Britain losing 'hearts and minds' in Afghanistan
By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph
Britain faces a critical 18 months in Afghanistan and may need to send troops in US-style "surges" to defeat the Taliban, a senior Foreign Office official has warned.
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He said that British troops were losing the battle for "hearts and minds" because of rising civilian casualties and war damage.
The official, who has worked for a long time in Afghanistan, told The Sunday Telegraph: "The next 18 months will be crucial. If we do not make progress in that time then we could be in deep trouble.
"We are losing the consent of the Afghan people and that is a serious concern. There is a real risk that Nato might win the battle but lose the war."
Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that the head of the Army has warned colleagues that Britain has almost run out of troops to defend the country.
In a memo, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, said that fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, training commitments and leave meant that only a single battalion of 500 troops would be available in the event of an emergency.
In the memo, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, he wrote: "We now have almost no capability to react to the unexpected."
The warnings follow a Commons Defence Committee report last week which said that Nato was beginning to fail in Afghanistan, and called for thousands more soldiers to be deployed to take on the resurgent Taliban and accelerate the pace of construction projects.
In their report, the MPs said they were "deeply concerned" that the reluctance of some Nato members to provide troops for the Afghanistan mission was undermining Nato's credibility.
Army generals fear that failure in Afghanistan could lead to an Islamist government seizing power in Pakistan and spark a regional civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
The high-ranking Foreign Office official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that British and other Nato soldiers were losing support because so many innocent civilians were being killed and their homes were being destroyed.
He said he feared that Nato might not have the "strategic patience" to continue the fight for 10 years or more, whereas the Taliban would fight on for 20 or 30 years. There was a genuine possibility that Holland and Canada would pull their troops out of Afghanistan after 2009, he said.
"We may have the watches but the Taliban have the time," the official added.
The official said that to achieve a serious breakthrough it was "crucial" to open talks with the Taliban and try to persuade their less extreme members to "cross over" in return for a stake in the government of Helmand and other volatile provinces.
But this had to be done by the Afghan government and not by Nato, he said. He feared that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader, was not strong enough to carry this out.
Increased reconstruction work, creating hundreds of local jobs and providing locals with water and electricity, was necessary to regain the support of local people, the official said.
Britain has provided 7,700 out of Nato's 36,750 troops, in Afghanistan, the second biggest contribution after the US.
