LONDON: The war in Afghanistan has cost Britain at least £37bn and the figure will rise to a sum equivalent to more than £2,000 for every taxpaying household, according to a devastating critique of the conflict.

Since 2006, at a conservative estimate, it has cost £15m a day to maintain Britain’s military presence in Helmand province. The equivalent of £25,000 will have been spent for every one of Helmand’s 1.5 million inhabitants, more than most of them will earn in a lifetime, it says. By 2020, the author of a new book says, Britain will have spent at the very least £40bn on its Afghan campaign, enough to recruit more than 5,000 police officers or nurses and pay for them throughout their careers.

Alternatively, the sum would be enough to equip the navy with an up-to-date aircraft carrier group.

In the first attempted audit of what he calls Britain’s “last imperial war”, Frank Ledwidge, author of Investment in Blood, published by Yale University Press, estimates British troops in Helmand have killed at least 500 non-combatants. About half of these have been officially admitted and Britain has paid compensation to the victims’ families.

The rest are based on estimates from UN and NGO reports, and “collateral damage” from air strikes and gun battles.

Ledwidge includes the human and financial cost of long-term care for more than 2,600 British troops wounded in the conflict and more than 5,000 he calls “psychologically injured”. He says: “There is no doubt that the continuing costs of taking care of the wounded will far exceed £1bn.”

The Afghan conflict has seen 444 British soldiers killed, according to the latest MoD figures. The ministry does not keep figures on civilian casualties and has told the House of Commons defence committee that it cannot provide a figure for the total cost of operations in Afghanistan. The government estimates the cost so far to the Treasury’s special reserve of military operations in Afghanistan to be about £25bn.

Ledwidge, who has been a civilian adviser to the British government in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, says Helmand is no more stable now than when British troops were deployed there in 2006. Opium production, which fell under the Taliban, is increasing, fuelling corruption.

“Rendering the Afghan armed forces capable of securing [Helmand] is regarded by many British soldiers as little short of ridiculous,” he writes. Although British and other foreign troops were sent to Afghanistan to stop Al Qaeda posing a threat to Britain’s national security, “of all the thousands of civilians and combatants, not a single Al Qaeda operative or ‘international terrorist’ who could conceivably have threatened the UK is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand”, Ledwidge says.

The real beneficiaries of the war, he suggests, are development consultants, Afghan drug lords, and international arms companies. Much of British aid to Afghanistan is spent on consultancy fees.

It was a serious mistake, the author adds, to treat Al Qaeda as a military problem. The problem was primarily an intelligence one. Reflecting the widespread view across Whitehall and among defence chiefs, he says the real reason Britain has expended so much blood and money on Afghanistan is simple — “the perceived necessity of retaining the closest possible links with the US”.

A proper national strategy for the UK is vital, the author writes. “How can we develop that in practice if we are to be dragged into almost every US campaign — including those such as Helmand that have no bearing whatsoever on British national interests, or indeed that actively damage them.”

Ledwidge said in an interview: “Once the last British helicopter leaves a deserted and wrecked Camp Bastion, Helmand — to which Britain claimed it would bring ‘good governance’ — will be a fractious narco-state occasionally fought over by opium barons and their cronies.

“There are no new lessons here, only one rather important old precept: before you engage in a war, understand the environment you are going into, precisely and realistically what it is you are trying to achieve, and will it be worth the cost? In other words have a strategy.”

The criticism reflects frustration among a growing band of young officers who have left the army. “We must hope that those who remain and become generals, unlike the current crop of senior officers, give blunt, well-founded and sensible advice to their political masters. Perhaps the one bright spot in all this is that from what I have seen, they probably will,” he said.

Ledwidge writes that soon after they were deployed in Helmand, British soldiers were sent to remote places, undermanned and under siege, “fighting battles of a ferocity and savagery unknown since the Korean war against thousands of ‘Taliban’ of whom British military intelligence had been ignorant”. Their predicament was compounded, he adds, because they had blundered into a drugs turf war with no idea how to deal with it.

Ministry of Defence officials said on Wednesday that British troops were in Helmand to protect British national security by helping the Afghans to build up their own security forces.

By arrangement with the Guardian