He held the position from 2008 to 2009, during the peak of the Taliban insurgency, and assisted American General Stanley A. McChrystal, then commander of ISAF, in redesigning the military strategy to combat the insurgency.
General David Richards (now Lord Richards), then British commander of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan in Kabul, wrote in his diary for 3 July: "Every UK position except the main base came under fire last night, but because, mercifully, there were no casualties, it did not merit a mention in the press.
Then we met the Italian army, the Isaf body responsible for security in Herat and Ghor.
Yet at a classified meeting six months ago at the Isaf headquarters, General Stanley McChrystal, the then Nato commander, was given a dossier on Ahmed Wali Karzai's malpractice by officers who wanted him removed.
He said the aim of the agreement was to hand security responsibility to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, and for foreign troops serving in the coalition, known as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, to cease combat by then.
So instead, Joschka Fischer, the then foreign minister, argued for an expanded UN-mandated Isaf mission run by Nato.
Since then, a "force reintegration cell" at the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, known as ISAF, has been working with Afghan officials on how such a program would be structured, but the program has yet to start because of bickering among Afghan officials over who would head the council.
"People check into coffee shops, then they tweet pictures of the patterns in the coffee foam," Mr. Isaf said.
How ironic then was General David Petraeus the other day when asked why the Afghan people should want the ISAF to stay in their country, the General responded: "They [Afghans] don't want to turn the clock back several centuries to the kinds of practices the Taliban inflicted on them".
ISAF said rebels had opened fire on a joint force of Afghan troops and its soldiers, who then shot back and called in an air attack.
