From the top down the forces can't be faulted, regardless of the cowardly attacks on the brass, when politicians like Bliar and Brown are the ones who make the rules and apportion funds.

You've obviously never served, though no doubt you will come back that you spent 150 years in the services etc. etc. yada yada.

In some ways the surge was a military success, but don't forget that it first involved negotiating a deal with the Ba'athist insurgents. Once they had agreed to support the West against al-Qaida, the military side of the surge could take place.

If you want reasons to negotiate with the Taliban then actually you should look at Iraq. There was no progress until the Americans were willing to sit down and work out a deal, even if military operations were used later, to stop extremists sabotaging it.

(You have to wonder what was promised to the Ba'athists. They've been given money and new weapons, but were they also offered some kind of deal about Iraq's future? The UN mandate for the occupying forces runs out at the end of 2008, and negotiations with the Iraqi government about replacing it with a treaty have been bogged down for months. I can't help wondering if agreement will be reached just after the American election, on terms that are not to America's liking.)

Now having been told by British military Commanders that Afghanistan was winnable, we now see them wanting to throw in the towel here as well.

Much more of this and we will be known as the ' cheese eating surrender monkey’s'

One can't fault our forces on the ground who are doing an heroic job, so one must wonder where this lack of nerve comes from. The Government certainly, but you must also wonder if the old men at the top of the military have become too fearful in their old age, and wanting to avail themselves of the luxuries of the £2.3 billion refurbished MOD Whitehall offices, or looking to get a piece of the luxury £230 million hotel and travel expenses the top brass have rung up.

I believe we could extract ourselves from Iraq with our 'honour' intact (even if the war itself is dishonourable) in fairly short order.

We will not win in Afghanistan so we might as well stop military operations as soon as we can. It may however be worthwhile to set up a favourable trading system with the ordinary people(s) of Afghanistan and, for instance, buy up the products of their opium poppies for conversion to medical grade heroin for NHS use. Trade may in time make them less willing to support terrorism.

The War on Drugs at home is no closer to resolution and no more successful than Prohibition was. Arguably it may be better for society to supply addicts with their drugs (e.g. heroin from Afghanistan) rather than criminalise people for something they cannot easily stop doing. Not an appealing solution, but dreadfully pragmatic.

Another question is whether the Harzai government could withstand the insurgency without Western support. General Carleton-Smith’s comments seem to suggest he believes that the insurgency must be reduced if the Afghan government are to be able to manage the security situation without NATO help. This implies that an unsuccessful surge would be disaster, likely to feed the insurgency all the more, and perhaps leading to the need for an open-ended Western commitment to prop up the government in Kabul. It seems therefore we have only two choices (i) a negotiated settlement with the Taliban or (ii) to ensure that such force is brought to bear against them that their resistance will be broken. The former seems the approach that is most likely to succeed but is only viable if the Taliban really aspire to make the Sinn Féin transition from political violence to mainstream political party. I don’t think it would hurt to have discussions with them to clarify what they would settle for.

We are now warned that this may take over 10 years, so there will be boys and girls aged 10 in primary school who's future is to be killed at 18 in Afghanistan because of decisions made now.

I think you should take a very sceptical approach, demand miles stones in the near future and hold those making the projections and decisions to account.

There are in a sense two types of insurgency. Alien and native. If we step back in time to Greece, immediately at the end of WW2, there was a Communist insurgency. It was essentially a Russian creation. Stalin agreed with Churchill that Greece was in the Allied sphere of influence, so he refrained from backing that insurgency. The Allies put a lot of troops on the ground and, to shape one of Churchills quotes to my purpose, made 90% of the country 100% safe. The insurgency could not fight effectively in the cities and so could not and did not succeed.

The key issue here is that there was no broad native base of support for the insurgency. Once defeated militarily, they were done for, gone.

This is of course in constrast to insurgencies where there are real native grievences which drive the insurgency – the Palestine and Chechnya being good recent examples. The people themselves as a mass hate and fear the oppressor and their atrocities and gross injusticies and military success is as such only temporary, because another round of insurgents will rise up over time.

In these cases, alas, I have almost never seen a negotiated solution. What actually happens is that time passes – years, decades of horrific suffering – and other events occur and eventually the conflict becomes irrelevent and passes away.

The Taliban exist because there are a considerable number of men in Afghanistan are in a situation such that the beliefs they hold lead them to support, contribute and indeed join and fight for the Taliban.

This is a native insurgency. Military victory will only ever be temporary. We are in effect attempting to impose our view, our vision of how the country should be – upon a population, a people, who hold a different view. It cannot work.

It is a tragedy it cannot work, because by my views – Thoreau, Mill, Smith, Hayek and Friedman – their beliefs are truly horrific. The State they would form – did form – is a cultural abortion. And yet it seems to me it is beyond our immediate power for things to be otherwise.

The real solution (in the sense of moving a Talibanesque society towards something which involves freedom) is economic. The country must prosper and form a middle class and the people as a whole must come to hold different views; and this takes generations.

It seems to me currently we are hoist by our own petard; having gone in, if we now go out, the Taliban will take over again, and then what will have been the point of having gone in in the first place?

And it is this which keeps us there; that leaving will mean our original effort was in error and all we have done, wasted.