The head of the Army has ordered his senior staff to make preparations for “a generation of conflict”, in a speech that the Ministry of Defence tried to keep secret.

General Sir Richard Dannatt gave warning of the dangers posed by a “strident Islamist shadow” and suggested that the British Army was “on the edge of a new and deadly Great Game in Afghanistan”.

He also told senior staff that the trust and respect of the public could be “increasingly difficult to gain” in the context of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The challenge of this generation is as great as any that have gone before us,” he added.

General Dannatt’s thoughts about the way forward for the Army were revealed in a speech given to a conference in London in June. The speech remained secret because the MoD did not allow the media to attend. However, under a Freedom of Information request, the contents of the address to senior British and overseas military have now been released.

In his address, General Dannatt underlined the importance of achieving success in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he said were the “all-consuming focus” of the Army at present. But he appeared to play down the prospects of achieving all of the main objectives.

“It is success today in these two theatres, however you define success, that, as far as I’m concerned, is both the top and bottom line because, if we fail in either campaign, then I submit that, in the face of that strident Islamist shadow, then tomorrow will be a very uncertain place,” he said.

However, he envisaged only “some form of success in Iraq” and spoke of “significant achievement in Afghanistan” as a short-term objective for the Army.

Gordon Brown said yesterday that progress in Afghanistan would be measured across a wide range of activity, covering governance, reconstruction, economic development and the building up of local security forces.

In a letter to Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, the Prime Minister also pledged that he would not seek an early withdrawal of British toops from Iraq for political reasons. “I believe that we have clear obligations to discharge,” he said.

Last year General Dannatt said he believed that the troops should be pulled out “some time soon”. However, in his June address, he seemed to be preparing for decades of fighting ahead — presumably with Afghanistan in mind. He had held a meeting of senior officers at an army development forum to address the question: “How do we prepare ourselves for potentially a generation of conflict?”

Hinting at his previously expressed fears that the Army may become burned out by the pressures of fighting two wars simultaneously, General Dannatt emphasised the need that soldiers and their families are cared for properly and given time to train for other types of warfare. “We need an army in being in five and ten years’ time, not just the memory of one that expended itself in the middle of the current decade,” he said.

“British soldiers should always expect the nation, the Army and their commanders to treat them fairly, to value and respect them as individuals and to sustain and reward them and their families with appropriate conditions of service,” he said.

The remarks were made during an address to the conference on future land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. The MoD banned the media from attending because it wanted General Dannatt and other speakers to be able to discuss key issues away from the glare of publicity. Whitehall insiders told The Times that the MoD was worried about the conference leading to unpalatable headlines the next day.

General Dannatt, who is approaching his first anniversary as Chief of the General Staff, said he believed that the general public had not yet grasped that Britain’s Armed Forces were engaged “in a wider conflict that may last for a generation”, which meant looking again at the structure and equipping of the services.

Referring to the Government’s expeditionary strategy for the Armed Forces, first outlined in 1998, he said: “The heady appeal of ‘go first, go fast, go home’ has to be balanced with a willingness and a structure to ‘go strong and go long’.” He said that the Army was “enmeshed” in helping to construct a modern Islamic state “in the tinderbox that is Iraq in the face of extremism and jihad [holy war]”.

He added: “We are doing this in a region perched precariously above a large proportion of the world’s remaining supply of oil. So it is, indeed, some high-octane context that we find surrounding current events.”

He also hinted at the threat posed by Islamist extremism within Britain. “The threats and challenges to our society are . . . global and have sympathisers in many societies and countries, including at home,” he said.

General Dannatt said that these threats could not be resolved by military means alone but required a “battle of hearts and minds”, adding: “These threats do not just face us abroad . . . increasingly we have identified that we need to understand our own home front.”

He underlined the importance of maintaining the highest standards. “The British Army is currently held in high esteem by our nation but this is fragile and under no circumstances must we take this for granted,” he said.

In May he had made clear his dismay at the damage to the Army’s reputation caused by the fatal beating by British soldiers of Baha Musa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist who was arrested by a patrol from The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment and subjected to 36 hours of ill-treatment at a temporary detention centre in Basra in September 2003. He suffered more than 90 injuries before dying of asphyxiation.

After the acquittal of all but one of the seven soldiers charged in connection with Mr Musa’s death, General Dannatt said that the investigation would go on to find the culprits, and he attacked the fall in standards and discipline that led to the brutal treatment of the Iraqi detainee.

In his June speech, he said: “The public will not continue to support the use of force in their name unless the Army is trusted and respected, and this may be increasingly difficult to gain. It is, therefore, vital that we, as an army, know what we stand for — thus our core values of selfless commitment, courage, discipline, integrity, loyalty and respect for others are increasingly important as the foundation on which success will be built.”

He concluded: “The challenge of this generation is as great as any that have gone before us in the last century. It is a battle of ideas, and the battleground will be unpredictable.

“We need to be prepared for a very wide range of tasks, from warfighting . . . operations to low-level combat within a complex environment, whilst critically maintaining the support of the population, the consent of the nation and maintaining our own values and reputation.”

Opium increases

— Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, where 6,000 British troops are based, has become the biggest source of illicit drugs in the world, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said yesterday

— The UN organisation said that Helmand had produced more than half of Afghanistan’s opium, which increased this year to 8,200 tonnes compared with last year’s official figure of 6,100, a 34 per cent rise. Afghan opium generates 93 per cent of the world’s heroin trade.

— Despite the presence of British and other troops and an objective of eliminating the opium crops, the area of cultivation increased this year by 17 per cent to 193,000 hectares (477,000 acres)

— The US says that Afghanistan has more land producing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined

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