UK troops needed to save Kabul from Taliban forces

It has been expected that Gordon Brown would announce a surge of British forces and efforts in Afghanistan in the first two weeks of the new year in line with the increased American firepower demanded by General David Petraeus - as many as 25,000 more US troops are expected to be sent to the region in the next three months. However, a series of developments are likely to bring forward major decisions and announcements.

Petraeus now assesses that the capital, Kabul, has grown highly unstable as Taliban forces cut roads to it from the south and east. The Americans are expected to move in a battalion of up to 1,000 fresh troops to the capital in the next two days.

This weekend militants destroyed 100 Nato supply trucks in Peshawar in northern Pakistan - the third major attack on the major overland supply line to international forces in Afghanistan inside a month. A large amount of the supplies come through the Pakistan port city of Karachi, where transport managers have been targeted and killed.

Military analysts ask whether UK troops should be concentrated on Helmand

One convoy was ambushed south of the Khyber pass and ten of the armoured vehicles of the security contractors seized and driven off by the Taliban for their own use. The Khyber region is now considered virtually under the control of Taliban elements.

British military analysts are now questioning whether British forces should be concentrated almost exclusively on Helmand in the south. The major British military effort was concentrated there from 2006 because this was the biggest opium-growing region in the world.

Since then nearly 200 British soldiers have been killed, many more wounded, and thousands of Afghans have died as the British have tried to bring some semblance of law and to encourage development of the economy away from heroin.

But progress has been slow and poppy production has continued to rise - so much so that it appears now to be an embarrassment to the Taliban and warlords whose gangsterism it has funded.

According to the UN narcotics agency, the Taliban are frantically stockpiling morphine in order to stop the price collapsing entirely. Preliminary estimates of last year's crop suggest that southern Afghanistan produced some 8,800 tons of raw heroin in 2007 - exactly double the world's annual consumption.

British military strategists believe it has been unwise to 'lock in' the bulk of UK forces in one area of Afghanistan, just as it was a mistake to keep most British forces in Basra and Amara in Iraq. Britain, they say, should now consider raising its strength in Afghanistan to the size of a small division - around 12,500 forces in all - and place them under Petraeus's strategic command.

But both commanders and diplomats say there is a need to "state a compelling narrative" for what Britain is doing in Afghanistan and why British troops need to be there. They believe that British voters are increasingly sceptical and puzzled about what British forces are doing there at all.

Meanwhile the terrorist-commando attack on Mumbai has provoked an even deeper rethink of international strategy across the region. Kashmir and Pakistan now looks more vital ground for the battle with al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadi terrorism than Afghanistan is today, or is likely to be in the foreseeable future.