UK 'facing 10-year Afghanistan war'

Leo Docherty, who served in Helmand province as a captain in the Scots Guards, said that UK troops were little more than a "big target" for militants in the south.

The high-intensity war-fighting they were engaged in was stoking antagonism among local people angry over the deaths of Afghan civilians and fearful for the opium industry which provides their livelihood.

He called for operations in Helmand to be drawn back to the area immediately around provincial capital Lashkar Gah in order to focus on reconstruction work there. And he warned that Britain risked becoming bogged down in the same disastrous quagmire in Afghanistan experienced by the Soviet Union after it invaded the country in 1979.

"If we keep up with high-intensity war-fighting and killing the local population, we are on a hiding to nothing and could be there in 10 years' time with more than 30,000 dead, which is what the Russians had," he told BBC Radio 4's Today.

Mr Docherty, who has written a book entitled Desert Of Death about his experiences in Afghanistan, was disciplined last year for speaking out publicly against the Army's strategy while a serving officer.

He said on Thursday that troops were told they were going into southern Afghanistan in 2006 to provide security for efforts to win the hearts and minds of local people with reconstruction work.

But they found that no work had been done to prepare the way for their arrival, and that local people were suspicious of their intentions, believing that the soldiers' mission was to destroy crops of opium poppies.

"It quickly became apparent that it was really high-intensity war-fighting," he told Today. "We were prepared for a mission of reconstruction based around a comprehensive approach combining the Army providing security and the Department for International Development and Foreign Office providing reconstruction and assistance with governance.

"What happened was that the Army was the only side of that triumvirate to have any kind of impact on the ground. We were the only ones present. We were there alone in isolation, unable to prosecute any kind of meaningful development or indeed win hearts and minds. We were nothing but a big target and the local population took exception to our presence."