This month marks ten years since the war in Afghanistan began, a chance to ask: how are things going? Who’s winning? What’s going to happen next?

The first thing to say is that the killing of the man the Americans held responsible for the war, Osama bin Laden, has made no difference. Neither has President Obama’s rhetoric.

He told the British Parliament on May 25 that the US forces/Nato were preparing “to turn the corner” and that the Taleban momentum had been broken. The reality is somewhat different. The day after his speech eight American soldiers were killed on one day alone. The Americans are suffering the highest casualty rate since 2011.

Two British soldiers died, bringing the total to 366, almost twice the number killed in Iraq. The father of one of them asked whether the death of his son had been a price worth paying. On May 28 an attack on a supposedly secure province left six dead including the commander of the northern Afghanistan police force and seriously wounded Nato General Markus Knaeip. On the same day Nato airstrikes on two villages killed 32 civilians including 17 children and five women.

More Afghan civilians are being killed than at any time since the invasion 10 years ago. President Karzai issued Nato with a final warning that these attacks had to stop.

There are more than double the number of US troops in Afghanistan than when President Obama was elected and he has expanded the war into Pakistan. His generals are pressing him to extend the 2014 deadline for withdrawing US troops. It is abundantly clear the war is a disaster. It has now lasted longer that World War 1 and World War 2 combined and is the longest war in US history. Critics of it abound.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, former British ambassador to Afghanistan and former UK special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan—in other words a man who should know—said on the eve of the tenth anniversary, that the US Commander, General David Petraeus, should be ashamed of himself.

“He has increased the violence, trebled the number of special forces raids by British, American, Dutch and Australian special forces going out and killing Taleban commanders and there has been a lot more rather regrettable boasting from the military about the body count.” He added that the use of body count statistics was like the Vietnam War, profoundly wrong, and not helpful for a stable political settlement.

The British-led campaign, The Stop the War Coalition, said it had decided that the planned exit strategy of training the Afghan police and army to administer a proxy occupation looked hopeless. The latest reports showed the security forces had been deeply penetrated by the Taleban and there had been a dramatic increase in the number of Afghan soldiers and policemen turning their weapons on Western troops or facilitating attacks by the Taleban.

The human cost of the war was well illustrated by a Reuters interview with a victim of the US bombing that killed the civilians in Helmand province. “My house was bombed in the middle of the night and my children were killed,” said Noor Agha. “The Taleban were far away from my home. Why was my house bombed and my children killed?”

The answer would be that this is the American way of waging war, deliberately planned to avoid American casualties. Infantry troops go out on “sweep” patrols to make the Taleban aware of their presence. If they run into a fire fight, they call in an airstrike of such size and intensity that “collateral damage” is inevitable and civilian casualties are bound to occur.

The Americans defend themselves saying that the Taleban hides in civilian areas. But in an insurgency war there will always be a mix of civilian and insurgents and the onus surely must be on the attackers to avoid killing civilians or suffer the resulting ignominy. Ten years after this war began the outlook for a coalition victory is grim indeed.

Phillip Knightley is a veteran London-based journalist and commentator