Fighting Expected to Intensify As Winter Ends

British troops in Helmand will be on the frontline of a coming Taliban offensive expected to present one of the greatest challenges in Nato's 58-year history.

As winter recedes, western commanders expect insurgents to emerge for a fresh assault on the Kabul government and its allies. "It's going to be a violent spring," US commander Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry said last week.

There are more than 40,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan, and the British contingent's task is to bring Helmand province to heel, one of the most complex and perilous parts of the mission.

Helmand is a microcosm of all that has gone wrong with Afghanistan since 2001. The province is racked by violence, awash with drug money and corroded by corruption. A spate of suicide bombings has sown fear in the main town Lashkar Gah while some rural areas have emptied of civilians due to combat between the Taliban and British Marines. The 4,000 or so British troops are concentrated at Camp Bastion, a sprawling billion-pound base in the desert, at Lashkar Gah and a handful of smaller district centres. Soldiers have decent facilities at base but outside the wire conditions are harsh and dangerous.

The Taliban have proven to be a surprisingly resilient and adaptable enemy. Battles last summer at besieged outposts such as Sangin and Musa Qala killed more than a dozen British soldiers and wounded many more. Taliban losses were in the hundreds, yet fresh recruits kept on coming.

British military superiority rests on air strikes delivered by Nato warplanes. Taliban sympathisers admit that B-52 bombers and Apache helicopter gunships terrify the insurgents. "The Taliban have no match for the air strikes," said Maulana Noor Muhammad, a leading cleric with a pro-Taliban religious party in Pakistan.

But the airstrikes are a blunt weapon that win battles but can lose hearts and minds. Reports of civilian deaths play into the wider objectives of a Taliban leadership keen to portray the western presence as a Soviet-style occupation.

The British "exit plan" is a strong local security force, but for now that is a distant dream. Soldiers posted to Sangin said that while they fought the Taliban local police smoked hashish and even sided with the insurgents. Efforts to win local sympathies are also complicated by the thriving drug trade. Last year's poppy crop touched record levels, earning millions of pounds for farmers, but also filled Taliban coffers. The government plans to destroy hundreds of hectares of poppy fields but the eradication drive could also draw a violent backlash against British troops.

British anti-narcotics officials may also soon be at odds with their US counterparts as powerful Washington politicians have long pushed for crop spraying, which is staunchly opposed by Britain. Now the spraying lobby appears to be winning.

Analysts say the coming months should represent a turning point for Afghanistan. Whether that direction will be better or worse remains unclear.