How much more blood on Gordon Brown's hands will it take?

Five more British soldiers killed, this time by an Afghan policeman. How many more pointless deaths will it take before Gorden Brown admits the war in Afghanistan cannot be won and brings the troops home?

The five British soldiers killed yesterday in Afghanistan are yet more victims of an unwinnable war. 229 soldiers have now died since the 2001 invasion, 92 of them this year. Gordon Brown insists, "They fought to make Afghanistan more secure, but above all to make Britain safer from the terrorism and extremism which continues to threaten us."

How much longer can Brown say that British soldiers are in Afghanistan to make it more secure, when by any yardstick the presence of foreign troops is the prime cause of the country's ever increasing insecurity?

This is what happens when a people resist the occupation of their country, but it seems a lot more British soldiers will have to die before Brown admits the war cannot be won.

The five soldiers were killed by an Afghan policeman, who it now turns out may have been a Taliban supporter. There should be no surprise here.

A number of American soldiers have been killed in the last year by Afghans who were being trained by NATO so they could, in Brown's words, "take responsibility for security in Afghanistan" -- by which he really means, so they can do NATO's killing and being killed in place of British and US troops, who can then be kept out of harm's way.

The Taliban and other forces resisting occupation are unlikely to look a gift horse in the mouth. Getting training from NATO in the skills and equipment required to resist the occupying armies -- and paid to do so -- is not an offer that is going to go begging. Usually the grateful trainees just disappear to help the resistance but every now and then, as with the British soldiers yesterday and the two US soldiers killed in October, they don't wait to leave the baracks before attacking.

Pipe dream

Gordon Brown's "exit strategy" is a pipe dream. As Ann Jones wrote on her return from researching the training camps in Afghanistan, this isn't going to happen, not now, not ever. Probably the only "success" the NATO training can be said to have achieved is in training Afghans to kill their trainers. Hardly a "winning" strategy.

The truth is, British troops are dying for no other purpose than to save the reputation of politicians like Brown, who slavishly follow the dictates of US foreign policy -- even when it's obvious that the world's second poorest country is no threat whatever to British interests.

The farce of the fraudulent Afghan elections, which ended with the re-election of Hamid Karzai -- the prime instigator of the fraud -- removed any hope Brown may have had that the war could be justified as defending "democracy" or a legitimately elected president.

The game is clearly up when even former Labour minister Kim Howells -- who a year ago, as a foreign office minister, was one of the government's most vociferous defenders of the war -- is now saying British troops should leave Afghanistan.

The blood of these five soldiers is on the hands of Gordon Brown. How many more British soldiers and Afghan civilians will die before he is forced to accept the inevitable and bring all the troops home? The longer Brown persists, the more likely it will be that Lance Corporal Joe Glenton -- the first soldier to refuse to return to Afghanistan -- will be joined by others, who like him are no longer prepared to fight a war which is neither justified or winnable.