Afghan deaths

The announcement of the 300th British casualty in Afghanistan (your report, 22 June) highlights yet again the increasingly alarming situation that our military personnel find themselves in.

It was approximately seven years after operations began in 2001 that we had lost our 100th serviceman. It was only a further 14 months before we reached the 200th fatality.

Now only ten months later and yet another 100 soldiers have tragically lost their lives. In September 2009 the US General Stanley McChrystal declared, during a review of operations, that the Allied forces could win the conflict only by radically changing strategy.

I sincerely hope that our military leaders do now have a more effective strategy in place and I pray that we will soon start to see a reversal of this spiralling rate of deaths.

BRIAN F WATT

Hainburn Park

Edinburgh