On Tuesday morning, Afghan forces logged operations in 14 of the country’s 34 provinces throughout the country. Last Sunday alone more than 50 government soldiers died, 15 of them in a series of co-ordinated assaults on isolated outposts in Jawzjan province in the country’s north, where detachments remain isolated and surrounded.

There’s an almost total and complete disconnect between reality and the illusory world of mirrors being broadcast from the radio studio. The problem is that two different worlds can’t exist in the same temporal space: one has to go. This disjuncture is nowhere more apparent than in Afghanistan.

In Khaz Uruzgan, close to where Australia’s effort was focused, elite Afghan commandos have been similarly surrounded for what’s now a period of two months. The Taliban may not, strictly speaking, "control" the province, but Kabul certainly doesn’t own it either. Its soldiers remain trapped behind sandbags – unable to either escape or attack – and waiting for relief. Local politician Obaidullah Barakzai says the surrounded garrison does not even have bread and has been waiting desperately for relief for weeks.

The problems cascade. Because the insurgents control the night; because they can wander into villages and execute anybody who cooperates with the government during the day; nobody really owns this land. Because there is no front line there is no safe and secure rear area where soldiers can be rebuilt and soldiers rested. There’s no prospect of victory. Those conscripted into the army and forced into the line know the only way out is either death or surrender. Nobody wants to die, particularly when they know their death will mean nothing.

As the prospect of victory recedes the willingness of soldiers to take risks evaporates and the army retreats behind the sandbags. This battlefield dynamic is now too firmly entrenched to be overturned. Neither side can win so instead they turn their guns on civilians who can’t shoot back. That’s why, last Friday, 10 children were killed when a small, remote-controlled Taliban drone floated down to explode in their midst. Another three were beheaded at their school – the insurgents apparently didn’t approve of the curriculum. Yet this is where the ideological battle segues into more intimate, bitter rivalries.

Uruzgan Governor Sahfiq Asadullah Saeed is honest. Last week he told a Jirga, or council meeting including representatives from Kabul that he fears the province’s homegrown strongmen just as much as the Taliban. This is hardly a message likely to inspire his audience or convince them to support him. What was a shock to me, though, was when I heard who these strongmen were, because I didn’t recognise one name.

I’d visited this province three times in the past decade, and yet the names now are completely unfamiliar. That’s because the ones I knew have now all been killed off – assassinated or killed by the Taliban (or, in one tragic, confused case, by our own SAS late at night). Without an effective civil space, a forum in which the open society can flourish, it’s inevitable that only the most ruthless will survive and that’s what’s happening in provinces throughout the country.