goods.

Next summer British troops will leave Basra, and the Blair project in Iraq will finally be at an end. Britain will emerge from a campaign a shade longer than the Second World War, with little credit - least of all from its senior partner, the United States, which has now taken over control from the UK of operations against the Shia militias in Basra.

The Americans seem to have lost confidence in the British at the operational and strategic level, while neo-con gurus like Fred Kagan and Marc Reuil Gerecht have been public in their contempt of the British.

Worse, if anything, is the plight of the alliance in the dysfunctional campaigns in Afghanistan. There the British are fighting a war in Helmand to an American strategy - to uproot drugs, beat the Taliban and support their dodgy Kabul proxy, Hamid Karzai. Yet the Americans treat the British as just another part of Nato, an organisation they like to pretend much of the time they are not part of.

The problem for the British, according to a senior adviser to the forces of the Dutch, the UK's closest

European ally on the ground in southern Afghanistan, is that the American strategy makes them act directly against their own, British, national security interest. "What they are doing in Helmand just encourages and inflames more recruits to the extremist cause throughout Britain. The Americans have no interest in this."

Last week Admiral Mike Mullen (left), head of all US armed forces, hosted a high-level strategic conference aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, cruising in the Indian Ocean, to discuss the worsening violence in Afghanistan and the border lands in Pakistan. With him were General David Petraeus and General David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan who doubles as a Nato international commander. Their guests were General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of Pakistan's armed forces, and his staff.

And what of America's principal ally, Britain, with 7,500 troops fighting and dying along the Afghan-Pakistan border and across Helmand? Where were their representatives at this floating summit? None was invited.