The UK's former senior diplomat in Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, has called on the coalition to accept that there is no military solution to the conflict.

"This is a question of a political problem that needs a political solution and a political settlement," the former special representative, who stepped down in September, told the Today presenter Justin Webb.

He said that the current government fully understood the situation as he sets it out, but that the same was not true of their predecessors in the Labour Party.

He called on political leaders to "get cracking with a serious political process that will harvest the success that our military has undoubtedly been having".

And he added: "The more Taliban we kill, the more difficult in the end it is to negotiate a sustainable settlement."

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