British troops could be the last to leave Afghanistan after it emerged that a new “road map” for handing over control would not include the southern provinces.

Sources told The Daily Telegraph that commanders were looking at creating a “critical mass” of provinces that would be able to withstand a surge of Taliban activity. Those are likely to be in the north of the country rather than Helmand in the south, where British forces are concentrated. British troops have born the brunt of the Afghan insurgency since they arrived in Helmand in 2006 and, although stability has been returned to some districts, the overall situation in the province remains dangerous.

The neighbouring provinces of Kandahar, Uruzgan and Paktika are also highly unstable.

The new framework for the handover of control in Afghanistan was agreed by Nato foreign ministers at a meeting in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, last week.

Gordon Brown had said last year that a handover of Helmand districts would be a vital part of the process of withdrawing British troops.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general, insisted that the process should be “conditions based not calendar based” but he said there was now a “road-map” in place.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said: “We believe that with sufficient attention, training and mentoring, the Afghans are perfectly capable of defending themselves against insurgents.” But she added: “Does that mean it will be smooth sailing? I don’t think so. Look at Iraq.”

No details on conditions required for a handover were disclosed but it is understood they involve the ability of Afghan forces to withstand attack, a provincial government that includes different ethnic and tribal elements, and a level of development activity that is improves the lives of Afghans.

Nato is keen not to draw attention to which provinces are likely to be the first to be handed back. But they are likely to include Bamyan, where the Taliban blew up the 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in 2001, and Panjshir, the home of the anti-Taliban forces before the war.

The decision on when that point is reached will be made by commanders of the Nato force on the ground and then approved by the Afghan cabinet and the North Atlantic Council.

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A commanding officer today relived the “grim” moment a US aircraft dropped a 500lb bomb on a position held by British troops, killing three soldiers.

Privates Aaron McClure, Robert Foster, both 19, and John Thrumble, 21, were under intense fire in Afghanistan’s Helmand province when the F15 fighter jet, called in to help, dropped the bomb on them instead of a Taliban position a kilometre further north.

The inquest had previously heard that grid co-ordinates communicated between an air controller and an American weapons officer “did not marry up”.

McClure, of Ipswich, Suffolk; Foster, of Harlow, Essex; and Thrumble, of Maldon, Essex, all of 7 Platoon, B Company, 1st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment, died in the blast on 23 August 2007.

Today at Wiltshire coroner’s court, Major Tony Borgnis, officer commanding B Company, told the inquest the men came under some of the heaviest fire he had experienced outside a village called Mazdurak, in Kajaki district.

The company’s fire support group, positioned on high ground nicknamed Essex Ridge, also came under attack from Taliban in the nearby village of Risaji.

Borgnis said it was at this stage that he decided to call in air support – to drop ordnance on Risaji. He was on a corrugated rooftop in Mazdurak when he witnessed the explosion just 90 metres away.

He said: “Obviously I knew with the size of the explosion that it was close air support that had engaged in the wrong place. I immediately got on the radio to confirm if they could count the men – see if there were any casualties. I got an immediate response from 6 Platoon who confirmed it had happened close to them but everyone was OK, but I could not get any response from 7 Platoon at all.

“I kept trying to find out what had happened – I knew in my heart what happened. I was hoping everyone was OK in 7 Platoon, but I knew the platoon sergeant and commander very well and they always answered my calls quickly, so I knew something was wrong.”

After letting off smoke canisters to provide cover, and under continued heavy fire and darkening skies, Borgnis ordered extraction of the casualties. He said: “I will just paint the scene – as you can imagine it was pretty grim. We had to extract across open ground. We were still being fired upon. It was getting dark.”

McClure and Thrumble were killed instantly. Borgnis said Foster was found under a metre of rubble. A postmortem examination showed he died of asphyxia.

