Out into the attack with the Royal Marines last year, we drove in dust-choked Viking armoured vehicles through the sand desert and to the crest of a ridge that overlooked the lush, irrigated valley along the Helmand River known to the soldiers as the Green Zone, their battlefield. Then, in the landscape below, people began to run. Men on motorbikes went from house to house to announce the battle. In all directions spread a panorama of terror, as women, children, boys, anyone not fighting, ran for safety. The Americans call this the "blue stream" - the indicator, almost every time, of an impending engagement.
Two days later, I was in another Viking, clutching some bit of metal in an attempt to anchor myself as it charged back to base across a poppy field. There were little grey puffs of exploding Airburst rocket-propelled grenades near us, and the crump of home-side mortars landing on the trenches from where the Taliban were firing. I looked out of the small porthole in the back, and there, in the middle of this "contact", was an old shepherd nonchalantly herding his sheep across a field, unflinching.
Two visions of the Afghan population - one of terror, one of apparent unconcern. But in both, a battlefield where the population can rarely just watch unaffected.
Seven years into Britain's fourth Afghan war (the previous battles being those of 1839-42, 1878-80 and 1919) and three years into its campaign on the Helmand River, those in command emphasise that the objective of military action is no longer focused on those Taliban firing rockets and laying bombs, but rather on people like the farmers I saw so fleetingly. General Stanley McChrystal, the US and Nato commander in Kabul, has designed this summer's offensive in Helmand, launched ahead of the 20 August presidential election, not as a counter-terrorist mission, but rather on classic counter-insurgency principles. Success would be measured, he said, by the numbers of people shielded from violence and the influence of the enemy.
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