“MY aim today is to convince you that we actually won the first and second Anglo-Afghan wars, contrary to popular belief,” said Colonel Dudley Giles as he showed a group of officers and diplomats inside Kabul’s Bala Hissar fort last week.

The fort is in ruins, destroyed by British troops in 1879 in retaliation for the murder of the British envoy. Giles is an accredited battlefield guide and in between heading Britain’s military police in Kabul for the past nine months, he has led a series of tours emphasising British military prowess on Afghan soil.

Down below in Kabul’s Nato headquarters, the most recent British general to attempt to tame the Afghans is engaged in a similar exercise of persuasion.

As General David Richards hands over control of all 31,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan to his American successor, General Dan McNeil, this morning, the message is very much “mission accomplished”. It is a message somewhat tarnished by the loss of the key southern town of Musa Qala to the Taliban.

Recent visitors to Richards’s office have been given a presentation entitled “2006 Achievements” that claims Nato “has gained the psychological ascendancy”. It goes on to cite statistics ranging from 6m children in school to 22m calls a month being made on the Afghan mobile phone system.

“In many respects I think we’ve been more successful than I anticipated,” Richards said last week. “At the start of the summer there was huge scepticism about Nato — could we fight, would we even still be here by now? Not only has Nato unequivocally proved it can fight but actually, militarily, it has defeated the Taliban.”

The fall of Musa Qala, where British troops had withdrawn after a much criticised peace deal with local elders, has nevertheless cast a pall over Richards’s farewells.

The attack was prompted by an airstrike near Musa Qala 10 days ago that was aimed at a Taliban commander named Mullah Ghafour but killed his family instead. He retaliated last weekend by invading the town centre but was driven out by local elders. On Friday he returned with more than 200 men and captured the town.

At Nato headquarters in Kabul yesterday, they were putting a rather desperate spin on events, saying the incursion proved to critics such as the Americans that the Musa Qala agreement had not been a peace deal with the Taliban. “We will take it back but in a manner and timing of our choosing,” said Mark Laity, a spokesman. “It’s a question of if, not when.”

Whoever ends up with their flag flying over Musa Qala, the general will not be returning home as “Richards of Afghanistan” as he clearly hoped when he arrived last April. But he has acquired widespread respect from both Afghans and diplomats as well as a nasty bout of whooping cough topped with viral pneumonia.

“General Richards has done a good job,” said President Hamid Karzai yesterday. “He’s tried hard and the situation is much better. But I don’t think we can declare victory.”

In fact he has overseen Afghanistan’s most violent year since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, with more than 4,000 Afghans and 191 coalition soldiers killed. The general, who before taking command had criticised the American forces for being “too kinetic”, ordered more than 650 airstrikes in September.

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