THE British general commanding all 31,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan has pledged to focus his winter campaign on development projects rather than killing Taleban fighters.

Lieutenant-General David Richards conceded that significant improvements were needed over the next few months to persuade Afghans to “keep the faith” with the Nato mission.

In an interview with The Times, General Richards said that he aimed to switch all the efforts of his 37-nation force towards protecting and enabling “visible” reconstruction projects. He was ready to “put a security cloak” around rebuilding programmes that would make an immediate difference to the people.

The shift follows months of fighting in which hundreds of Afghans have been killed in some of the toughest fighting experienced by British troops facing a resurgent Taleban. While not playing down the threat still posed by the Taleban, General Richards said he hoped that the “kinetic energy” that marked the first six months of his command would ease through the winter. Forty-six Nato troops have died in Afghanistan this year.

“Something that really hit me in the eye was just how important it was for the Afghan people for us to prove that we could fight and defend their areas. We did prove this but we don’t need to carry on doing this in the long term, and I hope the fighting element throughout the winter will be minimal compared with what our troops have had to face in the summer,” he said.

Speaking from Kabul, he added: “The security situation has improved. The level of violence in the last few weeks has reduced considerably, although there are bound to be tactical blips and setbacks. In the last three days we have killed, wounded or captured 150 [insurgents], mostly in the southern provinces of Oruzgan and Zabul.”

Now, under Operation Oqab (Eagle), General Richards, 54, intends to show critics of the mission that his troops can make a difference to the Afghan people and the economic future of the country. He said that it was easy for “armchair critics” in Britain to carp, but significant reconstruction work was being carried out and more road-building was planned for the winter.

One road project is to link Highway 1, which runs across Afghanistan, with the crucial dam at Kajaki in Helmand, which is being guarded by troops from 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines.

“I think in the last few months we have managed to stabilise the security situation and now I want to put a security cloak around the reconstruction programmes. Operation Oqab is the first pan-Afghanistan synchronised mission designed to facilitate more focused and visible reconstruction and governance,” General Richards said.

He has recently intervened in one area of traditional concern among Afghans: the taking of illegal road tolls by police. Cars and lorries are stopped every day on Highway 1 by police demanding money. General Richards said that he had issued a directive to all troops under his command not just to “monitor” the illegal activities by the police but “to physically intervene to stop them”. It was, he said, another way of getting the message across to the Afghan people that life was better under Nato’s watchful eye.

General Richards’s tactical switch away from killing Taleban comes as army officers, local officials and defence analysts gave warning that Nato’s daily “body count” of Afghan fighters could be fuelling the insurgency. The lessons of Vietnam suggested that body counts bore no relation to progress in the war, and more often signified the disaffection of the local population, they said.

Colonel Christopher Langton, an analyst in the Afghan section of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: “In Taleban culture death is victory, so the relevance of giving out body counts is doubtful, and may send out entirely the wrong message.”

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