Earlier today, Hilary Meredith, who represents the dead soldiers’ relatives attending the inquest, said the families wanted “total transparency” from the Ministry of Defence. “The families are here today to support their boys who were all fatally injured in this incident. It’s extremely difficult to understand how in today’s modern warfare an incident like this can happen and be allowed to happen. There are lessons to be learned by the MoD. There needs to be total transparency when incidents like this happen. The families need to have the truth and facts from day one.”

The inquest continues.

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Contingency plans include the possible wholesale withdrawal of the 9,500 British troops from Helmand to neighbouring Kandahar, the Taliban heartland, where US-led commanders are finalising plans for the largest counterinsurgency and “hearts and minds” operation since 2001.Canada, which has provided the bulk of Nato troops in Kandahar, says it will withdraw all its forces there next year.

Though there is broad Conservative and Liberal Democrat support for the government’s strategy in Afghanistan, there has been tension over the role played by the British in Sangin, the area of Helmand where 800 soldiers are deployed. It has been described by commanders as one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan – eight British soldiers were killed there last month alone.

The death toll has led the Tories to question the value of keeping troops there. A senior source said when Cameron visited Afghanistan in December, he sent a message via the ambassador to Kabul, Mark Sedwill, that the party would not criticise the government if it pulled out of areas of Helmand such as Musa Qala and Sangin where the army was overstretched. Musa Qala has been handed over, but when Cameron raised the issue of withdrawal from these areas in parliament, he was rebuffed and told that “these are judgments for generals”.

After Barack Obama‘s surge, there are now more US troops in Helmand than British. But the removal of British forces from the province, where commanders say they have built strong relations with local governors and tribal elders, will not be popular with UK defence chiefs. “There would be huge resistance from the MoD all the way to the chief of defence staff [Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup] given there has been huge British investment in Camp Bastion,” a senior and well-placed official told the Guardian. “A large amount of British blood and treasure has been invested in Helmand,” another official said.

Britain’s presence there is costing about £5bn a year. A total of 281 personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001, 248 as a result of hostile action. Ministers and officials have made it clear they are concerned about the lack of visible progress in Afghanistan and growing scepticism about the role of British forces there. A survey today of more than 2,000 defence analysts conducted by the Royal United Services Institute showed just 57% agreed that current operations in Afghanistan played “an intrinsic part in maintaining the UK’s security”.

Ministers and officials privately concede they have had difficulty in getting their message across, partly because they do not seem convinced that current operations are the only bulwark against further al-Qaida-sponsored terrorist attacks.

The precise role that British troops will play in the future has been an issue for some months now. US marines may take over specific districts and towns where overstretched British troops have been vulnerable to roadside bombs and small arms fire. Control of Musa Qala, a key town in northern Helmand twice captured by British troops where 23 were killed, was handed over to US marines last month. The 500 British troops who were there will be redeployed to “thicken and deepen” the British presence in central Helmand, closer to areas where thousands have been engaged in Operation Moshtarak with US and Afghan troops, defence officials said.

British troops may also give up their role defending the area around the Kajaki dam, a US-led aid project.

A key question is whether they will also leave Sangin. All British defence officials would say was that the 800 UK troops there could be reinforced by US soldiers.

US commanders are now hoping that British troops will make up the shortfall in the number of Nato soldiers available to train Afghan forces. “Nato forces until now have not seen training as a main military operation. It requires a unique skill set,” James Appathurai, chief Nato spokesman, said on a visit to London last week.

Nato commanders were having “great trouble” finding 500 more trainers, he said.

Nato foreign ministers will meet in Tallin, the Estonian capital, tomorrow amid uncertainty about whether there will be sufficient trained Afghan forces to start taking over responsibility for security in local districts by the end of the year – a key part of Nato’s exit strategy.

Nato commanders, meanwhile, are far from confident about the long-term success of Operation Moshtarak, designed to clear the Taliban out of central Helmand, in particular the district of Marjah. “It is too early for a final assessment,” said Appathurai. “It is going in the right direction, but we have to be patient.”

