Afghanistan: Soldiers' Reports Tell of Undue Optimism, Chaos, and Policy Made on the Hoof

Britain's top diplomat in Afghanistan has admitted to "misplaced optimism", and a senior commander has said that military policy is being made up as they go along, according to an account by UK soldiers fighting the Taliban, which will be published this week.

Operation Snakebite, by Stephen Grey, a journalist, describes behind-the-scenes tension between British troops and officials in Afghanistan and London, the poor state of the army's equipment, and the political and military chaos that occurred in 2007 as British and US troops retook from the Taliban the district of Musa Qala, a place regarded as a key objective in the province of Helmand.

Brigadier John Lorimer, commander of UK forces in southern Afghanistan, is quoted as comparing the operations to having been "mowing the lawn", when Taliban fighters returned quickly to villages seized but then let go by the stretched British troops.

Sherard Cowper-Coles, the UK ambassador in Kabul, described his job as sending back to London the unvarnished truth. "You know a lot of people had been rather naive about what could be done here in Afghanistan. There was still sort of a hangover of misplaced optimism," Grey quotes him as saying.

John Reid, defence secretary at the time of the initial deployment of 3,000 British troops in April 2006, said: "We are in the south to help ... the Afghan people construct their own democracy. We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot because our job is to protect the reconstruction."

Three years later military commanders and ministers admit that the situation in Afghanistan was little understood. General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the army, suggests the tactics were crude and self-defeating. He said that "in the early days the troops probably wound up - maybe still are - killing lots of farmers".

These are the people who must now be won over and persuaded to switch from growing opium poppies to wheat.

Brigadier Andrew Mackay, who took over command from Lorimer in 2007, said he had felt like a student - getting to grips with Afghanistan, thinking about counter insurgency doctrine and the principles of managing a large organisation. He said he was struck by the lack of clear direction from above. There was a sense of "making it up as we go along", he said.

Mackay signed a "ground truth" memo, sent to London, which listed serious problems with his soldiers' equipment. It noted that many of the engines of the Household Cavalry's ageing Scimitar reconnaissaince tanks did not work. Tanks labelled "working" could not even get into reverse gear without the driver first having to restart the engine, a limitation "not helpful in combat", the memo said.

A quarter of the Mastiff armoured vehicles were out of action for weeks because of suspension problems, and many of the new Vector armoured vehicles in Helmand were not being used because "the wheels just kept falling off". Heavy machine guns and reinforced Land Rovers were also in short supply, the memo added.

The operation to take back Musa Qala at the end of 2007 revealed tensions between US and British forces.

Grey quotes an American officer describing the two countries' potentially conflicting rules of engagement as a "huge friction point". UK commanders on the ground had to ask permission to strike targets inside the town, while US troops could fire without having to gain approval if it was considered to be in self defence.

US special forces were also accused, not least by the president, Hamid Karzai, of killing civilians, in their own raids and in action where they called up US gunships.

Grey says British forces from the Special Boat Service also killed civilians in raids. There was outrage, he says, over one SBS raid on an alleged drugs smuggler in the Nad Ali, in which a villager and his six-year-old son were killed. A soldier said he thought the man had been reaching for a gun but the latter proved unarmed.

General Sir David Richards, who takes over from Dannatt in the summer, is quoted as questioning "take down" operations which, he said, risked "alienating a lot of people".

Meanwhile British troops have not done reconstruction work because it is considered only for civilians - yet civilians can not do it because of the lack of security.