Thousands more soldiers should be deployed to Afghanistan to take on the resurgent Taleban and to accelerate the pace of construction projects, a committee of MPs said yesterday.

The Commons Defence Committee, giving warning that the shortage of troops threatened to undermine the whole campaign in Afghanistan, said that the size and strength of the Nato-led force should be “considerably greater than the international com-munity is at present willing to acknowledge, let alone to make”.

The committee, in a report on British operations in Afghanistan, said: “We remain deeply concerned that the reluctance of some Nato members to provide troops for the Isaf [International Security Assistance Force] mission is undermining Nato’s credibility and Isaf operations.”

Out of some 36,750 troops drawn from 37 countries now operating in Afghanistan, Britain has provided the second biggest contribution, with about 7,700 Service personnel, most of them in the south where the Taleban have been launching almost daily attacks on British and other Nato-member troops. The MPs said that if Britain’s mission was to bring stability to Helmand province in the south, it would require “a long-term military and humanitarian commitment”.

The MPs said: “We recommend that the Government clarify its planning assumptions for the UK deployment to Afghanistan and state the likely length of the deployment beyond the summer of 2009.” Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, has stated that the presence in Afghanistan will remain until at least 2009.

Part of the problem for the mission in Afghanistan was that the experts had been wrong when they said that the Taleban would fight with “asymmetric” tactics, such as roadside bombs and suicide bombers. Although both these tactics were being used, the Taleban had also conducted conventional attacks, relying on much larger fighting formations than had been envisaged when the Nato campaign began.

The MPs queried whether this “misreading of the insurgent threat in Helmand represented a failure of intelligence”.

Mr Browne admitted that knowledge of the insurgency in southern Afghanistan had been limited because, before the arrival of 5,000 British troops in Helmand in May last year, Isaf had had only 100 American service personnel in the province.

Mr Browne told the MPs: “The accepted wisdom was that we could expect a reaction from the Taleban and, indeed, possibly from others, but that the nature of it would be what people refer to as asymmetric.”

He added: “We were being advised by all the experts that that would be the nature of the way in which they would deploy their violence. It turned out that they did not.”

The MPs said that the Taleban had always been defeated in clashes with British and other Nato troops. But they cast doubt on whether the campaign was winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.

“The consensus of the people living in Helmand province will not be gained through the deployment of superior military force alone. Once security has been established, it is vital that development projects follow swiftly,” they said. The MPs said that one key area of concern was the thriving heroin trade.

The MPs said they were worried that the Afghan people seemed uncertain about Isaf’s policy towards poppy eradication and “that UK Forces, under Isaf command, may consequently have been put at risk . . . This uncertainty undermines the effectiveness of the entire Isaf mission.”

Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, said that the committee’s report was “a severe indictment of the Government’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan and makes a mockery of former Defence Secretary John Reid’s claim only last year that ‘British troops could be in Afghanistan for three years without a shot being fired’.”

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