Great Game – shame about the strategy

After nearly a month of intense fighting against the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan, involving a surge of 3,000 US Marines, the Americans are changing the guard. Their top US commander General Dan 'Bomber' McNeill is to hand over the command to General David McKiernan. It will mean a change of style, and perhaps a change in tactics, but don't expect the fierce fighting across Helmand and Kandahar to die down any time soon.

For all of this month, troops of the British 16 Air Assault Brigade and the US 24 Marine Expeditionary Unit, supported by Dutch and Canadian forces, have been battling to carve out a safe area round Garmsir in Helmand province.

Garmsir is a main route into Helmand and its neighbouring provinces for Taliban recruits coming north from Pakistan. It is also a

junction for shipping out paste from the opium poppies, which are enjoying a record bumper harvest for a third year in a row.

Since 2006 the fields along the Helmand river have been producing very nearly half of Afghanistan's exported morphine, according to the country's president Hamid Karzai. Nowadays Afghanistan is said to be the generator of more than 90 per cent of the heroin for the world's junkies.

Karzai likes to point out that 2006 was the year the British arrived in Helmand. But his criticism should not be taken at face value, particularly as there is more than a whiff of suspicion that some of the wider Karzai entourage - and the acolytes of some provincial governors - are deeply involved in narcotics trafficking.

However, Karzai's continual carping and criticism of European allies, particularly the British, underlines the severe strain the allies and the whole international effort are now under in Afghanistan. It is no rhetorical cliche to say that things cannot go on as they are ­ because they simply can't. Karzai does