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As with so many of the Helmand towns where the British are present the bazaar in Sangin is officially “thriving”.

Indeed, recent visitors have to admit that there are signs of commerce in the long thin strip of shops. But the rest, says David Gill, a photographer who visited Sangin three times last year, is like “a ghost town in Death Valley where you drive through and all you see is a sign flapping in the wind”.

In some of the more benign areas of Helmand children may offer the occasional wave to passing soldiers, but in Sangin all you can feel is the “intense hatred of a people who hate everything you stand for”, Gill says. Development work has been glacial. The new “traditional courthouse” is little more than a room with six plastic chairs.

When the British arrived in June 2006 they had to fight while filling sandbags and constructing their base at FOB (Forward Operation Base) Jackson. Sometimes the base came close to being overrun.

The figures for British deaths in Sangin and its immediate surroundings make stark reading: of the 281 servicemen and women who have died in Afghanistan, 88 lost their lives there.

For some soldiers the notoriety of the posting brings out grim humour. They wear T-shirts with the motif “Wishtan you were here?”, in reference to the notorious FOB Wishtan, with a mixture of pride and irony.

It took months to clear all the alleyways around Wishtan that had been intensively seeded with homemade bombs. No wonder Jerry Thomas, the brigadier in charge of British forces in Helmand when they first moved into Sangin, was said to be deeply sceptical about the wisdom of the move.

Today fighting is still intense, and in army spokesman Gordon Messenger’s words, Sangin is “the most challenging area in which British troops operate”.

Now the district is officially the country’s most lethal place for foreign forces, responsible for more than 10% of daily casualties of the entire Nato mission, as a result of its particularly poisonous mix of drugs and tribal warfare. With lots of water and fertile land, Sangin is perfect for growing the poppies currently being harvested for their opium sap.

Sangin is also well suited as a trafficking hub because of its proximity to the national ring road, putting cities such as Herat and Kandahar in easy reach.

The drugs industry has every reason to fight against attempts to assert government control, making natural allies of the insurgents in the district.

The Afghan government is in no position to assert itself against such powerful narco-traffickers who hopelessly compromise what little government capacity does exist. According to a Kabul-based diplomat last year the district had only 50 Afghan policemen and about 350 soldiers.

The abusive and corrupt police force, whose members think nothing of beating and stealing from local people, has been a constant problem, with the British seen as the enforcement mechanism for deeply corrupt Afghan authorities.

Drugs and weak government are further complicated by a complex tribal situation. The fighting between armed factions during Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s helped to fragment and weaken traditional tribal authority.

“The picture that emerges is one where a minority tribe controls the government and the majority, which is not in government, control the heroin. Everyone else gets angry and joins the Taliban,” says one Kabul diplomat with knowledge of Helmand.

The people of Sangin blame inter-tribal fighting and the drug trade for the dire security situation, but also hold the foreign soldiers responsible for the chaos.

According to two farmers currently staying in Lashkar Gah who were contacted by the Guardian but did not want to be named, the behaviour of the British is by the far the biggest problem.

One said: “The Taliban do not even have a bakery that they can give bread to the people, but still most people support the Taliban – that’s because people are sick of night raids and being treated badly by the foreigners.”

This article was amended on 23 April 2010. The original subheading quoted a visiting photographer. This has been changed to quote a local farmer.

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Nato plans to spend more than $1 billion (£648 million) over the next five years tempting Taleban foot soldiers to lay down their arms.

But research by a Kabul-based thinktank warns that those efforts could make matters worse by swelling the ranks of the insurgency, exacerbating village level feuds and fuelling government corruption.

The report, titled Golden Surrender, by the independent Afghanistan Analysts Network, is highly critical of the British-backed Peace and Reconciliation Scheme (PTS), established in 2005, which it says has been left to flounder under bad leadership with neither the political nor the financial capital it required. It is those rotten foundations on which Nato and the Afghan government must now build as part of its two-pronged negotiation strategy of reaching out to insurgent fighters while offering political accommodation to their ideological masters.

