COMBINED with general outrage about the British army’s sparse resources, the grim toll of British military casualties in Helmand province has turned the question why Britain is in Afghanistan into a nagging public concern.

Afghanistan seems certain to figure as an issue in the coming British general election, with many expecting a commitment from an incoming government to end a deployment for which public support is qualified at best.

The incoming head of the British Army, Gen. Sir David Richards, has scarcely assuaged public unease about the Afghan deployment by announcing that it may need to be maintained for another 40 years. It is fair to say that the general’s statement provoked widespread incredulity. Facing severe economic problems, Britain often seems to be making a less than impressive job of governing itself, yet now its most senior soldier is projecting a vastly expensive nation-building undertaking on the other side of the world that could go on for four decades.

In a recent interview, Gen. Richards enthused about the Afghan people’s “exotic blend of great kindness through to terrifying savagery.” It was an outburst that many may have felt betrayed a patronizing colonial mindset ill-befitting the 21st century. What many are certain to wonder is how talk of establishing democracy in Afghanistan can be reconciled with prosecuting a war for which there is no public mandate and which, in common with Britain’s hugely controversial intervention in Iraq under former Prime Minister Tony Blair can be seen as a violation of the very democratic principles for which it purports to stand.

In a referendum, the British government would be hard-pressed to secure public backing for a mission which, for reasons far from clear, has resulted in many soldiers dying and many more being horribly mutilated and traumatized.

THE week in which Gen. Richards made his extraordinary announcement saw the publication by The Independent newspaper of a harrowing anonymous dispatch from Afghanistan by a serving British soldier. It graphically evoked the hellish conditions that British troops are experiencing, fighting demoralizing battles against an enemy — whose numbers are endlessly replenished — while being handicapped by scant resources. The same week also happened to witness the funeral of the last British survivor of the World War I, Harry Patch, a military veteran who was greatly exercised by the horror of war and who became a fervent pacifist.

The impression that British soldiers are fighting the Taleban with insufficient resources and no realistic strategy is sapping public confidence in the mission. Few are persuaded that Prime Minister Gordon Brown truly believes in an operation, which a former defense secretary promised would be over in three years without a shot being fired. Yet it remains remarkable how little the growing public disquiet about Afghanistan has found political expression. Britain’s two major parties are united behind the consensus that British soldiers are fighting in Helmand for the sake of the domestic security of the British people. The Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, has offered no indication that he will significantly revise British foreign policy if he forms the next government. Moreover, Cameron and his neoconservative shadow ministers are zealous believers in the “war on terror” and the need for Britain to preserve the closest alliance with the United States.

IN view of all this, it is a piquant development that the Tory party may soon number among its ranks one of the Afghan deployment’s most outspoken critics, the 36-year-old diplomat-turned-Harvard professor, Rory Stewart. Stewart, who asserts that the deployment is doomed to failure and that Britain is only in Helmand province at all in order to appease Washington, is seeking to stand as a Conservative candidate in the next election. In contrast to Brown and Cameron, he has spent much time in Afghanistan, where he has been running a not-for-profit humanitarian organization. Ensconced in British political life, Stewart may conceivably become a cogent voice in favor of a British foreign policy very different from that of recent years.

Stewart believes it was an illusion to think Britain could create a democratic nation in Afghanistan. He also questions the official line that Afghanistan represents a terrorist threat to Britain, scoffing at the idea that if British soldiers do not fight in Afghan villages they will be fighting terrorists on the streets of Britain. As for Britain’s putative moral obligations to Afghanistan, he points out that Britain has no obligation to attempt the impossible. It especially dismays him that Britain is supposed to be extirpating Al-Qaeda, a terrorist movement that is currently not in Afghanistan but Pakistan. It is, he argues, as if “we have gone into a room with an angry cat called Afghanistan and a tiger called Pakistan and are beating the cat.” Yet in contrast to the respect he is accorded in Washington, neither Brown, nor Cameron has shown much interest in what Stewart has to say. It seems that the US political establishment takes greater interest in his opinions than does its British counterpart.

Put into effect, Stewart’s assessment of the British presence in Afghanistan would mean that Britain broke with its routine support of the US and acted as an independent sovereign nation.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Cameron reacted to the news that Stewart is to put himself forward as a Conservative member of the Parliament by advising him to think very carefully about what he was doing. In the wake of the damaging scandal over MPs’ expenses, Cameron is desperate to recruit fresh talent, but the addition to his party of a voluble opponent of the Afghan deployment is something about which Britain’s aspirant Conservative prime minister, eager to demonstrate his fealty to Washington, may have more than a few misgivings.