Helmand, Afghanistan, 25 July 2015. Sharon Mulholland/Flickr. Some rights reserved.The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan has come as a surprise only in those countries, such as Britain, where the country as a whole is rarely covered in detail in the media. This routine paucity of information also helps explain the publicity surrounding the news that a small group of UK advisers is joining 300 Nato personnel in Helmand province. This is part of an emergency response to a sudden threat of Taliban takeovers of the district centre of Sangin, and possibly even the provincial capital of Laskhar Gar.
Sangin has already largely fallen to Taliban militias but Nato has reportedly despatched special-forces units, including some British, to try and hold on to at least part of the town. For the British army the Sangin district is especially symbolic because of the loss of 106 lives there from 2006-10. This is nearly a quarter of the entire UK losses in the thirteen-year deployment that ended in 2014, when David Cameron made his extraordinary “mission accomplished” claim.
A much more immediate signal, and one that has had an electric effect in the United States, was the killing on 21 December of six United States military personnel by a motorcycle suicide-bomber. This happened not in Helmand, but instead close to Bagram airbase near Kabul where the Americans were attending a meeting with local officials. As such, it is an indication of the range of activities of the Taliban and its capacity to regroup and take territory in many different parts of Afghanistan. The incident has come as a shock to the Barack Obama administration, forcing it to abandon any hope of withdrawing US combat-forces before the president leaves office in January 2017.
