Men have always been drawn to war, even as they hated it. Lieutenant Mike Martin, 26, an army reserve officer who is just back from Afghanistan, spoke fondly last week about his six-month tour in Helmand province: “It was awesome, one of the best times of my life,” he told me.

Such enthusiasm for the war may seem inappropriate. Afghanistan has cost the lives of 159 British servicemen; it is a brutal, challenging, chaotic and hugely complex struggle and there is no end in sight. In the coming weeks and months the Americans are sending 21,000 reinforcements to help turn the tide.

Such coalition tactics show increasing signs of desperation. For the British, who have been in Helmand for three years and are now sending extra troops to boost the 8,300 already there, the expectations are that the fighting is going to get worse. The Taliban still have a strong hold in the province.

However, Martin, a reserve officer bearing a disconcerting resemblance to Prince Harry, is looking forward enormously to returning to Afghanistan for a second six-month tour in November. He has a unique role in Helmand, distinct from the other British soldiers fighting the Taliban, and the Ministry of Defence points out that he is the army’s first cultural understanding officer.

Martin’s job is to get out and about among the Afghans so that he can advise British commanders about how to get them on board. He is fluent in Pashtu, which he was taught during an intensive 15-month course (most military language students do only 10 weeks).

“The commanding officer trusted me to go out and get the information we needed to achieve our aims. There is a huge hunger for this type of information because up until now it did not exist at the battle group level and because of the amount of contact I had with Afghans I was able to tell the commander what they were thinking,” he said.

During Martin’s last posting, he built up a map of tribes, economics, politics and human geography of the operational area in Helmand. He says this was used to good effect in the town of Nad-e-Ali, from which British-led forces fought to eject the Taliban in December.

“There are hundreds of people in Nad-e-Ali who have my mobile number – from tribal elders down to Ahmed the farmer who wants to speak to me about night patrols which make his dogs bark,” he said. “I may not be able to stop the night patrols but I can explain to the farmers why they are happening.”

Perhaps Martin’s role sounds boring. The public, media and armed forces have a particular expectation of how to fight modern wars, and the conflict in Afghanistan has been “spectacularised”, with heavy emphasis on fighting and military equipment. But, as any counterinsurgency expert knows, defeating the Taliban and winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans (to use that overworked phrase from Vietnam) will never be achieved this way. Nor will it be achieved by the attri-tional war that the army still finds itself fighting in Helmand – sometimes over the same 500-yard strip of land as three years ago.

Despite the grumblings of some generals, the army today is as well equipped as at any time in its history. Its terrifying firepower remains its main weapon. Almost every day Javelin missiles costing £20,000 each are fired at the Taliban. Apache gun-ships strafe, and while the Taliban use their feet for mobility, the army uses helicopters.

It is, however, thought and local knowledge, not firepower, that will achieve some stability in this province. As long as there is fighting, the Taliban are winning. As long as there is no authority people can trust, there will be no stability. Throwing more equipment at the problem is a waste of money if the army does not understand its nature – as Vietnam once showed the Americans.

Knowledge comes relatively cheap. Britain, though, may yet fail in its objectives in Helmand because it does not have enough soldiers like Martin with intimate local knowledge. So his appointment and that of other cultural understanding officers is a welcome sign. “I haven’t met a single Afghan who is not absolutely gobsmacked that a white officer speaks Pashtu,” said Martin. “That enables a level of rapport that you can’t get through an interpreter, and generally people are very open when they see I can speak the language.”

However, supplying such officers at this late stage highlights how badly the armed forces slipped up in Afghanistan originally by ignoring the need to understand the whole environment in which British soldiers fight and die. Territory is not important in countering insurgency; the people living in it are. One military commander who recently returned from Afghanistan has admitted to me that he did not have a clue about what was happening in his area, even at the end of his second tour last year.

In this the British Army is woefully behind the Americans, who have set up a whole shadow army of human terrain teams consisting of anthropologists and social scientists embedded with combat brigades to help their commanders and troops in the field to understand Afghan culture.

The American human terrain system maps the human factors in an area of operations, which are more vital than geographical features when it comes to helping to create a stable region. One American unit has reported a 60% reduction in combat operations over eight months thanks to these techniques.

The British Army’s cultural understanding officers are designed to have the same effect. However, after 15 months of training, Martin is deployed for only six months at a time. Such discontinuity works against the effort. And Territorial Army officers such as him can have marginal status within the professional armed forces.

To be effective, the kind of local knowledge that Martin has gained must be incorporated all the way up the chain of command. At the top, the emphasis is still too much on war-fighting.

In September the army publishes a new counterinsurgency document. The Americans produced theirs back in 2005 and it is credited with helping to turn the Iraq war around.

The introduction of cultural understanding officers does move the army forward. Real progress is only possible, however, if this sort of approach is made to work on a much bigger scale, across the whole of an integrated military and civilian effort that puts counterinsurgency at its heart. This is what the British-led Civil-Military Mission in Helmand was set up to do. It is the success or failure of this approach that will determine whether our Afghan venture will fly or die.

When he meets Afghans, Martin is always armed and escorted by British troops. We will know that this approach is working when he feels safe enough to leave his rifle behind and talk to Afghans on his own.

Andrew Sullivan is away

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