The Lost War ; Ben Anderson Spent Two Months with Our Troops in Afghanistan. Here He Reveals the Despair of 18-Year-Olds with 20 'Kills' Who Fight Next to Local Soldiers High On Drugs Knowing This Is a War They Can Never Win

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CROUCHING in a deep ditch near the Helmand River, I'd been in southern Afghanistan long enough to recognise the high-pitched, staccato cracking noise over my head: it was bullets breaking the sound barrier. You only hear it, I'd been told, when you're within a few yards of the gunfire. The Taliban were getting terrifyingly close and I found myself gripping the earth with fear. Welcome to Helmand Province, I muttered to myself.

As a BBC foreign correspondent, I've visited most of the world's war zones Iraq, Gaza, Congo and many more but nothing prepared me for what I found when I flew into Kandahar airport to join up with a unit of the First Battalion Grenadier Guards mid-way through their six month tour of duty.

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The Lost War ; Ben Anderson Spent Two Months with Our Troops in Afghanistan. Here He Reveals the Despair of 18-Year-Olds with 20 'Kills' Who Fight Next to Local Soldiers High On Drugs Knowing This Is a War They Can Never Win

Nato forces may be making progress elsewhere in Afghanistan but the grinding relentlessness of the fighting British troops face in Helmand normally conducted in the most searing, energydraining heat was something I'd never seen before.

Day after day, the soldiers would rise from their make-shift camps before dawn, virtually certain their weapons would be fired in anger that day. The unit I joined up with would eventually spend 81 continuous days out on patrol.

'Contact' is what the Army call these exchanges with the enemy and, in truth, it's what British soldiers live for; what all those months and years of meticulous trainin...

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