Noting, eventually, that the Taliban were seemingly inured to casualties and able to recreate their shattered command chains with frightening alacrity, by the time 16 Air Assault returned to Helmand this year a new campaign strategy had emerged.

"This is a campaign of influence, fighting an election, fighting for what the population think, believe and feel," explained 16 Air Assault's commander, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, in July. "It is not a campaign about decisive military action. The decision here lies with the Afghans. They are the future and end state. The utilisation of military force is purely to allow local Afghan solutions to emerge."

A holistic package, the "Helmand Road Map", involving economic, political and security development, was seen as the way forward. The use of force was just one strand in the weave of a plan which hoped to marginalise, dilute and ultimately defeat the Taliban by empowering local Afghans towards their own mechanisms for peace and stability.

The concept is modern, but not original, and still has a long way to go if the current levels of fear and hostility in Helmand can be reversed. In his book The Utility of Force, the British General Sir Rupert Smith postulated the change of modern warfare away from conventional, industrial, nation-state conflicts to the new era of "war amongst the people". Sharing many of the same tenets, the American General David Petraeus applied his own doctrine at first hand in Iraq, having rewritten the US Army's manual of counter-insurgency.

Both noted the inadequacies of old-school conventional thought, weapons, strategy and tactics in conflict areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan where the emotions and beliefs of the local population - "the people" - are the decisive currency to be won or lost. As significant to the theory of war as the writings of Clausewitz and Jomini were in the 19th century, though not without critics, Smith's and Petraeus's work shifted the emphasis of modern military theory away from the traditional physical application of force. In this new interpretation, which far outstrips older concepts of winning "hearts and minds", the use of force is regarded as just one of several elements that can be used in conjunction to persuade perception and emotion, thereby governing will.