Afghan campaign 'not doomed'

The denial came after a French newspaper quoted a report that London's ambassador to Kabul said foreign troops added to the country's woes.

France's weekly Le Canard Enchaine published on Wednesday what it said was a leaked French diplomatic cable recounting talks between Britain's Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles and a French official.

The newspaper said the French cable reported that Mr Cowper-Coles had said Afghanistan might best be "governed by an acceptable dictator" and that the cable quoted him as saying foreign troops were adding to the country's problems by helping shore up a failing government in Kabul.

Mr Cowper-Coles was quoted as saying that "the American strategy is destined to fail" and that the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan was "part of the problem, not the solution". The prospect of a dictatorship "is the only realistic one and we must get public opinion ready to accept it," the report quotes the alleged cable as saying.

The newspaper, a weekly publication known for its investigative stories, published excerpts of the cable, including a passage that quoted the British ambassador as criticising both US presidential candidates over pledges to send more US troops to Afghanistan.

"It is the American presidential candidates who must be dissuaded from getting further bogged down in Afghanistan," an extract of the cable published by the newspaper quoted Mr Cowper-Coles as saying.

The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of the two-page cable, which it reported was sent from Kabul to Paris on September 2. It said the cable was written by France's deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, Jean-Francois Fitou, following his meeting with Mr Cowper-Coles. It said the cable was sent to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

Writing on his website on Friday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband described the report as "garbled", and insisted that the UK does not support a move toward 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," Mr Miliband wrote.

A Foreign Office official, who demanded anonymity to discuss the purported leaked cable, said the claim that Mr Cowper-Coles advocated a dictatorship in Afghanistan was "utter nonsense". The official added that the comments attributed to the ambassador were likely to have been a distortion, or exaggeration, of what he had actually said in the meeting.