It’s hard to believe that it’s going on forty years since I made the first of those treks.

As a correspondent covering the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s, almost always those long marches in country across the mountains would follow a familiar pattern.

Each night our heavily armed band of Afghan guerrilla fighters would set off for their objective by starlight to avoid the Russian helicopter gunships.

Most were gruelling marches of anything up to 20 hours or more, accompanied by explosions that growled and rumbled from distant battles making the horizon flicker like a candlelit room.

Fear was a constant companion, its reminders never far away. The threatening look of some rival mujahideen fighters on a lonely mountain track, the silhouette of a distant helicopter gunship like some bloated dragonfly, or the bright magnesium flare spiralling above a Russian outpost as we slipped quietly by in the dark.

For all the dangers encountered inside Afghanistan back during those years of the Soviet war in the 1980s, there was always the comparative reassurance that outside of main cities like Kabul, Kunduz or Kandahar, the territory we traversed remained largely under the control of the guerrillas I was accompanying.

Fast forward four decades and Afghanistan is still at war, only this time another guerrilla force, the Taliban, now controls 70 per cent of the country against a US backed Afghan Army.

In a country wracked by seemingly interminable conflict, events of the past week have once again served as a sharp reminder that Afghanistan’s “bleeding wound” as Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev once called it, has far from healed.

That much was evident on the city streets of Ghazni last week, where Afghan troops and Taliban fighters battled for the future of the country. Only on Wednesday was the Taliban’s five-day siege of the city broken.

Should the jihadists have captured Ghazni, it would have been the insurgents’ first major urban victory since a short-lived takeover of the northern city of Kunduz in 2015.

The current wave of bloodshed has not been confined to Ghazni however. From Baghlan province where the Taliban overran an army base to the capital city Kabul, attacks by the insurgents claimed hundred of lives.

It’s hardly surprising that this sudden uptick in Taliban battlefield activity has left analysts pondering what lies ahead for Afghanistan, not least given that the country has parliamentary elections looming in October.

“The Taliban was able to mass, plan, and execute an offensive under the noses of the Afghan government, military, police, as well as Nato,” observed Bill Roggio, managing editor of online military portal The Long War Journal.

“They did this undetected, and even if the Taliban is not able to take control of Ghazni, or hold it … they’ve really struck a blow to the Afghan government and Afghan security forces, and Nato’s Operation Resolute Support as well,” Roggio added.

Other Afghanistan watchers were even more bleak in their assessment of events in Ghazni and beyond, with one US intelligence officer quoted by former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof as saying that if the US were to pull its remaining estimated 14,000 troops out of the country, the US-installed Afghan government would not last beyond a week.

Faced with mounting casualties and diminishing results and having spent up to a staggering $6 trillion, the West remains stuck in the Afghanistan quagmire and pressure on Washington especially has mounted.

The US currently spends about $5 billion on the Afghan security forces each year. Yet, the Afghan army and police's main task as defined about a decade ago of becoming able to secure the country still eludes them.

“Taken individually, each development is an embarrassing defeat for the Afghan government and its Western supporters,” wrote Krishnadev Calmur, a senior editor on The Atlantic magazine last week.

“Taken together, the setbacks, especially the events in Ghazni, challenge the US and Afghan government’s narrative of progress in the conflict,” added the long time global affairs writer.

It was US President Donald Trump, who during his election campaign promised to bring US troops home from foreign campaigns like Afghanistan. But faced with the harsh reality of a re-galvanised Taliban, he has found himself having to further commit personnel and materiel to the country’s conflict.

Along the way Trump has been determined to ensure that the US alone does not share the burden of taking the fight to the Taliban.

To that end the UK last week began deploying another four hundred and forty troops, effectively almost doubling its ‘boots on the ground’ to a total of 1,090 military personnel. It’s a move many believe was almost certainly done to assuage the US President after his Europe Nato visit last month.

For its part the UK government insists that the latest British deployment will involve little more than ferrying international advisors safely around the country's capital city Kabul in their Foxhound vehicles, hence giving rise to them being dubbed “Armoured Uber.”

But Afghanistan watchers say we have been here before and point to how all too easy it is to be sucked back into the conflict.

This weekend there were also concerns after Erik Prince, billionaire founder of the controversial security contractor previously known as Blackwater, was reported to have been pushing to present President Trump with a plan to privatise the war in Afghanistan.

Prince's plan would see US troops replaced with private military contractors who work for a special envoy that reports directly to the president. But many within the Trump administration are understandably opposed to Prince’s use of contractors after the Blackwater experience in Iraq when the contractor found itself under investigation for what many regarded as ‘rogue’ activities.

“This is something out of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Something like this will raise all kinds of practical and logistical problems, as well as huge legal, moral and ethical ones,” a US Department of Defence official told The Independent newspaper last month in response to the initial reports. “The military is not going to back this kind of freewheeling.”

