While I cannot speak for the Afghans of Helmand and what they think per se, I cannot imagine they cared what the label was. As you mentioned, the fistfuls of cash were what mattered, and the ever opportunistic Afghans played the PRT for every cent it cared to disburse.
When the tell-all books start coming out because the generals have time to write, one of the recurring themes is sure to be the degree of outright contempt that they held for the British PRT and the female (was she Irish?) leader.
If there was ever a case study for the civil-military divide, and why sometimes the two should simply not mix, Helmand will be held up as the example. It's a shame too, because we should have learned and retained the lessons from Somalia, where the disconnect between civ-mil and the gulf between respective operations became glaringly apparent and the Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC) first came into collective use.
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