One starry-eyed British colonel dared to describe the situation there to me as one of "catastrophic success". (It was hard not to laugh.) Another commander, clearer-eyed as to the ebb and flow in the fortunes of insurgents and counter-insurgents, said with greater wisdom, "it's good, but for Christ's sake don't call it winning. Tactically victorious and strategically fucked is the general prognosis."

We have heard it all before, of course. No matter how smash-toothed and humble any British officer has been after a six-month tour in Helmand, almost every one of them has tried to put some positive spin on it, a little morsel of hope to suggest to those riven by doubt at home that so much death and mutilation was actually achieving something after all: ranging fire in the battle for narrative. I could hardly blame them. Back in 1930, the strategist Basil Liddell Hart noted: "Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war." But empathy was never enough to make their claims mean anything.

However, this time maybe things really are different. Veteran British troops who in the past were familiar with a daily grind of action in Helmand today more frequently patrol through "eventless" days, serenaded by the lukewarm waves of locals. "I know from past tours that we have to be careful what we wish for," one sergeant remarked to me, "but this time it's real. We've smashed them. We're bored."

The atmosphere in Helmand last autumn was certainly very different from 2009, the year in which the British were getting strung out and blown to bits across an impossibly huge operations zone.