IT always started with a jarring message over the base radio. Sometimes it would interrupt crew members having a meal in the chow hall or someone lifting weights in the camp gym or smoking a “stogie” on the makeshift cigar porch that sat alongside the US airfield at Jalalabad overlooking the mountains where the Taliban lurked. They called it a “nine-line” call, or for those readers unfamiliar with military parlance, a medevac radio request that included, nine vital points of information including location, casualty numbers and security at the pickup point. Within minutes, one of many Blackhawk air ambulance helicopters would lift off and, depending on the location, would return later with the wounded and all too often what remained of those that didn’t make it. Ten years ago, during the many months I was embedded with US medevac units in Afghanistan, I would often accompany those flights. I lost count of the times I watched the crew medics struggle to save the lives of young men and women, Americans, British, Afghans and other nationalities whose names I often didn’t even get to know. Some had wounds that were scarcely believable, torn, shattered, often beyond recognition.

Others had drawn their last breath before the “bird” could get them back to the field hospital.

All that suffering, all that blood and treasure for what? That’s what I’ve been asking myself this past week as the last coalition troops pulled out of Afghanistan after 20 long years leaving its people to an uncertain fate.

God only knows what those who lost loved ones or saw them return maimed and changed forever by what they endured and experienced must be thinking right now.

What too must countless ordinary Afghans be thinking, finding themselves as they do, once again abandoned by those foreigners who came with promises to make their lives safer and better? For them, the ordeal is far from over and indeed is set to enter yet another round of seemingly interminable bloodletting.

It’s over 40 years ago now since I first trekked across the border mountains from Pakistan into Afghanistan. In the years that followed there would be many such forays with the mujahideen guerrillas resisting the then Soviet occupation.

It’s hard to imagine that four decades have passed. That said, it’s even harder to imagine that in all that time those Afghans I’ve come to know during those intervening years have never known a single day without war in their country.

After the Russians left in 1989, there was a bitter and hugely destructive civil war. After that, the Taliban came to power hosting Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda which was duly followed by the US-led coalition that came to seek revenge after the 9/11 attacks. By now one might expect Afghanistan to be deserving of respite from all this killing, but that, sadly, is not to be.

Since May the Islamist inspired fighters have taken almost a quarter of all Afghanistan’s districts and surrounded several provincial capitals. Most recently it was the turn of the city of Kunduz to become encircled by the Taliban, the same city where 20 years ago I saw them routed at the hands of Afghan northern alliance fighters with the help of US air support.

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“We will be back,” insisted one captured Taliban fighter I interviewed during those days, drawing his finger across his throat in a threatening gesture to emphasise what this would mean for those who stood in their way.

And so now, back they are with a vengeance even if they have never really gone away. So desperate is the military situation in the country after the coalition withdrawal that thousands of Afghan soldiers in some northern provinces have fled their positions into neighbouring Tajikistan. Faced with such a rout, the Afghan government has had to make an extraordinary appeal for all able-bodied Afghans to stand and fight the Taliban advance.

For those of us that know the country well, there is real concern as to what this could mean. Already individual militias are digging in. Many are divided along ethnic lines or owe their allegiance to local commanders and warlords some of them bitter rivals that destroyed the capital Kabul in factional fighting in the 1990s that I witnessed. If ever the people of Afghanistan found themselves caught between a rock and hard place – and there has been no shortage of past occasions – then this is such a moment. The options are stark. Do nothing while the Taliban gain control of the country or arm militias that could lead to civil war. But then why should this bother us? The Taliban might be at the gates of Afghanistan’s cities, but “our soldiers” are gone, out of it, safe. While the country’s liberal educated elite in Kabul are also voting with their feet and trying desperately to leave the country, the vast majority in this impoverished nation have no such chance of escape. The Taliban can claim all they like to have changed but few buy into that, least of all those women and ethnic minorities that will bear the brunt of the jihadists’ return and their violent conquest and repression. Also, who is to say that should the Taliban take control the Islamic State (IS) group or al-Qaeda will not once again find sanctuary and flourish, perhaps engaging in that same transnational terrorism that the West sought to root out in the first place those 20 long years ago?

Make no mistake, the US-led coalition has not won this war, far from it. If success means anything to those that served in Afghanistan it means making it home alive.

For Afghans it’s a different story of course. Those few hard-won gains over girls’ education, rights for women and ethnic minorities and a fragile health system will all now be forfeit. To prevent that happening, they will have no choice but to continue fighting the Taliban and tragically, perhaps each other in a civil war.

For the West this was always an unwinnable conflict at heart. No foreign army that ever came to this “graveyard of empires” in past times has ever fared well in Afghanistan.

So, what then was all this death, destruction, and tremendous sacrifice these past two decades for if only to let the Taliban walk back into power again? Forty years after I first stepped into Afghanistan’s wars, I’m damned if I know.