Revelations have reinforced UK's Afghanistan failures

At last we have real journalistic meat in the latest dump of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, which today revealed how Britain's mission in southern Afghanistan was criticised by top US and Afghan officials.

The criticisms, backbiting and sheer mistrust between the allies are serious and ongoing, and will have to be addressed — and quickly.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai apparently dismissed British forces as "not up to the task", according to the leak. He claimed it would have been better if US forces had been responsible for securing Helmand.

US general Dan McNeill — who led Nato forces in Afghanistan in 2007/08 — is said to have been "dismayed" by a British effort which "made a mess of things" in Helmand.

The tensions between allies have been documented. But the outright criticisms of the British by senior US commanders, notably General McNeill, have never been revealed in such crude and devastating terms.

British efforts in Sangin are also found wanting, though in four years more than 100 British servicemen were killed in this mafia drugs town, the Corleone of southern Afghanistan, and up to a thousand wounded physically and mentally.

McNeill and Governor Mangal of Helmand may think the Americans can do better than the British in Helmand, but the Americans went into Marjah this spring, didn't know who to talk to and handed over lumps of cash to Taliban frontmen.

WikiLeaks has only reinforced what we already know — the failure to build a durable national government in Kabul. The allies must realise that they have built a government round the Karzai clan that is at best ineffectual, and at worst one of the most viable kleptocracies of the modern world.