'But they are losing ... it's going to take time and, alas, it does involve casualties,' he added.

However, former senior military leaders have openly criticised the government for allegedly failing to equip British forces with sufficient helicopters and other appropriate military hardware, while opposition parties accuse the government of 'throwing away young British lives'.

Experts, meanwhile, point out that it is not necessarily the fighting that claims most of the British lives in southern Afghanistan. Almost half of the recent casualties were killed by improvised roadside devices while out on foot patrol.

'The real danger to British forces is on foot patrols,' said the BBC, recalling that the spiralling deaths from such incidents forced the hasty withdrawal of British forces from its headquarters in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007.

Analysts also believe that it is becoming increasingly difficult for British citizens to follow the Brown argument of a direct link between the Afghan deployment and the terrorist threat.

'The immediate military problem is Afghanistan, but there is absolutely no doubt that Pakistan is a much more important security problem,' said David Kilcullen, a government adviser and author of the book The Accidental Guerrilla.

However, while there was undisputed evidence that all major terrorist activity since 2001 was linked to Pakistan, a withdrawal from Afghanistan at this point would have 'significant security implications' for the country and the whole region, said Kilcullen.

There would be a 'substantial outflow of refugees, a return of terrorist organisations and a fairly substantial bloodbath' inside Afghanistan, he predicted.

Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) agrees that the current British strategy is a one of 'containment' of the Taliban, and that chaos would ensue if it was abandoned at this point.

However, the claimed link with terrorism was clearly exaggerated, as even government research showed that 75 percent of 'all significant terrorist activity' in Britain could be traced back to Pakistan.

'Afghanistan is only one problem,' said Clarke. 'It's like letting a bit of air out of a balloon while the air is free to go everywhere else in the balloon.'