Nato claims there are up to 36,000 Taleban foot soldiers, most of them are fighting in southern Afghanistan. The PTS claims to have reconciled just 646, less than 2 per cent, over five years, including 33 commanders.

“Several of these have reportedly rejoined the insurgency, including a number of low to mid-level commanders who are currently active in Helmand…Uruzgan and Kandahar,” the report says.

One man identified as Mullah Mirza was reported to have returned to fight in Marjah, in Helmand, where thousands of US, British and Afghan troops launched Operation Moshtarak earlier this year.

A second commander, identified only as Azizullah, is reportedly fighting in Kajaki, also in Helmand, where British troops are guarding a massive hydroelectric dam. Efforts to repair the dam have been put on hold because engineers cannot get enough concrete through Taleban-held towns nearby.

Two others are fighting in Uruzgan, where US, Dutch and Australian troops are based, and the remaining four are active in Kandahar, the research found. Nato plans to launch a major operation in Kandahar in the summer.

“Most of these commanders were inactive for six to 18 months, waiting for the PTS to deliver on its promises,” the report says. “Once it became apparent that no support would be forthcoming they simply rejoined the fight.”

The Times was unable to corroborate the report’s findings, partly because Taleban commanders change their names every few months and the eight men referred to are not well known.

But officials in southern Afghanistan said it was known that fighters had reconciled and then reverted to the insurgency in the past.

“During my tenure as governor, two or three times the Taleban came through PTS and then went back to the Government,” the former governor of Uruzgan province, Engineer Assadullah Hamdam, told The Times.

Fighters are rarely motivated by money alone, the report says, but a complex mix including status, grievances with the Government, anger at civilian casualties and long-held personal enmities.

Reports of millions of dollars available to lure these people out of the fight risks tempting more people to join the insurgency – albeit temporarily – to benefit. Meanwhile, loyal government supporters “may become resentful, even hostile, if they see resources being channelled to anti?government groups”.

Protecting fighters who opt to swap sides will also prove difficult if the Taleban carry out threats of retribution.

Major General Richard Barrons, who heads Nato’s reintegration taskforce, told The Times last month that Nato would back community defence initiatives, which critics have branded militias, to protect communities who swap sides.

“Until we have grown the police we need a mechanism that delivers security, without fixing all the force that we have now,” he said.

“It’s very likely that the Local Defence Initiative will be part of the reintegration solution.”

A report by the Afghan NGO Safety Office, which provides independent security advice to charities across Afghanistan, warned that the first such scheme in eastern Afghanistan “not only devastated those areas with inter-tribal conflict but also appears to have ignited a power struggle within [a] neighbouring… district as tribal leaders there vie for a similar deal”.

The bleak quarterly assessment warns charity staff to prepare for Nato’s withdrawal by late 2011. “We note that International military forces have made their withdrawal contingent on being able to demonstrate two key… conditions: a degraded armed opposition and an improved government security force,” it states.

“We assess, perhaps cynically, that there is an awareness neither of these conditions can be genuinely extant in time and so strategies to create the perception of them are being pursued instead.”

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The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had issued an apology Sunday for the deaths of 12 civilians who were killed in Marjah, saying that an American rocket “failed to hit intended target” and struck a house 300 yards away. U.S. and Afghan forces in a mixed unit had come under sustained fire before American troops fired the rocket.

However, Afghanistan’s interior minister, Hanif Atmar, gave a different account Monday, saying the dead civilians were being held as hostages.

“The Taliban were attacking [the soldiers] from five places. We took a decision to hit the fort [house] but we didn’t know they had civilian hostages,” Atmar said at a news conference in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.

