 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment lost more lives than any other section of 16 Air Assault Brigade — 11 in total, and five in one week in June — or one in 10 of the unit.

Over the past few days, as the paras flew back to Camp Bastion at the start of their journey home, the mood was sombre. “2 Para took the bulk of the casualties,” said Sergeant Andrew Lamont.

“I lost a few good friends I’ve known for 12 years. Others lost limbs. But when you’re out on the bases you just get on. If anything it encourages you to fight to the best of your ability. Only now, as we’re going home without them, is it really sinking in.”

The most recent victim was popular Lance-Corporal Nicky Mason, killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol keeping the Taliban away from the Kajaki dam. “It was a big shock to everybody,” said Lamont, who was just a few hundred yards away when he heard the blast. “When I got back to camp I actually had a cigarette, the first I’d smoked in 19 years.”

It was not supposed to be that way. Unlike 16 Air Assault Brigade’s first tour in Helmand two years ago, when the then defence secretary John Reid declared that he hoped not a single shot would be fired, they were well prepared this time.

They had almost twice as many men — 7,800 troops and four combat battalions, consisting of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions the Parachute Regiment and two battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. Their commander, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, declared them “the best equipped force the British Army has ever sent”.

But the Taliban have also changed tactics, increasingly using improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hiring foreign fighters from Chechnya and Uzbekistan as well as from Pakistan, and even managing to lure defectors from the Afghan national army who had been trained by British and American forces by offering to double their £90-a-month combat pay.

Capitalising on an increasingly unpopular government in Kabul and growing anger at civilian casualties, the Taliban now present themselves as less hardline, promising if they return to power they will no longer ban kites or demand quite such long beards.

As he prepared to hand over to the marines, Carleton-Smith admitted that it had been “an intense summer”. But he insisted: “That intensity has been less a product of resurgent Taliban and more the result of a larger international military footprint. We’re controlling more, our perimeter is wider, more people are living in our enclaves.”

He said British forces had killed six senior or mid-level Taliban commanders and successfully transported a US-funded turbine to the Kajaki dam to prepare the way for a supply of electricity.

“We’ve taken the sting out of the Taliban for 2008,” he said. “As autumn turns to winter those who are foreign will return home and restore themselves and only reappear after the poppy harvest in May or June.”

The number of civilians caught in the crossfire has also been reduced. “We’ve dropped fewer bombs than on any of the previous missions,” said Carleton-Smith.

Yet, while the British claim 78% of the population lives in their zones, the governor of Helmand says half the province is under Taliban control and they are fighting in Nad Ali, less than 10 miles from brigade headquarters in Lashkar Gah.

Carleton-Smith acknowledges the preponderance of Taliban ringtones proclaiming “Death to the Invader” that are heard on the street, but dismisses them as “quite a good insurance policy to have on your phone”. He insists that “the very conventional battlefield of 2006 no longer applies”.

For those engaged in the fighting, it certainly seemed like war, particularly to the men of 2 Para who lost so many comrades.

Sergeant Phil Stout, 34, commander of one of C company’s three rifle platoons, lost five men from his 30-man unit, one to an IED and the others in firefights. Stationed at Forward Operating Base Gibraltar in the upper Gereshk valley, he had only been in theatre two weeks when two Royal Marines who were due to go home were killed on patrol. “That really brought home there’s a real threat out there,” he said.

The platoon’s first big contact was on June 12. “That day is marked in my head.” Two of his men, Lance-Corporal James Bateman and Private Jeff Doherty, were killed when ambushed by the Taliban while out on patrol. “The amount of firepower was phenomenal; they must have had their finger on the trigger the whole time.

“From then to the present day it never stopped,” said Stout. “We were getting contacts every day, some just pot-shots at the base, others much more. We always outnumber and outpower them with our weapons but they keep coming back. I reckon they’re crazy. Two of them would try to take on a company. That’s not good odds.”

The relentless attacks reduced the area in which British forces could operate. “When we arrived we could patrol up to the top of our operating area, 8-9km north, but by the end we couldn’t go more than 1-1Åkm,” Stout said.

The worst threat was from IEDs. “They’re very crude devices and we got good at identifying them, but it’s always in your head, ‘Am I going to lie on something or kneel on something and get blown up?’”

Conditions were basic. Food was usually 10-man ration packs, ammunition containers sufficed as chairs and tables, and the only washing facilities were solar showers. “It was so basic that I was really excited when we got a welfare pack from a teacher with wet wipes and toothbrushes,” he said.

When he started suffering from stomach pain, Stout blamed the way they were living and dosed himself with paracetamol. Then he collapsed and had to be “medi-vacced” back to the UK. His gall bladder was about to burst and he was lucky to have survived. Yet as soon as he had recovered he returned to Afghanistan, much to the horror of his wife.

With him at FOB Gibraltar was Corporal Scott Bourne, 26. “I knew it was always worse in summer than winter but thought it was ‘bigged up’ in the media before I came,” he laughed. His view changed when, on June 10, he narrowly escaped being blown up by a suicide bomber.

Two days later he was on patrol when there was an ambush by 30-40 Taliban. “After that it was every couple of days. By the end we could go less distance than at the beginning and we were just pushing, pushing, fighting Taliban off.”

Lamont, commander of one of 2 Para’s fire support groups, spent his entire tour based at Kajaki. “When we first arrived it was the poppy harvest, so fighting was low, but then the maize grew so they had more cover and fighting got more intense,” he said.

“If anything I’d say it’s getting worse. Taliban tactics are changing, using more IEDs, and they don’t back down.”

Lamont at first operated from a Wimik, an armed Land Rover, but near the end of the tour he was equipped with one of the new Jackals, a much better protected vehicle.

“It’s one of the best things the government has done for us,” he said. “It saved three of my boys’ lives.”

Two weeks ago they were on patrol when an IED blew up the vehicle behind him. “I heard this huge explosion and turned around thinking the worst,” he said. “All I could see was this massive wall of smoke. Then two guys started to walk towards me, the driver and the commander. The gunman had been thrown out. If we’d had the old vehicles we’d have lost all three guys.”

While getting the turbine to Kajaki was the high point of the tour, Carleton-Smith admits that the low point was sustaining so many casualties. In June Britain’s 100th soldier died in Afghanistan.

“Our casualty figures have been substantial but they have to be kept in context,” he says. “We may in the course of 2008 have in the region of 50 fatalities in Helmand, but in 1972 more than 100 British soldiers were killed in Northern Ireland, on our own streets.”

He insists that time is on the side of the Afghan government. “The young people want betterment of their lives. What the Taliban can’t do is deliver progress and development. As long as the international community can stay the course, over time the Afghan government capacity will grow.”

He argues that the international community should aim not for victory over the Taliban but to reduce the insurgency to a level that can be contained by the new Afghan army.

“If we reduce our expectations then I think realistically in the next three to five years we will be handing over tactical military responsibility to the Afghan army and in the next 10 years the bulk of responsibility for combating insurgency will be with them.”

Flying out through the dustbowl that is Camp Bastion, and watching all the building going on below, it seems the British Army is digging itself in for a very long campaign.

Video: Pathfinder's last mission in Afghanistan

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