Yet under closer scrutiny, both the Taliban's role in the killing and the intensity of the assassination campaign seem questionable. In the first ten months of 2010, of the 81 killings recorded by authorities inside Kandahar city just 59 were assessed to be the result of "assassination" as opposed to "murder", the difference in definition drawn according to whether the victim was in a position of authority or not. Even the overall body count only produced a murder ratio of 10.1 per 100,000 of population, a fraction of the murder ratio in US cities such as Chicago or Detroit. Hamidi freely admitted that his would-be killers could as easily be any warlord, mafia family member or criminal angry at his efforts to clean up the illegal use or appropriation of property. "I'm still not sure who killed my deputies," he said. "I've got many enemies in this city — warlords, thieves among the police. Far worse than the Taliban are those who claim to be my friends but come to me with snakes in their sleeves. They are more dangerous than any in Afghanistan."

But it is not solely the killings that threaten the development of governance in the south. Kabul's centralised, monolithic style of government has also stunted Kandahar's growth, potentially bestowing the insurgency with enough of an emergency oxygen supply to outlive the surge. The US and its allies have struggled hard to build a grassroots governance structure in the districts around Kandahar parallel to the military operation. The idea is to develop district administrations with access to village shurahs (meetings) through which to hoover up grievances. This structure has in turn been screwed together with Kandahar's provincial authorities appointed by Kabul so as to create an interface through which to identify and remedy the day-to-day problems affecting the rural population as quickly and effectively as possible, thereby blunting the edge of the insurgency. 

But Kabul's input to the scheme has been weak, ensuring that the Americans have ended up governing as well as bankrolling Kandahar, a strategy that is clearly unsustainable for anything but the shortest period. Some provincial employees may have dodged work through fear of assassination, but many Kandahar posts were simply left vacant. Some saw the wages as too low and the risks too high. But in many instances the Kabul government simply failed to nominate appointments. 

"Where is the (Kabul) remedy package?" queried a foreign diplomat in Kandahar. "We've become the secretariat for the governor and the mayor here, picking up trash, providing clean water, buying in electricity. We won't fail militarily here, nor in our foreign policy. The single point of potential failure is if the government in Kabul stunts governance at the periphery. Kabul is still stuck in a late Ottoman empire shemozzle of corruption and incompetence. People still want to take a chance in their government, but that government is potentially the sticking point that could reverse this."

Nevertheless, there is no doubting the overall sense of transformation in Afghanistan. A year ago palpable depression gripped Nato forces. The sense of "losing the war", stated or not, hung like a cloud over southern Afghanistan. That is no longer the case. The mission feels tight and focused again. "Winning" is still ill-defined but "losing" seems inconceivable. Top-level officials at the centre of the campaign in Afghanistan say that the report going to Obama for his December assessment will offer him the advice that the surge is achieving "not victory, but irreversible momentum; not rule of law, but law and order; not governance, but government services".

Moreover, the one Maginot Line-sized flaw in the surge strategy which would have ensured victory for the Taliban's patience — Obama's stated intention to start withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011 — appears to be fading. The picture has changed. Obama's timetables are under question and the 2011 withdrawal is in doubt. A limited scaling back of some US support troops next summer seems inevitable. But the combat forces set to replace this year's surge troops in Kandahar are already in training in America and due to come to Afghanistan next summer, transforming the supposed US withdrawal into something of a wooden horse that may instead haunt the Taliban. The insurgents have invested so much hope in the panacea of "2011" that as 2014 emerges as a more realistic date for significant US scaledown, it may be the Taliban, not the Americans, who become exhausted and find themselves battered to the negotiating table.

The surge has broken bets. The surge is buying itself time. And the surge seems set to last. 

"The original Taliban thought they would come back to govern," concluded a Petraeus team member as the autumn closed in on Kandahar and snow choked the mountain passes along the border with Pakistan. "But now they realise that they never will. By next spring they'll have to figure out, ‘Do we want to come back to this? Or has our high-water mark passed and should we negotiate while we still can?'"