In a small park just outside the sleepy Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett, there are 35,000 wooden crosses planted in neat lines. Each has a red poppy pinned to its centre; many have photos of the smiling faces of deceased British soldiers clipped to them by loved ones. The 'Garden of Remembrance', as it's called, is a dignified testament to the memory of dead British soldiers.
Wootton Bassett itself has received the bodies of fallen soldiers repatriated at RAF Lyneham since 2007, but this month the Union flag was lowered in the town's final ceremony. From now on, the British army's fatalities will be flown to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.
The end of Wootton Bassett repatriations, the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, and the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, have prompted a spate of television programmes and news stories. Britain is remembering Afghanistan and the 378 British soldiers who have died there since October 7th 2001. But what of the Afghan civilians killed in this war; what are their stories?
When US General Tommy Franks was asked this question, at Bagram Air Base in March 2002, he replied: "we don't do body counts". To a degree he was right. The British army, like its brother across the Atlantic, does not count the bodies of its victims. But Marc Herold, University of New Hampshire Professor, does.
His research is startling. In the first three months of the war (codenamed Operation Enduring Freedom), NATO's bombing campaign killed 3600 Afghan civilians. That means that by December 7th 2001, NATO had surpassed the death toll of al-Qaeda's 9/11 atrocity. For every 10,000 tonnes of bombs that were dropped, 2,643 Afghan civilians were killed - one of the worst civilian death ratios in history.
By 2002, the war had pushed millions of people into extreme poverty, and as the aid agencies fled the death toll rose. "The bombing prevented supplies from reaching the refugee camps", Professor Herold explains. How many died? In 2002 alone he "estimated this number as between 10 and 20,000". A total estimate of Afghan civilian deaths since 2001 is difficult, but a cautious composite exceeds 40,000.
The name of every British soldier killed in Afghanistan is known, yet estimates of the innocent Afghan dead vary by the tens of thousand. Take Karam village, 18 miles west of Jalalabad in Nangahar province. On October 14th 2001, a NATO bombing raid killed 160 of its civilians. Or the family of 4 in Kabul who, on October 15th 2001, were killed as an American F-18 released its 2000lb cargo, also leaving 12 year old 'Nagina' severely injured. What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Nagina, if she survived her injury, now lives in a country ravaged by war. Her life expectancy is just 45 years, and one in eight of her Afghan sisters die while pregnant. Over 400,000 of her countrymen are internally displaced, and a further 3 million are international refugees.
While in Wiltshire fields poppies decorate a place of remembrance for dead British soldiers, there are thousands of graves across Afghanistan that remain unmarked, and their residents go unremembered. And the poppies that blow in Helmand, Herat, Kandahar and Kabul are a sign not of remembrance, but a forgotten dead.