LONDON: An officer has resigned from the British army in protest its "grotesquely clumsy" campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, a newspaper reported on Sunday. Captain Leo Docherty was aide-de-camp to Colonel Charlie Knaggs, a senior commander in the British task force in southern Afghanistan but quit last month after becoming disillusioned with its strategy in Helmand province, The Sunday Times said. The approach is "a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency," Docherty was quoted as saying. "All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British," he said."We've been grotesquely clumsy. We've said we'll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them," he said. "We've deviated spectacularly from the original plan," Docherty was quoted as saying. "The plan was to secure the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, initiate development projects and enable governance. During this time, the insecure northern part of Helmand would be contained: troops would not be sucked in' to a problem unsolvable by military means alone," he explained.
Docherty said the plan "fell by the wayside" because of pressure from the governor of Helmand, who feared the Taliban were toppling his district.