"Our capability to kill whom we choose is almighty and over-reaching," one officer told me. "But that doesn't necessarily get us what we want. We've killed here across the last five years at an industrial level. It is an understanding of the insurgent networks and their interface with local power and patronage systems that we still lack. And in that respect the ANA, though so much less technologically sophisticated than us, are so much better. Long term it'll be their war."

Even when closely mentored by foreign troops, the Afghan National Army has always had a unique perspective on counter-insurgency. One evening in 2009, an ANA night patrol came into the district centre in Sangin. One of the soldiers stopped to share a cigarette and I asked him how the patrol had gone. He said it had been "very successful". The soldiers had heard a large explosion by a road at the edge of town, and on going to investigate had found the mutilated corpse of a Taliban fighter who had blown himself up while trying to lay an IED.

"So we made a sign and hung it round his neck," the soldier said. "It read ‘this is the fate of the Taliban'. Then we dragged the body around with us and set up check points on the road, so that passing people could see it and read the sign."

He paused after a lengthy drag of the cigarette, gave a beaming smile and delivered his punch-line.
"Hearts and minds!" he laughed. "Hearts and minds!"