Under the command of the officer who is now Chief of Staff of the British Army, Sir David Richards, they had an exemplary record in the complex Timor operation, which called for an ability to empathise with the local population whilst also being totally committed to routing out those terrorising the territory.

Those same qualities are on display in Helmand province in Afghanistan where the Royal Gurkha Rifles have played a key role in an especially difficult operation aimed at targeting the Taliban and protecting the local population from their influence.

The Gurkhas have more in common with the Afghans than any other group in the Western coalition of forces. Their role is to fight on operations as part of the British Army, work with the Afghan army and mentor the Afghan police. 'We love them like brothers,' said an Afghan police officer. His colleagues like to sing Bollywood songs and share jokes with their Nepalese colleagues. 'We share food and we do everything as a team just as they do,' said Sergeant Shivar Kumar Rai. Indeed, with every recruit the British Army gets not only a new fighting man but a whole Nepalese family behind him.

With the rest of the British Army in Helmand, the Gurkhas' role is to take on the Taliban, protect the population from them even though, for most of the time, they are indistinguishable from the rest of the population. In an area where Europeans are conspicuous not only by their presence but often by their inability to speak local languages, the Gurkhas have been able to communicate through their knowledge of Urdu. This has often been the key to intelligence which would otherwise have been denied to the British, intelligence which made the difference between success and failure and death and survival for their comrades.

Often when on patrol in Lashkar Gar, the main town in the province, a European officer gathering reports from the local authorities would be told that there was nothing to report whereas local Afghan Army men would confide in Gurkha troops revealing the existence of incidents that would otherwise have gone unknown. This is a crucial contribution by the Gurkhas because throughout the Afghan operation there has been a chronic lack of human intelligence, the shortage of which has been a handicap for all allied operations since the invasion of Iraq.

It was the British East India Company that decided to recruit soldiers from its erstwhile enemy on signing a peace treaty after suffering heavy casualties in its invasion of Nepal in 1815. Following the partition, an agreement between Nepal, India and Britain provided for the transfer of four Gurkha regiments from the Indian Army. Their ranks have always been dominated by four ethnic groups, the Gurungs and Magars from central Nepal and the Rais and Limbus from the east.

The soldiers are still selected from these areas through a process which is one of the toughest in the world. It requires potential young recruits to run uphill for 40 minutes with a wicker basket containing 70 lbs of rocks on their backs. That does not deter some 28,000 competing for the 200 places each year.

More than 200,000 Gurkhas have fought for the British in two world wars and throughout the conflicts since, winning a total of 13 Victoria Crosses and suffering 43,000 deaths during the Second World War alone when there was a peak of 112,000 men serving the British. The Gurkha Trust claims that if there were a minute's silence for every Gurkha casualty in the Second World War there would be silence for two weeks. Sir Ralph Turner of the 3rd Queen Alexandra's Own Gurkha Rifles said of the Gurkhas: 'Bravest of the brave, most generous of the generous, never had a country more faithful friends than you,' back in 1931. That tribute still holds good today.

Sadly the Gurkhas remain an undervalued element of the British Army and it has taken the intervention of show business personalities to persuade politicians that they should be given something approaching equality of treatment as their native-born counterparts when it comes to retirement.

After a high profile campaign last year headed by the actress Joanna Lumley, all retired Gurkhas now have the right to settle in the UK but they still do not have full pension rights. Although pension rights are in place for those retiring from 1997, when the British handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese, they are still locked in a legal battle with the government for payment of full pensions for those serving before that cutoff point. At the moment Gurkhas are discharged in Nepal at the conclusion of their service while their pensions have been pegged about one-sixth of the level of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts because, it was argued, of the much lower cost of living in Nepal. That argument is now undermined by the desire of so many of the men to settle in Britain with their families.

The changes to pension rules in 2007 gave serving Gurkha soldiers equal pension rights with their UK counterparts.

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