Officers warn of British troops' plight in Afghanistan

The insights threw into dramatic relief recent comments by military commanders, echoed by the defence secretary, Des Browne, about the dangers facing British soldiers engaged in almost daily contact with Taliban forces.

It was revealed yesterday that a major from 3 Para, James Loden, described British forces as desperately short of reinforcements and helicopters and berated the RAF for being "utterly, utterly useless". He referred to an attack when the pilot of a Harrier fighter bomber fired phosphorus bombs closer to British troops on the ground than the enemy. "A female Harrier pilot 'couldn't identify the target', fired two phosphorus rockets that just missed our own compound so that we thought they were incoming RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), and then strafed our perimeter missing the enemy by 200 metres," Maj Loden said.

The major also referred to the death last month of Corporal Bryan Budd in Sangin, to the north of Helmand province, and his colleagues' efforts to save the dying man during an intense ground battle. He described two junior colleagues, who appeared "very frightened and slow to react". He said his men were exhausted and at times - such as over Cpl Budd's death - were reduced to tears. The major's emails were leaked to Sky News.

They came less than 24 hours after it emerged that another army officer had described the scale of casualties suffered by British troops in southern Afghanistan as "very significant and showing no signs of reducing". The officer, Major Jon Swift, a company commander in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, added that "the current strategy was following political rather than military imperatives".

He was referring to pressure from local Afghan leaders on British commanders to send troops to forward bases - "platoon houses" - in Sangin, Musa Qala, and Naw Zad, in the north of Helmand province, where the Taliban were taking control.

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