Nato’s mission in Afghanistan is being undermined by troop shortages and by the numerous operational restrictions which individual nations continue to impose on their troops, the military head of the alliance said yesterday.

As two German soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing in the usually quiet northern town of Kunduz, General John Craddock, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said there were now 70 national “caveats” which prevent troops from countries such as Germany, Spain, Italy and France from performing certain operational missions without first receiving authorisation from their governments.

Berlin has the power to veto any German soldiers from being redeployed from Kunduz to the southern provinces where the Taleban have concentrated their attacks on Nato forces.

Bomb attacks in the north are relatively rare but yesterday a suicide bomber targeted a German convoy, killing two soldiers and five Afghan children. Germany has about 3,300 troops in northern Afghanistan.

General Craddock, an American, accused Nato of demonstrating a “wavering” political will in Afghanistan. Although he has spoken out on a number of occasions about the need for more alliance troops, his remarks yesterday underlined the growing alarm over the way the campaign is going, following a summer resurgence by the Taleban. More than 230 foreign soldiers have been killed by insurgents in Afghanistan so far this year, most of them from bomb attacks.

General Craddock told an audience at the London-based Royal United Services Institute: “It is this wavering political will that impedes operational progress and brings into question the relevance of the alliance here in the 21st century.”

The campaign in Afghanistan, he said, was suffering from manpower shortcomings, as well as the national restrictions. The alliance, he said, needed to look intently “at what they really wanted to achieve”.

General Craddock’s gloomy prognosis of the campaign in Afghanistan follows similarly downbeat comments in recent weeks by Brigadier Mark-Carleton-Smith, who has just completed his tour as British forces commander in the south, and by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador to Kabul, whose apparent pessimism about the mission was leaked in a cable sent by a French diplomat to Paris.

General Craddock agreed with Brigadier Carleton-Smith that victory over the Taleban could not be achieved through military means alone, but he admitted that the overall effort to make lasting progress in Afghanistan was “disjointed”.

Military gains, he said, were also being undermined by the failure of the Afghan government of President Karzai to establish effective, corruption-free local governance. “Unfortunately, there is a perception among much of the Afghan population that the Taleban system of justice is much more effective than that of the government of Afghanistan,” he said.

“Taleban justice is seen as swift, sensitive to cultural issues, and largely devoid of corruption whereas the government system is seen as slow, excessively bureaucratic and fraught with corruption,” General Craddock added.

His comments came on a day when British forces admitted to having killed Afghan civilians during an airstrike in the Nad e Ali area of Helmand province last Thursday.

“We regret and are deeply saddened by the loss of civilian life,” a joint MoD-Isaf statement said. However the alliance insisted the action was “a legitimate strike” and that “any loss of innocent life was the direct result of the insurgents’ policy of placing innocent civilians in harm’s way.”

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