Talks With Taliban the Only Way Forward in Afghanistan, Says Uk Commander

Britain is stepping up pressure for a political and diplomatic settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan, a move set in sharp relief yesterday by the commander of UK troops who warned that the war against the Taliban was not going to be won.

The message is being delivered with increasing urgency by British military commanders, diplomats and intelligence officers, to Nato allies and governments in the region, the Guardian has learned.

"We're not going to win this war," Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith said yesterday. "It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army. We may well leave with there still being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency."

Carleton-Smith, commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, which has just completed a six-month mission in southern Afghanistan during which 32 of his soldiers were killed and 170 injured, said his forces had "taken the sting out of the Taliban for 2008". But he warned that the public should not expect "a decisive military victory". It was necessary to "lower our expectations" and accept it as unrealistic that multinational forces can entirely rid Afghanistan of armed bands.

He said the aim should be to change the nature of the debate in Afghanistan so that disputes were settled by negotiation and not violence.

"If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that's precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this," Carleton-Smith said. "That shouldn't make people uncomfortable."

Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghanistan's defence minister, expressed disappointment at the comments.

But Carleton-Smith's warnings were echoed by a senior defence source yesterday, who said "the notion of winning and losing the decisive battle does not exist". Carleton-Smith added that all the Nato-led international military force could do in Afghanistan was provide the "parameters of security".

The deepening concerns reflect what British defence chiefs are saying privately. The conflict with the Taliban has reached "stalemate", they say. They also express increasing frustration with the weakness and corruption of President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul.

Britain has denied that it believes the military campaign in Afghanistan is doomed to failure after the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported that Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, told a French official that foreign troops added to the country's problems.

The newspaper reported that Cowper-Coles had said Afghanistan might best be "governed by an acceptable dictator", that the American strategy was "destined to fail", and the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan was "part of the problem, not the solution". The French foreign ministry said the newspaper report did not "correspond at all with what we hear from our British counterparts in our discussions on Afghanistan".

Writing on his website on Friday, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, described the report as "garbled" and insisted that Britain did not support a Kabul dictatorship.

"The future of Afghanistan is not about appointed dictators or foreign occupation, it is about building Afghan capabilities with the confidence of the Afghan people," he wrote.

A Foreign Office official was reported to have described the claim that Cowper-Coles advocated a dictatorship in Afghanistan as "utter nonsense", and that the comments attributed to the ambassador were likely to have been a distortion of what he had said in the meeting.

British officials are exasperated with the Karzai administration, the slowness in building up a national army and corruption in the Afghan police force.

Violence in Afghanistan has risen to its worst level since 2001, when US-led forces overthrew the Taliban.

Aid agencies say the Taliban and associated groups are controlling more territory and it is increasingly difficult to provide the population with their humanitarian needs, let alone physical security.

After months of indecision and attacking western diplomats and military officials for approaching Taliban forces and their local commanders, Karzai said last week he had asked the king of Saudi Arabia to mediate in negotiations.