The ISAF later suggested that the coalition’s initial apology had been in error. Coalition investigators now believe that the rocket hit its target and two insurgents died in the strike in addition to the 12 civilians, ISAF officials said. They are trying to determine whether those Taliban were holding the civilians prisoner.

Before the operation began, the ISAF had picked up some intelligence that the Taliban planned to detain civilians at gunpoint, ISAF officials said. Now, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Taliban in Marjah are trying to force their way into civilian homes.

There were further indications that Taliban fighters may be taking refuge in homes and setting the residents up as human shields. The ISAF announced Monday that it had killed three other civilians accidentally in the previous 48 hours in Operation Moshtarak, which means “together” in the Dari language. One of the dead men was “inside a building that was used by insurgents” during an engagement, the ISAF said.

The U.S.-led international force has targeted erroneously before but has tried to minimize civilian casualties to win popular support for its campaign.

Separately, an airstrike Monday against suspected militants in neighboring Kandahar province instead killed five civilians, the ISAF said.

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Officials at the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) say the focus of the coalition will shift from Helmand to Kandahar — the big prize for both the Taliban and the coalition. Kandahar city is home to around 1 million people, while Marjah, the target of the massive ongoing offensive in Helmand, is an obscure dusty town of 85,000 inhabitants that had turned into a Taliban stronghold.

A senior ISAF official, who didn’t want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said: “This moves to Kandahar. That’s the next main objective.”

Kandahar is Afghanistan’s political powerhouse. It was the seat of the former Afghan royal family and the base for Taliban founder Mullah Omar during his movement’s reign from the mid-’90s to 2001. President Hamid Karzai‘s family also comes from Kandahar, where his controversial brother Ahmad Wali Karzai heads the provincial council.

The Taliban’s priority is to take Kandahar, and the ISAF has been slow to counter it up to now, fielding a severely under-manned presence many experts believe was a strategic mistake.

Yet until recent months, a combat force of only 1,000 Canadian troops was in place to defend Kandahar. That allowed the Taliban to control large parts of the province and reach into the provincial capital with a step-by-step plan to capture Kandahar city. Districts around Kandahar, including Zhari and Panjwai, also have a strong Taliban presence, with their shadow courts and other extremist institutions.

The troop deployment in Kandahar is being ramped up rapidly and should reach some 6,000 this spring. Thousands more likely would be deployed to begin a major offensive in the province in early summer.

Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the Army’s Central Command and oversees U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that the Marjah campaign is only “the initial salvo” in a larger 12- to 18-month offensive that aims to drive out the Taliban and “clear, hold and build” stability in those areas.

There are 15,000 troops involved in the Marjah offensive, the largest of the war. Capt. Scott Costen, a spokesman for the ISAF’s regional command in the south, confirmed that an operation for Kandahar was being designed.

“The scale of what you will see in the Kandahar operation will be comparable to the scale you see in Helmand,” said Costen. “We’re still in the planning stages.”

Some experts believe the Kandahar offensive would need to be even bigger than the current operation in Helmand, because the Taliban are much more spread out in Kandahar and more integrated into the community.

Unlike Marjah, which was almost entirely in the hands of the Taliban, the situation in Kandahar is much more contested, with both government and insurgents present. Kandahar city is ostensibly in government hands, but the Taliban run a campaign of assassination and intimidation there and periodically stage attacks.

In districts around the city, a particularly violent group of young Taliban commanders terrorize locals, including the 23-year shadow district governor of Zhari, Mullah Esmat, also known as Mullah Zerghai, and the 22-year-old shadow district police chief of Zhari, Mullah Gul Mohammad.

“The younger generation [of Taliban] are very ruthless people,” said Hajji Mohammad Khan, a tribal elder from Zhari district. “The Americans don’t recognize them. They just stand there when the Americans pass.”

