I FEAR for Afghanistan. After more than 30 years of covering the country’s turbulent times, I can’t help but have a bad feeling about what might lie ahead there soon.

Heaven knows how many times history has repeated itself in this long-suffering and volatile place. Britain of all countries should know that. Ever since the 1800s it has found itself embroiled in Afghanistan off and on, with substantial human cost.

The degree to which great powers and their armies have often found themselves inextricably caught up in Afghanistan’s troubles over the centuries was brought home some years ago as I travelled through the Khyber Pass en route to the Afghan capital, Kabul, just as the Taliban were coming to power. There in the pass embedded into the rock of the cliffs, I came across numerous metal plaques marking British regiments that saw service at one time or another in this wild place. Among the plaques was that of the Cameronians Scottish Rifles, who served there in 1936.

At one time I had relatives in the regiment and the Cameronians were originally barracked in my birthplace town of Hamilton until disbanded in 1968, a ceremony I recall attending as a 10-year-old boy. Seeing that plaque only added to my sense of poignancy over Britain’s long-term military engagement with Afghanistan.

In more recent times the Russians and Americans too of course have also found themselves victims of the Afghan military mire. Which brings me back to why I fear for what lies ahead.

I’ve now lost count of how many times politicians and generals of various stripes have assured us that the Taliban are in retreat. I’ve lost count too of how many times we’ve been told that the Afghan military is on the brink of assuming control of the country, and the government in Kabul is one step away from being able to provide security across the land.

For going on 16 years this has been the mantra of the politicos and generals. The reality though is something else entirely.

Ask just about any ordinary Afghan right now and they will tell you that all this talk of victory could not be further from the truth. In the past fortnight three successive attacks by the Taliban and the Islamic State (IS) group have killed 128 people, mostly civilians, in Kabul alone.

Those same Taliban fighters that Britain, the US and others spent billions of pounds trying to defeat are now, according to research by the BBC, said to be openly active in 70 per cent of Afghanistan.

This too before one begins to factor in the increasingly malign presence of a comparatively new player on the devastated Afghan stage, the IS.

The latest independent data indicating a huge increase in Taliban presence is no surprise, significantly higher than the most recent assessment by the Nato-led coalition, which suggests the Islamists contest or control just 44 per cent of territory as of October last year. That figure in itself should be cause for worry, while the independent research should be setting alarm bells ringing.

How can it be that more than 15 years after the West’s initial engagement in Afghanistan the country appears not only to be in a worst state than when we ventured in, but might soon witness an escalation in the war that could see the UK sucked back into a role there.

Barring a few “advisers” on the ground, it’s now been four years since Britain extricated itself from its military deployment in Afghanistan. It’s hard also to imagine any political or public appetite for re-engaging even if the UK had the military resources to do so.

But then again as a Nato member who knows what future demands might be placed upon the UK, not least when we have a Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary who seem increasingly willing to dance to the Trump administration’s tune.

The simple fact is that the same Donald Trump who promised to put “America first” and pull the US back from foreign military involvement, is now himself beginning to sing a very different song.

“We’re going to finish what we have to finish…what nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it,” Mr Trump insisted earlier this week to UN ambassadors on the Security Council.

During his State of the Union address, he was similarly at pains to point out how “our warriors in Afghanistan have new rules of engagement”.

The inescapable fact is that in the coming months, the total number of American troops in Afghanistan will grow to an estimated 15,000. Nearly one-third of them, 4,000, will have been sent under Mr Trump’s new war strategy.

It might be a long way off the 100,000 US troops that were in Afghanistan at one point and failed to make headway even then, but it’s a start, and we all know from bitter experience where such things can lead.

Only the most naive would not see this for the beginning of mission creep not unlike that which led to the Nato-led coalition being bogged down in Afghanistan until now. Only the most naive too would imagine for a moment that as the US finds itself more deeply involved in Afghanistan, the same Mr Trump would not make demands of his Nato allies, Britain included, whether they like it or not.

Mr Trump can be accused of many things, but certainly not a reluctance to make demands of others, especially should it involve taking US foreign policy in a direction he promised not to and with the possibility of losing political support at home.

How curious it is too that as Mr Trump recommits to the war, the US defence department has for the first time banned its inspector in Afghanistan from publishing a report data on how much of the country is controlled by the Taliban and IS.

As the author of the report, John Sopko, the US’s inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (Sigar) put it: “The Taliban know how much they control and the US military does, the only ones who don’t are the American people who are paying for it.”

Let’s make sure that here in the UK we too don’t start paying the cost of getting bogged down in the Afghanistan mire yet again.