The Afghan city of Ghazni has always had a particular resonance for me.

It was near there back in the mid 1980’s at the height of the Soviet war in the country, that I narrowly escaped capture by Russian troops before finally slipping back across the border into the safety of neighbouring Pakistan.

Wracked with dysentery and in the company of a wounded Australian photographer colleague whose radial nerve had been severed by shrapnel, we had lain on the floor of a battered bus crammed with dead and wounded Afghan guerrilla fighters for five days as it crawled across desert plains and hills towards the Pakistan frontier.

It was only near Ghazni that to our great relief, we at last managed to give our Russian pursuers the slip before making it out of Afghanistan.

Ghazni’s strategic position has always been important in Afghanistan’s seemingly interminable wars. Its proximity to Kabul and location on the major highway connecting the capital to the south makes it a vital lifeline.

It’s for precisely this reason that over the past week, this city of some 280,000 people has found itself at the centre of a fierce battle as Taliban insurgents sought to capture it.

It was last Friday when more than 1,000 Taliban fighters stormed the city in a predawn assault. Reports indicate that a number of foreign fighters aided the Taliban in their offensive, among them Pakistani and Chechen jihadists and even some al-Qaeda affiliates.

For a while it was touch and go with the Taliban gaining control of much of Ghazni before Afghan Army troops backed by US forces retook the embattled city on Tuesday. This though is far from being an isolated incident.

No sooner had the security forces reasserted their control over Ghazni, than the Taliban in the past few days have again attacked and seized large parts of an army base in the northern province of Faryab, killing at least 10 soldiers and capturing dozens of others.

The latest violence not only raises questions over much mooted peace talks with the Taliban but also casts a shadow over Afghanistan’s upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for October 20.

It’s against this volatile backdrop too that Britain this week deployed another four hundred and forty troops, effectively almost doubling its ‘boots on the ground’ to a total of 1,090 military personnel.

It’s now four years since British troops ‘departed’ from Afghanistan. During those 13 years of fighting hundreds of British lives were lost while some £40bn was spent trying to tame the Taliban.

During my time embedded as a correspondent within both British and American units, I watched as the consummate professionalism of those troops on the ground was slowly eroded by the stark realisation that this was a war that was unwinnable.

The new plan now the politicians duly told us was that Nato would formally end its retaliation for Afghanistan harbouring Osama bin Laden. It would withdraw its forces and leave the Afghan government and its military along with continued ‘advisory’ support to deal with the Taliban itself. Cue the UK’s latest troop deployment which we are told, 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 all these ‘jolly japes’ aside, the reality remains that the Taliban is in the ascendancy, and any support role undertaken by UK troops still puts them in harms way. That we have all been here before and seemingly learned nothing beggars belief. As does the fact that the UK government’s agreement to deploy more troops is almost certainly done to assuage US President Donald Trump after his Nato visit last month.

Mr Trump, a president who promised to bring US troops home from foreign campaigns is now faced with the harsh reality of a re-galvanised Taliban, and is making sure his UK and Nato allies are not let of the hook when it comes to sharing the burden in the fight against them.

Not that all of this really matters in the military scheme of things, given that the Taliban is now said to be in control of 70 per cent of the country.

Yes, that’s the stark reality of where Afghanistan stands right now. Seventeen years on since a US and UK deployment that has cost tens of thousands of Afghan lives, thousands of American and British lives combined and swallowed up billions of dollars, we are right back where we started.

Only last month the New York Times highlighted how the newest US military strategy in Afghanistan “mirrors past plans for retreat.” In other words it calls for American-backed Afghan troops to pull back from partially populated areas of the country.

This of course will ensure that the Taliban and other Islamist groups will effectively hold on to territory that they have already seized, leaving the government in Kabul to safeguard the capital and major cities such as Kandahar, Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad. At least that’s how the thinking went until the Taliban this past week threw a spanner in the works with its assault on Ghazni.

What is this ‘retreat to the city’ if not searing confirmation that the American installed government in Afghanistan remains unable to lead and protect the country’s sprawling rural population? Barely over one-quarter of Afghanistan’s population lives in urban areas.

If there’s a sense of deja vu about all of this, then it’s because those thirty or so years ago when I travelled with the Afghan guerrillas back in the 80’s, the Soviets then too in their own war had abandoned rural areas allowing opposition fighters to control most of the country.

We should have learned from the Russians own decade long experience then, but we didn’t. We should have learned too from our own more recent military campaign in the country, but it appears that we haven’t.

Unpalatable as it might be, the inescapable fact is that any chance of a political solution in Afghanistan right now is just as remote as a military one. Once again slowly but surely we are being drawn back into the Afghanistan quagmire, and it’s only a matter of time before it costs us dearly.