An unsanitary cocktail of heat, dirt, flies and rats. And no enemy

We should, of course, be thankful that the latest British casualties from Afghanistan appear to be suffering a form of gastroenteritis, although the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has declined to confirm the type of illness involved. The casualties join three others who have needed treatment, variously, for appendicitis, altitude sickness and scorpion bite.

The conditions in which they, and the accompanying journalists, lived in Bagram, were an unsanitary cocktail of heat, dirt, flies and rats. At least the casualties were not victims of the Taliban or al-Qa'ida.

But after two months in the country, and two operations, the British expeditionary force in Afghanistan, the biggest military deployment since the Gulf, has yet to fire a shot in anger.

The first of these operations, Ptarmigan, despite all the hype, was little more than an acclimatisation exercise. But Snipe, with its force of 1,000, was meant to be for real. The troops were told that up to 1,000 guerrillas might be holed up in the target area, and there might even be tanks and armour.

Snipe ended, literally, with a bang. Four caves packed with arms and ammunition were blown up in the highlands of Drangkel Ghar, in Paktika. A wave of flame and earth shot 1,000ft from the valley floor, blocking out the sun. Even from a hilltop a mile away, the effect was awe inspiring. It was the biggest fireworks display most of us had seen. But was it really an al-Qa'ida arsenal, as the British military claim, or a communal stockpile for a group of warlords. And exactly how new was the discovery? The Americans, who have lost no opportunity to snipe at Operation Snipe, and indeed the British mission, were keen to whisper that it was they who had found the caves, months ago. The BBC declared they had filmed the same caves in March.

There was another factor in the debacle. The Americans had turned down a British request to block off a portion of Chamura Valley, the target area, because, as ever, they did not want to put their troops at risk. This left the way clear for any enemy fighters who were there to escape. Ninety minutes before the ceremonial blowing up, I spoke to Regimental Sergeant Major Russ Craig of 45 Commando.

"We haven't made any contact and the lads are disappointed.The al-Qa'ida have fled to Pakistan. Why should they stay here to be killed by us? They can wait until we leave and the Yanks leave, and then come back across the border," he said.

"We have done very well to clear the area and finding the arms. But we are not staying here to hold the ground. That will have to be done by Afghan government forces, and are they capable of doing this?

"But it doesn't look good, does it? People have been expecting that we will find the enemy. We haven't been given all the right information". This was an analysis from a formidable, and highly respected Falklands veteran. But it was not "on message". The official mantra, coming from Whitehall, which senior military officers repeat, is that the deployment has been a great success, al-Qa'ida and Taliban are defeated, the war in Afghanistan is all but over.

In reality, there has obviously been a shortfall of intelligence. But why and how? At the forward operations base a large windswept "wadi" of rock and dust in south-east Afghanistan which became the hub of Operation Snipe, Major Gary Green said the locals had been coming up regularly to the base to show how friendly they are.

But how did he know that they were not Taliban or Taliban sympathisers? Headquarters have not supplied him with a translator. Well, said the major, he was good at sign language and pidgin English. Plus there were messages in Pashtu and Dari to wave in front of the tribal elders.

But the warlords have been playing the Americans to their own Machiavellian ends. One, Padshah Khan, got the US air force to repeatedly bomb and kill his hapless tribal rivals by saying that they were Taliban and al-Qa'ida. It is only now that Mr Khan is happily firing rockets at Gardez, controlled by the Western-sponsored Karzai government, that the penny is beginning to drop. " We don't know any longer whether Padshah Khan is an ally or not," Major General Franklin "Buster" Hagenbeck, the American commander-in-chief in Afghanistan, said at the Bagram base last week.

The origin of the problems being faced by British forces goes back to last autumn and Tony Blair's grand announcement that he was going to send thousands of British troops to Afghanistan. That was stopped, embarrassingly, in its tracks, by the hostility of the Northern Alliance and the lack of support from the Americans. The Americans then carried out two land offensives, at Tora Bora, and Operation Anaconda in Gardez, with comparative lack of success because of a disinclination to commit troops to the fight due to the fear of casualties.

That, and the discovery that the "elite" 10th Mountain Division "don't do mountains", as one of its soldiers put it, led to General Tommy Franks, the US commander of Operation Enduring Freedom, to ask belatedly for the Royal Marines, with their mountain warfare expertise, in large numbers.

The intelligence given to the British force about the presence of al-Qa'ida and Taliban, came from Afghan sources via the Americans. Their absence is now explained away by portraying Anaconda as a great success which had taught the enemy not to congregate in large numbers and engage a Western force in battle.

Even if this is the case, the question that begs to be asked is that if al-Qa'ida picked up that lesson from Anaconda, why didn't the Americans and the British? Why deploy such a large force when the enemy is not there to be engaged? And what justification is there for keeping overstretched British forces there in such numbers for much longer?