The British government has denied a claim that the UK believes the military campaign in Afghanistan is doomed to failure, after a French newspaper quoted a report that London's ambassador to Kabul said foreign troops added to the country's woes.
France's weekly Le Canard Enchaine published what it said was a leaked French diplomatic cable recounting talks between Britain's Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles and a French official.
The newspaper said the French cable reported that Cowper-Coles had said Afghanistan might best be "governed by an acceptable dictator" and that the cable quoted him as saying foreign troops were adding to the country's problems by helping shore up a failing government in Kabul.
Cowper-Coles was quoted as saying that "the American strategy is destined to fail" and that the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan was "part of the problem, not the solution."
The prospect of a dictatorship was "the only realistic one and we must get public opinion ready to accept it," the report quotes the alleged cable as saying.
The newspaper, a weekly publication known for its investigative stories, published excerpts of the cable, including a passage that quoted the British ambassador as criticizing both US presidential candidates over pledges to send more US troops to Afghanistan.
"It is the American presidential candidates who must be dissuaded from getting further bogged down in Afghanistan," an extract of the cable published by the newspaper quoted Cowper-Coles as saying.
The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of the two-page cable, which it reported was sent from Kabul to Paris on September 2.
It said the cable was written by France's deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, Jean-Francois Fitou, following his meeting with Cowper-Coles.
It said the cable was sent to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.
French Foreign Ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier declined to comment on the alleged cable, refusing to confirm or deny its existence.
However, Chevallier, speaking by telephone, said the content of the alleged cable, as reported by the media, "doesn't correspond at all with what we hear from our British counterparts in our discussions on Afghanistan."
Writing on his website, Britain's Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, described the report as "garbled," and insisted the UK did not support a move toward a Kabul dictatorship.
Britain's Foreign Office said Cowper-Coles had held a meeting with a French counterpart, but insisted that the reported comments did not reflect the government's views.
Miliband said he had discussed Afghanistan in talks with US General David Petraeus, who is taking over as the head of US forces in the Middle East.
"He got a more accurate representation of UK concerns than the garbled reports in the French Private Eye, Le Canard Enchaine," Miliband wrote, likening the French publication to Britain's weekly satirical magazine Private Eye.
"The future of Afghanistan is not about appointed dictators or foreign occupation; it is about building Afghan capabilities with the confidence of the Afghan people," Miliband wrote.
A British Foreign Office official, who demanded anonymity to discuss the purported leaked cable, said the claim that Cowper-Coles advocated a dictatorship in Afghanistan was "utter nonsense."
The official said the comments attributed to the ambassador were likely to have been a distortion, or exaggeration, of what he had actually said in the meeting.
Cowper-Coles has previously offered a pessimistic view of worsening violence in Afghanistan and has warned that foreign troops will likely be required there for around 30 years.
"It's a marathon rather than a sprint. We should be thinking in terms of decades," he told BBC radio in June.