Almost certainly such a plan would be catastrophic for Afghanistan, but despite Pentagon disapproval there remain worries that Trump might see ‘virtue’ in such a scheme and give it a green light.

For its part, the White House still remains committed to the strategy set out by Trump last year, when he said “winning”is still the goal.

But as Peter Apps, global defence correspondent for Reuters recently pointed out, underneath the rhetoric a subtle shift is emerging from both sides in the war.

“The dynamics are very different from when the United States and its allies deployed tens of thousands of Nato troops in the hope of smashing the insurgency for good,” says Apps.”

“It was a strategy always doomed to failure, not least because the Taliban always knew the foreign forces could not maintain that pressure forever.”

Apps insists that it was not until 2014 when the West pulled back its large troop formations that the “real Afghan war” began. A war he describes as being between a rebooted Western-trained and supported Afghan National Army and a Taliban that senses perhaps long term it faces considerable challenges.

Among these is Afghanistan changing demographic, whereby according to the UN by 2050 half of Afghanistan’s population will live in cities.

In such an urbanised environment, one inevitably more liberal and outward looking, the Taliban would face difficulties in sustaining its “neo-medieval philosophies,” observes Apps.

But all that remains a long way off and right now the Taliban continues to be a powerful and malign presence across much of the country even making inroads operationally at least into Afghanistan’s big cities.

The insurgents’ strategy appears part of a duel pronged approach to prosecuting the war, on the one hand holding peace negotiations but using violence and attacks to give them leverage in such talks. Afghan politics have always been characterised by negotiating while fighting, and more than ever it appears for the Taliban action on the battlefield is aimed at political effects as much as military.

“The Taliban want to gain as much territory as they can and make sure militarily they're in a secure position.” in case the talks move to a more advanced stage, said Omar Samad, a former Afghan ambassador to Canada and France.

Others though say its remains uncertain whether the Taliban are in fact interested in genuine peace talks.

“They are willing to talk, that's pretty common in any insurgency. But to seriously sit down and negotiate, I see no evidence of that right now,” says Seth Jones, a former senior Pentagon official in Afghanistan who is now with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Jones, who himself has been in contact with Afghan and US officials involved in the preparatory discussions with the Taliban, sees last week’s events in Ghazni as little more than business as usual for the insurgents

“This is just the prosecution of a war. What we’ve seen in the last couple years is the Taliban trying to focus on urban areas they consider vulnerable. We saw it in Kunduz two years ago and I think in the case of Ghazni this was an attempt to take districts around the city and then to push in fighters,” Jones told Voice of America last week.

Many analysts likewise point to the fact that from a Taliban perspective it might simply be a case of them believing they now hold the initiative and are themselves winning.

There are other factors too of course on both sides that contribute substantially to the sustainment of the war. Neighbouring Pakistan's role in the conflict is one of them. This resurfaced last week with reports that Pakistanis and other foreign fighters were among the dead insurgents in Ghazni. Pakistan’s own Taliban undoubtedly continues to help fuel the fight waged by its Afghan counterparts next door.

Factionalism within the Taliban ranks often makes it difficult to discern and assess any cohesive strategy when it comes to peace talks and in turn how to respond.

So enduring has this war now been that there are others with vested interests in making sure that a peaceful solution doesn’t happen.

“The war has now gone on so long that it has produced entire economies and career structures, and that itself make it harder to manage, let alone end,” says Peter Apps of Reuters.

“Put simply, from corrupt military contracts to protection rackets, some powerful people would simply now rather the current conflict and instability continues,” was his assessment of the prevailing mindset in certain quarters.

Last Tuesday, several Taliban sources said the group was considering a ceasefire for the Eid-al Adha holiday this week, building on a similar but previously unprecedented truce in June.

Given the violence of the past week though, few are banking on such a respite. Such is the fear of unexpected bomb and gun attacks even in major cities that some ordinary Afghan citizens these days carry on their person documents giving personal details including blood group or 'in case I die' notes’.

“This is not a piece of paper for myself,” one Kabul resident recently explained to reporters. “This is my coffin I am carrying in my pocket. No one knows when a blast might happen or a suicide attacker comes from behind you.”

Such is life for many in some parts of Afghanistan today despite years of military engagement and billions of dollars spent by the West aimed at making the country secure and taming the Taliban.

If there’s a sense of deja vu about all of this, then it’s because all those decades ago when I travelled with the Afghan guerrillas back in the 80’s, the Soviets then too faced much the same challenge.

“You may all have the watches," a Taliban leader reportedly once told a senior American official in Kabul a few years back, “but we have all the time.”

More and more that wry and bitter observation is taking on an ever greater resonance.