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Family and comrades of Lance Sergeant David Walker honour the memory of a ‘terrific’ family man and ‘rock-hard’ soldier

Tributes have been paid to Lance Sergeant David Walker, of 1st Battalion Scots Guards, who was killed in Afghanistan while fighting the Taliban.

Walker, 36, died on Thursday in Nad-e-Ali, an insurgent stronghold in Helmand province. He was the third British solder killed while taking part in Operation Moshtarak – a joint UK, US and Afghan assault against the Taliban.

His family released a statement which read: “We are devastated by the loss of David, who was a terrific husband and father.

“We are proud of the fact that David was prepared to do his duty helping the people of Afghanistan; he will be sadly missed by his wife Teresa and by all his family and friends.”

His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lincoln Jopp MC, said Walker was a “brilliant soldier” who was “quite simply, as tough as old boots”.

He added: “Unflinching, steady as a rock and just as hard. He was just what the world would expect when they hear the phrase, ‘a sergeant in the Scots Guards’.

“He died during a crucial operation as part of Operation Moshtarak, leading his men in their task of air assault, flying and landing beyond the IEDs in order to extend the reach of the government forces.

“A numb pride in his sacrifice is the only relief from the pain of his death.”

Major Iain Lindsay-German, company commander right flank, Scots Guards, added: “The company has lost one of its brightest stars. Lance Sergeant Walker was one of the most inspiring men I have ever met.”

The defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, expressed his “deepest condolences” to Walker’s family and friends.

A total of 263 British troops have now died since operations in Afghanistan began in October 2001.

Last night the MoD named another soldier killed in Operation Moshtarak. Lieutenant Douglas “Dougie” Dalzell, from Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire and a member of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards, died in an explosion in the Babaji area of Helmand province on Thursday.

The deaths were announced as the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said that Nato’s efforts to prevent civilian deaths during its operations were insufficient because innocent people were still being killed.

In a speech at the opening session of the Afghan parliament today, Karzai held up a picture of an eight-year-old girl who he said was the only one left to recover the bodies of her 12 relatives, all killed when two Nato rockets struck their home during the offensive in the southern town of Marjah. He called the incident a tragedy for all Afghanistan.

Karzai acknowledged that Nato has made some progress in reducing civilian casualties, and thanked Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal for “standing with us honestly in this effort”, but he added: “We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties. Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal.”

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The Union flag-draped coffins carrying Rifleman Aidan Howell and Sapper David Watson were driven through Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire for their repatriation today.

Sapper Watson, 23, of 33 Engineer Regiment – a bomb disposal expert – and Rifleman Howell, 19, of 3rd Battalion the Rifles, were killed in Afghanistan in the last week of December.

Sapper Watson was brought up in Whickham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and died of wounds sustained in a blast caused by an improvised explosive device on New Year’s Eve near Patrol Base Blenheim in the Sangin region of Helmand province.

Rifleman Howell, who was born in Sidcup, Kent, died after an explosion near Forward Operating Base Zeebrugge in the Kajaki area of Helmand province on December 28.

Their repatriation comes as Islam4UK said it would apply to Wiltshire Police “in the next few days” to march through the town famous for honouring dead UK troops, despite calls for it to be called off.

Anjem Choudary, leader of Islam4UK, said it was “full steam ahead” for the march, which organisers say aims to remember Afghan civilians killed in the eight-year conflict.

A date for the event, featuring 500 people carrying symbolic coffins, has not been set but it will not coincide with a repatriation.

The group has, however, agreed to call it off if Gordon Brown or any of his ministers agrees to take part in a televised debate on the war.

Hundreds of people once again lined the streets in silent tribute as hearses carrying the coffins of the two soldiers were brought through en route to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

Friends and relatives sobbed as the coffins came into view and paused by the war memorial where dozens of flowers were placed on top of the hearses with weeping mourners touching the glass windows.

A Union flag with Leeds United written on it was placed on top of the hearse carrying Rifleman Howell, a life-long fan who attended school in Rothwell, near Leeds, before joining the army in 2006.

