LONDON (Reuters) — A US commander’s repudiation of a ceasefire in Afghanistan that was backed by his British predecessor reveals rifts among the main Western allies over how to defeat Taliban insurgents and win hearts and minds.London and Washington, with the most troops on the front line, have alternated command of NATO’s ISAF force since it was expanded and thrust into heavy fighting last year.

They have occasionally disagreed in private over tactics. But with concern that mounting civilian casualties are alienating Afghans, those disagreements seeped into the open.

“The higher echelons of ISAF appear to be in some disarray over the forward direction of strategy in southern Afghanistan,” said British defence writer Tim Ripley. The aggressive US approach “doesn’t seem to be in tune with the philosophy of the British Army,” he said. “On several occasions, senior British commanders have expressed a desire to try to modify the allegiances of potential insurgents, rather than try to kill them.”

Publicly, the allies still say any differences are over tactics, not the overall strategy of combating Taliban guerrillas while training Afghan forces and supporting the government of President Hamid Karzai.

But underlying the argument over tactics runs a constant philosophical debate over how much force to use and whether too much violence hurts the goal of winning local support.

In an interview last week, the American NATO commander in Kabul, General Dan McNeill, brusquely repudiated a ceasefire that his British predecessor, David Richards, had backed in territory patrolled by British troops.

“In its best case it might have been a tactical error. In its worst case it might have been a strategic blunder”, McNeill said of the ceasefire in Helmand province’s Musa Qala district.

He added that he could not give his full views on the British-backed truce because that “might be construed as criticising one of our allies, and I wouldn’t do that”.

The ceasefire collapsed when Taliban guerrillas seized the area in February, the week that Richards handed over command to McNeill. But the British military has defended its decision to withdraw troops from the district under the truce.

“The long term solution has to be political and local. This is why we welcomed the Musa Qala agreement,” a spokesman said. “It enabled UK forces to pull out, and brought months of peace and the chance to build up a local police force.”

Privately, British commanders have acknowledged that the ceasefire reached on territory they controlled may have given a propaganda boost to insurgents in neighbouring provinces. But officials also blame Washington for undermining the deal, by persuading Karzai to sack the local governor who agreed it.

Officials from the two allies have disagreed in private about other issues, notably the extent to which authorities should use force to eradicate opium crops. British commanders say they are trying to persuade locals that they are not there to destroy their livelihoods, an effort that has been undermined by the appearance of an Afghan paramilitary narcotic eradication force led by US contractors.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said tactical disagreements were inevitable when an alliance as big as NATO goes to war so far from its North Atlantic home.

“You are fighting a war that NATO was never designed to fight in a place it never planned to fight, and you are beginning to see all kinds of differences emerge,” he said.

With few troops on difficult terrain, NATO has had to rely heavily on air support, which has led in recent weeks to scores of civilian casualties. On Monday, German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung called for a review of NATO tactics.

“We have to make sure in future that operations do not take place in this way,” Jung said. “We don’t want the local population against us.”

Cordesman said disagreements between Britain and the United States, which have both committed large forces to dangerous parts of Afghanistan, are different from criticism levelled by allies like Germany, who have kept their troops out of battle.

“I do feel that the countries that try to find rationales for staying on the sidelines <\m> that’s one thing. The differences forced on countries which are actually in the fight are quite another,” he said.