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Afghanistan is back on the political map.

President Trumps three major security appointments all have a profound interest in the country, which separates them from President Obamas. Defence Secretary James Mattis, National Security Adviser H R McMaster and Homeland Security chief John Kelly all have military experience in the region.

Kellys son, Lt Robert Michael Kelly, was killed in Sangin serving with the Marines. In a speech in 2014 Kelly said the war did not end because opinion-formers had grown war-weary.

In the UK, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon is pledging more military muscle to shore up the Afghan army.

The renewed interest is partly because Islamic State has shown up in the south-east of the country and partly because Afghanistan is in a tantalising state of transition. So much Western blood and treasure has been invested in the country that it cannot be allowed to fall back in to being a terrorist state.

After decades of conflict the country has reached a kind of stalemate. The Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, controls the cities, the Taliban around 30 per cent of the rest of the country.

Everything about Afghanistan comes back to maps and borders. Iran on one side, Pakistan on the other, Russia involved against IS, China protecting its assets, particularly copper.

The saying goes that first came the Soviets, then the Americans and next it is the turn of the Chinese to try to control this country.

The British role is especially interesting. I have just returned from a couple of days in Kabul with a delegation from the Department for International Development (DfID). Priti Patel, its leader, describes the British mission as nation building a term very out of fashion during the George W Bush/ Donald Rumsfeld years.

The British Armys Camp Bastion may have vanished into the sand but everyone seems to accept that we have to stay with Afghanistan for the long haul now.

This means, along with training the Afghan army and providing aid for education and jobs, being party to Northern Ireland-style peace negotiations with the Taliban.

The acceptance of this is partly realism the Taliban has a solid base and steady recruitment from Pakistan. It is also a reflection of the changing face of terrorism.

President Ghani claims there are about 20 different terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan. The population may not like The Taliban, but at least they are home-grown unlike IS, which is regarded as foreign.

The Taliban is not asking for a caliphate and there is even talk of it having moderate members. Young men need employment and some have drifted to the Taliban for want of anything else.

One British military official repeats the old adage: You can buy a Pakistani but you can only rent an Afghan.

In Kabul there is no official Taliban presence, although there are enough insurgents to create tension.

It is more than a decade since I visited Kabul and its transitional phase still looks hairy. The DfID delegation travels by helicopter from the airport to the embassy in the fortified zone because the roads are considered too dangerous.

No one would think of travelling by road outside Kabul. They try to avoid convoys since an attack in 2014 on a British Embassy convoy in which six people died. Mobile reception is blocked while driving to protect against bombs triggered by phones.

The city is under surveillance from American airborne cameras.

Afghanistan is a cinematic place with a memory of tolerance and civic life before the rise of the Taliban in 1996.

The first lady, Rula Ghani, from a Christian Lebanese family, longs for the days when Afghanistan, much like her own country, was a cosmopolitan land of pleasure. It is a cruel reversal of feminism when mothers remember a freedom their daughters cannot know.

An Oxford-educated activist I meet in Kabul called Shaharzad Akbar says women everywhere are on their guard. She says that if she is out alone she becomes fearful of mens responses.

Women have retreated to the home in many areas. Virginity testing is still common practice. What inspires girls is access to phones, the internet and television, so they can compare their lives with women in the rest of the world.

Shaharzad said she watched Hillary Clinton lose the American election with bitter tears. Is that what happens? The crazy man gets it? What do women still have to do?

The criticism made of British and US policy in Afghanistan is that it was tactical rather than strategic. The population in return live for the short- term.

The President is doing his best to govern but the fragmented power bases are inherently unstable and the country seems always to be at the mercy of outside forces.

The latest threat is the one-and-a-half-million refugees returning to the country. Half-a-million have been expelled by Pakistan.

Some will certainly have been Taliban-trained. Refugees are also streaming back from Iran, and then there are those who did not get to Europe. Shaharzad observes that the world is in her country but wont allow Afghans in theirs.

Was ever a country so at the mercy of outside interests? Can Afghanistan defeat the Taliban if Pakistans madrassas continue to train the next generation?

Pakistan is suspicious of Afghanistans friendship with India. Iran is busy preserving the power of Shias.

Russia is believed to be ambivalent towards the Taliban, seeing a mischievous historical justice in disrupting the US/British intervention America did the same in supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviets.

Meanwhile, Russia contemplates gas pipelines and transport from the north. The UK looks to India.

In other words, Afghanistan is still at the centre of the Great Game.

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Sarah Sands: Will Afghanistan ever escape being a pawn in the Great Game? - Evening Standard