Two friends of Rifleman Howell, Steven Stratford and Pete Bell, criticised Islam4UK for suggesting Wootton Bassett as a venue for the march. “If they want to protest they should do it in London against the Government, not here. Wootton Bassett is where the soldiers come back, all of them, as heroes,” said Mr Stratford.

Mr Bell said: “If they came to protest here there would be carnage. Imagine Aidan’s mother and father seeing that, it’s the lowest of the low.”

MPs from across the Commons have signed a motion urging action by the Home Secretary and local authorities to prevent the march, which they said would be “a gross mark of disrespect” to soldiers who have died or been injured.

The motion, tabled by Tory Nigel Evans, calls on Home Secretary Alan Johnson to “urgently investigate the breaching of public order and other related offence” and urges Wootton Bassett Town Council and Wiltshire Police “to ensure that any proposed demonstration that breaches the Public Order Act 1986 be rightly refused”.

But Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said he would be “surprised” if senior officers in Wiltshire seek to block the protest because any group has a right to march even if their views are “unpleasant and offensive”.

He said: “Our view is we will have to deal with it, people have a right to march. People might not like it but that is the law.”

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Major-General Andrew Mackay, who commanded 52 Infantry Brigade in Helmand when he was a brigadier, resigned in September after voicing personal doubts about the way the campaign was being run.

In a paper published by the MoD’s Defence Academy at Shrivenham, in Oxfordshire, General Mackay says that messages from London often had “no relevance at ground level” to troops engaged in contact with the Taleban. He described the messages from the MoD as “a diluted and distant memory” by the time that they reached the front line.

The British Army in Helmand, he claimed, had also “consisently failed” to understand the motivations of the local Afghans.

After returning from Afghanistan in 2008, Brigadier Mackay was promoted to Major-General and became Scotland’s most senior commander, taking charge of the 2nd Division in Edinburgh. His resignation was a blow to the Army because he had distinguished himself in Afghanistan and was highly rated as a counter-insurgency veteran.

General Mackay’s assessment of what he regards as the MoD’s failures in Afghanistan appears in a 40-page report, written jointly with Steve Tatham, a senior commander in the Royal Navy.

They call for a new “hearts and minds” strategy which focuses less on winning battles against the Taleban and more on understanding their culture, economy and psychology.

General Mackay led the operation in 2008 to recapture Musa Qala in northern Helmand from the Taleban. Figures in his report show that the proportion of soldiers killed in the operation was 0.16 per cent, far lower than in other comparable assaults. He put it down to his adoption of different tactics.

He accused the MoD of failing to learn the lessons from such successes. “From the top of the MoD through to the Army’s staff colleges, the structures, despite the best will in the world, are institutionally incapable of keeping pace with rapid change and the associated willingness to adapt — and quickly — at the same time,” the paper says.

“The reality is that we have consistently failed to understand that what seems to us irrational behaviour [by the Afghans] is entirely rational to the individual facing tough choices,” he and his co-author write.

He gives as an example the offer of democracy to Afghans, saying that such an ideal is “largely irrelevant” to many local people as they struggle through their daily lives.

Casting doubt on the MoD’s ability to change, he says careers in the Army are built on “budgetary and management competence” rather than an understanding of how tomorrow’s conflicts will be fought.

He warns that anyone who attempts to pursue “soft power” in the Army is effectively writing the death knell for their careers.

“Thus the UK Armed Forces have no professional information operations practitioners, no media operators or professional psychological specialists. In their place, well-meaning and enthusiastic amateurs are seconded from every branch of the military for two or three-year tours, who do their best with minimal training but who are unlikely to return to such duties again,” the paper says.

An MoD spokesman said: “The Defence Academy seeks to stimulate debate and discussion to aid the formulation of policy. While the MoD will consider the findings of all its reports, they do not represent the views of the MoD or wider government.”

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