3 RIFLES CO: "People power is coming to Sangin"

It has been a long hard winter for the soldiers of this Battle Group.

With 29 dead and more than 100 injured since our current tour of duty began, the name of 3 Rifles has been heavily associated with sacrifice.

But as the cold begins to lift in Sangin, as well as farther north in Kajaki, and the landscape turns green, we see the prospect of great progress here in northern Helmand.

The terrible price that this Battle Group has paid, and those who have gone before us, brings with it the determination to fuel the momentum that we see here every day.

Spring in Sangin has brought an important step forward; we have a new district governor and a new government regime. This is significant progress.

The new governor cares about the people of the Sangin district. Unlike some others I have encountered, it is not just about himself, his family and his retainers. He has brought with him officials who can start building the inclusive, representative civil structures on which a stable and co-operative community can flourish.

Once the community is built and motivated to work together towards a more prosperous, non-violent and stable future, supported by Afghan government institutions, then the destructive and self-serving objectives of the insurgents will become increasingly incongruous and resisted by the people.

Despite the cars, the radios, the sporadic electricity supply, we are effectively in the Middle Ages here in Sangin.

With a population of some 80,000 the people need help; more precisely, they need the influence of effective Afghan governance if they are to step into the modern world.

Politics and civil primacy are at the heart of any counter-insurgency campaign. Every soldier in 3 Rifles understands this and they are to be commended for their role in delivering law and order and development in the district.

We have been working with a highly capable civilian team and with several hundred Afghan soldiers and policemen.

Building the community this way is a slow process. The casualties and risks we take create a natural impatience to get the job done.

But we all know that it will not come through military efforts alone nor will it necessarily come quickly, certainly not as quickly as we would like.

Our security progress will be consolidated only by Afghan-owned civil solutions, supported by the people, which will stand the test of time.

The Afghan Army does not yet possess the resources and cutting-edge equipment that we have, so it is no surprise that the Afghan civil side struggles even more than our brave Afghan warriors to keep pace.

So perhaps, in the interests of balance, we should move at their speed rather than expect them to move at ours?

This might be sensible were it not for a tenacious, agile and ruthless enemy against whom we must absolutely maintain the initiative to create the space for the wider progress we fight for.

We have had to deal with this imbalance with patience, nerve and determination, something which the soldiers of this Battle Group display, day in, day out.

Part of the effort to undermine the Taliban is educating the people to think for themselves. This begins with Afghan children.

Thirty years of conflict have robbed a generation of education. Imagine what our villages and towns would be like if no one had been to school or received any meaningful education for the past 30 years. Ignorance and lack of education are the real enemies.

We must continue to support government-led social progress if the culture of paranoid self-preservation, engrained after a generation of war and oppression, is ever to fade.

This is a place with significant potential; the soil is good, there is an extensive fertile strip alongside the large, fast-flowing Helmand River and the crop cycle moves at twice the rate of our own.

Any theories about the ground and conditions only being good for poppy are nonsense. That is a socio-economic phenomenon, not an ecological one.

Basic as this might all appear, it is significant that we can move on from the devastating pitched battles of the past and focus on development and governance.

With this change comes the need for greater subtlety and restraint from the military.

We do not delude ourselves that we are still countering a very real and violent insurgent threat. However, 'courageous restraint' is the cry and it requires both attributes in considerable measure. It shifts our focus from protecting ourselves to protecting progress and the Afghan population. That can come at a high cost as, sadly, we have seen.

We are coming to the end of our tour of duty here. Like those before us, we have given our all to this place. But we must also remember that Sangin is not Kabul. Nor is it Kandahar, nor even the little-known provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, the big city 70km down the valley. Frankly, it is Hicksville, Afghanistan, as my US colleagues might say.

Nonetheless, it is a key piece of the jigsaw, which, if not in our hands, would result in the cancer that is the insurgency growing daily. If we don't cut out this cancer, Sangin would provide a significant stronghold from which to thwart campaign progress across the country and store up further trouble for the future.

Nothing can make up for the losses of friends, comrades and loved ones and we have paid a particularly heavy price, particularly in recent weeks. In addition many of our soliders have suffered the severest injuries.

Desperately painful as this is, we feel sure that these sacrifices have not been in vain.

The vibrant Sangin bazaar now contains almost 900 shops where there were fewer than 400 a year or so ago. In 2007 there were about 70.

We must, of course, put this in context: there were up to 3,000 shops before 2006, but then it was one of the largest opium bazaars in the world.

More importantly, we know of more than 800 children in education following the government curriculum. This may, in places, be under sufferance from the Taliban but even they know that they cannot deny the people the modern education they crave.

And for the insurgency and the few wealthy criminals who sustain it, this will ultimately be their undoing. People-power is undoubtedly coming to Sangin.

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