Patrick Mercer, defense spokesman for the opposition Conservative party and a former army officer, claims that the troops have been given a job that is far too big with resources that are far too small.

"When I was instructing at the staff college, if a student had presented me with this plan for Afghanistan, I would have failed him, and failed him comprehensively," Mercer told the BBC over the weekend.

Mercer, who has close ties to senior officers, speaks for many in the army who believe the NATO operation to pacify Afghanistan's Helmand province has been ill-conceived from the beginning. Charged with winning the hearts and minds of the local Afghans and rallying support for the pro-Western government in Kabul against the surviving Taliban, the NATO troops have also been ordered to curtail the booming opium trade -- the main source of local livelihood.

But senior British officers are also claiming that the Helmand operation is suffering from the aggressive tactics of the U.S. troops in Afghanistan, in particular the need to support the current U.S.-led Operation Mountain Thrust.

This deploys more than 10,000 Afghan and coalition soldiers in the largest military offensive since the Taliban regime fell in late 2001, and has first call on the available air cover. Eye-witness reports from embedded British journalists over the weekend reported massed ambushes of British convoys who were then unable to get air support because the aircraft and helicopters were needed elsewhere.

There are 3,300 British troops currently assigned to Helmand province, close to the size of Belgium, but only 650 of them are combat soldiers. Of the 3,300, some 800 are combat engineers who are building the British base of Camp Bastion, and when they leave later this month the army is urging strongly that they be replaced by more combat units. But they will also need more air support.

So far, only eight Apache gunships have been assigned to the British contingent, and Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed to other NATO members to provide more helicopters.

The original military plan called for the combat troops to help guard the engineers as they built the electricity and water supplies, the schools and hospitals, that would help win local hearts and minds for the new Afghan government.

But so far, the security situation is too fragile for the engineers to go out into the villages and start to build, and the priority seems to be shifting to force protection.

When Britain first agreed last year to take over the Helmand mission as part of the NATO decision to take over responsibility for Afghanistan and free U.S. troops for Iraq, Britain's then Defense Minister John Reid said that British troops would not be fighting the Taliban.

Instead he claimed that they would be tackling the opium trade, which is the source of the vast bulk of the heroin on British streets. But under U.S. and NATO pressure, and with the revived Taliban mounting new campaigns to undermine the elected government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, the British mission seems to have changed.

Michael Gapes, Labor chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the House of Commons, is demanding an "urgent statement" from the Blair government defining its objectives in Afghanistan and moves to protect British troops from more attacks.

"Our forces there need proper protection and equipment and we need to have a clear explanation of what we are likely to be doing over the long-term here," Gapes said. "There are signs that the tactics that have brought such devastation to Iraq are being replicated in Afghanistan."

William Hague, the former Conservative leader who is now the party's shadow foreign minister, now claims that instead of a peacekeeping operation, British troops are engaged in a war.

"They are, and with very difficult objectives because they have to win the hearts and minds of the local population while at the same time removing their main source of income," Hague said. "Unless it can be shown to the people in Afghanistan that there's an alternative future to growing opium and being with the Taliban we are not going to succeed."

It was not meant to be like this. The Taliban was supposed to be a spent force. But with new recruits coming from sanctuaries over the border in Pakistan, ample finance from the drugs trade to buy weapons and to hire mercenaries, and a concerted Taliban effort to seek out and kill Afghans who support the Kabul government or who work for the U.S. and British forces, large parts of Afghanistan are slipping into anarchy.

United Nations Regional Director Talatbek Masadykov sadly admits that the U.N. now operates in only six of the country's 50 districts. Some 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and NATO spokesmen estimate that 900 have been killed already this year.

There will furious reappraisals of the mission and of the available NATO resources before the NATO commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-General David Richards, assumes authority over the Helmand province and the British operation on July 31. He has already demanded a massive reinforcement of more combat helicopters, close support aircraft and transport planes.

He also wants more resources to deliver some development aid. Britain's Department for International Development has pledged $50m for Helmand, but few civilian aid agencies are eager to volunteer to work in such a dangerous province.

But the priority will be to define the mission for the British and NATO troops. They might be able to win hearts and minds and gain space and time for development, but at the price of helping the opium trade export heroin to Europe. They might be able to tackle the Taliban, but only if they get authorization to pursue the guerillas back to their bases across the Pakistani border.

This seems politically unlikely, and yet Pakistan is the key to the mission. After one of the ambush attacks on British paratroops on Saturday night at a place called Zumbelay, the Afghan Islamic Press in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar had put out a statement claiming the Taliban had killed seven British soldiers in Zumbelay. It was untrue, but widely reported in the Pakistani and Arab media.

This revival of the Taliban is starting to sound like Iraq, at a time when the British government of Tony Blair is already unpopular for supporting the Bush administration in the Iraq war, and when the British army is becoming as overstretched as their American allies.

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